One of the recurrent themes of Pascal Quignard’s Lost Kingdom series, at least across the three volumes I’ve read, is the denial of community. In The Silent Crossing Quignard writes:

To turn one’s back on society, to break off from believing, to turn away from anything to do with looking and to prefer reading to surveillance, to protect those who have passed on from the survivors who denigrate them, to give succour to what is not visible—these are the virtues. The rare ones who have the matchless courage to escape spring up out in the wilds.

Quignard’s turning away from the world is centred on the idea of detachment from given identity. He writes “Do not become the slave of your people in the patronym they gave you within the collective language they taught you. Otherwise, the name they gave you will take the place of your flesh.”

Like an echo before a mirror, this idea has played on my mind for days until, this morning at 4.00am I dug out an old book and found the reference I was seeking. Before this blog, there were times when I was preoccupied with the work of Bourdieu and Badiou (at different periods). In this case I was trying to ferret out references from the work of the wrong ENS philosopher. What I was looking for I found in Badiou, mostly from one of the best introductions to Badiou’s  philosophy, Peter Hallward’s Badou: A Subject to Truth.

I have no competence in philosophy so forgive any misinterpretation. Badiou, like Quignard, rejects concepts of the Other. Hallward writes:

The whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question—and it is an extraordinarily difficult one—is much more that of recognising the Same.

Badiou holds that assertions of any group identity are pernicious, writing in his Ethics, “Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said ‘I am another.’ There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself.” Assertions of difference, whether social, biological, cultural or other, are not incorrect (or lacking powerful effects) but simply banal. It is not of course that there are no differences between us. There are only differences and each of us is not a self-identity but a self-difference.

Where Quignard and Badiou might differ is that denying community entails a turning away from the world. Badiou is after all Marxist to his core. In response to the Do Not Become What You Are quotation I posted recently, a reader linked to this conversation between Gilles Delueze and Antonio Negri which ends like this:

One might equally well speak of new kinds of event, rather than processes of subjectification: events that can’t be explained by the situations that give rise to them, or into which they lead. They appear for a moment, and it’s that moment that matters, it’s the chance we must seize. Or we can simply talk about the brain: the brain’s precisely this boundary of a continuous two-way movement between an Inside and Outside, this membrane between them. New cerebral pathways, new ways of thinking, aren’t explicable in terms of microsurgery; it’s for science, rather, to try and discover what might have happened in the brain for one to start thinking this way or that. I think subjectification, events, and brains are more or less the same thing. What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume. It’s what you call pietas. Our ability to resist control, or our submission to it, has to be assessed at the level of our every move. We need both creativity and a people.

This is one consequence I like about Quignard’s work, that it compels so much more thinking and reading. It is like a hunt chasing down allusions and memories that range across Badiou, Lacan, Melanie Klein, Freud and numerous ancient Franks, Greeks and Romans.