In Search of Lost Prose

Alain Badiou, Jacob Levi, Lucy Bergeret

MLN, Volume 132, Number 5, December 2017 (Comparative Literature Issue),

pp. 1254-1266 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2017.0095

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686879

Access provided by Cambridge University Library (2 Aug 2018 22:54 GMT)

 In Search of Lost Prose
❦

Alain Badiou

March 25, 1984, a quarter century ago. Let us imagine Philippe Lacoue-
Labarthe on the banks of the Neckar, near the tower. It is here that
we can situate Lacoue’s French translation of the definition of poetry
that Paul Celan proposes in The Meridian. A translation that follows,
and at least in certain places opposes, the translations by Blanchot,
André du Bouchet, and Jean Launay:
Poetry, Ladies and Gentlemen—: that infinite speaking of pure mortality
and the in-vain. [La poésie, Mesdames et Messieurs—: ce parler à l’infini de la
mortalité pure et de l’en vain.] (qtd. in Poetry 105)

Poetry is thus: a knotting of speaking, the infinite, and death.

April 13, 1984, the same spring, in Barcelona. In a translation of Celan,

this time Lacoue situates a definition not of poetry, but love. This defi-
nition lies in the space between the first and last lines of the poem,
“Les Globes,” from the collection The No-One’s-Rose [Die Niemandsrose].
The first line:
In the eyes all awry—read there:
[Dans les yeux fourvoyés—là, déchiffre]

The last lines:

All things,
even the heaviest, were
fledged, nothing
held back.
[Tout,
même le plus lourd, allait

MLN 132 (2017): 1254–1266 © 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press

 M  L N 1255

voler, rien
ne retenait.] (qtd. in Poetry 106)

After which Lacoue concludes, “it defines love” (106).

Love: a visionary blindness [un aveuglement extra-lucide], a decoding
of existence where everything is uprooted for the sake of the invisible,
where restraint no longer exists.
I would like to suggest that poetry and love are ultimately fused
together [fusionnés] under the name of “prose.” And that “prose”
designates the inscription or emergence [laisser-venir] of the phrase,
contra so-called “poetry,” which we can also call poetry without love.
For Lacoue, the destiny of thought can and even must pass through
these five terms: 1) the phrase, which comes from elsewhere, and is
“what has spoken within me—in the distance, elsewhere, almost out-
side—for a very long time [ce qui se prononce en moi—loin, ailleurs, presque
dehors, depuis très longtemps]” (Phrase 11). 2) Love, which eliminates the
restraints that caused the dispersion of the phrase. 3) Poetry proper,
which inscribes in speaking the phrase as the edge [comme lisière] of
the infinite and death. 4) So-called “poetry,” which pompously declares
restraint, and flees the phrase. 5) Prose, also called “literature,” which
is para-phrase, it is poetry in unrestrained love and the renunciation
of so-called “poetry.”
When I say, “in search of lost prose,” as an allegory for the destiny of
Lacoue’s life and thought, it is in this sense: in the beginning, there is
corrupting “poetry.” To renounce this implies love as unrestraint, and
poetry as experience. Hence the phrase can become the prose that it
always was, which gives meaning to justice, the only justice: just prose.
Or further still: so-called “poetry” is divine rhetoric, it is judgment
and prayer. But if God is silent (as he is today), if we can only love on
Earth and only speak on the verge of death, then we are delivered,
Lacoue tells us, from “the irresistible magnetism that [God] brings
to language,” we are delivered from prayer. Thus, Lacoue concludes,
“we can get a glimpse of a wholly other [tout autre] poetry, and this is
perhaps what Celan ultimately saw, and which drove him to despair.”
This wholly other kind of poetry is prose, which makes possible the
phrase. It is indeed this glimpse that, alas, drove Lacoue to despair,
just as it did Celan. The bridge to prose is lacking, but it is nonetheless
indicated to us by these two brilliant martyrs. Martyrs of poetry as prose.
But let us retrace this journey.
In the beginning, yes, there is fallacious “poetry,” submissive prayer
or ferocious judgment, the corruption of love. There is, to cite the
words of Phrase XIX:
1256 ALAIN BADIOU

this bitter falsification, this evasive

discourse, these residues (or this excess) of “poetry”
which have ruined our most just prose. (Phrase 114)

Lacoue adds these crucial parentheses:

(I do mean our prose, not that of the ages:
it is you I’m addressing, as you know.) (115)

“It is you I’m addressing,” clearly, is addressed to the one who is

literally “in love” with him [avec lui dans l’amour], which is to say, shar-
ing in the possibility of non-restraint. The residues or the excess of
“poetry” corrupt this shared [partage] non-restraint—this is why we
must renounce so-called “poetry.” As is said just before: the phrase
in question, Phrase XIX, is written “to try to say as nearly as possible
/ what I must renounce” (114). Only this renunciation allows us to
remain in such euphoria [dans l’envol], in a world where nothing is
restrained, with the person to whom Phrase is dedicated. Almost vio-
lently dedicated, by the exclusion of anyone else. This dedication, by
the way, is without a doubt the most exclusive and peremptory that I
know, since its questioning words mark the most radical affirmation:
“For who else but you?” (7).
This shows the force with which love—uprooting blindness—is com-
prised and inscribed in what Lacoue calls “our most just prose” (114),
or what we manage to attain in the pain of renouncing false “poetry.”
This first term, “poetry,” is eloquence and judgment, academic
praise, pompousness of the self, horror of love, or emphatic love,
which is quite simply the blissful satisfaction of existing. But we can-
not forget that at its core, as destinal, “poetry” is the maternal curse,
described in its most terrible nudity in Phrase XVIII, dated March 6,
2000. We must recall its words so that we too can hear its accursed
diction, its “harmful poetry [poésie malfaisante],” or, as Lacoue says in
the same phrase, “malevolence as such [la méchanceté même]” (110).
He describes how several hours before her death, his mother told
him—our Lacoue, her oldest son—that the alcohol would do him in.
This mother, “with that icy fury which for so very long / had been her
usual attitude,” who would say that her son was
unstable, ungrateful,
evasive; deficiencies had been concealed from [him],
but with exaggerated indulgence, as if
[he] had been normal, when the weight of dead
generations weighed upon [his] incapacity quite simply to live. (109)
 M  L N 1257

This curse is really where everything begins. Yes, alas, for Lacoue
everything begins with terror. Everything must be thought on the
basis of death, where the phrase indeed originates. He says this in
exemplary fashion in his discussion with Jean-François Lyotard, dated
November 21, 1983, located in Berkeley:
What we must think out is indeed the It happens that [Il arrive que]. But
from where do we begin to think if not the starting point of “terror,” the
threat that “It happens that” will stop happening? In other words, from
where can we begin to think, we to whom birth has been “given,” if not
from the starting point of death? Death, that other gift—or more exactly,
the pro-spect [l’à-venir] of the first and only one (the enigma of our birth
before us). (Poetry 89)

Is it not clear that the provenance of the event is captive to the

fact that, for Lacoue, birth—in the baleful authority of the mother,
wrapped in harmful “poetry”—is already to knock on death’s door
[une mortelle venue]? Here lies the root of my disagreement—a word
that is both too weak and too strong—with a man who, from the
depths of my thought [au plus profond de ma pensée], I loved above
all: Lacoue. For me, the “It happens that [Il arrive que]” is not at all
problematic. It is a gift without background. It is what I call the event,
authorizing thought by pure grace, which is not to be thought but
only accepted, followed, and deployed in its consequences. However,
I know that my mother wasn’t overjoyed with my birth either, nor that
I became who I am. But here, decisions made in childhood order us
mysteriously. In the perpetual darkness often covered by the assumed
acceptance of the power of false, I retaliated by devising the perpetual
joy of innumerably separated worlds. I thereby rejected any connection
between the fatality of birth and the indifference of death. I left the
finite far from life and the infinite far from death, which means that
my phrase could not be Lacoue’s. Because he, Lacoue, responded
to his curse not with fiction but rather with an enigma: the enigma
that his birth—invalidated by the maternal judgment that carries the
corruption of all prose—was always still in front of him, and thus in
fine in death.
We could also say: in the footsteps of Nietzsche, Lacoue had to
dismiss Wagner’s fictionalizing music as corrupting. As his stunning
Musica Ficta shows, he could not tolerate this sort of consolation, which
was for him the myth of all consolation, the opportunistic negation of
the inconsolable. Rather, I surrounded myself in Wagner’s harmonic
ambivalence because I could see in it what he could not: the achieve-
ment of separation.
1258 ALAIN BADIOU

Against this background, Wagner is for Lacoue the mimetic myth

of the possible reconciliation of poetry and communities or fami-
lies—that is, everything that was eternally proscribed for Lacoue.
What is more, Wagner musically enchants a mother’s nostalgia. How
these “Mutter, Mutter,” against the backdrop of low cellos and clari-
nets must’ve disturbed him! Perhaps he could have identified with
Siegmund from The Walkyrie, the naked hero of amorous uprooting
[déracinement amoureux], of incest that we might call im-maternal, in
the way we say im-material. But for Lacoue everything else amounts
to a simple proposition: Wagner is the music of so-called “poetry,” it
is prose corrupted by injustice, it is the lost phrase.
Clearly, for me, it is something else entirely. The path which leads
to Parsifal is the proposition of a new Ceremony, when something
occurs that forever separates us from childhood, or from birth. Parsifal
is the one who, in the name of the Idea, renounces the desire for his
mother’s love and embrace, even in the form of a woman of great
beauty; who leaves alone, traveling across worlds, in the certainty of
sovereignty. Thus, Wagner is the musician of the adult who was able
to permanently fend off the curse. He is the promise of prose itself.
He is the phrase.
It is clear for anyone who listens to Tristan and Isolde that, in its subtle
irresolution of everything and cellular arrangement of repetition, for
the future, a genius has made the obscure power of the phrase coexist
with the loss of the very powerlessness it should retain.
Wagner thus continues to serve as the test case for thought, as he has
invariably done in France since Baudelaire. He draws the line between
two philosophers that, in exemplary fashion, are connected and sepa-
rated by the mode in which they were—like everyone, as Althusser
once said to me—the former combatants from their childhood.
So, then, in Lacoue’s vision or experience, we must overcome terror,
we must seek out lost prose, drawing from the resources of both love
and true poetry. Which means: let the phrase pass. Even if—and this
is despair—we can only say: “there will have been […] this phrase —
which will have haunted me, and never crossed my lips” (Phrase 12).
“This abortive utterance, this sense of being haunted, this decidedly I call
literature” (12).

Literature thus means: the unutterable part of prose, which is the

phrase. We can therefore read Phrase XIX:
Prose is what I call diction that is just and, because it is
just, virtually unutterable. But indestructible, too.
 M  L N 1259

Some months ago, I read these words of Eliot’s:

“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead.”
Such indeed is diction.

The word “just” should be understood in the sense of justice and

consequently of rectitude. Prose at no point should
lie or provoke humiliation or
distress without recourse. But that is not
enough: what is just is the dictating of what is true.
In other words: prose has to utter a truth
that the dead, if they are just, would allow us to affirm.
It is never a foregone conclusion. Only the dead who were unable to say
anything
possess any authority whatsoever.

The clinic I’m in is clean, tidy, hygienic. The staff do not concern
themselves
too much with me. I’m in a room at the end of a corridor, a room that
is almost bare, and bright.
I take my meals with the other patients but I
practically never say a word to them. They chat about everything and
nothing,
observe one another, create different kinds of connections
between each other (hardly of desire, certainly not friendship
or love, or jealousy), they say uncomplimentary things about one
another, but in reality
they speak only of themselves and feel sorry for themselves.
Only some of them, staring into space, their eyes vacant and
infinitely painful, don’t utter a single word,
except to beg for a cigarette or money for a cup of coffee.
Those, so close by, are already
dead. Their barely audible elocution
is what I call veridiction. The reason I chose to come here,
against my own wishes, on the brink of being threatened or destroyed,
in this loathsome solitude, among the tables
in the cafeteria, and the trees in the park,
was to learn this mumbling,
not to take control of myself or renounce eloquence,
but to try to say as nearly as possible
what I must renounce:
this bitter falsification, this evasive
discourse, these residues (or this excess) of “poetry”
which have ruined our most just prose.
(I do mean our prose, not that of the ages:
it is you I’m addressing, as you know.)
1260 ALAIN BADIOU

A diction could return to us, no reason

to despair, if I strive no longer
to rely on the fury of words
and so long as we are capable of respecting the unutterable.
(December 1999–March 2000; Phrase 113–15)

I would like to punctuate this text or, if I can say, “star” what is
unquestionably its most enigmatic statement, which touches me most
intimately. It is the statement: “[…] what is just is the dictating of what
is true. / In other words: prose has to utter a truth.”
What does “truth” name here? Truth, which shows itself to be the
norm of prose, and thus of diction as veri-diction? This is the point
where the painful phrase meets philosophy.
The phrase is composed of four key movements.
The first follows from an energetic incipit, “Prose is what I call… ”
to a severe restriction, “Only the dead who were unable to say anything
/ possess any authority whatsoever.” It is a categorical movement: a
definition of prose, followed by rigorous abstract conditions.
The second is descriptive. It concerns the naked experience of a trip
to the clinic, which matches the date of the phrase: from December
1999 to March 2000. It begins with a perfectly neutral utterance,
voluntarily flat, almost in the style of the nouveau roman: “The clinic
I’m in is clean, tidy, hygienic.” It ends in the middle of a line, with
the “infinitely painful” silence of certain residents of the clinic—those
who are, for Lacoue, “already/ dead.” He strikingly describes “their
barely audible elocution / is what I call veridiction.” Here, by veri-
diction or the prose of truth, we are led to the third movement which
initiates an undisguised [sans ombre] subjectification in the middle of
the line: “The reason I chose to come here,/ […] was to learn this
mumbling.” The movement is therefore prescriptive. It gives shape to
what prescribes and, dare we say, commands Lacoue to remain in this
lifeless space, “in this loathsome solitude, among the tables/ in the
cafeteria.” We have already mentioned this prescription: to renounce
this evasive discourse, the bitter falsification, in short, artificial “poetry,”
the enemy of all just prose and all love without restraint. To renounce
this pathos—which can be the pathos of the drunkard’s lies and
emotions, just as much as of the blustering philosopher gone astray.
On the basis of this renunciation, we have the fourth movement that
we can call prophetic. There will be the end of despair, diction, the
phrase come to prose, poetry. Once more, let us read this moment
of enlightenment in its proper sobriety:
 M  L N 1261

A diction could return to us, no reason

to despair, if I strive no longer
to rely on the fury of words
and so long as we are capable of respecting the unutterable.

Perhaps this is the arrangement [agencement] of all thought: begin

with the categorical, from there clarify the descriptive, find in the
description itself the prescriptive point where it agrees with the cat-
egorical, subjectivize the point, and thus become able to desire the
future without despair.
As is always the case, if I translate Lacoue’s extraordinary density
and sobriety in my language that tends more towards formalism, or
makes a norm of clarity (despite its difficulty) more so than depth
(despite its seduction), it offers something of this sort: first, the axiom
or principle; then, the worlds where everything takes place. There, a
meeting, an event, a primordial statement, a punctual veri-diction, the
flash of almost nothing where truth can emerge [le vrai peut venir].
And so, here and now, an eternal possible [un possible éternel].
Lacoue makes prose of all this. Prose of the unutterable obscure
phrase. Lacoue makes prose of prose. In one phrase and four move-
ments, he brings together: prose, the clinic, the taciturn madmen, the
stammering of veri-diction, the renunciation of harmful pathos-laden
“poetry,” and love reinvented as the place of just prose. Which, for
Lacoue, is indicated by its relationship to the phrase: if the phrase is
the unpronounceable part of just prose, then prose is only just if it
shares in love [dans l’amour]—poetically—its respect for the phrase.
The question that still remains unanswered in all of this is the
function of death. The link between truth and death. Why, but why
must we say both that veri-diction can only be found in the barely
audible elocution of the already-dead, and that only the dead are
both judge and witness of veri-diction? Because, for Lacoue, death is
both in the phrase itself, connected to the mumbling of the infinite,
and in its compearance [comparution], since prose is only just if the
dead—the just dead [les justes morts]—allow us to uphold it. It is as
if we were ourselves exposed to a sort of desertion of truth, as if the
prosaic form of all truth were a deadly murmur that is exposed to
the judgment of the dead.
Let us note that one of the very first utterances of Phrase is the fol-
lowing: “It is, true enough, unanswerable, and we are / indisputably
abandoned [désértées]” (10), dated July 1976, thirty years ago.
At the time, for Lacoue the maxim of all truths in prose was
acceptance. Immediately after the bitter acknowledgment of this vital
abandonment, he continues:
1262 ALAIN BADIOU

But accept, all the same,

“don’t look away,” as when
you hold your head up, shamefaced, knowing nothing
of what is causing your downfall, accept this slow disaster
or exodus, rather, which is more or less what we are. (10)

Twenty-five years later, it is as if death were in the end the only

appeal for this abandonment. As if the truth of the disaster or exo-
dus had to be submitted to a compearance even more essential than
acceptance. I believe that Lacoue really did think this was the case
when, sometimes bordering on nightmare, he horrified even himself.
Indeed, he writes with devastating courage, for example, in the first
section of Phrase XX:
I have become an unavowable lie,
the entirely passive prey to disgust and shame.
And it’s terrible because I live on
and continue to act as though it was nothing.
Without even closing my eyes. (118)

Yes, in these moments when life becomes indistinguishable from

survival, that is, when harmful “poetry” entirely corrupts just prose,
we can conceive of death—truth of birth and judge of justice—as the
place of all compearance.
Here, we might consider a disagreement that I had voiced twenty
years ago in my Manifesto for Philosophy. I protested against Lacoue’s
formal judgment that philosophy is dead and its apparent survival is
no more than tradition. The verdict in Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The
Fiction of the Political, in 1987, was especially harsh. Its central claim
was: “Philosophy is finished/finite [finie]; its limit is uncrossable” (4).
It was therefore necessary to want neither philosophy, nor anything
in its place. The appeal is thus made to a certain modesty, which
objectively commands that we continue to philosophize without any
hope for any particular philosophical thesis, and subjectively com-
mands: “We must no longer have the desire to philosophize” (5). A
combination of philosophy’s end, its tradition, the obstinacy incapable
of affirmation, and the withdrawal [retrait] of all desire could not pos-
sibly be to my taste. This is why I wrote the exact opposite: philosophy
continues as before, is capable of new fundamental theses, and cre-
ates its proper desire. Against Lacoue, I protested [j’ai manifesté] and
declared myself in favor of philosophy. And I committed the offense
once more because—to pastiche André Breton without hesitation—I
published a Second Manifesto for Philosophy.
 M  L N 1263

But what strikes me today is that, for Lacoue, even at the time,
the attributes of philosophy were the same as those of death, in the
sense we have already encountered: death does justice to birth, from
which ultimately proceeds the unutterable nature of all phrases, and
thus of all just prose.
Of course, just as there is so-called “poetry,” there is also so-called
“philosophy,” which is no more than vain tradition, and which Lacoue
taunts without pity.
That is why it would be no overstatement to describe the sight of the philo-
sophical pose loftily reasserting itself today as ‘derisory’: it is and can only
be a mere tinkering around in inessential and subordinate matters (ethics,
the rights of man, etc.), journalistic socratism or anthropological approxi-
mations. It is nothing that has to do with the work of thought. (Heidegger 4)

I share with Lacoue the taste for a violent and destructive style, when
necessary. But even though it was clear that the target here was Bernard-
Henry Lévy and several others of his ilk (about whom I said exactly
what Lacoue did at the time), and even though in 1987 I had not yet
published Being and Event (a book whose judgment would be associ-
ated with Lacoue two years later in the context of my Habilitation),
nonetheless, I took personally—I had to take personally—the accusa-
tion made against anyone who affirms the unwavering continuation of
philosophy. I was compelled to say that the question of philosophical
posturing is irrelevant to the work of thought, which incarnates a new
chance for philosophical affirmation. Notorious imposters aside, I was
perhaps the only one to clearly—even violently—defend the position
Lacoue denounced as vacuous. Nor could I accept that my teacher
Sartre was described with iron contempt as “a doubly epigonal coun-
terfeit,” that had “noisily arrogated to itself the title of ‘philosophy’”
(Heidegger 2). Well, no and no! I had to throw my hat in the ring.
Fortunately, symmetrically, there is also philosophy in a different
sense: a philosophy that obstinately refuses to renounce thought, even
if it can only survive under the devastated and voided [nul] name of
“philosophy.” Just as only the dead—who must remain silent—have
the power to judge prose, so too philosophy—finite, impracticable,
impossible—must be, now and always, the starting point for thought
to find its prose. For Lacoue, we do not have the slightest notion of
what it means “to think,” other than “to philosophize.” I would venture
to say: from the inscrutable beyond of its end, of its death, philosophy
still judges what is at stake in thought.
And this is what I finally manage to understand. In the name of
prose, we have the trappings of the phrase in the encounter of love
1264 ALAIN BADIOU

and poetry. We can describe this encounter, the fusion of the poem
and thought, as prose. That is to say, in short, the fusion of poetry and
philosophizing [philosopher]. A fusion that, as we’ve seen, only finds
meaning insofar as it is prescribed from a place beyond all places,
namely the place of death. Lacoue’s operation summons us to a place
beyond philosophizing—prose as the poem of thought—that for now
can only be validated if philosophy occupies, in this game, the place
of the dead [la place du mort].
Unapologetically, my resistance is precisely to keep philosophy out
of this place, and instead to posit that there is no beyond for philoso-
phy for the simple reason that we are only at its beginnings. When
it comes to its definite withdrawal from the divine, philosophy is just
beginning, and we—Lacoue as much as myself—are its Presocratics.
To shed light on [désassombrir] this return of Presocratism: this is
my proximity and my duty to Lacoue’s oeuvre.
One step in my argument is that in Phrase, this most somber of
books, we have seen that the announcement of a true diction in love
stands on grounds other than the acceptance or proximity of death.
Indeed, the third section of Phrase XX employs a completely different
kind of narration than what we have come across so far:
Your tongue can be sharp, severe, commanding,
what you say outrageous, often simply reflecting your anxiety,
lack of intelligence, mistakes, falsity, or
injustices you view as unacceptable,
the self-assurance too of whoever has just spoken with
a self-assurance you believe to be lacking in yourself.
You ask, sovereign though you are, to be allowed
to speak. Faced with real but intractable
questions — I never underestimate them,
I’m too aware of my own shortcomings — you would like
firm, definite answers, or more or less.
(Just as you did, memorably, on the autostrada between
Livorno and Alessandria.)
Another voice dwells within you, though, or you give it shelter, musical,
vulnerable, almost childlike, the one
that makes one suspect that you are no longer afraid
nor hurt, nor have any kind of opaque apprehensiveness.
It’s the loving voice of intelligence or
gratitude, of the gift consented,
eternity glimpsed, or touched: of calm.
Then, your greenish-blue eyes have a radiance that makes you
superhuman
and your movements, and the way you walk, only animals could do as
such. (120–21)
 M  L N 1265

Here, the phrase composes the beloved woman in two contrasting

movements, almost as in music an allegro furioso would be followed by
an elegiac andante. With the precision of a moraliste, the first movement
describes the very specific harshness that a woman—who could very
well be this woman—is capable of in a lovers’ quarrel. It highlights
that prose is corrupted by the desire for the definitive, the assertion
which casts no doubt, the irrevocable commitment. Forms that relate
all too clearly to the catastrophic maternal verdict and belong to
harmful “poetry.” Even if the man’s faults are clearly identified and
acknowledged. Here, the virtuosity is that such a general description
of the quarreling voice—aggressive and despotic—is nonetheless so
lively. Such that the strangely empirical ending (“Just as you did,
memorably, on the autostrada between / Livorno and Alessandria”) is
not surprising. It only anchors the quarreling voices, which we might
call “out of prose [hors prose],” to whatever space where they make
themselves heard.
Then, the opposite movement begins: “Another voice dwells within
you, though.” Here, we have what I take to be the miracle of a striking
description of happiness and power for someone incorporated in the
process of truth. Indeed, we have what is for Lacoue the affect of prose,
which is for me the affect of all subjectivation in a truth procedure: we
are “are no longer afraid / nor hurt,” we can hear “the loving voice
of intelligence or / gratitude,” we are “the gift consented.” I would
have chosen the same corporeal metaphors to describe the physical
or prosodic dimension of a truth if I had to produce the portrait of
what I take to be a body of truth, rather than its formal schema: eyes
whose radiance outshines ordinary humanity, a flexibility, an allure, a
poise that—a brilliant formulation—“only animals could do as much.”
And above all, above all, the line where the beloved’s voice becomes
the voice of “eternity glimpsed, or touched: of calm.” This is exactly
what we feel in the midst of political storms, artistic commotions, flashes
of mathematical insight, and of course the intensity of a declaration
of love: a superhuman calm, uncannily composed of the violence of
what approaches.
“Eternity”: I would like to conclude with this term. The experi-
ence of prose as veri-diction is not condemned to death. It may well
be eternity’s touch—here and now—with a fidelity whose reward is
indeed an unknown calm.
Therefore, I am assured that our Lacoue, thrown by his originary
torment towards the purity of the judgment of the dead or the silence
of pure stupefaction, could say and know, like Rimbaud, to whom he is
1266 ALAIN BADIOU

linked in so many ways: “Found again. What? Eternity [Elle est arrivée,
quoi  ? l’éternité].” It was not: “the sea gone with the sun [la mer allée
avec le soleil]” (“Eternity” 181). Far more precious, it was the certainty
that love is compatible with poetry and therefore exists in this world,
in the form of prose.
I will thus disagree with our friend, the great philosopher Lacoue,
on a crucial point: despite what he sometimes said, he did find prose.
He did not merely despair at only catching a glimpse of its possible
existence. He thereby bestowed on us the task of seeking out and
finding prose—wherever it reveals itself, however rare these places
may be—in the uncanny form of the phrase. And under its three
joint conditions: renounce the pathos of so-called “poetry,” love loving
without restraint, and make experience of poetry.
We have heard you, Lacoue. And therefore, I tell you: you exist.
Athens, October 2008
English Translation by Jacob Levi and Lucy Bergeret

WORKS CITED

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. Heidegger, Art, and Politics: The Fiction of the Political. Translated
by Chris Turner, Basil Blackwell, 1990.
———. Phrase. Christian Bourgois, 2000.
———. Phrase. Translated by Leslie Hill, SUNY P, forthcoming.
———. Poetry as Experience. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski, Stanford UP, 1999.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Collected Poems. Translated by Martin Sorrell, Oxford UP, 2001.