Abstract
According to François Laruelle, French thought has been unduly influenced by corpuscular or atomist thinking, yet Laruelle has himself employed key atomist terms—in particular, that of the clinamen or swerve—in framing his own style of thought. This essay looks at this tension between atomism and anti-atomism in Laruelle’s thought, taking the measure of his contribution to a larger stream of postwar French thinking about the relevance and stakes of ancient atomism. Its contention is that Laruelle subtly but really outlines a quantum theoretical resumption of ancient atomist philosophy—one that deserves closer attention and comparative study in the larger context of French philosophical interest in the atomists. A first section of the paper briefly describes Laruelle’s general project, along with his claim that he differs from his contemporaries because he uniquely escapes the dangers of what he calls corpuscular thought. A second section addresses the apparent tension between Laruelle’s claim to produce a non-corpuscular thinking and his consistent recent use of the atomist image of the clinamen, ultimately arguing that Laruelle sides with the clinamen against two forms of corpuscularity supposedly avoided by the clinamen itself but nonetheless usefully embodied in atomist thought. The final section of the paper draws up in preliminary terms a comparison between Laruelle’s understanding of his relationship to atomism and that of his contemporaries, focusing in particular on Alain Badiou.
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Notes
See Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–1987, ed. François Matheron and Oliver Corpet, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006), pp. 163–207.
See Jacques Derrida, “My Chances/Mes Chances: A Rendezvous with Some Epicurean Stereophonies,” trans. Irene Harvey and Avital Ronell, in Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, eds., Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis, and Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), pp. 1–32.
See Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 3–50.
An important publication may well have drawn Badiou’s attention to atomism: Gaston Bachelard’s 1933 Les Intuitions atomistiques, republished in Paris in 1975. In light of Badiou’s clear indebtedness to Bachelard more generally, and of the fact that Badiou’s lectures on atomism were originally given in December of 1975, it seems difficult to doubt that Bachelard’s study played some role in Badiou’s thinking. For evidence of Badiou’s debt to Bachelard, see especially his work from the late 1960s: Alain Badiou, “Mark and Lack: On Zero,” in Peter Hallward and Knox Peden, eds., Concept and Form: Key Texts from the “Cahiers pour l’analyse,” 2 vols. (New York: Verso, 2012), vol. 1, pp. 159–185; and Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, ed. and trans. Zachary Luke Fraser and Tzuchien Tho (Melbourne: re.press, 2007). Another possible influence on all these thinkers’ interest in atomism may well have been the publication of Michel Serres’s The Birth of Physics in 1977; see Michel Serres, The Birth of Physics, trans. Jack Hawkes (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2000).
See the analyses of “realist” atomism in Gaston Bachelard, Les Intuitions atomistiques: Essai de classification, 2nd ed. (Paris: J. Vrin, 1975).
Several individuals have in recent years noted the focused interest in atomism among French thinkers during these decades. See, for example, Jonathan Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), pp. 31–62; Mladen Dolar, “Tyche, Clinamen, Den,” Continental Philosophy Review 46 (2013), pp. 223–239; Joseph M. Spencer, “Left Atomism: Marx, Badiou, and Althusser on the Greek Atomists,” Theory & Event 17.3 (2014); and Joseph M. Spencer, “Rancièrean Atomism: Clarifying the Debate between Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou,” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 23.2 (2015), pp. 98–121. One philosopher has recently attempted to fuse the interest of several French thinkers in atomism with their parallel interest in recent years in the writings of Saint Paul. See Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
I draw here on Adrian Johnston’s useful phrase; see Adrian Johnston, Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism, Volume One: The Outcome of Contemporary French Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013).
See François Laruelle, Le Principe de minorité (Paris: Aubier, 1981).
François Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference: A Critical Introduction to Non-Philosophy, trans. Rocco Gangle (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. xviii.
François Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 29.
This work is Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference.
Of course, it remains a question whether Laruelle’s uses of quantum-theoretical science are more than merely metaphorical, as some have alleged. One might imagine that if Laruelle had reached the quantum-theoretical development of his project earlier, he might have made an appearance in Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, as Badiou’s Theory of the Subject does for its alignment of set theoretical mathematics and Maoist politics; see Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998), pp. 180–181. It would require far more space than can be allowed here to investigate Laruelle’s uses of quantum theory for their coherence and appropriateness, however. It must suffice just to summarize Laruelle’s philosophical moves and address how they clarify his relationship to atomism.
François Laruelle, Anti-Badiou: On the Introduction of Maoism into Philosophy, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. xxx.
The most systematic exposition of non-philosophy, before the quantum-theoretical development of Laruelle’s thought, is to be found in François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, trans. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Laruelle levels this critique even against Gilles Deleuze (though less stringently than he does against others), but it should be noted that it makes little sense to accuse Deleuze of employing identity to ground immanence. As is made clear especially in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); and Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), Deleuze uses rather the notion of univocity to outline his conception of immanence. It remains to be shown that univocity trades on identity. And the complexity of Laruelle’s relationship to Deleuze remains to be developed fully. More à propos might be Badiou’s critique of Deleuze’s thought as a metaphysics of the One. See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 10–11; as well as useful commentary in Paul M. Livingston, The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp. 90–112.
For Laruelle’s purposes, the non-corpuscular and the microscopic amount to the same as the undulatory—that is, these are effectively coextensive with wave phenomena. This nonetheless does not mean that the distinction between the undulatory and the corpuscular is ultimately a matter of scale. Classical atomism, particularly in its revitalized scientific form in early modernity, emphasizes the microscopic but does so in an emphatically corpuscular fashion, a non-undulatory fashion. At issue, then, is not scale as such, but a failure to recognize the undulatory through a privileging of the corpuscularity of the macroscopic.
It is unsurprising that Laruelle takes special aim at Badiou, since he arguably recognizes a distinction not unlike the one Laruelle describes in terms of the micro- and the macroscropic, but he seems nonetheless to atomize the microscopic with his set-theoretical account of being by arguing deliberately against the idea of the continuum.
In a study that predates the full maturation of Laruelle’s project, John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (New York: Continuum, 2006), has framed Laruelle’s place in contemporary continental thought in precisely these terms. Of course, a similar account of contemporary French thought has been provided in Johnston’s already-mentioned Prolegomena to Any Future Materialism.
On this point, Althusser is perhaps the clearest: “The idea that the origin of every world, and therefore of all reality and all meaning, is due to a swerve, and that Swerve, not Reason or Cause, is the origin of the world, gives some sense of the audacity of Epicurus’ thesis.” Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 169.
Famously, Badiou makes this the basic question of contemporary philosophy in Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006).
See Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); and Gaston Bachelard, The Formation of the Scientific Mind, trans. M. McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2002).
In this sense, Alexander Galloway’s use of Laruelle “against the digital” and in defense of the analog may be misguided. That it uses little of Laruelle’s most recent thought is perhaps suggestive on this score. At the same time, it is to be noted that Galloway explicitly states that his aim is to borrow from, not to agree with or lend support to, Laruelle. See Alexander R. Galloway, Laruelle: Against the Digital (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).
Laruelle carefully distinguishes between two sorts of indeterminacy at work in quantum theory. See François Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard: Génerique, quantique, philo-fiction (Paris: Éditions Kimé, 2010), pp. 359–360.
See, generally, Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard.
Curiously but essentially, Laruelle refers to the clinamen in at least one of his works only as a figure for corpuscular thought, that is, for thought that regards inert materials as things (“immobile objects”) on which some external force transcendentally operates (“as a predicate,” Laruelle says). Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard, p. 264. The fact that this approach to the clinamen appears in his very first quantum-theoretical work, however, while the clearly affirmative references to the clinamen I will review have appeared in still-more-recent quantum-theoretical works, indicates that his assessment of the relevance of atomism to his thought has changed quite recently, coming eventually to see how the clinamen serves as a useful principle for organizing his own thought.
François Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, a Non-Standard Aesthetics, trans. Drew S. Burk (Minneapolis: Univocal, 2012), p. 5. Naturally, talk of “generic extension” smacks of Badiou and his use, in Being and Event, of Paul Cohen’s model theoretical operation of forcing. Laruelle does not deny the connection, but he insists that his own use of Cohen moves in a direction Badiou fails to see. See, generally, Laruelle, Anti-Badiou.
Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 5 (translation slightly modified).
See François Laruelle, General Theory of Victims, trans. Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015). For representative texts by Agamben, see Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002); and Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). I draw the language of the “man without content,” naturally, from Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). The distinction between Laruelle’s and Badiou’s respective conceptions of the generic lies in this attachment of the generic to the question of human nature. For Badiou, the generic is non- or extra-human, as is made especially clear in Badiou, Being and Event.
As is arguably ideal for the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard. See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 71–82.
Laruelle is emphatic that this vectorialization is not the result of an external force that acts on otherwise inert materials, but rather something immanent to them. He thus distinguishes between motion (mouvement) and mobility (mouvance), the latter concept marking the fashion in which vectorialization is immanent to mobilized materials. See Laruelle, Philosophie non-standard, p. 265.
On the domination of the real numbers in every real of appearance, see Alain Badiou, Number and Numbers, trans. Robin MacKay (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), pp. 1–4.
In François Laruelle, Christo-Fiction: The Ruins of Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), pp. 68–69), Laruelle provides a remarkably astute analysis of the meaning of constants as used in mathematical physics, spelling out the essential meaning of their being cut to the measure of the (generically) human observer.
A similarly astute analysis of the lived, as this functions in science, appears in Laruelle, Christo-Fiction, pp. 119–121. Laruelle’s insistence on the importance of the lived, despite his obvious non-phenomenological orientation, makes clear his odd positioning in French thought. Along with Gilles Deleuze and Michel Henry, Laruelle works at the boundary between the so-called rationalist and so-called vitalist strains of twentieth-century French thought. Although it does not comment directly on Laruelle, see Knox Peden, Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014).
Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, p. 5.
Laruelle explains this also in much the same fashion, but in connection with religion, in Laruelle, Christo-Fiction, pp. 93–98.
The two stages I have disintricated here map nicely onto Martin Heidegger’s classic distinction between (pre-conscious) understanding and (conscious) interpretation. In some sense, then, Laruelle’s project might be productively approached as a double clarification of the basic commitments of Heideggerian phenomenology. Quantum theoretical vectors can be used to clarify the basic nature of Heideggerian understanding, while a mathematics of probability can be used to clarify the basic nature of Heideggerian interpretation. See, of course, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 49–63.
The sort of probabilistic thinking Laruelle espouses and advocates here differs from the sort of (specifically Humean) probabilistic thinking critiqued by Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 82–111. The problematic Humean move Meillassoux forcefully identifies is that of “extending the probabilistic reasoning… that is internal to our universe” and focused on establishing natural laws “to the universe as such” (ibid., p. 97). The sort of probabilism at stake in quantum theory concerns position and direction of the particulate.
Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, pp. 15–17. A similar passage of parallel interest can be found in Laruelle, Christo-Fiction, p. 195, where the “christic matrix” accomplishes the same vectorialization of Jewish and Greek materials, orienting them to the generically human through what Laruelle there again calls a clinamen. This appears to be a consistent feature of his most recent thought.
Here, naturally, I deliberately use traditionally Hegelian language but replace the Hegelian “negative” with the Laruellean clinamen: “tarrying with the swerve.” This seems to me a rather apt formula for Laruelle’s form of thinking.
The swerve seems to have been invented by Epicurus, such that it did not feature in pre-Epicurean atomism. Its necessity to the Epicurean picture seems to have arisen because Epicurus added weight to the several properties of the atom, producing an emphatically materialist atomism (where that atomisms of Leucippus and Democritus before him were arguably idealist after a fashion). The clinamen is thus primarily a feature of specifically materialist atomism, of atomisms in which it intervenes between two radically distinct possible situations for the movement of the atoms in the void. For a good account of the non-materialist commitments of pre-Epicurean atomism, see Heinz Wismann, Les Avatars du vide: Démocrite et les fondaments de l’atomisme (Paris: Éditions Hermann, 2010).
See, of course, Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 2.251–293. For a good overview, see Tim O’Keefe, Epicureanism (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2010), pp. 73–83.
It may be of some importance that, in both Epicurus and Lucretius, the clinamen swerves according to a specific measure, a kind of quantum constant that they believe to be fixable. See the useful discussion of quantized minima among the Epicureans in O’Keefe, Epicureanism, pp. 22–24.
This second half of this summary statement seems to me to contain an important claim, at the very least because of the quite appropriate worry of Mladen Dolar that the clinamen seems “ideally suited to feature as the hero of the postmodern era, its fashionable catchword and password, conflating the developments in physics, Prigogine’s ‘dissipative structures,’ factals, chaos and quanta, with the devices of (post)modern poetics, where Jarry and Joyce, both keen admirers of Lucretius, have paved the way.” Dolar, “Tyche, Clinamen, Den,” 232.
See Henri Bergson, The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).
See Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin V. Boundas, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), pp. 266–279.
See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), pp. 17–64; and Jacques Lacan, “L’Étourdit,” The Letter 41 (2009), pp. 31–80.
See Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–1982, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005).
See Serres, The Birth of Physics.
See Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
It would, in addition, be quite necessary to trace carefully at least two crucial background thinkers whose influence can be felt in all the contributions to this conversation: Hegel’s comments on atomism in his Science of Logic and Marx’s discussions in his dissertation on Epicurean atomism. See G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1969), pp. 165–167; see also G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1892), vol 1., pp. 298–310, and vol. 2, pp. 276–311. And see Karl Marx, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels: Collected Works, Volume 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1975), pp. 25–105, 403–509.
Laruelle, Anti-Badiou, p. xvi.
For Badiou’s basic exposition of philosophy’s conditioned status, see especially Alain Badiou, Manifesto for Philosophy, ed. and trans. Norman Madarasz (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999), pp. 27–39. It should be noted at the same time that Badiou in no way obscures the fact that he regards philosophical reflection as a gesture of mastery; see Alain Badiou, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran (New York: Continuum, 2008), pp. 3–32. Importantly, Jacques Rancière’s central criticism of Badiou runs strictly parallel to Laruelle’s. See Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Literature, trans. Julie Rose (Malden, MA: Polity, 2011), pp. 183–205; and Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents, trans. Steven Corcoran (Malden, MA: Polity, 2009), pp. 63–87.
Laruelle, Anti-Badiou, p. xxii.
Laruelle, Anti-Badiou, pp. x, 16. In this regard, Laruelle’s thought might seem to align rather well with much of contemporary thought, and most proximately with Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze. Laruelle has nonetheless made a systematic effort to distinguish his own project from the work of these two thinkers. It would require another paper to summarize Laruelle’s treatment of these problem, but it may be worth quoting his most succinct summary of the difference, as he conceives it. It appears, incidentally, in a passage where he clearly recognizes why critics might suspect that he dresses up something banal in contemporary thought as something genuinely novel: “From where, in effect, do we take this point of view allowing for the description of the field of philosophy without being in its turn a philosophy included in this field, yet without in consequence wanting to be an impossible metalanguage? If this ‘invariant,’ in a new sense, of Difference is unthinkable and improbably from the standpoint of the ‘semi-systems’ of Nietzsche-Deleuze, Heidegger and Derrida, it is because it is acquired from entirely other ‘positions,’ rather from a mode of thought other than philosophical which, alone, is capable of perceiving in these three systems the distinct regions of the same domain of reality rather than the modes of a common essence. This experience is what we have called the One, endeavoring—we will come back to this—to describe its essence as indifference to the Unity of which all the philosophers speak—in particular those of Difference—which is always the unity-of-contraries, or scission-as-unity.” Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference, p. 12.
Laruelle, Anti-Badiou, p, 1.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 24.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 56.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 57.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 58.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 61.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 58.
Laruelle’s accusations are, of course, explicit, since they appear throughout his Anti-Badiou, as well as at various other points in his published writings. Badiou’s accusations are, to this point, implicit, since he has not as yet produced a direct response to Laruelle. Nonetheless, the basic nature of what he would likely have to say in response to Laruelle is, I think, relatively clear. In many ways, Badiou’s book-length engagement with Deleuze itself serves as a response to Laruelle’s larger project; see, again, Badiou, Deleuze.
The qualification of events as “radically transformative” is necessary, as Badiou has clarified in Logics of Worlds, where events appear as the most radical of several sorts of change that occur within worlds or orders of things. See Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano (New York: Continuum, 2009), pp. 355–396.
This critique in its fully mature form is found articulated most fully in Badiou, Deleuze, where the focus is less on a structuralist dialectic (where closure is a matter of dialectical circularity) than on a structuralist notion of being’s univocity (where closure is a matter of ontological oneness). Thus, in Theory of the Subject, Badiou identifies Hegel and Lacan, along with Stéphane Mallarmé, as the chief figures representative of the structuralist dialectic, while in the context of his mature work, he takes aim rather at thinkers like Deleuze—and therefore, implicitly, at Laruelle. One might nonetheless make the argument (I lack the space here to do it myself) that Badiou would ultimately regard thinkers of univocity and immanence new avatars of the dialectic, at the very least because they present only a new figure (or even a new logic) only of the same ontological commitment to the Parmenidean One.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, pp. 59, 61.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 61.
This become clear as earlier as Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference. In the language of Laruelle’s Principles of Non-Philosophy, every dialectical conception of thought has always already made the philosophical decision and so belongs on the side of standard philosophical thought, wedded to overdetermination.
Laruelle, Anti-Badiou, p. 197.
For what I believe is the richest available analysis and development of this perspective, see Galloway, Laruelle, pp. 25–48.
Badiou’s talk of the swerving atom as the atomistic designation or name of the void in Theory of the Subject anticipates quite perfectly his description of the role of names in every revolution in Being and Event. This is a crucial point of continuity in the development of his project from prematurity to maturity. See Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 178–183. It should be noted at the same time that Badiou has more recently complicated this picture by criticizing his former use of names in the articulation of radical change. See Badiou, The Concept of Model, pp. 95–96; and Badiou, Logics of Worlds, pp. 357–396.
This is a point of continuity across Badiou’s work from Theory of the Subject onward. Put most bluntly in Theory of the Subject, Badiou says just this: “Let us say that in the long run and well beyond the Greeks, the clinamen is the subject or, to be more precise, subjectivization.” Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 59.
Badiou develops a rather precise concept of the singular in Being and Event. See Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 93–101.
Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 57, describes the compromised use of the clinamen in the following terms: “In order to pass from the duality of principles (atoms/void) to the one of the world as system of wholes (things), one must obviously filter the strong difference into a weak difference… Here we are approaching a crucial operation of the dialectic, namely: the linking together of a chain. This means passing from a strong difference, wherein the quality of the real qua force makes itself felt, to a homogeneous combinatory space, wherein a process becomes composed with terms of the same kind.”
In this regard, Laruelle perhaps reproduces at least one of Deleuze’s conclusions regarding the clinamen: “The Clinamen or swerve has nothing to do with an oblique movement which would come accidentally to modify a vertical fall. It has always been present: it is not a secondary movement, nor a secondary determination of the movement, which would be produced at any time, at any place. The clinamen is the original determination of the direction of the movement of the atom. It is a kind of conatus—a differential of matter and, by the same token, a differential of thought, based on the method of exhaustion.” Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 269.
See distinct presentations of this process and procedure in Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 232–254; and Badiou, Logics of Worlds, pp. 399–447.
This is what Badiou calls already in Theory of the Subject the “enormous trace that is the whole.” Badiou, Theory of the Subject, p. 63.
There is a work of construction here as well, of course, but it is the construction of a matrix or a collider, along the lines of quantum theoretical experimentation—or of a camera, as Laruelle explores this point in Photo-Fiction. See Laruelle, Photo-Fiction, pp. 11–23.
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Spencer, J.M. The Laruellean Clinamen: François Laruelle and French Atomism. Cont Philos Rev 51, 527–547 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9435-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-018-9435-y