The ethic of truths: Badiou and Pierre Rivière

Emotion, Space and Society 5 (2012) 226e234

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The ethic of truths: Badiou and Pierre Rivièreq Bronwyn Davies* Youth Research Centre, University of Melbourne, Bronwyn Davies, 20/11 Springfield Ave., Potts Point NSW 2011, Australia

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history: Received 10 March 2011 Received in revised form 31 July 2011 Accepted 3 August 2011

Drawing on Badiou’s (2002, 2009) theory of the subject and his ethic of truths, this paper extends the analyses made by Foucault (1975) of the court documents of Pierre Rivière’s trial. Pierre Rivière wanted to bring about social change. His three murders, along with the Memoir he wrote afterwards, were not only an attempt to solve an intractable problem in his own family, but also to draw the world’s attention to what was wrong with society. Yet immediately after his murderous act, Pierre Rivière thought of what he had done as monstrous and evil. In order to explore his conflicting thoughts and emotions that led to the murders this paper draws on Badiou’s definitions of an event (a movement in thought and action through which the world changes) and of evil (where commitment to an event denies the multiplicity of truths, and sacrifices others to a singular cause). It asks in what way Pierre Rivière’s triple parricide can be thought of as contributing to an event, and how it was that his contribution turned to evil. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Emplacement Glory Ethics Evil Event Subject

1. Introduction Pierre Rivière wrote in his Memoir of the hour after the triple murder when his emotional state shifted from one of personal glory to abject horror: . I threw away my bill into a wheatfield near La Faucterie and went off. As I went I felt this courage and this idea of glory that inspired me weaken, and when I had gone farther and come into the woods I regained my full senses, ah, can it be so, I asked myself, monster that I am! Hapless victims! Can I possibly have done that, no it is but a dream! Ah but it is all too true! Chasms gape beneath my feet, earth swallow me; I wept, I fell to the ground, I lay there, I gazed at the scene, the woods. they are annihilated forever these hapless ones. (Foucault, 1975: 113) In this paper I explore the ways in which the emergent thought in France at the time of these murders in 1835 made it possible for Pierre Rivière to construe his murderous act as right, and even glorious. Pierre Rivière’s parents were married in 1814. The marriage was one of convenience enabling Pierre Margrin Rivière, Pierre Rivière’s

q This paper was written in preparation for the collaborative project on Pierre Rivière undertaken with Professor Jane Speedy and her research group while the author was Benjamin Meaker Professor at the University of Bristol MarcheApril 2010. * Tel.: þ61 407 212 943. E-mail address: [email protected]. 1755-4586/$ e see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2011.08.001

father, to evade the draft. The couple had been in bitter dispute throughout their twenty-year marriage.1 The situation of women was deeply ambiguous at that time. Whereas they had gained rights during the revolution, these had been lost early in the 1800s. As Bridges et al. (2012, footnote 1) point out: “The Napoleonic codes 1800e1804 reduced the status of woman to that of a minor and the ‘equal’ rights to divorce gained during the revolution were repealed in 1807. Between 1816 and 1880 it was impossible for all but the wealthiest to divorce”. Further, children were legally bound to their parents, even into adulthood, unless their parents could afford to set them up independently. Pierre Rivière and his feuding parents were bound together in legal knots that could not be untied without significant financial resources. Each anticipated a future life that was better than the one they had. Victoire Brion sought to establish her own independent living on her deceased parents farm and wished fervently to be free of child-bearing. Pierre Margrin Rivière dreamed of enabling his children to escape base servitude through his own hard labour and the acquisition of small parcels of land. But the law could force Pierre’s father to sell his land in order to pay his wife’s extensive debts, even though she did not live with her husband, reviled him, and had him to labour on her own land for her own profit. But the state could also force her to give up her own independent household and live with her husband. Pierre Rivière, for his part, longed to leave the life of hard labour on the

1 For a detailed account of Pierre Rivière’s life as it was told in his Memoir, see Davies and Speedy (2012).

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land and to make his impact on society through inventions, and through his writing. But he could not remove himself from the situation. There was not even enough money to buy the books he longed for in order to extend his knowledge. The fact that there were 10e15 parricides a year in France at that time, suggests that the legal situation of children was frequently intolerable.

recognition. It is compassionate, open to the other, not judging and categorizing, but responding; becoming open to the not-yet-known in the other and in itself. This non-egoic subject-of-movement has many names. I have called it the subject-of-thought (Davies, 2010). Badiou calls it the Immortal being that we can each become. Taubman (2010: 198e9) elaborates Badiou’s position:

2. Badiou’s theory of the subject Drawing on Badiou’s theory of the subject I examine Pierre Rivière’s embeddedness in the emerging thought of his times e the event he was caught up in. Further, drawing on Badiou’s ethic of truths I explore the way in which the event and Pierre Rivière’s placements within it turned him towards the pursuit of personal glory and to his monstrous crime. Badiou’s (2009) subject does not float free of place, but is multiply embedded in it. Rather than defining the multiplicity of the subject in terms of the multiple and contradictory discourses at work on and through the subject, Badiou focuses on the multiple emplacements, or positionings that each of us is subjected to, and becomes subject within. He uses an algebraic formula to elaborate this idea, where A refers to the general-singular of placement, the “something-in-itself” of being, and Ap refers to the self that is inflected by place or placement: “What is the meaning of the something-in-itself and the something-for-the-other? Pure identity and placed identity; the letter and the space in which it is marked; theory and practice” (Badiou, 2009: 6). Pure identity (A) cannot exist independent of place or space. It is never only itself: “it is always in this way that A presents itself (it is always placed) and refuses itself (because, as placed, it is never only itself, A, but also its place, Ap)” (Badiou, 2009: 6). An individual may gain an identity (a habitual set of recognitions within a fixed and limited number of placements), but “there are an infinity of places” in relation to which subjects are constituted (Badiou, 2009: 6). The phenomenological subject who imagines itself to float free of place and to have an integrated identity that it can carry from one place to another, I have called elsewhere the subject-of-will (Davies, 2010). That subject, despite its willing otherwise, is subjected to a “constitutive scission: A ¼ (AAp)” (2009, 6). “The index, p, refers back to the space of placement P, the site of any possible reduplication of A. [This reduplication of A is not only] spatial or geometrical: a reduplication can be temporal, or even fictive” (Badiou, 2009: 6). Being, or being-in-itself (A), refers to the sensate, animal being, to existence prior to subjectivation to truths. This sensate, affective being is both specific and, in its materiality, co-extensive with other beings, organic and inorganic. When that sensate being commits itself to the pursuit of a particular truth, it potentially takes on what Badiou calls immortality: “we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal e unpredictably, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important or secondary” (Badiou, 2002: 12). Truths in this definition are emergent, integral to the unfolding of events through which the not-yet-known emerges. Pierre Rivière revealed in his Memoir a passionate commitment to the pursuit of such truth. Immortality for Badiou is not the immortality of continuing individual existence, but a state of grace that subjects may encounter in themselves when they abandon or are abandoned by the usual state of affairs, and when they shed their ego’s investment in habitual ways of thinking and being. New knowledge “punches a ‘hole’ in [existing] knowledges, forcing a new state of affairs” (Badiou, 2002: 70). In a state of grace the immortal subject becomes movement, rather than being fixed in old habits and repetitions. This subject-of-movement sheds the defensive narcissism and paranoia of the individualized subject-of-will. It has no need of

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There exists on the one hand the status quo, what Badiou calls the ‘state’ of the situation, which consists of our quotidian livesddogmatic opinions, institutionalized knowledges, habits, bureaucratic allegiances, and the pursuit of fulfilling our animal appetites. It is, if you will, the conditioned life, the doxa, or, in psychoanalytic terms, the un-examined, overdetermined life. Badiou intentionally uses ‘state’ to suggest the role the State plays in maintaining the status quo. On the other hand, there is what Badiou calls ‘subjective truth’, which only emerges when a situation suddenly, as if by chance, or what Badiou will call grace, shifts, revealing what had, until that moment, been a void in the situation. . only by committing to that truth do we transcend our conditioned, overdetermined lives, becoming our better or what he calls ‘Immortal self’. The void is that which is present but not visible in the current situation. The current situation is organized around the void: “at the heart of every situation, as the foundation of its being, there is a ‘situated’ void, around which is organized the plenitude (or stable multiples) of the situation in question” (Badiou, 2002: 68). What emerges when the void is made visible is something else not yet imaginable within the current state of affairs. The Immortal self is integral to that something else. Varela, drawing on both psychoanalysis and Buddhism, refers to the Immortal self as the decentred self, which comes to exist through “a suspension of the acquired manner of emergence of the virtual self” (Varela, 1999: 64). He describes the Immortal being or de-centred self as experiencing unconditional compassion though that compassion is always potentially compromised by the egoic desire for recognition: The possibility for the concern for others present in all humans is usually mixed with a sense of ego and so becomes confused with the need to satisfy one’s own cravings for recognition and self-evaluation. Here, instead, I am referring to the spontaneous gestures that arise when one is not caught in the habitual patterns. It is the de-centered self ideal also expressed in psychoanalysis. (Varela, 1999: 69)2 Badiou’s philosophy is focussed on the possibility that human subjects can find ways not to be trapped by their egos in the status quo. He envisages a creative shifting away from the routine already-known state to a mode of being that is creatively engaged in opening up possibilities of thought and action. Badiou seeks above all, Hallward (2002: viii) says, “to expose and make sense of the potential for radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration.) in every situation”. Events are therefore central to his philosophy; they are the processes through which changes in the rationalities of the time and place take place, changes in the knowledges that are presupposed and actualized in the relations of power that unfold in each specific scene. An event is a dynamic movement towards the not-yet-known, the unfolding of a future possibility, something that cannot be reduced to the already known. It “compels us to a new way of being” (Badiou, 2002: 41). An event is not generated by an individual subject acting alone, but by multiple subjects multiply

2

See also Davies (2011) for a comparison of Buddhist and Deleuzian thought.

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placed. New thought emerges among subjects-in-relation; subjects who are open to emergent thought with transformative potential (Davies, 2010). The court documents associated with Pierre Rivière’s trial show that the courts had no interest in the emergent thought of the times. Their task of sentencing required that he be fitted within one of two pre-existing categories. Either he was of sane mind or he was mad. They were thus conceptually tied to choosing between one of only two possible placements or positionings, as if these were mutually exclusive and fixed qualities of persons rather than categorizations that render thought and being static within limited and fixed patterns. As Badiou argues, not only are there an infinite number of placements, but these placements overlap, inflect one another, and change over time. Pierre Rivière was a multiply placed being, read as rational and aware and also as mad, as religious and also as having given up on his faith, as creative and intelligent and also as an idiot. He placed himself in his own writing as writer, prisoner, farm labourer, loving son, inventor, potential priest, object of ridicule, seeker of glory, and murderer. Each of these placements was inflected by the other, and also by being geographically located in rural France. Each was also historically located in a particular time e not just 1835, but the times leading up to 1835 and the times arising out of 1835. Pierre Rivière was, historically speaking, a subject of the Enlightenment, who valued rationality above the emotional and the spiritual; he was a French subject committed to freedom and to glory; and in his imagination he was a member of the proletariat who would, in a little over a decade, rise up against the oppressive force of the bourgeoisie. At the same time he was a French peasant whose parents were newly able to enter into contracts and buy land; and he was a religious being in a country deeply ambivalent about the power of the church and the place of women. He was a labyrinth of differenciations. As Badiou says of himself: “[the] reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations. There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself” (Badiou, 2002: 25e6). When any subject accomplishes a sense of wholeness or unity, Badiou argues, the unity contains the contradictions and tensions of the multiplicity of placements: “the unity of the contraries supports contrariness in its very being” (Badiou, 2009: 9). Furthermore, it is not always possible to see, except in retrospect, what events or emergent knowledges one is caught up in. The subject named Pierre Rivière, much given to introspection, found himself caught between multiple and rapidly changing placements, not just because that is the nature of subjects, but also because he was a subject living in times of massive social change. The attempts of those in a position to judge his character always led to contradictory conclusions. 3. Pierre Rivière the thinker: the uprising of the French proletariat Pierre Rivière was at pains to make clear the rationality of his murderous act, attempting to articulate a truth about what was wrong with the social order at that time. It was possible for his mother to ruin his father financially, in effect, to undermine his attempts to change his own placement in society. While refusing to live in his house and living on her own farm, she could run up debts that he was liable to pay, even for example buying goods on credit and then selling them, leaving him with the original bills to pay. That she could behave in this way, with the help of the legal profession and of priests, seemed to Pierre Rivière completely incompatible with the new French social order espousing freedom.

He wrote in his Memoir: “it is the women who are in command now in this fine age which calls itself the age of enlightenment, this nation which seems to be so avid for liberty and glory obeys women” (Foucault, 1975: 108, my emphasis). In his analysis, he invests all agency for the ills of his own specific situation in his mother, with his sister as apprentice to that misery. He positions them as evil impediments to the longed for good e where his father would become a landholder free from misery, and where Pierre would be free to contribute to the emergent thinking of his times. A major event was becoming visible in France in the late 1830s and 40s, challenging the injustice of the proletariat’s entrapment in unfree lives. And that event is already vividly present in Pierre Rivière’s Memoir. This event, this emergence of new thinking, where the ‘proletariat’ emerged as “the central void of early bourgeois societies” (Badiou, 2002: 69), materialized in the uprising of French proletariat in Paris in 1848 and in Marx’s analysis of class relations that appeared 20 years later. As Badiou observes: “What started Marxism was nothing else than the popular and workers’ insurrections of 1830e50, themselves grafted onto the bourgeois democratic movement in Europe” (Badiou, 2009: 130). Pierre Rivière was a rural peasant, geographically distant from the place where the new thought was emerging. But he was an avid reader and it is possible to think of his writing and his actions as being part of that larger event, and to ask what it might have meant to be embedded in a time and place where that new event was first becoming thinkable. The 1848 uprising was one in which relations between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie was to change dramatically. Although it was an event that had not yet clearly articulated itself in 1835, his dream of a better life was quite obviously informed by it. The multiple uprisings that had gone before had made it evident that change was possible. Pierre Rivière hoped that his brutal act, accompanied by his Memoir, would contribute to the new thinking, by marking in such a dramatic fashion the impossibility of the then current state of gender relations that held his mother, his father and himself, in their deeply conflicted place. That new thinking, when it did emerge from the void, did not affirm Pierre Rivière’s analysis that women’s power was the source of the problem. It focussed, rather, on the relations of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. As Badiou points out, it is in the nature of an event that participants become faithful to a change, the terms of which are not-yet-known, since the void is that which is not yet visible. At the heart of Pierre Rivière’s life, as far as he could see, lay the problem of his mother’s power to undo his father’s struggle for freedom. One of the marked features of his life was that neither he nor his mother were legally or morally free to leave his father. Although his father might have found the money to make it possible for Pierre to make a new life for himself as a priest, Pierre described how his grandmother convinced him that such generosity would further contribute to his father’s ruin. The paths out of his life as a labouring peasant appeared to him to be closed if he chose, as he did, not to join with his mother in ruining his father. In the face of this lack of power to change his circumstances he decided to focus on something he could accomplish e the liberation of his father from his mother. Drawing on his extensive immersion in religious thought, on the belief in freedom, and on the concept of glorious death, he conceived a murderous scheme that would liberate his father, while simultaneously drawing society’s attention to the intolerable nature of the current state of affairs and leading to his own glorious death. He envisaged, in Badiou’s terms, an Immortality that would lift him out of the usual state of affairs, punching a hole in existing knowledges, and bringing about a new state of affairs. He committed himself to a truth through which he

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might transcend his conditioned, over-determined life. But his image of Immortality was inflected by his concept of individual glory. In his Memoir he elaborated the way in which his thinking settled on his “fearful design”. He had given up religion at the age of 10, having found the Bible to be no longer credible, given what he had read about the geographical structure of the earth. He longed to be a writer, or an inventor, to do something glorious. He wrote in his memoir: Despite these ideas of glory I cherished, I loved my father very much, his tribulations affected me sorely. The distress in which I saw him immersed in these latter days. all this affected me very deeply. All my ideas were directed towards these things and settled upon them. I conceived the fearful design which I executed, I was meditating it for about a month before. I wholly forgot the principles which should have made me respect my mother and my sister and my brother, I regarded my father as being in the power of mad dogs or barbarians against whom I must take up arms. It even seemed to me that God had destined me for this and that I would be executing his justice. it seemed to me that it would be a glory to me, that I should immortalize myself by dying for my father. I would be dying to deliver a man who loves and cherishes me. (Foucault, 1975: 104e5) Pierre Rivière imagined a state of glorious Immortality in which he rose above the condition in which he and his family were entrapped. The fearful design he settled on, of freeing his father from his mother, meant forfeiting his own life. In Badiou’s terms, he could not enter the state of Immortality or grace that he dreamt of, since he had lost sight of the multiplicity of truths, and thus lost the central feature of Immortal being e compassion. The concept of glory, in effect, trapped him inside an egoic self who desired both his own singular glory, and recognition for his singular thoughts. Is it possible to trace the path that his thinking and his emotions took him on, away from grace and towards disaster? Pierre Rivière had imagined that he would make a significant contribution to changing thought, by bringing attention to the “ignoble and shameful” rules of man that made his family’s situation possible (Foucault, 1975: 105). He drew the idea of sacrifice of the son for the father from his current reading of shipwrecked sailors sacrificing themselves to save the others, and from the Easter service in which his father sang. The images of sacrifice seemed to invite him to conceive of himself as the one to be sacrificed, and the flow of tears of others, in response to the beauty of his father’s voice, lodged the idea of sacrifice in his heart: The latest book I read was a history of shipwrecks lent to me by Lerot. I found in it that when the sailors lacked victuals, they sacrificed one of their number and ate him to save the rest of the crew. I thought to myself: I too will sacrifice myself for my father, everything seemed to invite me to this deed. Even with the mystery of the redemption, I thought that it was easier to understand, I said: our Lord Jesus Christ died on the cross to save mankind, to redeem him from slavery to the devil. as for me, I can deliver my father only by dying for him. When I heard that nearly fifty persons had wept when my father had intoned the Asperges, I said in my heart: if strangers who have nothing to do with it weep, what should I not do, I who am his son. I therefore took this fearful resolution. (Foucault, 1975: 106) The Asperges involves the priest sprinkling holy water on the members of the congregation and the words are sung from Psalm 51:

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You will sprinkle me, O Lord, with hyssop and I shall be cleansed, You will wash me, and I shall be whitewashed more than snow is. Pity me, O God, according to your great mercy. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit As it was in the beginning, is now and always shall be forever and ever. Amen. As a young child Pierre Rivière had been deeply religious, even memorizing and reciting sermons. At the age of 10 he gave up religion as he could no longer believe in the rationality of the Bible. But the image of Christ sacrificing himself for his Father still had deep emotional resonance for him. The words of the Asperges, sung by his father, offered him an image of purity not unlike Badiou’s pure Being (A) which exists in no space. But as Badiou (2009: 6) says: “it is always in this way that A presents itself (it is always placed) and refuses itself (because, as placed, it is never only itself, A, but also its place, Ap).” Pierre Rivière’s fantasy of escaping his emplacement as a peasant bound to his family was an impossible fantasy. In any practical sense he could not escape his placement within his family and within the labouring classes. Yet at the time of his arrest, some weeks after the murders, it seems that Pierre Rivière had escaped his sense of entrapment in place, transcending his quotidian life, while living alone in the forest. When asked by the Sergeant of Gendarmeries where he was from “he replied from everywhere; where are you going? Where God commands me” (Foucault, 1975: 14). His words could only be interpreted, by the courts, however, as either a sign of madness or of feigned madness. There was no room either for the impact of his image of God in his decision-making, or of a sense of ecstatic removal from the current state of the world in a state of grace. In the very concrete place of the courts, if Pierre Rivière had given up on religion he must have been lying. The understanding of the courts was tied, as it is today, to liberal notions of the subject, which presuppose that the answer to what happened is largely to be found in the character of the perpetrator. The logic of the courts was that if he was a rational being then he knew what he was doing and must lose his life as punishment. But as Butler (2004: 25) points out .perhaps we make a mistake if we take the definitions of who we are, legally, to be adequate descriptions of what we are about. Although this language may well establish our legitimacy within a legal framework ensconced in liberal versions of human ontology, it does not do justice to passion, grief and rage, all of which tear us from ourselves, bind us to others, transport us, undo us, implicate us in lives that are not our own, irreversibly, if not fatally. In his first interrogation in the courts Pierre Rivière began by situating himself in geographical space. He then stated what his crime was and what had been his motive. This was followed by a detailed account, drawing on religious images, of how he came to his horrendous act. In order to evoke the experience of transcendence, of stepping outside his quotidian life, he did not have the language that was yet to emerge in the events of 1848, and nor did he have the language of a transcendent Immortal subject-ofmovement who experiences a state of grace, except through religious imagery. It was not until he wrote his Memoir, while in prison, that his commitment to social change was made clear. At this point in the proceedings, in the first interrogation, he found himself only able to speak in terms of the already known, while the event yet to happen remained the void around which his speech circulated. That void was the abject situation of the proletariat. The invocation of current knowledge (such as religious knowledge) to justify the event (the emergence of the not-yet-known) is characterized by Badiou as emanating from the mistaken belief that

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“an event convokes not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude” (Badiou, 2002: 71). By remaining within the plenitude of the already known, in the name of that which is understood as good (in this case religion), violent action can be justified because it legitimates that which already is. Both Bergson (1998) and Deleuze (2004) point out, however, that the already known and the not-yet-known depend on each other e indeed cannot exist without each other. When the examining judge could find no truth in Pierre Rivière’s account, in which both a rational giving up on religion and an ecstatic experience of God telling him to carry out the murders were woven together, he demanded of Pierre Rivière that he give truth its due as if the truth of himself could not hold these contraries. In the face of the judge’s disbelief, Pierre Rivière abandoned his attempt to hold these two contraries in place. Perhaps he could see that it was not getting to the complex event that he was part of, which he could not make sensible within the rationalities of the court and the times. His use of religious imagery both held him inside of the already known and offered a way of expressing his ecstatic experience of being outside the current situation, and his yearning for a state of grace. But his placement in this first interrogation made the complex truth of this unhearable. When asked for the truth, then, he simply returned to his beginning point: the awful fact of the entrapment of his father by his mother and his sister. Pierre Rivière’s account, as he made it in that first interrogation in court, is presented here using Richardson’s (1997) poetic method, selecting out key words and phrases in order to present it in a way that enables the reader to enter the emotion and deeply ambivalent complexity of Pierre Rivière’s experience: I am Pierre Rivière, aged twenty, farmer, born in the commune of Courvaudon and resident in that of Aunay. I have murdered my mother, my sister and my brother because they were united in league to persecute my father. God appeared to me in the company of angels and ordered me to justify his providence just as He ordered Moses to slay the adorers of the golden calf, sparing neither friends nor father nor son. I have read Deuteronomy, many times, and Numbers. My father was being persecuted. It was fit to make one doubt God’s providence. I lost my religion when I read The Good Sense of Curé Melier which confirmed what I had read in the almanacs and geography books, that the earth is divided into several parts. If Adam was created in one of those parts I doubted it would have been possible for his posterity to people the others. I was unable to work because of the persecutions my father was suffering. Two weeks before I killed my mother and my sister and my brother I saw God, who ordered me to do it. He appeared to me in the company of angels, He gave me the order to justify his providence. I could not love my mother because of what she was doing to my father. I had no evil design against her. Besides, God’s commandments forbade me to do her harm.

I went against those commandments because I was specially inspired by God, as the Levites were. I am not of a ferocious character. The priest had told my father to pray to God, Saying God would help him out in his tribulations. If He had not helped him, the existence of God And his justice would have been in doubt. Afterwards, I retired to the woods to live as a solitary. By my deed I was consecrated to God. Examining judge: So far you have tried to deceive the law. You have not given truth its due. Tell us frankly today what course could have led you to murder your mother, your sister, and your brother? My defence is no more than a part I am acting. I have lost my faith. I shall tell the truth. I wished to deliver my father from an evil woman who had plagued him continually. Ever since she became his wife she has been ruining him, and driving him to such despair that he was sometimes tempted to commit suicide. I killed my sister Victoire Because she took my mother’s part. I killed my brother By reason of his love for my mother and my sister. (Foucault, 1975: 19e24) Later, in his Memoir, Pierre Rivière added another reason for killing his brother Jules: “I feared that if I only killed the other two, my father though greatly horrified by it might yet regret me when he knew that I was dying for him, I knew he loved that child who was very intelligent, I thought to myself he will hold me in such abhorrence that he will rejoice in my death, and so he will live happier being free from regrets” (Foucault, 1975: 106). 4. The judgement The lucidity of Pierre Rivière’s account in his Memoir, and its capacity to draw readers under its spell, seemed deeply at odds with the extreme brutality of his act. He provided the courts with a complex puzzle that they found impossible to solve. His character was ultimately opaque to them, yet it remained their sole interest. The complex questions he set out to address in his Memoir were always only reducible, by the participants to the court hearing, to this unsolvable puzzle: is he mad or is he sane? The medical experts at the time were divided, three saying he was mad and three saying he wasn’t. Legal opinion was also divided, thus producing documents that contain “rather a strange contest, a confrontation, a power relation, a battle among discourses and through discourses” (Foucault, 1975: x). The Prosecutor Royal at the Preliminary Investigation decided that Pierre Rivière was sane, and therefore evil, a criminal being who stifled his own conscience: Rivière is not a religious monomaniac as he tried to make out at first; nor is he an idiot, as some witnesses seemed to suppose him to be; so that in the eyes of the law he can only be regarded as a cruel being who has followed the promptings of evil, because, like all heinous criminals, he stifled the voice of conscience and did not struggle hard enough to control the propensities of his evil character. (Foucault, 1975: 40)

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Similarly, the assessment of the Regional Prosecutor at the Royal Court of Caens in his Bill of Indictment found him to have a savage character, a love of solitude, to be gifted with an aptitude for learning, a capacity for fidelity to his course of action and a cruel imagination. He concluded that Pierre Rivière was sane, albeit with ill-organised ideas. It was, finally, the nature of Pierre’s written language in his Memoir that left no doubt of his intelligence and thus his placement as sane: “.his language authenticates his full and entire knowledge of what he did and of his situation; some observations on the character, propensities, and habits of the accused leave no doubt about this” (Foucault, 1975: 48e50). Others found themselves much more sympathetic. The pre-trial court, of the Royal Court at Caen, for example, on receipt of the Prosecutor Royal’s report, and all the other documentation including Pierre’s Memoir, wrote: . in the second [part of the Memoir there is] a sketch of the character of the accused, a sketch drawn with a vigor which is simply astonishing and makes it most regrettable that Rivière has by an atrocious act rendered henceforth useless to Society the gifts so liberally imparted to him by nature without any assistance whatever from education; a remarkable memory, a great aptitude for the sciences, a lively and strong imagination; coupled with an eagerness for instruction and the achievement of glory. (Foucault, 1975: 45) While they differed in their conclusions, Pierre Rivière’s “character” was what the courts set about constructing. Who he was, or who he might be taken to be was naturalized; it was found to be in his nature to be gifted, or brutal, or evil. There is no mention of a larger truth concerning the ways the legal system itself created and exacerbated the problem of entrapment of all the participants in this fearful drama in an intolerable social order. One exception to this was a lengthy newspaper article that asked whether the crime was a manifestation of the times. Referring to the French Revolution, the author of the article wrote of the “victory of philosophy over the Catholic faith [that] has produced within the moral order a disturbance of mind and a breach to which must perhaps be ascribed all the ills with which our society is at present afflicted” (Foucault, 1975: 150). It goes on to say that it awaits the advent of a brilliant mind that can bring science and religion together in order to resolve these ills. Another exception was a compassionate letter to the paper calling into question the ethics of execution: “we deplore from the depths of our heart the fact that once again we have to resort to the executioner to cure the maladies, in some cases the hereditary maladies, of persons and societies. [To the judges we say] pity for him, but not infamy; and above all, not the scaffold!” For this writer at least, Pierre Rivière had succeeded in drawing attention to the social ills that his act sought to bring to the world’s attention. Finally, the court resolved the contradictions that its methods generated through a finding that Pierre Rivière was not mad, and that he therefore must be sentenced to death. At the same time it applied to the King for clemency and for the lighter sentence of imprisonment rather than death, appealing to the circumstances of his life, which may have clouded his reason: The jury, bringing in a verdict of guilty, deprecated his execution, for though they had found that he had discernment sufficient to render him responsible for his actions, they believed that his reason, of which he had never been fully in possession, might have been strongly affected by the circumstances in which he had been involved. Accordingly, they petitioned the king to commute the sentence. (Moulin, 1975: 212) In this appeal they were successful and Pierre Rivière was imprisoned for the term of his natural life.

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5. Ethics or an ethic of truths? In this section I turn in more detail to Badiou’s (2002) ethic of truths. Is it possible to listen to Pierre Rivière without judging and categorizing? Badiou contrasts his ethic of truths with what he calls “contemporary ethics”, which, according to Badiou (2002), is intrinsically conservative and regulative. Contemporary ethics assumes an a priori evil such as violence and suffering, and imposes a defensive ethics based on “human rights”. What informs those contemporary ethics discourses, Badiou says, is a relational dynamic where those who practice ethics are powerful, in contrast to those who are the objects of ethics practices. Contemporary ethics is accomplished through following rules, which assume the recipient of ethical practice is the “‘marginalized’, ‘excluded’ or ‘Third World’ victim, [who is] to be protected by a dutiful, efficient, and invariably ‘Western’ benefactor/exploiter” (Hallward, 2002: xiii). In so distinguishing those who engage in ethics, and those practiced on, as fundamentally categorically different, contemporary “ethics” loses sight of the particularity and situatedness of ethical practice. Badiou characterizes the ideology of contemporary ethics as having two poles: “a (vaguely Kantian) universalising pole. grounded in the abstract universality of ‘human’ attributes or rights. And second, a (vaguely Lévinasian) differentiated pole, attuned to the irreducible alterity of the Other” (Hallward, 2002: xiii). It gives primacy to the protection of the weak from abusive interference, and as a corollary, “conceives of ‘man’ as a fundamentally passive, fragile and mortal entity e as a potential victim to be protected” (Hallward, 2002: xiii). It further binds the object of study within its assigned category, as other to the researcher. In being so categorized it is fixed in place as a passive object of study, impervious to the practices of the research itself, or indeed of life itself. The move from contemporary ethics to an ethic of truths is not unlike the Deleuzian move from categorical difference to differenciation (Deleuze, 2004). Categorical difference involves difference and separation whereas differenciation is evolutionary, it involves an ongoing “continuum, a multiplicity of fusion” (Massey, 2005: 21) in which the other is not separated out, but an extension of the possibilities of becoming different. Differenciation involves “an insistence on the genuine openness of history, of the future" (Massey, 2005: 21). It is integral to what both Deleuze and Badiou call an event: something that cannot be reduced to the already known. An event punctures existing thought and “compels us to a new way of being” (Badiou, 2002: 41). “The event is both situated . and supplementary; thus absolutely detached from, or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation” (Badiou, 2002: 68). Badiou’s ethic of truths is situated and specific, and focused on events, on happenings, which implicate everyone “regardless of interest or privilege, regardless of state-sanctioned distinctions” (Hallward, 2002: xiv). In order to remain ethical, subjects caught up in such events must maintain a constant balance between their self-interest in a particular situation, and informed disinterest, which requires of them an openness to other opinions, and other commitments. An ethic of truths does not attempt to impose itself on everyone: The Good is Good only to the extent that it does not aspire to render the world good. Its sole being lies in the situated advent [l’advenue en situation] of a singular truth. Every absolutization of the power of a truth organizes an Evil. Not only does this Evil destroy the situation (for the will to eliminate opinion is, fundamentally, the same as the will to eliminate, in the human animal, its very animality, i.e. its being) but it also interrupts the truth-process in whose name it proceeds, since it fails to preserve, within the composition of its subject, the duality

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[duplicité] of interests (disinterested-interest and interest pure and simple). [creating] a disaster, a disaster of the truth induced by the absolutization of its power. (Badiou, 2002: 85) The witness accounts and the prosecution can be said to be located in contemporary ethics discourse, insofar as they constitute Pierre Rivière as irreducibly other e and thus as incomprehensible, and at the same time as a victim of his circumstances. Some straightforwardly evoke a monster, while others are more sympathetic. Here is Pierre Rivière as Other; he is not only mad, but a subhuman monster. Pierre Rivière’s excessive laughter is commented on frequently by the witnesses called to the hearing. Peter and Favret (in Foucault, 1975), with one foot in contemporary ethics and one in an ethic of truths, explain the excessive laughter in terms of the intolerable conditions of Pierre Rivière’s life. In another time and place, they say, he might have been someone of stature, of whom tales would be told in times to come, but in his current life of brute labour, there is only insensate laughter that “freezes and harrows the hearer”: If the peasants had a Plutarch, Pierre Rivière would have his chapter in the illustrious lives. And not he alone. His whole family falls into a rank of exemplary victims, a challenge, so to speak, to the galleries of storied urns and animated busts in the lofty ancestral mansions. But what Plutarch could conceive that exemplary lives could ever grow from the furrows tended by the stooping rustics? The humble earn only the meed of silence. So it is only right that one among those who stifle in their narrow confines should come to utter that insensate laughter which expresses the meaning even while it freezes and harrows the hearer, the prolonged peal of Pierre Rivière’s laughter in the years leading up to the murder, a laughter which speaks of the intolerable. (Peter and Favret, 1975: 175) In this interpretation his laughter is an expression of the total impossibility of his life among “stooping rustics”. He might have been like us, he might even have become great, but instead he was trapped in the intolerable otherness of “stooping rustics”. He is caught in his categorical difference. The laughter might equally be read using a Deleuzian image of excess, where the laughter potentially opens up lines of flight that disrupt the normative order. But lines of flight, or excess are always eventually brought back into the normative order, as they are in the court documents, asking not of the laughter what was so terrible that needed to be re-thought, disrupted, changed, but merely how might it signify the character of this particular murderer? Lines of flight can also be dangerous, and Pierre Rivière’s lines of flight, his laughter and his attempt to transcend the current state of affairs and to participate in changing them, took him on an irreversible path towards the horrifying slaughter of his mother, his sister and his brother, and finally of himself. 6. The question of Good and Evil In the excerpt from Pierre Rivière’s Memoir at the beginning of this paper, Pierre Rivière himself said of his fearful murders, that he knew one hour after he had carried them out, that his act was evil. In Badiou’s analysis the dividing line between a passionate commitment to an event that is true and just, and a passionate but mistaken (evil) commitment, is a fine, almost indistinguishable, line. The assemblage of legal, religious and class-based relations in 1835, in that part of France where Pierre Rivière and his family lived, alongside the specific relations between his parents, meant that his passionate commitment to freedom could find no line of flight that would make a difference, except through the brutal murders.

Pierre Rivière thought long and hard about what action he might take to liberate his father from his mother. He read the evil of his times as lying in the undue agency granted to women, agency that was taken up in his specific life by his mother and his sister. Pierre Rivière’s life, the circumstances in which he lived, made starkly visible the gap between the glorious ideals of the revolution and his own life of relentless hard labour. The brute facts of his own circumstances were that his own inability to escape was tied to the fact that his mother’s ambitions for her own freedom were lived out at the expense of her husband’s freedom and ultimately Pierre Rivière’s. To the extent that justice for such men as his father was Pierre Rivière’s cause, he was a subject caught up in the emergence of a new truth that culminated in the events of the 1848 revolution. But such truths, as Badiou defines them, must apply to everyone. One person’s freedom, for example, cannot be pursued by denying freedom to another. Pierre Rivière’s belief that he must sacrifice his mother, sister and brother to his father’s freedom, and to his own glory, meant that, in Badiou’s analysis, his truth, the event that he wanted to participate in to bring about a better world, took a fatal shift into evil. Badiou characterizes evil as having three elements: fidelity to and participation in an event, that event being larger than the individual participants and their actions, and often beyond their analysis or understanding; a betrayal of truth through giving up on the necessary multiplicity of truth, and imposing one’s own truth on others; and the forcing of a disaster that follows from a belief in the absolute rightness of one’s own point of view or truth. Pierre Rivière wanted to rise above his present condition. His desire to leave his life as a farm labourer and to contribute to society was in excess of what was possible, or thinkable for those around him. It drew energy from the writers of the Enlightenment who envisaged a world in which rationality might reign. He was on the edge of a new event, in which relations would change between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. But at that time and in that place the possibility of being someone else, other than labourer, was denied him. The normative moral order, and the legal order, made no room for his dreams. His capacity for fidelity to the cause of freedom hinged on his desire for glory. Integral to that glory was the possibility that, through the writing of his Memoir, he would be able to be heard, and that his reasoning might bring about a greater change in the way the normative moral order was understood and practiced. We might ask then, in conclusion, in what way was Pierre Rivière involved in (become a subject through) his commitment to a larger truth, and how did that commitment become a fidelity to massacre? How did his mother and sister become the enemy rather than the legal system, which set up and maintained the conditions that defeated his mother and his father, as well as himself? How did the substance of his cause turn from a fight against injustice to his mother and sister becoming the substance to be opposed? Badiou points out that it is in the nature of events to oppose those who are its adversaries: Every fidelity to an authentic event names the adversaries of its perseverance. Contrary to consensual ethics, which tries to avoid divisions, the ethic of truths is always more or less militant, combative. For the concrete manifestation of its heterogeneity to opinion and established knowledges is the struggle against all sorts of efforts at interruption, at corruption, at the return to the immediate interests of the human animal, at the humiliation and repression of the Immortal who arises as subject. The ethic of truths presumes recognition of these efforts, and thus the singular operation of naming enemies. (Badiou, 2002: 75)

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Was it always, inevitably, then, both of these that drove Pierre Rivière e the unbearable nature of his own and his father’s life, obstructed in their own search for freedom by the women whose search for freedom opposed their own, and the broader social issue that was emergent in the event to come of justice for the proletariat? It was not hard for Pierre Rivière, in seeking to understand why he found himself absolutely trapped, to name an enemy close to himself, since the talk within his household repeatedly named his mother as the source of the family’s grief. Peter and Favret define the conflict between Pierre Rivière and his mother in terms of the new belief in freedom and the legal contract, both taken up by peasants at that time. I would add the problem of liberal individualism, which was now clearly an entrenched part of the legal system. Just as the courts became caught in the particularity of Pierre Rivière’s character instead of the larger issue of the court’s, or religion’s, or the law’s own responsibility for the injustices that created the intolerable situation, so it could be said that Pierre Rivière got caught in the particularity of his mother’s (individual) offences instead of the legal system that made her offences probable and perhaps inevitable. At the same time, in writing his Memoir, which he wanted to do even before the event, he was able to show that it was more than his rage against his mother and sister that needed to be dealt with. If evil is the absolutization of one’s own point of view through the denial of other truths, or other ways of seeing the event, then we must ask what was the mother’s point of view that Pierre Rivière failed to hear? And that even Foucault and his colleagues failed to hear? What Foucault and his colleagues did not notice is that Pierre Rivière made starkly visible to the reader in his Memoir that men had the legal and moral right to bed their wives and to ignore their protests. Pierre Rivière did not see this as wrong. He offered it, rather, as proof of the unreasonable nature of his mother even while reporting in detail how seriously ill she became during and after her pregnancies. A large part of the Memoir is devoted to Pierre Margrin Rivière’s attempts to negotiate with his wife. What was implicitly not negotiable was his entitlement to his conjugal rights. Both Victoire Brion, and Victoire the daughter, were affronted and violated by his manner of claiming those rights. Victoire Brion developed a substantial armoury in retaliation for his exercising of his legal and moral rights, and all of her armoury was also, like his assertion of conjugal rights, legitimate at law.3 Her husband’s appeals to the courts to prevent her from mobilizing this arsenal were to no avail. He was told he should support her and encourage her to come and live with him and could even be supported in this by the gendarmes. Members of the legal and religious fraternities were unable to see, let alone resolve, the issue of claiming conjugal rights, and could only enjoin him to stay within the law. Rape within marriage was still lawful. Divorce was not available as a way out, nor a system in which an estranged wife might become liable for her own debts. Such thinking, which accords citizenship and financial responsibility to a woman, and the right to say no to sex, or to choose not to have children, was a century and a half away.4

7. (In)conclusion Pierre Rivière’s primary emplacement was as dutiful son to his father. It was an emplacement he could not escape from. He longed

3 For more detailed elaboration of these negotiations, see Davies and Speedy (2012). 4 For example men’s forcing of sex on their wives only became illegal in Australia in 1984, a decade after Foucault and his colleagues first published this work. And of course many women still do not have the right or the means to control their own fertility.

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for other placements as inventor, writer, priest, but the state of affairs at that time did not make such placements possible. He carefully examined the available modes of thought about religion, science, revenge, personal glorification, and humility. In his memoir these modes of thought do not come one after the other, first picked up and then abandoned. Each, in a palimpsest of reasoning and emotion, informs the decision to go ahead with the slaughter, the slaughter that not only affirms his primary placement as dutiful son to his father, but closes off forever all the other dreamt of possibilities. From that point onward, he was emplaced in a complex mix of two opposing categories e as one who was sane and therefore evil, and must be executed, or one who was mad, without reason, who must be imprisoned and certainly not listened to. In his memoir he showed that he was aware of the various modes of thought that he adopted; he explained where they came from and how they influenced his thinking. He separated them out, rejected one and then another as he struggled to make sense of his multiple entrapments and entanglements in rural France in 1835. They could tell him that the current situation was intolerable, but not how to escape it. The evidence of his everyday life pointed to his mother as culprit. In the final event the murders were a fearful act for him and he had to find the courage, the passion and the hope for glory that would, together, make the act possible. The judges listened to Pierre Rivière, from a liberal, legal framework, and within that space attempted to construct a unitary character. But their hearing was limited to the task of judgement through categorization. They were not open to the possibility, as far as the written records reveal, that he might be saying something to them that would open their minds to new ways of thinking, though that was what he demanded of them in his Memoir. They listened within the already existing codes, and they made relevant what they read and what they heard in terms of already existing categories and the prejudices that accompanied them. With often profound misgivings, they located evil in the character of Pierre Rivière, and not in the total situation that bound him, and his father and mother, into a situation that no event other than multiple deaths seemed capable of disrupting or overturning. Pierre Rivière described an ecstatic passion that made the murders possible, a condition of grace that can only be achieved on stepping outside the controls of the normative order. And it is this commonality of the experience of grace of those participating in an event that makes it imperative to distinguish when and how the moment of grace turns towards evil. The courts had no means of reflecting on the experience of grace and its link to social events through which social change is brought about. They could only think of it in terms of monomania or temporary madness, a categorization that they considered and rejected. Pierre Rivière was found to be too rational and aware to fit into any category other than sane, and yet they could not quite agree that he was evil. His entrapment in the current state of affairs combined with a passionate desire for social change and for betterment could not be made to make sense in the legalistic liberal framework of 1835. In the final event it might be said that Pierre Rivière’s act contributed to the larger event that was making new forms of freedom possible, if only by underlining the impossibility of the current state of affairs. Without denying that the act itself was evil as Badiou defines that term, the act, and Pierre Rivière’s account of it can make an important contribution to understanding how such acts are made possible by social conditions of entrapment when combined with passionate hope for change. Pierre Rivière attempted to participate in an event through which major social change would be accomplished. He wanted the world to realise the need for change and for his own violent act to be vindicated. It is in the nature of a world-changing event that the terms through which the not-yet-known will be brought into being

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are not at first clear to the participants. That lack of clarity must be born alongside a passionate fidelity to the event e the rupture to the existing state of affairs that are holding the intolerable in place. Pierre Rivière was entrapped inside a rigid state of affairs. His imaginative forays into creating something new, and his fidelity to the event were finally corrupted by his desire for glory and his belief that his mother was the source of evil e that her very existence was what obstructed the event from unfolding. In blaming his mother, he lost sight of the multiplicity of truths, and he lost his capacity for compassion. Perhaps his act did in some way impact on the impetus for change, but for Pierre there was no state of grace that could lift him or his father out of the oppressive conditions of their existence nor enable him to articulate the nature of the event he was participating in. His life in prison after the court hearings was not what he had sought, and some years after the murders he freed himself from what was intolerable by taking his own life. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor Jane Speedy and her research group for the wonderful workshops that led to this special issue, the two anonymous reviewers for their deeply insightful responses to this paper, and Sheridan Linnell who asked vital, penetrating questions of the penultimate draft. References Badiou, Alain, 2002. Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (P. Hallward, Trans.). Verso, London.

Badiou, Alain, 2009. Theory of the Subject (B. Bosteels, Trans.). Continuum, London. Bergson, H., 1998. Creative Evolution. Dover Publications Inc, Mineola. Bridges, Nell, Kemp, Donna, Speedy, Jane, 2012. Beyond the fragments of the two Victoires: a fictionalised and incomplete Memoir of the two women murdered by Pierre Rivière e his sister and his mother. Emotion, Space and Society 5, 260e268. Butler, Judith, 2004. Precarious Life. The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso, London. Davies, Bronwyn, 2010. The struggle between the individualised subject of phenomenology and the multiplicities of the poststructuralist subject: the problem of agency. Reconceptualizing Educational Research Methodology 1 (1), 54e68. Davies, Bronwyn, 2011. Intersections between zen buddhism and deleuzian philosophy. Psyke and Logos 32 (1), 28e45. Davies, Bronwyn, Speedy, Jane, 2012. Who was Pierre Rivière? Introduction to the special issue. Emotion, Space and Society 5, 207e215. Deleuze, Gilles, 2004. Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Continuum, London. (F. Jellinek, Trans.). In: Foucault, Michel (Ed.), I Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother. A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln. Hallward, Peter, 2002. Translator’s introduction. In: Badiou, Alain (Ed.), Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Verso, London, pp. viiexlvii. Massey, Doreen, 2005. For Space. Sage, London. Moulin, Patricia, 1975. Extenuating circumstances (F. Jellinek, Trans.). In: Foucault, Michel (Ed.), I Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother. A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, pp. 212e218. Peter, Jean-Pierre, Favret, Jeanne, 1975. The animal, the madman, and death (F. Jellinek, Trans.). In: Foucault, Michel (Ed.), I Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister and My Brother. A Case of Parricide in the 19th Century. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, pp. 175e198. Richardson, Laurel, 1997. Fields of Play. Constructing an Academic Life. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick. Taubman, Peter M., 2010. Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan and the ethics of teaching. Educational Philosophy and Theory 22 (2), 196e212. Varela, Francisco J., 1999. Ethical Know-How. Action, Wisdom and Cognition. Stanford University Press, Stanford.