Beyond Deleuze & Guattari, what is "potato fascism" and why did Badiou attack it?

Beyond Deleuze, Badiou proposes an alternative philosophical path rooted in a different understanding of the event, the multiple, and the role of philosophy itself. While acknowledging Deleuze's profound impact and insightful analyses, Badiou critiques Deleuze's ontology, particularly its emphasis on immanence, continuity, and the "fold," arguing that it ultimately falls short of grasping the radicality of the event as rupture and the power of truth as action.

Badiou's primary divergence from Deleuze lies in their respective ontologies. Deleuze, according to Badiou, embraces an "organicist ontology of the Multiple," where the event is seen as a spontaneous gesture within a dark backdrop of an enveloping and global animality. Badiou, however, champions a mathematical ontology, emphasizing the void and the infinite. He argues that Deleuze's focus on continuity and the fold obscures the "separated void" that precedes and enables the event. For Badiou, "the Book is not 'the fold of the event', it is the pure notion of eventality, or the poetic isolation of what is absent from any event."

Furthermore, Badiou critiques Deleuze's understanding of chance and the concept. He argues that Deleuze's concept of chance as the absence of any principle is insufficient, contrasting it with Mallarmé's view of chance as "the negation of any principle." Badiou suggests that Deleuze's descriptive approach, while insightful, ultimately remains within the immanence of the world, whereas philosophy should strive for the "salvation of truths." This involves a subtractive and active approach, opposing the "motionless intricacy of the empty set" to Deleuze's "flux" and the "stellar separation of the event" to his "creative continuity."

Ultimately, Badiou advocates for a philosophy that embraces the void, the infinite, and the power of truth as action, contrasting it with Deleuze's emphasis on immanence, continuity, and description. He proposes a path that separates the operations of life and the actions of truth, arguing that "A truth is the principle of a subject, through the void whose action it supports. A truth is action and not presence."