BADIOU KRITIK€¦ · Web viewAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII ... Rather, this is philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled by the theology,

West Coast Publishing 1Badiou K and Answers

Badiou Critique and Answers

Badiou K – 1NC Shell 1/2..........................................................................................................................................2Badiou K – 1NC Shell 2/2..........................................................................................................................................3Badiou K – Link – Human Rights...............................................................................................................................4Badiou K – Link – State Focus...................................................................................................................................5Badiou K – Link – Responsibility to the Other..........................................................................................................6Badiou K – Link – Levinasian Ethics..........................................................................................................................7Badiou K – Link – Ethics............................................................................................................................................8Badiou K – Link – Ethics............................................................................................................................................9Badiou K – Link – Ethics of Difference....................................................................................................................10Badiou K – Link – Ethics are Nihilist........................................................................................................................11Badiou K – Alternative – Politics of Truth...............................................................................................................12Badiou K – A2: Permutation...................................................................................................................................13

A2: Badiou K – Human Rights Good.......................................................................................................................14A2: Badiou K – Levinasian Ethics Good...................................................................................................................15A2: Badiou K – State Focus Good...........................................................................................................................16A2: Badiou K – State Demands Good.....................................................................................................................17A2: Badiou K – Alternative Fails.............................................................................................................................18A2: Badiou K – Alternative is Violent......................................................................................................................19


Badiou K – 1NC Shell 1/2

A. THE AFFIRMATIVE EQUATES THE EXPANSION OF RIGHTS WITH A DOCTRINE OF ETHICS. THIS CONSERVATIVE POLITICS ENSURES THE PERPETUATION OF THE STATUS QUOAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 4-5.

According to the way it is generally used today, the term ‘ethics’ relates above all to the domain of human rights, ‘the rights of man’ — or, by derivation, the rights of living beings. We are supposed to assume the existence of a universally recognizable human subject possessing ‘rights’ that are in some sense natural: the right to live, to avoid abusive treatment, to enjoy ‘fundamental’ liberties (of opinion, of expression, of democratic choice in the election of governments, etc.). These rights are held to be self-evident, and the result of a wide consensus. ‘Ethics’ is a matter of busying ourselves with these rights, of making sure that they are respected. This return to the old doctrine of the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolutionary Marxism, and of all the forms of progressive engagement that it inspired. In the political domain, deprived of any collective political landmark, stripped of any notion of the ‘meaning of History’ and no longer able to hope for or expect a social revolution, many intellectuals, along with much of public opinion, have been won over to the logic of a capitalist economy and a parliamentary democracy. In the domain of ‘philosophy’, they have rediscovered the virtues of that ideology constantly defended by their former opponents: humanitarian individualism and the liberal defense of rights against the constraints imposed by organized political engagement. Rather than seek out the terms of a new politics of collective liberation, they have, in sum, adopted as their own the principles of the established “Western” order.

B. RIGHTS WON FROM THE STATE ARE A PROBLEMATIC STARTING POINT FOR ANY EMANCIPATORY PROJECT – WE MUST ENTIRELY RETHINK THE CONCEPT OF ETHICSPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2003.BADIOU: A SUBJECT TO TRUTH, p. 257-258.

Though left-hanging intellectuals are obviously reluctant explicitly to defend today’s prevailing regime of capitalist exploitation, many happily agree that the supposedly “real Evil is elsewhere,” for instance, in ethnic fundamentalism, totalitarian violence, or religious terrorism. Enthusiastic denunciation of these crimes encourages us to make believe that we ourselves enjoy “if not the Good then at least the best possible state of affairs”—and helps us forget that nothing about such denunciation actively “leads in the direction of the real emancipation of humanity.”13 Badiou is one of very few contemporary thinkers prepared to accept the certainty of violence and the risk of disaster implicit in all genuine thought, that is, in any compelling break with the prevailing logic of re-presentation. As far as the established order is con-cerned, every “Idea is cruel” by definition, and there is no guarantee against this cruelty other than the devastating imperative so typical of our times: “Live without Idea” (LS, 95). Badiou is a thinker for whom the question of terror remains a genuine problem, rather than an essentially unproblematic instance of barbaric evil or crime. Since thought is grounded only in the real and proceeds purely as an “unjustifiable” affirmation, it is always vulnerable to a form of paranoid insecurity. There can be no evading the fact that “the real, conceived in its contingent absoluteness, is never so real that it cannot be suspected of being fictitious [semblant]. Nothing can testify to the fact that the real is real, other than the fictional system in which it will come to play the role of the real” (LS, 43). And since the real is fundamentally indifferent to the moral categories of good and evil, there is no built-in mechanism to prevent this fictional system from drawing upon terror as its ultimate means of distinguishing false from truthful testimony. There is, in particular, no blandly “humanizing” mechanism adequate to this purpose. Since every truth springs from an exception to the rules, we must refuse, in principle, the idea of any automatic or inherent rights of Man.14 No less than Lacan and Zizek, Badiou displaces the facile emphasis on human rights from the center of ethics by accepting that fidelity to truth need have “nothing to do with the ‘interests’ of the animal, is indifferent to its perpetuation, and has eternity as its destiny.”5 Human rights, if they exist at all, can be only exceptional rights, asserted and affirmed in their positivity rather than deduced, negatively, from the requirements of survival. Failure to make this distinction simply confuses human and animal rights in a single calculus of suffering.


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C. THIS NEGATIVE VIEW OF ETHICS AS THE PROPER DIVISION OF RIGHTS CAUSES VIOLENCE AND INTERVENTION IN THE NAME OF THE ETHICALAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 12-13.

If we do not set out from this point (which can be summarized, very simply, as the assertion that Man thinks, that Man is a tissue of truths), if we equate Man with the simple reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed to a conclusion quite opposite to the one that the principle of life seems to imply. For this ‘living being’ is in reality contemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt. Who can fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarkations of charitable legionnaires, the Subject presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? Since the barbarity of the situation is considered only in terms of ‘human rights’ — whereas in fact we are always dealing with a political situation, one that calls for a political thought-practice, one that is peopled by its own authentic actors — it is perceived, from the heights of our apparent civil peace, as the uncivilized that demands of the civilized a civilizing intervention. Every intervention in the name of a civilization requires an initial contempt for the situation as a whole, including its victims. And this is why the reign of ‘ethics’ coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today’s sordid self-satisfaction in the ‘West’, with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity — in short, of its subhumanitv.

D. ALTERNATIVE: WE MUST REFUSE ETHICS BASED ON RULE-MAKING AND LEGISLATION IN FAVOR OF A MILITANT COMMITMENT TO TRUTH BEYOND CALCULATIONPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2003.BADIOU: A SUBJECT TO TRUTH, p. 258.

Any given question of rights, then, is always particular to a truth procedure. The multiplicity of procedures rules out in advance the possibility of a single, transcendental morality. Badiou refuses to subordinate the particularity of political sequences, say, to universal moral judgments of the kind “violence is always wrong.” Since any political truth is an effort to realize the universal within the particularity of a situation, the pursuit of means appropriate to this universality must be internal to that situation. The unity of theory and practice in Badiou’s concept of truth compels the foreclosure of any abstract notion of morality per se (any deliberation as to what I should do). However transcendent its authority, mere morality remains a matter of the world. Morality calculates interests and benefits. What Badiou defends as ethics always involves, one way or another, a decision to forego the world, that is, to forego calculation—and so to accept a fully logical obligation, though one based only on chance. Unsurprisingly, Pascal’s analysis of choice is for Badiou an exemplary piece of true ethical reasoning. The obvious question that arises is this: Does this amoral refusal of calculation imply the refusal of all notions of moderation and restraint? What happens if a truth runs out of control? How can Badiou’s philosophy of effectively sovereign truths guard against their despotic corruption? If there is no moral “outside” to a truth, what can limit its effective jurisdiction? These are the questions Badiou tackles with his notion of the unnameable.


Badiou K – Link – Human Rights

1. HUMAN RIGHTS POSIT THE RECIPIENT OF RIGHTS AS A WEAK, SUFFERING BEING, MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR VICTIMS TO BECOME SUBJECTSAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001. ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 9-10.

The presuppositions of this cluster of convictions are clear. 1. We posit a general human subject, such that whatever evil befalls him is universally identifiable (even if this universality often goes by the altogether paradoxical name of ‘public opinion’), such that this subject is both, on the one hand, a passive, pathetic [pathetique], or reflexive subject —he who suffers — and, on the other, the active, determining subject of judgement — he who, in identifying suffering, knows that it must be stopped by all available means. 2. Politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of the circumstances. 3. Evil is that from which the Good is derived, not the other way round. 4. ‘Human rights’ are rights to non-Evil: rights not to be offended or mistreated with respect to one’s life (the horrors of murder and execution), one’s body (the horrors of torture, cruelty and famine), or one’s cultural identity (the horrors of the humiliation of women, of minorities, etc.). The power of this doctrine rests, at first glance, in its self-evidence. Indeed, we know from experience that suffering is highly visible. The eighteenth-century theoreticians had already made pity – identification with the suffering of a living being – the mainspring of the relation with the other. That political leaders are discredited chiefly by their corruption, indifference or cruelty was a fact already noted by the Greek theorists of tyranny. That it is easier to establish consensus regarding what is evil rather than regarding what is good is a fact already established by the experience of the Church: it was always easier for church leaders to indicate what was forbidden — indeed, to content themselves with such abstinences — than to try to figure out what should be done. It is certainly true, moreover, that every politics worthy of the name finds its point of departure in the way people represent their lives and rights. It might seem, then, that we have here a body of self-evident principles capable of cementing a global consensus, and of imposing themselves strongly. Yet we must insist that it is not so; that this ‘ethics’ is inconsistent, and that the — perfectly obvious — reality of the situation is characterized in fact by the unrestrained pursuit of self-interest, the disappearance or extreme fragility of emancipatory politics, the multiplication of ‘ethnic’ con-flicts, and the universality of unbridled competition.

2. LEGISLATION ON BEHALF OF VICTIMS IS ABSTRACTED FROM SUFFERING AND NEGLECTS INDIVIDUALS IN THE NAME OF COLLECTIVE GOODAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001. ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 14-15.

Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determinations of Evil, ethics prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which is the obligatory starting point of all properly human action. Thus, for instance, the doctor won over to ‘ethical’ ideology will ponder, in meetings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding ‘the sick,’ conceived of in exactly the same way as the partisan of human rights conceives of the indistinct crowd of victims- the ‘human’ totality of subhuman entities [reels]. But the same doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this particular person is not treated at the hospital, and accorded all necessary measures, because he or she is without legal residency papers, or not a contributor to Social Security. Once again, ‘collective’ responsibility demands it! What is erased in the process is the fact that there is only one medical situation, the clinical situation, and there is no need for an ‘ethics’ (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to understand that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if he deals with the situation according to the rule of maximum possibility — to treat this person who demands treatment of him (no intervention here!) as thoroughly as he can, using everything he knows and with all the means at his disposal, without taking anything else into consideration. And if he is to be prevented from giving treatment because of the State budget, because of death rates or laws governing immigration, then let them send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic duty would oblige him to resist them, with force if necessary. ‘Ethical commissions’ and other ruminations on ‘healthcare expenses’ or ‘managerial responsibility’, since they are radically exterior to the one situation that is genuinely medical,


can in reality only prevent us from being faithful to it. For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation.


Badiou K – Link – State Focus

1. ETHICAL POLICY-MAKING BY THE STATE PREVENTS TRUE EMANCIPATIONDaniel Bensaid, professor at the University of Paris VIII, 2004.THINK AGAIN: ALAIN BADIOU AND THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY, p. 100.

Yet in Badiou, the intermittence of event and subject renders the very idea of politics problematic. According to him, politics defines itself via fidelity to the event whereby the victims of oppression declare themselves. His determination to prise politics free from the state in order to subjecrivize it, to ‘deliver it from history in order to hand it over to the event’, is part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed. The alternative effort, to subordinate politics to some putative ‘meaning of history’, which has ominous echoes in recent history, is he suggests to incorporate it within the process of general technicization and to reduce it to the ‘management of state affairs’. One must have ‘the courage to declare that, from the point of view of politics, history as meaning or direction does not exist: all that exists is the periodic occurrence of the a priori conditions of chance’. However, this divorce between event and history (between the event and its historically determined conditions) tends to render politics if not unthinkable then at least impracticable (PP 18). Badiou’s philosophical trajectory appears, indeed, like a long march towards ‘a politics without a party’, the consummation of a subjectivation that is at once necessary and impossible. Isn’t a politics without a party actually a politics without politics? In Badiou’s account it is Rousseau who founded the modern concept of politics insofar as politics begins with the event of the contract rather than with the assembling of a structure: the subject is primarily its own legislator. Consequently, there is no truth more active than that of a politics which erupts like a pure instance of free decision when the order of things breaks down and when, refusing the apparent necessity of that order, we boldly venture forth into a hitherto unsuspected realm of possibility. Politics as such comes about, then, on the basis of its separation from the state, which is the very opposite and negation of the event, the petrified form of anti-politics; politics proceeds via a ‘brutal distancing of the state’. Nothing in the domain of the state can be against the state, just as nothing in the domain of economics can be against economics. So long as the economy and the state maintain their grip on the situation, politics is only a matter of controlled protests, captive resistances, reactions subordinated to the tutelary fetishes they pretend to defy. The only possible politics in such circumstances is, to use Gramsci’s terminology, a subaltern politics. For Badiou, the separation between politics and the state lies at the very root of politics. More precisely: it lies at the root of a politics of the oppressed, which is the only conceivable form in which politics can endure once it has vanished under the pressure of totalitarianism or the market.

2. LEGISLATING ETHICS REPRESSES DISSENT AND PREVENTS CHANGEAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001. ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 32-33.

The very idea of a consensual ‘ethics’, stemming from the general feeling provoked by the sight of atrocities, which replaces the ‘old ideological divisions’, is a powerful contributor to subjective resignation and acceptance of the status quo. For what every emancipatory project does, what every emergence of hitherto unknown possibilities does, is to put an end to consensus. How, indeed, could the incalculable novelty of a truth, and the hole that it bores in established knowledges, be inscribed in a situation without encountering resolute opposition? Precisely because a truth, in its invention, is the only thing that is for all, so it can actually be achieved only against dominant opinions, since these always work for the benefit of some rather than all. These privileged few certainly benefit from their position, their capital, their control of the media, and so on. But in particular, they wield the inert power of reality and time [de la realite et du temps] against that which is only, like every truth, the hazardous, precarious advent of a possibility of the Intemporal. As Mao Tse-tung used to say, with his customary simplicity: ‘If you have an idea, one will have to split into two.’ Yet ethics explicitly presents itself as the spiritual supplement of the consensus. The ‘splitting into two’ horrifies it (it smacks of ideology, it’s passé. . .). Ethics is thus part of what prohibits any idea, any coherent project of thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle (which, as we have said, does not itself contain any positive idea of humanity). And in the same way, the ‘concern for the other’ signifies that it is not a matter — that it is


never a matter — of prescribing hitherto unexplored possibilities for our situation, and ultimately for ourselves. The Law (human rights, etc.) is always already there. It regulates judgements and opinions concerning the evil that happens in some variable elsewhere. But there is no question of reconsidering the foundation of this ‘Law’, of going right back to the conservative identity that sustains it.


Badiou K – Link – Responsibility to the Other

1. RESPONSIBILITY TO THE OTHER IS A VIOLENT MEANS OF ASSIMILATING ALTERITY INTO WESTERN CAPITALISM Alain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), Winter 2002.CABINET MAGAZINE ISSUE 5, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php

My position is obviously that this "reasoning" is purely illusory ideology. First, liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. Second, the Communist revolutions of the 20th century have represented grandiose efforts to create a completely different historical and political universe. Politics is not the management of the power of the State. Politics is first the invention and the exercise of an absolutely new and concrete reality. Politics is the creation of thought. The Lenin who wrote What is to be Done?, the Trotsky who wrote History of the Russian Revolution, and the Mao Zedong who wrote On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People are intellectual geniuses, comparable to Freud or Einstein. Certainly, the politics of emancipation, or egalitarian politics, have not, thus far, been able to resolve the problem of the power of the State. They have exercised a terror that is finally useless. But that should encourage us to pick up the question where they left it off, rather than to rally to the capitalist, imperialist enemy. Third, the category "totalitarianism" is intellectually very weak. There is, on the side of Communism, a universal desire for emancipation, while on the side of Fascism, there is a national and racial desire. These are two radically opposed projects. The war between the two has indeed been the war between the idea of a universal politics and the idea of racial domination. Fourth, the use of terror in revolutionary circumstances or civil war does not at all mean that the leaders and militants are insane, or that they express the possibility of internal Evil. Terror is a political tool that has been in use as long as human societies have existed. It should therefore be judged as a political tool, and not submitted to infantilizing moral judgment. It should be added that there are different types of terror. Our liberal countries know how to use it perfectly. The colossal American army exerts terrorist blackmail on a global scale, and prisons and executions exert an interior blackmail no less violent. Fifth, the only coherent theory of the subject (mine, I might add, in jest!) does not recognize in it any particular disposition toward Evil. Even Freud's death drive is not particularly tied to Evil. The death drive is a necessary component of sublimation and creation, just as it is of murder and suicide. As for the love of the Other, or, worse, the "recognition of the Other," these are nothing but Christian confections. There is never "the Other" as such. There are projects of thought, or of actions, on the basis of which we distinguish between those who are friends, those who are enemies, and those who can be considered neutral. The question of knowing how to treat enemies or neutrals depends entirely on the project concerned, the thought that constitutes it, and the concrete circumstances (is the project in an escalating phase? is it very dangerous? etc.).

2. RESPECT FOR THE OTHER NECESSITATES VIOLENCEAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), Winter 2002.CABINET MAGAZINE ISSUE 5, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php

I must particularly insist that the formula "respect for the Other" has nothing to do with any serious definition of Good and Evil. What does "respect for the Other" mean when one is at war against an enemy, when one is brutally left by a woman for someone else, when one must judge the works of a mediocre "artist," when science is faced with obscurantist sects, etc.? Very often, it is the "respect for Others" that is injurious, that is Evil. Especially when it is resistance against others, or even hatred of others, that drives a subjectively just action. And it's always in these kinds of circumstances (violent conflicts, brutal changes, passionate loves, artistic creations) that the question of Evil can be truly asked for a subject. Evil does not exist either as nature or as law. It exists, and varies, in the singular becoming of the True.


Badiou K – Link – Levinasian Ethics

1. LEVINAS’S ETHIC OF RESPONSIBILITY IS NEVER ACHIEVABLE BECAUSE IT ELEVATES THE ENCOUNTER WITH THE OTHER TO A THEOLOGICAL EXPERIENCEAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 22-23.

The phenomenon of the other (his face) must then attest to a radical alterity which he nevertheless does not contain by himself. The Other, as he appears to me in the order of the finite, must be the epiphany of a properly infinite distance to the other, the traversal of which is the originary ethical experience. This means that in order to be intelligible, ethics requires that the Other be in some sense carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite experience. Levinas calls this principle the ‘Altogether-Other’, and it is quite obviously the ethical name for God. There can be no Other if he is not the immediate phenomenon of the Altogether-Other. There can be no finite devotion to the non-identical if it is not sustained by the infinite devotion of the principle to that which subsists outside it. There can be no ethics without God the ineffable. In Levinas’s enterprise, the ethical dominance of the Other over the theoretical ontology of the same is entirely bound up with a religious axiom; to believe that we can separate what Levinas’s thought unites is to betray the intimate movement of this thought, its subjective rigour. In truth, Levinas has no philosophy — not even philosophy as the ‘servant’ of theology. Rather, this is philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled by the theology, itself no longer a theology (the terminology is still too Greek, and presumes proximity to the divine via the identity and predicates of God) but, precisely, an ethics. To make of ethics the ultimate name of the religious as such (i.e. of that which relates [re-lie] to the Other under the ineffable authority of the Altogether-Other) is to distance it still more completely from all that can be gathered under the name of ‘philosophy’.

2. LEVINAS’S ENCOUNTER WITH THE OTHER RESULTS IN NARCISSISM AND VIOLENCEAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 21-22.

The principal — but also fairly superficial — objection that we might make to ethics in Levinas’s sense is: what is it that testifies to the originality of my de-votion [de-vouement] to the Other? The phenomenological analyses of the face, of the caress, of love, cannot by themselves ground the anti-ontological (or anti-identitarian) thesis of the author of Totality and Infinity. A ‘mimetic’ conception that locates original access to the other in my own redoubled image also sheds light on that element of self-forgetting that characterizes the grasping of this other: what I cherish is that me-myself-at-a-distance which, precisely because it is ‘objectified’ for my consciousness, founds me as a stable construction, as an interiority accessible in its exteriority. Psychoanalysis explains brilliantly how this construction of the Ego in the identification with the other — this mirror-effect2 — combines narcissism (I delight in the exteriority of the other in so far as he figures as myself made visible to myself) and aggressivity (I invest in the other my death drive, my own archaic desire for self-destruction). Here, however, we are a very long way from what Levinas wants to tell us. As always, the pure analysis of phenomenal appearing cannot decide between divergent orientations of thought. We need, in addition, to make explicit the axioms of thought that decide an orientation. The difficulty, which also defines the point of application for these axioms, can be explained as follows: the ethical primacy of the Other over the Same requires that the experience of alterity be ontologically ‘guaranteed’ as the experience of a distance, or of an essential non-identity, the traversal of which is the ethical experience itself. But nothing in the simple phenomenon of the other contains such a guarantee. And this simply because the finitude of the other’s appearing certainly can be conceived as resemblance, or as imitation, and thus lead back to the logic of the Same. The other always resembles me too much for the hypothesis of an originary exposure to his alterity to be necessarily true.


Badiou K – Link – Ethics

1. ETHICS SEEK TO BALANCE GOOD AND EVIL THROUGH CONSTANT VIOLENCEAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2002.CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL, issue 4, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/badiou.htm

But the acts of violence, often so extreme? The hundreds of thousands of dead? The persecutions, especially against intellectuals? One will say the same thing about them as about all the acts of violence that have marked the history, to this very day, of any expansive attempts to practice a free politics. The radical subversion of the eternal order that subjects society to wealth and to the wealthy, to power and to the powerful, to science and to scientists, to capital and to its servants, cannot be sweet, progressive and peaceful. There is already a great and rigorous violence of thought when you cease to tolerate that one counts what the people think for nothing, for nothing the collective intelligence of workers, for nothing, to say the truth, any thought that is not homogenous to the order in which the hideous reign of profit is perpetuated. The theme of total emancipation, practiced in the present, in the enthusiasm of the absolute present, is always situated beyond Good and Evil, because, in the circumstances of action, the only known Good is what the status quo establishes as the precious name of its own subsistence. Extreme violence is therefore reciprocal to extreme enthusiasm, because it is in effect, to speak like Nietzsche, a matter of the transvaluation of all values. The Leninist passion for the real, which is also the passion of thought, is without morality. The only status of morality, as Nietzsche saw, is genealogical. It is a residue of the old world. Thus, for a Leninist, the threshold of tolerance to what, seen from our old and pacified present, is the worst, is incredibly high, regardless of the camp that one belongs to. This is obviously what causes some today to speak of the barbarity of the century. Nevertheless, it is altogether unjust to isolate this dimension of the passion for the real. Even when it is a question of the persecution of intellectuals, as disastrous as its spectacle and effects may be, it is important to recall that what makes it possible is that it is not the privileges of knowledge that command the political access to the real. Like Fouquier-Tinville said during the French Revolution, when judging and condemning to death Lavoisier, the creator of modern chemistry: The Republic does not need scientists. Barbarous words if there ever were, totally extremist and unreasonable, but that must be understood, beyond themselves, in their abridged, axiomatic form: The Republic does not need. It is not from need, from interest, or from its correlate, privileged knowledge, that derives the political capture of a fragment of the real, but from the occurrence of a collectivisable thought, and from it alone. This can also be stated as follows: politics, when it exists, grounds its own principle regarding the real, and thus is in need of nothing, save for itself.

2. ETHICS ENTAILS BOTH A CONSERVATIVE DESIRE FOR THE GLOBAL PROPAGATION OF WESTERN VALUES AND A VIOLENT DESIRE TO MASTER THOSE WHO DO NOT COMPLYAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 38-39.

Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition for the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our ‘Western position — the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy [economie objective sauvage] with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life — or again, that dooms what is to the ‘Western’ mastery of death. This is why ethics would be better named — since it speaks Greek — a ‘eu-oudenose’, a smug nihilism. Against this we can set only that which is not yet in being, but which our thought declares itself able to conceive. Every age — and in the end, none is worth more than any other — has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names (‘ethics’, for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe. It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation,


every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle- against the ethics of living-well whose real content is the deciding of death – of an ethics of truth.


Badiou K – Link – Ethics

1. THE POWER TO DEFINE ETHICS RELIES ON THE POWER TO DECIDE WHO LIVES AND DIESAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 34-35.

We should be more struck than we usually are by a remark that often recurs in articles and commentaries devoted to the war in the former Yugoslavia: it is pointed out — with a kind of subjective excitement, an ornamental pathos — that these atrocities are taking place ‘only two hours by plane from Paris’. The authors of these texts invoke, naturally, all the ‘rights of man’, ethics, humanitarian intervention, the fact that Evil (thought to have been exorcized by the collapse of ‘totalitarianisms’) is making a terrible comeback. But then the observation seems ludicrous: if it is a matter of ethical principles, of the victimary essence of Man, of the fact that ‘rights are universal and imprescriptible’, why should we care about the length of the flight? Is the recognition of the other’ all the more intense if this other is in some sense almost within my reach? In this pathos of proximity, we can almost sense the trembling equivocation, halfway between fear and enjoyment, of finally perceiving so close to us horror and destruction, war and cynicism. Here ethical ideology has at its disposal, almost knocking on the protected gates of civilized shelter, the revolting yet delicious combination of a complex Other (Croats, Serbs, and those enigmatic ‘Muslims’ of Bosnia) and an avowed Evil. History has delivered the ethical dish to our very door. Ethics feeds too much on Evil and the Other not to take silent pleasure in seeing them close up (in a silence that is the abject underside of its prattle). For at the core of the mastery internal to ethics is always the power to decide who dies and who does not. Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death. And it is certainly true that in so far as we deny truths, we thereby challenge the immortal disjunction that they effect in any given situation. Between Man as the possible basis for the uncertainty [alea] of truths, or Man as being-for-death (or being-for-happiness, it is the same thing), you have to choose. It is the same choice that divides philosophy from ‘ethics’, or the courage of truths from nihilism.

2. THE AFFIRMATIVE’S ENDLESS QUEST FOR ETHICS MUST VIOLENTLY DESTROY ALL DISSENTAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2002.CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL, issue 4, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/badiou.htm

What must be emphasized is that to purify the real means to extract it from the reality that envelops and occults it. Whence the violent taste for surface and transparency. The century attempts to react against depth. It carries out a fierce critique of foundations and of the beyond, it promotes the immediate and the surface of sensation. It proposes, as heir to Nietzsche, to abandon all other-worlds, and to pose that the real is identical to appearance. Thought, precisely because what drives it is not the ideal but the real, must seize hold of appearance as appearance, or of the real as pure event of its own appearance. To achieve this, it must destroy every density, every claim to substantiality, every assertion of reality. It is reality that acts as an obstacle to the discovery of the real as pure surface. Here lies the struggle against semblance. But since the semblance-of-reality adheres to the real, the destruction of semblance comes to be identified with destruction pure and simple. At the end of its purification, the real, as total absence of reality, is the nothing. This path, undertaken by innumerable ventures in the century – political, artistic, scientific ventures – is the path of terrorist nihilism. Since its subjective motivation is the passion for the real, it is not a consent to anything, it is a creation, and one should recognise in it the traits of an active nihilism. Where are we today? The figure of active nihilism is regarded as completely obsolete. Every reasonable activity is limited, limiting, constrained by the burdens of reality. The best that one can do is to get away from evil, and to do this, the shortest path is to avoid any contact with the real. Ultimately one comes up against the nothing, the there-is-nothing-real, and in this sense one remains in nihilism.


Badiou K – Link – Ethics of Difference

1. TRUE ETHICS MUST BE INDIFFERENT TO DIFFERENCES IN IDENTITY THAT THE AFFIRMATIVE PROTECTS THROUGH RIGHTSPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. xxii-xxiii.

For Badiou, true ethical questions can arise only in a specific situation and under circumstances which, however divisive, are essentially indifferent to differences, concerning subjects ‘disinterested’ in the other as such, the other qua other (i.e. in the circumstances created by a truth-procedure). The ‘ethical ideology’, by contrast, precisely presumes to transcend all situated restrictions and to prevail in a consensual realm beyond division, all the while orientated around the imperious demands of difference and otherness qua otherness, the difference of the altogether other as much as the irreducibly incommensurable demands of every particular other. As Badiou is the first to recognize, nowhere is the essential logic more clearly articulated than in Levinas’s philosophy, where ‘the Other comes to us not only out of context but also without mediation.. According to Levinas, there can be no ethical situation as such, since ethics bears witness to a properly meta- or pre-ontological responsibility (roughly, the responsibility of a creature to its transcendent creator, a creator altogether beyond the ontological field of creation). For Levinas, as for Derrida after him, the other is other only if he immediately evokes or expresses the absolutely (divinely) other. Since the alterity of the other is simultaneously ‘the alterity of the human other [Autrui] and of the Most High [Tres Haut]’, so then our responsibility to this other is a matter of ‘unconditional obedience’, ‘trauma’, ‘obsession’, ‘persecution’, and so on.3” Of course, the limited creatures that we are can apprehend the Altogether-Other only if this otherness appears in some sense ‘on our own level’, that is, in the appearing of our ‘neighbour’ (of our neighbour’s face): there is only ‘responsibility and a Self because the trace of the [divinely] Infinite . . . is inscribed in proximity’. But this inscribing in nearness in no sense dilutes the essential fact that in my ‘non-relation’ with the Other, ‘the Other remains absolute and absolves itself from the relation which it enters into’. The relation with the other is first and foremost a ‘relation’ with the transcendent beyond as such. Levinasian ethics, in short, is a form of what Badiou criticizes as anti-philosophy, that is, the reservation of pure or absolute value to a realm beyond all conceptual distinction.

2. APPEALS TO IDENTITY DIFFERENCES ONLY ENSURE THAT MINORITIES ARE INTEGRATED INTO STRUCTURES OF DOMINATION – WE MUST BE BLIND TO DIFFERENCEAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 108-09.

The progressive formulation of a cause which engages cultural or communal predicates, linked to incontestable situations of oppression and humiliation, presumes that we propose these predicates, these particularities, these singularities, these communal qualities, in such a way that they be situated in another space and become heterogeneous to their ordinary oppressive operation. I never know in advance what quality, what particularity, is capable of becoming political or not; I have no preconceptions on that score. What I do know is that there must be a progressive meaning to these particularities, a meaning that is intelligible to all. Otherwise, we have something which has its raison d’etre, but which is necessarily of the order of a demand for integration — that is, of a demand that one’s particularity be valued in the existing state of things. This is something commendable, even necessary, but it is not, in my opinion, something to be inscribed directly in politics. Rather, it inscribes itself in what I would generally call ‘syndicalism’ [trade unionism] — that is to say, particular claims, claims that seek to be recognized and valued in a determinate relation of forces. I would call ‘political’ something that — in the categories, the slogans, the statements it puts forward — is less the demand of a social fraction or community to be integrated into the existing order than something which touches on a transformation of that order as a whole.


Badiou K – Link – Ethics are Nihilist

Their Ethics Are Nihilism—They Are A Symptom Of A Universe Ruled By A Distinctive Combination Of Resignation And A Destructive WillAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy, 2001, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, p. 30.

Whether we think of it as the consensual representation of Evil or as concern for the other, ethics designates above all the incapacity, so typical of the contemporary world, to name and strive for a Good. We should go even further, and say that the reign of ethics is one symptom of a universe ruled by a distinctive [singuliere combination of resignation in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if not destructive, will. It is this combination that should be designated as nihilism. Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefers to will nothingness rather than to will nothing at all. I will reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, which is like a kind of understudy [doublure] of blind necessity.

2. The affirmative return to ethics attempts to govern how we relate to ‘what is going on’- a means to regulate commentary on historical situations. This ethics results in genuine nihilismAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy, 2001, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, p. 2-3.

In fact, ethics designates today a principle that governs how we relate to 'what is going on', a vague way of regulating our, commentary on historical situations (the ethics of human rights), technico-scientific situations (medical ethics, bio-ethics), 'social' situations (the ethics of being-together), media situations (the ethics of communication), and so on. This norm of commentaries and opinions is backed up by official institutions, and carries its own authority: we now have 'national ethical commissions', nominated by the State. Every profession questions itself about its 'ethics'. We even deploy military expeditions in the name of 'the ethics of human rights'. With respect to today's socially inflated recourse to ethics, the purpose of this essay is twofold: To begin with, I will examine the precise nature of this phenomenon, which is the major 'philosophical' tend-ency of the day, as much in public opinion as for our official institutions. I will try to establish that in reality it amounts to a genuine nihilism, a threatening denial of thought as such. I will then argue against this meaning of the term 'ethics', and propose a very different one. Rather than link the word to abstract categories (Mari or Human, Right or Law, the Other ... ), it should be referred back to particu¬lar situations. Rather than reduce it to an aspect of pity for victims, it should become the enduring maxim of singular processes. Rather than make of it merely the province of conservatism with a good conscience, it should concern the destiny of truths, in the plural.


Badiou K – Alternative – Politics of Truth

1. EMANCIPATORY POLITICS MUST REJECT SIMPLE ADMINSTRATIVE JUSTICE LIKE THE AFFIRMATIVE, IN FAVOR OF A MILITANT CONCEPTION TO AXIOMATIC TRUTHPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2002.CULTURE MACHINE JOURANL, issue 4, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm

Badiou’s conception of political truth has nothing to do, then, with bland speculations concerning civic responsibility or liberal ‘communication’. Badiou knows that only a ‘militant conception of politics ... can link politics and thought’ (AM: 22); in particular, only such a conception can avoid recourse to the false dichotomy of theory and practice. ‘There is certainly a "doing" ["faire"] of politics, but it is immediately the pure and simple experience of a thought, its localisation. It cannot be distinguished from it’ (AM: 56). The philosophical or meta-political problem is simply one of understanding how politics thinks, according to what mode of thought and through what categories – the categories of Virtue and Corruption for Saint-Just, for instance, or revolutionary consciousness for Lenin. True political thought is neither a matter of judicious deliberation (Arendt) nor of anguished choice (Sartre), and still less of expert social engineering (Rorty) or procedural notions of justice (Rawls). Badiou, like Lenin, like Fanon, like all great revolutionary thinkers, maintains a strictly classical form of political logic: either p or not p, with no possible compromise in between. Badiou conceives of politics precisely as a matter of what Rimbaud called ‘logical revolt’, a matter of clearly stated principle – the sort of principle incarnated by the great intellectual résistants, Jean Cavaillès and Albert Lautman (AM: 12).2 The political subject acts or resists as a matter of course, and not thanks to a reasoned affiliation with a particular group, class, or opinion. He resists, not as a result of communication or consensus, but all at once, to the exclusion of any ‘third way’ (AM: 15).3

2. FIDELITY TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF A TRUTH-EVENT ALLOWS FOR RADICAL CHANGEPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2004.THINK AGAIN: ALAIN BADIOU AND THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY, p. 2-3.

Badiou’s most fundamental principle is thus simply the belief that radical change is indeed possible, that it is possible for people and the situations they inhabit to be dramatically transformed by what happens to them. He affirms this infinite capacity for transformation as the only appropriate point of departure for thought, and he affirms it in advance of any speculation about its enabling conditions or ultimate horizons. Innovation as such is independent of any cumulative dialectic, any acquired feel for the game, any tendency towards consensus or tolerance — any orientation carried by the ‘way of the world’. Triggered by an exceptional event whose occurrence cannot be proven with the resources currently available in the situation, true change proceeds insofar as it solicits the militant conviction of certain individuals who develop the implications of this event and hold firm to its consequences: by doing so they constitute themselves as the subjects of its innovation. A subject is someone carried by his or her fidelity to the implications of an event — or again, what distinguishes an event from other incidents that might ordinarily take place in the situation is that these implications, themselves illuminated by the consequences of previous events, make it impossible for those who affirm them to carry on as before. And what a subject declares persists as a truth insofar as these implications can be upheld in rigorously universalizable terms, i.e. in terms that relate to all members of their situation without .passing through the prevailing criteria of recognition, classification and domination which underlie the normal organization of that situation. The laborious, case-by-case application of these implications will eventually transform the way the situation organizes and represents itself. The most familiar of Badiou’s many examples of such truth procedures are Saint Paul’s militant conception of an apostolic subjectivity that exists only through proclamation of an event (the resurrection of Christ) of universal import but of no recognizable or established significance, and the Jacobin fidelity to a revolutionary event which dramatically exceeds, in its subjective power and generic scope, the particular circumstances that contributed to its occurrence.3


Badiou K – A2: Permutation

1. EMANCIPATORY POLITICS CAN ONLY BEGIN WITH A RADICAL BREAK FROM THE STATUS QUO – THE PERMUTATION IS MERELY BUSINESS AS USUALPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2002.CULTURE MACHINE JOURANL, issue 4, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm

A true political sequence can only begin when business as usual breaks down for one reason or another. This is because what ensures submission to the status quo is ‘submission to the indetermination of power, and not to power itself’ (TA, 8.04.98). Under normal circumstances, we know only that the excess of the static re-presentation over elementary presentation is wildly immeasurable (corresponding, in the terms of Badiou’s ontology, to the infinite excess of 2N over N). Today’s prevailing economic regime indeed dominates its inhabitants absolutely, precisely because we can hardly imagine how we might limit or measure this regime. The first achievement of a true political intervention is thus the effective, ‘distanced’ measurement of this excess. Intervention forces the state to show its hand, to use its full powers of coercion so as to try to restore things to their proper place. Every political sequence worthy of the name proceeds in keeping with the combative principle maintained, in Badiou’s native France, by the leaders of the chômeurs [unemployed] movement of 1997-1998: ‘we act according to what is right, not what is legal.’8 Political truth always begins in ‘trial and trouble’, in social ‘rupture and disorder’ (AM: 114). This is a price that those who seek after justice must be prepared to pay: We have too often wanted justice to establish the consistency of social bonds, whereas it can only name the most extreme moments of inconsistency. For the effect of the egalitarian axiom is to undo the bonds, to desocialise thought, to affirm the rights of the infinite and the immortal against the calculation of interests. Justice is a wager on the immortal over finitude, against ‘being-for-death’. For in the subjective dimension of the equality we declare, nothing now is of any interest other than the universality of this declaration, and the active consequences which follow from it. (AM: 118)

2. THE PLAN AND THE ALTERNATIVE ARE INCOMPATIBLE BECAUSE THE TRUTH-EVENT NECESSITATES REJECTING GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF ETHICS AND RIGHTS Peter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. xiv.

Badiou’s fundamentally ‘divisive’ ethics makes no less of a claim to universality than does its ideological rival. Simply, its universality is a rigorously situated project in something like the Sartrean sense: it persists as an unending compilation of what, in the situation, is addressed ‘for all’, regardless of interest or privilege, regardless of state-sanctioned distinctions (and thus against those who continue to defend those privileges and distinctions). A truth compiles, step by step, everything that affirms the strictly generic universality of all members of the situation. The point is that any such generic affirmation cannot be made ‘in theory’ or a priori, as the basis for an established consensus. It can take place only through an ‘evental [evenementiel]’ break with the status quo, a break sparked by an event that eludes classification in the situation. And it can continue only through a fidelity guarded against its Evil distortion. ‘The’ ethic of truth, then, is fully subordinate to the particularity of a truth. There can be no ‘ethics in general’, no general principle of human rights, for the simple reason that what is universally human is always rooted in particular truths, particular configurations of active thought.

http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/#Note%208


A2: Badiou K – Human Rights Good

1. BADIOU IS TOO QUICK TO DISMISS HUMAN RIGHTS – THEY ARE A RALLYING CALL FOR ACTIVISTSPeter Dews, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, 2004.THINK AGAIN: ALAIN BADIOU AND THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY, p. 109.

Badiou is not mistaken, of course, in suggesting that the discourse of human rights has come to provide a crucial ideological cover for economic and cultural imperialism, nor to mention outright military intervention. No one doubts the murderous hypocrisy with which the Western powers, led by the US, have invoked the language of human rights in recent years. But ‘human rights’ have also been a rallying call for many activists around the globe. In the form of the Helsinki Accords, they were a major focus for the East European opposition in the years leading up to 1989. They were equally important tactically for Latin America’s struggle against the dictatorships, and continue to provide a vital political point of leverage for many indigenous populations, nor to mention the Tibetans, the Burmese, the Palestinians. The United States, as is well known, continues to refuse recognition to the recently established International Criminal Court, fearful, no doubt, that members of its own armed forces, and perhaps of former administrations, could be amongst those arraigned before it.

2. ETHICS ARE NECESSARY TO DISTINGUISH GOOD AND EVIL – BADIOU’S ETHICAL FRAMEWORK CANNOT MAKE VALUE JUDGEMENTSJason Barker, Lecturer in Communications at Cardiff University, 2004.HISTORICAL MATERIALISM, Vol. 12, No. 1, p. 207.

Badiou’s ethics displays its fair share of militant ambition in aiming to revive the generic politics of the masses (Badiou’s blueprint in this regard remains the Chinese Cultural Revolution and May 1968 in France), and it is worth noting that Badiou’s emphasis on the real of concrete situations extends to his active participation in the Organisation Politique, a group of political activists engaged in fighting for workers’ and immigrants’ rights (pp. 95–116). Nevertheless, the most striking objection to Badiou’s ethic of truths will concern the apparent ambivalence of any presumed value judgement. What prevents a subject who, in striving to overcome an injustice ‘for Good’, lacks adequate understanding – since truth is only knowable after the event – of his possible proximity to Evil? The human animal’s ‘natural’ innocence when confronted by Good and Evil has certainly provided the impetus, on more than one ‘historic’ occasion, for the subject’s transcendence of these ‘all too human’ categories (p. 59). As a self-proclaimed ‘immanentist’, Badiou is alert to the potentially perilous, ontological neutrality which composes a situation in which Good is forever on the brink of passing over into its opposite, and, for this reason, Badiou draws up an outline for the avoidance of Evil. The outline draws a key distinction in Badiou’s philosophy between ontology and logic. For example, consider the Nazis’ instigation of the National-Socialist ‘revolution’ in Germany between the wars. Although this ‘event’ might superficially bear resemblance, in its language and symbolism, to the situations of mass uprisings – the French and Russian Revolutions – what disqualifies it as a true event is its denial of universal belonging. In grounding its political agenda in the particularity of race and nationalism, and the imagined destiny of a privileged part of the people to re-present the whole, the Nazis contrived to transform the randomness of a historical supplement into the natural substance of a community (pp. 72–3). This is not to say that the Nazi ‘event’ would have been justified under a ‘more rational’ set of circumstances – although, of course, this kind of perverse sentiment is always to be expected from the revisionists. On the contrary, the inherent dangers of such ethical sophistry are precisely what guide the subject in its struggle against Evil.


A2: Badiou K – Levinasian Ethics Good

1. LEVINASIAN ETHICS ARE ESSENTIAL TO COMBAT THE VIOLENCE OF LIBERALISMDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998. NATIONAL DECONSTRUCTION: VIOLENCE, IDENTITY AND JUSTICE IN BOSNIA, p. 175-76.

The ethical transcendence of alterity that marks the moment of generality in Levinas’s thought also fundamentally problematizes liberal humanism, an oft-considered alternate ground for ethics. In the prefatory note to “The Philosophy of Hitlerism,” Levinas posed a radical question: “We must ask ourselves if liberalism is all we need to achieve an authentic dignity for the human subject. Does this subject arrive at the human condition prior to assuming responsibility for the other man in the act of election that raises him up to this height?”50 The answer could only be “no.” In Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, Levinas wondered “if anything in the world is less conditioned than man, in whom the ultimate security a foundation would offer is absent. Is there then anything less unjustified than the contestation of the human condition?”5’ But this concern for justification abounds only if one requires sovereign grounds in advance of the Other. If that hope, driven by the perceived security such a foundation would offer, is expunged — and expunged it need be, otherwise ressentiment derived from the elusiveness of a foundation will thrive— the human condition will be understood as stemming from the relationship of alterity, and will be seen as without warrant prior to the responsibility the relationship with the Other entails. Accordingly, subjectivity is “imposed as an absolute” not through any interior value, but because it “is sacred in its alterity with respect to which, in an unexceptionable responsibility, I posit myself deposed of my sovereignty. Paradoxically it is qua alien us — foreigner and other — that man is not alienated.”52 Liberalism is thus insufficient for human dignity because the election that justifies man “comes from a god — or God — who beholds him in the face of the other man, his neighbor, the original ‘site’ of the Revelation.”53 Similarly, humanism is insufficient, and “modern antihumanism. . . is true over and beyond the reasons it gives itself.” What Levinas finds laudable in antihumanism is that it “abandoned the idea of person, goal and origin of itself, in which the ego is still a thing because it is still a being.” As such, antihumanism does not eradicate the human but “clears the place for subjectivity positing itself in abnegation, in sacrifice, in a substitution which precedes the will.” It would therefore be a grave error to conclude in haste that Levinas’s antihumanism is either inhuman or inhumane. To the contrary. Levinas declares that “humanism has to be denounced only because it is not sufficiently human,” because it is insufficiently attuned to alterity. If one understood “humanism” to mean a “humanism of the Other,” then there would be no greater humanist than Levinas.55

2. RESPONSIBILITY TO THE OTHER IS KEY TO ETHICAL SUBJECTIVITYDavid Campbell, Professor of International Politics at the University of Newcastle, 1998. NATIONAL DECONSTRUCTION: VIOLENCE, IDENTITY AND JUSTICE IN BOSNIA, p. 175-76.

Levinas’s thought is appealing for rethinking the question of responsibility, especially with respect to situations like the Bosnian war, because it maintains that there is no circumstance under which we could declare that it was not our concern. As Levinas notes, people can (and obviously do) conduct their relationship to the Other in terms of exploitation, oppression, and violence. But no matter how allergic to the other is the self, “the relation to the other, as a relation of responsibility, cannot be totally suppressed, even when it takes the form of politics or warfare.” In consequence, no self can ever opt out of a re-lationship with the other: “it is impossible to free myself by saying, ‘It’s not my concern.’ There is no choice, for it is always and inescapably my concern. This is a unique ‘no choice,’ one that is not slavery.”56 This unique lack of choice comes about because in Levinas’s thought ethics has been transformed from something independent of subjectivity — that is, from a set of rules and regulations adopted by pregiven, autonomous agents to something insinuated within and integral to that subjectivity Accordingly, ethics can be understood as something not ancillary to the existence of a subject; instead, ethics can be appreciated for its indispensability to the very being of the subject. This argument leads us to the recognition that “we” are always already ethically situated, so making judgments about conduct depends less on what sort of rules are invoked as regulations, and more on how the interdependencies of our relations with others are


appreciated. To repeat one of Levinas’s key points, “Ethics redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility, in contrast to autonomous freedom.”


A2: Badiou K – State Focus Good

1. THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS IS OVER – ANY POLITICAL PROGRAM MUST CONFRONT THE STATEPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2002. CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL, Iissue 4, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm

Today, however, now that the ‘age of revolutions is over’, Badiou admits that ‘I have been obliged to change my position as regards the state. The guiding principle can no longer be, in a unilateral way, "de-statification". It is a matter more of prescribing the state, often in a logic of reinforcement. The problem is to know from where politics prescribes the state’ (Badiou, letters to the author, 17.06.96; 13.10.97; cf. ‘Politics and Philosophy’, 1998: 114-115; TA, 26.11.97). Recent political sequences – the Palestinian Intifada, the uprisings in East Timor and Chiapas, the student mobilisation in Burma in 1988 – have proceeded in large part as attempts to answer this question, in terms most appropriate to the particular constraints of the situation. Among the most consequential ongoing efforts is the massive Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil: rather than persist in the futile pursuit of land reform through established re-presentative channels, the MST has organised the direct occupation of farmland by the landless poor themselves, allowing some 250,000 families to win titles to over 15 million acres since 1985. What the MST has understood with particular clarity is that legal recognition can only be won as the result of a subjective mobilisation which is itself indifferent to the logic of recognition and re-presentation as such. The remarkable gains of the MST have been won at what Badiou would call a ‘political distance’ from the state, and depend upon its own ability to maintain a successful organising structure, develop viable forms of non-exploitative economic cooperation, and resist violent intimidation from landowners and the state police.10

2. BADIOU’S OWN POLITICAL ATTITUDE DEMANDS RELIANCE ON THE STATE, WHICH JUSTIFIES THE PERMUTATIONPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2002. CULTURE MACHINE JOURNAL, issue 4, Accessed April 22, 2005, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm

We know that Badiou’s early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has considerably evolved. Just how far it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains resolutely anti-consensual, anti-‘re-presentative’, and thus anti-democratic (in the ordinary sense of the word). ‘A philosophy today is above all something that enables people to have done with the "democratic" submission to the world as it is’ (‘Entretien avec Alain Badiou’, 1999: 2). But he seems more willing, now, to engage with this submission on its own terms. La Distance politique again offers the most precise points de repère. On the one hand, the OP remains suspicious of any political campaign – for instance, electoral contests or petition movements – that operates as a ‘prisoner of the parliamentary space’ (LDP, 19-20.04.96: 2). It remains ‘an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the state as norm. The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics.’ On the other hand, however, it is now equally clear that ‘their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of political thought’ (LDP, 6.05.93: 1).24 The OP now conceives itself in a tense, non-dialectical ‘vis-à-vis’ with the state, a stance that rejects an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses ‘any antagonistic conception of their operation, any conception that smacks of classism.’ There is to no more choice to be made between the state or revolution; the ‘vis-à-vis demands the presence of the two terms and not the annihilation of one of the two’ (LDP, 11.01.95: 3-4). Indeed, at the height of the December ‘95 strikes, the OP recognised that the only contemporary movement of ‘désétatisation’ with any real power was the corporate-driven movement of partial de-statification in the interests of commercial flexibility and financial mobility. Unsurprisingly, ‘we are against this withdrawal of the state to the profit of capital, through general, systematic and brutal privatisation. The state is what can sometimes take account of people and their situations in other registers and by other modalities than those of profit. The state assures from this point of view the public space and the general interest. And capital does not incarnate the general interest’ (LDP, 15.12.96: 11). Coming from the author of Théorie de la contradiction, these are remarkable words.




A2: Badiou K – State Demands Good

1. DEMANDS ON THE STATE ARE THE ONLY WAY TO RESIST DOMINATIONPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2003. BADIOU: A SUBJECT TO TRUTH, p. 227.

Today, however, now that the “age of revolutions is over,” Badiou admits, “I have been obliged to change my position as regards the state. The guiding principle can no longer be, in a unilateral way, ‘destatification.’ It is a matter more of prescribing the state, often in a logic of reinforcement.” The problem is to know from where politics prescribes the state.”5 Recent political sequences—the Palestinian Intifada, the uprisings in East Timor and Chiapas, the student mobilization in Burma in 1988—have proceeded in large part as attempts to answer this question, in terms most appropriate to the situation as it stands. Among the most consequential ongoing efforts is the massive Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil: rather than per-sist in the futile pursuit of land reform through established re-presentative channels, the MST has organized the direct occupation of farmland by the landless poor themselves, allowing some 250,000 families to win titles to over fifteen million acres since 1985. What the MST has understood with particular clarity is that legal recognition can be won only as the result of a subjective mobilization that is itself indifferent to the logic of recognition and re-presentation as such. The remarkable gains of the MST have been won at what Badiou would call a “political distance” from the state, and depend upon its own ability to maintain a successful organizing structure, develop viable forms of nonexploitative economic cooperation, and resist violent intimidation from landowners and the state police.’6

2. NO RESPONSIBLE POLITICS CAN IGNORE THE STATE – WE SHOULD USE THE STATE AS A VEHICLE FOR RADICAL POLITICAL CHANGEAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII (Vincennes at Saint-Denis), 2001.ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL, p. 98-99.

The third and final point of change concerns the state. We used to be convinced that a new political stage [scene] had to be built, a stage for the masses, that would be radically external or foreign to the mechanism of the state. We tended to leave the state outside of the field of politics in the strict sense. Politics unfolded according to the interests of the masses, and the state was the external adversary. This was our way of being faithful to the old communist idea of the withering away of the state, and of the state’s necessarily bourgeois and reactionary character. Today our point of view is quite different. It is clear that there are two opposed forms of antistatism. There is the communist heritage of the withering of the state on the one hand; and on the other there is ultraliberalism, which also calls for the suppression of the state, or at least its reduction to its military and police functions. What we would say now is that there are a certain number of questions regarding which we cannot posit the absolute exteriority of the state. It is rather a matter of requiring something from the state, of formulating with respect to the state a certain number of prescriptions or statements. I’ll take up the same example I gave a moment ago, because it is an example of militant urgency. Considering the fate of the sans-papiers in this country, a first orientation might have been: they should revolt against the state. Today we would say that the singular form of their struggle is, rather, to create the conditions in which the state is led to change this or that thing concerning them, to repeal the laws that should be appealed, to take the measures of naturalization [regularisation] that should be taken, and so on. This is what we mean by prescriptions against the state. This is not to say that we participate in the state. We remain outside the electoral system, outside any party representation. But we include the state within our political field, to the extent that, on a number of essential points, we have to work more through prescriptions against the state than in any radical exteriority to the state.


A2: Badiou K – Alternative Fails

1. BADIOU’S ALTERNATIVE HAS NO PRACTICAL FORM OF POLITICSDaniel Bensaid, professor at the University of Paris VIII, 2004.THINK AGAIN: ALAIN BADIOU AND THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY, p. 100.

Yet in Badiou, the intermittence of event and subject renders the very idea of politics problematic. According to him, politics defines itself via fidelity to the event whereby the victims of oppression declare themselves. His determination to prise politics free from the state in order to subjectivize it, to ‘deliver it from history in order to hand it over to the event’, is part of a tentative search for an autonomous politics of the oppressed. The alternative effort, to subordinate politics to some putative ‘meaning of history’, which has ominous echoes in recent history, is he suggests to incorporate it within the process of general technicization and to reduce it to the ‘management of state affairs’. One must have ‘the courage to declare that, from the point of view of politics, history as meaning or direction does not exist: all that exists is the periodic occurrence of the a priori conditions of chance’. However, this divorce between event and history (between the event and its historically determined conditions) tends to render politics if not unthinkable then at least impracticable (PP 18).

2. BADIOU’S CONCEPTION OF TRUTH MAKES HIS ALTERNATIVE USELESSDaniel Bensaid, professor at the University of Paris VIII, 2004. THINK AGAIN: ALAIN BADIOU AND THE FUTURE OF PHILOSOPHY, p. 105.

In Badiou, fidelity to an event without a history and a politics without content has a tendency to turn into an axiomatics of resistance. Rimbaud’s logical revolt, the logical resistance of Cavailles or Lautman, figure here as instances of a commitment that evades all calculation and that is supposed to provide a paradoxical resolution for the absence of relation between truth and knowledge. For the axiom is more absolute than any definition. Beyond every proof or refutation, the axiom, in sovereign fashion, engenders its own objects as pure effects. Emerging out of nothing, the sovereign subject, like evental truth, provides its own norm. It is represented only by itself. Whence the worrying refusal of relations and alliances, of confrontations and contradictions. Badiou invariably prefers an absolute configuration over one that is relative: the absolute sovereignty of truth and the subject, which begins, in desolate solitude, where the turmoil of public opinion ends. Hallward rightly sees in this philosophy of politics an ‘absolutist logic’ that leaves little space for multiple subjectivities, shuns the democratic experience, and condemns the sophist to a sort of exile.21 Badiou’s quasi-absolutist orientation preserves the ghost of a subject without object. This is a return to a philosophy of majestic sovereignty, whose decision seems to be founded upon a nothing that commands the whole.

3. BADIOU’S SEARCH FOR A PURE POLITICS MAKES HIS ALTERNATIVE COMPLICIT WITH EXISTING STRUCTURES OF POWERJason Barker, Lecturer in Communications at Cardiff University, 2004. HISTORICAL MATERIALISM, Vol. 12, No. 1, p. 209-210.

The question we are left with, however – even if we accept, for argument’s sake, the transparency (nay, equality) of political practice to logical deduction – ironically leaves Badiou on virtually the same terrain as Althusser. For both, the return to the ‘real’ Marx – the scientific Marx of Capital in Althusser’s case, the political Marx of the Manifesto in Badiou’s – is the condition of a pure, unadulterated political practice; and unadulterated for being separated from what Althusser condemned as ‘anarchosyndicalism’, that is ‘attributing to economic practice all the active and even explosive virtues of politics’.19 But this explosively virtuous vision of political activism, a key strategy of Saint-Just, in which the Hegelian ‘sphere of needs’ would have been seen to degrade the integrity and self-sufficiency of the Republic which ‘does not need’,20 is ethically hazardous. Moreover, the idea that the economy, as the realm of the merely ‘given’, governs human needs falls back on the crude anthropology of man which Althusser, in one of his defining gestures, correctly eliminated from Marxist scholarship.21 It is ironic that Badiou’s interest in Marxism extends only as far as the ‘political’ Marx of 1848, for, had he read on, he would have encountered the Grundrisse, where Marx shows us the ways in which needs are historically created.22 It is only in the passage from the realm


of natural needs to historical needs, Marx observes, that the global market finally consolidates itself. The fact that the true extent of the development of the productive forces in our present era of globalisation is uncertain suggests that Badiou’s indifference to the fortunes of political economy is somewhat premature.


A2: Badiou K – Alternative is Violent

1. BADIOU’S ALTERNATIVE EMBRACES LARGE-SCALE VIOLENCESlavoj Zizek, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, 2002.WELCOME TO THE DESERT OF THE REAL!, p. 67-68.

I must particularly insist that the formula ‘respect for the Other’ has nothing to do with any serious definition of Good and Evil. What does ‘respect for the Other’ mean when one is at war against an enemy, when one is brutally left by a woman for someone else, when one must judge the works of a mediocre ‘artist,’ when science is faced with obscurantist sects, etc.? Very often, it is the ‘respect for Others’ that is injurious, that is Evil. Especially when it is resistance against others, or even hatred of others, that drives a subjectively just action.28 The obvious criticism here is: do not Badiou’s own examples display the limit of his logic? Yes, hatred for the enemy, intolerance of false wisdom, and so on, but is not the lesson of the last century that even — and especially — when we are caught up in such a struggle, we should respect a certain limit — the limit, precisely, of the Other’s radical Otherness? We should never reduce the Other to our enemy, to the bearer of false knowledge, and so forth: always in him or her there is the Absolute of the impenetrable abyss of another person. The twentieth century’s totalitarianism, with its millions of victims, shows the ultimate outcome of following to the end what appears to us a ‘subjectively just action’ — no wonder, then, that Badiou ended up directly supporting Communist terror.

2. BADIOU’S POLITICS FAIL BECAUSE THEY CANNOT EMBRACE THE AXIOMATIC COMMITMENT TO NON-VIOLENCE NECESSARY FOR TRUE EMANCIPATIONPeter Hallward, lecturer in the French department at King’s College, 2003.BADIOU: A SUBJECT TO TRUTH, p. 268-69.

My second question concerns Badiou’s essentially instrumental understanding of violence. His strict separation of true subjects from merely objective “individuals” allows him to consider violence as essentially external to any truth process, and there is certainly a compelling strategic case to be made for this position. But how exactly then are we to acknowledge the potential of any individual to become a subject? What precise circumstances justify the suppression of this potential? For it might well be argued that the last century, driven by that “passion for the real” which by Badiou’s own admission excludes the luxuries of critical distance or reserve, demonstrated more than once the inadequacy of an ethics based on an appreciation of these very luxuries. It might be more consistent, and arguably more courageous, to insist that the true break with our established order will come, not through recourse to alternative forms of violence, but with the organized, uncompromising imposition of a radical nonviolence. Only a precisely axiomatic commitment to nonviolence offers any hope of a lasting break in the futile recycling of violences. Only such a principled commitment can both respond to the violent re-presentation of the state and, once this re-presentation has been suspended, block the creation or reassertion of new forms of violence. In the absence of such a commitment, the appeal to philosophical “restraint” is ultimately unconvincing. We know that “the ethics of a truth is absolutely opposed to opinion” and communication, but at the same time we must communicate, we must have our opinions” (E, 48, 75). It is only by preserving the very opinions it penetrates that a truth avoids its disastrous totalization. But what is the precise mechanism of this preservation? This gives rise to my third question. If the only relation between truth and knowledge is one of subtraction, how can the one preserve the other? How are we to coordinate the imperative to maintain this relation—to maintain the sophist, maintain opinions, maintain the dialogue—with that more insistent imperative, prescribed by every generic procedure, to act in the singular absence of relation, to pursue a radical deliaison? If “philosophy ultimately has no relation other than to itself,”51 if philosophy is conditioned by nothing other than truth, it is difficult to see how it might regulate its relations with its non-philosophical counterpart, be it sophist, citizen, or opinion. In the end, the question of ethics turns on the preservation of a viable relationship between knowledge and truth, opinion and subject—but it is precisely this relationship that Badiou’s philosophy has yet to express in other than mainly subtractive terms.

BADIOU KRITIK€¦ · Web viewAlain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris VIII ... Rather, this is philosophy (in the Greek sense of the word) annulled by the theology,

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