INTRODUCTION[1]
A defining feature in Alain Badiou’s thought concerns his novel articulation of a formal theory of the subject, subtracting this notion from prevalent uses in philosophy and discourse. In the first part of his recently translated Logics of Worlds, Badiou outlines his rejection to three[2] approaches to the theorization of the subject, which obstruct its formalization and prevent a thinking of human agency outside contemporary ideologies[3]:
1) The phenomenological conception of the subject: as the conscious pole which registers experiences through a schema of reflexivity; separating conscious from non-conscious apprehension, for instance. This view attempts an impossible approximation towards unmediated presence, because “...it is formal concepts that presuppose a passive giveness, since they are subordinated to the passive organization of the given” [Pg, 48]
2) The subject as a moral category: assigned to the ‘bio-ethical’ imperative of recognizing and respecting the other as a living subject; finally flattening the subject “...onto the empirical manifestness of the living body” in a defensive stand against what threatens it. [Ibid] This position is insensitive to the possibility of a constructive vision of the Good, since it remains a priori circumscribed to specific normative registers, Statist or otherwise; for example, in the contemporary ideology of human rights. [Ibid]
3) The conception of the subject as an ideological construct: interpellated by Statist designations which reducing it to being the effects of discourse and rhetoric, thus leaving no room for its material becoming in the form of a body[4] [Ibid]. This position eradicates the possibility of conceiving subjectivity outside the State’s ideological command, and thus blocks a thinking of the transformative (material) power of subjective agency. As Badiou claims, under this view “There will be no political subject, because revolutionary politics cannot be a function of the State [MEP: Pg 63].
This paper develops some considerations surrounding Badiou’s rejection of the subject as a moral category[5], reflecting on the recent massacre which took place in the Peruvian Amazonian region of Bagua this past June. The following text is thus to serve as an overview of what a particular political sequence involves in sight of Badiou’s novel understanding of political subjectivation and its focus on productive acting apart from operative Statist legislations. This will allow us to identify how both representatives from the central government led by President Garcia, as well as the human rights activists staging a resistance in the cities, sought to suppress the abrupt novelty of an emancipatory political movement. We will see how Badiou’s formal edifice helps to identify subjectivation as also taking place through attempts to deny or veil emancipatory novelties beyond the State. For this, we will attempt to trace how the confrontations in Bagua were reduced to the split between democracy and its authoritarian exceptions.
To begin, we will briefly review how the formalization of ‘subjective types’ developed in Logics of Worlds can guide us towards a typology of subjective appearance, distinct from what Badiou imputes to the ideology of democratic materialism, i.e. the belief that any situation is merely composed of bodies and languages, individuals and cultures. Against democratic materialism, Badiou’s materialist dialectic constructs a figure of the subject around the inventive production of new truths understood as processes which supplement the existing possibilities found in particular situations[6] in the exceptional form of creative novelties. It is my wager that by conceiving the subject as a finite fragment in the local becoming of a truth-procedure, Badiou both avoids the reduction of the subject into the homogeneous medium regulating the moral prescriptions of human-rights and their negative fixation against death, as well as displacing the call for democratic freedoms as ultimate horizon for political action. As Ernesto Laclau (2004) notes: “Against the prevailing contemporary trend, which presents ethics as a purely defensive intervention – that is, as a reaction to the violation of human rights – Badiou roots his ethics in an essentially affirmative discourse.” [TA, Pg, 120] Opposing its reduction to the commerce of opinions, Badiou thus conceives of politics as an essentially affirmative thinking which reorients thought in unpredictable directions by way of creation. This way, and against the standard democratic materialist’s objectifying fixation on the ethics of man, Badiou’s subtraction of the subject from its three symptomatic versions allows a resounding ‘Yes!’ to answer the question ‘Is it possible to de-objectify the space of the subject?’[7]
“If it is possible, what is thus beyond the subject if not the very same subject dissociated or subtracted from reflexive jurisdiction, un-constituting, untied from all supports unrelated to the process of a truth -- of which the subject would be but a finite fragment? I call subject the local or finite status of a truth. A subject is what is locally born out. The "subject" thus ceases to be the inaugural or conditioning point of legitimate statements. He is no longer -- and here we see the cancellation of the object, as objective this time -- that for which there is truth, nor even the desirous eclipse of its surrection. A truth always precedes him.” [FOS, Pg. 2]
It is by way of a doctrine about subjective participation in truth (in the full sense which Plato sought to confer by ‘participation in the Idea’) that we will delineate a space to criticize today’s democratic materialism, and its reduction of the subject to the living body. A subject, Badiou contends, participates in truth not by way of a transcendent opening to the world through experience (phenomenology; Heidegger, Sartre); the expression of an a priori knowledge anticipating the juridical regulation of intersubjective practical life (neo-Kantian moralism, the return to the idea of the natural rights of man); nor in the accommodation to the rhetorical prescriptions of the State (ideological interpellation, Althusser[8]). Rather, the subject emerges by means of an inventive production which in becoming breaks from established knowledge, i.e. truths appear there where a world’s available registers encounter an impasse, a point where an (illicit) act allows the forcing of an extraneous impossibility into the worldly sphere of the possible. Peter Hallward (1998) synthesizes this facet of Badiou’s enterprise as finally deciding over the distinction between “...subjective truth and objective knowledge, showing how a subject affirms truth through its subtraction from knowledge”[9].
In continuity with Badiou, we will thus reject the objectification of the subject conceived as the victim of democratic exceptions, as part of our epoch’s sophistic aversion to truth, in the guise of a profound ideological conservatism which composes the contemporary Peruvian political situation. Depriving thought from acquiring a properly political form, the popular recourse to humanitarian slogans paralyzes activity, unwilling to move thought beyond the moralistic indictments to the authoritarian excesses against the democratic State, taken to be in turn the only possible name for an admissible politics.
I. Starbucks in Africa or Žižek in Congo.
In their recent debate held at The New York Public Library (September, 2008), Slavoj Žižek and Bernard Henrí-Lévy confronted the prospect of a new radical left and liberalism, in relation to some of the crucial events in our contemporary socio-political world and the history of the 20th Century. During the course of this discussion, Žižek challenged Henri-Levy to locate the more ambiguous effects of May 68, beyond the celebration of multiplied rights and freedoms in the subsequent appropriation of the event by the French liberal legacy. Žižek then describes the ironic aftermath of May 68 as having unwillingly given a new thrust to capitalism, as evidenced in new reactionary forms of collective engagement. He first targets acts of charity and the dialectics of 'self-realization', exposing them as integral moments in today's depoliticized world and their function as political sedatives. Žižek claims these somehow obfuscate the real severity of the problems we face, since underlying our watered down demands to answer the humanitarian tragedies of the world they work as mystifying effects in today’s liberal-capitalist ideology: “Charity is in now. It’s no longer as it was one hundred years ago with Carnegie some idiosyncratic guise, today, everybody does charity. But what is the message we get? You see that poster everywhere, some deformed black child and then “for a price of one cappuccino you can save his life,” whatever. The message, I think, if you read it between the lines, it’s a pretty cynical one, is, “Pay a little bit and it will make you feel better and you don’t have to worry about it and you don’t have to politicize it...”[10]
Against this crude diagnosis, Henri-Levy answers appealing to the 'grandeur' of charity insofar as it 'opens people to the Other' through humanitarian solidarity, generating sensitivity and concern in the midst of a West which is mostly indifferent to the tragedies which happen outside its privileged contours. Henri-Levy thereby claims that acts of charity evidence a unique ‘spark of universality’ in a world otherwise devoid of concern for the Other, making good use of shame to aid those in need: “About charity, I agree partly with you, partly only because I think that nevertheless there is a sort of grandeur and nobility in the charity and so on. All that means that one is concerned by the other, all that can make that I am ashamed even one second of what is happening outside my own private world, is good.” [Ibid, Pg. 23]
We can begin by signalling how Levy’s last remark is fundamentally undermined by Žižek's intervention; which indexes the latter to the standard form of leftist moralism, and the fatalist apolitical resignation of so-called ‘Third Way’ social democracies[11] [DLC, Pg. 337]. Through the call to aid the ‘suffering Other’ we effectively supplant politics with the (infinite) humanitarian demand to help victims; charity also avoids the task to think inside the political field and ask how our very natural capitalist democracies embody the problems it seeks to confront through humanitarian act. But Žižek’s criticism extends further: ‘concern for the Other’ obscures the very routine in which democracy and liberal market capitalism enter in direct complicity with the problems they think of as exceptions to their normal functioning. Using Žižek’s (2007) jargon, focusing on the subjective violence (directed towards identifying concrete assignable agents) of the non-democratic excess by the totalitarian barbarians, we veil the anonymous and systemic objective violence which results from the “...catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.” [V, Pg. 2]. By way of the moralistic call for humanitarian solidarity and its focus on ‘real lives’ underlying the tragedies, the humanitarian demand overlooks the symbolic efficiency which is rendered by the normal capitalist activity: “...the highest form of ideology does not reside in getting caught in ideological spectrality, forgetting about its foundation in real people and their relations, but precisely in overlooking this Real of spectrality and in pretending directly to address ‘real people with their real worries’” [V, Pg. 13]. Thus the ‘concern for the Other’ praised by Henri-Levy cannot but appear as a concrete partial index of the objective violence enacted by capitalism and liberal market democracies, an ideological mask obscuring this conflict and displacing its central matter. In the same line, Alain Badiou attests to the dark complicity between the regime of the Law and humanitarian action’s purported moral imperative, formulated in terms of a ‘concern for the Other’: “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 ourselves. The Law (human rights, etc.) is always already there. It regulates judgments 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.” [E, Pg. 33]
Žižek (2007, 2008) proceeds to exemplify this complicity in the case of the massacres in the African Congo, referencing Times’ (June, 2006) alarming report that the numbers of dead by non-natural causes during the armed sectarian conflict had escalated to the millions; thus pompously labelled the ‘world’s deadliest war’ [V, Pg 3]. Here we should underline how the general public’s reaction was that of a disorienting disavowal, whereby most found it impossible to flinch at the thought of the tragedy after its report. As Žižek underlines, it appeared as if ‘...some sort of filtering mechanism prevented the news from reaching its full impact on our symbolic space.” [V, Pg. 3] Žižek thus points to the cynical dismissal of Congo as a remote jumble outside our democracies, and the public’s hypocritical selective outrage in its moralizing indictments: “[Times] should have stuck to the usual suspects: Muslim women and their cavalry, the Tibetan oppression...” [Ibid] So Žižek briefly outlines that there is more to this hypocrisy than mere disavowal of what happens outside of our democratic society and its economies; these are directly in complicity with the massacres and within its activity. Ideological mystification then does not only separate us from genuine acting, but in the encouragement of humanitarian activity we find nothing but ideological distractions to avoid the direct confrontation with capitalism’s effects:
“In
Rwanda's army made at least $250 million in 18 months by selling coltan, which is used in cell-phones and laptops. The report concluded that the permanent civil war and disintegration of Congo 'has created a "win-win" situation for all belligerents. The only loser in this huge business venture is the Congolese people.' Beneath the façade of ethnic warfare, we thus discern the contours of global capitalism.” [UYI[12]]
This complicity reveals that the deaths of the Congolese under the sectarian conflict are not mere exceptions to the free, harmonious and inoffensive capitalist dynamics, outside in some primitive world; nor do they arise from a failure to integrate these societies to democratic practices due to their totalitarian excesses. On the contrary, Western democratic societies profit from the Congolese situation, which is why it becomes only possible to approach it from the patronizing perspective of a foreign tragedy, and not directly as an extension of our own activity. Thus Žižek can claim that finally “…charity is a humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation” [Ibid], and that we should at once “...forget of the ‘savage customs’ of the local populations. Just remove the companies of advanced technology from the equation and all the edifice of ethnic war founded on ancient passions will fall into pieces” [V., Pg, 3]. To avoid confronting the direct result of the ‘normal functioning’ of capitalism head on, the moralizing jest of humanitarian intervention into the non-democratic world presents itself thus as a way of victimizing the Other instead of politicizing it. The uniform designation of Congolese individuals as victims is thus equivalent to their reduction to living bodies, and their inexistence as political agents: “...the overpowering horror of violent acts and empathy with the victims inexorably function as a lure which prevents us from thinking.” [V, Pg. 4]
On the other hand, by way of this logic, it is those who engage in charity who are presented with the ethical duty to extend democratic peace to the victims in the form of a freely willed humanitarian act of solidarity, without having thus to be concerned about their situation as a political one. As Badiou remarks “...it is perceived, from the heights of our apparent civil peace, as the uncivilized that demands of the civilized a civilizing intervention.” [E, Pg. 13]. The patronizing gesture of the humanitarian is thus the facade behind which lies an accomplice: “In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries ‘help’ the undeveloped with aid, credits, and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the underdeveloped.” [V, Pg. 23]. In reference to charitative efforts in Rwanda, even Henri-Levy must underline how finally the humanitarian offerings from the West ended up reaching executioners and innocent civilians alike by the disappearance of politics.
So the first critical task that presents itself in the political field today is to show how “…anti-totalitarian thought appears in all its misery as what it really is, a worthless sophistic exercise, a pseudo-theorization of the lowest opportunistic survivalist fears and instincts, a way of thinking which is not only reactionary but also profoundly reactive, in Nietzsche’s sense of the term.” [DLC, Pg. 7] The same diagnosis is shared by Badiou's opposition to classical ethics, which he designates as part of ‘bioethical’ twist of the contemporary moralistic return, in the form of the ‘natural rights of man’ qua the rights of the living: “In the first place, because the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of a living organism pure and simple… To be sure, humanity is an animal special. It is mortal and predatory. But neither of these attributes can distinguish humanity within the world of the living. In his role as executioner, man is an animal abjection, but must have the courage to add that in his role as victim, he is generally worth little more.” [E, Pg. 12]
Both Žižek and Badiou thus reject the standard moralistic outrage at the loss of lives, since they function by converting human beings into mere animals worthy of pity; those Outside who can hope from us, in our most zealous moment, the purchase of a coffee so that the residue of a nickel goes in their way. With Badiou, however, we can go an inch further by explicitly designating how the count of the dead operates as the democratic symbolic medium or form for the homogenous representation of the victims. The ‘ethics of sensibility’ organized towards the ‘victim’ regulates the belief that “...the only thing that can really happen to someone is death.” [E, Pg. 36] Number is put to the service of the depoliticization of humans and their reduction to the status of living bodies. Since everyone who suffers is a victim, and since the measure of a tragedy is not given by its contents but by its magnitude, humanitarian solidarity can be extended uniformly to all situations where the number of dead escalate to notable heights. The same stupidity perceived by Žižek in the comparison made between Nazism and Stalinism in terms of a 'victim count' is thus in passing innocently reproduced through his reiterative appeals to Congo's catastrophe in Times (June 2007) magazine’s announcement that the numbers of victims escalated to 4 million. For Badiou, however, this complicity between number and politics is no surprise; the count is everywhere and puts everyone in their place:
“What counts – in the sense of what is valued – is that which is counted. Inversely, everything that deals with numbers must be valued. "Political Science" finesses numbers within numbers, cross-references series of numbers, its only object being shifts in voting patterns – that is, changes – usually infinitesimal – in the tabulation of numbers. So political "thought" is a numerical exegesis... No-one can be presented as an individual without naming that in which they count, for whom or for what they are really counted. Our soul has the cold transparency of the figures in which it is resolved.” [NN, Pg. 8]
Since only what is counted has value, and since the only thing that counts in the representation of the victim is death, it plainly follows that the only thing that counts for democratic materialist ideology is the negative bio-ethical ban on intersubjective violence, in a crusade against death. So a first step towards overcoming the bio-ethical imperative appears to be questioning the concrete objectification which indexes the victim homogenously through its representation in number. In other words, if we ought to reject the moralist diluted subjective stir of the masses we ought to just as adamantly, and more fundamentally, oppose the journalistic factual reporting of situations as supplementing the former with its juridical legitimacy (or put in Badiou’s language, its ‘correct’ representation by the state, and its register as part of knowledge[13]). As Žižek puts it, “... a cold analysis of violence somehow reproduces and participates in its horror.” [V, pg 4]. It becomes a matter of declaring, inverting Adorno’s ban on poetry after Auschwitz, that the meaning-giving reports which testify to the ‘truth’ of tragic situations signal true obscenity. It is rather the brutal resistance to meaning, the breakdown of all symbolic placements, which is palpable in truly traumatic situations: “...the very factual deficiencies of the traumatized subject’s report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content ‘contaminated’ the manner of reporting it.” [Ibid].
It is thus the neutral objectivity of prose, not poetry, which is impossible there where politics is lacking: the negative fixation on the objectivity of death is a smokescreen hiding political impotence or indifference. Against the moralists, it’s discarded that the condemnation of death provides the coordinates from which political action can be decided. It is rather this interplay between the sterile objectivity of fact and the meaning-providing moralist uproar which articulates democratic conservatism, under the moralistic banner of ‘human rights’. What follows may be thus read as an extended appendix to Badiou’s rejection to the thinking of the subject as a moral category, conceived as the (juridical) pole where the truth of human rights can be univocally read: “Turning to the subject as a moral category, it is clear that it belongs to the register of the norm. In that regard, it can be what is at stake in a form, for example in the imperative (‘Respect, in every individual, the human subject that he or she is)’; but it cannot be the form itself. Besides, it is clear today, as I recalled in the preface, that this conception of the subject flattens it onto the empirical manifestness of the living body. What deserves respect is the animal body as such. The forms are only the forms of this respect.” [LW, Pg. 48]
How are to read the insufficiency of the moralizing reduction to the ‘victim’, however, in order to transgress it? An obvious reading apropos of Badiou’s reference to the ‘democratic count’ offers itself, which we must guard against from the start, and which emerges quite naturally from democratic materialism’s emphasis on identity-politics or the ‘ethics of difference’ and its vocation towards homogeneity. This is the temptation to think the democratic objectification of the ‘victim’ by realizing “...that the problem is a more fundamental one, that global capitalist is ultimately an ontic effect of the underlying ontological principle of technology or “instrumental reason” [DLC, Pg. 338].
Through that approach, the bio-ethical fixation with death-polls is made to appear as a sort of Heideggerean 'Enframing' [Ge-stell] run amok: the extension of the reduction of nature to instrumentality to human existence, conflating the bulk of those deceased to a silent burial. For wasn’t Heidegger’s ‘stroke of genius’, as Badiou is quick to underline, to see beyond objectification, to grasp that “...what separated ‘fundamental ontology’ from the doctrine of cognition was the maintenance, in the latter, of the category of object, the guideline and absolute limit of the Kantian critique.” [MP: Pg. 75] In fact Badiou seems to validate this diagnosis when he designates today’s allotment of subjectivity to morality as proper to different forms of ‘Neo-Kantianism’ [LW, Pg. 48]. Likewise, Žižek’s suspicion against subjective violence and meaning-giving factual truth might indicate that the task is that of stepping away in the face of meaningless horror, the Heideggerean prescription of a listening attitude of Gelassenheit as the only possible resistance to instrumental reason’s metaphysical violence, etc.
The perspicuous reader will have already identified this discursive line as a version of the third conception of the subject which Badiou rejects, and which we underlined at the beginning as conceiving the subject to be an ideological construct or fiction. In the ‘deconstructive version’ we are dealing with here, however, it is not the State proper which interpellates individuals through ideological fables reducible to their symbolic efficiency; the metaphysical presupposition is rather historically rooted, the realization of a historical destiny, and so describing the effects of an operation not so easily escapable. This position pairs the immediate disposal of human life in the murder of millions and the inoffensive portrayal of victims as sharing the uncanny resemblance of a perverse ‘objectification’ of the subject; the reduction of human existence to the form of the statistical figure to be measured within the inventory of knowledge. And didn’t Heidegger himself hint towards this generalized obscenity when in his correspondence with Marcuse he equated the horrors of the holocaust to the control of pests in agriculture by fumigation?[14] In other words, it seems that as long as politics is laid to rest on an instrumental conception of existence which objectivises beings (Dasein included) we cannot get rid of the metaphysical excess of disposing of men as mere objects; thus intersubjective violence is ultimately nothing but the destined aftermath of a primitive ‘ontotheological’ deviance. The situation in Congo depicted by Žižek can then emerge as the residue of that ‘instrumental reason’ which both Heidegger and Adorno[15] insisted was responsible for the schizophrenic objectification of Man. So, as Žižek asks, does recourse to the artistic word detectable in Heidegger’s poetic-turn, and the suspicion against the instrumental count avowed in Adorno’s appeal to a historically reflexive ‘second nature’ not represent the “...danger of regressing to a contemplative attitude that somehow betrays the urgency to “do something” about the depicted horrors...There are situations when the only truly “practical” thing to do is to resist the temptation to engage immediately and to “wait and see” by means of a patient, critical analysis.”. [V, Pg 6]. Doesn’t Žižek here succumb, in a comedic leftish variation on Heidegger’s theme of the ‘Return of the Gods’, to the passive apathy of awaiting the striking moment of ‘divine violence’, as Simon Critchley (2008) seems to impute “...do nothing, sit still, prefer not to, be Bartleby, and silently dream of a ruthless violence, a grabbing of power, a consolidation of state power into one man’s hands.” [VTZ, Pg, 6]
Radicalizing this position of the ‘detached thinker’, we must remain in synchrony with Badiou in that number or ‘objectifying representation’ is not a simple side effect of a perverted politics or metaphysical thought, ruined by an all-too instrumental approach. Underlying such a thesis, Badiou diagnoses the tacit ideological nostalgia that some other form of political existence would be possible: one where man is no longer reduced to the sinister power of the count of the state and the latter’s reduction of the former to the symbolic order (or in Žižek’s case, according to Critchley, the sinister authoritarian rule of a dictatorial, military State)[16]. This is the nostalgia that all ‘poetic ontologies’ seem to invariably succumb to. Against this position, Badiou insists in that the logic of the count is imminent to any structured situation, and the meta-structural count of the state is uniform to all representations; man “always counts” [NN, Pg. 8]. The true danger does not consist in number, metaphysical ontotheology, instrumental reason, or objectifying representation, but on the precise depoliticizing supplement provided by democratic materialism, which reduces existence to life, and the subject to being a victim within the unavoidable split between democracy and totalitarian excess. In presenting death as the pure negation of life this split turns politics “...into a spectacle made as discreet as possible, a mere disappearing, regarding which the living have the right to hope that it will not disrupt their delusional habits of contended ignorance.” [E, Pg. 36] The poetic Heideggerean ruse, on the other hand, reduces the subject’s objectification to being the extension of an operation in number or reason, within the field of knowledge (techné), while truth (aletheia) is of course left to the ‘morning of the world’ proper to the poetic word[17]. What Badiou resists is precisely the pairing of ‘objectivised’ subject and number; the bare count which gives number (and which is thought in the ontological situation, i.e. mathematics) is in its being void of qualitative content; it is only the particular twist democratic materialism gives to it which must be rendered excessive here: “Heidegger ‘constructs’ the antinomy of the matheme and the poem in such a way as to make it coincide with the opposition of knowledge and truth, or the subject/object couple and Being...Poetry, thus more profound than its philosophical servant, has been altogether aware of a sharing of thinking since it has blindly perceived that the matheme too, in its pure literal offering, in its empty suture to every multiple presentation was questioning and dismissing the prevalence of objectivity.” [Ibid, Pg. 76]
The question of politics is thus not at all avoided by signalling, against transcendence, the instrumental obsession of humanity. Counting, the structure of a situation and its reduplication by the state, is always a proper condition for any politics (in fact, for any situation and truth procedure), and not just its contemporary permutations[18]. This is why ultimately Heidegger himself had to desperately trace the predicament of the West to its Greek Platonic origin within the metaphysical advent of the Idea, and not just the modern derail. It is not the prevalence of the bond to instrumental nature which lingers, but the morbid sacralisation of the bond in contemporary capital which indistinctly runs into complicity with the democratic world. As for the accusations against modernity for its excessive religiosity (to the ‘empire of the count’), what tacitly governs its thinking is a profoundly paralyzing nostalgia in the face of an impotence against capital: “Capital is the general dissolvent of sacralising representations, which postulates the existence of intrinsic and essential relations (between man and nature, men, groups, and the Polis, mortal and eternal life, etc.). It is altogether typical that the denunciation of ‘technological nihilism’ is always correlated to the nostalgia of such relations.” [MP, Pg. 56]
Politics cannot start from life, but it cannot escape into a regressive gaze into history or a romantic surrender to poetry either. Against the apolitical stance following the accusation of ‘technological nihilism’, politics demands its own (local) systematic construction, its own ‘truths’, and resists reduction to the effects of a defective ‘form’ of reason veiling our allegiance to metaphysical spectres. This is why Badiou insists adamantly on an ‘ethics of singularity’, assigned to an affirmative production of the Good, and not the all-embracing indulgence on an ‘ethics of difference’, obsessed with avoiding death and the dispersionist vocation to admit all forms of life. In politics, nothing can take the place of affirmation; there where the bio-ethical obsession with life resounds, lingers the reactionary suspicion against any positive vision of the Good, of what a different political situation or vision of the human subject could be: “What shall be the destiny of thought, since we know very well that it must be affirmative invention or nothing at all? In reality, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism. The ethical conception of man, besides the fact that its foundation is either biological (images of victims) or ‘Western’ (the self-satisfaction of the armed benefactor), prohibits every broad positive vision of possibilities. What is vaunted here, what ethics legitimates, is in fact the conservation by the so-called ‘West’ of what it possesses.” [E, Pg. 16]
This is in fact the ultimate result of all ‘alarming’ reports on these incalculable tragedies taking place. The cover story of Times' magazine on Congo incites interest much in the same way the endless array of horrors reported every day through the media do: offering synthetic factual descriptions which at best stir the sensibility of their audience for a few moments before passing on to the next tragedy. Our next step will be to follow Badiou’s subtraction of subjectivity from the concrete victimization of the moralistic imperative, and survey how his new theory of ‘subjective types’ exposes the democratic materialist reactive or obscurantist[19] appropriation of concrete situations. It is through this subtraction of the subject from knowledge and objectivity that Badiou will be able to register the exceptional character of the subject, linking it to a participation in the generic construction of a truth. This should put in perspective the discursive limits of democratic materialism’s obsession with life in bio-ethics, and its localization of the subject as ‘the victim’.
[1] This sample is an extract from work in progress titled Mortification as a Political Category. It comprises the second part of the paper, which deals with Badiou’s theory of the subject specifically, and the analysis of the Baguan crisis in
[2] As we will see below, a fourth version of the subject in the form of the Lacanian psychoanalytic conception (the ‘subject of the unconscious’) is also targeted by Badiou, even if it shares its subtraction from all scientific or ideological registers. For an acute delineation on the separation between Badiou’s theory of the subject and its Lacanian version, refer to Bruno Bosteels’ excellent two-part essay in Pli Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject [2001-2002].
[3] LW, Pg. 47-48
[4] I suspect Badiou would include in this category the hermeneutic and deconstructive conception of the subject as a metaphysical or ‘ontotheological’ configuration to be exposed in its structural fragility, or whose priority ought to be displaced from ontology or post-metaphysical thought (Heidegger, Derrida).
[5] As Peter Dews (2005) recognizes, the contemporary return of the ‘ethics of man’ comes as part of a more general return to the concern about subjective agency in politics and ethics, reversing the displacement of these issues which occurred in the wake (and enthusiasm) of so-called post-modern theory on the 1970’s: “Yet a decade or so later questions of conscience and obligation, of recognition and respect, of justice and the law, once dismissed as the residue of an outdated humanism, have returned to occupy, if not the center stage, then something pretty close to it.” [TA, Pg. 107]
[6] Of course, it is impossible to proceed without an understanding of what Badiou means by ‘situation’, which inevitably leads us into the very foundations of his (meta) ontological enterprise. For reasons of space, we cannot deal with this issue thoroughly here, but it should be broadly understood that ‘situation’ or ‘world’ (as Badiou will begin to say in Logics of Worlds) refers to a given structured (multiple) presentation. A situation is a presented multiple and the regime which counts it as a part, i.e. its relation to the state of the situation determining it as a normal, singular or excrescent multiplicity. A situation can be a political moment or sequence, a group of individuals, a theoretical system of scientific principles, a composition of artistic works or even the experience of love. For the thorough description of the concept of multiplicity and situation the first three Meditations of Being and Event are prerequisite. For the entire discussion of the representation and the count of the state, refer to BE, Meditation 8 and 9.
[7] In this sense, Badiou’s enterprise remains structurally close to Lacan’s own subtraction of subjectivity from objectivity; although, as we will see, for Badiou this subtraction is woven in sight of the subjective link to creative activity in the form of truths. We will have more to say about the link between Lacan and Badiou’s registers below.
[8] Notably, the Althusserian position advanced in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1969), against his initial partition of the subject into its scientific, aesthetic, ideological and psychoanalytic (the subject of the unconscious) versions. See Bosteels (2001), Pgs. 214-217.
[9] HALLWARD, Peter, Generic Sovereignty: The Philosophy of Alain Badiou, Angelaki, 1998, Pg. 87.
[10] Žižek, BERNARD-HENRI LÉVY & SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK, A Debate Instigated by Paul Holdengräber, Violence & the Left in Dark Times, Pg. 20]. Transcript available at WWW.NYPL.ORG/LIVE
[11] Later in the debate, Žižek rejects ‘in passing’ the leftist moralistic discourse which seeks to mobilize activity by inducing fear and shame in the light of the atrocities resulting from capitalist activity. Žižek proposes that this is a weak stand since it does not yet politicize situations, and encourages reactionary forms of response, such as charity. Levy’s position at this early stage of the debate nonetheless appears very close to the moralistic position. In agreement with Žižek, the question of ‘moralism’ and the difficulty of what can constitute a true political engagement, will be tackled in the paper below.
[13] The concept of representation broadly refers in Badiou’s system to the way in which the parts of a particular situation are counted, i.e. the count of all the multiples included in a situation (as opposed to those which belong to the situation).The state of the situation is thus simply the multiple-organization which is registered as parts of a given situation. For the substantive exposition of the state of the situation refer to Being and Event, Meditations 8-10. For the (crucial) distinction between belonging and inclusion, presentation and representation, Meditations 5, 8-10 are necessary.
[14] And which, rightfully, was the kernel of Philippe’s Lacoue-Labarthe’s (2002) principled opposition to Heidegger’s dismissive remarks on the extermination of the Jews under Nazism.
[15] In spite of Adorno’s explicit aversion to the whole Heideggerean talk of authenticity( most notably in his Jargon of Authenticity); does not his own thriving against instrumental reason and the whole theme of the ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’ coincide all too often with Heidegger’s own criticism of modern technology as the substantializing (metaphysical) reduction of Dasein to the animal rationale?
[16] This was in fact the primitive classical Marxist impasse, in its expectation to see the state disappear [BE, Meditation 9].
[17] In accord to the contemporary aversion to the Platonic proximity to truth, which Badiou designates as a contemporary sophism.
[18] Which is why some post-Heideggerean authors following his line of analysis end up forcing a stricter correspondence between techné and Dasein as such; see for example Bernard Stiegler’s three-volume Technics and Time (1994, 1996, 2001)
[19] These (technical) terms will be given their full weight in the next section.
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