Mortification as a Political Category - II

I. Towards a Logic of Subtractive Agency: from Texture to Subjects

A) THE OCCULTATION OF THE SCULPTURE: SCULLY AND LACAN

Let’s begin by way of a short detour through two apparently asymmetrical domains to politics: architecture and cinema, paving the way back to our discussion of Badiou’s theory of subjective types. Looking back at Žižek remarks on the African situation and the Western humanitarian retort, we are thinking how democratic materialism perversely hides its effects through a depoliticizing gesture in favor of the humanitarian protection of human life. We have thus identified ‘bio-ethics’ as the operation whereby the subject is reduced to the status of a plain living body and the contours of his world made to disappear. A fitting analogy to the homogenization of the ‘victim’ through bio-ethics can be made here through Vincent Scully’s celebrated distinction between delimitation and population apropos the understanding of plane and sculpture in architectural theory. For Scully, what defines the sculpture is its independence from the texture of the plane which it inhabits; it is the sculpture which allows the notion of population to emerge in a second moment: “Through the art of sculpture human beings populate that environment, that space, with their own creatures, embodiments of their own perception of the quality of being alive, which is above all the quality of being potentially able to gesture or to act.” [Scully, Vincent, Architecture and Environment, Pg. 198]
Crucial here is the definition of the sculpture from the consideration of potentiality to act or the capacity of gesturing; that which is properly an inhabitant, individual and distinguished is sculptural in essence. The sculptor is thus, in his creation of living potency “godlike”, bringing into existence that which is observably animated, at least potentially.[1] Whereas a plane delimits a space merely occupied by objects; the sculpture is self-subsistent, populating the plane, and not properly part of the plane itself. This means, of course, that a sculpture is always relatively defined in relation to the plane, so that the same thing which was a sculpture can, from another perspective, become a plane (a good example here might be the Trojan horse, where from the perspective of the outsiders was perceived as a sculpture, whereas for the insiders it merely delimited a particular space or cavity). The presence of the sculpture is thus something like an anomaly, a notable exception to that which merely furnishes a territory: “The sculptor has created not life but something more than an image of life, certainly not a “representation” or even a “sign” of life. He has embodied life, and his creature becomes mysteriously more real than the other creature.” [Ibid, Pg. 203]

Scully avows the glorious erection of man in the Greek temple, the astounding promise of movement and life which, induced by the sculpture’s verticality, like Athena at the Paestum, opposes the immobile horizontal plainness of the surface. But this paradigm of man as worthy of being the symbol of living potency in the image of the Gods is rather maudlin, and far from today’s cynical ‘post-modern’ exploration of the ambiguity between the texture and the sculpture. Today it is not the triumphant exposition of the figure which lingers, but perhaps its unbearable horror which demands occultation, or reintegration into the surface. Here we are close to the Lacanian designation of lamella as ‘the Thing’: the traumatic kernel of the Real as an image which shatters our symbolic coordinates if confronted directly, and which must thereby be perpetually deferred, hidden, as an impossible point thought from the order of the Imaginary. The full force of this effect, widely popularized by Žižek’s foray into Cinema, is exemplarily visible in H.R Giger’s work for the Alien series[2]. In its first version, we see a terrifying scene where the investigating crew of passengers explore the alien hive’s corridors, which display an ambiguous rib-caged structure undecided between the living matter (of what would be a living entity, aliens themselves) and the lifeless walls of the hive. It is thus never clear whether what we’re looking at is simply a wall or an altar, a part of the texture of the corridor or the sculptural figure of the Alien itself. It is this uncanny symbiosis between the horrifying observing creature and the lifeless space in which the passengers dwell which works to elevate the tension, since one never feels safely alone in the room; the monster threatens to have been always too near, already apparent, just camouflaged to pass unnoticed.

“Beyond representation as it is in its monstrosity, lamella nonetheless remains within the domain of the Imaginary, although as a kind of limit-image: the image to cancel all images, the image that endeavors to stretch the imagination to the very border of the irrepresentable… As such, lamella stands for the Real in its most terrifying dimension, as the primordial abyss which swallows everything, dissolving all identities” [Žižek, How to Read Lacan – Troubles With the Real: Lacan as a Reader of Alien[3]]

The perversion of this logic of disguising the horrific image in its dissolution into texture is easily extended to the political terrain we wish to analyze. We ask: what happens when the horror of the Thing becomes man himself, in his worldly and bodily existence? What happens when it is an unfathomable Real of human social reality which presents itself as the point of impossibility which threatens to shatter the coordinates of the symbolic order and with it all experience of meaning?[4] If our provisional foray into democratic materialist ideology has any sense, it is that that the moralistic conception of the subject is nothing but the operation of the occultation of the Real; the apathic scepticism against any positive vision of emancipatory politics in favour of a conservative and slothful reduction of man to life, and to the democratic guarantee of freedoms. Something demands to be hidden for things to remain as they are. But the transition here is enforced not to inscribe the ‘looming monster’ permanently into the texture of our social life, haunting us with a mortifying presence and unease in order to trigger action. The dead in the virtual cemetery do not threaten with the prospect of climbing out of walls to assail; they are led to disappear at the margins of a distant report.

To put matters in Hegelese, repeating Žižek’s formal exercise from The Ticklish Subject [Chapter II]: what we must accomplish in order to overcome the sedative of the victim is the transition from in-itself to for-itself, to recognize how the perceived solution to the problem is actually part of the problem itself. In the first stage, the normal functioning of liberal capitalism perceives itself as advancing the freedoms exempt from the primitive authoritarian political rule (the Congolese tragedy is but a deviation or exception to the normal liberal capitalist process). In a second moment, this exception is then confronted by the moralistic claim to horror inducing us to assume responsibility and engage in a direct intervention (charity is encouraged as the humanitarian ethical duty of the Western world to those who suffer the whims of violence outside of it). What this perspective misses is how what it perceives as a solution (assistance by charity, moralistic outrage) is already included in the problem itself; the Congolese tragedy does not occur because of its failure to incorporate itself to the normal capitalist dynamics, but exactly the opposite, because it did in fact accomplish this incorporation (warlords effectively doing business with private companies which provides their military sustenance…). The third necessary stage is thus to acknowledge that in the sought for liberation gained from the prospect of aiding the victims of the humanitarian tragedy by capitalist means we merely repeat the very gesture that provoked the tragedy to begin with; it is not apart from capitalism that the crisis is generated but along with it, so that what we must do is negate the framework which filters the moral ‘horror’ through the perspective of the capitalist reintegration.

Žižek has formally expressed this transition in the Hegelian ‘negation of the negation’ as “…that of a process of passage from state A to state B; the first, immediate negation of A negates the position of A while remaining within its symbolic confines, so it must be followed by another negation, which then negates the very symbolic space common to A and its immediate negation…” [TS, Pg. 72]. In our example, the first negation would constitute the foreseen prospect of reintegrating the victims to the democratic life through capitalist means (charity, volunteer work…), while the sought for second negation acknowledges in the very form of the capitalist dynamics the source of the problem as such. In Lacanese, the failure to reach the goal of our desire imagining a world without victims is the very realization of the drive’s true aim: keeping those excluded perpetually ‘victimized’ as those longing for integration to the capitalist-democratic activity, never calling it into question. To supplement this ‘negative’ movement in the dialectics, however, we will see how Badiou proposes the subject’s affirmative production in what he calls ‘truth-procedures’, and which properly begins a new sequence for the activity of subjects in the wake of an event, a radical rupture with the established situation and the State which legitimizes it. Only then will we be able to enter politics once again.

B) THE VOID: BEING OR SUBJECT, BADIOU OR LACAN?

If we are to gravitate back into politics, then it seems that we must first devise a new figure of subjectivity which can ‘give shape’ to action outside democratic materialism’s operations. The subject cannot be the mere animalistic victim worthy of aid, awaiting democratic freedoms in some underprivileged world. The character of the subject rather seems to be a declaration of singular potency, an exceptional affirmation which acquires, like the Greek temple, an independent voice in the participation of a new process for truth. We should thus approach the de-objectification of the subject closer to the Lacanian imperative ‘Do not objectify the subject’, in which the subject is an incision in the realm of the objective, properly immersed in it, but never directly identical to it. “If there are no ethics ‘in general’, that is because there is no abstract Subject, who would adopt it as its shield. There is only a particular kind of animal, convoked by certain circumstances to become a subject – or rather, to enter into the composing of a subject. This is to say that at a given moment, everything he is – his body, his abilities – is called upon to enable the passing of a truth along its path. This is when the human animal is convoked to be the immortal that he was not yet.” [E, Pg. 40]

But to avoid further confusion, let us make some distinctions. It might seem that we are moving between two philosophical registers here which are at least not coextensive intuitively. On the one hand we have anticipated in our introduction a strict application of Badiou’s theory of subjective types in relation to the subject’s participation in truth-procedures. We also designate, following Lacan, the Real as experienced in the association with the experience of ‘horror’ in cinema, and then exhibit a parallel to the symbolic placing of the victim within democratic materialism’s effective ideology and politics. However, Peter Hallward (2003), among others, has pointed out that a gap separates Badiou from the Lacanian conception of the Real[5], since truth concerns the subject’s engaged transformation of the Real in a (local) process of fidelity, whereas the Lacanian Real seems assigned to its immoveable resistance to the effects of the Symbolic, thus to a kind of perpetual inaccessibility from the realm of nomination. This is why Hallward suggests that the Lacanian associations with “…horror, brute materiality, mystery, and fixity” [ST, Pg. 15] must be dropped from Badiou’s ascription of the Real. In the end, for Badiou, it is this very inaccessibility of the Real which becomes transformed into a possibility for the subject incorporated in truth. Or in Badiou’s more poetic language: “Miracles do happen.”
In the concluding chapter of his book, Hallward furthermore underlines Badiou’s greatest achievement as precisely having been the systematic “…separation of the merely ineffable, insignificant horror of death from the generic destitution demanded by any subjectivation” [Pg. 262]. The Real for Badiou is re-placed by the subject’s interventional link to a truth-procedure, and so not as the mere ‘limit-experience’ of a fixed point against the ontic order, in which the subject can be nothing but the gap between its own void and the internally excluded object of desire, with the excess of death-drive founding its libidinal thrust (ultimately a ‘nothing counted for something’; the proper barred subject: $) [Ecrits, Pg. 861]. It is in this excess from symbolic appropriation, in which Žižek (2003) finds nothing but ‘an indivisible remainder’, that Badiou finds the potency intrinsic to every situation for an evental change, or as Bruno Bosteels (2002) adequately put: “Pinpointing the absent cause or constitutive outside of a situation, in other words, remains a dialectical yet idealist tactic, unless this evanescent point of the real is forced, distorted, and extended, in order to give consistency to the real as a new generic truth.”

Contra Žižek’s support for such a Lacanian ‘excremental’ view on the subject, Hallward takes sides with Badiou and thinks in such a view the Real is ‘…incapable of provoking the slightest reaction from within either the domain of purely multiple being as being on the one hand, or the domain of an immortal subjectivation on the other.’ [Ibid] In this way, he anticipates Badiou’s own opposition to the Lacanian (and Žižek’s) Real in a brief note to Logics of Worlds, where it is designated as an obstacle ‘…so ephermal, so brutally punctual, that it is impossible to uphold its consequences. The effects of this kind of frenzied upsurge, in which the real rules over the comedy of our symptoms are ultimately indiscernible from those of skepticism.[6]” [LW, Pg. 563] This is why for Badiou, no matter how nearly it approaches the materialist dialectic, Lacan’s obsession with the Real as impasse thwarts the possibility of approaching truths, or as Bosteels puts it “…as though the end of analysis were the mere recognition of a structural impasse, maybe accompanied by an identification with the remaining symptom of enjoyment, but without the actual process of a subject conditioned by truth.” [Ibid, Pg. 182]. Finally, to pass the limit of the Real as limit, Badiou seeks a theory in which the real is not experienced as lack, but “…that which passes with force” [TOS, Pg. 41].

We should certainly agree in that the fixity of the Real in Lacan is 'dynamized' by putting it in reach of the subject within the inventive production of truth, thereby displacing the strict psychoanalytic conception’s constraint to its encounter as limit (say, through the experience of anxiety). However, there is no reason why both ‘versions’ of the Real cannot overlap in what sustains the association to experiences of horror and brute materiality (the question of mystery remains undecided for me). This is because those experiences relate to the Real in both Lacan and Badiou by virtue of their ‘traumatic dimension’, their mark as points outside the situation’s symbolic appropriation or nomination, as sort of ‘limit experiences’ to what can be incorporated in the field of meaning. This status of the Real as the experience of something ‘traumatic’ is not by any means excluded from Badiou’s dynamic approach. It is ultimately just the fixity of the Real and the precise form of the subject’s relation to it which separates both conceptions. So we can say, that while Lacan offers two options to cope with the Real in humanistic disavowal and the capitalist integration[7], Badiou’s insertion of the subject to the rare displacement of the Real in an event can allow us to see how contemporary ideology organizes a juncture of these two options under the obscuring gesture of indexing to victims the democratic fetish.

Finally, we can agree with Žižek in that the barred subject’s permanent split from the Real remains a point of excess to our symbolic life, and with Hallward in that Badiou’s theory of the event and participation of truth allows for a precise inventive contact with it at the indiscernible point of any situation. Since this point is clearly discernable in the ontological situation (as parts of generic subsets, in excess of the naming resources of the encyclopedia of knowledge[8]) Badiou can preserve the evanescent character of the Real and admit the power of subjective intervention in the consequences of an event. So to Žižek’s qualification: “…a Truth-Event can operate only against the background of a traumatic encounter with the undead/monstrous Thing.” [TS, Pg. 162] Badiou could simply retort a triumphant ‘Yes! But it is precisely the form of action in sight of monstrous limit-‘Thing’ that decides between a subject’s emergence in an inventive faithfulness to the truth-event, reactive denial, or obscurantist occultation’[9]. Or, as Bosteels (2002) phrases it, for Badiou it is insufficient for the production of truth that we recognize the Real as impasse, since what is ultimately at stake is its sequential displacement: “Can any new truth actually emerge in a couple from the sole recognition of the real that is their constitutive impasse? For Badiou, the truth of love or politics is neither this impasse nor its symptomatic outbreaks in the moments of crisis. The formal impossibility of the sexual or social bond, which certainly reveals itself in such a crisis, is at best a site for a possible event, but the truth of a love encounter or a political manifestation consists only in whatever a dual or collective subject makes happen afterwards, on the basis of this event as being generally applicable to the entire situation.” [Bosteels, Pg. 182]

From the side of the subject, the fixity of the Real assigns the subject to the constancy of its libidinal structure, identifiable as the gap sustained by the fantasy towards the embodied impossible object-cause of desire (objet a). On the other hand, the possible displacement of the Real marks the subject’s definite rarity to truth-procedures: “The choice is here between a structural recurrence, which thinks the subject-effect as void set, thus identifiable with the uniform networks of experience, and a hypothesis of the rarity of the subject…both returning the void to, and reinsuring it within a function of suture to being…”[BE, Pg. 432] Robert Hughes (2007) does well to remind us, however, that this ‘contact of the Real’ is not strictly its ‘transformation into a consistency’[10] as Žižek (2007) remarks (the void as such is never a positive term of the situation, outside ontology), but more like a displacement. Put differently, in Badiou’s own words, “…what we know of truth is merely knowledge” [Conditions 192f]. For more on this separation see Hughes’ objection to Žižek “From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real”, where he writes: “Badiou seems well aware that the status of the truth as real is lost in that very process and that has instead relapsed into mere knowledge…” [Pg. 177]

Below we will see how the horrific contact with the real (the Lacanian lamella designated above in film) can be also the very site which needs to be bereft of its evental potency, insofar as both descriptions describe within a specific situation the impossible point which demands deferral and occultation, outside the confines of the symbolic. Horror cinema uses this for the elevation of suspense and tension; the impending appearance of the traumatic image guarantees this experience in the anticipatory suffering of fear as an experience of the proximity of the Real. In politics the deferral is accomplished to substitute the experience of the Real, to obscure (in Badiou’s precise sense) the unbearable image which threatens the symbolic and its revolutionary (evental) potency, thus avoiding contact with it, pacifying the unease of foreseeing it. From this it is a short walk to the conception of mortification as a category for politics; the imperative to rebel against the democratic materialist obscuring of the horrific Real which pacifies the emancipatory potency of evental sites in an ideological blackmail advertised as the struggle for ‘democratic peace’ and against violence.

It is to this purpose that Badiou has forged the bedrock for a new typology for describing the distinct forms of subjective constitution, which renders palpable the exceptional character in which a subject can appear in a concrete situation, and towards concrete ‘destinations’ with respect to truth[11]. We will show how Badiou’s framework allows us to observe a concrete political juncture from the recent killings in the Peruvian Amazon in Bagua, and show how it works as a first step towards a new thinking of the subject in political situations, rescuing it from the ruse of democratic materialism.

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[1] Ibid, Pg.203.

[3] http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm

[4] The classic example, advanced by Agamben (1999) (and frequently underlined by Žižek), is the ascription of ‘post-traumatic subjects’ or the ‘musulman’ as the ‘living dead’; those who suffer the complete breakdown of the symbolic order (concentration camp victims, individuals under extreme conditions, resisting all possible integration to a universe of meaning…)

[5] The difficult question linking Badiou and Lacan has been furthermore signaled by Bruno Bosteels (2001, 2002) whose two part paper published in Pli, "Alain Badiou's Theory of the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism ?insists on the necessity of a reading of Theory of the Subject is made in conjunction to that of Being and Event, for an adequate understanding of what separates the two positions.

[6] As Bruno Bosteels (2002) shows, elsewhere Badiou designates on the other hand the Lacanian dialectical fixation on the primacy and indivisibility of the symbolic in the logic of place, blocking the path towards the production of new truths, and thus indexing it (along Mallarmé) to the risk of idealism. Bosteels writes “…the problem of this doctrine is precisely that, while never ceasing to be dialectical in pinpointing the absent cause and its divisive effects on the whole, it nevertheless remains tied to this whole itself and is thus unable to account for the latter’s transformation” (Pg. 179) In this ‘oscillation’ between the priority of the symbolic (as the site for an algebra of the subject) and the primacy of the Real, Badiou’s Theory of the Subject rescues the materialist necessity to take sides with the latter (materialist) nearness to the Real within a transformative theory of agency; to ask finally whether the real ‘…cannot also on rare occasions become the site for a newly consistent truth’. [Ibid, Pg. 181]

[7] Žižek (2003) gives this distinction before outlining what separates Badiou and Lacan on this point.

[8] For the substantive exposition on these concepts the reader should refer to Being and Event (Part VII, Meditations 27-34)

[9] Again, these designations will be thoroughly explained in the next section.

[10] Which is perhaps also suggested by an earlier formulation in Theory of the Subject, where Badiou links the algebraic and topological capture of the ‘…real as consistency’ [TDS, Pg. 243-244]

[11] We will see below how Badiou articulates this concept of ‘subjective destinations’ as a result of the basic relation that subjects may have to the truth-event

Mortification as a Political Category - Introduction

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 20^th 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 2001, a UN investigation into the illegal exploitation of natural resources in Congo found that the conflict in the country is mainly about access to, control of and trade in five key minerals: coltan, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold. According to this investigation, the exploitation of Congo's natural resources by local warlords and foreign armies was 'systematic and systemic'.

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’.

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[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 Peru. The first section was an introduction to Zizek and Badiou’s criticisms against bioethics and their depoliticizing function, developing some considerations surrounding the difference between Lacan and Badiou’s notion of the Real. The final part of this section (still in progress) considers Badiou’s theory of change, and the possibility of extending Badiou’s notion of reactive/obscure subjects to non-evental situations. For this I show that the operations of such subjects can work in the projection of possible events, and not just actual events; in the appearance of sites which fall short of being strong singularities (sites with maximal intensity and with maximal consequences).

[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.

[12] http://www.lrb.co.uk/webonly/14/11/2008/zize01_.html

[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.