Badiou K
Badiou K........................................................................................................................................... 1
Notes ............................................................................................................................................... 3
Shell ................................................................................................................................................. 4
Ethics of the Other Shell .......................................................................................................... 5
Links ................................................................................................................................................. 9
Ethics ..................................................................................................................................... 10
Embrace Difference ............................................................................................................... 12
Hegemony ............................................................................................................................. 14
Human Rights ........................................................................................................................ 15
Identity Politics ...................................................................................................................... 18
Include the Other .................................................................................................................. 23
Language Fluidity ................................................................................................................... 25
Law......................................................................................................................................... 26
AT: Moral Obligation ............................................................................................................. 27
State....................................................................................................................................... 28
Terrorism ............................................................................................................................... 30
Impacts .......................................................................................................................................... 32
Inequality / capitalism ........................................................................................................... 33
Nihilism .................................................................................................................................. 34
War ........................................................................................................................................ 36
Alternative ..................................................................................................................................... 37
Fidelity to the Event .............................................................................................................. 38
Solves Oppression ................................................................................................................. 40
Radical Questioning Key ........................................................................................................ 42
Situational Ethics Good ......................................................................................................... 43
2NC Blocks ..................................................................................................................................... 45
AT: Link Turn / Prereq............................................................................................................ 46
AT: Perm ................................................................................................................................ 47
AT: Cede the Political............................................................................................................. 50
AT: Events are Evil ................................................................................................................. 52
AT: Realism ............................................................................................................................ 53
AT: Badiou is Totalizing.......................................................................................................... 54
AT: Generic Lacan Bad Cards ................................................................................................. 55
AT: Desanti ............................................................................................................................ 57
AT: Laclau............................................................................................................................... 58
AT: Nancy ............................................................................................................................... 59
Affirmative Answers ...................................................................................................................... 60
Cede the Political ................................................................................................................... 61
Alt Fails – Capitalism too big.................................................................................................. 63
Alt fails – impossible .............................................................................................................. 65
Badiou over universalizes ...................................................................................................... 66
Badiou – Radical Violence ..................................................................................................... 67
Permutation........................................................................................................................... 69
Badiou = Esoteric / unworldly ............................................................................................... 70
Nazism DA.............................................................................................................................. 71
Ethics of Other First ............................................................................................................... 73
Human Rights Good............................................................................................................... 75
Notes
What does this argument link to?
Any affirmative predicated on changing one of our human rights abuses links to this critique. For
instance the human rights credibility advantage for the indefinite detention affirmative. Badiou
believes that when good liberal politicians act to give us a better HR record, they are only
disguising the systematic violence being committed now.
The armed hostilities affirmative would also link to this critique. The affirmative attempts to
open western ways of knowing the world to the perspective of Afghani women. Badiou thinks
this form of identity politics is incredibly violent.
A) It still participates in creating ethical insiders verse ethical outsides (anyone not engaging in
the aff’s methodology is the new ethical outsider).
B) Ethics don’t account for changing circumstances – Suggesting that the entirety of the
occupation of afghanstan should be read as an imperialist occupation ignores the authoritarian
rule there previously.
c) Victims are portrayed as being helpless beings – drained of their humanity. They are dying,
emaciated bodies.
Non-camp related
Any affirmative with an ethical obligation impact – Badiou believes that ethics should be made
in the situation. Attempts to predetermine our action ignore situational factors that are
important for ethical decisions.
Best K links always come from the affirmative evidence. Reading their cards to find examples
that fit the argument in the tag will make the link debate much easier.
Shell
Ethics of the Other Shell
‘Respecting difference’ only operates insofar as the other is willing to be
integrated into Western modes of thought – all others are characterized as
dangerous and expendable.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 23-25)
What then becomes of this category if we claim to suppress, or mask, its religious character, all
the while preserving the abstract arrangement of its apparent constitution (‘recognition of the
other’, etc.)? The answer is obvious: a dog’s dinner [de la bouillie pour les chats]. We are left
with a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and
a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class
struggle. Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics
and of the 'right to difference' are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference. For
them, Mrican customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so
on. As a matter of fact, this celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a good other - which is
to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? Respect for differences, of course! But on condition
that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market economics, in favour of
freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment. ... That is to say: I respect differences, but
only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences.
Just as there can be 'no freedom for the enemies of freedom', so there can be no respect for
those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences. To prove the point, just
consider the obsessive resentment expressed by the partisans of ethics regarding anything that
resembles an Islamic 'fundamentalist'. The problem is that the 'respect for differences' and the
ethics of human rights do seem to define an identity! And that as a result, the respect for
differences applies only to those differences that are reasonably consistent with this identity
(which, after all, is nothing other than the identity of a wealthy -albeit visibly declining -'West').
Even immigrants in this country [France], as seen by the partisans of ethics, are acceptably
different only when they are 'integrated', only if they seek integration (which seems to mean,
if you think about it: only if they want to suppress their difference). It might well be that ethical
ideology, detached from the religious teachings which at least conferred upon it the fullness of a
'revealed' identity, is simply the final imperative of a conquering civilization: 'Become like me
and I will respect your difference.'
Their ethical stance is just camouflage for cultural domination. Only others
who are already compatible with the dominant ideology will be embraced by
their ethics.
McCarraher, 01 (Eugene teaches humanities at Villanova University Review of Ethics: An
Essay on the Understanding of Evil By Alain Badiou,
http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/18/mccarraher2518.html).
While purporting to "respect difference," the acolytes of otherness are "clearly horrified,"
Badiou observes, "by any vigorously sustained difference." Arguing that genuine difference
entails conflict, Badiou contends that "difference" is really a recipe for homogeneity and
consensus. By this token, left-wing militants, along with Christian and Islamic fundamentalists
and African practitioners of clitorectomy, are stigmatized as "bad others" and disinvited from
those "celebrations of diversity" sponsored in campus halls and advertising agencies. "Good
others," on the other hand, exhibit differences that are remarkably consonant with "the
identity of a wealthy West." Indeed, with its mantra of "inclusion" and its vagueness about
"the exact political meaning of the identity being promoted," identity politics supplies exotic
grist for the corporate mills of Western democracies. Thus, in Badiou's view, "difference," cast
in the image and likeness of consumerism, joins "rights" as rhetorical camouflage for Western
economic and military domination.
Their politically compromised framework allows the West to wage perpetual
war on those it considers ethical outsiders.
Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ
Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223–238 ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals)
From the moment we begin to live indistinctly in the war of democracies against Islamic terrorism, which is
to say, quite simply, the war of Good (democratic) against Evil (dictatorial), operations of war –
expeditions, bombings – don’t need to be any more solemnly announced than do police raids on
petty criminals. By the same token, assassinating heads of state, their wives, children, and grandchildren, or putting a
price on their heads like in a western, no longer surprises anyone. Thus, little by little the continuity of war
comes to be established, the declaration of which, in times past, showed that, on the
contrary, war was the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity renders war and
peace indistinguishable. This means that the question of the protagonists of the state of
war is more and more obscure. “Terrorists,” “rogue states,” “dictatorships,” “Islamists”:
just what are these ideological entities? Who identifies them, who proclaims them?
Traditionally, there were two kinds of war: on the one hand, symmetrical war, between comparable imperial powers, like the two world wars of the twentieth century, or
like the cold war between the USA and the USSR; on the other hand, non-symmetrical or dissymmetrical wars between an imperial power and popular forces
theoretically much weaker in terms of military power – either wars of colonial conquest (the conquest of Algeria, the Rif war, or the extermination of the Indians in North
America), or wars of national liberation (Vietnam, Algeria, and so forth). Today, we can talk about dissymmetrical wars, but without the political identity of the
invasion and occupation operations (Afghanistan,
Kosovo, Iraq, and so on) are explicitly presented as liberations – and this despite the fact
that the local populations don’t see things in that way at all. In fact, now the concept of
war only designates the use of violence, disposed in variable dissymmetries. The only
invariable trait is dissymmetry: only the weak are targeted, and as soon as the shadow of power can be seen (North
dissymmetry being really conceivable. The proof for this lies in the fact that
Korea’s atomic bomb, the Russia of brutal extortions in Chechnya, the heavy hand of the Chinese in Tibet), war – war which might risk actually becoming war, and not the
American wars don’t constitute
any kind of present, it’s because, being politically unconnected to any dialectic, whether
interimperialist, whether according to the war/revolution schema, they are not really
distinguishable from the continuity of “peace.” And by “peace” is meant American, or
“western,” peace, democratic peace/war, whose entire content is the comfort of the
above-mentioned “democrats” against the barbarian aggressiveness of the poor.
peace of the police, or peace/war (la pe´guerre apre‘s l’apre‘s-guerre?)–is not on the agenda. In fact, if the
Ethical principles remove us from the urgency of particular needs. We focus on
identifying situations that match the rules, rather than imagining a positive
vision of the future. This reduces us all to a subhuman mass.
The alternative is to break with such rules and give ourselves over to the
particular event—what Badiou calls fidelity to the event.
Badiou, 1998 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 14-16)
Every collective will to the Good creates Evil This is sophistry at its most devastating. For if our
only agenda is an ethical engagement against an Evil we recognize a priori, how are we to
envisage any transformation of the way things are? From what source will man draw the
strength to be the immortal that he is? 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 selfsatisfaction 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. It is
squarely astride these possessions (material possessions, but also possession of its own being)
that ethics determines Evil to be, in a certain sense, simply that which it does not own and enjoy
[ce qui n 'est pas ce dont elle jouit]. But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and
the un-possessed. He is sustained by non-being [non-etant]. To forbid him to imagine the Good,
to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to
think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him
humanity as such. 3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determination of Evil, ethics
prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which is the obligatory
starting point of all properly human action. Thus, for instance, the doctor won over to 'ethical'
ideology will ponder, in meetings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding 'the
sick', conceived of in exactly the same way as the partisan of human rights conceives of the
indistinct crowd of victims -the 'human' totality of subhuman entities [reels]. But the same
doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this particular person is not treated at the
hospital, and accorded all necessary measures, because he or she is without legal residency
papers, or not a contributor to Social Security. Once again, 'collective' responsibility demands it!
What is erased in the process is the fact that there is only one medical situation, the clinical
situation,' and there is no need for an 'ethics' (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to
understand that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if he deals with the situation
according to the rule of maximum possibility -to treat this person who demands treatment of
him (no intervention here!) as thoroughly as he can, using everything he knows and with all the
means at his disposal, without taking anything else into consideration. And if he is to be
prevented from giving treatment because of the State budget, because of death rates or laws
governing immigration, then let them send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic duty
would oblige him to resist them, with force if necessary. 'Ethical commissions' and other
ruminations on 'healthcare expenses' or 'managerial responsibility', since they are radically
exterior to the one situation that is genuinely medical, can in reality only prevent us from
being faithful to it. For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the
possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the
affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation. As
a matter of fact, bureaucratic medicine that complies with ethical ideology depends on 'the
sick' conceived as vague victims or statistics, but is quickly overwhelmed by any urgent,
singular situation of need. Hence the reduction of 'managed', 'responsible' and 'ethical' healthcare to the abject task of deciding which sick people the 'French medical system' can treat and
which others -because the Budget and public opinion demand it -it must send away to die in the
shantytowns of Kinshasa.
Links
Ethics
Ethical rules maintain are an attempt to freeze the current order and are
therefore nihilist and deeply conservative.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 30-34)
The very idea of a consensual 'ethics', stemming from the general feeling provoked by the sight
of atrocities, which replaces the 'old ideological divisions', is a powerful contributor to
subjective resignation and acceptance of the status quo. For what every emancipatory project
does, what every emergence of hitherto unknown possibilities does, is to put an end to
consensus. How, indeed, could the incalculable novelty of a truth, and the hole that it bores in
established knowledges, be inscribed in a situation without encountering resolute opposition?
Precisely because a truth, in its invention, is the only thing that is for all, so it can actually be
achieved only against dominant opinions, since these always work for the benefit of some
rather than all. These privileged few certainly benefit from their position, their capital, their
control of the media, and so on. But in particular, they wield the inert power of reality and time
[de la realite et du temps] against that which is only, like every truth, the hazardous, precarious
advent of a possibility of the Intemporal. As Mao Tse-tung used to say, with his customary
simplicity: 'If you have an idea, one will have to split into two.' Yet ethics explicitly presents
itself as the spiritual supplement of the consensus. The 'splitting into two' horrifies it (it smacks
of ideology, it's passe . ..). Ethics is thus part of what prohibits any idea, any coherent project
of thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and anonymous situations with mere
humanitarian prattle (which, as we have said, does not itself contain any positive idea of
humanity). And in the same way, the 'concern for the other' signifies that it is not a matter that it is never a matter -of prescribing hitherto unexplored possibilities for our situation, and
ultimately for ourselves. The Law (human rights, etc.) is always already there. It regulates
judgements and opinions concerning the evil that happens in some variable elsewhere. But
there is no question of reconsidering the foundation of this 'Law', of going right back to the
conservative identity that sustains it. As everyone knows, France -which, under Vichy, approved
a law regulating the status of the Jews, and which at this very moment is voting to approve laws
for the racial identification of an alleged internal enemy that goes by the name of 'illegal
immigrant' [immigre clandestin]; France which is subjectively dominated by fear and impotence
-is an 'island of law and liberty'. Ethics is the ideology of this insularity, and this is why it
valorizes -throughout the world, and with the complacency of 'intervention' -the gunboats of
Law. But by doing this, by everywhere promoting a domestic haughtiness and cowardly selfsatisfaction, it sterilizes every collective gathering around a vigorous conception [pensee] of
what can (and thus must) be done here and now. And in this, once again, it is nothing more
than a variant of the conservative consensus. But what must be understood is that this
resignation in the face of (economic) necessities is neither the only nor the worst component
of the public spirit held together by ethics. For Nietzsche's maxim forces us to consider that
every non-willing (every impotence) is shaped by a will to nothingness, whose other name is:
death drive.
The affirmative’s call for universal ethics relies upon assumptions about the
‘victim’ that are fundamentally dehumanizing and necessitates Western
domination – only a situational understanding of ethics allows us to escape.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 11-14)
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 (life being, as Bichat says, nothing other than 'the set of functions that resist
death').5 To be sure, humanity is an animal species. 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 we must have the courage to add that in his role
as victim, he is generally worth little more. The stories told by survivors of torture4 forcefully underline the point: if the torturers and
bureaucrats of the dungeons and the camps are able to treat their victims like animals destined for the slaughterhouse, with whom they themselves, the well-nourished
criminals, have nothing in common, it is because the victims have indeed become such animals. What had to be done for this to happen has indeed been done. That some
nevertheless remain human beings, and testify to that effect, is a confirmed fact. But this is always achieved precisely through enormous effort, an effort acknowledged by
witnesses (in whom it excites a radiant recognition) as an almost incomprehensible resistance on the part of that which, in them, does not coincide with the identity of victim.
This is where we are to find Man, if we are determined to think him [le penser]: in what ensures, as Varlam Shalamov puts in his Stories of Life in the Camps,s that we are dealing
with an animal whose resistance, unlike that of a horse, lies not in his fragile body but in his stubborn determination to remain what he is -that is to say, precisely something
other than a victim, other than a being-for-death, and thus: something other than a mortal being. An immortal: this is what the worst situations that can be inflicted upon Man
if
'rights of man' exist, they are surely not rights of life against death, or rights of survival against
misery. They are the rights of the Immortal, affirmed in their own right, or the rights of the
Infinite, exercised over the contingency of suffering and death. The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains,
show him to be, in so far as he distinguishes himself within the varied and rapacious flux of life. In order to think any aspect of Man, we must begin from this principle. So
in no way alters Man's identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which
circumstances may expose him. And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal -unpredictably, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important
or secondary. In each case, subjectivation is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species, a 'biped without feathers', whose charms are not obvious. If
we do not set out from this point (which can be summarized, very simply, as the assertion that Man thinks, that Man is a tissue of truths), if we equate Man with the simple
this 'living being' is in
reality contemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt. ·Who can fail to see that in our
humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarkations of charitable legionnaires, the Subject
presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on
television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene.
And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see
that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides behind its victim-Man, the goodMan, the white-Man? Since the barbarity of the situation is considered only in terms of
'human rights' -whereas in fact we are always dealing with a political situation, one that calls for
a political thought practice, one that is peopled by its own authentic actors -it is perceived, from
the heights of our apparent civil peace, as the uncivilized that demands of the civilized a
civilizing intervention. Every intervention in the name of a civilization requires an initial
contempt for the situation as a whole, including its victims. And this is why the reign of 'ethics'
coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today's
sordid self-satisfaction in the 'West', with the insistent argument according to which the
misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity -in short, of its
subhumanity.2. In the second place, because if the ethical 'consensus' is founded on the
recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the
Good, let alone to identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of
evil itse1f; such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every
revolutionary project stigmatized as 'utopian' turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare.
Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad.
reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed to a conclusion quite opposite to the one that the principle of life seems to imply. For
Embrace Difference
*Included in the Ethics of the other Shell
*‘Respecting difference’ only operates insofar as the other is willing to be
integrated into Western modes of thought – all others are characterized as
dangerous and expendable.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 23-25)
What then becomes of this category if we claim to suppress, or mask, its religious character, all
the while preserving the abstract arrangement of its apparent constitution (‘recognition of the
other’, etc.)? The answer is obvious: a dog’s dinner [de la bouillie pour les chats]. We are left
with a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and
a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class
struggle. Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics
and of the 'right to difference' are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference. For
them, Mrican customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so
on. As a matter of fact, this celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a good other - which is
to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? Respect for differences, of course! But on condition
that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market economics, in favour of
freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment. ... That is to say: I respect differences, but
only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects, just as I do, the said differences.
Just as there can be 'no freedom for the enemies of freedom', so there can be no respect for
those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences. To prove the point, just
consider the obsessive resentment expressed by the partisans of ethics regarding anything that
resembles an Islamic 'fundamentalist'. The problem is that the 'respect for differences' and the
ethics of human rights do seem to define an identity! And that as a result, the respect for
differences applies only to those differences that are reasonably consistent with this identity
(which, after all, is nothing other than the identity of a wealthy -albeit visibly declining -'West').
Even immigrants in this country [France], as seen by the partisans of ethics, are acceptably
different only when they are 'integrated', only if they seek integration (which seems to mean,
if you think about it: only if they want to suppress their difference). It might well be that ethical
ideology, detached from the religious teachings which at least conferred upon it the fullness of a
'revealed' identity, is simply the final imperative of a conquering civilization: 'Become like me
and I will respect your difference.'
Emphasizing difference is useless—we are all different in an infinite number of
ways, making the category of the “other” hopeless.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 26-27)
Contemporary ethics kicks up a big fuss about 'cultural' differences. Its conception of the
'other' is informed mainly by this kind of differences. Its great ideal is the peaceful coexistence
of cultural, religious, and national 'communities', the refusal of 'exclusion'. But what we must
recognize is that these differences hold no interest for thought, that they amount to nothing
more than the infinite and self-evident multiplicity of humankind, as obvious in the difference
between me and my cousin from Lyon as it is between the Shi'ite 'community' of Iraq and the fat
cowboys of Texas. The objective (or historical) foundation of contemporary ethics is culturalism,
in truth a tourist's fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs. And in particular,
for the irreducible medley of imaginary formations (religions, sexual representations,
incarnations of authority ...). Yes, the essential 'objective' basis of ethics rests on a vulgar
sociology, directly inherited from the astonishment of the colonial encounter with savages. And
we must not forget that there are also savages among us (the drug addicts of the banlieues,
religious sects -the whole journalistic paraphernalia of menacing internal alterity), confronted by
an ethics that offers, without changing its means of investigation, its 'recognition' and its social
workers. Against these trifling descriptions (of a reality that is both obvious and inconsistent in
itself), genuine thought should affirm the following principle: since differences are what there
is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then
precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant. No light is shed on any concrete
situation by the notion of the 'recognition of the other'. Every modern collective configuration
involves people from everywhere, who have their different ways of eating and speaking, who
wear different sorts of headgear, follow different religions, have complex and varied relations to
sexuality, prefer authority or disorder, and such is the way of the world.
Hegemony
Hegemony saves lives only very selectively—millions are allowed to die from
AIDS while mass interventions are justified if US interests are threatened in
even a small way. The result is violence without limit.
Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ
Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223–238 ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477-2876.)
In fact, the United States is an imperialist power without an empire, a hegemony without
territoriality. I propose the term “zoning” [zonage] to convey its relation to the world: every
place in the world can be considered by the American government as a zone of vital interest,
or as a zone of total disinterest, according to fluctuations in the consideration of its
“democratic” comfort. You could die by the thousands without America raising an eyebrow
(thus, for years, AIDS in Africa), or, on the other hand, have to endure the build-up of a
colossal army in the middle of the desert (Iraq today). Zonage means that American military
intervention resembles a raid much more than a colonial-type intervention. It’s about vast
incursions, particularly brutal in nature, that are as brief as possible. Kill people in large
numbers, beat them into a stupor, smash them until their last gasp, then return home to enjoy
the comfort you’ve so skillfully defended in a provisionally “strategic” zone: this is how the
USA thinks about its power, and about how to use it. The time will certainly come for us to
conceptualize this assertion: the metaphysics of American power is a metaphysics of
limitlessness. The great imperial theories of the nineteenth century were always theories of
dividing, dividing up the world, creating boundaries. For the USA, there are no limits. Nixon’s
advisers, as Noam Chomsky points out, were already proclaiming this under the name of “the
politics of the madman.” The USA must impose upon the rest of the world the belief that it –
the United States – is capable of anything, and especially of what is neither rational nor
foreseeable. The excessive quality of the interventions aims at getting the adversary to realize
that the American retaliation can be totally unrelated to what was initially at stake. The
adversary will deem it preferable to concede management of the disputed zone, for a time, to
the “mad” power. The invasion of Iraq, currently under preparation, is a figure of that madness.
It shows that, for American governments, there are neither countries, nor States, nor peoples.
There are only zones, where one is justified in destroying everything if there is, in those zones,
the slightest question of the idea – an empty one, besides – of American comfort.
Human Rights
Human rights stands in cooperation with conservative power—all those who
oppose rights are labeled as terrorists to be exterminated.
Meister 02 [Robert, Professor of Philosophy @ UC Santa Cruz, “Human Rights and the Politics
of Victimhood,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 16, Iss. 2, pg. 91, proquest]
This theme in much of present-day Human Rights Discourse is most directly understandable as
an effort to depoliticize the unresolved victim-beneficiary issues of the
revolutionary/counterrevolutionary politics that drove the Cold War. It seeks to represent these
issues as superseded by a moral consensus on the means used to resolve them: violent or
nonviolent, constitutional or "terrorist.''12 The political effect of recent Human Rights
Discourse is to marginalize as "terrorists" those on both sides of the old conflict who are still
willing to fight on. Terrorism-the remnant of twentieth-century "inhumanity"-is now the
phenomenon against which all civilized nations in the twenty-first century can agree to make
"war." The main point, today, of calling a movement or regime "terrorist" is to drain it of its
twentieth-century political content and context. Indeed, struggles for political and/or cultural
autonomy that might recently have claimed the mantle of human rights are now described
(looking forward) as morally equivalent to crimes against humanity insofar as they engage in
acts of "terror" or are hesitant in condemning terrorism elsewhere. In its new proximity to
power, the mainstream human rights establishment speaks with increasing hostility toward
movements that it might once have sought to comprehend. As we begin this new century,
Human Rights Discourse is in danger of devolving from an aspirational ideal to an implicit
compromise that allows the victims of past injustice a moral victory on the understanding that
the ongoing beneficiaries get to keep their gains without fear of terrorism. The movement
aims, of course, to persuade the passive supporters of the old order to abjure illegitimate
means of counterrevolutionary politics-the repressive and fraudulent techniques of power
that they once condoned or ignored. Insofar as the aim is also to reconcile these passive
supporters (including many beneficiaries) with the victims of past injustice, it nevertheless
advances the counterrevolutionary project by other means. The new culture of respect for
human rights would, thus, reassure the beneficiary that the (former) victim no longer poses this
threat, and maybe never did. For the victim who was morally undamaged and/or subsequently
"healed," the past would be truly over once its horrors were acknowledged by national
consensus. This sought-after consensus on the moral meaning of the past comes at the
expense, however, of cutting off future claims that would normally seem to follow from it. To
put the point crudely, the cost of achieving a moral consensus that the past was evil is to reach a
political consensus that the evil is past. In practice, this political consensus operates to
constrain debate in societies that regard themselves as "recovering" from horrible histories. It
means that unreconciled victims who continue to demand redistribution at the expense of
beneficiaries will be accused of undermining the consensus that the evil is past; it also means
that continuing beneficiaries who act on their fears that victims are still unreconciled will be
accused of undermining the consensus that the past was evil by "blaming the victim.' Indeed,
the substantive meaning of evil itself has changed in the human rights culture that is widely
believed to have superseded the Cold War. "Evil" is no longer widely understood to be a system
of social injustice that can have ongoing structural effects, even after the structure is
dismantled. Rather, evil is described as a time that is past-or can be put in the past. The present
way that born-again adherents to human rights address surviving victims of past evil is to project
a distinction between the "good" (undamaged) and "bad" (unreconciled or recalcitrant)
members of the victimized groups. To the extent that the emergent human rights project aims
to enlist the support of the good victims in repressing the bad victims as terrorists (and/or
criminals, depending on the type of judicial process they will receive), it is, prima facie, a
continuation, by other means, of the twentieth-century project of counterrevolution.
The politics of human rights justifies massive violence—the powerful can wage
wars against the inhuman masses lying outside the circle of rights holders.
Meister 02 [Robert, Professor of Philosophy @ UC Santa Cruz, “Human Rights and the Politics
of Victimhood,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 16, Iss. 2, pg. 91, proquest]
The anti-messianic message of the Human Rights Discourse is not entirely the program of
peace and reconciliation that it might seem to be on the surface. It is, also, a declaration of war
against a new enemy. Carl Schmitt first pointed this out in his criticism of the Kellogg-Briand
Pact of 1928, outlawing war. "The solemn declaration of outlawing war," he asserted, "does not
abolish the friend-enemy distinction, but, on the contrary, opens new possibilities by giving an
international hostis declaration new content and new vigor."30 This criticism applied equally, in
Schmitt's view, to the human rights consensus expressed by the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919,
which established the League of Nations: When a state fights its political enemy in the name of
humanity it...seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent ... in the same
way that one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as
one's own and to deny the same to the enemy.31 Although Schmitt's own political agenda,
which led to a defense of Nazism, is ultimately despicable, he nevertheless provides a helpful
guide to the ideological significance of Human Rights Discourse at a moment of U.S. military and
economic hegemony at the end of the Cold War. This move is, as he well understood, a way to
create new political alliances by shifting enemies. The underlying intent of such an international
consensus to protect human rights is not to assert a selfconfident universality, but rather to
represent what Schmitt called "a potential or actual alliance, that is, a coalition."32 In the
present conjuncture, he is worth quoting at length on this point: It is...erroneous to believe that
a political position founded on economic superiority is "essentially unwarlike"... [It] will naturally
attempt to sustain a worldwide condition which enables it to apply and manage, unmolested, its
economic means, e.g., terminating credit, embargoing raw materials, destroying the currencies
of others, and so on. Every attempt of a people to withdraw itself from the effects of such
"peaceful methods" is considered by this imperialism as extraeconomic power.... Modern means
of annihilation have been produced by enormous investments of capital and intelligence, surely
to be used if necessary.33 Schmitt anticipated the rhetorical demands that Human Rights
Discourse would place on liberal politicians still fighting, as Woodrow Wilson did, "to make
the world safe for democracy"-but now in the name of a "world community" defending
"humanity" as such. As he explains: For the application of such means, a new and essentially
pacifist vocabulary has been created. War is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive
expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures to assure
peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is
thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.... But this allegedly non-political... system
cannot escape the logic of the political.34 Schmitt's analysis, above, might be read today as a
forecast: Although we are now able to fight wars only on the condition that they are not
described as such, these wars do not thereby "escape the logic of the political." Schmitt's
powerful critique of the depoliticizing project of what was, in his time, the precursor to Human
Rights Discourse went some way toward repoliticizing it, at least in Weimar Germany. Perhaps
because of his own dalliance in the politics of victimhood in its most pernicious form, Schmitt
did not fully understand a deeper implication of his own argument: that adopting a Human
Rights Discourse gives survivors of past barbarity the consciousness of victims. It is they, the
newly vulnerable, who must now be protected from being violated by the "inhuman."
"Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat;' Schmitt says. "To... invoke and monopolize such
a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of
being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven
to the most extreme inhumanity."35
Rights are designed for passive victims in need of state protection. True ethics
emerge in particular situations and cannot be derived from a pre-determined
principle.
Barker 02 ( Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Philosophy at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 138)
Clearly, then, these subtractions from ethics exclude all the usual founding assumptions about
the human being as the possessor of certain inalienable rights. Any such rights merely amount
to the right not to be (offended, mistreated, threatened. tortured, etc.). With Badiou, this
standard conception of right is clearly nothing of the kind, and depends rather on the lack of
an infinite set of particular rights. Ethics must therefore begin, not with abstractions which
would seek to distinguish between primary and secondary rights, but from the concrete
demands of any given situation. Following the Hegelian and Maoist models, then: from the
particular to the universal. There is also a debt to Spinoza in Badiou's approach to ethics, since if
the 'human animal' is 'convened by circumstances to become subiect', 'to enter into the
composition of a subject’ (E, 37), then it also enters the realm of freedom (libera) and
necessity where a thing acts according to the force of its very own reason. However, for Badiou
the circumstances of becoming are not ultimately the circumstances of the ordinary, everyday
world (what Spinoza calls 'nature'). The subject - which ordinarily is not - in order to surpass
itself (its indifferent nature) in becoming what it is, must harness the historical supplement of
the truth-event (E, 38). Henceforth, for the duration of its existence (in this new realm of being),
the subject is compelled to think or act (it's the same thing now) in a way which is unique to
the (new) situation where it finds itself. As we have already seen, this procedure where, in a
set of historical circumstances, the subject manages to rally selflessly to the enterprise of
truth is called ‘fidelity’. Singularity, therefore, is where ethics must begin, since ethics always
involves the new emergence of a subject (E, 38-40). Finally, the consensus surrounding what is
or is not, does or does not involve ethics, can have no part of and gain no access to truth. Ethics
is a constriction, must be constructed, in the here and now. It is not concerned with founding
a universal law of human conduct, and so takes no account of the possible negative
consequences that a given set of principles may inadvertently unleash.
Identity Politics
Identity politics are the ultimate basis of banal homogeneity-endless numbers
of groups will demand recognition and will only be marked as ready for
capitalist targeting, such as distinctive fashion or a specialty magazine.
Badiou '03 (Alain. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, p.9-11)
Our world is in no way as "complex’ as those who wish to ensure Its perpetuation claim. It is
even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple -J On the one hand, there is an extension of the
automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx's inspired predictions: the world finally
configured!, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an
abstract homogenization. Everything that circulates falls under the unity of a count, while
inversely, only what lets itself be counted in this way can circulate Moreover, this is the norm
that illuminates a paradox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the
phantasm of instantaneous cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the
circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere. So. it is that in France, never have fewer
foreigners settled than in the recent period! Free circulation of what lets itself be counted, yes,
and above all of capital, which is the count of the count. Free circulation of that uncountable
infinity constituted by a singular human life, never! For capitalist monetary abstraction is
certainly a singularity, but a singularity that has no consideration fir any singularity whatsoever:
singularity as indifferent to the persistent infinity of existence as is to the eventual becoming of
truths. On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the
culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation. Both processes are
perfectly intertwined. For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity)
creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing
more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the
invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or
territories. The semblance of nonequivalence is required so that equivalence itself can
constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurgetaking the form to communities demanding recognition and so called cultural singularities – of
women, homosexuals, and disabled Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predicative traits,
what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims
married priests, ecologist yuppies, the sub save unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each
time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping
malls, "free" radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady "public debates"
at peak viewing times. Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant
reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial
identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action: identities.
Moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to
the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the
identitarian and cultural logic of communities or minorities form an articulated whole. This
articulation plays a constraining role relative to every truth procedure. It is organic ally
without truth.
Identity politics is a contradiction in terms. Identity can never be the
foundation for liberation because true politics must search for the universal.
Revaluation of the whole system is the pre-requisite to their project.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis / London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in
Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy).
The very notion of identity politics is thus an explicit contradiction in terms. The OP regularly
condemns the articulation of a “'French' identity that authorizes discrimination or persecution”
of any kind; the only legitimate national unit is one that counts all of its elements as one,
regardless of ethnocultural particularity. 26 The left-liberal insistence on the vacuous “right to
remain 'the same as ourselves' has no chance against the abstract universality” of
contemporary capital, and does nothing more than “organize an inclusion in what it pretends
to oppose.” 27 Of course, it has often been argued that if we are oppressed as Arab, as
woman, as black, as homosexual, and so on, this oppression will not end until these particular
categories have been revalued. 28 Badiou's response to this line of attack is worth quoting at
length: When I hear people say, “We are oppressed as blacks, as women, ” I have only one
problem: what exactly is meant by “black” or “women”? … Can this identity, in itself, function in
a progressive fashion, that is, other than as a property invented by the oppressors themselves?
… I understand very well what “black” means for those who use that predicate in a logic of
differentiation, oppression, and separation, just as I understand very well what “French” means
when Le Pen uses the word, when he champions national preference, France for the French,
exclusion of Arabs, etc…. Negritude, for example, as incarnated by Césaire and Senghor,
consisted essentially of reworking exactly those traditional predicates once used to designate
black people: as intuitive, as natural, as primitive, as living by rhythm rather than by concepts,
etc…. I understand why this kind of movement took place, why it was necessary. It was a very
strong, very beautiful, and very necessary movement. But having said that, it is not something
that can be inscribed as such in politics. I think it is a matter of poetics, of culture, of turning the
subjective situation upside down. It doesn't provide a possible framework for political
initiative. The progressive formulation of a cause that engages cultural or communal
predicates, linked to incontestable situations of oppression and humiliation, presumes that
we propose these predicates, these particularities, these singularities, these communal
qualities, in such a way that they become situated in another space and become
heterogeneous to their ordinary oppressive operation. I never know in advance what quality,
what particularity, is capable of becoming political or not; I have no preconceptions on that
score. What I do know is that there must be a progressive meaning to these particularities, a
meaning that is intelligible to all. Otherwise, we have something that has its raison d'être, but
that is necessarily of the order of a demand for integration, that is, of a demand that one's
particularity be valued in the existing state of things….
All forms of identity politics are enemies of truth. The test of true ethics is very
simple: it is either based on a universal that applies to all or it is not.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis / London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in
Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy).
Every invocation “of custom, of community, works directly against truths” (E, 67; cf. PP, 19).
Badiou rejects categorically the idea that true understanding is a function of belonging to a
given community. This idea results in “catastrophic statements, on the model: only a
homosexual can 'understand' what a homosexual is, only an Arab an Arab, etc.” (SP, 13). No
community, be it real or virtual, corresponds to philosophy, and all genuine philosophy is
characterized by the “indifference of its address, ” its lack of explicit destination, partner, or
disciple. Mindful of Heidegger's notorious political engagement, Badiou is especially wary of any
effort to “inscribe philosophy in history” or identify its appeal with a particular cultural tradition
or group (C, 85, 75–76). Philosophy and communal specificity are mutually exclusive: “Every
particularity is a conformation, a conformism, ” whereas every truth is a nonconforming.
Hence the search for a rigorously generic form of community, roughly in line with Blanchot's
communauté inavouable, Nancy's communauté désoeuvrée, and Agamben's coming
community, so many variations of a pure presentation without presence. 89 The only
community consistent with truth would be a “communism of singularities, ” a community of
“extreme particularity.” 90 Nothing is more opposed to the truth of community than
knowledge of a communitarian substance, be it French, Jewish, Arab, or Western. As Deleuze
might put it, philosophy must affirm the necessary deterritorialization of truth. “I see nothing
but national if not religious reaction, ” Badiou writes, “in the use of expressions like 'the Arab
community,' 'the Jewish community,' 'the Protestant community.' The cultural idea, the heavy
sociological idea of the self-contained and respectable multiplicity of cultures …, is foreign to
thought. The thing itself, in politics, is acultural, as is every thought and every truth.” 91 What
may distinguish Badiou's critique of the communal is the rigor with which he carries it through
to its admittedly unfashionable conclusion: “The whole ethical predication based upon
recognition of the other must be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question—and it is
an extraordinarily difficult one—is much more that of recognizing the Same.” 92 An ontology of
infinite multiplicity posits alterity—infinite alterity—as the very substance of what is. So,
“differences being what there is, and every truth being the coming to be of that which is not yet,
differences are then precisely what every truth deposes, or makes appear insignificant.”
Difference is what there is; the Same is what comes to be, as truth, as “indifferent to
differences” (E, 27). True justice is either for all or not at all.
The affirmative claim to save a particular identity group is what Badiou calls a
simulacrum of the truth. Simulacrums are dangerous because they create an
“us” of ethical insiders vs a “them” of outsiders. This is the root of war, racism,
and genocide. Only a search for universals that we refuse to impose on others
can be emancipatory.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 73-77)
What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of a truth -which is the only thing that can be for
all, and can be eternally -is precisely the fact that it relates to the particularity of a situation only
from the bias of its void. The void, the multiple-of-nothing, neither excludes nor constrains
anyone. It is the absolute neutrality of being, such that the fidelity that originates in an event,
although it is an immanent break within a singular situation, is none the less universally
addressed. By contrast, the striking break provoked by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933,
although formally indistinguishable from an event -it is precisely this that led Heidegger astray5 since it conceives itself as a 'German' revolution, and is faithful only to the alleged national
substance of a people, is actually addressed only to those that it itself deems 'German'. It is thus
right from the moment the event is named, and despite the fact that this nomination
('revolution') functions only under the condition of true universal events (for example the
Revolutions of 1792 or 19I7) -radically incapable of any truth whatsoever. When a radical break
in a situation, under names borrowed from real truth-processes, convokes not the void but
the 'full' particularity or presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing with a
simulacrum of truth. 'Simulacrum' must be understood here in its strong sense: all the formal
traits of a truth are at work in the simulacrum. Not only a universal nomination of the event,
inducing the power of a radical break, but also the 'obligation' of a fidelity, and the promotion
of a simulacrum of the subject, erected -without the advent of any Immortal above the human
animality of the others, of those who are arbitrarily declared not to belong to the
communitarian substance whose promotion and domination the simulacrumevent is designed
to assure. Fidelity to a simulacrum, unlike fidelity to an event, regulates its break with the
situation not by the universality of the void, but by the closed particularity of an abstract set
[ensemble] (the 'Germans' or the 'Aryans'). Its invariable operation is the unending construction
of this set, and it has no other means of doing this than that of 'voiding' what surrounds it. The
void, 'avoided' [chassel by the simulacrous promotion of an 'event-substance', here returns,
with its universality, as what must be accomplished in order that this substance can be. This is to
say that what is addressed 'to everyone' (and 'everyone', here, is necessarily that which does
not belong to the German communitarian substance for this substance is not an 'everyone' but,
rather, some 'few' who dominate 'everyone') is death, or that deferred form of death which is
slavery in the service of the German substance. ¶ Hence fidelity to the simulacrum (and it
demands of the 'few' belonging to the German substance prolonged sacrifices and
commitments, since it really does have the form of a fidelity) has as its content war and
massacre. These are not here means to an end: they make up the very real [tout le Tliel] 6 of
such a fidelity. In the case of Nazism, the void made its return under one privileged name in
particular, the name ‘Jew'. There were certainly others as well: the Gypsies, the mentally ill,
homosexuals, communists.... But the name ‘Jew' was the name of names, serving to designate
those people whose disappearance created, around that presumed German substance
promoted by the 'National Socialist revolution' simulacrum, a void that would suffice to
identify the substance. The choice of this name relates, without any doubt, to its obvious link
with universalism, in particular with revolutionary universalism -to what was in effect already
void [vide] about this name -that is, what was connected to the universality and eternity of
truths. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it served to organize the extermination, the name ‘Jew' was a
political creation of the Nazis, without any pre-existing referent. It is a name whose meaning no
one can share with the Nazis, a meaning that presumes the simulacrum and fidelity to the
simulacrum -and hence the absolute singularity of Nazism as a political sequence. But even in
this respect, we have to recognize that this process mimics an actual truth-process. Every
fidelity to an authentic event names the adversaries of its perseverance. Contrary to
consensual ethics, which tries to avoid divisions, the ethic of truths is always more or less
militant, combative. For the concrete manifestation of its heterogeneity to opinions and
established knowledges is the struggle against all sorts of efforts at interruption, at corruption,
at the return to the immediate interests of the human animal, at the humiliation and repression
of the Immortal who arises as subject. The ethic of truths presumes recognition of these efforts,
and thus the singular operation of naming enemies. The 'National Socialist revolution'
simulacrum encouraged nominations of this kind, in particular the nomination of Jew'. But the
simulacrum's subversion of the true event continues with these namings. For the enemy of a
true subjective fidelity is precisely the closed set [ensemble], the substance of the situation, the
community. The values of truth, of its hazardous course and its universal address, are to be
erected against these forms of inertia. Every invocation of blood and soil, of race, of custom, of
community, works directly against truths; and it is this very collection [ensemble] that is
named as the enemy in the ethic of truths. Whereas fidelity to the simulacrum, which
promotes the community, blood, race, and so on, names as its enemy -for example, under the
name of 'jew' -precisely the abstract universality and eternity of truths, the address to all.
Moreover, the two processes treat what is thus named in diametrically opposite ways. For
however hostile to a truth he might be, in the ethic of truths every 'some-one' is always
represented as capable of becoming the Immortal that he is. So we may fight against the
judgements and opinions he exchanges with others for the purpose of corrupting every fidelity,
but not against his person -which, under the circumstances, is insignificant, and to which, in any
case, every truth is ultimately addressed. By contrast, the void with which those who are faithful
to a simulacrum strive to surround its alleged substance must be a real void, obtained by cutting
into the flesh itself. And since it is not the subjective advent of an Immortal, so fidelity to the
simulacrum -that appalling imitation of truths -presumes nothing more about those they
designate as the enemy than their strictly particular existence as human animals. It is thus this
existence that will have to bear the return of the void. This is why the exercise of fidelity to the
simulacrum is necessarily the exercise of terror. Understand by terror, here, not the political
concept of Terror, linked (in a universalizable couple) to the concept of Virtue by the Immortals
of the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, but the pure and simple reduction of all to their
being-for death. Terror thus conceived really postulates that in order to let [the] substance be,
nothing must be [pour que La substance soit, rien ne doit etre]. I have pursued the example of
Nazism because it enters to a significant extent into that 'ethical' configuration (of 'radical Evil')
opposed by the ethic of truths. What is at issue here is the simulacrum of an event that gives
rise to a political fidelity. Such a simulacrum is possible only thanks to the success of political
revolutions that were genuinely evental (and thus universally addressed). But simulacra linked
to all the other possible kinds of truth-processes also exist. The reader may find it useful to
identity them. For example, we can see how certain sexual passions are simulacra of the
amorous event. There can be no doubt that on this account they bring with them terror and
violence. Likewise, brutal obscurantist preachings present themselves as the simulacra of
science, with obviously damaging results. And so on. But in each case, these violent damages
are unintelligible if we do not understand them in relation to the truth-processes whose
simulacra they manipulate. In sum, our first definition of Evil is this: Evil is the process of a
simulacrum of truth. And in its essence, under a name of its invention, it is terror directed at
everyone.
Include the Other
*Included in the Ethics of the other Shell
*Their ethical stance is just camouflage for cultural domination. Only others
who are already compatible with the dominant ideology will be embraced by
their ethics.
McCarraher, 01 (Eugene teaches humanities at Villanova University Review of Ethics: An
Essay on the Understanding of Evil By Alain Badiou,
http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/18/mccarraher2518.html).
While purporting to "respect difference," the acolytes of otherness are "clearly horrified,"
Badiou observes, "by any vigorously sustained difference." Arguing that genuine difference
entails conflict, Badiou contends that "difference" is really a recipe for homogeneity and
consensus. By this token, left-wing militants, along with Christian and Islamic fundamentalists
and African practitioners of clitorectomy, are stigmatized as "bad others" and disinvited from
those "celebrations of diversity" sponsored in campus halls and advertising agencies. "Good
others," on the other hand, exhibit differences that are remarkably consonant with "the
identity of a wealthy West." Indeed, with its mantra of "inclusion" and its vagueness about
"the exact political meaning of the identity being promoted," identity politics supplies exotic
grist for the corporate mills of Western democracies. Thus, in Badiou's view, "difference," cast
in the image and likeness of consumerism, joins "rights" as rhetorical camouflage for Western
economic and military domination.
The ethics of difference are irrelevant – Dwelling on difference must be
abandoned to search for universals.
Johnston, 02 (Theory and Event, Confronting the New Sophists, 6:2 | © 2002 Adrian
Johnston, Book Review of Jason Barker, Alian Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto
Press, 2002), Adrian Johnston recently received his Ph.D. in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. He
is presently an interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University).
In the continental philosophical tradition ever since Levinas, an ethics of the "difference of the
Other" has predominated to the point of effectively crowding out any serious alternative.
Proponents of this stance adamantly insist that the root of all evils is a lack of sufficient and
proper respect for the differences of others. This bit of academic dogma reflects a broader
popular ideology of (multi)culturalism: once people become comfortable with each other's
lifestyles and tastes, things will be just fine. In his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil,
Badiou launches a scathing attack on the ethics of difference. A passage from this text offers
the finest summary of his position: The objective (or historical) foundation of contemporary
ethics is culturalism, in truth a tourist's fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and
beliefs. And in particular, for the irreducible medley of imaginary formations (religions, sexual
representations, incarnations of authority....). Yes, the essential 'objective' bias of ethics rests
on a vulgar sociology, directly inherited from the astonishment of the colonial encounter with
savages (Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil [trans. Peter Hallward],
London: Verso, 2001, pg. 26.) Badiou continues:Against these trifling descriptions (of a reality
that is both obvious and inconsistent in itself), genuine thought should affirm the following
principle: since differences are what there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that
which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant.
No light is shed on any concrete situation by the notion of the 'recognition of the other.' Every
modern collective configuration involves people from everywhere, who have their different
ways of eating and speaking, who wear different sorts of headgear, follow different religions,
have complex and varied relations to sexuality, prefer authority or disorder, and such is the way
of the world (pg. 27). “Difference" as such isn't worthy of the labor of thinking, being what is
most obvious and immediately given in today's globalized living spaces. Instead, the challenge
to "think the same," to grasp what is true for all and thus what should be dignified as
universal, is increasingly more relevant and pressing in contemporary socio-political contexts.
The notion of ‘obligation to the other’ must be abandoned – we are all different
in an infinite number of ways, making their category useless
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 25-26)
The truth is that, in the context of a system of thought that is both a-religious and genuinely
contemporary with the truths of our time, the whole ethical predication based upon
recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question -and it
is an extraordinarily difficult one - is much more that of recognizing the Same. Let us posit our
axioms. There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple 'without-one' -every
multiple being in its sum nothing other than a multiple of multiples - is the law of being. The
only stopping point is the void. The infinite, as Pascal had already realized, is the banal reality
of every situation, not the predicate of a transcendence. For the infinite, as Cantor
demonstrated with the creation of set theory, is actually only the most general form of multiplebeing [etre-multiple]. In fact, every situation, inasmuch as it is, is a multiple composed of an
infinity of elements, each one of which is itself a multiple. Considered in their simple belonging
to a situation (to an infinite multiple), the animals of the species Homo sapiens are ordinary
multiplicities. What, then, are we to make of the other, of differences, and of their ethical
recognition? Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite
deployment of infinite differences. Even the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no
means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations, and Rimbaud was certainly not
wrong when he said: 'I am another.' There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese
peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including
myself. As many, but also, then, neither more nor less.
Language Fluidity
The notion that language orders truth is merely modern sophistry that seeks to
undermine reason and the universality of truths
Badiou 1992 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 116-117)
Let me add that in my view this definition is itself an historic invariant. It is not a definition in
terms of a result, or the production of a loss of sense. It is an intrinsic definition enabling one to
distinguish philosophy from what is not philosophy, and this, since Plato. It can also be
distinguished from what is not philosophy but what resembles it, resembles it a great deal, and
which, since Plate, we call sophistry. This question of sophistry is very important. The sophist is
from the outset the enemy-brother, philosophy’s implacable twin. Philosophy today, caught in
its historicist malaise, is very weak in the face of modern sophists. Most often, it even considers
the great sophists – for there are great sophists – as great philosophers. Exactly as if we were to
consider that the great philosophers of Antiquity were not Plato and Aristotle, but Gorgias and
Protagoras. An argument which is moreover increasingly defended, and often brilliantly, by
modern historiographers of Antiquity. Who are the modern sophists? The modern sophists are
those that, in the footsteps of the great Wittgenstein, maintain that thought is held to the
following alternative: either effects of discourse, language games, or the silent indication, the
pure ‘showing’ of something subtracted from the clutches of language. Those for whom the
fundamental opposition is not between truth and error or wandering, but between speech and
silence, between what can be said and what is impossible to say. Or between statements
endowed with meaning and other devoid of it. In many regards, what is presented as the most
contemporary philosophy is a potent sophistry. It ratifes the final statement of the Tractatus –
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – whereas philosophy exists only to
defend that the whereof one cannot speak is precisely what it sets out to say. The objection will
be raised that, in its essential movement, contemporary discourse itself also claims to break
with historicism, at least in its Marxist or Humanist form; that is goes against the ideas of
progress and the avant-garde; that it declares, along with Lyotard, that the epoch of the Grand
Narratives if over. To be sure. But this discourse only draws from its ‘postmodernist’ rebuttal a
kind of general equivalence of discourses, a rule of virtuosity and obliquity. It attempts to
compromise the very idea of truth in the fall of historic narratives. Its critique of Hegel is
actually a critique of philosophy itself, to the benefit of art, or Right, or an immemorial or
unutterable Law. This is why it must be said that this discourse, which adjusts the multiplicity
of the registers of meaning to some silent correlate, is nothing but modern sophistry. That
such a completely productive and virtuosic discourse should be taken for a philosophy
demonstrates the philosophers inability today to practice a firm, founding delimitation
between him- or herself and the sophist.
Law
The law cannot be the site of the event. The law fixes identity and politics
ahead of time—the event can only emerge from unfixed struggle.
Pluth, 99 (The Pauline Event? 3:3, Ed, Review of Alain Badiou, St. Paul: La fondation de
l'universalisme, doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University,
Johns Hopkins University Press, p)
Yet Badiou finds that there is something in Paul's work that resists this tendency. What exactly
made the universality of Paul's project distinct from the constitution of a new identity? We have
already seen one aspect of it that makes for this difference: the maintaining of a disjunctive
"no...but." According to Badiou, the constitution of an identity articulates a pseudo-universality
on the basis of a law that is always only partial (85). Universality, he claims, should be
"organically connected to the contingence of what happens to us" (85). 6 The false universality
of law is one that gives place to everything in advance -- it distributes and fixes regions of
identity. Thus it excludes the event, Badiou's name for "the contingence of what happens to
us." The law, if it poses as a universality, is always a partial universality, a universality of
placement and designation: in other words, of identification. The universality of a truthprocess, however, is not particularzing. The deciding question is: where is the force of
universality coming from? Does it come from the contingency and perpetual resistance of the
event within the situation, or does it ground itself on the placings that stem from the law of
the situation? If it is the former, then the One is proceeding from the event, and is adressed to
everyone. If the latter, it comes from the law, and only promotes the dominance of one group
over others. Hence Badiou's first of eight theorems derived from the work of St. Paul: "There is
only a One for everyone, and it proceeds not from the law, but from the event" (85).
AT: Moral Obligation
A priori ethical rules are nonsense—true ethics can only take place at a distance
from the state and in particular contexts. We need to search for the egalitarian
lessons of each situation—what Badiou calls “fidelity to the event.”
Ling, 06 (Alex, University of Melbourne, www.cosmosandhistory.org 359 Cosmos and History:
The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006, BOOK REVIEW).
In point of fact the whole of contemporary ethics—derisively designated by the author as ‘the
ethical ideology’—appears in Badiou’s eyes to be little more than a vast synonym for
negativity: today’s ‘ethical ideology’ is a fundamentally statist edifice whose principle role is
to ‘[prohibit] any idea, any coherent project of thought, settling instead for overlaying
unthought and anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle’ (E 32-33). The task is
then, reductively speaking, to invent a new ethics which would radically circumvent the state’s
authority. And, by happy coincidence, it is precisely this sort of circumvention that Badiou’s
philosophy has been offering all along. Setting himself then firmly at odds with the dominant
‘ethics of otherness’ Badiou contrarily asserts his own ethics as fundamentally of the subject
and accordingly (it means the same thing) as not of the other but of the same. Of course we
need remember here that for Badiou the subject is neither transcendental nor substantial, but is
rather a ‘finite local configuration’—albeit one touched by immortality—convoked through an
(aleatory, unknowable) event. This means precisely (once again, in Badiouian terms) that his
subjective ethics is equivalent to an ethic of truth(s)—which is what the event gives rise to—
or of the same—which, emanating from the situational void (and thus from what is in-different
to all situations and hence properly universal) is what truth is. To this effect Badiou’s is a
philosophy that strictly opposes any a priori concept of ethicality: ‘there is no ethics in
general’ he tells us, ‘there are only—eventually—ethics of processes by which we treat the
possibilities of a situation’ (E 16). Further, as Badiou’s subject only comes into being by virtue
of a singular event—an event which is strictly immanent to a particular situation—and
subsists only by maintaining a militant fidelity to the truth of the event, his subjective ethics is
then ultimately a situated ethics, that is, an ethics of the situation. In sum—and in stark
contrast to the contemporary understanding of ethics as natural, objective, a priori, a-situational
and fundamentally of the other—Badiou’s ethics are of the event, of the subject, of truth, of the
situation, and of the same.
State
Egalitarian politics of resistance to capitalism are possible when the state is
held at a distance.
Badiou, 2005 (http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm, Appears in Metapolitics, New York:
Verso, 2005, Alain Badiou, • Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy,
translated Barbara Fulks).
At the moment that the political procedure exists, up to the point of the prescription on the
State, then, and then only, can the logic of the same be deployed, that is to say the egalitarian
maxim, proper for every politics of emancipation. The egalitarian maxim is effectively
incompatible with the errancy of state excess. The matrix of inequality is precisely that the
excess power of the State cannot be measured. Today, for example, all egalitarian politics are
rendered impossible and declared absurd in the name of a necessity of the liberal economy
without measure or concept. But what characterizes this blind power of unchained Capital is
precisely that at no point is this power measurable or fixed. What one knows is only that it
weighs absolutely on the subjective destiny of collectives, such as they are. Consequently, in
order that a politics can practice an egalitarian maxim in the sequence opened by an event, it is
absolutely necessary that the state of the situation be put at a distance by a rigid calculation
of its power. The inegalitarian conscience is a deaf conscience, captive of an errancy, captive of
a power of which it has no measure. It is what explains the arrogant and peremptory character
of inegalitarian statements, even if they are evidently inconsistent and abject. It is that these
statements of the contemporary reaction are entirely supported by the errancy of state
excess, that is to say by the violence deployed entirely by the capitalist anarchy. It is why
liberal statements represent a mix of certitude in regard to the power and total indecision
about what is important for the life of people and the universal affirmation of collectives. The
egalitarian logic cannot be broached except when the State is configured, put at a distance,
measured. It is the errancy of excess which obstructs egalitarian logic and not the excess itself. It
is not at all the simple power of the state of the situation which interdicts egalitarian politics. It
is the obscurity and the without-measure in which this power is enveloped. If the political event
authorizes a clarification, a calculation, a demonstration of this power, then, at least locally, the
egalitarian maxim is practicable.
Our alternative can only succeed by maintaining its distance from the state.
Politics must be conceived of as the search for a universal that is
uncompromised by political calculations.
Badiou, 05 (http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm, Appears in Metapolitics, New York: Verso,
2005, Alain Badiou, • Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy, translated
Barbara Fulks).
The representation of the State through power, in the case of public power, indicates on the
one hand its excess, and on the other the indeterminacy, or errancy, of this excess. We all
know that the political, when it exists, instigates manifestations of the power of the State. It is
evident in that the political is collective, and thus universally concerns parts of the situation,
which is the field of existence of the state of the situation. The political-and it is the only
procedure of truth to do it directly-convokes the power of the State. The ordinary figure of this
convocation is that the political always coincides with repression. But repression, which is the
empirical form of the errant excess of the State, is not the essential point. The true
characteristic of the political event and of the procedure of truth which it activates is that a
political event fixes the errancy, assigns a measure to the excess power of the State, fixes the
power of the State. As a consequence, the political event interrupts the subjective errancy of
the power of the State. It constructs the state of the situation. It gives it shape; it gives shape
to its power, it measures its power. Empirically this means that when there is a truly political
event, the State shows itself. It shows its excess of power, the repressive dimension. But it
shows also a measure of this excess which in ordinary times does not let itself be seen because
it is essential to the normal functioning of the State that its power remain without measure,
errant, unassignable. The political event puts an end to all that by assigning a visible measure
to the excessive power of the State. The political puts the State at a distance, in the distance
of its measure. The apathy of non-political time is maintained by the State's not being at a
distance, because the measure of its power is errant. We are captives of its unassignable
errancy. The political is the interruption of this errancy, it is the demonstration of a measure
of State power. It is in this sense that the political is "liberty." The State is in effect a bondage without measure of the parts
of the situation, a bondage of which the secret is precisely the errancy of the excess power, its absence of measure. Liberty is here to set a distance from the State, through the
collective fixation of a measure of excess. And if the excess is measured, it is because the collective can measure it. At the moment that the political procedure exists, up to the
point of the prescription on the State, then, and then only, can the logic of the same be deployed, that is to say the egalitarian maxim, proper for every politics of emancipation.
The egalitarian maxim is effectively incompatible with the errancy of state excess. The matrix of
inequality is precisely that the excess power of the State cannot be measured. Today, for example, all egalitarian politics are rendered impossible and declared absurd in the
name of a necessity of the liberal economy without measure or concept. But what characterizes this blind power of unchained Capital is precisely that at no point is this power
, in order that a
politics can practice an egalitarian maxim in the sequence opened by an event, it is absolutely
necessary that the state of the situation be put at a distance by a rigid calculation of its power.
The inegalitarian conscience is a deaf conscience, captive of an errancy, captive of a power of
which it has no measure. It is what explains the arrogant and peremptory character of
inegalitarian statements, even if they are evidently inconsistent and abject. It is that these
statements of the contemporary reaction are entirely supported by the errancy of state excess,
that is to say by the violence deployed entirely by the capitalist anarchy. It is why liberal
statements represent a mix of certitude in regard to the power and total indecision about what
is important for the life of people and the universal affirmation of collectives. The egalitarian
logic cannot be broached except when the State is configured, put at a distance, measured. It
is the errancy of excess which obstructs egalitarian logic and not the excess itself. It is not at all
the simple power of the state of the situation which interdicts egalitarian politics. It is the
obscurity and the without-measure in which this power is enveloped. If the political event
authorizes a clarification, a calculation, a demonstration of this power, then, at least locally,
the egalitarian maxim is practicable.
measurable or fixed. What one knows is only that it weighs absolutely on the subjective destiny of collectives, such as they are. Consequently
Terrorism
The war on terrorism creates a simplistic division into rigid categories of Good
and Evil that resist investigation of the causes of violence. Such
thoughtlessness generates perpetual warfare.
Badiou, 02 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Theory and Event, 6:2, “Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts”).
It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word "terrorist" is an
intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned
examination of political situations, their causes and their consequences. In fact, it is a term that
has become essentially formal. No longer does "terrorist" designate either a political
orientation or the possibilities of such and such a situation, but rather, and exclusively, the
form of the act. And it does so according to three criteria. It is first and foremost -- for public opinion and those concerned with shaping it -- a
spectacular, non-State action, which emerges from clandestine networks, really or mythologically. Secondly, it is a violent action aiming to kill and/or
destroy. Lastly, it is an action which makes no distinction between civilians and non-civilians. This formalism goes hand-in-hand with Kant's moral
formalism. That is the reason why a "moral philosophy" specialist like Monique Canto believed she could declare that the absolute condemnation of
"terrorist" actions and the symmetrical approval of reprisals, including those of Sharon in Palestine, could and should precede all critical examination of
the situation and be abstracted from general political consideration. As it is a matter of "terrorism", explained this iron lady of a new breed, to explain
It is convenient to punish without delay and without further examination.
Henceforth, "terrorism" qualifies an action as being the formal figure of Evil. That is exactly,
moreover, the way Bush conceived of the expenditure of vengeance right from the start: Good
(factually speaking, State terrorism of villages and ancient cities of Central Asia) against Evil
(non-State terrorism of "Western" buildings). At this crucial point, as all rationality risks folding
beneath the immensity of such propagandistic evidence, one must be careful to be sure of the
details and, in particular, to examine the effects of the nominal chain induced by the passage
from the adjective "terrorist" -- as the formal qualification of an action -- to the substantive
"terrorism". Indeed, such is the moment when, insidiously, form becomes substance. Three
kinds of effect are thereby rendered possible: a subject-effect (facing "terrorism" is a "we"
avenging itself); an alterity-effect (this "terrorism" is the other of Civilisation, the barbarous
Islam); and finally, a periodisation-effect (now commences the long "war against terrorism")....
My thesis is that, in the formal representation it makes of itself, the American imperial power
privileges the form of war as an attestation -- the only one -- of its existence. Moreover, one
observes today that the powerful subjective unity that carries (away) the Americans in their
desire for vengeance and war is constructed immediately around the flag and the army. The
United States has become a hegemonic power in and through war: from the civil war, called the war of
is already to justify.
Secession (the first modern war by its industrial means and the number of deaths); then the two World Wars; and finally the uninterrupted
continuation of local wars and military interventions of all kinds since the Korean War up until the present ransacking of Afghanistan, passing via
Lebanon, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Libya, Panama, Barbados, the Gulf War, and Serbia, not to mention their persistent support for Israel in its war
without end against the Palestinians. Of course, one will hasten to add that the USA won the day in the Cold War against the USSR on the terrain of
military rivalry (Reagan's Star Wars project pushed the Russians to throw in the towel) and are understood to be doing the same thing against China, by
the imposition of an exhausting armament race (that is the only sense of the pharaoh-like anti-missile shield project) by means of which one hopes to
discourage any project of great magnitude. This should remind us, in these times of economic obsession, that in the last instance power continues to be
military. Even the USSR, albeit it ruined, insofar as it was considered as an important military power (and above all by the Americans), continued to codirect the world. Today the USA has the monopoly on the aggressive financial backing of enormous forces of destruction, and does not hesitate to serve
itself with them. And the consequences of that can be seen, including (notably) in the idea that the American people has of itself and of what must be
done. Let's hope that the Europeans -- and the Chinese -- draw the imperative lesson from the situation: servitude is promised to those who do not
Being forged in this way out of the continual barbarity of war -leaving aside the genocide of the Indians and the importation of tens of millions of black slaves - the USA quite naturally considers that the only riposte worthy of them is a spectacular
staging of power. Truly speaking, the adversary matters little and may be entirely removed
from the initial crime. The pure capacity to destroy this or that will do the job, even if at the end
watch carefully over their armed forces.
what is left is a few thousand miserable devils or a phantomatic "government". Provided, in
sum, that the appearance of victory is overwhelming, any war is convenient. What we have
here (and will also have if the USA continues in Somalia and in Iraq etc.,) is war as pure form, as
the theatrical capture of an adversary ("Terrorism") in its essence vague and elusive. The war
against nothing: itself removed from the very idea of war.
Impacts
Inequality / capitalism
Promoting human rights and democracy as the only viable politics allows
millions to die from brutal inequalities. And, their demand that we have a
more specific alternative dooms us to maintaining status quo power relations.
Badiou, 02 (Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland
Translated/Interviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php, On Evil: An Interview with Alain
Badiou).
Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parlimentarianism, as the only natural
and acceptable solutions. Every revolutionary idea is considered utopian and ultimately
criminal. We are made to believe that the global spread of capitalism and what gets called
"democracy" is the dream of all humanity. And also that the whole world wants the authority
of the American Empire, and its military police, NATO. In truth, our leaders and propagandists
know very well that liberal capitalism is an inegalitarian regime, unjust, and unacceptable for
the vast majority of humanity. And they know too that our "democracy" is an illusion: Where
is the power of the people? Where is the political power for third world peasants, the European
working class, the poor everywhere? We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs,
profoundly inegalitarian–where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone–is
presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order
cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is
horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that
we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody
dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans
die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with
our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc. That's
why the idea of Evil has become essential. No intellectual will actually defend the brutal power
of money and the accompanying political disdain for the disenfranchised, or for manual
laborers, but many agree to say that real Evil is elsewhere. Who indeed today would defend the
Stalinist terror, the African genocides, the Latin American torturers? Nobody. It's there that the
consensus concerning Evil is decisive. Under the pretext of not accepting Evil, we end up making
believe that we have, if not the Good, at least the best possible state of affairs—even if this best
is not so great. The refrain of "human rights" is nothing other than the ideology of modern
liberal capitalism: We won't massacre you, we won't torture you in caves, so keep quiet and
worship the golden calf. As for those who don't want to worship it, or who don't believe in our
superiority, there's always the American army and its European minions to make them be
quiet.
Nihilism
The affirmative’s ethical demands are nihilistic – their pathos relies on disaster
fetishism and a silent pleasure in witnessing Evil.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 34-35)
We should be more struck than we usually are by a remark that often recurs in articles and
commentaries devoted to the war in the former Yugoslavia: it is pointed out -with a kind of
subjective excitement, an ornamental pathos -that these atrocities are taking place 'only two
hours by plane from Paris'. The authors of these texts invoke, naturally, all the 'rights of man',
ethics, humanitarian intervention, the fact that Evil (thought to have been exorcized by the
collapse of 'totalitarianisms') is making a terrible comeback. But then the observation seems
ludicrous: if it is a matter of ethical principles, of the victimary essence of Man, of the fact that
'rights are universal and imprescriptible', why should we care about the length of the flight? Is
the 'recognition of the other' all the more intense if this other is in some sense almost within my
reach? In this pathos of proximity, we can almost sense the trembling equivocation, halfway
between fear and enjoyment, of finally perceiving so close to us horror and destruction, war
and cynicism. Here ethical ideology has at its disposal, almost knocking on the protected gates
of civilized shelter, the revolting yet delicious combination of a complex Other (Croats, Serbs,
and those enigmatic 'Muslims' of Bosnia) and an avowed Evil. History has delivered the ethical
dish to our very door. Ethics feeds too much on Evil and the Other not to take silent pleasure in
seeing them close up (in a silence that is the abject underside of its prattle)(For at the core of
the mastery internal to ethics is always the power to decide who dies and who does not)
Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen
to someone is death. And it is certainly true that in so far as we deny truths, we thereby
challenge the immortal disjunction that they effect in any given situation. Between Man as the
possible basis for the uncertainty [alia] of truths, or Man as being-for death (or being-forhappiness, it is the same thing), you have to choose. It is the same choice that divides
philosophy from 'ethics', or the courage of truths from nihilism.
Only the alternative can escape the smug nihilism of the affirmative’s ethics
that demand brutal domination and desire for catastrophe.
Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 37-39)
The root of the problem is that, in a certain way, every definition of Man based on happiness is
nihilist. It is clear that the external barricades erected to protect our sickly prosperity have as
their internal counterpart, against the nihilist drive, the derisory and complicit barrier of
ethical commissions. When a prime minister, the political eulogist of a civic ethics, declares that
France 'cannot welcome [accueillir] all the misery of the world', he is careful not to tell us about
the criteria and the methods that will allow us to distinguish the part of the said misery that we
welcome from that part which we will request -no doubt from within detention centres -to
return to its place of death, so that we might continue to enjoy those unshared riches which, as
we know, condition both our happiness and our 'ethics'. And in the same way, it is certainly
impossible to settle on stable, 'responsible', and of course 'collective' criteria in the name of
which commissions on bio-ethics will distinguish between eugenics and euthanasia, between
the scientific improvement of the white man and his happiness, and the elimination 'with
dignity' of monsters, of those who suffer or become unpleasant to behold. Chance, the
circumstances of life, the tangle of beliefs, combined with the rigorous and impartial treatment
without exception of the clinical situation, is worth a thousand times more than the pompous,
made-for-media conscription of bio-ethical authorities [instances] -a conscription whose place
of work, whose very name, have a nasty smell about them. IV Ethical nihilism between
conservatism and the death drive Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that
our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between
two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition for the
legitimacy of the order peculiar to our 'Western' position -the interweaving of an unbridled
and impassive economy [economie objective sauvage] with a discourse of law; and a murderous
desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life -or
again, that dooms what is to the 'Western' mastery of death. This is why ethics would be
better named -since it speaks Greek -a 'eu-oudenose', a smug nihilism. Against this we can set
only that which is not yet in being, but which our thought declares itself able to conceive.
Every age -and in the end, none is worth more than any other - has its own figure of nihilism.
The names change, but always under these names ('ethics', for example) we find the articulation
of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe. It is only by declaring that
we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the
desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the
impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every
artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle -against the
ethics of living well whose real content is the deciding of death - of an ethic of truths.
War
*Included in the Ethics of the Other Shell
*Their politically compromised framework allows the West to wage perpetual
war on those it considers ethical outsiders.
Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ
Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223–238 ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals)
From the moment we begin to live indistinctly in the war of democracies against Islamic terrorism, which is
to say, quite simply, the war of Good (democratic) against Evil (dictatorial), operations of war –
expeditions, bombings – don’t need to be any more solemnly announced than do police raids on
petty criminals. By the same token, assassinating heads of state, their wives, children, and grandchildren, or putting a
price on their heads like in a western, no longer surprises anyone. Thus, little by little the continuity of war
comes to be established, the declaration of which, in times past, showed that, on the
contrary, war was the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity renders war and
peace indistinguishable. This means that the question of the protagonists of the state of
war is more and more obscure. “Terrorists,” “rogue states,” “dictatorships,” “Islamists”:
just what are these ideological entities? Who identifies them, who proclaims them?
Traditionally, there were two kinds of war: on the one hand, symmetrical war, between comparable imperial powers, like the two world wars of the twentieth century, or
like the cold war between the USA and the USSR; on the other hand, non-symmetrical or dissymmetrical wars between an imperial power and popular forces
theoretically much weaker in terms of military power – either wars of colonial conquest (the conquest of Algeria, the Rif war, or the extermination of the Indians in North
America), or wars of national liberation (Vietnam, Algeria, and so forth). Today, we can talk about dissymmetrical wars, but without the political identity of the
invasion and occupation operations (Afghanistan,
Kosovo, Iraq, and so on) are explicitly presented as liberations – and this despite the fact
that the local populations don’t see things in that way at all. In fact, now the concept of
war only designates the use of violence, disposed in variable dissymmetries. The only
invariable trait is dissymmetry: only the weak are targeted, and as soon as the shadow of power can be seen (North
dissymmetry being really conceivable. The proof for this lies in the fact that
Korea’s atomic bomb, the Russia of brutal extortions in Chechnya, the heavy hand of the Chinese in Tibet), war – war which might risk actually becoming war, and not the
American wars don’t constitute
any kind of present, it’s because, being politically unconnected to any dialectic, whether
interimperialist, whether according to the war/revolution schema, they are not really
distinguishable from the continuity of “peace.” And by “peace” is meant American, or
“western,” peace, democratic peace/war, whose entire content is the comfort of the
above-mentioned “democrats” against the barbarian aggressiveness of the poor.
peace of the police, or peace/war (la pe´guerre apre‘s l’apre‘s-guerre?)–is not on the agenda. In fact, if the
Alternative
Fidelity to the Event
Ethical principles remove us from the urgency of particular needs. We focus on
identifying situations that match the rules, rather than imagining a positive
vision of the future. This reduces us all to a subhuman mass.
The alternative is to break with such rules and give ourselves over to the
particular event—what Badiou calls fidelity to the event.
Badiou, 1998 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 14-16)
Every collective will to the Good creates Evil This is sophistry at its most devastating. For if our
only agenda is an ethical engagement against an Evil we recognize a priori, how are we to
envisage any transformation of the way things are? From what source will man draw the
strength to be the immortal that he is? 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 selfsatisfaction 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. It is
squarely astride these possessions (material possessions, but also possession of its own being)
that ethics determines Evil to be, in a certain sense, simply that which it does not own and enjoy
[ce qui n 'est pas ce dont elle jouit]. But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and
the un-possessed. He is sustained by non-being [non-etant]. To forbid him to imagine the Good,
to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to
think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him
humanity as such. 3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determination of Evil, ethics
prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which is the obligatory
starting point of all properly human action. Thus, for instance, the doctor won over to 'ethical'
ideology will ponder, in meetings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding 'the
sick', conceived of in exactly the same way as the partisan of human rights conceives of the
indistinct crowd of victims -the 'human' totality of subhuman entities [reels]. But the same
doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this particular person is not treated at the
hospital, and accorded all necessary measures, because he or she is without legal residency
papers, or not a contributor to Social Security. Once again, 'collective' responsibility demands it!
What is erased in the process is the fact that there is only one medical situation, the clinical
situation,' and there is no need for an 'ethics' (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to
understand that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if he deals with the situation
according to the rule of maximum possibility -to treat this person who demands treatment of
him (no intervention here!) as thoroughly as he can, using everything he knows and with all the
means at his disposal, without taking anything else into consideration. And if he is to be
prevented from giving treatment because of the State budget, because of death rates or laws
governing immigration, then let them send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic duty
would oblige him to resist them, with force if necessary. 'Ethical commissions' and other
ruminations on 'healthcare expenses' or 'managerial responsibility', since they are radically
exterior to the one situation that is genuinely medical, can in reality only prevent us from
being faithful to it. For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the
possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the
affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation. As
a matter of fact, bureaucratic medicine that complies with ethical ideology depends on 'the
sick' conceived as vague victims or statistics, but is quickly overwhelmed by any urgent,
singular situation of need. Hence the reduction of 'managed', 'responsible' and 'ethical' healthcare to the abject task of deciding which sick people the 'French medical system' can treat and
which others -because the Budget and public opinion demand it -it must send away to die in the
shantytowns of Kinshasa.
Solves Oppression
Badiou's open system of ethics as searching for truth is the best means of
discovering social bonds that can create genuine egalitarianism-allowing us to
seize power from oppressive state systems.
Barker 02 (Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Philosophy at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 147- 148)
How does Balibar's theory of the State constitution stand alongside Badiou's, and can we find
any key areas of mutual agreement between these two ex-'Althusserians'? The most general
area of difference involves Balibar's 'aporetic' approach to the question of the masses. Balibar
refuses to see any principle underlying the masses' conduct, since the latter are synonymous
with the power of the State. Badiou, on the other hand, regards the masses (ideally) as the
bearers of the category of justice, to which the State remains indifferent (AM, 114). Two
divergent theories of the State, then, each of which is placed in the service of a distinctive
ethics. With Balibar we have an ethics - or 'ethic' in the sense of praxis - of communication
which encourages a dynamic and expanding equilibrium of desires where every opinion has an
equal chance of counting in the democratic sphere. With Badiou we have an ethics of truths
which hunts down those exceptional political statements in order to subtract from them their
egalitarian core, thereby striking ii blow for justice against the passive democracy of the State.
Overall we might say that the general area of agreement lies in the fact that, in each case,
'democracy' remains a rational possibility. In particular, for both Balibar and Badiou, it is love as
an amorous feeling towards or encounter with one's fellow man - a recognition that the
fraternal part that is held in common between human beings is somehow 'greater' than the
whole of their differences - which forges the social bond. However, on the precise nature of the
ratio of this bond their respective paths diverge somewhat. In Balibar's case we are dealing with
an objective illusion wherein one imagines that the love one feels for an object (an abstract
egalitarian ideal, say) is shared by others. Crucially, love in this sense is wholly ambivalent, wildly
vacillating between itself and its inherent opposite, hate. On this evidence we might say that a
'communist' peace would be really indistinct from a 'fascist' one. Therefore, the challenge for
Balibar is to construct a prescriptive political framework capable of operating without repression
in a utilitarian public sphere where the free exchange of opinions is more likely than not to
result in the self-limitation of extreme views. In Badiou's case what we are dealing with, on the
other hand - and what we have been dealing with more or less consistently throughout this
book - is a subjective reality. The social contract is forever being conditioned, worked on
practically from within by the political militants, in readiness for the occurrence of the truthevent. This is the unforeseen moment of an ‘amorous encounter’ between two natural
adversaries (a group of student mounting a boycott of university fees, for instance) which
retrieves the latent communist axiom of equality from within the social process. Here we have
a particular call for social justice ('free education for all!') which strikes a chord with the whole
people (students and non-students alike). Crucially, love in this sense is infinite, de-finite, in
seizing back at least part of) the State power directly into the hands of the people. Moreover,
in this encounter between students and the university authorities there is an invariant
connection (of communist hope) which is shared by all, and where any difference of opinion is
purely incidental. Momentarily, at least. For Badiou, the challenge is to develop and deepen
an ethical practice, not in any utilitarian or communitarian sense – since the latter would
merely risk ‘forcing’ a political manifesto prematurely, perhaps giving rise to various brands of
State-sponsored populism – but in the sense of a politics capable of combating repression; a
politics which, in its extreme singularity, holds itself open to seizure by Truth.
Radical Questioning Key
Radical questioning produces new forms of politics—any past failures are
reasons to re-dedicate ourselves and resist the savage and destructive nihilism
of status quo politics.
Badiou, 02 (Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland
Translated/Interviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php, On Evil: An Interview with Alain
Badiou).
It is necessary to examine, in a detailed way, the contemporary theory of Evil, the ideology of
human rights, the concept of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there leads in
the direction of the real emancipation of humanity. It is necessary to reconstruct rights, in
everyday life as in politics, of Truth and of the Good. Our ability to once again have real ideas
and real projects depends on it. You say that, for liberal capitalism, evil is always elsewhere, the
dreaded other, something that liberal capitalism believes it has thankfully banished and kept at
bay. ... My position is obviously that this "reasoning" is purely illusory ideology. First, liberal
capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage,
destructive nihilism. Second, the Communist revolutions of the 20th century have represented
grandiose efforts to create a completely different historical and political universe. Politics is not
the management of the power of the State. Politics is first the invention and the exercise of an
absolutely new and concrete reality. Politics is the creation of thought. The Lenin who wrote
What is to be Done?, the Trotsky who wrote History of the Russian Revolution, and the Mao
Zedong who wrote On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People are intellectual
geniuses, comparable to Freud or Einstein. Certainly, the politics of emancipation, or
egalitarian politics, have not, thus far, been able to resolve the problem of the power of the
State. They have exercised a terror that is finally useless. But that should encourage us to pick
up the question where they left it off, rather than to rally to the capitalist, imperialist enemy.
Situational Ethics Good
The notion that it is possible to adopt a critical perspective towards the world
still pre-supposes global ethics as an object of study. Our point is that such
universals are a fiction—ethics should only be created in context.
Franke, 2000 (Mark Franke, Instructor of International Studies at the University of Northern
British Columbia, 2000. “Refusing an Ethical Approach to World Politics in Favour of Political
Ethics,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 6(3): 307-333.
The world is a notion through which sense of subjects, their shared and respective conditions,
and their standings to one another could be made. Hence, views of the world may be seen to
function precisely in the service of quashing the sort of agonistic competition of global
perspectives that Campbell desires. As a total or universal perspective, a worldview competes
for the description of a globe. To say, then, that we must keep the worldviews, that emerge
through the flux of experience, in debate with respect to one another does little more than keep
at bay the decision regarding which sense or which amalgam of sense shall dominate. For,
supporting a competition of worldviews as a way to maintain a critical perspective on world
politics retains the world as a legitimate domain where none in fact exists, where it is itself
always already a creation (Nancy, 1997: 41). To do so already insinuates a sense of human life
in which humans are supposed to inform and constitute one another in the face of alterity and
difference. And, as a result, it serves to continue to suppress the political activity that gives
rise to world images. A world is presupposed as the given limits with respect to which
theoretical and political engagements are to be globalized. If critical inquiries into international
politics offer any positive position, it is that 'the world' or 'the international' and any
representations of these things are first and foremost the consequences of politics. Thus, while
one ought to accept the fact that any approach to International Relations is already ethically
situated, one need not accept ethics or the ethical as the conditions from which politics in the
world ought to be understood or through which they arise. For example, Hugh C. Dyer is
quite right to claim that 'whatever facts are apprehended [in terms of International
Relations] are apprehended as a consequence of normative influences' (1997: 201). But it
does not then follow that 'political substance resides in values' (Dyer, 1997: 202). Neither
International Relations nor the world are themselves the grounds of politics. Rather, they
are ways of framing politics of human life in terms of ethics, in terms that may allegedly
make sense for humans so understood. My contention is that it is the conflict of ideas and
actions in inter-human encounters that produces the possibility of world politics. Experiencing
the way in which one's views and actions are inhibited or even negated through contact and
engagement with others produces the grounds under which a competition of views may
seem necessary. And the most successful medium through which one's own views may
survive is one that can claim global validity. Even where persons may decide that
competition is undesirable, it is only through a general subscription to some sort of
universal concept that the experience of conflict may be avoided. In this case, all, willingly
or through coercion, may agree to a fundamental sense of how things are in order to enjoy
respective differences, as in the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes or Jean - Jacques
Rousseau. Hence, all politics may be viewed as essentially a world politics, as politics
involves constant efforts to world in one sense or another. But, paradoxically, critical inquiry
must also take the position that there is no world in world politics, understood in whatever
manner.
Ethics cannot be formulated from an armchair- they must be grappled with by a
subject in the singular involvement with an event.
Barker 02 (Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Philosophy, at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 140)
Here, then, we have the Evil variants of Good, understood as the dialectical momentum of the
process of truth itself, in three stages: 1) the event which denies the void and tends towards
'terror' or 'simulacrum'; 2) the fidelity which passively yields to its desire in an act of 'betrayal';
and 3) the totalitarian accession of truth to the point of 'disaster' (E, 63). For the militant
practitioner of ethics (and for Badiou there can be no other kind), given the fact that Evil
remains immanent to Good - a simulacrum as it were - Good must not be regarded as the mere
avoidance of Evil. The only means of truly avoiding evil, so to speak - particularly given the fact
that every truth, as well as being undecidable, is also indiscernible and unnameable - is to
(attempt to) appreciate the perils of not standing up to it. The act of the informed decision (or
perception) is naturally perilous here and risks regression (although of course there are always
risks ...). For given the ethical practitioner's uncertain attachment to the event, we might say
that the subject is forced to find out for itself, this side of (rather than beyond) Good and Evil,
what ethics is (E, 75). In this sense, finally, 'The Good is Good only inasmuch as it doesn't
pretend to render the world good.' The notebooks on ethics are not a bible, nor must they be
read as one. In highlighting the constitutive political dimension to ethics, Badiou's Ethics avoids
lapsing into the kind of abstract moral reasoning which tends - in the 'analytic' tradition - to
distort the field of enquiry. No longer is it a question of what the individual would do in some
ideal world with adequate time tor reflection. Instead, for Badiou ethics becomes a question
of being catapulted into the here and now, and or following through the consequences of its
actions. Ethics, from this militant standpoint, cannot take an effective back seat when it
comes to determining what is right (unlike the journalist who claims to enable the facts to
'speak for themselves'). Of course, the question which we have been dealing with here all along
involves the ambivalence which returns to afflict the ethical practitioner in the service of truth,
in any one of its four realms, although politics is the one which will continue to interest us for
the remainder of this book.
2NC Blocks
AT: Link Turn / Prereq
Liberation that tries to begin with a particular group is destined to fail. Only
demands for universal justice, can result in true political change.
Hallward, 04 (Badiou’s Politics: Equality and Justice, Peter, Professor of Modern European
Philosophy, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm).
All genuine politics seeks to change the situation as a whole, in the interest of the universal
interest. But this change is always sparked by a particular event, one located in a particular
site and carried by a particular interest (the sans culottes, the soviets, the workers, the sanspapiers...). 1792 in France, 1917 in Russia, 1959 in Cuba, 1988 in Burma: each time, the event
opposes those with a vested interest in the established state of the situation to those who
support a revolutionary movement or perspective from which the situation is seen as for all.
Other, more narrow principles and demands, however worthy their beneficiaries might be, are
merely a matter of ‘syndicalism’ or trade union style negotiation, i.e. negotiation for an
improved, more integrated place within the established situation. Clearly, what goes under
the label of ‘politics’ in the ordinary day to day sense amounts only to ‘revindication and
resentment ..., electoral nihilism and the blind confrontation of communities’ (AM: 110). The
very notion of identity-politics is thus an explicit contradiction in terms. The OP regularly
condemns the articulation of a ‘"French" identity which authorises discrimination or
persecution’ of any kind; the only legitimate national unit is one which counts all of its
elements as one, regardless of ethno-cultural particularity (‘Le pays comme principe’, 1992:
135). The left-liberal insistence on the vacuous ‘right to remain "the same as ourselves" has no
chance against the abstract universality’ of contemporary capital, and does nothing more than
‘organise an inclusion in what it pretends to oppose’ (Badiou, letter to the author, 11.06.96).
AT: Perm
The permutation is also an additional link. Any calls for political compromise
are what Badiou calls a “betrayal of the event.” It is to fall back into the world
and become an enemy of the truth. This is a root cause of oppression.
Santitli 03 (Siena College, Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badiou’s Ethic of the Truth Event
World Congress of The International Society for Universal Dialogue, Pyrgos, Greece, May 18-22,
2003 http://www.isud.org/papers/pdfs/Santilli.pdf#search=%22santilli%20badiou%22).
From this idea of truth as a subject-making, break-through event, Badiou derives his ethics. An
ethic is “the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process” (p. 44), and consists
fundamentally in a single imperative: “Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds
your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and
broken you” (p. 47). He calls this the principle of consistency or fidelity to fidelity. It’s maxim is
“Keep Going,” especially when it is tempting to forget about the Truth that has happened to
you and to settle back into the ordinary way of doing and thinking about things. The ethical
subject, then, is one who experiences a split in his or her being between the mundane, selfinterested situations of life and the extraordinary disinterested spirit of truth and who is able to
sustain this split in all its tension, without giving up on one side on the other. It is in relation to
this ethic of the truth event that one is to understand evil. What then is evil for Badiou? Evil
essentially consists in the subject’s violation of the consistency principle. This can happen in
three general ways. First, as with the Nazis, one can give one’s allegiance to a false imitation of
the event of truth, a simulacrum or pseudo-event. Nazism structurally resembles an authentic
truth event (convulsion of the ordinary, revolutionary practice etc.), but, because it doe not
champion a true universal for all humanity, only the dominance of a specific tribe, it is a mere
simulacrum. Its “fakeness” is demonstrated by its terrorist drive to annihilate the Jews rather
than address an eternal truth to all (p. 76). Secondly, as with Stalinism, one can create a disaster
by attempting to totalize one’s truth and remake the whole of Being according to its principles.
Authentic truth events in politics and science, while universal and transcendent, are only
appropriate for specific traditions and circumstances. It would falsify a biological discovery, for
example, to apply it everywhere outside of a limited context (as was done with Darwinism for
example). So truth is disastrous when it absolutizes its power: “Rigid and dogmatic (or ‘blinded’),
the subject-language would claim the power, based on its own axioms to name the whole of the
real and thus to change the world” (p. 83). Religious fundamentalisms, to the extent that they
are based on truth events and are not “fakes” in the first place, would seem to be particularly
susceptible to this kind of evil. Finally, the subject can be guilty of the simple disavowal of Truth.
From fatigue, cowardice, doubt, the unbearable tension of living that split in being, or simple
self-interest, one can give up on the truth that has happened to one and “fall” back into the
world: “I must betray the becoming-subject in myself, I must become the enemy of that
truth.” (p. 79, Emphasis added). Let us then locate the precise difference between Badiou’s
ethics and its account of evil and that of the “ethical ideology” of human rights and radical evil.
For Badiou ethics originates in transformative ideals that envision new possibilities for all human
beings (a requirement of universality). One’s primary obligation is to remain faithful to the
transformative event and to the particular finite situations to which it applies, without
terrorizing those who do not subscribe to it. For Badiou the Platonic vision of the “Good” is
primary, with evil appearing only as a deviation or swerve from one’s obligatory allegiance to
this Good. ... Precisely in the way that Kant describes radical evil, Badiou too speaks of the
human being falling from grace by betraying the formal imperative of consistency, by putting
self-interest and self-love ahead of the immortal truth. Evil emerges for Badiou, not because of
the effects of human action on others, but because of a disorder in the way the subject
responds to a revelation of truth. Evil is measured in other words, not by what is done to others,
that is, by the horrible suffering even well-intentioned men cause (that would smack too much
of the ideology of rights for Badiou), but by failures in what Kant would call the subjective will.
Badiou does not speak of freedom the way Kant does, but one would have to surmise that for
him, this fall or swerve from the truth is freely undertaken: one willfully relaxes back in to the
status quo, one gives up on one’s principles, and one chooses totalizing power and
contingencies, rather than the concrete universality of truth. Evil represents a contamination
of the purity of one’s insight, whether it is political, artistic, religious, or amatory.
Tying the truth of an event to traditional politics risks disaster. For instance,
Nazism and Stalinism were both politics of absolute truth. This means that the
ethical subject searches for the universal but does not enforce that universal on
others.
Barker 02 (Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of
Philosophy at Cardiff University “Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction,” p. 134- 135)
But there is a paradox at work here, perhaps an aporia, and a potentially dangerous one at that,
since what seizes by chance and without warning can all too easily be taken up by the State
and enacted as the rule of law. In such circumstances where philosophy is elevated to the
heights of ethical responsibility (‘the philosopher-king named by Plato’) disaster looms.
‘Disaster in philosophical thought is the order of the day when philosophy presents itself as
being, not a seizure of truths, but a ‘situation of truth’ (C. 70). There we encounter the jump
from logic to ontology. As we will recall from our earlier chapters, the situation is the set of
circumstances, infinitely multiple, which is interrupted and named 'after the event'. In light of
what we have also said above, the situation is seized from the outside before being 'sutured' to
politics, art, science or love as one of the four conditions of its truth. The 'suture' is a concept
derived from Lacan, and Badiou employs it to define the tendency of philosophy to ‘delegate
its functions to such or such of its conditions’ at times when its intellectual circuit becomes
'blocked' (MP, 41). In the nineteenth century for example, 'between Hegel and Nietzsche', we
mainly encounter the positivist suture, which pretends to be able to manage time scientifically,
thereby playing into the hands of the 'diffuse religiosity' of capitalist industry. There is also, in
the same epoch, the suture of philosophy to politics, where we discover Marx's commitment to
philosophy as the practical means to change the world. And of course, what has overtaken both
science and Marxism in the twentieth century - largely as a result of Heidegger's influence,
although continued in the philosophy of Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze - is the suture of
philosophy to art: the 'age of the poets' (MP, 42-58). The suture always brings about a
reduction of thought - synonymous with a 'heightening of the void' - which turns out to have a
"triple effect': truth is made I) ecstatic, 2) sacred and 3) terroristic (C, 71-2). Taken together,
these three aspects add up to the concept of disaster. Although the latter pertains primarily to
thought, disaster finds expression in empirical effects, while 'Reciprocally, every real disaster, in
particular historical, contains a philosopheme which joins together ecstasy, the sacred and
terror.’ The destiny of the German people to establish a new world order, for example, and
Stalinist Marxism in its claims over the future course of history both combine a terroristic
element (the persecution of ‘traitors’), an ecstatic element (a romantic sense of ‘place’ or
community, e.g. German Heimat) and a sacred name (‘Fuhrer’) (C, 73). Can we assume,
therefore, that every philosophy must navigate this perilous path on the brink, or at least within
the vicinity of disaster? For Badiou, the answer to this question is yes, since disaster is always
internal to the conflict between philosophy and sophistry. ‘Philosophy must never abandon
itself to anti-sophistic extremism. It loses its way when it feeds the dark desire to finish with the
sophist once and for all’ (C, 73). The sophist, it would seem, serves the ends of Good in stting the
philosopher a worthy target, a good enemy as Nietzsche says. Evil is not the practice of the
sophist, but is made possible whenever the philosopher arrogantly denies that sophistry does
not exist. The sophist is the measure of Evil, the means of holding Evil within our sights. ‘The
ethics of philosophy,’ Badiou says, ‘is at heart to maintain the sophist as an adversary, to
preserve the polemos, the dialectical conflict’ (C, 74-5).
AT: Cede the Political
The state dooms the creation of new forms of ethics. We must have seperaiton
from traditional power structures to find new alternatives
Franke, 2000 (Mark Franke, Instructor of International Studies at the University of Northern
British Columbia, 2000. “Refusing an Ethical Approach to World Politics in Favour of Political
Ethics,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 6(3): 307-333. )
Rather than being a repository and force of political power in the world, the modern state,
where sovereignty is said to rest first in the people, is a ground for ethics. And it gains its right
as such via the political efforts that found and sustain it. Whether it is popularly constructed
through the fabled general will and social contract or founded through the forces of conquest,
terror, theology or revolution, the state provides a socially constructed human universe in
which one vision and map holds sway for all. It is a space in which all individuals are required
to submit to one fundamental set of principles and ideas of inter-human relations, expressed
through a constitution and laws. As such, the liberal state provides a matrix in which members
may and must conform to a particular set of codes of conduct, notions of responsibility and
rules of judgement. The state is at base a moral order created through political conflict and
cooperation to overcome the anarchy that naturally makes ethics always uncertain and open to
question. Furthermore, the state functions primarily to enforce a specific and identical ethical
subject position in each of its members. As beings who are understood to fit equally within the
same sovereign order, citizens of a modern liberal state are required to appreciate themselves
and one another as essentially the same kind of being. They must not only understand that
each one of them enjoys the same world but could also partake of the same perspective of that
world. The citizen of the state, in other words, must cast away particular perspective in favour
of the notion that she or he may see her- or himself reflected in the attitude of the state as it
exists. Moreover, she or he must accept the fact that the vision and character attributed to this
human sub-universe may be changed only as permitted by the amendments acknowledged
through the constitution under which each enjoys her or his identity as an ethical being. The
state not only normalizes the limits and structure of political associations. It also provides
mechanisms through which the normalization of humans may occur, where the title of
citizenship and normalcy are coextensive and where the notion of criminality allows for the
correction of citizens.6
This argument is the essence of what keeps us docile--submission to the state
results precisely when power is indeterminate and it becomes impossible to
imagine alternatives.
Hallward, 04 (Badiou’s Politics: Equality and Justice, Peter, Professor of Modern European
Philosophy, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University
http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm).
Politics thus proceeds through the invention of new subtractive mechanisms of formalisation
that can confront and transform this formless resistance to change (LS: 89). A true political
sequence can only begin when business as usual breaks down for one reason or another. This
is because what ensures submission to the status quo is ‘submission to the indetermination of
power, and not to power itself’ (TA, 8.04.98). Under normal circumstances, we know only that
the excess of the static re-presentation over elementary presentation is wildly immeasurable
(corresponding, in the terms of Badiou’s ontology, to the infinite excess of 2N over N). Today’s
prevailing economic regime indeed dominates its inhabitants absolutely, precisely because we
can hardly imagine how we might limit or measure this regime. The first achievement of a true
political intervention is thus the effective, ‘distanced’ measurement of this excess.
Intervention forces the state to show its hand, to use its full powers of coercion so as to try to
restore things to their proper place.
AT: Events are Evil
Events are emancipatory because they demand fidelity to something universal
without trying to impose those truths on others—these simple standards make
the identification of false events easy.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting
for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).
If one's own support of a truth is fundamentally a matter of decision, what is to distinguish
untruth from truth? Didn't, for example, at least some Germans (Heidegger is the obvious
example) believe that, far from representing a monstrous falsehood, their participation in a
fascist movement was fidelity to an event, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933? "[W]hen all is
said and done, it is obvious that reaction, even the forces of death, can be stamped with the
creative force of an event" (Ethics, lvii). Since mere predation is beneath good and evil, evil must
take its sense from some perversion of a truth-procedure; and since a truth-procedure has
essentially three parts (the event, fidelity to the event, and the truth this fidelity constructs),
there are three ways a truth-procedure can be perverted into evil. The first is the substitution
of a simulacrum for the event, the second is betrayal of a real event, and the third is to ascribe
to the truth-process total power. It seems to me that these three modes of evil are meant to
correspond primarily to three political evils, although only the first is spelled out. The
"revolution" of National Socialism was a simulacrum of [End Page 299] the previous
revolutions of 1792 and 1917: because it convokes the plenitude of an ethnic "Germany"
instead of the (universalizable) exclusion on which this plenitude was founded, it blocks any
possible truth-procedure. In a strange echo of Heidegger's scandalous paragraph on the gas
chambers, the (ontic) extermination of the Jews appears here as the effect of an (ontological)
blockage of truth: inasmuch as "Jew" names the address to all that Nazism cannot make, its
referent must be eliminated. The second evil, that of betrayal, could be taken to refer to the
abandonment of the revolutionary movements in the Third World—the corruption of the
political class in Angola after the MPLA took power, or the strange quiescence of some Brazilian
radicals in the face of the military dictatorship in the late 1960s. The third evil ascribes total
power to the truth-process—as though a truth, rather than reconfiguring the situation from
which it emerges, could actively become the situation, subjecting everything to a single rule.
The referent here would seem to be Left absolutism.
AT: Realism
Realism only proves Badiou’s thesis – that the world is constantly unstable
makes the notion of universal ethics absurd
Franke, 2000 (Mark Franke, Instructor of International Studies at the University of Northern
British Columbia, 2000. “Refusing an Ethical Approach to World Politics in Favour of Political
Ethics,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 6(3): 307-333. )
The grounds that propel International Relations and, consequently, the general concern of
international ethics themselves, though, are surely not of an ethical character per se.
International Relations and the considerations of ethics made possible within that vision
respond primarily to the notion that there is no natural structure or code upon which actions
and judgements in human relations may be legitimately justified in any final sense. No person
or group of persons has view to any thing like what one might call the universal conditions of
humanity. Each is limited to particular perspectives and cultural mappings of how a human
universe may appear if local understandings could be extended globally. It is for this reason that
persons are said to be naturally in a state of war with each other.' In trying to orient
themselves to one another and the things that come of interest to them via experience and
reports of the experiences of others, humans run inevitably into a cartographic crisis with one
another, a crisis regarding how each ought to orient her- or himself to others. Even prior to any
kind of base power struggle that Realists may attribute to them, people come into a conflict of
ideas and representations of what the world of experience might be. The multiple images that
different humans may project or adopt in trying to understand the potential range of their
respective interests and movements share no natural grounds in common. There is no one
place, life or vision in which all humans commonly partake. The world of humans is therefore
anarchical. But it is not so because of a selfish nature identically reproduced in each individual,
as the metaphysicists of Realism/Idealism proclaim. Rather this 'world' is anarchical due to the
fact that there is never actually a single world to which all ideas of human life may agree. And
there are no natural grounds upon which a singular world may be justifiably created from this
variety of views. Instead, humans, by the fact of being particular and finite beings unable to see
all things and enjoy all possible lives at once, give rise to unlimited numbers and kinds of
principles upon which unending worlds may be founded and demanded. Only one universally
applicable social fact must then be said to confront each and every possible person, that an
ethics is not available by nature. There are at least no grounds upon which such an ethics may
be assumed possible. The codes of conduct and grounds upon which judgements are to be
made must, rather, be constructed and legitimized politically. The basis for shared human
norms can be accomplished only through processes of tyranny, negotiation, competition
and/or force. And thus it is that the liberal state emerges as it does.
AT: Badiou is Totalizing
Badiou’s striving for a universal is not totalizing because it does not seek to
impose itself on others—his conception of truth is inherently plural.
Rothberg 01 (Criticism 43.4 (2001) 478-484, Book Review, Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).
A truth is, for Badiou, "indifferent to differences"; it is "the same for all" (27; AB's italics). How
can we situate such a claim in the contemporary theoretical landscape? Is Badiou's ethics
simply a return to the totalizing and universalizing thought that a combination of historical and
intellectual events (the Holocaust, Stalinism, colonialism, postmodernism, etc.) had seemed to
render hopelessly passé? While Badiou's understanding of truth, and thus also ethics, is
uncompromisingly universalizing, it is also definitively not totalizing. The interest of his
thought today lies precisely in the way he finesses this apparent paradox. When Badiou writes
that truth is "the same for all" he does not mean that there is only one truth. To the contrary,
truths are irreducibly plural. They are the product of "the real process of fidelity to an event"
(42), and there are an infinite number of possible events. Events—to continue using Badiou's
vocabulary—are immanent breaks with a given situation. And a situation is a singular
configuration, an "infinite multiple" which can be "politico-historical," "strictly physical or
material," aesthetic, or even defined by the relationship of two people (129).
AT: Generic Lacan Bad Cards
Badiou’s alternative is simply not the same as Lacan’s—where Lacan is accused
of being politically dangerous because he denies all access to the Real, Badiou
allows for real world political transformation.
Rothberg 01 (Criticism 43.4 (2001) 478-484, Book Review, Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).
Because knowledge serves power (and this is not precisely Badiou's own language), there will
always be "voids" in a given situation that cannot be known or thought according to the
recognized forms of knowledge. Badiou links this notion of the unthought in a given reality to
Lacan's notion of the Real. (One also thinks of the Sartre of Search for a Method.) But there is
also a significant difference between Badiou's void and Lacan's Real: while the Real is never
susceptible to transformation (it is the place to which one always returns), the void can be
revealed and thus potentially displaced through the advent of an event (although it is never
clear from where the event emerges—Badiou likens its advent to a non-theological "grace"
[122-3]). An event—whether it involves the production of art, political action, scientific
discovery, or an amorous encounter—reveals what was missing in the given state of the
situation. Once the event has taken place, producing truth entails remaining "faithful" to the
event that has revealed the gaps in the situation. The production of truth also constitutes a
subject (which, for Badiou, is more an assemblage than an individual), and helps to re-make the
opinions and instituted knowledges of the situation—it is thus fundamentally a form of
permanent, if local, revolution.
Badiou’s concept of the subject is a major break from Lacan—he sees the
subject as fully capable of positive action through his alternative of fidelity to
the event.
Ling, 06 (Alex, University of Melbourne, www.cosmosandhistory.org 359 Cosmos and History:
The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006, BOOK REVIEW).
Clearly then the core of Badiou’s ethics is nothing other than the evental prescription of the
subject, that is, the absolute necessity to remain faithful to a fidelity—to continue being a militant of truth—which
he rather nicely summarizes in a single imperative: continuez! (in which one should of course hear Lacan’s ethical maxim ‘ne pas céder sur son désir’: don’t give way on your
desire). Simply—and one cannot stress this point too strongly— outside of the fact of the event, there is no subject, nor truth, nor ethics—there is solely difference (which is
simply what is) and an otherwise inconsequential biological species counted as human, ‘a “biped without feathers,” whose charms are not obvious’. (E 12) So then in light of his
theory of subjectivation Badiou accordingly reinterprets Lacan’s ethical imperative as the necessity to ‘seize in your being that which has seized and broken you’ (E 47), to remain
. Of course, the reader of Lacan would likely
wonder precisely what is to be found here that is new? Certainly the literally exceptional status of Badiou’s ethics resonates with
faithful to an event, to hold on at all costs to a truth and continue being a subject
Lacan’s own distinction between the moral and the ethical—between Creon’s Law and Antigone’s desire, between the good and the beautiful—insofar as morality, for Lacan,
fundamentally serves to reinforce/reinscribe the statist order (qua ‘service of goods’) while ethicality is by contrast necessarily anti-statist (owing to the fact that, as an ethical
subject, we must first give ourself over to ‘the cause that animates us’, a cause—desire; drive—which is in itself radically antithetical to order as such). Clearly then we are once
more presented with those familiar divisions between ethical radicality and moral stasis, between revolutionary praxis and conservative polity, between truth and the
. And yet it also at this precise point that we discern a clear break with
Lacan—who we should remember is not only for Badiou an antiphilosopher par excellence
(witness the role played here by desire and drive) but also the term’s true father (le nom du
père)—insofar as Badiou, by virtue of his decidedly non-Lacanian (non-Cartesian) conception
of the subject, necessarily presents something of a recession of orders, seeing the ethical as
coextensive with (indeed, equivalent to) the good, thereby leaving morality (which is in
knowledge through which it punches a hole
Badiou’s thinking implicitly tied up with that truthless realm of ‘opinions’) lying necessarily
beneath both good and evil. Thus the beautiful descends to the good and the good—to invoke
Badiou’s reading of that other archetypal antiphilosopher Saint Paul—falls from grace. If this
however seems something of a negative gesture, we should remember that one of the great
virtues of Badiou’s philosophy is on the contrary its fundamental positivity, which is
something we can (unexpectedly perhaps) clearly discern in his conception of evil as an ‘effect
of the power of truth’ (E 61). Indeed, this simple progression—from good to evil—stands in marked opposition to the ethical ideology he so despises, in
which good might be solely derived as an after-effect of evil (such good depriving itself of positive content in its reduction to the sole function of preventing evil) and which
accordingly thinks ‘the only thing that can really happen to someone is death’ (35) (such negative movement accounting for the intrinsic nihilism of, for example, the discourse
of human rights). Simply, if the good is ultimately truth, then evil is at base that which has a negative effect on truth; it is the corruption, in one way or another, of truth. This of
, Badiou’s ethics of truth means in the
end that ‘every subject is guilty of all the good he did not do’. Thus the human animal, along
with its concomitant predilections—be they munificent, disinterested, or just plain nasty—
exists, outside of the embrace of the event, fundamentally beneath good and evil.
course means that, as with the good, evil is knotted to the evental subject, or, to paraphrase Voltaire
AT: Desanti
Desanti’s critique fundamentally misses the point. Badiou under-theorizes
ontology on purpose because he believes that the Event, not pre-determined
ontology, shapes the subject.
Van Rompaey, 06 (Deakin University, Chris, www.cosmosandhistory.org 350 Cosmos and
History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006 BOOK REVIEW: A
QUESTION OF FIDELITY).
Other critics object to the minimalism of Badiou’s ontology, to its radical exclusion of the
phenomenological concerns that they refuse to relinquish from philosophy’s grip. Here, it is
Jean-Toussaint Desanti who comes most immediately to mind with his discussion of what he
calls Badiou’s ‘intrinsic’ ontology. Badiou’s ‘choice’ of a minimal ontology, he argues, does not
in any way eliminate the need for ontology to account for being in a more expansive sense.
This emphasis on ‘choice’ as if it were simply a matter of personal predilection entirely
overlooks Badiou’s rigorously axiomatic development and exposition of his thesis. It is only his
foundational decisions that (i) mathematics is ontology and (ii) the ‘one’ does not exist that
could be construed as acts of choice. Even these decisions, though, are, as Badiou has pointed
out, not arbitrary but based empirically on the logical impasse generated by alternative points of
departure. Another line of demarcation could be drawn between those who criticize, often from
a position of fidelity to the Badiouian event, aspects of Badiou’s procedural methodology, and
those who, like Desanti, attack Badiou for failing to encompass what at no stage he sets out to
encompass. Implicit in most such critiques is the assumption that ontology must, by definition,
account for every conceivable aspect of being, that it must contain within it the promise of
boundless plenitude. But it is precisely this kind of totalizing gesture that Badiou is at pains to
avoid. In a brief response to his critics, he stresses the limits of his enquiry into the nature of
being: It is very important to grant a statement from the very beginning of Being and Event its
full scope: ontology is a situation. Or, if you prefer: ontology is a world. This means that the
mathematical theory of pure multiplicity in no way claims to inform the way we might think
everything that is presented in the infinity of real situations, but only the thinking of
presentation as such. This is what I call, adopting the vocabulary of the philosophical tradition,
being qua being (233). Clearly, there is nothing in Badiou’s ontology that challenges the validity
of Desanti’s concerns per se. When, for example, Desanti asks (60) how we are to gain access to
what he calls ‘modes of presence’ (seemingly just another version of his need to know who
performs the count-as-one and in what ‘realm’), he raises questions that, however pertinent
they might be to the world of ‘real situations’, have nothing to do with the ‘thinking of
presentation as such’. If Badiou’s ontology were to embrace these concerns by extending itself
into its ‘margins’ (to use another of Desanti’s terms), it would immediately lose the rigour that
sets it so decisively and productively against the grain of poststructuralist indeterminacy.
AT: Laclau
Laclau gave Badiou only a cursory reading and distorts his concepts in order to
advance a different point about his own work. His argument is therefore
irrelevant to really understanding Badiou.
Van Rompaey, 06 (Deakin University, Chris, www.cosmosandhistory.org 350 Cosmos and
History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006 BOOK REVIEW: A
QUESTION OF FIDELITY).
Ernesto Laclau’s critique of Badiou’s ontology or, more precisely, of the extra-ontological status
of the Badiouian event is at a formal level the inverse of Desanti’s. Where Desanti has nothing
but praise for Badiou’s procedural thoroughness—the reader, he insists, will find ‘admirably set
out, all the mathematical instructions required in order to follow [the book’s] argument’ (63)—
Laclau enthusiastically embraces Badiou’s interventionist notion of ethical engagement but
rejects entirely the theoretical apparatus that underpins his concept of fidelity. What for
Laclau is particularly problematic is the relation between the evental site, the subject and the
constitution of a truth procedure. Once again, though, it is a critique that founders on its
distortion of Badiou’s fundamental categories. Rather than pursue in a rigorous way Badiou’s
suturing of ethical commitment to the constitution of the subject, he persists with a focus on
the curious notion of ‘filling’ the void, arguing that, even though this process is incompatible
with Badiou’s ontology, it nevertheless requires ‘theoretical description’ (125). At the heart of
Laclau’s protestations is a refusal of the mathematical basis of ontology, but it is a refusal that is
justified by only the most cursory reference to Badiou’s use of set theory. Before canvassing the
possibility of situations in which the ‘logic of representation might lose its structuring abilities’
(125), Laclau might have made a more systematic examination Badiou’s exposition of such
crucial concepts as the event, the evental site, the state’s ‘prohibition’ of the event and the
act of subjective intervention. It soon becomes clear, though, that what is at stake for Laclau is
the inability of set theory to account for what is not included in a situation in terms other than
the void. Of course, what in a given situation escapes the count is not nothing in any absolute
sense and, contrary to the impression given by Laclau, set theory at no point makes any such
claim; it simply has no existence for the situation. It is precisely because Laclau’s own project—
the articulation of his theory of ‘hegemonic universality’ (131-2)—is rooted in what he
mistakenly takes to be voided unconditionally by set theory that he finds it necessary to
dismiss Badiou’s ontology.
AT: Nancy
Nancy misrepresents Badiou in order to make a point about his own
philosophical project—it is irrelevant in terms of actually understanding
Badiou’s argument.
Van Rompaey, 06 (Deakin University, Chris, www.cosmosandhistory.org 350 Cosmos and
History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006 BOOK REVIEW: A
QUESTION OF FIDELITY).
Jean-Luc Nancy is another contributor who, like Laclau, frames his critique through his own
hardly inconsiderable philosophical enterprise and accordingly misrepresents important
elements of Badiou’s project. In spite of being ‘close’ on certain points, Nancy insists that he
and Badiou ‘inhabit utterly different sites of thought’ (39), an observation which appears to
license him to ‘force’ Badiou into an entirely alien theoretical context. A prime example is
where Nancy takes Badiou to task for his account of the origins of philosophy, ex nihilo, as a
consequence of Plato’s foundational gesture. In disputing this account Nancy blurs what for
Badiou is a crucial distinction between generic form, or discursive mode, and articulated
content. At issue is not the emergence, several centuries before Plato, of ‘philosophy’ as a
discursive focus on what Nancy calls the ‘deconstruction of the structures of a crumbling …
mythico-religious world’ (45), but the wresting of that discourse from the clutches of the poem
so as to constitute an independent, ‘properly’ philosophical mode of enquiry. Like Desanti’s
critique, Nancy’s [critique] is based on the assumption that Badiou’s claims are other than
they actually are.
Affirmative Answers
Cede the Political
Badiou is not politically useful because his alternative is too vague—he says
that the event side-steps the state but any alternative politics must be able to
reform the state to succeed.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting
for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).
Badiou's ontology cannot usefully displace the dialectic. Because the Event must descend like a
grace, Badiou's ontology can only describe situations and never History. Since the event
emerges from outside of the state of the situation, it is rigorously untheorizable: as we saw
above, it is theorized as untheorizable. Despite every protestation to the contrary, Badiou's
system cannot address the question "What is to be done?" because the only thing to do is to
wait for the Event. What happens when the precipitation of the Event is precisely what needs
to be done? Yes, we can be faithful to a previous event, as Badiou says Lenin was to the Paris Commune. But surely this solution
mitigates the power of the Event as the irruption of the void into this situation. The dialectic, on the other hand, conceives the void as immanent contradiction. While both
contradiction and void are immanent to the situation, contradiction has the tremendous advantage of having movement built in, as it were: the Event does not appear out of an
immanent nowhere, but is already fully present in itself in the situation, which it explodes in the movement to for-itself. Meanwhile, the question of the dialectic leads us back
to the twofold meaning of "state": both the law and order that govern knowledge, and law and order in the everyday sense. This identification authorizes Badiou's antistatism,
forcefully reflected in his own political commitment, the Organisation Politique (whose members do not vote), which has made limited [End Page 306] but effective
interventions into the status of immigrant workers. In Badiou's system, nothing can happen within the state of a situation; innovation can only emerge from an evental site,
constitutively excluded from the state. But can a principled indifference to the state ground a politics? The state surely has the function of suppressing the anarchic possibilities
inherent in the (national) situation. But it can also suppress the possibilities exploited by an anarchic capitalism. It is well known that the current rightist "small-government"
movement is an assault on the class compromise represented by the Keynesian state. To be sure, one should be suspicious of that compromise and what it excluded. But it also
, Badiou is certainly describing something: the
utopian moment of a total break with the state may be a part of any genuine political
transformation. But, unless we are talking about the sad old interplay of transgression and
limit—which posited the state as basically permanent, with transgression as its permanent
suspension—this anarchic moment says nothing about the new state of affairs that will
ultimately be imposed on the generic set it constructs. Surely the configuration of that state
will be paramount—in which case state power has to be fought for, not merely evaded.
protected workers against some of capitalism's more baleful effects. As with Ethics
Complete abandonment of the state and abstract alternatives fail – focusing on
concrete solutions is necessary to form a genuine political process
Alain Badiou, 2001, Chair of Philosophy: École Normale Supérieure University [Ph.D: Rene
Descartes Chair at EGS, “An Interview with Alain Badiou” by Peter Hallward, PhD, Professor of
Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University , Ethics: An Understanding of Evil, Pages
96- 143 Appendix]
Hammond: One last question about immigration. You describe it as a 'problem of internal
polities', and distance yourselves from those who 'brandish pseudfrprescriptions, like the
suppression of frontiers'.1' But doesn't a politics of unconditional naturalization remain pretty
abstract, as long as current borders remain intact? Badiou: I would say of the abolition of
frontiers what I said a moment ago about the withering away of the state. I'm for it, I'm
absolutely for it! But to be for something yields no active political principle in the situation. In
reality, politics must always find its point of departure in the concrete situation. The question
of knowing what happens to people who are in France is already a huge question. To refer this
question back to a debate about the opening or the closing of borders, to the question of
whether labour belongs to a global market or not, and so on, seems to forbid thinking about
the situation itself and intervening in it so as to transform it. The guiding principle concerning
these questions should be as follows. We still belong to a historical era dominated by states
and borders. There is nothing to suggest that this situation is going to change completely in
the near future. The real question is whether the regulations [reglementation] at issue are
more or less consistent with egalitarian aspirations. We should first tackle the question of
how, concretely, we treat the people who are here; then, how we deal with those who would
like to be here; and finally, what it is about the situation of their original countries that makes
them want to leave. All three questions must be addressed, but in that order. To proclaim the
slogan 'An end to frontiers' defines no real policy, because no one knows exactly what it
means. Whereas by addressing the questions of how we treat the people who are here, who
want to be here, or who find themselves obliged to leave their homes, we can initiate a
genuine political process.
Alt Fails – Capitalism too big
Badiou’s system fails—he has no way to overcome the enormous power he
attributes to capitalism.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting
for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).
But what is strange is the vehemence with which Badiou maintains his distance from the
economic—from what classical Marxism called the "base," the elements of a situation that
pertain to its own reproduction. It is perfectly orthodox to say that there can be no purely
economic intervention in the economy: even with the best intentions, the World Bank could not
solve the problem of Third World poverty. However, in Badiou's system the economy is not
merely reduced to one aspect among many, but actively dismissed from consideration. Material
reproduction is reduced to the sneering Lacanian contempt for "le service des biens," the
servicing of goods which pertains to the human animal beneath good and evil. Why should
Badiou fully endorse Marx's analysis of the world economy ("there is no need for a revision of
Marxism itself," [Ethics, 97]) while keeping Marx's entire problematic at arm's length? In fact,
capitalism is the point of impasse in Badiou's own system, the problem which cannot be
actively thought without grave danger to the system as a whole. Capital's great power, the
tremendous ease with which it colonizes (geographic, cultural, psychic) territory, is precisely
that it seizes situations at their evental site. In their paraphrase of a brilliant but much-maligned passage in Marx's
Grundrisse, Deleuze and Guattari insist that "capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread
they feel of a flow that would elude their codes."2 Is this flow that eludes every society's codes not identical with generic multiplicity, the void which,
eluding every representation, nonetheless haunts every situation? Does not capitalism make its entry at a society's point of impasse—social relations
already haunted by variously dissimulated exploitation—and revolutionize them into the capital-labor relation? A safely non-Orientalist version of this
would be the eruption from modernist art's evental site—the art market, which belonged to the situation of modernism while being excluded from its
represented state—of what we might call the "Warhol-event," which inaugurates the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of (artistic)
labor under Capital. It makes perfect sense to say that this transition is the truth of the [End Page 308] Warhol-event. As we saw earlier, the real
subsumption of labor under Capital, the conversion of every relation into a monetary relation, is the origin of formal equality: that is, the foundation of
capitalism itself fits perfectly
the form of the revolutionary Event. It would then appear that capitalism is, like religion,
eliminated from the art-politics-science-love series only by fiat. And why is this? Because the
economic, the "servicing of goods," cannot enter Badiou's system without immediately
assuming the status of a cause. Excluded from direct consideration, capitalism as a condition of
set theory is perfectly innocuous; its preconditional status belongs to a different order than
what it conditions. It opens up a mode of presentation, but what is presented existed all along:
look at Paul, for example. But included as the product of a truth-procedure, capitalism
immediately appears as the basis for all the others: it is, in fact, the revolutionary irruption of
Capital (in whatever society) that conditions any modern process of science, art, love, or politics.
If Badiou's system were to consider capitalism directly, some elements, those pertaining to
the "base," would appear to have more weight than others—the "superstructure." The effects
of such an inclusion of capitalism in Badiou's system—an inclusion which nothing prevents—
would be catastrophic. Radical universality (as opposed to the historically conditioned
universality imposed by the emergence of capitalism) would become unthinkable. The
"eternity" of truth would yield to historicism.
universalism. And far from pertaining to mere animal life beneath the level of the truth-procedure,
Badiou’s great enemy of capitalism fits perfectly within what he considers a
truth event—the alternative merely re-creates the status quo.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting
for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).
Badiou cannot think Capital precisely because Capital has already thought Badiou. And let's
face it: despite Badiou's inspiring presentation, nothing is more native to capitalism than his
basic narrative matrix. The violent seizure of the subject by an idea, fidelity to it in the
absence of any guarantee, and ultimate transformation of the state of the situation: these are
the elements of the narrative of entrepreneurial risk, "revolutionary innovation," the
"transformation of the industry," and so on. In pushing away material reproduction, Badiou
merely adapts this narrative to the needs of intellectuals, who, in Badiou's conception, have a
monopoly over much of the field of truth.
Alt fails – impossible
The radical break of the truth event is impossible—slow reforms are a more
effective politics.
Ingram 05 (James, PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research, “Can Universalism
Still Be Radical? Alain Badiou’s Politics of Truth,” Constellations Vol. 12 No. 4, 2005, p. 571)
It could be replied that this is the realm of practical judgment, about which theory can tell us
little. But the problem seems to stem from Badiou’s approach, in particular his attempt to
combine radical subjectivism with abstract formalism. For Badiou, the contribution of
philosophy (which is universal and formal) to politics and ethics (which are singular and
situational) is to discover the generic logic by which events happen. The problem with his
empyrean perch is not only that it suspends the actor between two irreconcilable attitudes; it is
that no historical event could correspond to his theory. No less than otherness, no event is
completely foreign to the situation it interrupts. Even if we allow that new things do happen,
they do not emerge all at once, out of the blue, in stark relief to everything that exists,
immediately changing everything. In this respect, the purism of Badiou’s event, like his activist,
seems too wedded to a romantic notion of total transformation. Suppose Bertolucci’s teenagers tidied up, went to the
supermarket, and eventually took jobs to support their love nest; one suspects their tryst would cease to be an event and become an alternative lifestyle. Yet some such
adaptation is surely involved in the realization of a new possibility. The pacte civile, which we can imagine our lovers availing themselves of as their thoughts turn to insurance
and retirement, is a long way from the liberation of desire.16 But the question should be what it changes and what further changes it makes possible. Analogously, universal
global equality will not come about in a single stroke. Seattle does not lead straight to
global revolution, but to Porto Alegre and Cancún – the difficult forging of new solidarities and
the contestation, with imperfect means, of the system’s more glaring injustices.
citizenship and
Badiou over universalizes
Badiou wrongly universalizes, destroy any chance for a successful alternative
Rothberg 01[Michael, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “Ethics: An Essay on the
Understanding of Evil” Criticism 43.4 (2001) 478-484]
Another sort of problem emerges when we consider Badiou's attempt to [End Page 482] surpass
the discourse of victimization that he and many others see as defining the contemporary
moment. While this critique of victim-centered ethics is crucial, and works well with respect to
many situations, it risks overgeneralization. In his laudable insistence that humanity "does not
coincide with the identity of the victim" (11; emphasis in original), Badiou leaves out of his
system the possibility that a human being could be reduced precisely to the status of victim.
Such a case has been investigated by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz under the heading of the
"Muselmann." Muselmann, or "Muslim," was the name given in certain Nazi camps to prisoners who had been so overcome by hunger,
beatings, etc. that they became zombie-like, incapable of human communication or response, trapped in an indeterminate zone between life
and death. While surely the product of an extremity not conducive to generalization, the Muselmann nevertheless constitutes the unthought
of Badiou's own project: the potential of a victimization so radical that it really does exceed the possibility of any human project or truthprocess. Whether this case is at all conducive to ethical or political elaboration must remain open here, but what the counter-example of the
Muselmann suggests is the limit of Badiou's will to universality. The
problem with universality surely also returns in
the insistence on ignoring questions of cultural difference. Badiou's absolute commitment to
the ethical value of the Same—the fact that truths are addressed equally to all—demonstrates a
provocative and radically democratic spirit. In presenting truths as simultaneously multiple and
universal, Badiou poses an imaginative answer to what may be the most intractable antinomy
of contemporary left social theory: the difficulty of adjudicating claims for universality and
particularlity. (For other attempts to think through this problem, see the contributions to the recent collective volume by Judith
Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Z;akiz;akek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality [London and New York: Verso, 2000]. And yet, is his
notion that the universality of truths is premised on the simultaneous local nature of truth—
its immanence to a particular situation with which it breaks—sufficient to ward off fears of
homogenization, if not cultural imperialism? How can we differentiate between the Sameness
of truth and the homogenization produced by capitalist commodification? Is there an
alternative formulation that would respect the universal address of truths while still allowing
for a valorization of or commitment to difference? The unease that Badiou's dismissal of
cultural difference provokes, despite the freshness of his formulation, suggests that the
antinomy of the universal and the particular is as much a symptom of the post-Cold War
historical moment as a problem solvable in theory.
Badiou – Radical Violence
Badiou’s critique of victimization is an overgeneralization – the muselmann
demonstrates that violence can be so radical that it exceeds the possibility of
universality.
Michael Rothberg 2002 (University of Illinois, Ubana-Champaign Book Review “Ethics: An
Essay on the Understanding of Evil” Muse)
Another sort of problem emerges when we consider Badiou's attempt to surpass the
discourse of victimization that he and many others see as defining the contemporary moment. While this critique
of victim-centered ethics is crucial, and works well with respect to many situations, it risks
overgeneralization. In his laudable insistence that humanity "does not coincide with the identity of the victim" (11; emphasis
in original), Badiou leaves out of his system the possibility that a human being could be reduced
precisely to the status of victim. Such a case has been investigated by the Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz under the heading of the "Muselmann." Muselmann, or
"Muslim," was the name given in certain Nazi camps to prisoners who had been so overcome
by hunger, beatings, etc. that they became zombie-like, incapable of human communication
or response, trapped in an indeterminate zone between life and death. While surely the
product of an extremity not conducive to generalization, the Muselmann nevertheless
constitutes the unthought of Badiou's own project: the potential of a victimization so radical
that it really does exceed the possibility of any human project or truth-process. Whether this case is
at all conducive to ethical or political elaboration must remain open here, but what the counter-example of the Muselmann
suggests is the limit of Badiou's will to universality.
Badious’s alternative results in violence-takes out solvency.
Hallward 2003 (lecturer at King’s College, Peter, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, p. 268-69,)
My second question concerns Badiou’s essentially instrumental understanding of violence. His strict separation
of true subjects
from merely objective “individuals” allows him to consider violence as essentially external to
any truth process, and there is certainly a compelling strategic case to be made for this
position. But how exactly then are we to acknowledge the potential of any individual to become a subject? What precise circumstances justify the
suppression of this potential? For it might well be argued that the last century, driven by that “passion for the real” which by Badiou’s own admission
excludes the luxuries of critical distance or reserve, demonstrated more than once the inadequacy of an ethics based on an appreciation of these very
luxuries. It might be more consistent, and arguably more courageous, to insist that the
true break with our established order
will come, not through recourse to alternative forms of violence, but with the organized,
uncompromising imposition of a radical nonviolence. Only a precisely axiomatic commitment
to nonviolence offers any hope of a lasting break in the futile recycling of violences. Only such
a principled commitment can both respond to the violent re-presentation of the state and,
once this re-presentation has been suspended, block the creation or reassertion of new forms
of violence. In the absence of such a commitment, the appeal to philosophical “restraint” is
ultimately unconvincing. We know that “the ethics of a truth is absolutely opposed to opinion” and communication, but at the same
time we must communicate, we must have our opinions” (E, 48, 75). It is only by preserving the very opinions it penetrates that a truth avoids its
disastrous totalization. But what is the precise mechanism of this preservation? This gives rise to my third question. If the only relation between truth
and knowledge is one of subtraction, how can the one preserve the other? How are we to coordinate the imperative to maintain this relation—to
maintain the sophist, maintain opinions, maintain the dialogue—with that more insistent imperative, prescribed by every generic procedure, to act in
the singular absence of relation, to pursue a radical deliaison? If
“philosophy ultimately has no relation other than to
itself,”51 if philosophy is conditioned by nothing other than truth, it is difficult to see how it
might regulate its relations with its non-philosophical counterpart, be it sophist, citizen, or
opinion. In the end, the question of ethics turns on the preservation of a viable relationship
between knowledge and truth, opinion and subject—but it is precisely this relationship that
Badiou’s philosophy has yet to express in other than mainly subtractive terms.
Permutation
Perm: do both.
The state and the revolutionary political subject can cooperate in Badiou’s
conception of the alternative.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis / London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in
Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy).
We know that Badiou's early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has considerably
evolved. Just how far it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains
resolutely anticonsensual, anti–“re-presentative, ” and thus antidemocratic (in the ordinary
sense of the word). Democracy has become the central ideological category of the neo-liberal
status quo, and any genuine “philosophy today is above all something that enables people to
have done with the 'democratic' submission to the world as it is.” 66 But he seems more
willing, now, to engage with this submission on its own terms. La Distance politique again
offers the most precise points de repère. On the one hand, the OP remains suspicious of any
political campaign—for instance, an electoral contest or petition movement—that operates as a
“prisoner of the parliamentary space.” 67 It remains “an absolute necessity [of politics] not to
have the state as norm. The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics.” On the
other hand, however, it is now equally clear that “their separation need not lead to the
banishment of the state from the field of political thought.” 68 The OP now conceives itself in
a tense, nondialectical “vis-à-vis” with the state, a stance that rejects an intimate cooperation
(in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses “any antagonistic conception of their
operation—a conception that smacks of classism.” There is no more choice to be made
between the state and revolution; the “vis-à-vis demands the presence of the two terms and
not the annihilation of one of the two.” 69
Badiou = Esoteric / unworldly
Badiou is the pinnacle of esoteric philosophy – his alternative has no way of
connecting to politics because he cannot find examples to support his theories
MacKenzie 8
(Iain MacKenzie, a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Kent. He is the author of The Idea of Pure Critique, “What is a Political
Event?” Theory & Event¶ Volume 11, Issue 3, 2008, Muse, KB)
This can be seen in three different but related ways. Firstly, and in agreement with Egyed,
Badiou’s examples of political events are ‘too obvious’.34 Caught between the need for
examples to support his analysis and a strict demarcation of what might count as a political
event, Badiou faces a dilemma; ‘he either has a theory of the event that relies on commonly
received opinions, or one that is highly esoteric’.35 The result in either case is that his
approach imposes an uncompromising burden on our understanding of political events. Either
they are revolutionary embodiments of the universal ideal of equality or, what we often take
to be political events are, in fact, merely inconsequential ‘happenings’ that actually change
nothing fundamental within ‘the political’. In other words, only the exceptional, epochal and
revolutionary egalitarian occurrences actually count as political events, while others are
relegated to the category of ‘the situation’. Second, while Badiou is correct to emphasise the
ways in which individuals become political subjects through the embodiment of significance,
by then claiming that a political subject is only truly created if that subjectivity rests upon a
universalizable ‘fidelity’ to the event Badiou robs political subjectivity of all but the most
revolutionary content. As shown above, there are only militant political subjects for Badiou
and the vast array of other possible political ‘subjects’ – we could think of the groups that
make up ‘identity politics’ (civil rights groups, women’s groups, disability groups etc) – are
simply elements within a political situation rather than agents of change, or of a truly
political event. This evacuates what we ordinarily think of as politics from contemporary
political life because on Badiou’s criteria there are only militant political subjects, bound
together by a shared fidelity to universal equality, and as such there can be no way of
conceiving of contestation, dissensus and consensus among these political subjects. As such,
and thirdly, Badiou’s understanding of the political event implies a conception of ‘the political’
that is verging perilously close to being an empty formalism. Bensaïd captures this well when
he says that Badiou’s theory of the ‘pure diamond of truth, the event’ creates ‘a politics
without politics [that] is akin to a negative theology. The preoccupation with purity reduces
politics to a grand refusal’.36 While Badiou is one of the few philosophers of his generation to
integrate political events into his systematic philosophy, his account of political events is in
such stark contrast to everyday understandings of political life that it has to be noted, at least,
that it lacks plausibility.
Nazism DA
Badiou’s theory of political events justifies Nazism
MacKenzie 8
(Iain MacKenzie, a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International
Relations, University of Kent. He is the author of The Idea of Pure Critique, “What is a Political
Event?” Theory & Event¶ Volume 11, Issue 3, 2008, Muse, KB)
As noted already, Badiou can be said to resolve, initially at least, the problem of how to
introduce the idea of significance into the internal constitution of political events (while
maintaining an apparatus to identify what counts as a political event) by way of the criteria of
universalisability understood as a form of address that equally applies to all and to which all
individuals can be faithful to in equal measure. Clarifying this, Badiou says that equality ‘means
that the political actor is represented under the sole sign of the uniquely human capacity’ and
that ‘thought is the one and only uniquely human capacity’.39 This would appear to mean that
a true political event engenders an ‘equality of thought’ whereas a political non-event always
privileges a particular perspective on thought (perhaps, the thinking, rational man over and
against the unthinking, irrational woman) in the service of maintaining the status quo of the
political situation. Yet, a few lines later, Badiou says that equality ‘signifies nothing
objective...political equality is not what we desire or plan; it is that which we declare to be,
here and now, in the heat of the moment, and not something that should be’.40 At this point it
would seem that Badiou is eschewing any conception of equality that can be understood as
‘equality of x’ - ‘it is not a question of the equality of social status, income, function and still
less of the supposedly egalitarian dynamics of contracts or reforms’41 – thereby seeming to
embrace what we could call a purely formal conception of equality. This formal conception,
one devoid of particular referents, can be unpacked as the claim that ‘like cases should be
treated alike’.¶ It seems clear that these two claims regarding equality are in conflict with
each other : the former being a version of a human capacity argument for equality (because
we are all equally capable of thought we should only aspire to political ideals that recognise
this fact); whereas the latter would seem to deny any validity to arguments in support of any
particular version of equality at all. The vacillation on this point has its source in the fact that a
purely formal conception of equality – treat like cases alike – can sanction deep and profound
inequality if one simply assumes that the cases are not alike. Unless it is filled out by a
conception of why it is that all humans are intrinsically equal then a purely formal conception
of equality will be no more than an empty tautology . On a purely formal understanding, it
would mean that the Nazis could indeed be said to have embraced equality while simply
adding that some individuals (Jews, gays, gypsies and so on) were not really human at all and
therefore not to be treated like people. As such, Badiou’s attempt to dismiss Nazism as a
‘simulacrum’ of a true political event begins to look like a value-laden judgement, a matter of
political opinion rather than an axiomatic principle of the political itself.¶ The general problem
Badiou faces is that his ideas push in two different directions at once. If he understands
equality in a purely formal way then he cannot distinguish a true political event from a false
one . If he understands equality more substantively as ‘equality of thought’ then this
introduces a normative dimension into his analysis that erodes his claim to be establishing an
axiomatic of true political events. The problem in this latter case resides in the value-laden and
thereby contestable claims he is making about equality. In particular: a) it is not clear that the
capacity for thought is ‘uniquely human’; b) it is not beyond dispute that this capacity, even if
it is uniquely human, is shared equally by all humans, and; c) if it is the case that all humans
have this capacity in equal measure then this is only pertinent to political life if it is given
value, at which point the question of how this value is to be treated would emerge. Without
deciding these issues, it is clear that by relying upon a rather traditional ‘human nature’
argument, Badiou unwittingly finds himself in the realm of opinions, values and debate; that
is, in the realm of the political as it is more traditionally conceived. In sum, Badiou’s addition of
the criteria of universalizability to the idea of significance, for all its provocative qualities, does
little to either sustain a rigorous distinction between political events and mere occurrences in
the political situation or to clarify or change our grasp of the political itself.
Ethics of Other First
Responsibility to the Other must come first
Grob 1999, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, [Leonard, Ethics after the Holocaust, p. 47]
Finally, if it is not just another abstraction in a history of philo-sophical abstractions, how does the face-to-face encounter help us to
realize our goal of a post-Holocaust ethics? How can it help us to prevent future genocides? Is Levinas's depiction of the ethical relation descriptive or prescriptive in nature? It must be recalled that Levinas is writing against the backdrop of centuries—no,
millennia—within which moral, legal, and reli-gious systems have failed to protect us from the threat and, all-too-often, the reality
of genocidal acts. Levinas
does not offer us just another set of moral directives akin to those
ultimately derived from a base of egoist ontology. Rather, he endeavors to ground all modes
of thinking and acting in a ground of all grounds: the call to responsibility sounded by the
Other. This call undergirds, and thus stands outside any traditional descriptive/prescriptive distinction. Levinas's thought provides
a context of all contexts for what it means to be moral, prompting us to rethink, from the bottom up, where we stand in relation to
others. Where do we stand? We stand, in every aspect of our lived expe-rience, as called to account for ourselves. Levinas
brings to our at-tention that which, at bottom, is requisite for action which would refuse our
potential for genocide. Whether it be those aspects of my being traditionally analyzed, let us say, by behavioral, social, or
any other ( alleged ) science of humankind, each and every part of my being must now be looked at as founded in a fundamental call
to responsibility. The human sciences must indeed be called upon in the endeavor to combat genocide, but they must no longer
ground themselves in an egoist base. After
Levinas, it is not as if I am no longer subject to emotional or
social constraints; rather, I must see this -being subject to- as rooted in something more basic
than the alleged need to act, in all instances, from mere self-interest. The ethical relation to
the Other permeates all that has heretofore been considered rooted in a fundamentally egoist
ambition.
Ethics of the other comes first
Grob 1999, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, [Leonard, Ethics after the Holocaust, p. 13]
Philosophy in the post-Holocaust world need not speak explicitly of the face of the Other,
because, implicitly, it is a work addressed to that very face. Guided by this "face" as the
absolute, the end of all ends, the teacher of philosophy—or, by extension any teacher or parent—can
adopt only that content mid pedagogy which ultimately honor the value of the personhood of
the Other. In the shadows cast by the Holocaust, all the ways we teach and learn must
radically be called into question. As that discipline which, perhaps more than others, has modeled the enterprise of an
egoist appropriation of the world, philosophy has a special obligation to take upon itself the task of rethinking its fundamental aims.
In its movement from warlike to peaceful means and ends, philosophy after the Holocaust
must model a mode of thinking which will help prevent new genocidal acts. Post-Holocaust
philosophy must recall that it is neither (as has traditionally been said) theory nor practice. In its primordial sense, philosophy is an
offering. With Levinas, we must recall that ethics is first philosophy.
Ethics comes first
Grob 1999, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, [Leonard, Ethics after the Holocaust, p. 9]
Ethics, for Levinas, is thus not to be identified with any ethical or even meta-ethical position. Levinas speaks neither as deontologist
nor consequentialist. He does not attempt to articulate any list of rights or obligations, or even the principles on which the latter
would be based. All
ethical theories, he implies, are secondary to, or derivative from, a primordial
or founding moment: the encounter with the face of the Other. It is this moment-of-allmoments which institutes the very possibility of the "ethical" systems so hotly debated within
the history of Western thought. Before there can be any ethical positioning—before there can be
discussions of virtue, happiness, duties—there is the meeting with the Other. Ethics is no set of directives;
rather, in Levinas's words, “Already of itself ethics is an 'optics,'" a way of seeing which
precedes—and founds—all that has heretofore been identified as ethical philosophy.
Human Rights Good
We must continually engage human rights to produce an increasingly better
society by embracing the alterity and uniqueness of all individuals.
Burggraveve 04 (Roger, The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as
the Surpassing of Political Rationality,
http://www.springerlink.com/content/2hnac1r8cdr4ewx8/fulltext.pdf Human Rights Review,
2004, Volume 6, Number 2, 92-94) WC
The one who thinks and acts from the basis of human rights – e.g., standing up for and
committing oneself to the rights of certain minorities or forgotten peoples – then does more in
terms of humanization than what the sociopolitical structures can achieve. This is so because
these structures can never take to heart completely the singular realization of the rights of the
unique other. In our ever more international and structurally constructed societal bonds, they
precisely make it possible to orientate separately every responsible person towards the
necessary surplus of the good for each and every other. In one of his three articles, which
Levinas dedicated entirely to human rights; he expressed the bond between the uniqueness of
the other and human rights in a radical and challenging manner (HS 176-78). Human rights,
which in no way whatsoever must be attributed from without because they are experienced as
a prior and therefore as irrevocable and inalienable, express the alterity or absoluteness of
every human being (AT 151). Every reference is annulled by human rights since it is
acknowledged that every individual person possesses those rights: they are inherent to their
being-human as persons. In this regard, human rights wrench every human person away from
the determining order of nature and the social body, to which everyone indeed obviously
belong. Herein lies, according to Levinas, a remarkable paradox. Thanks to the belongingness of
every person to human kind – humanity – every person possesses an incomparable alterity
and uniqueness, whereby everyone likewise transcends the generalness of the human kind.
The belongingness of every person to the human kind does not mean a reduction to a neutral
unity, but a presentation as a unique person, who by means of that fact itself actually destroys
humanity as an abstract idea. Every person is unique in his or her genre. Every person is a
person like every other person and yet utterly unique and irreducible: a radically spate other.
Humanity exists only by grace or irreducible beings, who are for each other utterly unique and
non-exchangeable others. Levinas also calls it the absolute identity of the person (HS 176). It is
about a uniqueness that surpasses every individuality of the many individuals in their kind. The
uniqueness or dignity of every individual person does not depend on one or the other specific
and distinctive difference. It is about an “unconditional” uniqueness, in the sense that the
dignity of the person – over every individual person – is not determined by their sex, color of
skin, place of birth, moment of their existence, not by the possession of certain qualities and
capacities. Every person possess dignity that is to be utterly respected, independent of
whichever property of characteristic. It is about uniqueness that precedes every difference,
namely understanding a radical alterity as an irreducible and inalienable alterity, whereby a
person can precisely say “I.” This leads Levinas to state that human rights reveal the uniqueness
or the absoluteness of the human person, in spite of their belongingness to the human kind or
rather thanks to this belongingness. This is absolute, literally detached and unconditional
alterity and thus uniqueness of every person simply signifies the paradox, the mystery and the
newness of the human in being!
Human rights produce a spillover effect in which people will demand ever
greater social justice.
Burggraveve 04 (Roger, The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as
the Surpassing of Political Rationality,
http://www.springerlink.com/content/2hnac1r8cdr4ewx8/fulltext.pdf Human Rights Review,
2004, Volume 6, Number 2, 92-94) WC
But there is more. Human rights also fulfill a function within socially and politically organized
justice itself, namely insofar as they also offer a specific contribution to an even better justice.
Or rather, they precisely flow froth from the awareness that justice is never just enough (EFP
98). From within their surpassing position, people will begin to demand that the current, not
yet stipulated or realized human rights be acknowledged in society and also acquire a
structural, social, economic, juridical and political rendition. In this regard they belong to the
essence of a non-totalitarian order of society itself, which namely is an order where the political
(to be understood as a synthesizing term for the entirety of social, economic, financial, juridical
and state structures, institutions and forms) is not the definitive and total regime. Even though
they are not indentified with the presence of a government, and thus they have no direct
political or state function, it is still within the political structure that they are acknowledged as
their own parallel institution alongside the written laws. It is precisely this acknowledgement
that makes the state a non-totalitarian state. For human rights to make a specific institutional
place means indeed accepting that the political order does not proclaim itself as the final
word. A politics that accepts human rights agrees at the same time to be critiqued on the basis
of these human rights to make a specific institutional place means indeed accepting that the
political order does not proclaim itself as the final word. A politics that accepts human rights
agrees at the same time to be critiqued on the basis of these human rights so that a better
justice becomes effectively possible. With human rights, which is not equated with the regime,
one can lay one’s finger on the sore spot. By means of pressing charges when human rights are
violated, one can question radically a political system that has become rigid or break its open
towards greater justice. Human rights remind us that there still no perfect social and political
justice – and there will never be as well (EFP 119).
Human rights must be addressed in a utopian manner. Though never
actualizable, we must attempt the impossible to refine ethics.
Burggraveve 04 (Roger, The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as
the Surpassing of Political Rationality,
http://www.springerlink.com/content/2hnac1r8cdr4ewx8/fulltext.pdf Human Rights Review,
2004, Volume 6, Number 2, 92-94) WC
Thus human rights have both a critical as well as a prophetic character. They go against all
conservatism that is self-resigned and plays it safe, provoking or calling us forth literally to
strive for full justice, without lapsing into the faults of a totalitarian regime, however. By so
doing, human rights keep the future of the ideal society open. We can call this a utopia insofar
as it is about something that shall not and cannot be realized. But at the same time it is an
effective utopia because, ultimately, it leads all our ethical actions of responsibility and
justice. Even though the utopia is unattainable, it does not hinder the condemnation of
certain, factual conditions and structures. It makes it concretely possible to have eye for
relative progress that can achieved utopian thinking does not condemn all the rest, but on the
contrary works like leaven in all the rest, so that the future is held open dynamically time and
again. No ethical life is possible without the utopia of human rights (PM 178).