The truth is partial: Imagine a blue light shining from an invisible source on a room full of differently colored materials: the blue light has no visible presence in the air, but a white curtain will appear blue, a red wall will appear purple, and so forth. The same invisible force creates different effects. This is why Žižek can say that every element in the situation (which is itself shaped by some determining but hidden Real) “takes its own side” with respect to it. 162
The retroversion in Badiou’s model concerns the construction of a space and a vocabulary that could make visible what was overlooked in teh original situation — an occulted egalitarian dimension — but this dimension is posited (and glimpsed in the event) rather than achieved. To take an example from Badiou’s own political efforts, the sans-papiers, foreign workers in France, are recognized in the current political situation only as “immigrants,” not as productive workers. The “encyclopedia” of the French (and arguable Western) situation has no term for these people that would bring to light their status as workers, that is, as having the same properties, necessary to France, as any other worker. The specifically political nature of the Badiouan act is a function of working towards realizing this occulted egalitarian dimension, a dimension which we prescribe. Badiou emphasizes repeated that one’s efforts to work to reveal equality should continue regardless of any apparent lack of success. 163
Universality based on the excess generated by the formal negation does not depend upon finding a common ontic property, that is a property which is just one more difference within the situation. All such properties can be used to name differences that are mobilized in the game of hegemony, empty spaces, and master-signifiers, as we have seen in the discussion of Laclau’s political thought. Only the minimal self-difference (described as the radical antagonism cutting across every element) escapes this play of signifiers, existing in an extimate relation to the situation, rather than in its encyclopedia. This self-difference or (self-)antagonism subsists (ex-sists, Lacan would say, to emphasize its extimacy) as the hidden dimension. … Žižek goes on to argue … admonishing Laclau … for ultimately recasting antagonism as agonism, that is, as differences among self-same elements in the social field (Iraq Kettle 90 cited in Rothenberg 164)