Does this then mean that Lacan himself effectively was a sophist, in this sense, when he asserted that “there is no Other of the Other;’ no ultimate guarantee of Truth exempted from the circular (self-referential) play of language? If every such line of separation is “undecidable,” does this mean that Badiou’s desperate struggle against postmodernist — deconstructionist “sophists,” and his heroic Platonic insistence on Truth as independent of historical language games, amounts to an empty gesture with no foundation? Badiou can nonetheless be defended here: the opposition between Truth and doxa occurs within the “undecidable” self-referential field of language, so when Badiou emphasizes the undecidability of a Truth-Event, his conception is radically different from the standard deconstructionist notion of undecidability.
For Badiou, undecidability means that there are no neutral “objective” criteria for an Event: an Event appears as such only to those who recognize themselves in its call, or, as Badiou puts it, an Event is self-relating, including itself — its own nomination-among its components. While this does mean that one has to decide about an Event, such an ultimately groundless decision is not “undecidable” in the standard sense. It is, rather, uncannily similar to the Hegelian dialectical process in which — as Hegel had already made clear in the Introduction to his Phenomenology — a “figure of consciousness” is not measured by any external standard of truth but in an absolutely immanent way, through the gap between itself and its own exemplification/staging. An Event is thus “non-All” in the precise Lacanian sense of the term: it is never fully verified precisely because it is infinite, that is, because there is no external limit to it. The conclusion t o be drawn is that, for the very same reason, the Hegelian “totality” is also “non-All.” 76-77
The element of truth in this reproach is that, for Hegel, the truth of a proposition is inherently notional, determined by the immanent notional content, not a matter of c01nparison between notion and reality — in Lacanian terms, there is a non-All (pas-tout) of truth. It may sound strange to invoke Hegel with regard to the non-All — is he not the philosopher of All par excellence? The Hegelian truth, however, is precisely without an external limitation/exception that would serve as its measure or standard, which is why its criterion is absolutely immanent: a statement is compared with itself, with its own process of enunciation. 77
Badiou and Barbara Cassin are engaged in an ongoing dialogue which can best be characterized as a new version of the ancient dialogue between Plato and the sophists: the Platonist Badiou against Cassin’s insistence on the irreducibility of the sophists’ rupture. The fact that Badiou is a man and Cassin a woman takes on a special Significance here: the opposition between the Platonist’s trust in the firm foundation of truth and the sophists’ groundless play of speech is connoted by sexual difference. So, from the strict Hegelian standpoint, perhaps Cassin is right to insist on the irreducible character of the sophist’s position: the self-referential play of the symbolic process has no external support which would allow us to draw a line, within the language game, between truth and falsity. Sophists are the irreducible “vanishing mediators” between mythos and logos, between the traditional mythic universe and philosophical rationality, and, as such, they are a permanent threat to philosophy. Why is this the case?
The sophists broke down the mythic unity of words and things, playfully insisting on the gap that separates words from things; and philosophy proper can only be understood as a reaction to this, as an attempt to close the gap the sophists opened up, to provide a foundation of truth for words, to return to mythos but under the new conditions of rationality. This is where one should locate Plato: he first tried to provide this foundation with his teaching on Ideas, and when, in Parmenides, he was forced to admit the fragility of that foundation, he engaged in a long struggle to re-establish a clear line of separation between sophistics and truth.”*
The irony of the history of philosophy is that the line of philosophers who struggle against the sophistic temptation ends with Hegel, the “last philosopher;’ who, in a way, is also the ultimate sophist, embracing the self-referential play of the symbolic with no external support of its truth. For Hegel, there is truth, but it is immanent to the symbolic process — the truth is measured not by an external standard, but by the “pragmatic contradiction,” the inner (in)consistency of the discursive process, the gap between the enunciated content and its position of enunciation.
*The opposition between the sophists and Plato is also linked to the opposition between democracy and corporate organic order: the sophists are dearly democratic, teaching the art of seducing and convincing the crowd, while Plato outlines a hierarchic corporate order in which every individual has his or her proper place, allowing for no position of singular universality.