Our hypothesis is that it is only with reference to this abyss (Night of the World) that one can answer the question “How can an Event explode in the midst of Being? How must the domain of Being be structured so that an Event is possible within it?”
Hegelian one: one can and should fully assert creation ex nihilo in a materialist (non-obscurantist) way if one asserts the non-All (ontological incompleteness) of reality. From this standpoint, an Event is irreducible to the order of Being (or to a situation with regard to which it is Event); it is also In-itself not just a “fragment of being,” not because it is grounded in some “higher” spiritual reality, but because it emerges out of the void in the order of being. 823
The only solution here is to admit that the couple Being/Event is not exhaustive, that there must be a third level.
Insofar as an Event is a distortion or twist of Being, is it not possible to think this distortion independently of (or as prior to) the Event,
so that the “Event” ultimately names a minimal “fetishization” of the immanent distortion of the texture of Being into its virtual object-cause?
And is not the Freudo-Lacanian name for this distortion the drive, the death drive?
Badiou distinguishes man qua mortal “human animal” from the “inhuman” subject as the agent of a truth-procedure: as an animal endowed with intelligence and able to develop instruments to reach its goals, man pursues happiness and pleasure, worries about death, and so on; but only as a subject faithful to a Truth-Event does man truly rise above animality.
How, then, does the Freudian unconscious fit into this duality of the human animal and the subject (defined by its relation to the Truth-Event)? 823
the “human animal,” a living being bent on survival, a being whose life follows “pathological” interests (in the Kantian sense): the “human animal” leads a life regulated by the pleasure principle, a life unperturbed by the shocking intrusion of a Real which introduces a point of fixation that persists “beyond the pleasure principle.” What distinguishes humans from animals (the “human animal” included) is not consciousness―one can easily concede that animals do have some kind of self-awareness―but the unconscious: animals do not have the Unconscious. One should thus say that the Unconscious, or, rather, the domain of the “death drive,” this distortion or destabilization of animal instinctual life, is what renders a life capable of transforming itself into a subject of Truth: only a living being with an Unconscious can become the receptacle of a Truth-Event.
The problem with Badiou’s dualism is thus that it ignores Freud’s basic lesson:
there is no “human animal,” a human being is from its birth (and even before) torn away from its animal constraints, its instincts are “denaturalized,” caught up in the circularity of the (death) drive, functioning “beyond the pleasure principle,” marked by the stigma of what Eric Santner called “undeadness” or the excess of life.
This is why there is no place for the “death drive” in Badiou’s theory, for that “distortion” of human animality which precedes the fidelity to an Event.