Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.
The Zizekian interpretation of Lenin’s writings suggests something already proposed here: in certain circumstances, forcing must precede,rather than simply follow, an event. A forcing prior to the actual event itself must seize an opportunity arising by chance for disruption (i.e.,some sort of structural flaw or historical vulnerability, the “weakest link”as a proverbial chink in the armor of the status quo) inadvertently presented by the reigning state-of-the situation. This point of weakness within a state’s constellation must be grasped firmly beforehand (steered by the discerning gaze of one not fooled, not taken in, by the preexistent distribution of relations and roles as influenced by statist ideologies) in order to spark an event’s occurrence.
Badiou, by contrast, describes the labor of forcing as transpiring only after the fact of an evental occurrence; the already-past event is identified following its having appeared and disappeared, and exclusively in the aftermath of this vanished winking can the work of stretching out the effects of its truth-consequences through forcing move forward under the guidance of subjects-of-the-event.
Badiou treats events (including political ones)as anonymous and mysterious happenings. Badiouian events can not be forced into occurring; as others have justifiably described them, such moments just pop up within the current scene as out-of-nowhere miracles. This sort of purposive refusal to think through in precise details the preconditions for the genesis of events is incompatible with Lenin’s insistence that, in initiating a revolution, one must “prematurely” force an event before it actually transpires spontaneously (in the mode of organically emerging out of the defiles of sociohistorical trends) by deliberately and nimbly exploiting whatever small chances there are in a situation despite the overall absence of the “proper conditions” for this event’s blooming.
In short, Badiou’s adamant insistence on there being a theoretically unbridgeable divide between an event and its pre-evental background (including his position that all subjects, with their capacities for forcing, are post-evental) forecloses considering how concrete forms of engaged praxis might, in certain instances, participate in precipitating in advance an ensuing evental sequence. 133-134