Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Northwestern University Press, 2009.
Žižek’s argument is that Badiou’s need philosophically to prohibit the theoretical delineation of the (pre-evental ) emergence of the evental out of the ontological , a prohibition Žižek identifies as betraying the allegedly idealist core buried within the heart of Badiouian philosophy, is an inevitable, necessary by-product of mathematizing ontology, of insisting that set theory is the sole “science” up to the task of thinking l’être en tant qu’être. In Organs Without Bodies, Žižek describes what he sees as the proper manner in which genuine materialism would accommodate the phenomena Badiou struggles to grasp vis his fundamental disctinction between being and event:
The materialist solution is … that the Event is nothing but its own inscription into the order of Being, a cut/rupture in the order of Being on account of which Being cannot ever form a consistent All. There is no Beyond of Being that inscribes itself into the order of Being.
There “is” nothing but the order of Being … An Event does not curve the space of Being through its inscription into it: on the contrary, an Event is nothing but this curvature of the space of Being. “All there is” is the interstice, the nonself-coincidence, of Being, namely, the ontological nonclosure of the order of Being.
What this means at the ontological level is that, ultimately, one should reject Badiou’s notion of mathematics (the theory of pure multiplicity) as the only consistent ontology (science of Being); if mathematics is ontology, then, to account for the gap between Being and Event, one either remains stuck in dualism or one has to dismiss the Event as an ultimately illusory local occurrence within the encompassing order of Being. Against this notion of multiplicity, one should assert as the ultimate ontological given the gap that separates the One from within. (Žižek cited in Johnstone BZPT 2009 136)