Žižek “Notes on a Debate ” Criticism. 46:4 (2004) 661-666.
On Badiou and Deleuze:
However, what unites them above this difference is that both perform the same paradoxical philosophical gesture of defending, as materialists, the autonomy of the “immaterial” order of the Event. As a materialist, and in order to be thoroughly materialist, Badiou focuses on the idealist topos par excellence: How can a human animal forsake its animality and put its life in the service of a transcendent Truth? How can the “transubstantiation” from the pleasure-oriented life of an individual to the life of a subject dedicated to a Cause occur?
In other words, how is a free act possible? How can one break (out of) the network of the causal connections of positive reality and conceive of an act that begins by and in itself?
In short, Badiou repeats within the materialist frame the elementary gesture of idealist anti-reductionism: human Reason cannot be reduced to the result of evolutionary adaptation; art is not just a heightened procedure of providing sensual pleasures, but a medium of Truth; and so on. Additionally, against the false appearance that this gesture is also aimed at psychoanalysis (is not the point of the notion of “sublimation” that the allegedly “higher” human activities are just a roundabout “sublimated” way to realize a “lower” goal?), therein resides already the significant achievement of psychoanalysis: its claim is that sexuality itself, sexual drives pertaining to the human animal, cannot be accounted for in evolutionary terms.
This makes clear the true stakes of Badiou’s gesture: in order for materialism to truly win over idealism, it is not enough to succeed in the “reductionist” approach and demonstrate how mind, consciousness, and so forth can nonetheless somehow be accounted for within the evolutionary-positivist frame of materialism. On the contrary, the materialist claim should be much stronger: it is only materialism that can accurately explain the very phenomena of mind, consciousness, and so forth; and, conversely, it is idealism that is “vulgar,” that always already “reifies” these phenomena. 665