Žižek. “From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real.” [Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. 2004 ]
Also Žižek’s new Preface to For They Know Not What They Do. 2008
The basic problem remains unsolved by Kant as well as by Badiou: how does the gap between the pure multiplicity of being and its appearance in the multitude of worlds arise?
How does being appear to itself?
Or, to put it in ‘Leninist’ terms: the problem is not whether there is some reality beneath the phenomenal world of our experience.
The true problem is exactly the opposite one — how does the gap open up within the absolute closure of the Real, within which elements of the Real can appear? 174-175
Why the need for the pure multiplicity to be re-presented in a state? When Bosteels writes that the state of a situation is “an imposing defence mechanism set up to guard against the perils of the void”, one should therefore raise a naive, but nonetheless crucial, question: where does this need for defence come from? Why are we not able simply to dwell in the void? Is it not that there already has to be some tension/antagonism operative within the pure multiplicity of Being itself. 175
[The following appears also in the New Preface to For They Know Not What They Do. 2008]
Nowhere is the gap which separates Badiou from Lacan more clearly evident than apropos of the four discourses (the hysteric’s discourse, the master’s discourse, the pervert’s discourse, and the mystic’s discourse); through a criticism of Lacan, Badiou recently (in his latest seminars) proposed his own version of these discourses.
At the beginning, there is the hysteric’s discourse: in the hysterical subject, the new truth explodes in an event, it is articulated in the guise of an inconsistent provocation, and the subject itself is blind to the true dimension of what it stumbled upon – think of the proverbial unexpected outburst to the beloved: “I love you!”, which surprises even the one who utters it.
It is the master’s task properly to elaborate the truth into a consistent discourse, to work out its sequence.
The pervert, on the contrary, works as if there was no truth-event, categorizes the effects of this event as if they can be accounted for in the order of knowledge (for example, a historian of the French Revolution like Francois Furet, who explains it as the outcome of the complexity of the French situation in the late eighteenth century, depriving it of its universal scope). To these three one should add the mystic’s discourse, the position of clinging to the pure In-Itself of the truth that is beyond the grasp of any discourse.(lxxxvii)
There is a series of interconnected differences between this notion of four discourses and Lacan’s matrix of four discourses; the two principal ones concern the opposition of Master and Analyst.
First, in Lacan, it is not the hysteric but the Master who performs the act of nomination: he pronounces the new Master-Signifier which restructures the entire field; the Master’s intervention is momentary, unique, singular, like the magic touch which shifts the perspective and, all of a sudden, transforms chaos into the New Order – in contrast to the discourse of the University which elaborates the sequence from the new Master-Signifier (the new system of knowledge).
The second difference is that in Badiou’s account there is no place for the discourse of the analyst – its place is held by the mystical discourse fixated on the unnameable Event, resisting its discursive elaboration as inauthentic.
For Lacan, there is no place for an additional mystical discourse, for the simple reason that such a mystical stance is not a discourse (a social link) – and the discourse of the analyst is precisely a discourse which takes as its “agent”, its structuring principle, the traumatic kernel of the Real which acts as an insurmountable obstacle to the discursive link, introducing into it an indelible antagonism, an impossibility, a destabilizing gap.
That is the true difference between Badiou and Lacan: what Badiou precludes is the possibility of devising a discourse which has as its Structuring principle the unnameable “indivisible remainder” that eludes the discursive grasp – that is to say, for Badiou, when we are confronted with this remainder, we should name it, transpose it into the master’s discourse, or stare at it in mystified awe.
This means that we should turn Badiou’s criticism of Lacan back against Badiou himself: it is Badiou who is unable to expand the encounter with the Real into a discourse, Badiou for whom this encounter, if it is to start to function as a discourse, has to be transposed into a Master’s discourse.
The ultimate difference between Badiou and Lacan, therefore, concerns the relationship between the shattering encounter with the Real and the ensuing arduous work of transforming this explosion of negativity into a new order:
for Badiou, this new order “sublates” the exploding negativity into a new consistent truth;
while for Lacan, every Truth displays the structure of a (symbolic) fiction, that is, it is unable to touch the Real.
Does this mean that Badiou is right when he says that Lacan, in a paradigmatic gesture of what Badiou calls “anti-philosophy”, relativizes truth to just another narrative/symbolic fiction which forever fails to grasp the “irrational” hard kernel of the Real?
Here we should recall the three dimensions of the Lacanian Real: far from being reduced to the traumatic Void of the Thing which resists symbolization, it also designates the senseless symbolic consistency (of the “matheme”), as well as the pure appearance that is irreducible to its causes (“the real of an illusion”).
So Lacan not only does supplement the Real as the void of the absent cause with the Real as consistency; he adds a third term, that of the Real as pure appearing, which is also operative for Badiou in the guise of what he calls the “minimal difference” which arises when we subtract all fake particular difference – from the minimal “pure” difference between figure and background in Malevich’s White Square on White Surface, up to the unfathomable minimal difference between Christ and other men.
2B Continued