Pluth, E. and Hoens, D. (2004) What if the Other is Stupid? Badiou and Lacan on ‘Logical Time’ In Think Again Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. Edited by Peter Hallward. 182-190.
The enthusiast knows he or she is making claims that cannot be proved, but is courageous enough to proceed and is confident that the claim is true and that sufficient reasons for it will show up. The enthusiast is by definition modest. He or she has neither the modesty of someone who decides nothing (‘I cannot decide, there are not enough premises, I don’t have enough information, my knowledge is too limited’, etc.) nor the modesty of the fanatic who says that he or she is sure about a claim but that it is only a subjective point of view and that, of course, others may have another opinion (the contemporary, liberal ideology of tolerance, where everything is ‘an interesting opinion’).
The enthusiast is modest in making a claim precisely because of how he or she is positioned ‘on the way to’ truth. Or put differently, the enthusiast leaves the gap between the singular decision and a universal truth open until the situation changes in such a way that the singular can be universally assumed as ‘a given’.
Furthermore, the situation is limited by the way it is set up, and in particular by the fact that there are only two possibilities: either one is white or black. A’s entire reasoning process is based on these two possibilities. Whatever claim A then makes can already be verified within the terms of the situation.
While we have been trying to point out the similarities between Badiou’s theory of decision or intervention and the situation in ‘Logical Time’, the two don’t quite match, and the reason for this is very simple: there is no event in ‘Logical Time’. In the absence of an event, it is difficult to see what the act is based on.
Elsewhere in Badiou’s theory, of course, decisive acts, or truth-processes, are contingent upon events. By contrast, an event seems radically excluded from the situation of ‘Logical Time’, because there are only two signifiers, or two names, available (black or white), and they fully describe all the elements of the situation among which one has to choose.
Apart from these problems inherent to the situation described in ‘Logical Time’, the situation there does allow both Badiou and Lacan to show the importance of a singular moment of acting which precedes an intersubjective verification process.
This implies that the individual decision might be mistaken. What is important is what follows. Using the distinction between enthusiasm and fanaticism again, we see that there are two modes of acting: the enthusiast can enthusiastically make mistakes, but what will always differentiate the enthusiast from the fanatic is the way he or she fails.
The fanatic resembles a prisoner who might have learned the truth from a whisper in his ear by the prison warden. Like this prisoner, the fanatic does not go through the anxious moment of the act.
As Badiou formulates it, ‘only the intervener will know if there was something that happened’. A fanatic is not actually intervening, because he or she has not made a decision and therefore does not participate in a truth process.
Only someone who has decided can put a decision to the test. This reminds us of one of the commonly acknowledged features of enthusiasm: enthusiasm is contagious, it needs others with whom it can share its ‘divine insight’. The fanatic does not need others because in the end he or she is completely satisfied with a mystical union with supersensible truths.
Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability. The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic.
Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.
The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.
Put in these terms, of course, no one would want to be a fanatic: fanaticism is pathological. Therefore, to avoid fanaticism, one might be inclined to think of the undecidable as something which ought to be preserved in its undecidability.
The question then is whether such an advocate of the undecidable is really so very different from the fanatic. Whereas the fanatic immediately embraces revelations that cannot be discussed, thereby negating the undecidable directly, the advocate of the undecidable would, in ‘Logical Time’, remain forever positioned in that uncomfortable, anxious moment of conclusion, never acceding to a process of verification, in fear of doing injustice to the truth-moment of anxiety.
The enthusiast goes through the truth-moment of anxiety, and remains faithful to that moment precisely by replying to it: by replying to it with an act. As Lacan puts it in his unpublished Seminar on anxiety: ‘to act is to pull a certitude out of anxiety’.
At the opening of his discussion of ‘Logical Time’, Badiou declares that what is at stake for him is the fixing of an ‘irreducible gap’ between his theory and Lacan’s. We have shown that when it comes to an understanding of the act, both thinkers are quite similar. Where Badiou differs from Lacan is in his ability to draw explicit ethical and political lessons from the kind of act described in ‘Logical Time’. In political terms, Badiou’s conclusion implies adherence to a familiar Leninist principle:
When the popular insurrection bursts out, it is never because the calculable moment of this insurrection has come. It is because there is nothing left for it but to rise up, which is what Lenin said: there is a revolution when ‘those on the bottom’ no longer want to continue as before, and the evidence imposes itself, massively, that it is better to die standing than to live lying down. [Lacan’s] anecdote shows that it is the interruption of an algorithm that subjectivates, not its effectuation (TS 272–3).
Any revolutionary act must work with the troubling undecidability inherent to a symbolic universe, and acts precisely as a reply to the real of an event.
But as we have shown, Badiou nonetheless emphasizes the necessary struggle or work to be done to name this event. This process of naming eventually creates a new symbolic order whose operational closure, to use Lacanian terminology, will be ensured by other master signifiers.