Here is Ž from his latest book:
My ongoing debate with Badiou could be read as a series of variations on the motif of how to redeem Hegel, how to reclaim him for the contemporary universe of radical contingency. In terms of the most elementary ontological coordinates, my difference with Badiou is threefold, with regard to the triad Being/World/Event.
1. At the level of being, the multiplicity of multiples has to be supplemented by the “barred One,” the Void as the impossibility of the One becoming One.
2. At the level of appearance, the world has to be conceived of as language-bound: each world is sustained by a Master-Signifier (the true reference of what Badiou calls a “point”).
3. At the level of the Event, the “negativity” of anxiety and the (death) drive has to be posited as prior to the affirmative enthusiasm for the Event, as its condition of possibility.
How we pass from being to appearing, how and why does being start to appear to itself? Ray Brassier is thus right to insist on Badiou’s “failure to clarify the connection between ontological inconsistency and ontical consistency,” that is, the passage from Being to a World
In the history of philosophy, the most consistent answer to this question (in a certain sense one could say the only true answer) was provided by the German Idealists, especially Schelling and Hegel. In his Weltalter manuscripts, Schelling outlined the birth of logos (the articulated World) out of the pre-ontological antagonism of drives, while Hegel, in his Logic, tries to demonstrate how “appearing” (correlative to Essence) emerges out of the immanent inconsistencies (“contradictions”) of Being. In spite of the insurmountable differences between Schelling and Hegel, the two share a key feature: they try to account for the emergence of appearing with reference to some kind of tension or antagonism or contradiction in the preceding order of being. LTN 809
🙂 Being to appearing, the stuff of being is sheer multiplicity, what Ž is arguing is that there has to be something to organize this chaos. But the push from being to appearing first happens as drive 🙂
This route, however, is excluded a priori by Badiou, since his axiom is that “being as being is absolutely homogeneous: a mathematically thinkable pure multiplicity.” This is why all Badiou can do is offer obscure hints about “a kind of push” of being towards appearing which belongs more to the Schopenhauerian Gnostic notion of how the abyssal Ground of Being harbors an obscure inexplicable will to appear.
The key axiom of Badiou’s “logics of worlds” concerns the concept of the “inexistent” of a world: “If a multiplicity appears in a world, one element of this multiplicity and only one is an inexistent of this world.”
A “non-existent” is an element which is part of a world but participates in it with the minimal degree of intensity; that is, the transcendental structure of this world renders it “invisible”: “The thing is in the world, but its appearing in the world is the destruction of its identity.”
The classical example is, of course, Marx’s notion of the proletariat which belongs to the existing society but within its horizon is invisible in its specific function. Such an inexistent is, of course, the “evental site” of a world: when the Event occurs, the inexistent passes from minimal to maximal existence, or, to quote the well-known line from the “Internationale”: “We were nothing, we shall be all.”
As Badiou makes clear, this inexistence is not ontological (at the level of being, workers are massively present in capitalist society), but phenomenological: they are here, but invisible in their specific mode of existence. The philosophical question here is: why, exactly, does every world contain a “non-existent”?
In short, precisely because of the gap between being (irreducible multiplicity) and appearing (atoms or Ones), the unity (overlapping) of being and appearing (existence) can only appear within the (transcendental) space of appearance in a negative way, in the guise of an inexistent, a One which is (from within the transcendental frame that regulates appearing) not-One, an atom which, while part of the world of appearing, is not properly covered by it, participates minimally in it.
This inexistent is the point of symptomal torsion of a world: it functions as a “universal singular,” a singular element which directly participates in the universal (belongs to its world), but lacks a determinate place in it.
At the formal level of the logic of the signifier, this inexistent is the empty “signifier without a signified,” the zero-signifier which, deprived of all determinate meaning, stands only for the presence of meaning as such, in contrast to its absence, to non-meaning: its meaning is tautological, it means only that things have meaning, without saying what this meaning is. 810
What Badiou calls “subtraction” is thus another name, his name, for negativity in its affirmative dimension, for a negativity which is not just a destructive gesture, but gives, opens up a new dimension. LTN 811
The question to be raised here is this: why should an Event not designate a modification of the very internal rules of the transcendental of a world? Why do we not actually pass from one to another world? Is it not that, for a non-existent to change into a being with the maximum intensity of existence, the very rules which measure the intensity of being have to change?
🙂 Žižek’s Butler moment
If proletarians are to count as “being-human as such,” does not the very measure of what counts as “being-human” have to be modified? In other words, is it not that an inexistent which is the point of symptomal torsion of a world can only be made fully existent if we pass into another world? 812
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…reality is, at its most elementary ontological level, an inconsistent multiplicity that no One can totalize into a consistent unity. Of course, reality always appears to us within a determinate situation, as a particular world whose consistency is regulated by its transcendental features. LTN 813
The term “inconsistency” is used here in two senses that are not clearly distinguished. First, there is inconsistency as the “true ontological foundation of any multiple-being,” namely “a multiple-deployment that no unity can gather”―inconsistency is here the starting point, the zero-level of pure presence, that which is subsequently counted-as-one, organized into a world, that which subsequently appears within a given transcendental horizon.
Then, there is inconsistency as the symptomal knot of a world, the excess which cannot be accounted for in its terms. (Exactly the same ambiguity characterizes the Lacanian Real.)
a World is historical, a transcendental-historical organization of a sphere of Being, while―as Badiou repeatedly emphasizes in his unabashedly Platonic way―Truth is eternal, in enforcing it one enforces onto reality an eternal Idea. We are thus dealing with two radically different levels: a World is a formation of human finitude, “hermeneutic” (a horizon of meaning); the evental Truth is eternal, the trans-historical persistence of an eternal Idea which continues to haunt us “in all possible worlds.” 815
Both World and Truth-Event are modes of appearing: a World consists of the transcendental coordinates of appearing, while a Truth-Event (or an immortal Idea) is something that, rather than appearing, “shines through,” transpires in reality. The status of the World is hermeneutic, it provides the horizon of meaning that determines our experience of reality, while the status of the Idea is Real, it is a virtual-immovable X whose traces are discernible in reality. In other words, the universality of a World is always “false” in the Marxist critico-ideological sense: every World is based upon an exclusion or “repression” which can be detected through its points of symptomal torsion, while the universality of Truth is unconditional, for it is not based upon a constitutive exception, it does not generate its point of symptomal torsion.