Category: badiou

johnston adrian meillassoux anti-kantianism

Johnston, Adrian. “The World before Worlds: Quentin Meillassoux and Alain Badiou’s Anti-Kantian Transcendentalism” Contemporary French Civilization. 33.1 (2009): 73-99. Print.

idealist dogma according to which objects are phenomenal appearances dependent, for their existence, on a conscious individual human animal or sentient mind to whom they appear. Badiou and Meillassoux both identify Kant’s critical-transcendental framework as an exemplary instance of the idealist faith of what Meillassoux christens “correlationism,” a belief-system insisting upon the primacy of finite epistemological subjectivity as the ubiquitous mediating milieu for all actual and possible knowledge of objects (each and every object supposedly being constituted exclusively in and through this same milieu)

Post-Kantian variants of “correlationism,” share in common an anti-realist, de-ontologized epistemology denying that subjects can and do, as Jacques Lacan would put it, touch the Real (i.e., gain direct, unmediated access to the ontological domain of being in and of itself). 75

In particular, he has in mind such natural scientific disciplines as paleotology, geology, and astrophysics, sciences seemingly able to speak of the earth and the universe as they were and are apart from the mediating experience of microcosmic human minds.

Badiou desires to preserve a distinction between l’être en tant qu’être — i.e., noumenal being an sich knowable through set theory — and être-là — i.e., appearing as phenomenal objects-in-worlds delineable through category/topos theory — without positing a transcendental subject as co-extensive with the latter field/stratum — i.e., the regions of appearances.

But this leads Badiou to talk incomprehensibly about appearances without a who/what to which they appear — with this incomprehensible talk being what purportedly legitimates the idea of a transcendental decoupled from any transcendental subject.

Meillassoux, in contrast, actually provides no support what-soever for this decoupling,given his avoidance of characterizing the material beings-in-themselves referred to by the ancestral utterances of the natural sciences as paradoxical non-manifest manifestations — i.e., appearances appearing to/for nobody and nothing.

For the archi-fossil argument to buttress Badiou’s hypothesis regarding worlds-without-subjects — this hypothesis expresses the essence of his attempt at conceiving a non/anti-Kantian transcendental — the archi-fossil would have to belong to a world.

But although M’s archi-fossil belongs to an asubjective earth-on-its-own, it is not part of a world;

in other (Badiouian) words, this ancestral being is part of a world-less earth, a world, as it were, before worlds. in the absence of this support he claims to find in M’s thought, B is faced with the unappetizing prospects of the collapse of his distinction between being (as l’être en tant qu’être [being qua being]) and appearing as (être-là [being-there])  and/or a failure thoroughly to cleanse a retained transcendentalism of its associated idealism. 80

adrian johnston meillassoux badiou

Johnston, Adrian. “Phantom of consistency: Alain Badiou and Kantian Transcendental Idealism.” Continental Philosophy Review. 41 (2008): 345–366.

There are three fundamental reasons why Kant functions as one of the main nemeses for Badiouian philosophy.

First, Badiou blames him for having invented the motif of finitude, a motif present nowadays in various guises. Badiou’s tirades against this motif recur throughout his writings in the form of attacks upon not only epistemologies of finite subjective knowledge, but also upon promotions of mortality, of death-bound being, as philosophically foundational and ultimate.

Second, Badiou balks at Kant’s invocation of the ostensible ‘‘limits of possible experience’’ insofar as this boundary-line partitioning noumena from phenomena entails the prohibition of constructing a rational ontology. The Kantian critical-transcendental apparatus insists that only a de-ontologized epistemology is philosophically valid and defensible, which, in light of Badiou’s post-Heideggerian ontological ambitions, is a position that must be eradicated.

Third, for Badiou as a committed materialist, the idealism of Kantian transcendental idealism is simply unacceptable. Badiou’s transcendental is both asubjective and (materially) immanent to the world of which it is, at one and the same time, both a structuring scaffolding as well as an internal component.  348

With implicit reference to the Kantian gesture of enclosing subjects within the prison-houses and shadow-theaters of their own cognition, Badiou sneeringly dubs Kant ‘‘our first professor,’’ the initiator of a sterile academic orientation in philosophy whose very theoretical content reflects the alleged practical fact of its lack of substantial connections to any sort of (so to speak) real world.

What accounts for the genesis of the relative coherence and organization of “worlds” (i.e., structured domains of relations between presentable entities) out of the incoherence and disorganization of pure being an sich?

One might anticipate that it is in response to precisely this query that Badiou re-deploys the notion of the transcendental. However, such is not the case. Badiou’s transcendental is co-extensive with what he calls “worlds”.

More specifically, each Badiouian world, as a regional sphere within which multiple-being is made to appear in the form of localized/situated existences according to the relational logic of this same sphere, is ordered by its own “transcendental regime”.

Additionally, he contends that there are indefinite numbers of worlds both possible and actual. Hence, the Badiouian transcendental isn’t a concept-term denoting delineable (pre)conditions for the emergence of phenomenal being-there (i.e., the appearances and presentations of transcendentally structured worlds) out of ontological being qua being (as distinct from any and every phenomenology).

To the extent that Badiou’s transcendental is internal to and entirely entangled with the circumscribed domain of être-la it cannot simultaneously operate in a mediating transitional role between this domain and l’être en tant qu’être.

Badiou seems to be left with the unanswered questions of how and why being(s) give rise to worlds (the latter involving the transcendental as each world’s organizing state/regime). In isolation from Kant’s idealism, the broadest sense of his notion of the transcendental has to do with conditions of possibility. In this sense, Badiou’s transcendental begs the question of the conditions of possibility for its own surfacing out of the Real of being.

Who or what catalyzes the coming into existence of the being-there of appearances? Badiouian transcendentalism, if there is such a thing, would thus require supplementation by a meta-transcendentalism, an explanation of that which makes possible this very catalyzing.

Again and again, Badiou opposes the crucial move at the heart of the Kantian critical “Copernican revolution,” namely, the insistence that knowable reality conforms to the mediating templates of subjective cognition (rather than this cognition directly apprehending real being in and of itself).

As regards the former (i.e., a direct knowledge of l’être en tant qu’être), he claims, against Kant’s maintenance of the limits of possible experience, that cognition indeed can transgress these purported limits so as to seize being qua being in an unmediated fashion.

For Badiou, being-in-itself, unlike das Ding an sich, is “entirely knowable” (for this same reason, he disagrees with readings of Lacan in which the register of the Real is treated as akin or equivalent to Kant’s realm of noumena.  In Logiques des mondes, he speaks of thought’s ability to operate “beyond the limits of sensibility” so as to “synthetically think the noumenal and the phenomenal” (Hegel’s post-Kantian aspirations are mentioned here too)

 

 Compter pour Un  Counting For One

One of the core concepts entangled with the ontology elaborated inBeing and Event is that of ‘‘counting-for-one’’ (compter-pour-un).

This unifying operation, as an operation, isn’t itself a being in the strict ontological sense (i.e., something inhering within l’être en tant qu’être).

Instead, Badiou defines this ‘‘count’’ as distinct from being, although (supposedly) always-already having acted upon it so as to render being-in-itself presentable (as Fabien Tarby explains, “the unity of something is operational and not substantial”, and, “Unity is transitory, evanescent, operational”).

Any “situation,” as a locality within which unified entities can and do appear, is structured by a situation-specific operation of counting-for-one. Furthermore, from within any situation arising as an outcome of such a count, one can, after-the-fact of this operation, infer something (i.e., being qua being as pure multiplicities-without-one) retroactively presupposed as prior to this process of counting.

This leads Badiou to propose a distinction between “inconsistent multiplicity” and “consistent multiplicity”; the former is what presumably precedes the consistency-producing intervention of counting-for-one and the latter is what is created as a result of this unifying operation.

A situation structured by a count contains many ones (i.e., consistent multiplicities), while being as such, posited as anterior to this situational structuring and organization, “in-consists” of multiplicities without one-ness or unity (hence, “being qua being, strictly speaking, is neither one nor multiple” — with “multiple” here meaning many unified ones).

 

With respect to this matter, Badiou oscillates between two incompatible stances: On the one hand, when railing against Kantian epistemological finitude with its limits of possible experience denying direct access to noumena, he claims that the noumenal realm of Real being an sich indeed can be grasped cognitively in ways forbidden by Kant’s de-ontologizing epistemology;

On the other hand, he sometimes seems to reinstate essential features of the Kantian divide between the phenomenal and the noumenal when speaking of unsayble being-in-itself as inconsistent multiplicities-without-one inaccessible to all discourse and thought (even that of pure mathematics). 353

The phenomenal appearances of being-there (i.e., existence at the phenomenological level) are said to be constituted by virtue of the transcendental regime” of a “world” (monde) configuring given multiplicities (i.e., being at the ontological level). Real beings appear in a world, a domain of organized, inter-related phenomena, thanks to the structuring intervention of a transcendental architecture responsible for distributing varying degrees of “visibility” across the multiplicities of which a particular situation consists.  (W)

The “logics of worlds” spoken of by the title of this 2006 book are none other than the ordering networks and webs allegedly making possible the localized appearings that compose the tableaus of varying phenomenological regions of situated, differentially co-determining manifestations. (W)

on badiou being and event

Set Theory 55 minute tutorial on Utube

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bosteels event

Bosteels, Bruno.”What is an Event?” Lecture 02 Jul 2012
Bruno Bosteels “Event,” Encyclopedia of Political Theory. ed. Mark Bevir, vol. 2, Routledge (2010), 878-880.
Event
Follow-up discussion here

The event is arguably the core concept in contemporary European philosophy. While there is no shortage of references to the event in the Anglo-American tradition, from Alfred North Whitehead to Donald Davidson, the concept serves above all to define the principal stake of so-called Continental thought, from Martin Heidegger to Jacques Derrida to Catherine Malabou and from Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to Alain Badiou.

Genealogically, the event emerges with particular force toward the late sixties, marking a possible crossover point between structuralist and subject-centered approaches. Among the features that are relatively invariant in the use of its concept, we can mention the event’s contingent, unpredictable, singular, and radically transformative nature. Beyond these basic invariant traits, however, each individual thinker also gives the event a specific inflection. Major polemics thus concern the unicity or plurality of events, their ontological or nonontological inscription, their immanence or transcendence to the world as is, and their susceptibility to a hermeneutical or a dialectical understanding. Finally, the primacy attributed to the event in contemporary philosophy is not immune to criticisms and attacks from a political point of view, insofar as eventfulness, contingency, and difference in the context of late capitalism can be seen as descriptive of the current functioning of the global market, instead of promising its revolutionary transformation.

Genealogically speaking, we might say that the event becomes the central topic of theoretical and philosophical reflection precisely in the wake of the worldwide “events” of 1968. To think this revolutionary sequence, then, entails not only investigating what happened but also asking the underlying question of how to think the happening of that which happens. In French, this is often called the événementialité of the event, awkwardly translated as the “eventality” of the event, with the task of thinking, whether in history, in political theory, or in philosophy, being described as événementialisation, “eventalization.” Of course, we can also enumerate many conceptual precursors for this notion, such as Aristotle’s tuchè or “chance” as opposed to “automatism” or automaton; the role of clinamen, “deviation” or “swerve,” for ancient atomists after Lucretius; Machiavelli’s fortuna, “fortune” or “chance” in relation to virtù as “capacity” or “power” for intervention; Mallarmé’s coup de dés or “dice throw” as the attempt to “abolish” chance; Nietzsche’s “destiny” of breaking in two the history of humanity; or Heidegger’s Ereignis as “enowning.” These concepts have been variously retrieved among contemporary thinkers of the event, but they appear as precursors only in retrospect and as a result of such retrievals, which do not begin to give shape to a common doctrine until the late sixties in what is then frequently called post-metaphysical or anti-foundational thinking.

More specifically, the concept of the event bridges two traditions that otherwise are at loggerheads: a humanist, subject-centered approach and an anti-humanist focus on the action of the structure. An event is neither the expression of free human action nor the causal effect of structural determinisms.

Instead, an event occurs precisely when and where a certain dysfunction or systematic deadlock becomes visible through the intervention of a subject who, by gaining a foothold in this gap in the structure, at the same time profoundly reshuffles the coordinates that otherwise continue to be determining in the last instance.

The event, in other words, transversally cuts across the traditional oppositions of freedom and necessity, action and system, spontaneity and organization, movement and the State.

Among the event’s defining features we should list its contingency, its unpredictability, its singularity, and its transformative capacity. Beyond this basic consensus, however, we find a wide range of divergent and often polemical orientations.

In the Heideggerian tradition, for example, there is good reason to speak of the event only in the singular, as the event of being itself—being which “is” not but “happens” or “occurs.” This then raises the difficult question, which thinkers as diverse as Derrida and Deleuze grapple with in much of their work, of defining the relation between the unique event of being qua being and the occurrence of plural events in the everyday sense of the term.

For Badiou, on the contrary, the event is that which is not being qua being. In this orientation, therefore, ontology, as the science of being, can literally say nothing of the event, which rather calls for an intervening doctrine of the subject as operative in various fields or conditions, such as art, politics, or science.

A related polemic concerns the immanent or transcendent nature of the event with regard to the situation at hand. Here a Deleuzian orientation, which involves a reevaluation of virtuality outside the traditional binary of the real and the possible, will insist on the presence of the unique event of being as if folded into particular accidents. To this image of the event as fold, by contrast, we can oppose to notion of a radical break, which Badiou, for example, finds at work in Nietzsche and Mallarmé. Neither immanent nor transcendent, in fact, the event crosses out this very opposition for Badiou.

The method for thinking the event also changes depending on which of these basic orientations we adopt. Thus, if in everything that happens the virtuality of the one and only event of being is always already present, then our approach will ultimately take the form of a hermeneutic interpretation in which each item or entity (this or that occurrence) can also simultaneously be read as the expression of the immanence of being (the happening of all that occurs).

Conversely, if an event is inscribed in a specific situation by way of this situation’s deadlock and yet depends on a break with (existing representations of) being, then our approach will most likely take the guise of a dialectical articulation (not in the orthodox terms of negation and the negation of negation but as a logic of scission and of the exception).

The proliferation of theories of the random, multiple, contingent, and radically transformative event, however, can also be seen as the product of late capitalism, rather than as a counteracting force. Marx was after all quite enthusiastic about the power of capitalism to break down old feudal, patriarchal, or idyllic bonds and hierarchies.

But, if it is indeed capitalism itself that reveals all presence to be a mere semblance covering over random multiplicity, then the event as the core concern of post- metaphysical thought might turn out to be little more than descriptive of, if not complicitous with, the status quo.

Difference, multiplicity, or the primacy of events and becomings over subjects and objects, far from giving us critical leverage, thus would define our given state of affairs under late capitalism and its attendant cultural logic.

Further Readings

Badiou, A. (2005). Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum.

Casati, R., and Varzi, A. C., eds. (1996). Events. Aldershot-Dartmouth: International Research Library of Philosophy. Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on Actions and Events. New York: Oxford University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1990). The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press.

Derrida, J. (1982). “Signature Event Context,” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 309-330.

Foucault, M. (2003). “On the Archaeology of the Sciences: Response to the Epistemology Circle.” The Essential Foucault. Ed. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. New York: The New Press. 392-404.

Heidegger, M. (1999). Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). Trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Lyotard, J.F. (1990). Peregrinations: Law, Form, Event. New York: Columbia University Press.

Malabou, Catherine. (2004). The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic. Trans. Lisabeth During. New York: Routledge.

Rajchman, J. 1991. Philosophical Events. Essays on the Eighties. New York: Columbia University Press.

Whitehead, Alfred North. (1978). Process and Reality. New York: The Free Press.

jodi dean communist desire democratic drive

A better way to conceive the division within the people, one capable of expressing the power of the people in and as a collectivity but not as a whole and not as a unity, makes use of the psychoanalytic distinction between desire and drive . While Freud’s vicissitudes of the drive are generally known (reversal in to its opposite, turn ing ro und upon the subject’s own self, repression, and sublimation), two features of the perhaps less familiar Lacanian notion of drive bear emphasizing. The first concerns the difference between drive and desire as relations of jouissance, in other words, as economies through which the subject structures her enjoyment. Desire is always a desire to desire, a desire that can never be filled, a desire for a jouissance or enjoyment that can never be attained.

In contrast, drive attains jouissance in the repetitive process process of not reaching it. One doesn’t have to reach the goal to enjoy. Enjoyment attaches to the process, thereby capturing the subject. Enjoyment, no matter how small, fleeting, or partial, is why one persists in the loop of drive. The second feature concerns the different status of objet petit a in desire and drive.

Zizek In Defense of Lost Causes pg 328: Although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of the objet a as the object of desire, we have an object which was originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of the objet a as the object of drive, , the “object ” is directly the loss itself — in the shift from desire to drive we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.

That is to say, the weird movement called “drive”. is not driven by the “impossible” quest for the lost object; it is a push to directly enact the “loss ” — the gap, cut, distance-itself.

🙂 And here is Dean’s point:

The people as desiring have needs, needs they can only address together, collectively, active and in common. Their sovereignty can be reduced neither to their majority nor to their procedures. Rather, it names the cause and reason for government: the collective people in their desire for a common good. The people as caught in drive are fragmented, dispersed into networks and tributaries. Stuck in drive’s repetitive loops, they pursue their separate enterprises even as they are governmentalized objects, a population.

hegel democracy

Žižek, Slavoj. “Reply: What to Do When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil” positions: east asia cultures critique, Volume 19, Number 3, Winter 2011, pp. 653-669 (Article)

So what does it mean to begin from the beginning again? One should bear in mind that 1990 was not only the defeat of communist state socialism but also the defeat of the Western social democracy. Nowhere is the misery of today’s Left more palpable than in its “principled” defense of the social-democratic welfare state: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the welfare state, knowing well that the state will not be able to deliver. This necessary disappointment will then serve as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social- democratic Left and thus push the
people toward a new radical revolutionary Left. It is needless to add that such a politics of cynical “pedagogy” is destined to fail, since it fights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the welfare state to deliver will be rightist populism.

In order to avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the social- democratic welfare state.

One should never forget that 1989 was the defeat of both tendencies of the modern statist Left, communist and social- democratic. This is also why it is totally erroneous to put the hopes on strong (fully sovereign) nation-states (which can defend the acquisitions of the welfare state) against transnational bodies such as the European Union which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of global capital to dismantle whatever remained of the welfare state. From here, it is only a short step to accept the “strategic alliance” with the nationalist Right worried about the dilution of national identity in transnational Europe.

But the trickiest mode of the false fidelity to twentieth-century commu-nism is the rejection of all “really existing socialisms” on behalf of some authentic working- class movement waiting to explode … a traditional Marxist certain that— sooner or later, we just have to be patient and wait— an authentic revolutionary work-ers movement will arise again, victoriously sweeping away the capitalist rule as well as the corrupted official Leftist parties and trade unions. … the surviving Trotskyites who continued to rely on the trust that, out of the entire crisis of the Marxist Left, a new authentic revolution-ary working- class movement would somehow emerge.

So where are we today? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized the postsocialist situation as “this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing on the ruins of Evil”: there is no question of any nostalgia, the com-munist regimes were “evil”— the problem is that what replaced them is also “evil,” albeit in a different way. In what way?

Back in 1991, Badiou gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from the times of really existing socialism about the difference between the democratic West and the communist East: in the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly awaited and has a great echo, but they are prohibited to speak and write freely, while in the West, they can say and write whatever they want, but their word is ignored by the wide public.

Although Lukacs used the famous Hegelian couple “in- itself/for- itself” to describe the becoming- proletariat of the “empirical” working class as part of social reality, this doesn’t mean that class consciousness arises out of the “objective” social process, that it is “inscribed, almost programmed, in and by historical and social reality”: the very absence of class consciousness is already the outcome of the politico- ideological struggle. In other words, Lukacs doesn’t distinguish the neutral objective social reality from subjec-tive political engagement, not because, for him, political subjectivization is determined by the “objective” social process, but because there is no “objective social reality” that is not already mediated by political subjectivity.

This brings us to Badiou’s dismissal of the critique of political economy. Since he conceives economy as a particular sphere of positive social being, he excludes it as a possible site of a “truth-event.” But once we accept that economy is always political economy, that is, a site of political struggle, and that its depoliticization, its status as a neutral sphere of “servicing the goods,” is in itself always-already the outcome of a political struggle, then the prospect opens up of the repoliticization of economy and thus of its reassertion as the possible site of truth-event.

Badiou’s exclusive opposition between the “corruptive” force of economy and the purity of the communist idea as two incompatible domains introduces an almost gnostic tone into his work: on the one side the noble citoyenstruggling on behalf of the principled axiom of equality, on the other side the “fallen” bourgeois, a miserable “human animal” striving for profits and pleasures. The necessary outcome of such a gap is terror: it is on account of the very purity of the communist idea motivating the revolutionary process, of the lack of “mediation” between this Idea and social reality, that the Idea can intervene into historical reality without betraying its radical character only in the guise of self- destructive terror.

This is why the “critique of political economy” is crucial if we are to surmount this deadlock: only through a change in the structure of capitalism can the circle of necessary defeats be broken.

It is crucial to clearly distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossible-real of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here redoubled, it serves as a mask of itself, that is, the ideological function of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility.

Today, the ruling ideology endeavors to make us accept the “impossibility” of a radical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained to parliamentary game, and so on, in order to render invisible the impossible/real of the antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies.

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order, that is, its constitutive antagonism— which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in a “crazy” act that changes the basic “transcendental” coordinates of a social field.

This is why, as Alenka Zupancic put it, Jacques Lacan’s formula of overcoming an ideological impossibility is not “everything is possible,” but “impossible happens.”

The Lacanian real/impossible is not an a priori limi-tation that should realistically be taken into account, but it is the domain of act, of interventions that can change its coordinates: an act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible— an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.

This is why communism also concerns the real: to act as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism underlying today’s global capitalism.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal but a critical notion— to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite.

So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, and so forth? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — that is, its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a reaction— a false, mystifying, reaction, of course— against a real aw of
liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself— the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left.

In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to  remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal — on the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself in a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. This is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith cannot only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on “terror,” indicated by Christ’s words that he brings sword, not peace, and that whoever doesn’t hate his or her father and mother is not his true follower, and so forth. The content of this terror is the rejection of all traditional hierarchic community ties, with the wager that another collective link is possible based on this ter-ror, an egalitarian link of believers connected by agape as political love.

Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. One should follow Claude Lefort’s description of democracy here: the democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his or her expert and leadership properties. This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of  power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.

And this is also why one can supplement in a democratic way Hegel’s deduction of monarchy. Hegel insists on the monarch as the “irrational” (contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power apart from the experts (for him embodied in state bureaucracy) — while the bureaucracy rules by expertise; that is, while bureaucrats are chosen on account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is a king by his birth, ultimately, by a lot, on account of natural contingency.

The danger Hegel is thereby trying to avoid exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy, which is precisely the rule of (communist) experts: Stalin is NOT a figure of a master but the one who “really knows,” who is an expert in all imaginable fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.

But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral
result: far from being its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totali-tarian temptation— which is why, as it was already clear to the Ancient Greeks, the most democratic form of selecting who will rule us is by a lot.

That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its great-est crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, “the throne is empty,” which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus reenacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order.

Hegel is thus perhaps— measured by his own standards of what a ratio-nal state should be— wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831). It is pre-cisely democracy (democratic universal election) that (much more appropri-ately than his own state of estates) accomplishes the “magic” trick of convert-ing the negativity (the self- destructive absolute freedom that coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new political order. In democracy, the radi-cal negativity of terror, the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify with the place of power, is aufgehobenand turned into the positive form of democratic procedure.

Today, when we know the limitation of the formal democratic procedure, the question is whether we can imagine a step further in this direction of  the reversal of egalitarian negativity into a new positive order. One should look for traces of such an order in different domains, including the scientific communities. A report on how the CERN community (European Organi-zation for Nuclear Research) is functioning is indicative here: in an almost utopian way, individual efforts coexist with nonhierarchic collective spirit, and the dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang) far outweighs material considerations.

We are in the middle of a new wave of “enclosure of commons”: the com-mons of our natural environs, of our symbolic substance, even of our genetic inheritance. … Antonio Negri was right with his anti- Socialist title Good- Bye Mr. Socialism: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, instead of the egalitarian collective, offers a solitary organic community— Nazism was national socialism, not national communism. There can be socialist anti-Semitism; there cannot be a communist one. (If it appears, as in Stalin’s last years, it is an indicator that one is no longer faithful to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title “Social-ism Has Failed. Now Capitalism Is Bankrupt. So What Comes Next?” The answer is communism. Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without the fourth one, without the singular universality of the proletariat.

The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long- term antago-nism and simultaneously to avoid the communist solution will be to reinvent some kind of socialism in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatsoever.

The future will be communist or socialist. How, then, are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe in a communist way? It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the “eternal idea” of revolutionary- egalitarian justice. What is demanded is:

– strict egalitarian justice. All people should pay the same price in eventual renumerations, that is, one should impose the same worldwide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing third world countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development;

– terror. Ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal “freedoms” and technological control of the prospective lawbreakers;

– voluntarism. The only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large- scale collective decisions that will run counter to the “spontaneous” immanent logic of capitalist development; as Walter Benjamin pointed out in his “Theses on the Concept of History,” today, the task of a revolution is not to help the historical tendency or
necessity to realize itself but to “stop the train” of history that runs toward the precipice of global catastrophe— an insight that gained new weight with the prospect of ecological catastrophe;

– and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people (the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the “informer” who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)

This is how what once was called communism can still be of use today.

dean on the party

Back to the Party (again, with Zizek and Badiou)

Žižek provides one of the most compelling arguments why the party is not outmoded, why we have not entered a political time that has surpassed the need for a party, and why the party is not a form confined to the limits it encountered in a prior sequence. The most succinct way to put the argument is the “proletarian struggles with a foreign kernel.” Another way to make the same point is to say that the proletariat is not self-identical; it is split. Or, the proletariat doesn’t know what it desires; it confronts its own desire as something foreign or mysterious.

What are the implications of this idea for thinking about the potential of a party for us? I begin by looking at how Zizek approaches his discussion, namely, via Lenin’s paraphrase–and revision–of Kautsky with respect to the idea that the working class needs non-working class intellectuals to bring knowledge to them. This idea has been widely criticized, viewed as elitist or as a failure to trust the workers. Zizek emphasizes that Lenin and Kautsky are not the same here: where Kautsky says that intellectuals are external to the class struggle, Lenin says they are external to the economic struggle, which means they are still within the class stuggle. So, the first thing to note is that the perspective of the party is one that is not external to class struggle but embedded within it.

Nonetheless, there is an externality here, an externality to the economic struggle. This is important insofar as without this external perspective, the working class remains subordinate to bourgeois ideology. Its spontaneous development can go no further. The perspective of the party, then, is one that situates the economic struggle within the larger class struggle. It makes the economic struggle appear not as a matter for these workers in this factory but as part of a larger, more fundamental conflict, the antagonism constitutive of capitalist society.

Another way to express the same point is to note that the working class is a bourgeois subject. It is constrained within a field or discourse configured by and for the bourgeoisie; it gets its position from within this field. So it might refuse and resist, sabotage and strike, but all these actions are still confined within a field given by the bourgeoisie, configured for its interests, in its behalf. To be another kind of subject, the subject of another field, discourse, politics (sequence?), to be proletarian, requires a break or twist, a shift to another field, the field of the Party.

Badiou has something like this in mind in Theory of the Subject when he notes the internal split in the working class between its ‘true political identity’ and ‘its latent corruption by bourgeois or imperialist ideas and practices’ (8). He writes: “the practical (historical) working class is always the contradictory unity of itself as proletariat and of it specific bourgeois inversion … This unity of opposites is determined .. by the general bourgeois space” (9). And, “the bourgeoisie makes a subject” (42); “the subjective effect of their force lies in the divided people” (42).

Zizek writes: “‘external’ intellectuals are needed because the working class cannot immediately perceive its own place within the social totality, which enables it to accomplish its ‘mission’–this insight has to be mediated through an external element.” This external element is the Party.

The Party is not identical to the ‘external intellectuals.’ As we know from “What is to be Done?” Lenin assumed that the membership of the Party would come from intellectuals and workers, in fact, that those categories blurred and intermingled; they were not fixed and firm as some kind of split between mental and physical labor. The Party, then, cannot be localized onto a specific, empirical set of people. In fact, because it is not reducible to a number of given people, it cannot be said to ‘substitute’ these people for the workers, proletariat, or masses. To assume so is to make a kind of category mistake.

The Party “gives form” to the external element, to the setting in which the workers are situated but which remains opaque to them with respect to their own position in it. It does this in several senses.

First, the Party occupies the position of the proletariat’s own decenteredness. It takes that place; it inserts itself there. Zizek writes: “it is not possible for the working class to actualize its historical mission spontaneously — the Party must intervene from the outside, shaking it out of the self-indulgent spontaneity.” He continues, “in psychoanalysis there is no self-analysis proper; analysis is possible only if a foreign kernel gives body to the object-cause of the subject’s desire.”

[Unfortunately for me as I typed this I realized that psychoanalysis is in fact rooted in Freud’s self-analysis. My best guess is that the way out of this would be to focus on Freud’s dream analysis and his writing, understanding these as practices of externalization and working through that ultimately were taken up in letters to and discussions with others.]

I understand the analogy between working class and analysand/Party and analyst as relying on the insight that we do not know our own desire; desire remains opaque to us; it is unconscious, manifest in our actions, our practices, in various symptoms or distortions, but not something we know. Nor is it something we choose–rather, we are who we are because, in a way, desire has chosen us; we are who are because of the desire that makes us. It is in us more than ourselves, a constitutively foreign, even alienating kernel. [I add alienating here as a step toward rejecting a politics rooted in a critique of alienation; alienation is constitutive and unavoidable.]

The argument for the split nature of the working class is important as a response to those who would posit in workers a clear knowledge of what they want and who would link this knowledge to politics. Put in old fashioned Leninist terms, this can only take us as far as trade union consciousness. It remains within the economic struggle rather than the class struggle.

Second, the Party gives form to a new kind of knowledge, knowledge rooted not in some determinate content but linked “to a collective political subject.” The Party doesn’t know everything; it provides a position from which to know. We could say that it opens up another field, another discourse. The Party holds this field in place, providing the working class within a new place, the place of the proletariat.

From within the economic struggle, only the opposition between worker and bourgeoisie was possible. The external element of the Party opens out another field, one in which the proletariat is its subject. Zizek writes,

“What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our ‘I’ in the “we” of the Party’s collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line –just don’t do it alone, outside the Party. Exactly as in Lacan’s formula of the discourse of the analyst, what is important about the Party’s knowledge is not its content, but the fact that it occupies the place of Truth.”

So, with respect to knowledge, the Party is not necessary because of its knowledge of history, of struggles, or of anything. It’s necessary because its knowing stems from class struggle. The Party speaks from the position of the truth of class struggle as the fundamental antagonism. To say that the position of the Party is true is to designate the position from which the Party speaks, the fact that it holds in place a field or discourse or set of meanings.

[A filled out account of the Party as analogous to the analyst would note that the subject is in the position of addressee and that the master is remaindered. This suggests a formal way of describing the perhaps some of the resistance felt towards the Party and its demands, its requirements and its discipline that we know may be wrong or arbitrary and may very well result in failure insofar as the Party cannot guarantee its own political success; again, the Master is remaindered.]

Third, by giving form to the divided working class (the class within the field of the bourgeoisie), the Party occupies the place of its division and establishes the field for a new subject, the proletariat (or, in my jargon, the people as the rest of us, the people understood in terms of the primacy of division). With respect to the analogy with the analyst, this does not mean that the Party knows the secret of the working class (and thereby turns it into the proletariat). Nor does it mean that the Party cures the working of its bourgeois tendencies, and thereby subjectifies it. Rather, the Party holds open the place necessary for this subjectification.

If we think of analysis as providing the space within which the analysand can concentrate his or her feelings, fantasies, and experiences, then we can think of action in relation to, in the context of, the Party as an analogous kind of concentration. Badiou is appropriate here when he condemns the idea of ‘convergence of struggles.’

You may ‘coordinate’ them as much as you like, but a sum of revolts does not make a subject. The geometric character of ‘convergence’ must be replaced with the qualitative character of concentration . . . Convergence is the typical objectivist deviation, in which, once the work of subjective purification is spirited away, antagonism finds itself ill-advisedly dissolved (44).

To sum up, the Party is necessary because the people are split. They are split between the way they are given, positioned, within capitalism. They are situated within a field that tells them who they are and what they can be, that establishes the matrix of their desire (Zizek’s definition of ideology), but that represses the truth of this field in class struggle. The Party asserts this truth, it speaks from the position of this truth and offers another field of possibilities, a discourse for another subject. In contrast, opposition to, capitalist desire, it opens up a terrain for the desire of another subject, a collective, political subject.

At this point, I have basically repeated points I’ve already made in Zizek’s Politics and The Communist Horizon. Why bother? Because at least one element of the analogy between the party and the analyst remains unexplored, the status of each as a transferential object. This is what I want to explore next–the party as a transferential object. What does this mean and what does it accomplish? My intuition is that this is a crucial matter for a defense of the party. Accounts of small, open, and fluctuating groups and associations generally ignore transference. That is, they proceed flatly, as if associations were nothing but assemblages of people working together (with varying degrees of conflict). The unconscious component of association is ignored. I’ll take this up in subsequent posts.

event fidelity

Badiou, A. (2003) After the Event: Rationality and the Politics of Invention, an interview with Alain Badiou conducted by the Radical Politics group at the University of Essex.  pp. 180-197.

What needs to be said, to be more precise on this point, is that an event creates  the conditions of intelligibility of its situation, and these new conditions of  intelligibility are applied, in particular, to itself. Hence, the intelligibility of the event is neither prospective nor calculative; it is rather retroactive.  Therefore, even if I sometimes compare the event to a miracle, a grace, etc., these are only metaphors. Undoubtedly, I remain rationalist in my appreciation of the event, and convinced that it is intelligible. Yet, precisely because it is an event, it is only intelligible afterwards, its conditions of intelligibility can never be anticipated.

Consequently, one cannot say that an event is religious, because “religious”  always means that something remains unintelligible, that something is definitely mysterious: there is something in God’s design that remains forever inaccessible. This is not the case of the event. There is an intelligibility of the event, but one that is created, and in many ways this constitutes one of the definitions of fidelity: fidelity is the creation in the future tense of the intelligibility of the event. This is the reason why thinking the intelligibility of the event understanding of the Revolution of 1917 took much time – perhaps it is still not complete – but this does not imply that it is a mystery. In sum, when events are constituted, they were not calculable, predictable, and were not part of the previous rationality. One must understand that an event is also the creation of new instruments of rationality what experience are you committing yourselves to? What is your experience? This leads to a new form of the creation of rationality.

Foucault is a very complicated thinker, especially in politics, where very few risks were taken.  But it is possible to interpret Foucault as someone who says: finally, power and resistance are the same thing.  I think this is not the case at all. I think that we only have resistance to the State when it is constituted elsewhere, when it is heterogeneous to the nature of the power. I really believe in the “power of the two”, in the power of difference, but a true difference, not false difference, such as thinking that we have a single twisted space, as if resistance was the torsion of power.  I am not favourable to this idea.

[…]   But it is not the case that if we have movements, we also have politics. This is a very important point. There are innumerable movements that constantly occur; some movements are renewals of political thought, but this is not the same as simply being a movement and nothing more. Negri always speaks of the great creativity of the multitudes (multitude is the new name for masses, let us admit to this), but where have we seen this creativity?  It is not because you’re protesting at Genoa that there is a creativity of the multitude. I have seen hundreds of these type of protests over the years and can honestly say that there isn’t an ounce of creativity in all of this.

Hence, the problem of creativity at this stage is a problem of knowing what creates a political heterogeneity. But to create a political heterogeneity supposes very complicated and very novel principles of rupture. I am not saying that all this is easy, on the contrary. But at least we have this idea: we have this experimental idea of seeing how, on a certain number of issues, in a certain number of spaces, we can finally create political heterogeneity. Here, there is an empirical rule: I think that we can finally create political heterogeneity in continuity only with popular  components that are themselves heterogeneous, and that the little civil bourgeoisie is not the one that will create by itself such political heterogeneity.

The anti-globalisation movement is also a movement that is – in old Marxist terms – bourgeois. Let us put aside this old vocabulary, but let us also admit that anti-globalisation is not a popular movement. This at least is clear! It is perhaps an ideological movement, which is interesting, but all in all, I think that it remains confined within the categories that are not those of the heterogeneous.

My difference with Negri on this point is almost ontological; it is truly fundamental. It is really the attempt to create from scratch a substantialist, vitalist, and political – homogenous, finally – vision, whose practical form is in fact the movement itself. There is no other practical form than the movement. But the movement does not resolve by itself the questions of politics.  Politics is first and foremost the creation of spaces: you must create your space.

analyst discourse

Bryant, Levi R. “Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist” International Journal of Žižek Studies (Vol 2, no. 4) 1-48.

Discourse of Critical Theory

a –> S1
S2     $

As Žižek writes in the introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology,

In contrast to [the] Althusserian ethics of alienation in the symbolic ‘process without a subject’, we may denote the ethics implied by Lacanian psychoanalysis as that of separation. The famous Lacanian motto not to give way on one’s desire [ne pas céder sur son desir]– is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the Real from its symbolization: it is this surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-cause of desire. To come to terms with this surplus (or, more precisely, leftover) means to acknowledge the fundamental deadlock (‘antagonism’), a kernel resisting symbolic integration-dissolution (Žižek 1989: 3). 34

Are analysis and engaged political activity consistent with one another? As Lacan remarks at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “[t]he analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it” (Lacan 1998: 276).

The analysand begins analysis in the dimension of the imaginary, treating everything and everyone as the Same. Over the course of analysis what emerges is an absolutely singular constellation of signifiers, specific to this subject and this subject alone as determinants of his unconscious (hence Lacan’s reference to
the subject being in a position to subject himself to this primary signifier).

Lacan goes so far as to suggest that the primary signifiers uncovered in analysis are pure non-sense. “…[T]he effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense…” (Ibid: 250). If this primary signifier has the status of non-sense, then this is precisely because it is not common but particular to the subject and no other.

It is thus difficult to see how it is possible to get a politics out of the discourse of the analyst, for the discourse of the analyst does not aim at collective engagement or the common– which is necessary for politics –but the precise opposite.

Nonetheless, there is a kernal of truth in Žižek’s characterization of his own position in terms of the discourse of the analyst. Unlike the politics of the discourse of the master premised on the fantasy of imaginary organic totality, any revolutionary politics must speak not from the position of totality, but from the standpoint of the Real, of antagonism, of the remainder, or of that which the other social ties function to veil or hide from view.

In other words, revolutionary political engagement differs from the politics of the State and master in that it approaches the social from the perspective of the Real, treating this as the truth of social formations.

As Žižek remarks, All ‘culture’ is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize — to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis.

It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension (Žižek 1989: 5).

Where the politics of the master treats this imbalance or traumatic kernel of radical antagonism as an accident to be eradicated and overcome, the critical-revolutionary politics treats the tension as the truth that allows a whole set of social symptoms to be discerned and engaged.

For example, Marx does not treat discontent among the proletariat as an anomalous deviation disrupting the social to be summarily dismissed, but rather as the key to the systematic organization of capitalism and the perspective from which capitalist production is to be understood, and as the potential for revolutionary transformation.

The mark of any critical-revolutionary political theory will thus be that objet a, the remainder, the gap, the traumatic kernel, occupies the position of the agent in the social relation.

subject of truth death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

In sum, according to Žižek (and Santner) the Freudian notion of death drive, and more generally Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis, would provide Badiou with an anti-humanist anthropology that, as a necessary supplement to his purely formal theory of the subject, would allow him to explain more precisely what it is about the human animal that makes it capable, in contrast to all other animals, of breaking with its immediate needs and desires in order to dedicate itself to a Cause beyond its own self-interests, in short, to become a subject of truth.

difference between Ž and Badiou on subject

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010

What does the freedom that the death drive enables look like?

Žižek (FTKN 206; CWZ 94, 135; PV 202, 210, 231) clearly links death drive with freedom. The death drive as a ‘self-sabotaging structure’ is what enables a break with the determinism of both our natural instincts and our ‘second nature’ in terms of the cultural dialectic of law and desire in service of the pleasure principle. This rupture with the normal run of things made possible by the death drive represents, as Žižek (PV 231) puts it, ‘the minimum of freedom’. So, according to Žižek, freedom in its most elementary form is a rupture, a break with determinism.

“I am determined by causes (be it direct brute natural causes or motivations), and the space of freedom is not a magic gap in this first-level causal chain but my ability retroactively to choose/determine which causes will determine me.” Thus, a free act is not simply what sets off a new causal sequence; rather it is the retroactive act of endorsing which causal sequence will determine me. 207

Žižek explains the retroactive character of this ‘second level reflexive causality’ through a useful opposition between what he terms the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’ and the notion of time displayed in a passage in Henri Bergson’s Two Sources of Morality and Religion.

In the ‘ordinary historical notion of time’, possibilities precede their realization, whereas the Bergsonian notion of time is characterized by the assertion that an act (realization) retrospectively opens up its own possibility.

Rather than thinking of times as succeeding moments all loaded with multiple possibilities just waiting to be realized, according to the Bergsonian notion of time, an event only even becomes possible after it has happened, and so it is not determined by its past, rather it changes the past retrospectively by now appearing as a (realized) possibility. 207

In a brief excurse in his 2008 book In Defense of Lost Causes, Žižek offers two explanations for Badiou’s (mistaken) opposition to the notion of death drive. The first reason for Badiou’s reluctance is, according to Žižek, due to the fact that he relates the death drive to the ‘religious’ motif of finitude.

But, as we have just seen in the above, in Žižek’s view the death drive has nothing to do with the pathos of finitude and obsession with mortality, on the contrary. So, as Žižek (IDLC 395) puts it, “What Badiou misses here is the fact that ‘death drive’ is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis: for an uncanny excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.”

The second reason for Badiou’s dismissal of the death drive is, according to Žižek (IDLC 394), an all too crude opposition in Badiou’s (e.g. IT 62; D 91-92) philosophy between the rupture of the event as the introduction of genuine novelty and repetition as an obstacle for the rise of anything truly new.

As demonstrated by Adrian Johnston (2007d, 165) in an article on Žižek’s reading of Badiou, the heart of the matter in Žižek’s critique of Badiou’s hostility to the notion of death drive is not this hostility as such, but a more fundamental matter concerning the very core of Badiou’s theory of the subject, namely the question of how Badiou explains what makes a mere human animal, caught up in a life dictated entirely by its self-interests and desire, capable of suddenly taking the decision to be true to an event and thus becomes a subject of truth. Or, to put it in terms of Badiou’s Pauline formula of ‘not…but’:

What is it that enables the individual under the law to withdraw from (‘not’) the law, from the path of the flesh, in order to affirm (‘but’) the exception of the gracious event and thus becomes a subject, entering the path of the spirit? Žižek touches upon this matter in his extensive discussion in The Ticklish Subject of the differences between Badiou’s philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the section entitled ‘The Lacanian Subject’, Žižek (TTS 159) outlines what he takes to be the core of the matter:

“That is the difference between Lacan and Badiou: Lacan insists on the primacy of the (negative) act over the positive establishment of a ‘new harmony’ […] while for Badiou, the different facets of negativity […] are
reduced to so many versions of ‘betrayal’ of (or infidelity to, or denial of) the positive Truth-event.” It is undoubtedly correct that Badiou, at least prior to Logics of Worlds, seems to describe any negative mode of relationship to an event as a disqualification for being a subject; that is, anyone who denies an event can of course never become a subject, and anyone who betrays his fidelity to an event is no longer a subject.

But, the question is, whether Badiou, as Žižek seems to imply, refuses negativity as such in regard to the subject. Nevertheless, Žižek (TTS 159) is completely right, when he in the succeeding paragraph states that: “This difference between Badiou and Lacan concerns the precise statusof the subject: Badiou’s main point is to avoid identifying the subject with the constitutive void of the structure […].” (BE 432; C 202-203; IT 86) Badiou has himself on more than one occasion declared this as the crucial difference between Lacanian psychoanalysis and his own philosophy.

Žižek (TTS 159-160) elaborates further on this difference between Lacan and Badiou concerning the subject in the following way:

For Badiou […] the subject is consubstantial with a contingent act of Decision; while Lacan introduces the distinction between the subject and the gesture of subjectivization: what Badiou […] describe[s] is the process of subjectivization – the emphatic engagement, the assumption of fidelity to the Event […] while the subject is the negative gesture of breaking out of the constraints of Being that opens up the space of possible subjectivization.

In Lacanese, the subject prior to subjectivization is the pure negativity of the death drive […]

In other words, according to Žižek, Badiou wrongly equates the subject with the process of subjectivization, that is, to put it in Badiou’s terms, with the ‘operation’ of decision, fidelity and forcing by means of which we pass from being a mere human animal to becoming a subject of truth. What Badiou misses here is … the negative moment or dimension that grounds the decision to affirm the event, the dimension that makes it possible to engage in a fidelity to an event in the first place. And this dimension is precisely the self-sabotaging dimension of the death drive. (TTS 160)

moment of madness between nature and culture death drive

Peter Karlsen The Grace of Materialism Theology with Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek. Københavns Universitet 2010.

Freud formulated his thesis on the death drive precisely in response to phenomena which could not be explained on the basis of the ‘pleasure principle’, phenomena that were ‘beyond the pleasure principle’, and its directive of self-preservation. In Žižek’s (CWZ 61) words:

“In trying to explain the functioning of the human psyche in terms of the pleasure principle, reality principle and so on, Freud became increasingly aware of a radical non-functional element, a basic destructiveness and excess of negativity, that couldn’t be accounted for. And thatis why Freud posed the hypothesis of death drive.”

How did man go from being a mere animal to a being of language bound by the symbolic order? How was the passage from a natural into a civil or cultural state brought about? The answer given by classical Political Philosophy is of course the famous narrative of the ‘social contract’.

But in Žižek’s (FTKN 205) view this is an inconsistent explanation insofar that “[…] the fiction of a ‘social contract’ presupposes in advancewhat is or should be its result, its final outcome – the  presence of individuals who act according to rules of a civilized rational order […].” According to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 206), the passage from a natural to a cultural state cannot be accounted for in terms of a smooth continuous transition, something has to intervene between these two states. What the evolutionary narratives of social contract silently presuppose is, according to  Žižek (TTS 36), a kind of ‘vanishing mediator’ which is neither nature nor culture. So, what is this vanishing mediator? 193

Man did not become what he is through a “[…] spark of logos magically conferred on Homo sapiens[…].” Instead, Žižek’s (CWZ 80) claim is that the transition from nature to culture is enabled by a ‘malfunction’, a failure, in nature itself. As he (CWZ 65) puts it in one of his conversations with Glyn Daly: “We cannot pass directly from nature to culture. Something goes terribly wrong innature: nature produces an unnatural monstrosity and I claim that it is in order to cope with, to domesticate, this monstrosity that we symbolize.”

As the last part of the quote suggests, and as Žižek (TTS 37) explicitly underlines in his discussion in The Ticklish Subject, the symbolic order of law (culture) is thus not, as it is usually asserted, aimed at controlling our natural instincts and inclination (nature) but, rather directed against something in us which is not natural, namely this moment of thoroughly derailed, malfunctioning, denaturalized ‘nature’.

Indeed in the effort to domesticate this malfunctioning (de)nature “[…] man’s natural propensities are, rather, on the side of moral law against the excess of ‘unruliness’ that threatens his well-being” (TTS 37). As Žižek (TTS 289) emphasizes later in the same book, one should never forget that the law is ultimately in the service of the ‘pleasure principle’ which dictates our daily functioning in accordance with the upholding of our welfare; that is to say, the law is not opposed to our natural instincts as it is claimed in the standard story of ‘nature versus culture’, rather the law and the natural instincts are united in their attempt to constrain the derailed (de)nature of man endangering his self-preservation.

This mediating moment of malfunction, this intersection between nature and culture, which made possible the transition between these two states, only to ‘vanish’ under the domesticating reign of symbolic law and the ‘pleasure principle’, is, according to Žižek (TTS 36; FTKN 207; CWZ 65), nothing less than the emergence of the (death) drive.