{"id":10140,"date":"2012-12-19T18:37:03","date_gmt":"2012-12-19T23:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=10140"},"modified":"2012-12-19T18:58:58","modified_gmt":"2012-12-19T23:58:58","slug":"10140","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2012\/12\/19\/10140\/","title":{"rendered":"event fidelity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Badiou, A. (2003) After the Event: Rationality and the Politics of Invention<\/a>, an interview with Alain Badiou conducted by the Radical Politics group at the University of Essex.\u00a0\u00a0pp. 180-197.<\/p>\n

What needs to be said, to be more precise on this point, is that an event<\/span> creates \u00a0the conditions of intelligibility of its situation, and these new conditions of \u00a0intelligibility are applied, in particular, to itself. Hence, the intelligibility of the<\/span> event<\/span> is neither prospective nor calculative; it is rather retroactive<\/span>.\u00a0 Therefore, even if I sometimes compare the event<\/span> to a miracle, a grace, etc., these are only metaphors. Undoubtedly, I remain rationalist in my appreciation of the event<\/span>, and convinced that it is intelligible. Yet, precisely because it is an event<\/span>, it is only intelligible afterwards, its conditions of intelligibility can never be anticipated.<\/span><\/p>\n

Consequently, one cannot say that an event<\/span> is religious, because \u201creligious\u201d \u00a0always means that something remains unintelligible, that something is definitely mysterious: there is something in God\u2019s design that remains forever inaccessible. This is not the case of the event<\/span>. There is an intelligibility of the event<\/span>, but one that is created, and in many ways this constitutes one of the definitions of fidelity:<\/strong> fidelity<\/span> is the creation in the future tense of the intelligibility of the<\/span> event<\/span>. This is the reason why thinking the intelligibility of the event <\/span>understanding of the Revolution of 1917 took much time \u2013 perhaps it is still not complete \u2013 but this does not imply that it is a mystery. In sum, when events<\/span> are constituted, they were not calculable, predictable, and were not part of the previous rationality.<\/strong> One must understand that an event<\/span> is also the creation of new instruments of rationality<\/strong> what experience are you committing yourselves to? What is your experience? This leads to a new form of the creation of rationality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Foucault<\/strong> is a very complicated thinker, especially in politics, where very few risks were taken.\u00a0 But it is possible to interpret Foucault<\/strong> as someone who says: finally, power and resistance are the same thing.\u00a0 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<\/span> to the nature of the power.<\/span> I really believe in the \u201cpower of the two\u201d, 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. \u00a0I am not favourable to this idea.<\/p>\n

[…]\u00a0 \u00a0But 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?\u00a0 It is not because you\u2019re 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\u2019t an ounce of creativity in all of this.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hence, the problem of creativity at this stage is a problem of knowing what creates a political<\/strong> heterogeneity<\/span>. But to create a political heterogeneity<\/span> supposes very complicated and very novel principles of rupture.<\/span> 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<\/span>. Here, there is an empirical rule: I think that we can finally create political heterogeneity<\/span> in continuity only with popular \u00a0components that are themselves heterogeneous<\/span>, and that the little civil bourgeoisie is not the one that will create by itself such political heterogeneity<\/span>.<\/p>\n

The anti-globalisation movement is also a movement that is \u2013 in old Marxist terms \u2013 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n

My difference with Negri<\/strong> on this point is almost ontological; it is truly fundamental. It is really the attempt to create from scratch a substantialist, vitalist, and political \u2013 homogenous<\/strong>, finally \u2013 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.\u00a0 Politics is first and foremost the creation of spaces: you must create your space.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0\u00a0pp. 180-197. What needs to be said, to be more precise on this point, is that an event creates \u00a0the conditions of intelligibility of its situation, and these … Continue reading “event fidelity”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,20],"tags":[137],"class_list":["post-10140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-zizek","tag-interview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10140"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10142,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10140\/revisions\/10142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}