{"id":12041,"date":"2013-09-29T17:35:43","date_gmt":"2013-09-29T22:35:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=12041"},"modified":"2013-09-29T18:11:40","modified_gmt":"2013-09-29T23:11:40","slug":"12041","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2013\/09\/29\/12041\/","title":{"rendered":"badiou’s subject"},"content":{"rendered":"

Phelps, Hollis. Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology<\/em><\/a>. Acumen Publishing. 2013\u00a0 B2430.B274 P44 2013\u00a0\u00a0 Rye U
\n\ud83d\ude42 Phelps delves into Cantor’s infinity and also provides very useful discussion of Badiou as witness below. I should read this book carefully, because its a good resource for any work on Badiou in the future. <\/p>\n

Badiou\u2019s subject does not immediately correspond to the human individual. There is no one-to-one relationship between them. This gap between inidivudals and subject ruls out thinking of the subject in finite terms, as a category of morality, a locus or register of experience, or an ideological fiction.<\/p>\n

First, concerning the subject of morality, it does not matter for Badiou if it is the (neo-)Kantian subject of human rights or the Levinasian subject that underpins the \u201cethics of difference\u201d: both tend to flatten the subject \u201conto the empirical manifestness of the living body. What deserves respect is the animal body as such\u201d (LW 48; cf. E 4-29).<\/p>\n

Conceiving the subject primarily in moral terms ultimately reduces the human being to \u201cthe status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, [it] equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of living organism, pure and simple\u201d <\/p>\n

Badiou\u2019s main point is that understanding the subject as a category of morality confines the subject to finitude, to the limitation constitutive of individual human beings. The reduction of the subject to finitude is part and parcel of what Badiou pejoratively refers to in Logic of Worlds as \u201cdemocratic materialism\u201d, whose axiom is: \u201cThere are only bodies and languages\u201d Democratic materialism, and the subject that corresponds to it, takes as its horizon \u201cthe dogma of our finitude, of our carnal exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death.\u201d The claim that \u201cthere are only bodies and languages\u201d amounts to little more than a \u201cbio-materialism\u201d that reduces \u201chumanity to an overstretched vision of animality\u201d.<\/p>\n

Second, if the subject is not a category of morality, it is also not \u201ca register of experience, a schema for the conscious distribution of the reflexive and the non-reflexive; this thesis conjoins subject and consciousness and is deployed today as phenomenology\u201d (LW 48). The phenomenological or existential subject is, as Badiou points out, irrevocably bound to meaning, to the circulation of sense. It does, to be sure, exercise a transcendental function in relation to experience, but this subject can only conceive of the infinite as a horizon, as a negative correlate of the immediacy of its own essential finitude (BE 391).
\n[\u2026]
\nThird, although Badiou rejects conceiving the subject in either moral or existential terms, this does not lead him to reduce the subject to a mere ideological fiction, an \u201cinterpellation\u201d of the state and its apparatuses, as Louis Althusser thought. At both the political and the ontological level, the state certainly reproduces itself through various ideologies and their mechanisms. But strictly speaking that state exerts this pressure through the re-presentation of individuals, which latter, we have said, do not correspond to subjects for Badiou.<\/p>\n

In contrasts to these three broad understandings of the subject, Badiou\u2019s subject is a formal category. Badiou\u2019s subject is \u201cany local configuration fo a generic procedure from which a truth is supported\u201d (BE 391); the subject is for Badiou the \u201clocal status of a procedure, a configuration in excess of the situation. 74-75<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Phelps, Hollis. Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology. Acumen Publishing. 2013\u00a0 B2430.B274 P44 2013\u00a0\u00a0 Rye U \ud83d\ude42 Phelps delves into Cantor’s infinity and also provides very useful discussion of Badiou as witness below. I should read this book carefully, because its a good resource for any work on Badiou in the future. Badiou\u2019s subject does … Continue reading “badiou’s subject”<\/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":[45,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-badiou","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12041","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=12041"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12041\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12050,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12041\/revisions\/12050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}