Ethics, Riots and the Real

Badiou's Politics

1. Ethics

This text, Ethics anEssay on the Understanding of Evil, first published in 1993 and in English in 2001, appears as anomalous. Not only is ethics as generally conceived not a concern of Badiou but ethics when he does come to think about it is not the name of a virtuous process whereby a process is deemed correct if it conforms in its acts and ends with its moral referent; thus some good as referent of a substantive norm, let’s says, but marks, for Badiou, simply the keeping going in an orientation and an invention: one that doesn't necessarily take its orientation from what is supposed to already exist and, as such, can be an ethics at odds with the world as it goes, on the one hand, and some notion of the eternal verities on the other. It doesn't name ‘right going’, but ‘on going’ or as we’ll see, keeping going, continuing.

As you might know he does end his earlier work, Theory of the Subject, with a question of Ethics – but again, not what you’d find ‘on the curriculum’.

Theory of the Subject is a complex book: essentially an effort over a series of seminars, themselves spanning several years, to rethink the possibility of revolutionary politics, one not circumscribed by the practical exhaustion of prior sequences nor reconciled to them, and not within the confines of the historical determination of its theoretical trajectory.

In essence, Badiou seeks to explode all this history from within and retain the kernel of it, emancipation or justice, as the key to keeping on with it despite everything. That is to say, this ‘despite everything’ is the setting into concrete the years, after the 70’s, of the reaction to come: the sad complex we have inherited and reproduce as ourselves of individual nihilism and collective reaction. In other words, for want of some idea.

This attempt to recommence to think in this orientation, wherein it is ‘reasonable to revolt against the reactionaries’ – critically, to formalise the reason of this revolt by way of the revolt as such – sees Badiou call on a strange array of bedfellows: ancient Greek tragedy, Lacan, Mallarme, set and category theory, Hegel, Rousseau a certain Holderlin and so on. The idea is to see how in these inventions in thought, the invention in thought that remains invariant to any form of the revolt and to see how this invariance – decision, practice, discipline, organisation, continuing etc., is written there. So, the presented invariance, in the variety of its representations.

In other words, ethics names what we might call the illegal passage of a subject through the situation in which it is represented otherwise as this or that known and acting thing. Or, that which it is in the practice of not being. Hence, in Theory of the Subject, the passage of the subject is from courage to justice: which entails also the simultaneous traversing and annulling of the passage from anxiety to superego. You could say the second is where we are at and the first is where we want to get! The traverse from one to the other is not miraculous but decisive; if we want it we can make it. I’d say that we have forgotten this at the collective level even if at the individual or corporate level it is demanded of us, which in turn is the very means of our forgetting.

The latter two, anxiety and superego – the latter the imperative which orders the former – are the perennial temptations of the revolutionary subject, in whatever form: the places, we might say, of falling back or if you like the places of contemporary capitalist democracy, bound as it is by this double, which invites the subject to stop all its carry-on and return to the fold.

Thus anxiety, which ‘doesn’t lie’, marks in the subject that antagonism between structure and reason. To take up reason in revolt is what courage names: thus to go from anxiety to courage. That reason in revolt is addressed to all as what it is capable of, marks what is just in process and effect and stands against superego, which would return the revolt to the logic of the few, which is to say, to ‘father knows best’ thus to a state form. But what is critical here is that the ethics of the passage from courage to justice is oriented not to law, norms, morality, but to what happens – to what the situation is capable of. Hence, a subject ‘otherwise’.

In Being and Event, which apart from mentions of the title of Spinoza’s text, mentions ethics in passing only three or four times, he says this about ethics as imperative in Theory of the Subject:  'Decide from the standpoint of the undecidable.' Mallarme writes: 'Every thought emits a cast of dice.' On the basis that 'a cast of dice never will abolish chance', one must not conclude in nihilism, in the uselessness of action, even less in the management-cult of reality and its swarm of fictive relationships. For if the event is erratic, and if, from the standpoint of situations, one cannot decide whether it exists or not, it is given to us to bet; that is, to legislate without law in respect to this existence. Given that undecidability is a rational attribute of the event, and the salvatory guarantee of its non-being, there is no other vigilance than that of becoming, as much through the anxiety of hesitation as through the courage of the outside-place, …’

Mallarme, Lacan, Mao, set theory. All in this passage; all underpin what an ethics, if we must, can be. And the crucial line then is this: ‘legislate without law’. Or if you like, and I like this: ‘let the masses educate themselves in the great revolutionary project, let them decide for themselves what is just and what is not.’

In the revolution there is precisely no other right than the revolt itself – the revolt is the decision on that which precisely is not there in the situation, which is, in other words, illegal to it. The nothing of the situation, of what it is not. Let me be clear here, the revolt is not against injustice but for justice – this is its reason – other wise it would be one of those anti-this or that movements which are so attractive today, ostensibly, because all reason and thus all discipline has gone out of them.

The difference is that in Badiou’s formalisation of this question, this nothing is thinkable and not, thereby, the site for the nihilism of ‘anything goes because nothing is true’. The opposite. In a way, this is Badiou’s radicalism in a nutshell: that which is nothing to the laws of the world, to its forms of presentation, its logical reproductions, its language, the very means by which it determines what there is – is actually nothing. Or rather: this nothing is both immanent to what excludes it as such and can be thought – meaning its unthinkability cannot be, then, the category of its impossibility. And thus for Badiou, the determination of the unthinkable is the ruse of the superego and not at all true.

Indeed, to determine something unthinkable is the height of un-reason: hence, then, it is right or reasonable to revolt against the reactionaries whose very determinations rely on positing precisely this point of unthinkability. Badiou’s radicalism is very simple and formal: mathematically demonstrable, yes – the nothing is real, void – but also politically, poetically and amorously.

So what are we left with? Ethics names the subjective orientation to the process of making manifest the consequences of a decision on what for the world as it is is undecidable. Yes, the world is right, it is unknowable for it, excluded from and as such foundational for its knowledge, but that doesn't exhaust the being of the thing itself and hence to decide on its being, which an event exposes in the situation – that it can not-be – is the recommencement of its thought.

The revolution is the making manifest, the thinking of this being as true. Note here, though, there is no truth of being, only the being of what is true. A truth must become so. Ethics names this becoming so, so long as this becoming so, keeps going. There is, as Badiou says, ‘no ethics in general only an ethic of singular truths, and thus an ethic relative to a particular situation.’ And let me add, oriented by an event – which is precisely not being qua being; so not ‘always already’ and not ‘readily knowable’. This is why those schools of applied ethics are a comedy – they work on the Homer Simpson model of invention: take an existing product and put a clock in it.

If you have read the Intro and or the preface, both will point out to you that several key categories of his thought are brought to bear in the analysis of the contemporary situation in which ethics has found a renewal: especially in what is called identity politics and in the correlate legal-moralism of human rights discourse.

You will also have noted some invective – ‘moral terrorism, democratic totalitarianism’ – which is perhaps another name for humanitarian intervention, which comes in may forms let’s not forget: from drones, to boots on the ground, to advertising, free trade, opening of markets, privatisation, Israels genocidal occupation of Palestine, education... (The latter is probably the most exemplary in terms of how a supposed virtue hides an actual dispossession, exploitation and all round de-subjectivation. In my humble opinion the exporting of education is the capitalist Trojan horse par excellence.) Note here also the inversion of the two terms terrorism and totalitarianism – these are the watchwords of the new human rights ethics after all.

So Badiou remarks on a certain fury, just as I have noted here with education: the supposed good is the carrier of the worst. ‘The presumed 'rights of man' were serving at every point to annihilate any attempt to invent forms of free thought.’

In a real sense, this line describes the form of the book: a polemical critique of the dominant ideology of the day. As always, note, this ideology is backed by its correlate, the repressive apparatuses it serves hence humanitarian bombing if you fail to ‘get right’ and coupled to an act of free thought – a thought of ethics free from this ideological determination; more than a determination but an imperative and thus as if it comes from ‘elsewhere’, from God, for example. So again, from a place unquestionable as such.

This is the ruse of all morality as Nietzsche should have convinced us: or perhaps he convinced us too well in the sense that on the one hand we have taken the death of god too paradigmatically, too morally, dare I say it, and thus supposed that we must hold to, indeed, ‘will’ nothing at all. But this is to take the now dead God as everything! Hence, as I noted above, a subjective nihilism.

Part of the question here of an ethics of truths is precisely to return from God as guarantee to us in some way. But herein lies the other pole of the problem for what is this ‘us’? What is a human, a being possessed so they say, of certain inalienable rights? But – leaving aside the question of this being – in what sense inalienable, in what sense can there be a being of rights, and what are these rights?

What we have is a humanism, which, structurally at least is the replacing of God with us. But then come all the same problems of establishing the being and or existence of this thing which serves as the site of something inalienable. One of the ongoing controversies in theology was that of assigning predicates or even essences to God, the same goes for us in this discursive sense. What is it to be human? Of course Nietzsche imagined an overcoming of man in man – thanks of course to Life itself.

But for the humanists it's a question of knowledge or of ‘adequation’ such that a human is a being/body of rights. Thus, on the one hand, whatever effects these rights is right and human given it is adequate to the being of the animal, and, of course, whatever does not is not and this all by ‘right’. Hence, by recourse to a certain knowledge of what it is and can be to be human. Note here the equation of body and being – a fantastical trope with great currency – which, as we’ll see, is also crucial to the conception of human being as suffering body and thus of the suffering body as the truth of human rights. Note also that this notion of right is oriented by the knowledge of a limit - an un-knowlable or known unknown, if you like.

Hence, Badiou’s analysis as always is ‘a war on two fronts’: against the imperatives of the ethics of human rights, which fundamentally at the level of concept and thus effect accepts its Christian or theological inheritance into its legalist humanism; and against the nihilism which supposes itself opposed to this form of the imperative. ‘Both choices are worse’, to borrow a phrase.

What Badiou wants to argue is that these two are essentially in league. There is no god but man thus man must be found everywhere as a matter of right. The right man is the one who does not believe but knows, and lives accordingly – to live without belief, to take, at the global level, one thing as another is the essence of free choice or will. What is offered us to choose is what is seen to exist: goods, opinions, sexual orientations, knowledge etc.

One cannot of course choose against choice itself, as this would put you outside the frame of being human – which is to be evil and thus makes you available for death. Thus, the structure of a theology, the materialism of an economy: or, of a global law. As an aside, let me speculate that this is why tolerance comes into play as mediation. It’s not about cross cultural or ethnic understanding; it's the right orientation to the rabid exploitation of man and world by man itself. This is what we have learned to ‘tolerate’.

Now, I have simplified very much here. But this is essentially the complex to be investigated and as you can see in this preface, Badiou frames it very specifically as a political problematic: contemporary ethics is the occlusion of politics, which is not a matter of knowledge per se but a matter of truth, the singular truth of what is for all.

Let’s look at the book; which is an invention of ethics but from out of that Ethics, given to us today, whose conceptual background Badiou argues runs together two models: the Kantian legal framing and the Levinisian framing of otherness. This coupling actively occludes the link between an ethics and a truth. It’s not that Kant and Levinas are to blame, as such, but that they have been put to use. And for Badiou, in the context he is writing, this use is exemplified by the so called new philosophers, who set the tone for the re-moralisation of ethics and its humanitarianism.

Now, I’m not going to follow the order of the book in the exegesis but am going to cut across it and sort of reconstruct what’s at stake there. Ultimately, our aim is to get a sense of the politics of Badiou so it’s toward that I’ll orient this effort. I’m going to be polemical as well, which is not at all an imposition on what is in the text; it is polemical insofar as polemos is a ‘war in discourse’, which is to say, it is an opening up of a space determinedly and deterministically closed down.

Let’s start with the context in which, for Badiou, ‘ethics’ receives its renewed impetus, which means we start with a sort of discursive framework to which Badiou has always been opposed and which has made itself evident and ubiquitous.

I mentioned this milieu: that of the so-called new philosophers.

 In the early 1970’s, in the wake of the period inaugurated by May 68, a gang of influential figures dubbed the New Philosophers made the Parisian scene: renegade leftists, some, pretend renegade leftists, others. These media heroes, television in particular – the medium being the message as we know – proclaimed among other things, to have discovered the gulag and also the suffering third world too: at least according to Bernard Kouchner co-creator of the paratrooper doctors MSF, famous for prescribing, by turns, the correct dosages of medicine and bombs. Kouchner was lately a minister under Sarkozy but, of course, he was a member of the socialist party.

There are several figures who have lead and continue this European humanitarian charge: BHL, Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkelkraut, Eric Marty among others and Andre Glucksman (now his son!); a charge already described in the early 80’s ‘as the moral rearmament of capitalism’. We can’t underestimate this crowd, their influence in the media and state. Badiou, in this work, singles out Glucksman as the most insistent on the absolute priority of the awareness of Evil, and on the idea that the catastrophic primacy [primal] of the Good was a creation of philosophy.

Thus, as B says, 'Ethical' ideology is thus rooted, in part, in the work of the[se] 'new philosophers' of the late 1970s. Their power – and this is what is instructive beyond this French scene – lies in their occupation of a certain space; a mediated space, where a whole heterogeneous series of historical, intellectual, economic and political vectors intersect. As Hallward glosses this, it extends to a (generally implicit) confrontation with positions as diverse as those of Rawls, Habermas, Benhabib, Ricoeur, Rorty, Irigaray,  and downstream, much of what is called 'cultural studies' in North America and beyond. In other words, to whatever insists of what is called humanism – of liberalism and its avatars.

The details are too many to go into but these new philosophers, this renewed general retreat from the conviction that politics can be thought, essentially begins – in the French context – the process of ethics as first politics. This displacement or renunciation of politics – which their association with the political process of May paradoxically provided legitimation for; hence they had, they reckoned, seen up close what an ‘evil’ revolution is; which their subsequent reading of history proved – means turning attention to individuals and not processes or collectives and hence to our individual or communal comportment and not our material conditions. If it’s not the state of the political situation that needs to be thought in terms of distribution, the division of labour, the means of expropriation, exploitation and so on as the conditions of possibility for collective life, then that individuals suffer must be something to do with an inherent ethical failing – theirs or ours. The correct adjustments – psychological, behavioural, occupational – can then be made.

This gang also operates on the basis of what I’ve called an ineffability. That is, the positing of what is unthinkable for us; ontologically, this is an ancient trope, Aristotelian in heritage and we know he didn’t fancy revolution, which is why a target of this orientation under discussion here hates what it calls master thinkers like Plato, Hegel, Marx, none of whom believed we were bound to knowledge as such and dared precisely to think what must not be thought.

Thus, in a TV appearance in the 70’s, BHL was praising his fellow NP’s for their discovery of the Gulag via Solzhenitsyn (let’s note that they have never cared about historical accuracy these guys even as they do like to cite numbers). These guys are performers, and so every thing is sort of staged as a drama, and in this appearance BHL has an Oedipal sort of moment. Referring to the ‘tormented intellectuals’ of Les Temps Modernes, Sartre and de Beauvoir’s journal, Levy says: ‘Such articles [those of Les temps] lack that aspect of myth, of fiction, of the symbolic that makes it possible that Evil, which cannot be thought, can be represented’.

Cannot be thought, must be represented! For the ‘New Philosophers’, as Kristin Ross recounts in her book, May 68 and its Afterlives: ‘the figure of the suffering individual could then be mobilized to show the primacy of the ethical or moral dimension over the political, the superiority of insight over cognition, as well as the superior value of aesthetic modes of representation over the scientism or rationality of the social sciences. It was that blanket of cold rationality—all the facts and figures about the camps, all the information that existed before Solzhenitsyn—that had in fact helped to stifle the cries of the victims. The figure of individual suffering, baptized “the pleb” in the writings of André Glucksmann, would quickly evolve in the 1980’s into the figure of the starving victim in the discourse of human rights’.

So again: What cannot be thought – but can be represented. This is the key motif that ties this new ethical moment to the Levinasian thematic that Badiou analyses, as we’ll see, and in a certain sense to the Kantian notion of the limit – or the law of knowledge we might say, of discernments and judgments.

Everything in contemporary ethics, Badiou argues, is built on this rejection of thought: simply that situations are thinkable, that real change is thinkable, that some truth of the collective exists and on this embrace of representation or even the pathos of representation: especially insofar as by the power of representation – myths, fiction, symbolism – the Other becomes the suffering other, the victim other of those with the limit power and the means of representation or knowledge.

What interests these representers, as I am calling them, is not Levinas’ absolute Other – which is the Other as anterior to the Same which is to say, the Jew to the Greek, God to philosophy – but the control of the relation to its ineffability: that is to say, the other they can construct as absolute and in so doing keep all thought at bay: to think, to say it again, means that one consider not only the image, the spectacle or the symptom but the situation: the conditions, the context, the process, in which what there is emerges; which is a thinking that holds out the possibility that the truly new or the true change in that situation, is not impossible. And how by thinking the situation as such – which for the representer is the impossible to think – translate that to todays political situation where we can all freak out about race and gender, indeed we must, it is imperative, we are told too, and especially when one race or gender is not being exploited in the same way as everyone else, but we cannot think about exploitation per se. As if a black president or a woman president of facebook make one bit of difference to the general regime of things. In fact it aids it immensely. As W. Benn Michaels points out, ‘corporations, like universities, all have diversity managers.’

The goal of the representers is to make this truly new impossible, and in the most extensive sense to make thought into an evil in itself – lest it consider the ineffable as such. All thought  – of what the situation is and what can be done – leads, the representers say, to the Gulag, to terror, to totalitarianism; these are after all the things they know. Witness today the fate of any attempt to contextualize the attacks in Paris – hence that ludicrous, pathological not to mention unconsciously ironic hashtag ‘pray for paris’. One wants to scream, don't fucking pray, think! But it’s too late and indeed who is praying for Burkino Faso on twitter today? On this Paris crime, let me refer you to Badiou’s paper, ‘Our Wound is not so Recent’: In it he delineates quite clearly how for both the western ethical democrat and the fascist islamist nihilist, thought is the enemy.

Again, K. Ross articulates this force of representation as it applies to the New Philosophers and we, their descendants, clearly: ‘the colonial or third-world other of the 1960s is refigured and transformed from militant and articulate fighter and thinker to “victim” by a defense of human rights strictly identified as the rights of the victim, the rights of those who do not have the means to argue their rights or to create a political solution to their own problems. The interest awakened by the third world in the West is thus now in inverse proportion to its political force, to its capacity to construct its own future or to have any remote bearing upon our own. The pathos of the victim rivets attention onto the effects of the crisis immediately at hand, blocking any analysis of the processes that led to such a crisis; a rhetoric of emergency reinforces the paralysis of thought’.

Certainly it is interesting to think how out of this construction – which is of course actual and not merely ideological; for example, out of the deliberate destruction of politics in the Arab world which has been ongoing since it was ‘set up’ after WW1, an ISIS emerges: at once refusing this western construction and yet being weirdly, pathologically attached to this same west as its object petit a.

Lacan identified the imperialist paradox in this:  ‘For if we consider human rights from the vantage point of philosophy, we see what, in any case, everyone now knows about their truth. They boil down to the freedom to desire in vain.’ Desiring in vain – it reminds me of Thoreau: most men lead lives of quiet desperation – except that Thoreau’s individualism makes of it a pathos, whereas today, this human right goes off loudly and destructively.

What we see here in this example of ‘the great liberal counterreformation’ of the 1970’s and 80’s – that we live out today – is also then, the, productive force of representation.

Representation, as BHL celebrates, constructed of myth, fiction, and the symbolic is, and this by the very type of exposure it is, the capacity to occlude and cover over and so to produce a memory not of what happened but as what happened itself. The memory of the ‘what happened’ is ‘what happened’, and this, the representers produce as common ethical knowledge.

Note how Ross here speaks of a certain form of the relation to the other – the political relation –i.e. what can make of the other and the other to the other the same and without at all reducing one to the other in any identitarian way. What the representers claim is that what presents itself cannot be thought; it can only be spoken for. Quite immediately this is then a matter of the power of language or as they say these days of ‘communication’ and so, clearly, the best narrative or really, opinion, wins.

In terms also abused by these New Philosophers – new only because they were on TV – it’s a language game. But in fact it’s not only the best narrative, for that itself is a matter of contest and so of contingency at some level, rather its a matter of publicity – of making a knowledge known. This is the true power of discourses of representation: this very fact of being representative.

Nothing transmits or communicates so effortlessly as representation, and indeed the very confusion or diffusion representation includes within in it – that is to say, that our representations may not coincide – is the very guarantee of difference that representation thrives on. All differences are included in representation and they are included insofar as they are representations. All clamours for recognition, still a central core of contemporary calls for ethics, need to think about how such recognition is already inscribed within the parameters of representation.

So, Badiou’s little book is an intervention onto this scene of the other: itself an intense effort to occlude both the actualities of the anti-colonial struggles, the events of May ‘68 in Paris and across the globe, and the possibility of their re-surrection or reaffirmation.

Probably the most pronounced sentence in this book is this: ‘The whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned.’ But it is the second part of it that is the kicker: ‘Why? because, ‘the real practical and philosophical question concerns the status of the Same.  Differences being simply what there is, the question of what 'ought to be' must concern only what is valid for all, at a level of legitimacy that is indifferent to differences.’

Ethics, in this difference sense, then, stands for Reaction – pure and simple. The subjective process of reaction is restoration: at the limit, to return Europe or the ‘west’ or the occident to the role of ‘all humanity’. To quote Pascal Bruckner’s revolting scribble, Tears of the White Man:  ‘The ridiculous plea of Frantz Fanon was to “go beyond” Europe. . . . It is impossible to “go beyond” democracy. If the peoples of the third world are to become themselves, they must become more Western. . . . [Europe] is the only culture that has been capable of seeing itself through others’ eyes (even though its perceptions may be mistaken). Because there has been no doubt about its identity, it has been able to grant a great deal to other cultures’.

So: democracy, the occident, the power to reflect, the consequent power to grant, the power to determine rightful becoming. What does an ethics look like to such a master? If we think about the ethics of Aristotle we remember that ethics was, strictly speaking, the domain of the master – everyone else just lived out the effects. Ethics is always referred to an order or a technique even, a way of doing something, namely work, and of course one works for a master. As Lacan says in Seminar 7, addressing Aristotle’s Ethics,  ‘Thus the problem is raised of the way in which that order may be established in a subject. How can a form of adequation be achieved in a subject so that he will enter that order and submit himself to it?’

It’s different today, though, in a society of little masters, masters of choice and knowledge, for now it is ethically proper to live out the effects of the ethics of the master and thus there is no Master at all, so the ethicists tell us. This is true, to the extent that a master is at a distance from the normal running of things and that is why a real Master is not such a bad thing. But the absence of masters, singular, is the horror of an implacable mastery: or in other words, a global adaptation of egos to what Lacan identified in the 1950’s as the ‘American Good Housekeeping way of life’ – the superego of our times. The key to an ethics – if that word can be recuperated at all today – is, thus, its point of orientation, if you like; what is the point at which a subject can be sutured to an order.

Let me restate: ethics is the name of reaction. If so, then it’s a reaction to something that was not a reaction. This was a process in the real – to use a Lacanian formulation. So the suture point for this reactionary ethics is in the effort to re-member what must not be. So the tale must be told of what it is in reaction too, in such a way that it is never thought.

To make a period illegible, Badiou says, ‘is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil.’

The ethics of the other is implacably opposed to any thought of the same. So much for tolerance…

Contrarily, but concerning the same impossible point, an ethics of truths, such is what Badiou proposes as Ethics, this ‘process in the real’, is what must be thought. Thus the process and thought are indiscernible as such. This is what the representers keep apart at all costs – hence the aesthetics of the victim and the superiority of the judge. So in order to affirm a point of orientation, an impossible point as existing for us, we need to find the means to abandon this disorientation, this acceptance of the ethical primacy of the demand of the ‘lesser-evil’. We need as Badiou says, an Idea – which is not a knowledge – and the courage to make it manifest.

So lets break down the new ethics:

Man

The term ‘human rights’ expresses a couple of ideas already there in Aristotle. The question of the human – its essence, its nature and rights, as that which somehow corrects the excesses of nature. There is no getting away from nature, so this correction is simply a check and, as such, is what actually gives the human its definition with the natural world. As a being capable of right, it is specific. This capacity is what makes an animal human – not, not an animal but a human animal. A human is a being of rights.

This nice balance though is upset at every turn and conceptually by the assumption of its necessity. Aristotle’s fondness for the middle way means that anything monstrous is a problem. That all existence conforms to a pre-established harmony or balance is the singular effect of Aristotle today. We like to confirm the natural balance and ascribe to it things like the economy and the rights its ensures to it. As long as there is balance then all is right with the humans. You hear it all the time – ‘we have to strike a balance’:  of course a few fat billionaires is all it takes to counterweight several billions of undernourished poor.

The problem though is the exception. If this regime of balance has to a priori exclude its monsters of imbalance then what account of the generic can be given? What we have is an account of man on the basis of some imaginary conditions of man itself – an inclusion on the basis of the exclusion that makes the inclusion count.

In other words, ‘does man exist’?

Badiou gives a succinct summary of the death of this concept, Man. Indeed that it is a concept is the first mark of its death. For Foucault, man is nothing but a discursive construct perceivable in relation to a specific historical time bearing nothing essential to it – and, as Badiou says, certainly not capable of founding human rights or a universal ethics. Once the discursive arrangements had changed, man was dead. For Althusser, history was simply process without a subject – thus the bourgeois version of man as the self-constituted, self identical, knowing subject etc. was an impossible fiction or rather, another object of history mistaken for its effect. The subject was merely ideological and what science demanded was a theoretical anti-humanism. For Lacan, the subject was an imaginary unity, the normed effect an originary division for whom nothing natural could be prescribed. ‘The subject had no substance, no 'nature', being a function both of the contingent laws of language and of the always singular history of objects of desire’.

‘What was contested in this way’, Badiou notes, ‘was the idea of a natural or spiritual identity of Man, and with it, as a consequence, the very foundation of an 'ethical' doctrine in today's sense of the word – which is to say,  ‘a consensual law-making concerning human beings in general, their needs, their lives, and their deaths - and, by extension, the self-evident, universal demarcation of evil, of what is incompatible with the human essence.’

 So the question is then under what conditions and why has man come back? There is, for Badiou, two aspects to this: the material real of capitalism which needs individuals capable of making their way, as Thatcher said, or not; and of knowing themselves as in their essence such creatures that make their way, individually – hence success or failure, it’s all your fault and not a systematic or political question.

Thus, there needs to be something that sustains this capacity for individuality that does not interfere with it – hence, nature. Rights are of course what allow us to correct even the excesses of nature to which humans are prone. So when some Saddam or Gadhafi or Hamas gets too demanding, we have the right, which is to say, the duty, as humans – and as humans the right to choose this duty – to act in the name of our common, communicable humanity to correct this excess.

Note, Saddam, Gaddafi, Hamas, the evil de jour, is not an exception but an excess. It would be evil itself to think Gaddafi an exception: the only exception is God after all (or his so-called chosen people, i suppose!). But Gaddafi or the recalcitrant poor from the outer suburbs – for we have internal monsters too – must be represented, which simply means referred to the order of ethical recognition. For the internal monsters we have sociologists, psychologists and teachers; for the external, bombs.

The other aspect is theoretical: there is Levinas but there is also Kant or as Badiou says, an image of Kant as represented by theorists of natural law. In essence there exist formal cases of evil such that the recognition of them requires no investigation of situations, sequences etc., and that they must be punished; again, in the name of our common humanity and thus by international law etc., and moreover, these offences allow for intervention to make sure this happens. Thus ethics is what knows evil; a priori and all the time and as such is the ultimate principle of judgment. There is a complex array of interactions: to know evil a priori is, as a consequence, to know the good. This knowledge of the good confers the right to intervene on evil such that law is always, then, law against evil. An ethics of discernment and judgment – very humanist and seeming to leave god out of it – except that man now occupies his absent place and all the old structural questions of its existence return anew. But anyway.

 If 'the rule of law' (a literal translation of Badiou’s French here would be the ‘right of the state’ ) is obligatory, that is because it alone authorises a space for the identification of Evil (this is the 'freedom of opinion' which, in the ethical vision, is first and foremost the freedom to designate Evil) and provides the means of arbitration when the issue is not clear (the apparatus of judicial precautions).’

So when man is effected by evil which is always universally recognizable, he is a suffering animal and yet man is he who is also capable of discernment, judging and intervening. As such, ethics, knowing evil and thus alone capable of judgment, is prior to politics. We know good only because we know evil. ‘Human rights are rights to non-Evil: rights not to be offended or mistreated with respect to one's life (the horrors of murder and execution), one's body (the horrors of torture, cruelty and famine), or one's cultural identity (the horrors of the humiliation of women, of minorities, etc.)’

 So, Badiou says, man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim. This way we get the victim part and the agency part.

What Badiou leaves open here is the question of orientation. Under the force of an ethical ideology man recognizes himself as victim and begins his efforts from that recognition. For if our only agenda is an ethical engagement against an Evil we recognize a priori, how are we to envisage any transformation of the way things are?

You can see here, let me pun, the ‘Caucasian chalk circle’. Anything that smells of not conforming to the way things are as known and understood by the ethical ideology is already suspect a priori, no matter what it might be. Recall, judgment is not the same as thought – judgment works on the basis of a priori orders of recognition, not on the basis of situated enquiry. This is what the representers already said over and again; that is to say, ‘if the ethical 'consensus' is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone to identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself: every revolutionary project stigmatized as 'utopian’ turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil.’

But should another orientation be found man might in fact become something other than this creature shackled to its mortality or finitude as an animal built for death. ‘From what source will man draw the strength to be the immortal that he is?’ In other words how can we stop being man and start becoming subject?

This brings Badiou to Levinas and the Other because the refrain has been that the humanist conception is not the all of ethics at all – that real ethics is an ethics of the other. As I have stressed, what is at stake for Badiou is their conceptual links: but lets carry on.

For Levinas, for the other to be Other means it cannot be subject to some form of relation i.e. it is not other because it is not the Same – it is absolutely or Altogether-Other. It is what there is before there is the Same. The ethical individual – and i’m reducing things profoundly here – is what lives out this impossible relation to the demand of the Other, or in the ‘face’ of the Other, which is nevertheless its absolute guarantee. Any ‘I’ is subverted in that it is the result of the demand. That the Other is absolutely other however means that the impossibility of the relation to it is also absolute. In other words the impossible cannot be thought, it cannot itself be an ontological or philosophical question; nothing can come to supplement – to use a psychoanalytic term – this impossibility because it cannot be conceived. So the key thing in Levinas here is that any attempt toward the same is always already an ethical betrayal, a reduction of that otherness. Thus in Levinas any contact between other and other, so to speak, cannot be predicated on some existing concept of mediation.

The key thing here is this notion that ‘there exists’ – and already it is un-Levinasian to say ‘there exists’ in this manner – what cannot be thought. In Levinas, who is far from being an idiot, this impossibility has a rigorous framework – even if its irrefutability would lie in the real or the facticity of faciality, of God; which is to say, in his ineffability as purely Other. So the approach to the other, as Badiou argues, always has this religious dimension whose point really is to reserve something from thought – for Levinas, anyway, to save God from the philosophers; for the ethical democrat, man from the idea.

‘Levinas is the coherent and inventive thinker of an assumption that no academic exercise of veiling or abstraction can obscure: distanced from its Greek usage (according to which it  is clearly subordinated to the theoretical), and taken in general, ethics is a category of pious discourse.’

For Badiou, there is no ineffable – we can come to know all we do not. This, as we know, is the mathematical objection – not in the first instance a philosophical one – but is one to which any philosophy must be faithful.

So this is, very truncated, the Other of Levinas. Now, a little more about the other of those others who are not Levinas but know the other in exactly the way Levinas said you cannot. We can say this is where Kant, the theorist of the law of limits mixes with Levinas, theorist of the absolute, in this ‘ethics’.

This other, then, is basically the other of the ethicists of difference; everywhere we proclaim this relation to difference. But it’s sort of weird to bang on about a relation when in fact difference is simply constitutive of our entire situation. In Badiou’s words: ‘Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said: I am an other. There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself. As many, but also, then, neither more nor less.’

If it’s a relation we have to this difference then somehow we are not in it ourselves – whoever these selves may be, and so it appears that the ethic of difference relies on the other ethical construction of man as a specified animal: mortal, individual, Subject. But if this man is not everyone – because everyone is different, then who is that man – this was the problem Levinas fixes with God. 

Of course, this is what the ethic of difference hopes to have done with, this self-identical, western, white, authoritarian, rationalist, bon-homme.  This ethics contains these tropes Badiou says: 'recognition of the other (against racism, which would deny this other), or to 'the ethics of differences' (against substantialist nationalism, which would exclude immigrants, or sexism, which would deny feminine-being), or to 'multiculturalism' (against the imposition of a unified model of behaviour and intellectual approach). Or, quite simply, to good old-fashioned 'tolerance’, which consists of not being offended by the fact that others think and act differently from you.’

The upshot for Badiou, and this refers us back to Levinas is that the real predicate of an ethics of the other is God. Thus again a principal of operation is founded in an ineffability that is off limits to thought. It can be represented, indeed is only representative, and that’s what all good democrats want, after all. But without this predicate in what cannot be thought as guarantee, what is an ethics of difference or a recognition of the other?

Well, Hallward translates what Badiou writes in answer as ‘a dogs breakfast’:

[which is a clever idiomatic translation but he misses an excellent pun. The French is de la bouillie pour les chats – so more literally ‘of the broth for cats’. But bouille – so bouillie without the i – but sounding the same – means face. Levinas’s big thing in Totality and Infinity is the ‘face of the other’. ]

He says: ‘We are left with a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle. Of course other inconsistencies arise: when we see real sustained difference – Islamic fundamentalists, Chinese totalitarians, African customs, we forget all notions of respect and tolerance.’

An aside on tolerance: Of course I am all for intolerance myself but what i want to know is when liberal humanitarians talk about tolerance is there only one sort? It makes me wonder: is communist intolerance for example – that is, the refusal to tolerate inequality, the same as fascist intolerance? More importantly, can liberals be tolerant? Wouldn’t being tolerant be intolerant of intolerance such that tolerance only tolerates tolerance? What then of those who are intolerant? Are they not thereby different and so others? Are not the truly intolerant, the truly different? Then how can our ethics be predicated on the intolerant?

That is obviously too different to tolerate and so the best thing is to have a criteria for difference – true alterity is too tricky a thing, and anyway only God guarantees alterity as such. But for the secular ethicists of difference there can be no God because that would be to be intolerant of differences (all Gods are equal) and so difference will have to be posited in such a way that it doesn’t get out of hand. Hence what is different is either a victim – the suffering human animal and, as such, ‘good different’; or the terrorist barbarian intolerant who is available for death. The latter cannot ever be anything but radically different or evil and so has to go. The former can, with our aid and comfort, become the same as us and so their difference is good, manageable and in the best of all possible worlds they will actually go on reproducing themselves as victim others so that we can go on saving them from themselves and thus, being neither a victim nor intolerant, we can remain good and liberal. But of course we are all human, right?

And: ‘Respect for differences, of course! But on condition that the different be parliamentary, democratic, pro free-market economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment. ...’

Nihilism

It’s around now in Ethics that Badiou writes the quote that all those years ago set me on a (un)certain path. Let me just note that in Ross’ book she says of the New Philosophers ‘that they speak out from their garage of lost illusions?’ Of course they love their lost illusions, it’s what sustains them in their ridiculous pathos whose aura of passivity is so marketable and hence so aggressive that it translates directly into capital, affording them the comfort of expensive seaside holiday houses, giving them the solitude all great men need in order to properly represent the suffering of the masses.

We have no such illusions, right?

Given that it’s all a dogs breakfast – that is to say, nothing intrinsic to any of it guarantees it any consistency, what holds it together? This is the figure of Nihilism or the will-full submission to necessity. What is the only necessity today – in a world without God or the Subject of consciousness e.g.? The modern name for necessity is, as everyone knows, 'economics'.

‘Economic objectivity; the logic of Capital. It is the basis from which our parliamentary regimes organize a subjectivity and a public opinion condemned in advance to ratify what seems necessary.’

Thus, if necessary, there is nothing to be done – sit back, complain or enjoy, it’s all the same. In the Epicurean words of Tom Waits ‘drive out nature with a pitchfork, it always comes rollin’ back again.’ Capitalism is the natural form of the way of things and so its futile, we know its futile in advance, to seek to hold it at bay or have done with it.

‘For the possibilities whose development it pretends to organize are in reality circumscribed and annulled, in advance, by the external neutrality of the economic referent – in such a way that subjectivity in general is inevitably dragged down into a kind of belligerent impotence, the emptiness of which is filled by elections and the 'sound-bites' of party leaders.’

This is why the Greens are so ineffective – they idolize the necessity of nature. Ethics, thus, ‘explicitly presents itself as the spiritual supplement of th[is] consensus’. Or as he says ‘a smug nihilism’.

The point for ethics, as this suggests, is that it accords with this logic of submission. No possible collective project can be thought because any effort to organize collectively, any effort toward the Good without prior sanction of evil, any effort to subject oneself or others to a discipline of principle, and, especially, of equality is doomed in advance. Not only does it break with ethical procedures of recognition and difference, it is fundamentally evil insofar as it even assumes these can be other than what they are. ‘The very idea of a consensual 'ethics’, stemming from the general feeling provoked by the sight of atrocities, which replaces the 'old ideological divisions', is a powerful contributor to subjective resignation and acceptance of the status quo.’

To quote Ross again: ‘The new figuration of the victim occurs in a regime of pure actuality created by the rhetoric of emergency, an eternal present that not only dis-possesses the victim of her own history, but removes her from history it-self. In the new politics of emotion, subject and object are described in different, indeed invidious terms, with the objects of the relationship—the victims—bearing distinctive, and distinctively less equal, qualities than the subjects from the West. In fact, to call it a politics of emotion is some-thing of a misnomer. For to what extent can the figure of suffering—the new generic figure of alterity in the 1980s and 1990s appearing nightly on television screens in the West—lead in and of itself to a politics? Are pity and moral indignation political emotions?’

Hence capital as what is inviolable and operates by necessity and, as such, cannot be thought, sustains the dogma of an ethics of pity and suffering; the dogma against all dogma and at the same time of course it provides its very conditions. It’s a virtuous circle and I do mean virtuous in this ethical context. Nothing is better for western man, as Bruckner and his apogees everywhere know, than the possession of the right to end suffering and so in order that this right be protected as all such human rights should be, and certainly European democratic man is human, then someone has to suffer somewhere.

It’s a happy coincidence, then, that the new nature, that new unthinkable, the economy, that producer of excess is so implacable in its logic and in going about its business because it alone affords the Good man his share of the fight against evil; which is to say, his share of making sure that all the changes that go on everyday under the force of necessity, and even the celebration of them is reducible to this same force, is to make sure that fuck all ever changes. Again, simply, any change in the good is evil – this, by the way, is Plato’s point and this makes sense given our ethics is of the representative kind and thus is an imitation of the good and not the good itself!

Ever the optimist, as every communist must be, Badiou says: ‘What every emancipatory project does, what every emergence of hitherto unknown possibilities does, is to put an end to consensus.’

So we arrive at ‘The Real Question’: that of an abandonment.

All this is to be abandoned. In fact, it’s an abandoning of an abandonment. In Theory of the Subject, Badiou says simply. ‘When one abandons universality, one obtains universal horror’ (TS 197).

Today, every keystroke you make, every button you press is in the service of the economy. It’s not a trade off either. You punch some keys to see a funny cat; you think there is an equality there. No, every keystroke is mined, collated, interpreted and sold back to you – the price of logging on is the work of logging on – so you can be sold. You go to the supermarket, you check out your own groceries, you process your own bill payments, you think about which provider you will use: will I change, how many texts, what kind of phone, you concern yourselves with the economy even more so when you don’t even know you are doing it. To parody that moral fetishism called anti-smoking, every keystroke is doing you damage.

There is no way out today of this totalitarian logic for all, this democratic totalitarianism called the market. Except that there is always an except that that marks the point of that which is truly, universally, an ‘except that’ for all. It’s this that provides the possibility of some new orientation to the world that is not that of individual submission, as the price of enjoyment, to the necessity of the economy and its managing democrats.

Otherness won’t cut it; we need to produce the Same. The name of the Same is truth. Don’t panic when you hear the word truth – that is the panic the representers have represented to you – you think you will be a victim of evil. This to me is the symptom of the pedagogical success of parliamentary-capitalism in the last 40 years. Everyone believes that truths and authority are the same thing and it’s capital that preaches freedom of desire for all. It’s the greatest ruse, and so the left spent ages mistaking its enemy, assuming its ethics.

Truths.

I remember when i was growing up, the worst crime was to ‘be the same as everyone else’. Hilarious. Not only is it impossible to be the same as everyone else, everyone else was saying the same thing. They used to show us pictures of the Soviets or the Chinese where ‘everyone was the same’ – watch out they would tell us – if we don’t all reject this sameness stuff we’ll all be the same – that’s communism! Even though it has a real aesthetic dimension, its aim was to terrify. The Nazis knew about the aestheticisation of terror.

First thing is to differentiate this Same from the One. Same is simply the name for the advent of some truth and truth is always situational for Badiou, singular insofar as it is constrained to appear in a situation – hence there are only truths – plural. So the same or the truth must come to be in a situation. It’s a work of generic construction. Generic because it touches all and this is possible because everyone shares the capacity to not be counted by the state; which in this context is to say, the capacity to be indifferent to differences. The non-one is thereby what there is.

If differences are what there is – purely and simply – then, as we have seen, its inconsistent, even dangerous to base a Law on this ineffable contingency. When you turn what there is into a Law of being, you have a bio-ethics or bio-politics – a totalisation of life but based on life itself. Again, the thesis has to be ‘say no to life’; say no to nature.

So the capacity to be indifferent to differences. I said this is a capacity everyone shares. I’m anthropomorphising a formal deduction. It’s too much to go into the details, suffice to say that in the representative regime of ethics there is always a little bit left over which representation by its very nature cannot touch (it gets the state really upset this bit), that there always is what it re-presents – which is why it likes to say it’s ineffable, unknowable. In another register, this is what contemporary ethics designates as radical evil – that unthinkable which stands as limit exemplar.

Badiou, formally, thus in order to think it, names this the void of a situation – the bit that can’t be presented. The ontology shows that every element of a situation has such a void part and given the void can only be re-presented, included as nothing for the ‘state’, it is what every one shares equally – this capacity, as I said, to not be known by the state.

Let me just give a quick anecdote on this. UNESCO put out a document a couple of years ago: They are ethical UNESCO – helping the other and all that. It was about what they call Low Development Capacity Countries. This is the new name for the third world – note the conception of agency. Anyway, to cut a long story short they are pissed off with these Africans because they won’t comport themselves to the right order. Again and again they have been told what they need to do; you know, modernise, have done with old ways, adapt to the global market etc. – basically get proper educated – this is UNESCO’s remit.

They say all this of course in the most suitable way – narratives and stories the Director General says – because the Africans themselves asked that the report not be theoretical!!! Seriously, this is what he said. The point, or my point, is that this low development capacity, represented by UNESCO as problem, is precisely the capacity manifestly existing in the global state to not be known by this state.

If you know anything about the historical struggles of Africa, it’s hardly that they, in all their diversity, lack capacity or subjectivity. What we see here is that capacity to not be,  being known to us, represented for us by the UN ethicists as incapacity and in fact an incapacity which is grounded in some evil. As such, the west can ride in and return capacity to them in the way we do – in this narrative or myth Bill and Melinda Gates play the angels. The same analysis could be done on the Australian Northern Territory ‘ethical’ intervention, which is still in place some 22 years later!

So this capacity can be formally described but it is historically attested to in all sorts of ways. Without going into examples, the point of change is when the change is for all – such that there is a new orientation to the situation or world itself. So the equal capacity to not be known by the state is the basis of the possibility of such an orientation. But it cannot be known as such. Rather, it is the orientation for what is true of this situation, what is the capacity of all, that ‘ethics’ will include as ‘nothing’. and hence the predicate of a ‘bad infinity’ of ‘ethical, humanitarian interventions’.

As you know, for Badiou, this non-knowledge or equality is revealed in a situation by an event. The event is what happens – that's it. And to be sure you can’t make an event as such but this is because you can’t know what one is a priori nor where it will happen – otherwise it’s a matter of knowledge. And secondly, it’s status as event truly relies on the work one puts in to establish its consequences. But rest assured, all the work you may have put into changing the situation for all will be rewarded nevertheless – but that is not to say you can impose all that on the new situation; that’s what renegades do – those who love their knowledge more than change itself.

What an event is, and it’s not much in itself, is the exposure of the void capacity of all to being thought. Basically, the event shows that the knowledge of the state is not all there is – and so to think the situation truly, we need to think what the state doesn’t know.

Note of course that via the thinkable concept of the void, the question of the ineffable as limit to all knowledge is done away with. We can think what is not known! Every revolutionary thinks exactly this – hence their compact with Evil. The key to contemporary ethics, and what binds its strange strands, is the knowledge of the unthinakability of the ineffable; the key to an ethics of truths is that the ineffable is not.

 The subject is that which takes up this practice of thinking into being this unknown capacity, and by doing so, inserting this generic capacity back into the situation. It effectively constructs the situation anew from the perspective of what is true to it – that everyone shares the capacity to not be ‘ethical’. The event is what marks the existing site of the truth of our shared incapacity to be totalized by any knowledge, law or order or norm.

So very importantly for Badiou,  truths are not knowledge: they break with the ethical regime but are for all; thus the point is, if you want an ethics – which by definition should be universal – then it can only be an ethics of truths – plural. ‘[O]r, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world’. An ethics then is ‘that which lends consistency to the presence of some-one in the composition of the subject induced by the process of this truth. The subjective name for consistency is fidelity – so the subject is faithful to a fidelity.’

When all is said and done, consistency is the engagement of one's singularity (the animal 'some-one') in the continuation of a subject of truth. Or again: it is to submit the perseverance of what is known to a duration peculiar to the not-known.’ The anyone that we ‘naturally’ are becomes the subject in and by the decision to think along side the event which has seized them. The event implies its own consistency of appearing and so the subject is faithful to this consistency of appearing and as such exceeds his animal being whose only consistency is as pure perseverance with regard to its animal interests. In The Century, Badiou calls this ethics a ‘formalized in-humanism’.

So for every truth that becomes so, and this becoming so is the work of the subject – those who say yes to what happened, that it happened in a situation – there is this ethics. And of course there is not one Subject (capital S) but as many subjects as there are truths. Badiou follows Lacan’s own ethics of psychoanalysis – itself universal on the basis of lack and against the ego-psychology so amenable to western capitalism: ‘never give way on your desire’. Desire, for Lacan, is constitutive of the subject of the unconscious; it is thus the not-known par excellence, such that 'do not give up on your desire' rightly means: 'do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know'. Or in other words, ‘we can come to know all that we do not know.’

Earlier I noted that Lacan named human rights the freedom to desire in vein – is this not capitalist ethics, for all: an ethics precisely of knowing over and over again?

So Badiou’s only ethical imperative is Continue – keep going. Keep going in what you have decided for; do not give up on your own seizure by a truth-process. 

In sum, then, for Badiou, the ethical predication in the other is another prescription to non-thought. It’s reactionary, as we have seen, predicated on the exhaustion of one sequence of subjective political struggle. Our period remains a period of restoration, an intervallic or pointless period as he calls it in Logics of Worlds. Ethics, thus, is the soul supplement to the having given up on this political process of revolutionary, egalitarian struggle; on justice, if you prefer. This giving up in one way or another – simulacrum, betrayal, disaster – on what is true for all, is what Badiou, reversing the predicates of ethics, denotes as evil for our times.