Surrealpolitik

Surrealpolitik: Ethics

Author: Alain Badiou

Quick Summary

One of the more accessible examples of Badiou's writing, in which he explains how 'truth events' enable us to see glimpses of The Real. His 'power of truth' to force changes in opinion and communication reminds me of Lacan: fidelity to truth-events confesses the new reality to the Big Other, whence it becomes woven into the common fabric. Event (rupture in the fabric or as Zizek puts it "intrusions of the traumatic Real, which shatters the predominant symbolic texture") => fidelity (pursuing rather than ignoring the revelations of the event) => truth (universal, immortal). That's Badiou's "truth procedure". False events -- simulacra -- can also inspire fidelity, but fidelity to a simulacrum is an 'Evil' in the form of betrayal (ultimately a betrayal of oneself by oneself). An interesting thing about Badiou is that he uses terms that sound religious -- 'the Immortal' or 'Evil' or 'grace' -- in an utterly unreligious ('laicized') way. ("This evental giving, based absolutely on chance, and beyond any principle of the management or calculation of existence-why not call it a grace? Simply, it is a grace that requires no all-powerful, no divine transcendence.") Also, unlike postmodern theorists, he embraces the concept of universals: "The one thing that distinguishes the human species from the predatory living organism that it also is: the capacity to enter into the composition and becoming of some eternal truths" (p 90)

Quotes

There are 33 quotes currently associated with this book.

Lacan himself -- beyond the fact that he was a 'total' clinical analyst who spent the best part of his life listening to people -- conceived of his struggle against the 'normative' orientation of American psychoanalysis, and the degrading subordination of thought to the 'American way of life', as a decisive commitment [engagement]. (page 7)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
The truth is that, in the context of a system of thought that is both a-religious and genuinely contemporary with the truths of our time, the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question -- and it is an extraordinarily difficult one -- is much more that of recognizing the Same. (page 25)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Let us posit our axioms. There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple 'without-one' -- every multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of multiples -- is the law of being. The only stopping point is the void. The infinite, as Pascal had already realized, is the banal reality of every situation, not the predicate of a transcendence. For the infinite, as Cantor demonstrated with the creation of set theory, is actually only the most general form of multiple-being. (page 25)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
The only genuine ethics is of truths in the plural -- or, more precisely, the only ethics is of processes of truth, of the labour that brings some truths into the world. Ethics must be taken in the sense presumed by Lacan when, against Kant and the notion of a general morality, he discusses the ethics of psychoanalysis. Ethics does not exist. There is only the ethic-of (of politics, of love, of science, of art). (page 28)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
There is not, in fact, one single Subject, but as many subjects as there are truths, and as many subjective types as there are procedures of truths.

As for me, I identify four fundamental subjective 'types': political, scientific, artistic, and amorous.

Every human animal, by participating in a given singular truth, is inscribed in one of these four types.

A philosophy sets out to construct a space of thought in which the different subjective types, expressed by the singular truths of its time, coexist. But this coexistence is not a unification -- that is why it is impossible to speak of one Ethics. (page 28)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Every truth, as we have seen, deposes constituted knowledges, and thus opposes opinions. For what we call opinions are representations without truth, the anarchic debris of circulating knowledge. (page 50)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Opinions without an ounce of truth -- or, indeed, of falsehood. Opinion is beneath the true and the false, precisely because its sole office is to be communicable. What arises from a truth-process, by contrast, cannot be communicated. Communication is suited only to opinions (and again, we cannot manage without them). In all that concerns truths, there must be an encounter...To enter into the composition of a subject of truth can only be something that happens to you. (page 51)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Confirmation of the point [about truth being encountered] is provided by the concrete circumstances in which someone is seized by a fidelity: an amorous encounter, the sudden feeling that this poem was addressed to you, a scientific theory whose initially obscure beauty overwhelms you, or the active intelligence of a political place...As a result, the ethic of a truth is the complete opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic of the Real, if it is true that -- as Lacan suggests -- all access to the Real is of the order of an encounter. (page 52)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
In one of my previous books, my formula was: 'Love what you will never believe twice'. In this the ethic of a truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general, which is itself nothing but a schema of opinion. For the maxim of opinion is: 'Love only that which you have always believed.' (page 52)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
[Refusing to acknowledge Nazism as a political sequence as opposed to emanating directly from Evil is] Cowardly, because it is impossible to think politics through to the end if we refuse to envisage the possibility of political sequences whose organic categories and subjective prescriptions are criminal. (page 65)
Tags: [Fascism]
[Event, Fidelity, and Truth] Remember that the three major dimensions of a truth-process are as follows: the event, which brings to pass 'something other' than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the event is a hazardous, unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears; the fidelity, which is the name of the process: it amounts to a sustained investigation of the situation, under the imperative of the event itself; it is an immanent and continuing break; the truth as such, that is, the multiple, internal to the situation, that the fidelity constructs, bit by bit; it is what the fidelity gathers together and produces. (page 67)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Marx is an event for political thought because he designates, under the name 'proletariat', the central void of early bourgeois societies...To sum up: the fundamental ontological characteristic of an event is to inscribe, to name, the situated void of that for which it is an event. (page 69)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Finally, as regards the truth that results, we must above all emphasize its power. I have already evoked this theme, with respect to the 'return' to the cave of Plato's prisoner, which is the return of a truth back to knowledges. A truth punches a 'hole' in knowledges, it is heterogeneous to them, but it is also the sole known source of new knowledges. We shall say that the truth forces knowledges. The verb to force indicates that since the power of a truth is that of a break, it is by violating established and circulating knowledges that a truth returns to the immediacy of the situation, or reworks that sort of portable encyclopedia from which opinions, communications and sociality draw their meaning. (page 70)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
It is upon these three dimensions of the process of truth -- the convocation by an event of the void of a situation; the uncertainty of fidelity; and the powerful forcing of knowledges by a truth -- that the thought of Evil depends.

For Evil has three names:
1) to believe that an event convokes not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude, is Evil in the sense of simulacrum, or terror;
2) to fail to live up to a fidelity is Evil in the sense of betrayal, betrayal in oneself of the Immortal that you are;
3) to identify a truth with total power is Evil in the sense of disaster.

Terror, betrayal and disaster are what an ethic of truths -- as opposed to the impotent morality of human rights -- tries to ward off, in the singularity of its reliance on a truth in progress. (page 71)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of a truth -- which is the only thing that can be for all, and can be eternally -- is precisely the fact that it relates to the particularity of a situation only from the bias of its void. The void, the multiple-of-nothing, neither excludes nor constrains anyone...When a radical break in a situation, under names borrowed from real truth-processes, convokes not the void but the 'full' particularity of presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing with a simulacrum of truth. (page 73)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
'Simulacrum' must be understood here in its strong sense: all the formal traits of a truth are at work in the simulacrum. Not only a universal nomination of the event, inducing the power of a radical break, but also the 'obligation' of a fidelity, and the promotion of a simulacrum of the subject, erected -- without the advent of any Immortal -- above the human animality of the others, of those who are arbitrarily declared not to belong to the communitarian substance whose promotion and domination the simulacrum-event is designed to assure. (page 74)
Tags: [Truth & Real, Simulacra/Illusion]
Every fidelity to an authentic event names the adversaries of its perseverance. Contrary to consensual ethics, which tries to avoid divisions, the ethic of truths is always more or less militant, combative. For the concrete manifestation of its heterogeneity to opinions and established knowledges is the struggle against all sorts of efforts at interruption, at corruption at the return to the immediate interests of the human animal, at the humiliation and repression of the Immortal who arises as subject. The ethic of truths presumes recognition of these efforts, and thus the singular operation of naming enemies. (page 75)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Every invocation of blood and soil, of race, of custom, of community, works directly against truths; and it is this very collection that is named as the enemy in the ethic of truths. Whereas fidelity to the simulacrum, which promotes the community, blood, race, and so on, names as its enemy -- for example, under the name of 'Jew' -- precisely the abstract universality and eternity of truths, the address to all. (page 76)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
[T]he well-known existence of simulacra is a powerful stimulus to the crystallization of crises. Opinion tells me (and therefore I tell myself, for I am never outside opinions) that my fidelity may well be terror exerted against myself, and that the fidelity to which I am faithful looks very much like -- too much like -- this or that certified Evil. It is always a possibility, since the formal characteristics of this Evil (as simulacrum) are exactly those of a truth. (page 79)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
I have said that a truth transforms the codes of communication and changes the regime of opinions -- such is its effect of 'return'. Not that these opinions become 'true' (or false). They are not capable of truth, and a truth, in its eternal multiple-being, remains indifferent to opinions. But they become other. This means that formerly obvious judgements are no longer defensible, that others become necessary, that the means of communication change, and so on. I have called this reorganization of opinions the power [puissance] of truths. (page 80)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
In the end, a truth changes the names of elements in the situation. (page 82)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
We can now define what the total power of a truth would be: it would imply the ability to name and evaluate all the elements of the objective situation from the perspective of the truth-process. Rigid and dogmatic (or 'blinded'), the subject-language would claim the power, based on its own axioms, to name the whole of the real, and thus to change the world....[but in the end] every attempt to impose the total power of a truth ruins that truth's very foundation. (page 83)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
The Good is Good only to the extent that it does not aspire to render the world good. Its sole being lies in the situated advent of a singular truth. So it must be that the power of a truth is also a kind of powerlessness...Every absolutization of the power of a truth organizes an Evil...This is why I will call this figure of Evil a disaster, a disaster of the truth induced by the absolutization of its power. (page 85)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
That truth does not have total power means, in the last analysis, that the subject-language, the production of a truth-process, does not have the power to name all the elements of the situation. At least one real element must exist, one multiple existing in the situation, which remains inaccessible to truthful nominations, and is exclusively reserved to opinion, to the language of the situation. At least one point that the truth cannot force. I shall call this element the unnameable of a truth...[T]he community and the collective are the unnamable of political truth: every attempt 'politically' to name a community induces a disastrous Evil (which can be seen as much in the extreme example of Nazism as in the reactionary usage of the word 'French'...) What matters here is the general principle: Evil in this case is to want, at all costs and under condition of a truth, to force the naming of the unnameable. Such, exactly, is the principle of disaster. (page 87)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
Simulacrum (associated with the event), betrayal (associated with the fidelity), and the forcing of the unnamable (associated with the power of the true): these are the figures of Evil, an Evil which becomes an actual possibility only thanks to the sole Good we recognize -- a truth-process. (page 87)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
This ethics combines...under the imperative to 'Keep going!', resources of discernment (do not fall for simulacra), of courage (do not give up), and of moderation (do not get carried away to the extremes of Totality). The ethic of truths aims neither to submit the world to the abstract rule of a Law, nor to struggle against an external and radical Evil. On the contrary, it strives, through its own fidelity to truths, to ward off Evil -- that Evil which it recognizes as the underside, or dark side, of these very truths. (page 91)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
'Politics without party' means that politics does not spring from or originate in the party. It does not stem from that synthesis of theory and practice that represented, for Lenin, the Party. Politics springs from real situations, from what we can say and do in these situations. And so in reality there are political sequences, political processes, but these are not totalized by a party that would be simultaneously the representation of certain social forces and the source of politics itself. (page 96)
Tags: [Activism]
It's simply not true that you can participate in a system as powerful and as ramified as parliamentarism without a real subjective commitment to it. In any case, the facts speak for themselves. None of the parties which have engaged in the parliamentary system and won governing power has escaped what I would call the subjective law of 'democracy', which is, when all is said and done, what Marx called an 'authorized representative' of capital. And I think that this is because, in order to participate in electoral or governmental representation, you have to conform to the subjectivity it demands -- that is, a principle of continuity, the principle of the politique unique -- the principle of 'this is the way it is, there is nothing to be done', the principle of Maastricht, of a Europe in conformity with the financial markets, and so on. In France we've known this for a long time, for again and again, when left-wing parties come to power, they bring with them the themes of disappointment, broken promises, and so forth. I think we need to see this as an inflexible law, not as a matter of corruption. I don't think it happens because people change their minds, but because parliamentary subjectivity compels it. (page 99)
Tags: [Activism]
[I]t's a formidably complex problem, which can sometimes expose us, I admit, to the risk of being the unconscious agents of capital itself. I remember the days when the French progressive movement -- and Deleuze was very engaged in this -- supported the creation of free [i.e. private-sector] radio stations. At the time, French radio was still entirely state-run. The creation of free radio stations was to be the conquest of a fragmented, multiform territoriality. And Deleuze was partly right. But for the most part, what took place, overwhelmingly, was the conquest of radio by capital. This is always the danger. We can't avoid it. Because on this point we are rivals to capital, rather than merely reacting against it. It is a struggle of universalism against universalism, not of particularism against universalism. (page 114)
Tags: [Universality]
The conception of politics that we defend is far from the idea that 'everything is possible'. In fact, it's an immense task to try to propose a few possibles, in the plural -- a few possibilities other than what we are told is possible. It is a matter of showing how the space of the possible is larger than the one we are assigned -- that something else is possible, but not that everything is possible. In any case, it is essential that politics renounce the category of totality, which is perhaps another change with respect to the previous period. (page 115)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
What especially interested me about Lacan was his conception of the real. First, the distinction he makes between the real and reality, which is not the same as the classical metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality, or between phenomenon and noumenon. And in particular, this conception of the real as being, in a situation, in any given symbolic field, the point of impasse, or the point of impossibility, which precisely allows us to think the situation as a whole, according to its real. Part of what I said a moment ago could be resaid as follows: emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible. (page 121)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
What any event reveals -- and I think it's particularly striking in politics -- is that there was something which had its own identity beyond the count, which was not taken account of. It's why I've always said that an event was, one way or another, a breakdown of the count. It's also why -- and here we come back to what I was saying about Lacan -- we can equally say, of an event, that it is what demonstrates what is impossible for the count, as its real, such that the law of the count is made apparent, as being such that this thing, which wasn't counted, should have been counted. (page 134)
Tags: [Truth & Real]
I think there are truth-procedures everywhere, and that they are always universal; that a Chinese novel, Arabic algebra, Iranian music...that all this is, in the end, universal by right. Simply, the conditions of their concrete universalization have followed a complicated history. On the other hand, I would admit that there is an element of the cultural site, which I would see in a system of interconnection, in which there is always something contingent, and also an aspect of sedimentation, of conservation, which is irreducibly particular...I conceive of a culture, in something other than empirical fashion. I'm perfectly aware that there are cultural universes, linguistic universes. But I'd like to be able to cross through this empirical reality in a slightly different way. (page 141)
Tags: [Culture, Universality]