Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change

BADIOU,

ZIZEK,

AND

POLITICAL

TRANSFORMATIONS

Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Founding Editor

+

James M . Edie

General Editor Anthony J. Steinbock

Associate Editor John McCumber

<■©»

B A D I O U , ZIZEK, AND POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS The Cadence of Change

Adrian Johnston

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2009 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2009. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnston, Adrian. Badiou, Zizek, and political transformations : the cadence of change / Adrian Johnston. p. cm. — (Northwestern University studies in phenomenology and existential philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-2569-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8101-2570-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Badiou, Alain. 2. Zizek, Slavoj. 3. Political science—Philosophy. I. Title. II. Series: Northwestern University studies in phenomenology and existential philosophy. JA71J585 2009 320.01'1—dc22 2009024604

® The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

For amazing Eathryn, again—the unforeseen impossibility who has become the very condition of possibility for all my possibilities

Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward. But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth—there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born—so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by iso­ lated symptoms. The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order, the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which, in one flash, illuminates the features of the new world. —G. W. F. Hegel We have spoken continuously of systematic, planned prepara­ tion, yet it is by no means our intention to imply that the autoc­ racy can be overthrown only by a regular siege or by organized assault. Such a view would be absurd and doctrinaire. On the contrary, it is quite possible, and historically much more prob­ able, that the autocracy will collapse under the impact of one of the spontaneous outbursts or unforeseen political complications which constantly threaten it from all sides. But no political party that wishes to avoid adventurous gambles can base its activi­ ties on the anticipation of such outbursts and complications. We must go our own way, and we must steadfastly carry on our regular work, and the less our reliance on the unexpected, the less the chance of our being caught unawares by any "historic turns." —V. I. Lenin The temporality belonging to philosophy holds that it has all the time it needs. —Alain Badiou

Contents

Preface: "Be Reasonable: Demand the Impossible!"—The Contemporary Importance of Badiou and 2izek

xiii

Acknowledgments

xxv

Introduction: The Badiouian-2izekian Politburo—Political Interventions in the Shadow of Lacan

xxvii

Part 1. Alain Badiou: From Event to Act 1 2

The Quick and the Dead: Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation One Must Have Confidence That the Other Does Not Exist: Select Preconditions for Events and Acts in Contemporary Circumstances

5

37

Part 2. Slavoj Zizek: From Act to Event 3

The Cynic's Fetish: 2izek and the Dynamics of Belief

85

4

From the Spectacular Act to the Vanishing Act: The Politics of Lacanian Theory

127

Appendix A "Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom! ": Some Brief Remarks on and Responses to 2izek's "Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate"

161

Appendix B Slavoj 2izek, "An Answer to Two Questions"

174

Notes

231

Works Cited

253

Index

269

Preface: "Be Reasonable: Demand the Impossible!"—The Contemporary Importance of Badiou and Zizek

For any concerned leftist living through the current conjuncture, Walter Benjamin's evocative description of the "angel of history" can't but seem fitting to press into the service of conveying an oppressive, immobilizing pessimism hanging heavily in the air of the prevailing Zeitgeist. A tired hopelessness afflicts even those on the Left who don't consciously reg­ ister this resigned exhaustion. The Benjaminian angel's "face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet."1 Like this angel, the consciousness of those forming today's radical Left, when they cast a glance backward over their own history from Marx through the present, is painfully aware of facing a "pile of debris" which incessantly "grows skyward."2 A dark, bloodstained arc of setbacks, failures, and defeats, an arc nearly two centuries old, looms over the Left: from, in Marx's nineteenth century, the unsuccess­ ful workers' revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 and the inspiring but excruciatingly brief Paris Commune brutally put down in May 1871 after barely two months in effective existence to, in the twentieth century of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, the evaporation of and ensuing reaction against May '68 in France, the savage, anarchic degeneration of China's Cultural Revolution brought to an end with Mao's death in 1976, and the wheezing collapses of the sclerotic nomenklatura bureaucratic state ap­ paratuses of Yugoslavia and the Eastern bloc initiated with the falling of the first dominoes in 1989. Innovative experiments in emancipatory poli­ tics crossing the fiercely guarded borders that separate the masses from the state (as in traditional revolutionary Marxism) and transgressing the lines of demarcation partitioning the cultural, political, and economic assignment of places and positions in rigid, atomizing divisions of labor (as in the not-unrelated defiant struggles of Maoism and May '68 that left their marks on Badiou, Jacques Rancière, and many others) 3 have not fared well, at least thus far. xiii

xiv PREFACE

Even worse, turning away from such historical debris to the pres­ ent offers no reassurance whatsoever. Classical sources of communist comfort ranging from Marx's assertions (in, for instance, both The Poverty of Philosophy and The Communist Manifesto) to the effect that history advances thanks to its supposed "bad side"4 up through Mao's "Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again . . . till . . . victory"5 become less comforting year by year, with the Left's situation increasingly feeling as though the Bad never, in fact, will lead to the Good. The unorganized radical Left is scattered in confusion and disarray. The center-left, when not relegated to being a caged, paper housecat confined to perpetual parliamentary opposition to the Right, walks into the corridors of gov­ ernment every once in a while only after dropping all authentically leftist programs at the threshold of each election campaign. Such moderates opportunistically betray leftism in chasing after a center that has been drifting steadily rightward for quite some time now. The Right has the momentum in the political systems of the late-capitalist, liberal demo­ cratic West, a momentum to which the Left is stuck belatedly reacting again and again within a context whose coordinates are defined by its adversaries. The game is rigged, but the center-left keeps playing anyway. The anemic humanism of tepidly moderate leftists has proven itself to be unsurprisingly unable to galvanize the imagination of the body politic. A perplexing, clumsy inability to master the affect-laden aesthetics of massmedia politics is merely one of many sad failings of today's Left. Where is its Leni Riefenstahl? The era of revolutionary politics certainly looks to be over. But what, if anything, can and should replace it is far from clear. In this day and age, an index of how low leftist expectations have sunk is that the prospect of thoroughly corrupt and incompetent right-wingers finally be­ ing voted out of office after years of flagrantly facilitating war and theft, perhaps to be replaced by centrist spokespersons of the petty bourgeois middle classes, is trumpeted by some as real change. Is this the most that can be hoped for nowadays? The "angel of history" appears in the ninth of Walter Benjamin's rightly renowned "Theses on the Philosophy of History." In the two im­ mediately following theses, he issues warnings cautioning against faith in historical "progress," warnings quite pertinent especially as regards the Hegelian-style secular theodicy of "scientific" socialist economism that has come to be identified as originating with the vulgar Marxism of the Second International 6 (not to mention "diamat" à la Stalin's doctrine expounded in the 1938 booklet Dialectical and Historical Materialism1— of course, Benjamin is writing about history at the time of the unholy Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Stalin and Hitler, a practical fact run-

XV PREFACE

ning parallel to the establishment of diamat as the theoretical orthodoxy of socialist states) .8 If nothing else, the lengthy string of losses suffered by the Left ought to dissuade anyone from succumbing to the complacency born of believing that the flow of sociohistorical trends inevitably will carry one effortlessly to the shores of a post-capitalist paradise. But Benjamin engages in a delicate balancing act. Although unwill­ ing to turn a blind Utopian eye to the dismal and discouraging record of revolutionary leftist politics, he appeals to a "weak messianic power"9 through which the setbacks, failures, and defeats of yesterday and today might very well be redeemed after the fact by something unforeseen to come, something that might arrive with each new tomorrow.10 This tem­ pered "theology" of a modified sort of historical materialism involves weakening the ostensibly specious strength of the historical materialism associated with traditional Marxism-Leninism (i.e., the old optimism that the dialectics of class struggle as delineated in Marxian analyses of political economy inevitably will result, whether sooner or later, in the victorious emergence of a classless global society of communist nations). And yet, Benjamin's is nonetheless still a messianism, a messianism hold­ ing out hope for a future "miracle" as a retroactive redemption that will transubstantiate après-coup yesterday's obscured defeats into tomorrow's bright heralds of victory avant le fait}1 In other words, Benjamin could be said here to carve out a precari­ ously thin space between an excess and a deficit of confidence. In cor­ rectly struggling against the overconfidence engendered by (mis) appro­ priations of Marxist historical materialism for the fashioning of tall tales of progress that have been steadily discredited ever more since the com­ pletion of these "Theses" in 1940—to be frank, they have been discred­ ited to the point of becoming utterly unbelievable even for most remain­ ing self-declared adherents of Marxism—Benjamin doesn't consequently deviate in the opposite direction by lapsing into total cynical despair (precisely the sort that leads to rightist deviations which give up on a true leftist trajectory). If, as the cliché goes, there's a fine line between bravery and stupidity, then, for leftist politics in the aftermath of the Marxisms of earlier eras, there's an even finer line, a delicate in-between, separating confidence from overconfidence. For those who can't bring themselves to practice maintaining this tenuous affective equilibrium, there's always the cheap-and-easy option of underconfidence, of comfortable discour­ agement in place of courage. Like freedom, hope, despite false ideologi­ cal depictions of it in romanticized hues—freedom and hope often are celebrated as wonderful blessings to be treasured with pleasure—is, in reality, a painful burden. Losing hope, in the same way as self-deceptively attempting to slough off freedom with excuses to the effect that one has

xvi PREFACE

no choices thanks to inconsiderate, unaccommodating circumstances, usually results in the oblivion of depoliticized relaxation, in a soothing sense of soporific relief. Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" can be read as an example of throwing out the bathwater of such co-mingling currents as (pseudo-)Hegelian Marxism and economism (i.e., historical teleologies proffering false promises to the effect that socialism can't fail eventually to succeed) while not discarding the baby (or, in the case of this particular essay, the dwarf)12 of truly emancipatory aspirations for which the socio­ political status quo isn't here to stay. However, many representatives of the contemporary post-Marxist Left, whether they acknowledge it or not, indeed throw out this baby with the same bathwater. That is to say, they fundamentally accept that the partnership of liberal democratic state ap­ paratuses and poorly regulated free markets indeed is here to stay. This discouraged underconfidence, which, at the same time, buys into the Right's quasi-delusional overconfidence that capitalism is the invincible terminator of history, is disguised in gratuitously hyper-technical jargon as a more restrained and realistic confidence celebrating democracy as the regulative ideal of an "unfinished project." The simple imperative urging people to resign themselves to refining what merely exists as al­ ready established—"ought" gets pathetically reduced to an extension of "is" in this case—is dressed up with fancy scraps of academically chewedover discourse cobbled together from the likes ofJacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and company (not to men­ tion an anachronistically revised version of the early twentieth-century Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, whose attacks on economism 13 and cri­ tiques of the insufficiently dialectical elaboration of the infrastructuresuperstructure distinction in certain strains of Marxism14 are sometimes converted into justifications for thoroughly downplaying the role of the economic base in tandem with entirely dismantling the infrastructuresuperstructure distinction). As is well known, post-structuralism and deconstruction now fur­ nish constituents of the lingua franca of such organizations as the Israeli Defense Forces15 and first-world advertising firms16 (helping further to substantiate Frederic Jameson's characterization of "postmodernism" as reflecting "the cultural logic of late-capitalism") .17 For orientations along these lines that veer away from the Marxist legacy, to the extent that the dialectics of history can no longer be seen as unambiguously point­ ing toward a telos beyond capitalism, the dialectical vision of capitalism and its corresponding superstructural democratic forms as transient his­ torical arrangements vulnerable to vanishing (rather than as speciously naturalized indestructible orders impervious to all hostile interventions)

xvii PREFACE

must be scrapped too. A weariness induced by a recent history filled with disheartening defeats understandably has engendered a defeatist Realpolitik according to which the verdict of history, ostensibly already turned in, has shown radical Marxism in its entirety to be a single, mas­ sive "infantile disorder" of the Left. The time purportedly has come for the Left to (in a perversion of a May '68 slogan that likely would appeal to the "nouveauxphilosophes" France's repentantpost-'68 ex-leftists starring as well-paid talking heads in the French popular media) be reasonable and cease demanding the (seemingly) impossible. Or, if the impossible is demanded, the state realistically shouldn't be expected to prostrate itself in response. It's enough to hurl a few stones (verbal or otherwise) of protest, gestures not even necessarily meant to elicit a direct response, over the thick wall said to separate the populace from the politicians. The mere symbolism of the performance supposedly will suffice. Badiou and Zizek both, each in his own way (ways that overlap with one another on several significant levels), strive to strike a precise bal­ ance akin to that negotiated by Benjamin. To begin with, in manners subtly echoing Benjamin's invocations of the retroactively redemptive powers of unpredictable futurity, Badiou and Zizek plead for an acknowl­ edgment that not only has the apparently impossible happened in the past, but that it will occur again in incalculable, unforeseeable forms in the future too. Thus, they vehemently refuse to capitulate to and com­ promise with global capitalism and its cultural, legal, and political hand­ maidens under the depressing pressure of a loss of leftist faith, a pres­ sure emanating from the pervasive nihilistic opinion according to which elections and commodities offer the sole goods that can and should be pursued safely and productively. Even if this realistically appears to be the unsurpassable enveloping limit of what remains historically possible, Badiou and Zizek tirelessly remind their audiences that conceptions of realistic possibilities are themselves historically transitory constructions, constructions that are smashed apart in any properly revolutionary ex­ plosion (which, like Benjamin's historical messiah, could irrupt disruptively into the present at any moment). Whereas Lenin, echoing Marx, counsels Marxists to practice politics as an "art of insurrection," 18 Ba­ diou and Zizek urge political agents to pursue politics as an "art of the impossible"19—namely, to engage with circumstances through words and deeds that, among other effects, rewrite the rules of what is and isn't pos­ sible, what is and isn't realistic. This stance, along with other features of their positions, sharply separates both of them from everyone ranging from disillusioned ex-Maoist converts to pragmatic center-rightism to the center-left advocates of radicalized democracies à venir, democracies of agonistically proliferating identitarian differences.

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But, again like Benjamin, Badiou and Zizek, while remaining faith­ ful to certain of the intertwined theoretical and practical legacies of Marx and his heirs, try (however successfully or unsuccessfully remains to be seen here) to avoid the twin pitfalls of complacently quietistic tailism and recklessly hubristic utopianism constantly threatening to arise from those Marxist historical materialisms resting on a crude, speciously Hegelian te­ leology of the dialectics of conflict between the economic class-categories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Badiou, even in his early Maoist period—he never completely abandons Mao over the course of his later labors20—rejects Hegelianized-qua-teleological Marxism21 (although, by contrast with his writings from the late 1980s onward,22 he's still, in the 1970s, sympathetic to Hegel and dialectics).23 His account of events, in­ cluding political ones, elaborated in Being and Event (and foreshadowed in Peut-on penser la politique?)24 admittedly originates, in part, out of his May '68 Maoist past25 and involves, among many other things, conceiving of revolutionary ruptures without theoretically anticipating such shatter­ ing shifts on the basis of traditional Marxist diagnoses of already-present socioeconomic tensions (in terms of this aspect of Marxism, Badiou and Zizek, as in other cases too, don't entirely agree). To put this in Benjaminian parlance, the "weak messianism" of a doctrine of events—by con­ trast with the majority of post-Marxist leftisms, this doctrine continues to believe that major changes (rather than minor reforms) can still come about—replaces the strong messianism of that Hegelian-style Marxism covered with dust dating from the nineteenth century. Similarly, Zizek, through arranging a marriage between the Lenin of 191726 and Lacan circa the 1960s and 1970s, celebrates the potential for revolutionary acts as untimely interventions that appear possible only after the fact of actually transpiring—and before which such interven­ tions are impossible qua unimaginable in the eyes of the popular political imagination. The points of convergence and divergence between the Badiouian event and the Zizekian act will be one of the main foci of this book. For now, it should be noted that Badiou is sometimes made to aid and abet Zizek's construction of his Lenin-at^c-Lacan couple. Addition­ ally, attention ought to be paid to the fact that, whereas Badiou begins by dismissing the Hegel of Hegelian Marxism and ends up with a more general philosophical aversion to Hegel,27 Zizek delineates the contours of a quite heterodox Hegel, a Hegel whose views of historical temporali­ ties could be said to foreshadow Benjamin's altered version of historical materialism.28 Zizek's Hegelian Geist is an illusion of perspective floating atop a volatile historical-material mixture of contingencies and retroac­ tions. This Zizekian Hegel is a far cry from the caricatured philosopher of inexorably zigzagging but ultimately linear progress leaned upon

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by classical Marxism-Leninism's economistic pseudo-science of history. Moreover, whereas Marx himself, as is common knowledge, insists upon the necessity of "standing Hegel on his head" (i.e., inverting his alleged idealism hypothesizing the invisible hand of a conceptual-ideational Weltgeist) so as "to discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell,"29 Zizek unconventionally argues that Hegel already is, prior to this Marxist extraction of a "rational kernel," a materialist thinker of history as a series of variables and accidents. (Of course, this preface isn't the place to wade into the dense, tangled labyrinths of discussions and debates surround­ ing the Hegel-Marx relationship.) As arguably does Badiou's theory of the event, Zizek's LeninistLacanian conception of the act entails, so to speak, a non-utopian utopianism—that is, an optimistic faith that the limited possibilities of today don't discouragingly demarcate an inescapable enclosure, albeit a faith decoupled from an overly optimistic conviction that revolutionary com­ munism is destined to triumph tomorrow come what may. Contained in a collection of texts assembled by Zizek, certain of Lenin's remarks point to a core aspect of this non-utopian utopianism's outlook: There are no miracles in nature or history, but every abrupt turn in history, and this applies to every revolution, presents such a wealth of content, unfolds such unexpected and specific combinations of forms of struggle and alignment of forces of the contestants, that to the lay mind there is much that must appear miraculous.30 For Lenin, a revolution would be, as it were, a non-miraculous miracle. Simply put, when a revolutionary moment arrives (immanently surfacing out of the materialized complexity of given concrete conjunctures), it seems as though the impossible has become not only possible, but actual. Set against the backdrop of a preceding situational context, it appears as if such a momentous "abrupt turn" shouldn't have (been able to) come to pass. Believing that history's futures hold in store more unexpected upheavals and twists of a comparable order of magnitude (as do Benja­ min, Badiou, and Zizek) is Utopian only if one buys into the compara­ tively much more Utopian notion that the relentless march of time finally has produced out of itself a stable state impervious to destabilization by unforeseen occurrences to come. To employ the pejorative sense of the word Utopian, perhaps the most Utopian sentiment of all is the belief that tomorrow's possibilities will confirm and conform to today's sense of what is (and isn't) possible (an insight already grasped by Herbert Marcuse in the 1950s and 1960s).31 Along similar lines, it should be specified that there are two Utopias

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jointiy dismissed by Badiou and Zizek, two historical mirages they refuse to be beguiled by in their orientation toward what arguably could be identified as a third category/type of Utopia (a category/type not without relation to Benjaminian historical materialism's vision of potential even­ tual redemption). On the one hand, there's the Utopia of the traditional Marxist-Leninist end of history, the sublating Aufhebung entirely over­ coming prior class conflicts structuring the socioeconomic past; on the other hand, there's the Utopia of global capitalism's supposedly irresist­ ible expansion, an alternate end of history in which market forces always manage to liquidate decisively any and every form of serious resistance or opposition. Badiou and Zizek both represent political positions that reso­ lutely abandon the Utopia of vulgar Marxism's economic determinism while nonetheless, in so doing, successfully resisting the temptation to fall (if only through the passive acceptance of defeatist resignation) into the other utopianism of late-capitalism triumphant. There is a BadiouianZizekian weak utopianism grounded on the positing of aleatory historical causalities,32 causalities whose incalculable factors, the surprises around which historical times take shape, are called "events" or "acts." Before proceeding to an introductory overview of the project to be pursued by this book, two additional sets of prefatory remarks must be made: one set indicating a few matters that will be centrally involved in what follows, and another concerning what will not be addressed be­ low (with an explanation for why not). Apropos the first set, this project aims to situate itself between the two poles of the Badiouian opposition between "political philosophy" and "metapolitics."33 Simply put, the dif­ ference between political philosophy and metapolitics is this: in political philosophy, philosophy attempts to dictate to politics what can and should be done at the level of things political, whereas, in metapolitics, philosophy accepts that it should listen to the practitioners of politics rather than vice versa (i.e., philosophy doesn't know the truth of poli­ tics in advance of political processes transpiring outside its boundaries). There are moments herein when what is at stake is an implicit plea for a return to political philosophy in the face of Badiou's metapolitics (tak­ ing into consideration the related risks of quietism and tailism entailed by the latter—the contention that Badiouian philosophy flirts with these dangers is one of the arguments to be laid out in this book). Both p r e / non-Badiouian political philosophy and the Badiouian metapolitics op­ posing it succumb to a standard philosophical temptation with politi­ cally problematic ramifications: the philosopher's occupational hazard of hastily generalizing a given model, relation, or structure as an ahistorical invariant or injunction (or, one correspondingly could say, the neglect of the Leninist insistence on sticking to the pursuit of "a concrete analysis of a concrete situation").

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More precisely, although Badiou (and, in the same manner, Rancière too) 34 justifiably attacks political philosophy's pretensions always to dictate, from an elitist expert's position, to those non-philosophers engaged in actively practicing politics, Badiou isn't justified, either theo­ retically or practically, in countering this with an equally exceptionless perspective according to which non-philosophical politics always dic­ tates to philosophy the political truths philosophy is to consider—be­ hind this lurks Badiou's more general depiction of philosophy as con­ ditioned by éventai happenings in art, love, science, and politics qua the extra-philosophical "conditions" under which it is to be placed35 (a depiction not without associative resonances with Hegel's characteriza­ tion of philosophy as the "owl of Minerva" which spreads its wings solely at dusk, when the events of the day already are done) ,36 In other words, this project takes issue with both sides' appeal to an "always," with the in­ sistence that the direction of influence between philosophy and politics can or should invariably flow in one and only one direction, no matter the time, place, or circumstances. Sometimes philosophers should listen to politicians (as per metapolitics), and sometimes politicians should lis­ ten to philosophers (as per political philosophy). It all depends on the exigencies and specifics of the situations in question. Nothing can or should be ruled out a priori in advance. Related to Badiou's repudiation of political philosophy in favor of metapolitics as philosophies under the condition of specific political events, a more dialectical approach, one closer to Zizek's Hegelianism, maintains that conditioning is a two-way street (a point also perhaps dis­ cernible in Balibar's reading of Marx) ,37 In other words, not only is phi­ losophy conditioned by, among other domains, politics, but philosophy can and (at least sometimes, however infrequently) does have reciprocal conditioning effects upon what Badiou identifies as the conditions of philosophy. What happens if and when a metapolitics starts influenc­ ing politics (including those event-generated political sequences from which a given corresponding metapolitical framework initially arose)? Badiou is generally (although not entirely) 38 silent about this easily fore­ seeable eventuality (Bruno Bosteels brushes up against it in passing in an essay on the lasting influence of Maoism on Badiou's thinking) .39 The ensuing critical assessments of the conceptions of revolutionary change offered by Badiou and Zizek—overall, this project carries out, side-byside, equally immanent critiques and defenses of Badiouian and Zizekian political theories—explore, among other topics, the consequences of their theoretical delineations of radical transformations in light of pos­ sible metapolitical conditionings of political conditions. As for the second set of prefatory remarks, remarks regarding what won't be treated in what follows, this book doesn't spend much time

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discussing the political practices of Badiou and Zizek (i.e., their for­ ays into "real politics" outside of the context of their published books, such as Badiou's participation in the activism of L'Organisation Politique and Zizek's presence on Slovenia's national political stage). For the sort of philosophical approach adopted here, it isn't valid to evaluate the ideas of other philosophers in light of their behind-the-texts activities. It is perfectly possible (and, as regards Badiou and Zizek, maybe some­ times really the case) for a philosopher's political reflections and his or her political activities to be out of joint with one another, loosely con­ nected or utterly disconnected. Similarly, as with the distinction between political philosophy and metapolitics as explained above, there isn't one and only one ahistorical structure or dynamic for the theory-practice rap­ port, including any sort of dialectical conception of this rapport hastily promoted to the status of an inflexible configuration or formal template (or, in a prescriptive as opposed to descriptive register, an atemporal ideal of unity that one is morally obliged always and everywhere to strive to realize). As Badiou himself proposes on several occasions, the dialectic must itself be dialecticized,40 thereby granting the possibility of a metadialectical oscillation between the dialectical (when theory and practice are inextricably intertwined) and the non-dialectical (when theory and practice peel apart, with one running ahead of the other) .41 Such a metadialectics is not only, at a minimum, theoretically thinkable—it might be practically useful, or even, in some instances, downright necessary and unavoidable. Additionally, the focus of this project's perspective is on what sort of legacy Badiou and Zizek will leave for the politically minded agents of posterity. When the historically specific details of their non-textual in­ terventions and sociopolitical situations are long forgotten by everyone save for a few specialist intellectual historians and biographers, what will the likely-to-be-remembered philosophical texts of Badiou and Zizek still say to practitioners operating in different future conditions? As a per­ haps apocryphal story recounts (told by, most notably, Derrida), Mar­ tin Heidegger, when asked by a student in a seminar what in Aristotle's biographical life history is crucial to know for understanding his phi­ losophy, is reported to have said: "Here's what you need to know: Aris­ totle was born, he thought, and he died. That's it." There's an element of such an outlook in this project's handling of Badiou and Zizek. They are taken to be philosophers first and foremost, even when dealing with politics. As such, they are engaged with from a vantage point that just might have the potential to transcend the ephemeral, transient particu­ larities of their fields of extra-philosophical activities so as to continue to be relevant in later circumstances and contexts beyond the present,

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a vantage point perhaps able to survive the ordeal of subsequent de/recon textualizations. Moreover, this angle of approach is hardly foreign to the sensibili­ ties of either Badiou or Zizek. The former, throughout his long intel­ lectual itinerary, never hesitates to invoke trans-historical common de­ nominators of radically emancipatory politics, and even dares to speak, in an ethos permeated by post-Nietzschean historicism, of such Platonic heresies as eternity and immortality. The latter employs Lacanian psycho­ analysis to revive Kant and the post-Kantian German idealists, arguing that the speculations of these purportedly passé metaphysicians concern­ ing things both timeless and temporal are more relevant today than ever before. In what seems, at first glance, to be utter disregard for the Jamesonian Marxist-dialectical imperative "Always historicize!"42 Badiou and Zizek each suggestively indicate that, in a historical conjuncture in which historicization itself has been divested of its critical-subversive powers in being absorbed into reigning ideologies and narratives (a key example being late-capitalism's assimilative co-opting of "postmodern" theoretical discourses originating in the France of the late 1960s and early 1970s), a forceful resistance to automatic, knee jerk historicizing might be sorely needed by radical politics today. In some of his later writings, Marx denies that his analyses, taken together, constitute "a general historico-philosophical theory" 43 (i.e., the historical materialist critique of political economy doesn't constitute an ahistorical analytic frame, an overarching doctrine, for future analy­ ses) ,44 During this same period, confronted with questions concerning the feasibility of a viable revolution being launched in agrarian czarist Russia (burning practical questions eventually leading to Lenin's antieconomist, anti-evolutionist conception of revolutionary interventions), Marx speculates about "accidents" defying the predictions of the versions of historical materialism developed in painstaking detail in his earlier texts.45 In short, he admits that materialist theories of history, his own in­ cluded, must be open to modification in response to the twists and turns of unfolding history itself; no theory, not even a materialist one, should congeal into a reified orthodoxy. In this vein, Georg Lukâcs' 1919 essay "What Is Orthodox Marxism?" (contained in History and Class Consciousness) contends that Marxist thought should never be reduced to nothing more than an encyclopedia of static contents to be committed to memory by engaged leftist subjects. Instead, what Marx arguably bequeaths to his successors is a "method" both theoretical and practical—more spe­ cifically, a flexible ensemble of strategies and tactics for comprehending given infrastructural and superstructural phenomena as relationally con­ figured parts of the totality of an unstable historical whole-in-process.46

xxiv PREFACE

As Lukâcs puts it in one of the final sentences of his essay, "Marxist or­ thodoxy is no guardian of traditions, it is the eternally vigilant prophet proclaiming the relation between the tasks of the immediate present and the totality of the historical process."47 Although both Badiou and Zizek have pronounced reservations regarding talk of wholes and totalities, their fundamental fidelity to communist (qua emancipatory and egalitarian) politics after Marx is orthodox precisely in the best of senses as delineated by Lukâcs (thus appearing to be heterodox in the eyes of a number of other views). Nei­ ther too inflexibly clinging to outdated Marxist models of political econo­ mies (i.e., being dogmatic) nor too flexibly updating away the core com­ munist components of genuinely leftist-emancipatory positions (i.e., being revisionist) ,48 each in his own way labors creatively to carry forward the pursuit of radical egalitarianism into new contexts that are far from exhaustively mapped by extant conceptual grids. Badiou and Zizek's in­ novative reflections on and responses to ongoing political circumstances, while arguably not proffering decisive, detailed solutions on the ques­ tion of leftist organization—as both of them are aware, one of the many causes of the radical Left's impotence is a lack of effective large-scale organization—are examples of philosophers doing what philosophy has done best since Socrates: daring to raise questions about the existing order of things, to interrogate the status quo, even when such queries can't and don't promise to be readily answerable. This is based on a basic, axiomatic refusal to accept that things must or should be as they are, a principle held to in the teeth of the current difficulty, if not impossibility, of imagining things being otherwise. As Lenin vehemently maintains, organizing without relation to theorizing is worse than pointless: "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practi­ cal activity."49 In this respect at least, Lenin's time, the time of which he speaks in this context, isn't gone for good. Nonetheless, in these times, the Badiouian-Zizekian engagement with politics gives strong reason for hoping that thinking can in fact generate change. Even if new transfor­ mative possibilities issuing immediately from their philosophies have yet clearly and tangibly to materialize, it's worth betting that this thinking will have mattered—and this even if one can't quite see how so from within the constraints of the hic et nunc. Such is the wager of this book.

Acknowledgments

Given that Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change deals with the volatile terrain of politics, I feel it's important to date this text. The original version of chapter 3 of this book was written in fall 2002 and was intended to appear as part of my previous book, Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Northwestern University Press, 2008). The rest of it, save for the preface (put together in early fall 2008), was written between summer 2006 and spring 2007. As such, certain materials aren't dealt with herein. Badiou and Zizek, as incredibly prolific living thinkers, already have published additional texts since I finished composing the main body of this work. What's more, the quantity of secondary literature addressing the two of them has steadily increased in the past few years. With the exception of instances in which I felt compelled to incorporate references to this extremely recent pri­ mary and secondary material in revisions responding to comments in the readers' reports, I decided to let the manuscript stand as it was when completed early in 2007.1 think its arguments and ideas continue to re­ main relevant. Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward generously agreed to serve as reviewers of the manuscript. I could not have asked for two better read­ ers. My work has benefited enormously from their thought-provoking criticisms and illuminating insights. I hope that my revisions to the book have managed to do at least some justice to the quality of their responses. I would like to thank both Bruno and Peter not only for their invaluable feedback, but also for their friendship. In writing this book, I received financial assistance from the Uni­ versity of New Mexico in the form of a Dean's Summer Research Award for 2007. I greatly appreciate having been granted this assistance. I also appreciate the support I've been given by my colleagues in the Depart­ ment of Philosophy at the university. The editors and staff at Northwestern University Press are fantas­ tic. This is the third book I've happily done with them. Anne Gendler has worked closely with me on editing all three books, and an acknowl­ edgment by me of her help is long overdue. Apart from being incredXXV

xxvi A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

ibly attentive, conscientious, and meticulous in treating my writing, she's been as patient as a saint in handling my neurotic anxieties and obses­ sions apropos the editing and publishing processes. Henry Carrigan is an absolute pleasure to work with, being an excellent acquisitions editor who kindly keeps me updated on the progress of my projects. Everyone at Northwestern University Press has been wonderfully responsive and helpful. Moreover, once again, I owe Tony Steinbock, the editor of the Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy series, quite a lot of gratitude for his unwavering support of my work. I am profoundly grateful to Slavoj Zizek for many things. But, in the context of this particular book's acknowledgments, I would like to thank him specifically for his magnanimous willingness to put together a substantial text in response to a series of questions I posed to him in Albuquerque at the end of November 2007. This material appears as the second appendix of the book. My ways of thinking and the directions of my writing would not be what they are without Slavoj—things for which a mere "thank you" is not enough. Finally, words cannot convey the extent and depth of the signifi­ cance of Kathryn Wichelns in my life. Her love, care, company, and con­ cern sustain me not only in my work, but in my very being. She is the transcendental horizon of my world.

Modified portions of this volume have appeared in several different venues: "The Cynic's Fetish: Slavoj Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief," Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 9, no. 3 (December 2004 [reprinted in the International Journal of Zizek Studies 1, no. 0 (2007)]); "Hi tri in mrtvi: Alain Badiou in razcepljene hitrosti transformacije" (trans. Ana Zerjav), Problemi, no. 7/8 (2006); "The Quick and the Dead: Alain Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation," International Journal of Zizek Studies 1, no. 2 (2007); " 'Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!': Some Brief Remarks on and Responses to Zizek's 'Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate,' " International Journal of Zizek Studies 1, no. 2 (2007); "From the Spectacu­ lar Act to the Vanishing Act: Badiou, Zizek, and the Politics of Lacanian Theory," in Did Somebody Say Ideology? Slavoj Zizek in a Post-Ideological Universe, ed. Fabio Vighi and Heiko Feldner (Newcastle: Cambridge Schol­ ars Publishing, 2007 [also published in the International Journal of Zizek Studies 1, no. 0 (2007)]); and "Courage Before the Event: Alain Badiou and the Force of Affects," Filozofski Vestnik: Radical Philosophy? 29, no. 2, ed. Peter Klepec, 2008. I appreciate the editors' allowing these portions to reappear here.

Introduction: The Badiouian-Zizekian Politburo—Political Interventions in the Shadow of Lacan

Over the past several years, Badiou and Zizek have emerged together as two of Europe's most important living thinkers. They are both key agenda-setters for various discussions in contemporary Continental phi­ losophy. Despite their differences, Badiou and Zizek, who are actively en­ gaged in dialogue with each other, have a great deal in common, includ­ ing a shared commitment to bringing theoretical reflection to bear upon a range of aspects characterizing present-day political circumstances. These two philosophers are particularly interested in asking what conse­ quences the long-running string of defeats for the Left, culminating most recently in the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, has entailed for leftist political thought. The so-called death of communism occurring near the end of the twentieth century arguably has resulted in, among other effects, a profound reshaping of the collective political imagination. Confronted with capitalism's quite recent historical triumphs—as is frequently ob­ served, capitalism nowadays appears to be the proverbial "only game in town"—it often can be difficult to avoid envisioning this singular socioeconomic system as the sole viable option available for organizing hu­ manity's multiple forms of group coexistence. Badiou and Zizek believe that philosophy has a duty to resist this temptation, and to keep the col­ lective political imagination open by challenging the widely assumed no­ tion that the current version of global late-capitalism is irreversibly en­ trenched. How likely is it that the political status quo will remain more or less interminably impervious to the possibility of radical alterations and alternatives? Is the future now devoid of the potential for the hap­ pening of revolutionary upheavals that are something other than chaotic disasters? Moving from analyses of the specific level of these features of to- • day's political situation to the relatively more general level of theoretical contemplation, the philosophies of Badiou and Zizek are concerned xxvii

xxviii I N T R O D U C T I O N

with questions about how significant, reality-shattering shifts arise. Badiouian events and Zizekian acts are both well-known concepts in con­ temporary Continental philosophy designating occurrences and gestures through which old orders are broken with via points of abrupt rupture, points interrupting the cohesion and continuity of whatever counts as the established run of things. An event or an act is that which, from ap­ parently out of nowhere, suddenly and unexpectedly catalyzes processes of transformation within given sets of circumstances—including, for in­ stance, the sets of circumstances constituting today's political situation. This project critically examines Badiouian and Zizekian theoretical depictions of trajectories of transformation, especially as deployed by these two thinkers at the intersection of philosophy and politics. It un­ dertakes two tasks. First, it traces in detail the philosophical and political origins of Badiou's concept of the event and Zizek's concept of the act. Second, it delineates the philosophical and political problems plaguing these two similar, related concepts. The central thesis here is that Badiou and Zizek tend to favor models of change that risk discouraging in ad­ vance precisely the sorts of efforts at transforming the world of today that they so ardently desire. To go into greater detail as regards these matters, it should be ob­ served that a noticeable imbalance has been present for quite some time in the relationship between Zizek and Badiou. Whereas the former, in numerous contexts, has singled out and directly engaged with the phi­ losophy of the latter (starting as early as his 1993 book Tarrying with the Negative),1 the reverse hasn't been the case; at least in print, Badiou, up until a short while ago, made no explicit mention of Zizek's work. How­ ever, in an appendix-like section entitled "Enquiries, Comments, and Di­ gressions" near the end of his 2006 tome Logiques des mondes, Badiou says several things about the Zizekian project as well as the Slovene school of Lacanian theory more generally. In particular, as regards their shared passion for the realm of politics, Badiou speaks of certain "invaluable remainders of Stalinist culture" in Zizek's corpus as providing a common meeting ground for the two of them (given Badiou's Maoist past and en­ during radical leftist stance) .2 After noting this, Badiou immediately adds that "we two form a Politburo where it's decided who will be the first to execute the other, after having extracted from him an appropriate autocritique."3 If nothing else, this reference to the Stalin-era show trials of the Soviet Union certainly betrays a degree of ambivalence on Badiou's part toward Zizek (an ambivalence which surfaces elsewhere too, such as with Badiou referring to an "amiable confrontation" with Zizek,4 or his reply when asked by an interviewer, "In general, what do you take to

xxix I N T R O D U C T I O N

be the decisive difference between your position and Zizek's?").5 Badiou seems to situate himself in relation to Zizek under the sway of a conflicted commingling of strong feelings of intellectual fraternity coupled with a powerful sense of (sibling) rivalry hinging on specific critical points of divergence—for instance, to take one example among many relevant in the context of this discussion, Badiouian politics-without-the-party-state,6 based on the purported disjunction between explosive events of subver­ sive political "truth" (vérité) and reified regimes of institutionalized statist "knowledge" (savoir) ,7 versus Zizekian endorsements of strong socialist party-state apparatuses (justified by the need to "re-politicize" the decep­ tively depoliticized economic sphere) 8 and corresponding denunciations of this Badiouian politics-without-the-party-state as a politics purified to the point of being apolitical.9 Although much could be written about the differences that make for all the difference between Badiou and Zizek (and, following Bruno Bosteels's call to read "Badiou Without Zizek,"10 much undoubtedly will be written about this), the focus here instead will be on those, as it were, familial resemblances underpinning the other, positive side of Badiou's ambivalence, namely, on those shared features that have brought Badiou and Zizek together to form the axis of a new "Politburo" through a joint rejection of such contemporary leftist (or pseudo-leftist) orientations as radical democratic theory à la Laclau and Mouffe and the compromis­ ing centrism of Blair's "Third Way" or Clinton's "New Democrats." As is common knowledge, Badiou and Zizek are both profoundly influenced by the thought of Lacan. Additionally and more specifically, Zizek has re­ course to the Lacanian notion of the "act" (Vacte) as delineated primarily during Lacan's seminars of the mid-1960s. He derives from the Lacanian definition and description of acts (as distinguished, by contrast, from "ac­ tions") a mixed set of tacit assumptions, rhetorical tropes, metaphorical imagery, and lines of argumentation bearing upon the topic of the ca­ dence of political change. Moreover, Zizek, with ample theoretical justi­ fication, draws direct parallels between his version of Lacan's act and Badiou's event.11 It could be maintained that the Badiouian event and the Zizekian act both essentially entail positing a stark discrepancy between, on the one hand, actions stuck within the slow-moving inertia of status quo reali­ ties shackled by a "big Other" (as per Lacan/Zizek) and/or a "state of the situation" (as per Badiou), and, on the other hand, acts/events suddenly irrupting within a static scene with the ensuing consequence of setting in motion trajectories of transformation breaking away from and shat­ tering stagnant status quo realities (these trajectories being, so to speak,

XXX I N T R O D U C T I O N

escape velocities of a form of subjectivity subtracting itself from extant matrices of mediation). This drastic dichotomy splitting the temporal dynamics and rhythms of sociopolitical processes between either mere actions hopelessly embedded within the lurching continuous flow of a given situated reality (i.e., the stasis of repetition) and spectacular éven­ tai acts emerging with a seemingly immeasurable infinité speed (a speed incapable of being captured by chronology) so as to explode the order of the statist Other in an instantaneous gesture of rupture (i.e., the kinesis of becoming) is questionable and problematic. To put it in the terms of a debate sparked in evolutionary theory by the late Stephen J. Gould, Badiou and Zizek often tend hastily to dismiss "gradual evolution" as involving no real change at all. Critics of Gould's alternative "punctuated evolution" model, involving plateau-like periods of stability occasionally shaken up by the abrupt, sudden impacts of catalysts of alteration (and with which Badiou's depiction of history as a non-totalizable, heterogeneous jumble of temporal strata dispersed by event-driven aleatory ruptures bears a resemblance) 12 called this model "evolution by jerks," to which Gould famously and wittily replied that these critics were stuck advocating "evolution by creeps." (To be men­ tioned as an aside, those on the receiving end of Badiou and Zizek's blisteringly aggressive polemical critiques, especially when listed as part of their indictments against contemporary forms of democracy, might similarly be tempted to label these two thinkers as promoting a politics by undemocratic, Leninist jerks—as Peter Hallward indicates, speaking of a variety of politics resembling that advocated by Badiou and Zizek, such a politics necessarily appears to be "authoritarian or intransigent.") 13 In its quick dismissal of ostensibly minor actions in favor of awaiting the mi­ raculous event of the major act, this "parallax view" of politics is at risk of being blind to, among other things, the possibility of various dialectical interactions between the multiple-speed temporal tracks structuring both the microcosm of subjectivity and the macrocosm of the polis, includ­ ing immanent self-sundering movements out of and into the planes of varying-velocity movement associated with both actions and acts. (How­ ever, one should note, Badiou's inclination to veer somewhat away from the relational structures favored by Hegelian dialectics beginning in his 1988 Being and Event,14 despite his flirtations with Hegel and the dialectic in his prior work [especially his 1982 Théorie du sujet],15 makes this less of an obvious problem for him than for the avowedly Hegelian Zizek— although, at a larger theoretical level beyond rudimentary compare-andcontrast textual exegesis, it could be claimed that this ostensible rejec­ tion of dialectical or relational models by the "mature" Badiou should itself be subjected to rigorous interrogation and criticism.)

xxx i I N T R O D U C T I O N

One very important thing that Badiou's manner of conceptualizing the event and Zizek's fashion of portraying the Lacanian notion of the act share in common is a refusal to specify any possible preconditions for the occurrence of these points of separation from the reality of a par­ ticular situation. In fact, for Badiou, with his wish to have done with the "genealogical imperative"16 so dominant in various currents of twentiethcentury European thought, this is a principled refusal in line with his desire to prevent events from being dialectically reinscribed back within any prior contextual continuum. 17 Both the event and the act apparentiy arise ex nihilo, without visible foreshadowing or discernible precursors, violently punctuating the otherwise gradual drifting of the sociohistorical run of things. This book is organized into two parts, the first dealing with Badiou and the second with Zizek, and each part consists of two chapters divided into five sections. In part 1, the first chapter ("The Quick and the Dead: Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation") critically examines Ba­ diou's theory of the event through scrutinizing his portrayals of historic­ ity and temporality in light of his motivated, principled refusal to relate events to any possible pre-evental historical/temporal backgrounds or conditions (a refusal arguably leading to discouraging political conse­ quences). The second chapter ("One Must Have Confidence That the Other Does Not Exist: Select Preconditions for Events and Acts in Con­ temporary Circumstances") sketches the contours of an account of the pre-evental conditions of possibility for events (contra Badiou's prohi­ bitions of any such account) in connection with, in particular, the Ba­ diouian depiction of affects. In part 2, the third chapter ("The Cynic's Fetish: Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief) builds to the argument that Zizek's political deployment of the Lacanian concept of the act actually endangers rather than invigorates the program of political change he wants to advance. The fourth chapter ("From the Spectacular Act to the Vanishing Act: The Politics of Lacanian Theory"), after passing through an exegetically meticulous "return to Lacan" (specifically in terms of re­ visiting the history of the notion of the act in his teachings), utilizes a new interpretation of the Lacanian act so as to propose a model of possible political transformations differing in important ways from that promoted in the form of the Badiouian event or the Zizekian act. Finally, the first appendix (" 'Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!': Some Brief Remarks on and Responses to Zizek's 'Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate'") engages with Zizek's recent reading of chapter 1 of this project. More specifically, it assesses the various manners in which theories of the rela­ tions between ideologies and transformations offered by Badiou, Zizek, and this project are all equally vulnerable to the danger of perverting

xxxii INTRODUCTION

quietist appropriations of such theories, namely, the twisting of theories that aim to provoke radical changes into rationalizations for perpetually postponing any such changes. Correct theories of political transformations by themselves are unable to inoculate and immunize themselves against this omnipresent, ubiquitous risk. Something more is necessary, something at stake in the related forces of affect and will.

BADIOU,

ZIZEK,

AND

POLITICAL

TRANSFORMATIONS

Part 1

Alain Badiou: From Event to Act

The Quick and the Dead: Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation

§1 The Challenge of Change: Alterations from Within Two particular lowest common denominators, among many, of Badiou and Zizek's ways of thinking politics are of interest here: one, their shared conviction that any genuine reworking of a system, in terms of real and true political transformations, can issue only from the unprecedented occurrence of a gesture separate or subtracted from the ordinary, quo­ tidian run of things in the status quo of a given situated socio-symbolic reality; and two, their penchant, especially at the level of their choices of adjectives and metaphors helping to structure the articulation of their political discourses, for sharply splitting the speeds of collective trans­ formation between the stagnant stasis of system-complicit behaviors and the kinetic lightning flash of system-shattering interventions. This study begins, in part 1, with a focus on Badiou, after which, in part 2, attention will be turned to Zizek—not for the reasonless reason that B alphabeti­ cally comes before Z, but rather because Zizek's politics draws much in­ spiration, both implicitly as well as explicitiy, from Badiou's philosophy. For instance, apart from enthusiastically appropriating the Badiouian concept of event, Zizek borrows his denunciations of the liberal demo­ cratic use of the word totalitarianism as a form of ideological blackmail, a "prohibition against thinking" ultimately aimed at preventing the con­ templation of alternatives to present-day late-capitalism, from Badiou's 1985 book Peut-on penser la politique?1 (Moreover, this particular borrowing from Badiou involves Zizek being implicitly self-critical of his initial radi­ cal democratic sympathies, a symptom of which is the fact that Ernesto Laclau wrote a preface to Zizek's 1989 debut book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology.) Given the complications arising from the fact that Badiou has changed his mind several times as regards various ideas and topics linked to the terrain of politics (and given that this analysis isn't

5

6 ALAIN

B A D I O U

meant to be primarily an exhaustive summary of Badiouian politics as an isolated whole), the interpretation proffered here will strategically limit itself to basing its assertions mainly on Badiou's writings from 1985 up through the present (thereby largely neglecting such early Maoist texts as Théorie de la contradiction [1975] and De l'idéologie [1976] ). Remarks found in the 1996 book Anthropologie du nom, written by Badiou's ally and fellow activist Sylvain Lazarus, will also be taken into consideration here, given the extent to which Badiou acknowledges relying on the ideas of Lazarus apropos several key matters in political thought. 2 In Being and Event, Badiou links his theory of the event to the the­ sis that "there is some newness in being." 3 And, in a recently published interview entitled "Can Change Be Thought?" he declares that all of his philosophical endeavors ultimately are animated by a desire to theorize how it's possible for novelty to surface within situations. 4 (At least as early as his youthful Maoist texts Théorie de la contradiction and Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégélienne from the 1970s, a concern with the New is quite evident.) 5 He explains himself thus: Really, in the end, I have only one question: what is the new in a situa­ tion? My unique philosophical question, I would say, is the following: can we think that there is something new in the situation, not outside the situation nor the new somewhere else, but can we really think through novelty and treat it in the situation? The system of philo­ sophical answers that I elaborate, whatever its complexity may be, is subordinated to that question and to no other. Even when there is event, structure, formalism, mathematics, multiplicity, and so on, this is exclusively destined, in my eyes, to think through the new in terms of the situation.6 The most important feature to note in this statement is the constraint Badiou places upon himself in relation to this task of philosophically grasping newness in its strongest sense: the new must be conceived as immanently arising out of specific "situations," rather than as swooping in from some unspecified transcendent other place in order to modify externally the coordinates of a particular status quo reality as an agent of alteration essentially foreign to the given site of change. 7 However, certain of what might be described as Badiou's "aesthetic" preferences in his political vocabulary—both he and Zizek have a shared taste for a circumscribed constellation of discursive motifs bound together by a set of cross-resonating family resemblances—are in danger of preventing him from taking into consideration possible types of transformation that exemplify precisely the sort of change he claims to be most interested in

7 THE

QUICK

AND

THE

DEAD

thinking through, namely, transformations immanently generated from within the internal parameters of a specific situation a n d / o r a given world. One striking feature of both the aesthetics of Badiou's political dis­ course as well as this discourse's conceptual-argumentative content is the recurrent emphasis on figures of abrupt discontinuity. Here are just a few examples: an authentic intervention in politics involves a "cut" estab­ lishing a separation from communitarian links and relationships; 8 any genuine event establishing a political sequence marks a moment of "rup­ ture" in relation to the sociohistorical contextual terrain within which this éventai detonation occurs;9 political pronouncements "spring up" in spaces left uncounted and uncovered by existing configurations of society or state;10 singular events of declaration creating the stratified histories of politics each amount to an "eruption" exploding (out of) the continuum of the status quo; 11 politics as such entails a decisive "break" with that which is in the current state of affairs;12. . . and so on. In his 1998 text on metapolitics, Badiou speaks of "the suddenly emergent materiality of a universalisable collective."13 He repeatedly invokes the evocative figures of "rupture" 14 and "sudden emergence." 15 In so doing, Badiou endorses a sharp contrast between "repetition" (i.e., the static inertia of what is) and "interruption" (i.e., the kinetic gesture of separating from what is) .16 Various thinkers engaged with Badiou, including both sympathetic com­ mentators and skeptical critics, have picked up on this thematic thread appearing to entail that the initiation of real political trajectories is to be pinpointed in an irruptive happening that emerges with a surpris­ ing, shocking, and stunning degree of rapidity.17 Similarly, the same set of motifs operates throughout Lazarus's Anthropologie du nom, in which Lazarus describes the event of politics as a "caesura"18 and "irruption";19 he maintains that, politically speaking, "the subjective is not continuous. It arises suddenly, then ceases to be."20 Despite the general thrust of these images and metaphors portray­ ing true change as shining new light on the world through brief, inter­ mittent flashes blinking on and off in an unconditioned, unpredictable fashion, Badiou, in the 1998 essay "Of an Obscure Disaster," articulates a crucial qualification to be kept in mind as regards the issues at stake in this discussion. He clarifies that an abrupt and complete change in a situation does not at all mean that the grace of an event has happened to i t . . . In the serenity of the concept, let's say that everything that changes is not an event, and that surprise, velocity, disorder, may only be simulacra of the event, not its promise of truth.21

8 ALAIN

B A D I O U

Or, as he succinctly puts it in his Ethics, "not every 'novelty' is an event."22 So it would seem to be safe simply to say that although every event has the power to lead to changes exhibiting "surprise, velocity, disorder," not everything that exhibits these features qualifies as an event. Furthermore, Badiou's above caveat indicates that both events and their simulacra can and do involve change. Hence, the question to pose now is: what general account of change is to be found in Badiouian philosophy? Such an account sits at the center of some of Badiou's most recent work. In the interview "Beyond Formalisation," conducted in 2002, Badiou delineates four distinct categories of change: I distinguish between four types of change: modifications (which are consistent with the existing transcendental regime), weak singularities (or novelties with no strong existential consequences), strong singulari­ ties (which imply an important existential change but whose conse­ quences remain measurable), and,finally,events (strong singularities whose consequences are virtually infinite).23 This fourfold typology of transformation, succinctly sketched in the course of a rapidly moving conversation, clearly foreshadows the much more de­ tailed and sustained treatment of this topic four years later in "Book V" (entitled "The Four Forms of Change") of Logiques des mondes.24 Therein, as visually encapsulated and summarized by a helpful graph, 25 Badiou be­ gins with the general category of "becoming" (devenir), which initially is subdivided into "modification," qua becoming without real change, and "site," qua a locus/place with the potential to give rise to real change. Incidentally, unlike in Being and Event, the concept-term "site" in Logiques des mondes doesn't invariably designate the locus of an event; in Being and Event, a site is always an éventai site, whereas in Logiques des mondes a. site can be, but isn't necessarily, the site of an event (and yet, in an interview dealing with, among other things, the renovated philosophical architec­ ture of Logiques des mondes, Badiou voices his intention "to retain the theory of the event-site [site événementiel] ,"26 rather than simply jettison it in an abrupt turn away from certain key aspects of Being and Event). The category of site, as distinguished from that of modification, is then fur­ ther subdivided into "deed/occurrence" (noting that the term "fait" can be translated either way—it could even be rendered in English as "act"), qua site lacking a maximal degree of existential intensity in a given situa­ tion/world; and "singularity," qua site endowed with a maximal degree of existential intensity in a given situation/world. 27 Finally, the category of singularity is itself subdivided into "weak singularity," qua maximally ex­ istent singularity whose ensuing situational/worldly consequences aren't

9 THE

QUICK

AND

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maximal (although such a singularity, while not [yet] an effective change in the authentic sense of éventai transformation, retains the possibility of eventually becoming stronger); 28 and "event," qua maximally existent singularity (i.e., "strong singularity") whose ensuing situational/worldly consequences are indeed maximal.29 Simply put, an event doesn't just happen within a world as one occurrence among others in this world's history. Rather, an event changes a world so radically that, at one and the same time, an old world is destroyed and a new one is assembled in the clearing opened up by the demolition of what was.30 Weak singularities, occurrences, and modifications all fall short, in their own ways, of attain­ ing a properly éventai status. Obviously, the greatest contrast exists between, on the one hand, modification (as simple becoming comfortably and compatibly going with the normal flow of stable reality as regulated by an already existent "state of the situation" or "transcendental regime" ordering a particular "world"),31 and, on the other hand, event (as a genuine transformation of what exists dictated by the unforeseen and unanticipated upsurge of an X that, before the event, didn't exist for the situation's state or the world's transcendental regime, while, after the event, the implications of this upsurge are so potent and powerful as to force the situation or world to be razed and rebuilt as a place wherein the previously inexistent is accorded the most intense degree of existence—with Badiou claim­ ing that the strongest existential-transcendental consequence is to make what was before an invisible inexistent be the most visible of existents) .32 Highlighting this stark contrast between modification and event, the title of the first section of "Book V" of Logiques des mondes is "Simple Becom­ ing and True Change." This axis of tension between "simple becoming" (i.e., modification) and "true change" (i.e., event) is an enduring theo­ retical motif throughout Badiou's writings over the years. As regards the problem of philosophically grasping change, the novel, innovative con­ tribution of Logiques des mondes consists primarily in the nuance added to the Badiouian account of processes of transformation by his admission that there are intermediary forms of change between modifications and events.33 It's worth asking whether this added nuance makes a signifi­ cant difference specifically to Badiou's (meta) politics. As will be seen, Badiou continues persistently to invoke sharp black-and-white distinc­ tions apropos shifts in political domains despite, in Logiques des mondes, the insertions of shades of grey between non-evental inertia and éventai momentum. In an interview broadcast on French radio in April 2006 to mark the publication of Logiques des mondes, Badiou, when asked about his relation­ ship to Deleuze—the latter allegedly is enthralled by a Bergsonian variety

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of vitalist becoming which amounts to, in Badiou's language, nothing more than mere modification—maintains that the question of continuity versus discontinuity, of a philosophical choice between models favoring images of transformation as fluid dynamics of uninterrupted movement (i.e., gradual becoming) or as staccato rhythms of abrupt shifts (i.e., punctuated change), is an absolutely central thematic in contemporary philosophy.34 (Perhaps this choice could be said to be "axiomatic" in Ba­ diou's sense—namely, the decision to bet on one or the other model is an underivable, undeducible ground for any and every philosophical sys­ tem today.) In this radio interview he again confirms, during a discussion of the various categories of change outlined in Logiques des mondes, that his focus is on figures of rupture, going so far as to affirm the occurrence of instances of "radical discontinuity"35 (i.e., events). Indeed, "Book V" of Logiques des mondes departs from the assertion that "real change," as a happening that isn't authorized either by the mathematical-ontological order of "being qua being" {l'être en tant qu'être) or by the logical system of transcendental structures regulating the play of appearances within circumstances in a given world,36 necessarily includes the imposition of discontinuity upon a world.37 For Badiou, faced with the challenge of conceptualizing change, "it is necessary to think discontinuity as such, as that which nothing reabsorbs into any creative univocity, however in­ distinct, or chaotic, the concept of it would be."38 But what would be in­ volved in this thinking of "discontinuity as such" (especially considering that, relatively early in Logiques des mondes, Badiou describes post-evental subjects-of-events as embodying a mixture of "continuities and disconti­ nuities") ?39 And what are its implications specifically for thinking through politics, especially in terms of questions concerning the conditions and consequences of processes of political transformation? Answering these important queries requires outlining Badiou's interlinked philosophical constructions of history and temporality.

§2 "History Does Not Exist": Eventai Times In the 1982 volume Théorie du sujet, Badiou issues a declaration whose foundational status and various ramifications he has adhered to ever since: "History does not exist"1 (the history in question here being that of simplistic, teleological Hegelian Marxism). Broadly speaking, this means (invoking Badiou's later identification of the four "generic procedures" producing the truths handled by philosophy) ~ that the sequences of hu­ manity's amorous, artistic, political, and scientific activities do not unfold

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in the all-encompassing medium of a neutral, homogeneous, and single historical time, the chronological continuum of a unified temporal OneAll. What alternative vision of historical temporality does Badiou pro­ pose? By tying his account of real change to events, Badiou is prompted to argue that, as he nicely summarizes this particular point from Being and Event during an interview,3 "every event constitutes its own time. Consequently, every truth also involves the constitution of a time. So there are times, not one time." 4 As he puts it more recently, "An event establishes a singular time . . . the event outlines in the situation—in the 'there is'—both a before and an after. A time starts to exist."5 Hallward christens this "the beginning of a new time."6 Similarly, "history" is nonexistent precisely because what exists instead are histories in the plural (there is evidence Badiou draws inspiration here from Sartre's Critique ofDialectical Reason) ,7 namely, multiple strata of temporalized truthtrajectories (in the realms of love, art, politics, and science) that cannot be compared and integrated with each other on the basis of reference to an overarching historical totality as a standard yardstick of mutual measurement. 8 Badiou fragments both history and time into a heteroge­ neous jumble of incomparable, autonomous sequences. 9 For him, truths that have appeared form a nontemporal ("temporal" being understood here as an enveloping, homogeneous, linear chronology) meta-history (as the succession of singular flashes in which eternal truths burst forth into the temporal defiles of banal, humdrum historical becoming); 10 Ba­ diou speaks of an "intemporal meta-history."11 Despite Badiou's general systematic consistency on these issues (as with his rigorous handling of other issues too), subtle differences in his various wordings of these points regarding history and time betray the lurking presence of serious theoretical difficulties. In Metapolitics, he in­ sists that "singularity . . . has no relation as such to historical time, for it constitutes its own time through and through." 12 In other words, éven­ tai singularities utterly break with history's temporalities; these tears in the fabric of historical time suddenly rip into this fabric in an abrupt, discontinuous manner. However, in Logiques des mondes, Badiou words this line of thought somewhat differently: "The event extracts from one time the possibility of another time."13 The latter formulation clearly is more consistent with the previously mentioned constraint Badiou places on any theory of change (articulated in the interview "Can Change Be Thought?"): such a theory must succeed at envisioning processes of transformation as immanently arising from a given situation, rather than being imposed upon "what is" from a mysterious external Elsewhere. As per the latter formulation from Logiques des mondes, éventai time emerges out of (and then separates itself off from) other historical-temporal cur-

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rents (this could be described as an immanent genesis of the thereaftertranscendent qua subsequently independent in relation to its innerworldly site as a situational point of origin). And yet Badiou's above-cited insistence that one must think "discontinuity as such" appears to pull him away from stressing the immanence to broader stretches of historical time of the event's engendering of another time, perhaps based on the worry that this would amount to a concession to the "cult of genealogies"14 (i.e., historicist orientations in postmodernism that compulsively reinscribe all transpiring phenomena back within overdetermining streams of his­ torical continuity), resulting in the inability to think genuine newness per se due to the implicit denial that utter and complete ruptures with what comes before are possible. But, obviously, Badiou could embed aspects of éventai times within larger temporal cross-sections of a given historical period without thereby positing, as he wishes to avoid doing, a single, monolithic history or time, a stifling historical-temporal closure within which it's impossible to af­ firm that there is or can be anything new under the proverbial sun. Along these same lines, it's well worth remembering Schelling's 1809 warning, apropos Spinoza's substance metaphysics, that identifying all attributes and modes to be part and parcel of substance is not, regardless of what­ ever one might think, to succeed at reducing these attributes and modes to the status of mere epiphenomenal residues of a unified substantial substratum. 15 What's important in this Schellingian stipulation for Badiouian philosophy is the notion that, as Schelling himself puts it in his Freiheitschrift,

dependence does not exclude autonomy or even freedom. Dependence does not determine the nature of the dependent, and merely declares that the dependent entity, whatever else it may be, can only be as a con­ sequence of that upon which it is dependent; it does not declare what this dependent entity is or is not16 Schelling's statements, if taken seriously by Badiouian philosophy, would permit proposing, without fear of this proposal pushing one into con­ ceding there being the temporally continuous One-All of an ultimate historical-genealogical consistency, that specifically éventai times immanently arise within and out of broader, longer currents of non-evental times. (As will soon be seen, Hallward's crafting of a distinction between the "specified" and the "specific" similarly permits Badiou the option of admitting that something could be related to a situation or world with­ out, for all that, being entirely determined and dominated by such rela­ tions.) Although éventai time is produced on the basis of the materials of

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non-evental time, the former nonetheless achieves a self-defining, autoconstituting autonomy that distances and separates it from the preced­ ing background of temporal currents from which it branched off as what might initially have appeared to be a mere tributary. The issues and problems at stake in the preceding discussion can be rendered clearer and more concrete through turning attention to the reverberations in Badiou's political thought of these ways of conceiv­ ing history and time. As early as Peut-on penser la politique? Badiou pro­ poses that one of the main tasks of authentic politics in his sense is the "re-punctuation of the chronique")11 it should be noted that "la chronique" could be rendered in English as either "the chronic" or "the chronicle," with Badiou likely intending to convey both of these meanings simulta­ neously (that is to say, the events of political interventions interrupt, dis­ place, and reorganize the chronic constancy of chronicles à la continuous, linear sociohistorical narratives—echoing this point, Lazarus describes this re-punctuation as a "de-historicization" essential to any and every real political gesture, with history here understood as the homogeniz­ ing chronologies of extant sociopolitical discourses).18 Badiou goes on to describe this re-punctuating as a distribution of "other accents" and an isolation of "other sequences"19 (i.e., truth-trajectories irreducible to and incompatible with the current state-of-the-situation's stories about its political history—Lazarus, without directly citing Badiou, links this Badiouian assertion about the political re-punctuation of, so to speak, the chronic-logical to the thesis that time itself only exists as a dispersed, heterogeneous multiplicity of constructed and constructible times) .20 The thread of these remarks from 1985 is picked up again in the 2005 study Le siècle, in which Badiou goes so far as to describe time itself as a political construction; and, he complains that there is no real think­ ing of time today.21 The roughly contemporaneous second installment of Circonstances further develops this weaving together of the political and the temporal. Therein, Badiou claims that "there is no common mea­ sure, no common chronology, between power on one side and truths on the other—truths as creation."22 A few pages later, insisting again upon this gap by invoking "the distance between thought and power, the dis­ tance between the State and truths," he assigns to philosophy the task of measuring this distance and knowing whether or not the chasm dividing the history of statist power from the history of events giving rise to real political truths can be bridged. 23 In fulfilling the role of assessor and po­ tential sealer of this rift (with this rift being a particular instance of the foundational parallax split between stasis and kinesis arguably posited by Badiou at the level of his overarching theory of change), philosophy supposedly assists in changing existence itself.24 However, all of this raises

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a set of troubling questions: If there is an abyss of incommensurabil­ ity separating history-power-state from politics-thought-truth—this abyss reflects the ineliminable time lag that Badiou repeatedly insists leaves the dynamic movements of political events and their subjects always and necessarily out of sync with the sluggish inertia of an inherently conser­ vative and essentially homogeneous status quo 25 —then what does it mean to charge philosophy with the mandate of crossing this boundary line of division so as to negotiate a link between otherwise foreign territories? How, if at all, can this apparently absolute split be sutured?

§3 Events Before and After- Cleaving Time in Two The strangeness of Badiou's position on these matters is promptly sig­ naled on the page of Circonstances} 2 immediately following his claim that philosophy transforms political situations by bridging the gap between history-power-state and politics-thought-truth. He contends that phi­ losophy concerns itself with "paradoxical relations" that are "relations which are not relations" 1 (maybe these could be conceived of, in vaguely Schellingian parlance, as instances of transcendence-in-immanence). Along related and relevant lines, in Le siècle he refers to another paradox, one at the heart of his mode of conceptualizing temporality: "Time . . . is an inaccessible mix of agitation and sterility; it is the paradox of a stagnant feverishness."2 Is there (as will be asserted here subsequently) a subtle rapport between these two paradoxical structures (i.e., non­ relational relations and the blending of stasis with kinesis)? This precise juncture marks the point of entry into a tangled thicket of difficulties. Moreover, this is a point where various thinkers' critical-interpretive paths diverge—for instance, the paths of two particularly articulate experts on Badiouian philosophy: Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward. Bosteels departs from the conviction that Badiou's 1988 "mathe­ matical turn" in Being and Event, rather than functioning as a sudden shift in a totally new and different direction, is a continuous and con­ sequent extension of his earlier work as culminating in Théorie du sujet? He argues that the "and" in the title of Badiou's magnum opus indicates that, instead of inflexibly partitioning the trans-ontological realm of the event from the ontological domain of being qua being, Badiou is inter­ ested in formally articulating the paradoxical conjunction-in-disjunction, the tension-ridden relation-that-is-not-a-relation, operative between be­ ing and event;4 for Bosteels, the title of Badiou's 1988 tome shouldn't

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be heard as announcing yet another rigid dualism to be added to the long list of philosophy's dichotomies accumulated over the course of its history.5 Hallward, by contrast, views Being and Event as a fault line demarcat­ ing a pronounced distinction between early and late periods in Badiou's thought. He contends that "his books up to and including Théorie du sujet (1982), the summa of his early work, have become partially obsolete by his own subsequent criteria,"6 and he denies that these pre-1988 writings can be read as a "hesitant, embryonic version of a subsequently finished product." 7 In terms of the knot (and knottiness) of the positioning of politics and temporality with respect to each other in Badiouian phi­ losophy, Hallward, contra the implications of the position defended by Bosteels, maintains that the post-1988 Badiou, with his overriding focus on event-prompted subtraction and separation, is pushed into promot­ ing "a politics of the 'flash,' a politics grounded in the revolutionary but ephemeral moment in which a serial inertia can be suspended with only minimal recourse to an institutional stability of any kind."8 What Hall­ ward is picking up on here is Badiou's frequently reiterated character­ ization of events as fleeting occurrences of extraordinarily rare dysfunctionality—for Badiou, an event, including a political event, amounts to a dysfunctioning of the representational state-of-the-situation or the tran­ scendental regime of a world9—surfacing within the run of things ever so briefly. Throughout Logiques des mondes, for example, Badiou repeatedly emphasizes that the temporality of the event consists of an instantaneous appearing-and-then-disappearing, a "brusque," "evanescent," and selfconsuming conflagration that immolates itself into non-being as soon as it strikes the surface of being.10 Badiou and Bosteels would both respond to Hallward's comments on Badiou's "flash politics" by contrasting the abrupt, irruptive temporal­ ity of the instantaneity of the event with the protracted, enduring labor, engaged in by a militant subject-of-the-event, of both drawing out the consequent truths following from this event as well as faithfully "forc­ ing" the situation and its state to change by inscribing these truths back into the textured being of the world. According to Badiou, whereas the time of the event is an immeasurably fast coming and going, the unique time this specific event creates in its wake, a time forged through the fidelity of this event's subject(s), can be (and often is) an extended, sus­ tained period or path spanning lengthy stretches of the becoming of chronological-historical time,11 a post-evental time tied to the enduring, eternal "trace" left behind by the vanished event.12 (As early as 1976, Ba­ diou characterizes revolutionary political sequences as long, extenuated processes always capable of being interrupted.) 13

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Such is the reply of Badiou, Bosteels,14 and certain others (for in­ stance, Carsten Strathausen) 15 to lines of criticism departing from the ap­ parent link between the rapid-fire temporality of events and a politics un­ able to think its relation to the nitty-gritty, brass-tacks details of historical and social realities forming the supposed referents of any and every con­ crete, material mode of recognizably political praxis. In this vein, Al­ berto Toscano, after lucidly outlining the reasons why certain readers perceive Badiou as being in danger of depoliticizing politics through his emphasis on purification through separation (i.e., the distancing of politics-thought-truth from history-power-state),16 dismisses this percep­ tion as erroneous; given the post-evental labors of forcing engaged in by subjects-of-events, which involve rolling up one's sleeves and grappling with the details of how to change determinate situations and worlds, Badiou's politics is certainly not hopelessly abstract and ethereal. 17 (Bosteels also argues against the impression that Badiouian politics insists upon a principled retreat into a depoliticizing subtractive purity.)18 In more general philosophical terms, Bosteels likewise stresses that the postevental process of a subject-of-an-event forcing its surrounding situation or world to be transformed through its faithful work of extracting and exploring the reality-altering implications of the event—in so doing, sub­ jects force being to respond to and be reshaped by events—shows how Badiou is indeed interested in the dialectical interaction between, at the broadest of levels, the ontological and the trans-ontological.19 Bosteels's remarks also (arguably) insinuate that the Badiouian philosophical con­ ception of temporality is not as starkly split between the different speeds of ontological stasis and trans-ontological kinesis as it might seem to be at first glance. (Similarly, regarding the topics of fidelity and love, Badiou, in Being and Event, speaks of "the dialectic of being and event" and its "temporal orientation"; 20 more recently, in an interview occasioned by the publication of Logiques des mondes, he invokes the notion of dialectics apropos the rapport between, on the one hand, being, and, on the other hand, both events and appearances.) 21 The position represented by Hallward (and espoused by several others too), grounded on the contention that Being and Event inaugu­ rates a turning away from structures of relationality and toward models of "subtraction" (figured as breaks, cuts, discontinuities, ruptures, with­ drawals, etc.), 22 moves in a very different direction from that taken by Bosteels. Through the later Badiou's insistence that all truths (including political ones) and their corresponding subjects subtract themselves as absolutely separate from the network of relations constituting what exists within a given situation,23 Hallward sees the post-1988 Badiou as render­ ing himself unable to explain or dictate any "real-world" politics:

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This déhaison underlies both the extraordinary ambition of Badiou's philosophy, its unflinching determination, and its own peculiar diffi­ culty—the difficulty it has in describing any possible relation between truth and knowledge, any dialectic linking subject and object. Rather than seek to transform relations, to convert oppressive relations into lib­ erating relations, Badiou seeks subtraction from the relational tout court. So long as it works within the element of this subtraction, Badiou's phi­ losophy forever risks its restriction to the empty realm of prescription pure and simple.24 Or, as h e puts it later (after q u e s t i o n i n g w h e t h e r Badiou is capable of keeping the continuous stream of historico-statist "global trends" sepa­ rate from the aleatory discontinuity of disruptive events, that is, categori­ cally refusing to acknowledge a n d e x a m i n e the latter's relations to the former) :25 It is as if Badiou's recent work positively embraces a version of what Hegel dubbed the unhappy consciousness—the stoical affirmation of a worthy ideal or subjective principle, but as divorced from any substan­ tial relation to the material organization of the situation.26 O t h e r critics share Hallward's c o n c e r n that, at the political level, the price to b e paid for subtractive purity, for the affirmation of the distance taken from t h e given o r d e r of things by a n event-subject-truth axis, is a metapolitics purified to t h e p o i n t of b e i n g a politics-without-politics. Daniel Bensaïd, in an essay whose very title ("Alain Badiou a n d the Mir­ acle of t h e Event") expresses the suspicion that Badiou's anti-relational stance inevitably results in a sort of quasi-religious mystical obscuran­ tism, warns that "a new d a n g e r threatens: that of a philosophy h a u n t e d by the sacralization of the éventai miracle." 2 7 Both Bensaïd (agreeing with Hallward's critique of the absolutism involved in Badiou's post-1988 subtractive a p p r o a c h ) 2 8 a n d Oliver M a r c h a r t w o n d e r whether, in t h e political realm, this a p p r o a c h a m o u n t s to a justification for haughtily re­ fusing to dirty one's h a n d s with the bargains a n d compromises unavoid­ able in t h e practice of Realpolitik. 29 It seems that, in Badiouian political t h o u g h t , s e r e n e subjective d e t a c h m e n t in the satisfying self-enclosure of an auto-justifying éventai truth-trajectory is preferred to .immersion in a n d e n g a g e m e n t with the préexistent e n s e m b l e of, as it were, facts o n the g r o u n d . Looking at the p r o n o u n c e d division within the reception of Badi­ ou's philosophy epitomized by the gap separating, for instance, Bosteels a n d Hallward, how is it possible that this philosophy, priding itself o n its

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rigorous clarity and alleged resistance qua system to a fuzzy nebula of disseminated interpretive translations, could give rise to such drastically divergent understandings? The claim to be defended here is that the divi­ sion between these positions actually reflects the cleaving of time in two by the event into the pre-evental "before" and the post-evental "after." (As Badiou himself stipulates, "An event establishes a singular time on the basis of its nominal fixation. Since it is traced, named, and inscribed, the event outlines in the situation—in the 'there is'—both a before and an after. A time starts to exist.")30 More specifically, the Bosteels-type em­ phasis on the relating of being and event highlights an essential feature of post-evental time (just as Toscano's defense of the concreteness of Badiouian politics is based exclusively on references to Badiou's discussions of the fidelity of organized inquiries into the consequences of events after the fact of their occurrence). By contrast, the Hallward-type focus on anti-relational subtraction reveals an integral aspect of Badiou's ex­ planations of (or, it might be said, refusals to explain) the pre-evental temporal background. As Hallward notes, Badiou's "philosophy effec­ tively proscribes thought from considering the production of an event"31 (and this because Badiou fears that such considerations ultimately end up erasing the newness of irruptive events by treating them as outgrowths of prior trends, thus supposedly reinscribing them back within preced­ ing historical-temporal continuums). In short, Bosteels and Hallward are both right. Put more precisely, although Bosteels is quite correct that the temporally abrupt éventai flash catalyzes a thereafter enduring and protracted labor of a subject's faithful and militant forcing of the event's truth (s) back into the being of a situation with its worlds (i.e., a sustained new time), Hallward is equally correct in maintaining that, regardless of whether being and event are drawn into relational structures following an event (something Hallward questions), the moment of this éventai flash itself is deliberately treated as inexplicable and without identifiable preconditions paving the way for its happening. The most telling criticisms issued by Hallward, Bensaïd, and Marchart are the ones that zero in on problems for Badiou's philosophy spe­ cifically at the pre-evental level.32 Bensaïd speculates that, in the absence of an account of preconditions for events, Badiou, an avowed atheist, risks lapsing into a form of religiosity.33 Likewise, Marchart, reminding readers that Badiou denies the presence of any pre-evental subject34 (in­ sofar as Badiou insists that subjects come into being through recognizing and subsequently subjecting themselves to events), accuses Badiouian thought of resurrecting a not-so-secular conception of grace.35 In the conclusion of Logiques des mondes (entitled "What Is It to Live?"), Badiou admits to relying on a certain notion of grace;36 but, he protests, this is a

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thoroughly non-miraculous version of this notion, 37 one seamlessly incor­ porated as part of a philosophy informed by an atheistic materialism (a "laicized grace,"38 as he puts it elsewhere). Regarding Badiou's politics, Hallward sees the post-1988 Badiou as hamstrung by a rigid dichotomy between "state-driven operations of inclusion or classification, and truthdriven operations of separation or subtraction."39 Similarly, Marchart ac­ curately observes that the lack of concreteness in Badiouian subtractive politics, as allegedly purified to the point of becoming depoliticized in an essential manner, results from his avoidance of relating split levels40— such as (to put it in Zizekian parlance) the parallax gap between, on the one hand, the gently ambling run of things at the ordinary quotidian level (i.e., stasis) and, on the other hand, the violently disruptive light­ ning strike of the extraordinarily rare event (i.e., kinesis). In an article charting, with impeccable scholarship, the theoretical and terminological undercurrents flowing from Badiou's youthful Mao­ ism (informed by a variety of dialectical thinking) up through his con­ temporary philosophical concerns, Bosteels aims directly to refute the sorts of criticisms leveled against Badiou by Hallward and Bensaïd. He again insists that the Badiouian distinction between being and event isn't as absolutely non/anti-dialectical as these criticisms make it out to be,41 and he asks the critics to concede, if nothing else, that Badiou's later work involves a "struggle" to avoid treating éventai processes as otherworldly by divorcing them from the details of specific situations.42 Bosteels's su­ perlative contributions to the growing literature on Badiou's philosophy convincingly demonstrate and defend the thesis that concepts such as "enquiry" and "forcing" (both being post-evental endeavors carried out by subjects-of-events) represent, in the post-1988 Badiouian framework, continuations of his pre-1988 commitments to thinking through certain forms of dialectical relations essential to the dynamics of transforma­ tion internal to particular circumstances. Nonetheless, in light of the most challenging objections raised by Hallward, Bensaïd, and Marchart, the problems arising from Badiou's principled refusal to tie together be­ ing and event at the pre-evental level persist despite the ample evidence Bosteels provides in making his case that the post-evental fallout of an event consists in the interpénétration of being and other-than-being. Summing up his perspective on what renders Badiouian philosophy spe­ cial, Bosteels states that "what from my point of view singularizes the thought of Badiou is not only the ontological delimitation of the event as a lightning-flash cut or punctual encounter with the real, but rather the event's logical and topological inscription in accordance with the labor of different subjective figures in the living flesh of any given situa­ tion."43 Indeed, Badiou's focus on the concept of event is not just cen-

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tered on the motif of the abrupt cut, but also on the long-term project of working to force one's circumstances to respond to the occurrence of certain breaks or interruptions in the default order of things. However, even if only inadvertently, Bosteels's wording here concedes that events are sudden ruptures in the fabric of being which get related to the ontological solely in the aftermath of the inexplicable emergence of the éventai. In fact, the only way for Badiou to dodge the deadliest bullets of the Hallward-Bensaïd-Marchart critique is to find a means somehow to bridge the chasm between the divided times of statist history and (in Badiou's own words) the "meta-history" of éventai occurrences—and not only to do so within post-evental time, but also within both pre-evental time as well as the moment of the event itself. The remainder of this chapter's analysis of Badiou's political thought will be devoted to show­ ing certain means available for this bridging that draw on resources to be found within Badiouian philosophy itself. This is intended as both an im­ manent critique and an equally immanent defense of the philosophical/ metapolitical articulation of Badiou's politics.

§4 Ideologies of Revolution: Distributing the Velocities of Instability Oddly enough, despite his sweeping ban on positing conditions or pre­ cursors for events, Badiou himself occasionally appears to defy this same ban. In his 1998 Handbook of Inaesthetics he remarks, "We can say that every event admits of a figurai preparation, that it always possesses a preevental figure"1 In a contemporaneous interview he notes, along similar lines, that "we are in a period of the constitution of a possible éventai site. There are not yet events in the philosophical sense of the word, but it is at least the constitution of zones of precariousness, of partial movement which one can interpret as announcing that something will happen." 2 So it would seem reasonable to propose, on the basis of these remarks, that although an event apparently explodes onto a situational scene in an ex nihilo fashion, there are certain (perhaps hidden and invisible) primers or triggers (i.e., "figures" in the above Badiouian sense) clan­ destinely participating in setting off this explosion—and furthermore, that such figures, as primers or triggers prefiguring events, perhaps can be discerned, thus allowing for a foreseeing of potential event-level hap­ penings. Such propositions indeed must be put forward if Badiou is to adhere to his own requirement that change be accounted for as an immanently emergent transformation arising from within the worldly situa-

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tion itself. And, addressing the interlinked topics of éventai temporality and historicity in Logiques des mondes, he describes how "truths, beyond History, braid their discontinuities along the strand of a subtle structural alloy of anticipations and retroactions." 3 Perhaps the "anticipations" of which he speaks here are the strictly post-evental hypotheses of a situa­ tion yet to come as transformed by the truth-implications of an event, hy­ potheses posited by the subject-of-the-event in its activity of forçage4 (see also chapter 2, section 9). But what if there are figures anticipating the event prior to its happening, that is, pre-evental figures capable of being put to work (whether knowingly or unknowingly) by those interested in clearing the ground of the status quo in preparation for the advent of something new? The 2005 text Le siècle contains Badiou's oft-cited discussion of "the passion of the real." Therein, Badiou contends that the twentieth cen­ tury was animated by a desire to strip away and obliterate various veils of illusion supposedly concealing the hard kernel of an X beyond the superficial dance of semblances; this century was obsessed with projects for brutally short-circuiting the separation between the ideal and the real through concretely realizing, in the guise of heavens brought down to earth, visions previously viewed as Utopian.5 During this discussion, Badiou draws a distinction between a politics of destruction driven by this passion of the real and a politics of subtraction (as the alternative project endorsed by Badiou's political thought). He describes the latter as striving to "measure" an "ineluctable negativity," rather than as furi­ ously trying to seize, while in the grip of "the convulsive charms of ter­ ror" after having been seduced by the passion of the real, some sort of purity through mobilizing forces of annihilation. Additionally, he claims here that the advance over Théorie du sujet achieved by Being and Event is the shift from a politics of destruction to one of subtraction. 6 (However, more recently, Badiou's 2007 lecture at the European Graduate School entitled "Destruction, Negation, Subtraction" problematizes this implied non-dialectical distinction between destruction and subtraction by, first, making subtraction and destruction two interrelated subtypes of nega­ tion [subtraction as affirmative negation and destruction as negative ne­ gation] , and, second, arguing that truly creative subtractions [say, pro­ ductive post-evental truth-procedures] generally require the defensive violence of destruction as a means of protecting and preserving their novel creations.) 7 Further specifying in Le siècle what his political ap­ proach entails, Badiou states that "the subtractive path" involves "exhib­ iting as a real point not the destruction of reality but the minimal differ­ ence"; this "minuscule difference" is tied to the real of a "vanishing term" buried within reality.8 Along related lines, in the contemporaneous third

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installment of Circonstances, he declares that "one cannot find the sym­ bol of the universal in the situation except in inventing what nobody has yet seen or said."9 Insofar as Badiou is committed to the thesis that uni­ versality emerges out of particularity, that eternal trans-world truths are born within specific temporalized worlds and become universal through thereafter (potentially) addressing everyone in being open to all,10 the upshot of the preceding claims would seem to be that a subtractive poli­ tics searches within its situation for the fleeting pre-evental figures of little differences that perhaps shelter the promise of eventually making a big éventai difference. But is the task of subtractive politics to discern and extract such differences as already present, préexistent elements of a given situation—such might be the advice of a rather traditional Hege­ lian Marxism—or, rather, to invent them à la symbolic creations as yet unseen and unheard? Isn't there a certain tension here between, on the one hand, conceiving of situations as containing within themselves preevental figures/symbols heralding the possibility of truly éventai change (indicating that the state-of-the-situation can be internally subverted us­ ing resources drawn from its own préexistent spaces), and, on the other hand, speaking of the need utterly and completely to break with this situational state through creating entirely new figures/symbols up to the task of founding a genuinely universal politics for all (indicating, in a non-Marxist manner, that the state-of-the-situation must be assailed from a position not already to be found within its spaces)? The ambiguities and difficulties plaguing Badiou's politics, as illus­ trated above, can be resolved through a two-part solution. The first part is drawn from Hallward's proposal that a distinction needs to be drawn between the "specified" versus the "specific."11 What does this mean? Both the specific and the specified, as Hallward defines them, are relationally configured components of a situation and its worlds. Neither term, in Badiou's system, would be a point purified by subtraction (in the way that the event-subject-truth axis is withdrawn from the network of re­ lations constituting a situational-worldly reality, a reality opposed to a real separate from any such mediating relational network). So how then is the specific to be distinguished from the specified? The specified would be something that is thoroughly shaped and governed by its inner-worldly situation as stuck in a tangled web of relationships wholly binding it to its context and circumstances. The specific, by contrast, would be some­ thing that, while being related to the milieu of its situational world, none­ theless isn't entirely constrained by its insertion into this milieu; in other words, that which is specific is a constituent of a situation/world, and yet, at the same time, isn't entirely reducible to an exhaustively overdetermined epiphenomenon generated by its surrounding situation/world.

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As n o t e d , Hallward views Badiouian philosophy after Being and Event as imprisoning itself within the politically disempowering confines of a false dilemma between exhaustive statist absorption (i.e., the relational) a n d liberating anti-statist extraction (i.e., subtraction as anti-relational), a false d i l e m m a leaving o n e s t r a n d e d in a "pure déhaison" that is, politically speaking, "unduly abstract" (as Hallward puts it in the closing lines of his book o n Badiou) .12 His key c o n t e n t i o n h e r e in this effort to contest what h e sees as Badiou's unjustified refusal to p o n d e r seriously a distinction such as that between the specified a n d the specific is that, with the idea of the specific, things already included within situations a n d their worlds can be linked to o t h e r entities a n d functions of this m e d i a t i n g matrix of relational structures without, for all that, losing the capacity productively to resist t h e established o r d e r — a n d , j u s t maybe, fundamentally trans­ form t h e state-of-the-situation from within in a t h o r o u g h l y i m m a n e n t m o v e m e n t of transformation. 1 3 A d d e d to Hallward's differentiation between the specific a n d t h e specified, the second part of this two-part solution to Badiou's political problems pushes off from a set of c o m m e n t s m a d e by Terry Eagleton in the o p e n i n g p a r a g r a p h of his review of Badiou's Ethics. Paraphrasing Ba­ diou's ideas, Eagleton states: There is a paradox m the idea of transformation. If a transformation is deep-seated enough, it might also transform the very criteria by which we could identify it, thus making it unintelligible to us. But if it is intelli­ gible, it might be because the transformation was not radical enough. If we can talk about the change then it is not full-blooded enough; but if it is full-blooded enough, it threatens to fall outside our comprehension. Change must presuppose continuity—a subject to whom the altera­ tion occurs—if we are not to be left merely with two incommensurable states; but how can such continuity be compatible with revolutionary upheaval?14 Eagleton's suggestive description of this "paradox in the idea of transfor­ mation" gestures at theoretical alternatives whose serious consideration entails s o m e significant ramifications for Badiou's a c c o u n t of c h a n g e (and this despite his description b e i n g a p a r a p h r a s e — t h e "para" makes a difference h e r e ) . In particular, Eagleton's speculations a b o u t a "revo­ lutionary upheaval" so drastic that it retroactively r e n d e r s its own past (including its conditions a n d catalysts) difficult if n o t impossible for sub­ s e q u e n t attempts at u n d e r s t a n d i n g to grasp adequately lead to some star­ tling possibilities, possibilities that m i g h t h e l p to resolve, in conjunction with select portions of Badiou's own philosophical apparatus, certain dif-

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faculties plaguing Badiouian political thought. Within the context of the present discussion, the most important line of speculation opened up by Eagleton in the passage above is the theoretical notion, a notion that can be inscribed back into the internal parameters of Badiou's philo­ sophical system, of processes of transformation that transform, among other things, the very change-category status of the places and forces involved in these processes themselves. In "Book V" of Logiques des mondes, in which Badiou focuses on the dynamics of transformation, he insists that truly éventai shifts are so dra­ matic as to change the very world within which these ruptures in the sociohistorical continuum surface. More specifically, Badiou stipulates that the changes wrought by an event and its subject-sustained aftermath in­ clude changing the world's "transcendental regime" (i.e., the framework, always tied to a particular world, determining the distribution of assigned degrees of existence to appearing entities enveloped by this worldly scaf­ folding).15 That is to say, éventai changes redistribute the assignation of degrees of existence in a world, thereby creating another world through installing a different transcendental regime. 16 But apart from this effect, couldn't an event's implications also involve redrawing the lines of de­ marcation distinguishing between the four types of change delineated in this same section of Logiques des mondes} Recall that these four types (as listed in the interview "Beyond Formalisation") are modifications, weak singularities, strong singularities, and events proper. What if one of the consequences of an event, in its allowing for and opening onto the crea­ tion of a new post-evental world, is a redistribution of these categories of change across the elements caught up in this movement of transfor­ mation? Logiques des mondes is subtitled L'être et l'événement, 2, meaning that it's clearly identified as a sequel to Being and Event, supplementing the non-relational, mathematical ontology ("being qua being" [l'être en tant qu'être] as based on set theory) of this latter text with what might be dubbed a relational, logical phenomenology ("being there" [être-là] as based on category theory). So it can be assumed that the theses deployed in Logiques des mondes are based upon and largely compatible with the doctrine of the event elaborated in Being and Event As will be demon­ strated immediately below, the 1988 philosophical formulation of the theory of the event dictates accepting that one of the consequences of an event is indeed a potential redistributing of the categories of change across the elements of a situation, a redistribution that may even affect the change-category status of the very event prompting this shaking-up of the world and its situations (at least in the eyes of many living in the event's temporal shadow). The concept of the éventai site as sketched in "Part IV, Médita-

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tion Sixteen" of Being and Event provides the key link to the account of change elaborated in "Book V" of Logiques des mondes. "Meditation Six­ teen" of Being and Event is the section of this text inaugurating the turn from an ontological concern with being qua being as set-theoretically conceived pure multiplicity to the doctrine of the event as "what-is-notbeing-qua-being"17 (i.e., "Part IV" is the first part of this book dealing with "event" after the first three parts on "being"). Badiou warns that "whatis-not-being-qua-being" shouldn't be equated with pure non-being, utter nothingness. 18 Rather, this "other-than-being" is the "place" of the "nonnatural," with Badiou describing this a/anti-naturalness as "abnormal"/ "instable" and choosing to identify it as what qualifies as "historical," strictly speaking; it is here the matter of a difference between the "nor­ mal"/"stable" multiplicities of nature and those multiplicities serving as the "material" of historical processes.19 Referring to the results of prior meditations m Being and Event, Badiou proceeds to define the abnormali­ ties constituting the currents of histories as "singular multiples," namely, "multiples which belong to the situation without being included in the latter: they are elements but not subsets."20 It's important to be aware of, in the midst of this detailed survey of an apparently abstract philo­ sophical architecture seemingly unrelated to the concreteness of politics, Badiou's insistence that "the inception of a politics . . . is always located in the absolute singularity of an event."21 Hence, the sites from which events can and do come, as singular multiples, are the point of origin for any and every event-driven dynamic of political transformation. Summarizing here a series of core concepts lying at the heart of Being and Event much too hastily, Badiou distinguishes between, on the one hand, situations, to which multiples "belong" as "elements" insofar as they are presented as constituents of a given situation, and, on the other hand, states of situations, in which these same situated multiples are "included" as "parts" by being grouped together as sub­ sets in the form of representations. In short, the fourfold constella­ tion belonging-element-presentation-situation is distinct from that of inclusion-part-representation-state. 22 The singularity of abnormal mul­ tiples thus amounts to there being elements of a sub-multiple part qua state-secured representation that are not themselves recognized and "counted" within the representational structures of the situation in ques­ tion. From the standpoint of the state-of-the-situation (as the metastructural level of representation generated out of but nonetheless distinct from the structural level of presentation), these elements simply do not exist (i.e., they are inexistent—remembering that in Logiques des mondes, Badiou contends that the world-changing effects of events include rais­ ing what was before invisibly inexistent, with respect to a transcendental

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regime's distribution of degrees of existence in the situation of t h e old world, to enjoying a maximal d e g r e e of visible existential intensity in the novel t r a n s c e n d e n t a l o r d e r of a new world). Badiou goes o n to e q u a t e the singularity of a b n o r m a l multiples with what h e calls "éventai sites": I will term éventai site an entirely abnormal multiple; that is, a multiple such that none of its elements are presented in the situation. The site, itself, is presented, but "beneath" it nothing from which it is composed is presented. As such, the site is not a part of the situation. I will also say of such a multiple that it is on the edge of the void, or foundationalP Explaining this t u r n of phrase invoking the "void"—in Badiou's system, éventai sites are c o m p o s e d of a c o m b i n a t i o n of "singular terms" (i.e., entities that are p r e s e n t e d in a situation b u t n o t r e p r e s e n t e d in this situa­ tion's state, these terms being "on the edge of the void") a n d "void (non-) terms" (i.e., entities that are n e i t h e r p r e s e n t e d n o r represented, b e i n g the void framed by singular terms) 2 4 —he continues: It becomes clearer why an éventai site can be said to be "on the edge of the void" when we remember that from the perspective of the situation this multiple is made up exclusively of non-presented multiples. Just "beneath" this multiple—if we consider the multiples from which it is composed—there is nothing, because none of its terms are themselves counted-as-one. A site is therefore the minimal effect of structure which can be conceived; it is such that it belongs to the situation, whilst what belongs to it in turn does not. The border effect in which this multiple touches upon the void originates in its consistency (its one-multiple) be­ ing composed solely from what, with respect to the situation, in-consists. Within the situation, this multiple is, but thai of which it is the multiple is not.25 These passages are p r e g n a n t with n u m e r o u s implications apropos b o t h Badiouian p h i l o s o p h y as a whole as well as c o n t e m p o r a r y p h i l o s o p h y m o r e generally. However, within the comparatively limited scope of this discussion of Badiou's account of c h a n g e a n d its political consequences, the crucial detail to be highlighted h e r e is that the void lurking within the éventai site, h a u n t i n g the r e / p r e s e n t a t i o n a l structures of the situation a n d its c o r r e s p o n d i n g state, isn't an absolute void à la the non-specific nothingness or negativity of non-being p e r se. Instead, t h e sort of void s p o k e n of by Badiou in the q u o t a t i o n s above is a relative nonexistence (noting that, in the subsequent investi­ gations of Logiques des mondes, Badiou is careful to distinguish between being a n d existence, 2 6 and, therefore, between non-being a n d nonexis-

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tence; the un-re/presented multiple-elements constituting the éventai site are "inexistent" in the Badiouian phenomeno-logical sense of having being, but being deprived of existence in relation to the transcendental logic governing the distribution of existence and nonexistence across appearances within a given world). The éventai site, as a necessary but not sufficient condition for an event27 (see also chapter 4, section 16), harbors elements lacking existential visibility specifically with respect to a particular state-of-the-situation. In a different situation or world, these elements might very well possess the non-void status of being integrated into the networks of a state-regulated situation or world through r e / presentation. Badiou himself spells this out,28 saying, "the concept of an éventai site . . . is neither intrinsic nor absolute. A multiple could quite easily be singular in one situation . . . yet normal in another situation," and this fact "prohibits us from speaking of a site 'in-itself.' A multiple is a site relative to the situation in which it is presented (counted as one). A multiple is a site solely in situ."29 The concept of the site (albeit not invariably the éventai site, as in Being and Event) returns eighteen years later in the theory of transfor­ mations presented in "Book V" of Logiques des mondes. Therein, as sum­ marized here earlier, the site is identified as the (potential) locus of real change. This site is capable of giving rise to an existentially non-maximal deed/occurrence {fait) or an existentially maximal singularity which can result either in a weak singularity (as lacking existentially maximal conse­ quences) or an event (as a strong singularity, a singularity producing ex­ istentially maximal consequences). Furthermore, a site is fundamentally different from a place of mere modification as becoming-without-realchange. "Subsection 1" of "Section I" of "Book V" is entitled "Subversion of Appearance by Being: The Site," and the heading of the immediately following "Subsection 2" is "Ontology of the Site." The opening para­ graph of "Subsection 1" states that a site is a reflexive multiple, namely, a multiplicity that takes itself into account, that introjectively inserts selfrepresentations (such as its own name) as elements of itself as a set.30 This resonates with a thesis from Being and Event bearing upon one of the dis­ tinctive features of the trans-ontological event: whereas the set-theoretic structure of being qua being forbids a set from being a member-element of itself (and hence denies the existence of events),31 the event, as a kind of "illegal" multiple breaking the laws of l'être en tant qu'être, is a set that violates this order of being insofar as this event's name is one of its own elements belonging to it.32 (Curiously, Badiou moves from this reflexive self-belonging being, in Being and Event, a key feature of the event, to it becoming, in Logiques des mondes, an aspect of the potential but not necessarily éventai site instead.) The opening paragraph of "Subsection 1" adds that a site, as involving its own self-representation, subverts the

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order of appearances (as organized by the transcendental regulations of a worldly state-of-the-situation) by bringing into the appearing of "being there" those of its own elements that, in relation to the situational state of the world, have being but lack existence (i.e., the site makes the inex­ istent appear, thus disrupting the previous rules of the game of appear­ ing) ,33 Succinctly put, a site is a place wherein a singularity (as a nonrepresented point within a statist situation-world) can come to appear on its own terms by reflexively representing itself. The site bequeaths a degree of existential intensity to that which, prior to the formation of the site and with regard to the representational scaffolding of the stateof-the-situation, is normally deprived of being recognized as fully and properly existing in its surrounding worldly environs. "Subsection 2" on the "Ontology of the Site" concludes with several specifications concerning the site. Badiou describes how the site, being a transgression of the "laws of being" achieved by a "reflexive violence," is a fleeting occurrence incapable of maintaining itself in the face of being's pressing foreclosure of such violations of its constraining dictates (spe­ cifically, its prohibition of self-belonging).34 Hence, temporally speaking, the éventai site disappears as soon as it appears, immediately vanishing after flashing across the surface of what is (its sole manner of enduring is through its possible subsequent truth-consequences as drawn out by a subject faithful to it) ,35 "Subsection 2" then ends by listing three proper­ ties of the ontology of the site: 1. A site is a reflexive multiplicity that belongs to itself and hence trans­ gresses the laws of being. 2. A site is the instantaneous revelation of a void that haunts the [other] multiplicities, a revelation by the transitory cancellation that the site operates through the gap between being and being-there. 3. A site is an ontologicalfigureof the instant: it does not appear except to disappear/dissipate.36 Taking all of the above into account, Badiou's twin 1988 and 2006 elabo­ rations concerning the interconnected concepts of event and site result in the following: processes of real change are set in motion by the sud­ den, unforeseen disclosure, from within the immanent confines of the worldly situation, of something that, for this situated state, is nothing (i.e., a something that "in-exists" insofar as its being isn't acknowledged as being there by the circumscribing transcendental regime bringing into existence and structuring the recognized, regulated, and rule-bound ap­ pearances of a world). As Badiou makes consistently clear in both 1988 and 2006, the, as it were, event-ness of the site and/or event is a relative property, a change-category status (as in the four categories of change

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identified by Badiou) dependent upon the préexistent configuration of a worldly state-of-the-situation. This is a real whose realness is indexed with respect to a given particular reality. So how does this long detour through Badiou's two magnum opera set up the formulation of the previously promised but not yet delivered two-part solution (a solution mobilizing Hallward's distinction between the specific and the specified as well as Eagleton's comments regard­ ing radical change) to his political difficulties? Having slowly proceeded through the preceding work of laying the conceptual bricks of the path leading up to this present moment, spelling out the payoffs of this la­ bor can now be elaborated with comparative rapidity. As shown above, if (éventai) sites and the voids they circumscribe, as together forming the points out of which events emerge, are what they are strictly in rela­ tion to the (pre) arrangement of the situational-worldly contexts in which they're embedded—as Badiou admits, the very same multiples that are éventai qua abnormally singular/void in one situation or world easily could be non-evental in another setting—then it necessarily follows, from a post-evental perspective, that fundamentally changing the situa­ tion or world might also significantly alter the distribution of the four categories of change across the field of multiples caught up in the transi­ tion from one situation/world to another. But more importantly, from a pre-evental perspective, it might very well be worth granting, particularly in relation to politics, that there are, at a minimum, at least two layers of distribution for the types of transformation delineated by Badiou: the state's (understood both as administrative governmental apparatus and in Badiou's broader sense as state-of-the-situation)37 classification of the change-category status of the multiples of its situation, and other schémas for change-category classifi­ cation of the same matrix of multiples (such as those schémas deployed by militants working against the state, trying to fulminate in advance, during pre-evental time, an éventai split with the status quo). Ultimately, what is being proposed at this juncture is a novel, renewed notion of ideology formulated precisely on the basis of Badiou's post-1988 work (keeping in mind that one of his early texts, from 1976, is entitled "On Ideology"). In trying to control the speeds of transformation, to man­ age and regulate the cadence of change, statist ideology, defined here as involving the pre-evental distribution of change-category classifica­ tions across the multiples at play in the world of appearances, can and does adopt the dual strategy of (1) making mere modifications appear to promise éventai newness (a tactic that comes to the fore in the ideology of late-capitalism, whose noisily marketed "perpetual revolution" is really just an instance of the cliché "the more things change, the more they stay the same," or, as Badiou puts it, "capitalism itself is the obsession of

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novelty and the perpetual renovation of forms");38 and (2) making the sites sheltering potentially explosive éventai upheavals appear to be, at a minimum, unremarkable features of the banal, everyday landscape and, at most, nothing more than temporary, correctable glitches in the func­ tioning of the established system. Badiou talks about post-evental denials of the event: for those who don't constitute themselves as subjects-of-the-event-in-question, this hap­ pening doesn't appear to them as éventai per se, as that in whose after­ math nothing can be the same again.39 Instead, as in the examples Badiou offers of the perspectives situated within the Roman Empire on the figure of the resurrected Jesus Christ40 and historian François Furet's rendition of the French Revolution,41 those who aren't subjects faithful to a given event tend to view this occurrence not as a pronounced rupture insti­ tuting a sharp break between a "before" and an "after," but as a ruffle or wrinkle remaining seamlessly woven into the fabric of an overarching historical-temporal continuity. However, given his staunch refusal to re­ flect upon the possibility of prior conditions for events, Badiou doesn't talk about pre-evental denials (issued from the stance of statist ideology) of specific intra-situational, inner-worldly nodes being sites harboring the potential to give rise to events. Badiou's politics would gain in clarity and precision from conceding that the ideology of the worldly state, through a sort of bluff or masquerade, disguises its non-integrated weakest points, its Achilles' heels, as fully integrated cogs and components of its allegedly harmonious functioning—rather than as loci containing the potential to throw monkey wrenches into its gears and thereby generate éventai dysfunctions of this regime, a regime that is never so deeply entrenched as it would like to appear to be in the eyes of its subjects (see also chapter 2, section 6). Temporally speaking, statist ideology sometimes depicts the gradual/static as punctuated/kinetic and vice versa. A line from Marx's The Civil War in France can be appreciated differently in light of such Badiou-inspired considerations: "It is generally the fate of completely new historical creations to be mistaken for the counterpart of older and even defunct forms of social life, to which they may bear a certain likeness."42

§5 Temporal Disciplines Patiently Engineering Upheavals As quoted earlier, Badiou describes his own brand of sub tractive politics as involving, instead of an all-demolishing destructiveness driven by the passion of the real, a conscientious scrutinizing of situations in search of

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paradoxical relations that are not relations, which now sounds a lot like Hallward's concept of the specific that is not specified. Combining this latter Hallwardian concept with the Eagleton-inspired hypothesis that movements of transformation can and do (retroactively) transform the very change-category status of the sites and trajectories involved in these movements themselves, the following claim can be advanced: prior to the subject-recognized occurrence of an event, those practicing a certain va­ riety of subtractive politics are quite justified in hoping to find, through a careful examination of their situation, figures and sites that are both specific but not specified (Hallward) as well as capable of shifting from appearing to be not-quite-evental openings in the eyes of pre-evental present anticipation to becoming powerful disruptions in post-evental future hindsight (Eagleton). In other words, subtractive politics produc­ tively could be thought of as deploying a pre-evental subjective enquiry or investigation in search of points within the transcendental regime of a world where, to a careful critical gaze not entirely taken in by the bluffs of statist ideology, the (to use Badiou's language verbatim) vanishing term of a minimal/minuscule difference (here construed as the difference between the change-category statuses simultaneously assigned to a single intra-situational multiple both by the ideology of the state and, in opposi­ tion, by another, non-statist framework) can be discerned. This differen­ tially categorized term could then be said to be the situation-immanent material basis for a (re)invention of currently unseen and unheard fig­ ures/symbols that, from inside the parameters of a particular world, have the capacity to broadcast a potentially universal address. In the interview "Beyond Formalisation," Badiou draws a political distinction between "axioms" and "directives" {mots d'ordre). An axiom is an absolutely foundational declaration fixing a point of departure for the activities of the subjects of politics, a proclamation establishing an Archimedean point around which practical programs will pivot;1 a di­ rective is the application of an axiom to the concrete constellation of a given situation, an extension of an axiom's implications into the realityinfrastructure of a world.2 Directives are the political putting-to-work of axioms. Perhaps in order to reassure those with concerns that his subtrac­ tive politics remains hopelessly and ineffectively abstract, Badiou insists on the overriding importance of translating axioms into directives.3 And yet it seems, at least in his published books (his empirical modes of en­ gaged praxis through L'Organisation Politique aside), that Badiou himself refrains from spending much time engaging in this labor of translation. (Hallward considers Badiou's reflections on the relational application of axioms to be still underdeveloped.) 4 Maybe this is a symptom of, as the saying goes, the perfect having become the enemy of the good. And

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this "becoming the enemy of the good" would be due to Badiou's quick dismissal of apparently gradualist measures of seemingly minor political adjustments and reforms (i.e., not-quite-evental gestures) in the spheres of legislation and socioeconomics while awaiting the quasi-divine inter­ vention of the system-shattering éventai upheaval ushering in an uncom­ promisingly "perfect" revolution. But the preceding analyses call into question whether he can be entirely confident and sure that what ap­ pears to be gradual or minor really is so or, rather, simply seems this way exclusively under the shadow of statist ideology's assignation of changecategory statuses. At the post-evental level, Badiou speaks of the immeasurability of the truth-consequences of an event: 'You have to understand that there is something in the becoming of a truth that exceeds the strict possi­ bilities of the human mind. There is something in truth that is beyond our immediate capacities."5 There are an infinite (i.e., non-finite as noncalculable/denumerable) number of potentially forcible ramifications for countless situations/worlds past, present, and future flowing from a particular event.6 In an interview with Hallward forming the appendix of Hallward's translation of his Ethics (an interview entitled "Politics and Philosophy"), Badiou admits that "at a certain moment, the set of actors of a generic procedure, of a truth-procedure, are clearly ignorant, un­ knowing, of what it is. This is an essential point." 7 But, shifting temporal perspective from a post-evental to a pre-evental position, what about the pre-evental actors acting in a situation/world? What if, like the subjects of a post-evental truth-trajectory, they too don't really know exactly what they're doing or quite where they're going? What if, under the influence of statist ideology, they anticipate that a particular gesture will effectuate a system-preserving modification only to find out, after the fact of this gesture, that their intervention unexpectedly hastened (rather than de­ layed) the demise of this very system? For both better and worse, there is an inherent incalculability to the factors involved in setting the pace of the cadence of political change. There remains an as-yet unexplored implication in Eagleton's above-cited remarks apropos Badiou. From within the confines of a new post-evental situation/world, with its reassignation of the types of trans­ formation to the constituents of its reality (including the components relevant to how this situation/world constructs its own history), it seems possible that individuals, in the wake of an event-prompted upheaval, might very well fail to recognize the prior éventai triggers responsible for catalyzing the creation of the world in which they live. Past events may no longer appear as events to the backward glances of those situ­ ated in the post-evental reality. Of course, one of Badiou's responses to

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this suggestion, located in "Meditation Twenty" of Being and Event ("The Intervention: Illegal Choice of a Name of the Event, Logic of the Two, Temporal Foundation"), would be that every event must happen twice. More precisely, there is no event as such without the "intervention" of someone naming the event as an event, thereby becoming a subjectof-the-event responsible for, through militant fidelity, preserving the event at the level of a temporally elongated post-evental labor of forcing the event's truth-consequences back into the being of a world as config­ ured by a state-of-the-situation.8 Likewise, in Peut-on penser la politique? Badiou, paraphrasing a famous Lacanian definition of the subject of the signifier, stipulates that the politically intervening subject is that which an event represents for another event, namely, the "between-two" interval linking a first named event with a second event of naming this first event 9 (Although Badiou subsequently expresses reservations about the notion of naming, 10 the concepts of "consequence" and "trace" that appear to replace it in the new framework of Logiques des mondes still exhibit the same temporal dynamic/structure, that of the future anterior, in which what happens after retroactively determines whether what came before was/is or was/is not an event.)11 If there's no initial event without both the second event of this first event being named as an event per se and a subsequent subject sustaining this first event through its post-evental endeavors—the initial event in itself surges forth and then disappears, continuing to exist if and only insofar as it leaves behind a nominal trace forged through a second event of a subjective intervention naming this vanished happening 12 —then Badiou excludes the possibility of there be­ ing a past event which vanishes as an event proper after the fact of its hav­ ing changed the situation/world to such an extent that a redistribution of change-category statuses retroactively revokes this same event's éventai status. (The recent replacement of the word "name" with "trace" a n d / or "consequence" changes nothing in this context. Moreover, in a March 2006 discussion with Simon Critchley, the same month when Logiques des mondes was published, Badiou explicitly reinvokes his theory of éventai naming, saying things such as "There is always in every truth procedure a poetic moment. Because we always have to find a new name for the event. The creation of a new name is always part of the birth of a new subjectiv­ ity"; "If a poetic event is the birth of the new possibility of naming, we have to acknowledge a poetic gesture in all truth procedures"; and "We always have to find new names."13) But, this Badiouian response notwith­ standing, even if there cannot be a totally vanishing event (i.e., an éventai cause which is obfuscated as éventai by its ensuing effects) as an event per se in Badiou's strict technical sense (since all events, according to Badiou, must, in order to be eventally consequent, leave behind traces as

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names and bodies supporting ensuing truth-trajectories), 14 isn't it philo­ sophically and politically crucial to contemplate the possibility and rami­ fications of there being radical breaks and discontinuities that might, in part due to their own reverberations unfolding off into the future, be­ come invisible to those living in realities founded on such eclipsed points of origin—with these points as instances of a real retroactively foreclosed from reality (à la Lacan 's notion of the Real, in his eleventh seminar, as an après-coup "lost cause")?15 Apart from containing the philosophical grounds for Badiou's ex­ clusion of the possibility of a vanishing event, "Meditation Twenty" of Being and Event also directly addresses the temporality of events. Badiou claims that "the theory of intervention forms the kernel of any theory of time. Time . . . is intervention itself, thought as the gap between two events. The essential historicity of intervention does not refer to time as a measurable milieu."16 He proceeds to add that "time is here . . . the requirement of the Two; for there to be an event, one must be able to situate oneself within the consequences of another."17 The intervention of naming, as the post-event event retroactively rendering the first event an event proper (hence the association of event-ness with what Badiou calls "the Two"), brings into play at least two temporal dimensions: one, the time in between the first event's instantaneous coming and going and the second event's naming of this disappeared occurrence (i.e., time "as the gap between two events") ; and two, the new time, broken off from the chrono-logic of common state/world time (i.e., "time as a measurable milieu" qua the medium of homogeneous linear historical temporality), as a unique post-evental temporality constituting itself in the aftermath of the two events out of which it arose (thus, there's a specific time-of-anevent, just as there's a particular subject-of-an-event). In the second volume of Circonstances, Badiou sings the praises of a "discipline of the real"18 (as implicitly opposed to the violent destructiveness of the passion of the real diagnosed as a symptom of the twentieth century in Le siècle). In good Platonic fashion, he takes mathematical thought as an exemplary instance of what he means here (and as an ex­ ample to be followed by other, non-mathematical practices of thinking) : contra the common, vulgar assumption that discipline automatically en­ tails a rigidity precluding the possibility of creativity, Badiou insightfully observes that the activity of mathematics exhibits how a certain sort of discipline (i.e., the subtractive contraction into itself of mathematical thinking, its withdrawal from the world, necessary for carrying out its in­ ternal deductive procedures leading to novel results) "is identical to total liberty, to absolute creation"19 (a point Lacan also makes with reference to Cantor in his fourteenth seminar of 1966-67) .20 He proposes that, in

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this respect, politics should emulate mathematics. 21 Similarly, near the end of "Meditation Twenty" of Being and Event, Badiou defines "fidelity" (i.e., a post-evental subject's faithfulness to an event and the consequent extension of its implications) as "a discipline of time," an "organized con­ trol of time."22 As regards the political importance and relevance of re­ thinking the notion of discipline, Badiou declares, "People who have nothing—no power, no money, no media—have only their discipline as a possibility of strength."23 The militant subject-of-the-event (whether political, amorous, artistic, or scientific) must employ a variety of disci­ pline custom-tailored to the task of deploying the truth-consequences of the event in relation to which it's a subject. Without such discipline, nothing new can be created in the world, since, in the absence of a sub­ jective organization of procedures constructed in response to the event, the event itself is left to evaporate inconsequentially without a trace back into situation-relative nothingness. Once again, Badiou's focus is on the post-evental dimension of time. However, in line with the preceding arguments, there is also an urgent need for a pre-evental discipline of time. This other sort of tem­ poral discipline would be neither the undisciplined impatience of hur­ riedly doing anything and everything to enact some ill-defined, poorly conceived notion of making things different nor the quietist patience of either resigning oneself to the current state of affairs drifting along interminably or awaiting the unpredictable arrival of a not-to-be-activelyprecipitated X sparking genuine change. (Badiou's philosophy some­ times seems to be in danger of licensing a version of this latter mode of quietism24; see also chapter 4, section 16.) Those subjected to today's fre­ netic socioeconomic forms of late-capitalism are constantly at risk of suc­ cumbing to various versions of what one could refer to loosely as "atten­ tion deficit disorder," that is, a frantic, thoughtless jumping from present to ever-new present. At the political level, such capitalist impatience must be countered with the discipline of what could be designated as a specifi­ cally communist patience (designated thus in line with Badiou's asser­ tion that all authentic modes of politics are "communist" in the broad sense of being both emancipatory as well as "generic" qua radically egal­ itarian and non-identitarian) 25 —not the quietist patience condemned above, but, instead, the calm contemplation of the details of situations, states, and worlds with an eye to the discerning of ideologically veiled weak points in the structural architecture of the statist system. Given the theoretical validity of assuming that these camouflaged Achilles' heels (as hidden sites with éventai potentials) can and do exist in one's worldly context, one should be patiently hopeful that one's apparently minor gestures, carried out under the guidance of a pre-evental surveillance of

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the situation in search of its concealed kernels of real transformation, might come to unleash major repercussions for the state-of-the-situation or the transcendental regime of the world. In other words, it's reason­ able to anticipate that seemingly circumscribed and constrained regional projects, if carefully targeted under the guidance of the proper sort of ideology critique, might actually result in fundamental reality-altering re­ verberations (perhaps there is indeed some salvageable political merit in the hackneyed bumper-sticker injunction to "think globally, act locally"). In temporal terms, this is to place hope in the non-miraculous possibility that the abrupt, punctuating shifts inaugurating new times could emerge immanently out of the subterranean internal flows of currently unfurl­ ing histories (at this level, Hegelian-Marxist historical dialectics deserves to be reaffirmed in a certain sense). This is a new sort of disciplined patience, one that optimistically wagers on futures bound up with the inherent incalculability of interventions.

2

One Must Have Confidence That the Other Does Not Exist: Select Preconditions for Events and Acts in Contemporary Circumstances

§6 Impotent Powers: Illusions of Statist Potency In his early Maoist reflections on politics and ideology from the 1970s, Badiou decisively denounces the tendency of many French theorists of the period to portray statist power as a monolithic colossus overshadow­ ing the relatively weak, feeble masses, disparate and dispersed crowds whose sole option for defanged rebellion is the "intimate revolt" of desir­ ing away in the dark corners and recesses of their depoliticized libidinal economies. 1 He vehemendy asserts that Marxism requires seeing things the other way around: statist power is inherently fragile and reaction­ ary in the face of the masses2 (an assertion echoing key statements from Mao's "little red book," such as "We must never be cowed by the bluster of reactionaries" 3 and "We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong"). 4 Instead of positing the ideologi­ cal and material domination of the alliance between capital and state as the point of departure for political analyses, a proper Marxist, according to Badiou, must begin with an opposed axiom: "It is resistance which is the secret of domination."5 A few years later, in Théorie du sujet, Badiou explicitly links this line of thought with Mao's dictum that one must have confi­ dence in the masses.6 In this vein, Badiou maintains that "in the matter of Marxist politics and the class subject, the one manner of giving up is to lose confidence." 7 He then proceeds to the statement that "the essence of confidence is having confidence in confidence."8 For Lacan, there is no Other of the Other, truth of the truth, or act of the act (see chapter 4, section 19). However, an essential feature of Lacanian desire is its re­ flexive character: as Lacan puts it in the seventh seminar, "desire . . . is always desire in the second degree, desire of desire."9 (Along these lines, 37

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Badiou speaks of the "pure desire"10 moving a subject-of-an-event as "the desire of a desire,"11 the subjective willing of the willful pursuit of the implications of an event-revealed truth.) Put differently, Lacan's 1959 proposition regarding the modes of desire peculiar to the subjectivity of speaking beings alleges that there is only desire of desire (of desire . . .). Badiou says something similar about confidence. On the basis of this, one could contend that theoretical confidence in "communist" qua genericegalitarian political projects must be redoubled and reinforced by a cor­ responding practical confidence surging forth out of the intermingled sources of will and affect. (For more on the place of the political will with respect to both theory and practice, see appendix A below.) A key matter to be examined critically here is what sorts of influ­ ences tying politics to events might have on the determination of political agents, a determination relying upon specific forms of courage. To ask a question in Badiouian terms that Badiou doesn't pose: what would be the likely effects of Badiou's metapolitics on politics? If Badiou succeeds in gaining an audience among practitioners of politics, then, contrary to his insistence that political practices condition philosophical theo­ ries and not vice versa, it's reasonable to anticipate that there will be extra-philosophical repercussions generated by a reciprocal counterconditioning of politics by (Badiouian) metapolitics. That the metapolitical can or should remain entirely conditioned without being in the least bit conditioning relative to the political is not only of questionable desir­ ability (especially from any number of Marxist perspectives)—it's utterly unrealistic to expect, unless one pathetically and pessimistically assumes in advance the complete inefficacy and irrelevance of one's theorizations apropos politics. And even then, whether or not theories conditioned by practices end up becoming theories that condition practices is far from being under the sole authoritative control of the philosophical metapolitician. As mentioned earlier, Being and Event uses the word state in two overlapping senses: on the one hand, the ontological-phenomenological conception of the state as the representational architecture of a stateof-the-situation (or, in the language of Logiques des mondes, the transcen­ dental regime of a world); and, on the other hand, the state according to the everyday understanding of the word as referring to the institutional apparatus of government endowed with a sufficiently recognized quota of sovereignty. At the beginning of "Meditation Eight" of Being and Event, a meditation devoted to the delineation of this concept of the state at the level of his set-theoretic ontology, Badiou claims: The apparent solidity of the world of presentation is merely a result of die action of structure, even if nothing is outside such a result. It is nee-

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essary to prohibit that catastrophe of presentation which would be its encounter with its own void, the presentational occurrence of inconsis­ tency as such, or the ruin of the One. 12 Careful a t t e n t i o n should b e paid to t h e fact that Badiou qualifies t h e "solidity" of "the world of p r e s e n t a t i o n " resulting from "the action of structure," a world whose structure is stabilized by the a c c o m p a n y i n g m e t a s t r u c t u r e of a state t e t h e r e d to this world, as merely " a p p a r e n t . " T h e full implications of this qualification for politics subsequently be­ come clearer in the concluding c h a p t e r of his 1998 b o o k Metapolitics (a chapter entitled "Politics as Truth P r o c e d u r e " ) . T h e r e i n , h e develops t h e implications for politics of Being and Event's eighth meditation, arguing that a g e n u i n e political event causes t h e previously mysterious, spectral, a n d (most importantly) immeasurable excess of state power suddenly to b e c o m e s o m e t h i n g with a precise a n d known measure: 1 3 The real characteristic of the political event and the truth procedure that it sets off is that a political event fixes the errancy and assigns a measure to the superpower of the State. It fixes the power of the State. Consequendy, the political event interrupts the subjective errancy of the power of the State. It configures the state-of-the-situation. It gives it a figure; it configures its power; it measures it.14 H e continues: Empirically, this means that whenever there is a genuinely political event, the State reveals itself. It reveals its excess of power, its repressive dimension. But it also reveals a measure for the usually invisible excess. For it is essential to the normal functioning of the State that its power remains measureless, errant, unassignable. The political event puts an end to all this by assigning a visible measure to the excessive power of the State.15 This power's u n k n o w n , phantom-like virtuality is forced to transform it­ self, in response to the challenge posed by a revolutionary event, into a concretely expressed counter-exertion. In so doing, it loses s o m e t h i n g in the eyes of those subjected to it. 16 Paradoxically, power's passage from potentiality to actuality—the actuality of its exercise is often taken as t h e essential p r o o f of power's p o t e n c y — r e s u l t s in t h e d i m i n u t i o n of this power itself (not d u e to an e x p e n d i t u r e of a finite quantity of force usually h e l d in reserve, b u t because t h e scope a n d limits of power are m a d e to e m e r g e into the light of publicly visible d a y — t h e p h o t o g r a p h of the lone protester facing the c o l u m n of People's Liberation Army tanks

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taken during the Tiananmen Square happening in China epitomizes this effect whereby state power is strangely diminished at the very moment it displays itself in all its raw, ferocious strength). Destructive, enraged outbursts of undiluted brutality are, as Mao himself observes in 1942,17 often symptomatic manifestations of an underlying impotence on the verge of being revealed, desperate last resorts to protect an insubstantial Symbolic authority (beneath which lies nothing more than the physically violent means of blatant suppression). In Lacanian terms, the Badiouian political event reduces the state apparatus from a Symbolic authority to an Imaginary rival, from a quasi-omnipotent mediating medium to a lessthan-omnipotent external adversary. Truly effective state power is thus always and necessarily a shadowy, potential sort of power.18 For instance, it's worth observing that an institu­ tion common to authoritarian regimes is the secret police (who abduct people clandestinely in the middle of the night, who torture dissidents and subversives behind closed doors, who carry out executions of the re­ gime's opponents in hidden locations). This can't really be due to shame or guilt on the part of the tyrannical rulers (such tyrants are, with justifi­ cation, frequently presumed to be sociopathically devoid of conscience); nor can it be ascribed to the desire to "maintain appearances," to conceal the brutal nature of the regime (the public is, in nearly every case, aware of the dictatorial status of their given state authority—and moreover, such a government wants the governed to be acutely aware of its willing­ ness savagely to quash resistance to it). Rather, the phenomenon of the secret police as an institutional feature of autocratic state power reflects an understanding that the direct and visible display of power in all its vio­ lent actuality somehow detracts from the intimidating allure of authority as a fearsome myth, as a force known about only at the level of rumor and speculation (after all, people's imaginations are capable of concoct­ ing the most horrific of scenarios, so leaving them to their own imagina­ tions is indeed a clever strategy). This institution is, in fact, an ingenious way actually to exercise power while nonetheless preserving the mysteri­ ous immeasurability associated with power-as-potentiality. The devil one doesn't know is feared much more than the known devil. The overt ac­ tualization of power lessens this fear supporting the recognition of the Symbolic dimension of the state's authority. Keeping the workings of this power covert preserves this fear—and, in turn, this fear both preserves the recognition of Symbolic authority as well as deters the issuance of challenges that might call its bluff. A key Badiouian question arises here: what sort of courage has the chance to dispel this fear, this state terror? Further on in the chapter addressing "Politics as Truth Procedure," Badiou spells out an upshot of his 1998 musings on the dynamics of

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political events that echoes his youthful Maoist faith in the p e o p l e as a mass q u a generic, non-identitarian political body: "Generally speaking, insurrectionary forms of political t h o u g h t are b o u n d to a post-evental d e t e r m i n a t i o n of the power of the State as being very weak or even in­ ferior to the power of simple collective presentation." 1 9 Certain features of Zizek's Lacanian thinking of politics resonate with b o t h the y o u n g Badiou's affirmation of the Maoist confidence in the masses as well as the "mature" Badiou's speculations a b o u t the normally concealed b u t eventally revealed frailty of state apparatuses. These resonating features are perhaps p a r t of what cements in place the feeling of fraternal solidarity exhibited by these two thinkers toward each o t h e r ( p r o m p t i n g Badiou to proclaim that the two of t h e m form a new Politburo) despite their differences a n d disagreements a b o u t m a n y topics. Zizek makes the late Lacan's p r o c l a m a t i o n "Le grand Autre n'existe pas" a central t e n e t of his theoretical apparatus in all its aspects, 20 including n o t only his ontology a n d c o r r e s p o n d i n g account of subjectivity, 21 b u t in theorizing political matters too ( o n e should k e e p in m i n d that the c o n c e p t of this O t h e r functions h e r e as the Lacanian-Zizekian equivalent of t h e Badiouian state). In How to Read Lacan, Zizek describes the delicate insubstantiality of the big O t h e r : In spite of all its grounding power, the big Other is fragile, insubstantial, properly virtual, in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presup­ position. It exists only in so far as subjects act as if it exists. Its status is similar to that of an ideological cause like Communism or Nation: it is the substance of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of their whole existence, the point of reference that provides the ultimate horizon of meaning, something for which these individuals are ready to give their lives, yet the only thing that really exists are these individuals and their activity, so this substance is actual only in so far as individuals believe in it and act accordingly.22 A couple of paragraphs later, h e adds: "This virtual character of the big O t h e r m e a n s that the symbolic o r d e r is n o t a kind of spiritual substance existing i n d e p e n d e n t l y of individuals, b u t something that is sustained by their c o n t i n u o u s activity."23 This emphasis on the "as if" status, the "vir­ tual reality," of the big O t h e r q u a socio-symbolic network is a r e c u r r e n t t h e m e in Zizek's work. For instance, in his 2000 essay o n David Lynch, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, h e stipulates that "there is a n 'objective' socio-symbolic system only insofar as subjects treat it as such."24 In connec­ tion with this assertion, h e clarifies that Lacan, despite his 1950s engage­ m e n t with a classical structuralism s t e m m i n g from the work of Claude

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Lévi-Strauss, s h o u l d n ' t be read as a sort of psychoanalytic D u r k h e i m pos­ iting the i n d e p e n d e n t existence of a t r a n s c e n d e n t , overarching O r d e r with a capital O: "Lacan is . . . n o D u r k h e i m i a n : h e opposes any reification of the Institution, i.e., h e knows very well that the Institution is h e r e only as the performative effect of the subject's activity. T h e Institution exists only w h e n subjects believe in it, or, rather, act (in their social inter­ activity) AS IF they believe in it."25 Both Badiou, who speaks of the " a p p a r e n t solidity" of state-secured situations, a n d Zizek, who similarly speaks of the "fragile, insubstantial" character of the Other, c o n c u r that in spite of all appearances to the con­ trary, the organizing ideological o r d e r s / r e g i m e s structuring the circum­ stances of realities are n o t nearly so cohesive a n d g r o u n d e d as they m i g h t (wish to) seem to be. This p o i n t of convergence between Badiouian a n d Zizekian thinking (i.e., the conception of the s t a t e / O t h e r as only seem­ ingly massive, strong, a n d invincible) cries o u t for precisely the concep­ tion of the politics of minimal differences outlined earlier vis-à-vis Badiou (in c h a p t e r 1, sections 4 a n d 5): a theoretical practice of surveying situ­ ations prior to the o c c u r r e n c e of events or acts with an eye p e e l e d for those nodes within the state-regulated situation that might be ideologi­ cally d o u b l e inscribed, namely, intra-situational loci c o u n t e d a n d m a r k e d by a given statist big O t h e r as having o n e change-category status but, t h r o u g h the gaze of a specific p r e - a c t / e v e n t critical assessment, p e r h a p s hinting at the possibility of being assigned o t h e r change-category statuses different t h a n those i m p u t e d to these loci by t h e ideologies of the O t h e r s in question. Derrida, in a set of reflections o n S e p t e m b e r 11, 2001 a n d its consequences, treats the terrorist attacks of that day as symptomatic of what h e designates as an "autoimmunity" disorder. Derrida's treat­ m e n t of this e x a m p l e helps to r e n d e r m o r e tangible the j o i n t BadiouianZizekian thesis r e g a r d i n g the ultimate weakness of the statist Other, its p e r m a n e n t vulnerability to immanently g e n e r a t e d dysfunctions: Here is the first symptom of suicidal autoimmunity: not only is the ground, that is, the literal figure of the founding or foundation of this "force of law," seen to be exposed to aggression, but the aggression of which it is the object (the object exposed, precisely, to violence, but also, "in a loop," to its own cameras in its own interests) comes, as from the inside, from forces that are apparently without any force of their own but that are able to find the means, through ruse and the implementation of high-tech knowledge, to get hold of an American weapon in an American city on the ground of an American airport. Immigrated, trained, prepared for their act in the United States by the United States, these hijackers incorporate, so to speak, two suicides in one: their own (and

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one will remain forever defenseless in the face of a suicidal, autoimmunitary aggression—and that is what terrorizes most) but also the suicide of those who welcomed, armed, and trained them. For let us not forget that the United States had in effect paved the way for and consolidated the forces of the "adversary" by training people like "bin Laden," who would here be the most striking example, and by first of all creating the politico-military circumstances that would favor their emergence and their shifts in allegiance (for example, the alliance with Saudi Arabia and other Arab Muslim countries in its war against the Soviet Union or Russia in Afghanistan—though one could endlessly multiply examples of these suicidal paradoxes) .26 As with Badiou's metapolitical observations to the effect that, paradoxi­ cally, the m o r e openly states reveal a n d exercise their power the m o r e this power is diminished in the view of those subjected to its exercise (insofar as this power thereby takes o n the clear contours of a definite measure­ ment) , so too with Derrida's a u t o i m m u n i t y disorder: with increasing infrastructural elaborateness a n d technological complexity (i.e., "power" in a loose sense) comes increasing vulnerability for a s t a t e / O t h e r - r e g u l a t e d situation. T h e m o r e intricate a n d developed a system becomes, the m o r e potential bugs, loopholes, a n d s h o r t circuits the system c o m e s to con­ tain within the confines of its own architecture as internally g e n e r a t e d weak points ripe for exploitation. 2 7 T h e s e weak points are the n o d e s in networks e n d o w e d with the potential to give rise to event-level systemic dysfunctions disrupting the very networks in which they're e m b e d d e d . Moreover, this D e r r i d e a n line of reflection suggests that a p l e t h o r a of resources for subversively d i s o r d e r i n g the reigning o r d e r of t h e statist O t h e r are to b e found within the d o m a i n of this o r d e r itself, a n d that this plethora of extant resources was strikingly disclosed by the p e r p e t r a t o r s of the 9 / 1 1 attacks.

§7 "Even a Broken Clock Is Right at Least Twice a Day": Raising Terror to the Dignity of its Notion Badiou describes the clash between the two o p p o s e d camps clustering a r o u n d the signifiers "United States" a n d "al-Qaeda" as (borrowing a phrase from Deleuze) the "disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms." 1 T h a t is to say, in this "war o n terror" (i.e., conflict as a disjunction), two nihil­ istic forces woven of the same historical a n d ideological cloth (i.e., the

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U n i t e d States a n d al-Qaeda as a synthesis q u a historically a n d ideologi­ cally entangled adversaries fighting for power) are locked in a struggle for a h e g e m o n y r o o t e d in n o t h i n g m o r e t h a n financial wealth a n d b r u t e material domination. 2 Badiou proposes that "on b o t h sides, it is a m a t t e r of striking blindly to demonstrate one's strike capacity. W h a t is at stake are bloody a n d nihilistic games of power without p u r p o s e a n d without truth." 3 Badiou t h e n proceeds to explain why it is that the terrorism prac­ ticed by bin L a d e n a n d associates, unlike forms of terror mobilized in situations past (for instance, in the context of French history, b o t h the terror of the Revolution as well as that employed by the Resistance dur­ ing Nazi o c c u p a t i o n ) , is far from being properly political in the full Badiouian sense. H e states: All the formal traits of the crime of New York indicate its nihilistic character: the sacralization of death; the absolute indifference to the victims; the transformation of oneself and others into instruments . . . but nothing speaks louder than the silence, the terrible silence of the authors and planners of this crime. For with affirmative, liberating, nonnihilistic political violence not only is responsibility always claimed, but its essence is found in claiming responsibility. In 1941, when the first resistance fighters killed a German officer or blew up a pylon, it was solely in order to be able to say "it's us, the Resistance! Resistance exists and will continue to strike back!" The tract, saying who did what, how­ ever perilous it might be, must accompany the act. Violence is a Tract. There is none of that today. The act remains unnamed and anonymous just like the culprits. There lies the infallible sign of a type of fascist nihilism.4 Badiou draws attention to a curious fact n o t e d by various c o m m e n t a t o r s o n the occurrences of S e p t e m b e r 11: t h e r e was n o accompanying state­ m e n t , n o i m m e d i a t e taking of credit for t h e d e e d n o r declaration of policy-making d e m a n d s , issued by al-Qaeda. Badiou speculates that this isn't accidental or incidental. Instead, this absence of a public s t a t e m e n t reveals, a c c o r d i n g to h i m , the absence of any c o h e r e n t , true political p r o g r a m beyond the empty a g e n d a of staging m e d i a spectacles of d e a t h a n d destruction. In the terminology of Logiques des mondes, today's terror­ ists would be "obscure subjects," namely, agents carrying out a d e r a n g e d demolition of what exists in the n a m e of u s h e r i n g in a fetishized absolute (albeit an "obscure" absolute as a hazy, d e l u d e d mirage of an e t e r n a l One-All). 5 D u r i n g an interview given in N o v e m b e r 2001, Osama bin L a d e n

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succinctly formulates his version of the "us-versus-them" distinction in a way that very easily can be interpreted as confirming Badiou's depiction of the conflict between al-Qaeda and the United States as nothing more than a "disjunctive synthesis of two nihilisms": "We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the big difference between us." From a Badiouian per­ spective, the "death" and "life" invoked here by bin Laden are the recto and verso of the same nihilistic coin: al-Qaeda revels in the pointless destruction of life (i.e., sacrificial violence decoupled from any viable, genuine political program, a bloodlust enthralled by religiously attired delusional fantasies), while the United States clings to the preservation of life rendered pointless (i.e., bare biological existence, denuded of causes and truths worth more than raw physical being, raised by the reigning Western ethico-political framework to the status of the highest good, the ultimate value). Both bin Laden and Bush insist on the either/or struc­ ture of the choice between "for us or against us." In light of bin Laden's revealing 2001 formulation, this can be reduced to: either die for noth­ ing (al-Qaeda) or live for nothing (the United States). Nevertheless, to resort to a Hegelian formulation, perhaps it is now time to raise current empirical terror to the dignity of its philosophicalpolitical Notion. How so? What does this mean? Both Badiou and Zizek drop hints about a much-needed resuscitation of the notion of a "good terror" in the face of the sweeping condemnations of any and every mode of political violence—these condemnations insist that all terror is "bad"— pronounced by the vast majority of Western witnesses to terrorism-driven occurrences on the contemporary geopolitical ground. 6 Neither thinker believes that the Left should simply and mindlessly renounce violence tout court either under ideological pressure from the "centrist" liberal democratic consensus or on the basis of an erroneous article of faith falsely stating that all disciplined, organized militancy is intrinsically fascistic (for example, well before 9/11, the young Badiou insists that par­ tisan Marxist truths are necessarily violent, terrorist, and dictatorial) .7 Moreover, Zizek, in relation to the topic of terrorism, clarifies a point implicit in Badiou's contention that the human individual is, from the standpoint of an éventai truth, expendable in relation to the sustenance or trajectory of a subject-of-an-event8 (see also chapter 4, section 19): un­ der the sway of new bio-political paradigms and the related Nietzschean "last man" stance according to which the perpetuation of mere physical life is the ultimate good, individuals dwelling in late-capitalist poleis are, for the most part, incapable of comprehending the terrorists' willing­ ness to die in the name of their chosen cause; the sacrifice of one's life for a "higher purpose" necessarily appears to be "crazy" and "fanatical" to these last men of late-capitalism.9 However nihilistically deranged

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al-Qaeda-style terrorism might be, it nonetheless contains two elements worthy, as it were, of being elevated to the dignity of the Notion of a new leftist politics: one, an eye for targeting immanent sites of potential dysfunctionality subsisting within the present order of things (i.e., symptoms of a structurally inherent "autoimmunity disorder" chronically afflicting technologically advanced capitalist systems); two, a willingness to value something more than mere animalistic comfort and well-being, some­ thing other than the tranquil, soporific "life of happiness" advertised without end to the consuming populace. As condemnable as al-Qaeda and what it stands for indeed are, one should nonetheless keep in mind a piece of cliché wisdom: even a broken clock is right at least twice a day. What's more, al-Qaeda's confidence that the superpower Other (whether the Soviet Union circa the 1980s or the United States nowadays) isn't as strong as it appears to be, that it's a paper tiger capable of being con­ fronted successfully, seems, at least superficially, to reflect both Badiou's insistence on the underlying feebleness of statist power as well as Zizek's similar characterization of big Others as fragile and insubstantial.

§8 There Is Repetition, and Then There Is Repetition: Betting on Discontinuity Al-Qaeda-style terrorism also brings up the notion of repetition, a notion central to an account of change situated in relation to the Lacan-ZizekBadiou trinity. The 2001 attack on the Twin Towers was a second effort by this loose, nebulous Islamic network to knock them down, a sort of repe­ tition of the first failed attempt to destroy them carried out in 1993 (one might be tempted to formulate a perverse Benjaminian reading of 2001 as the deferred historical vindication of 1993—see also chapter 4, section 16). Certainly, persistence is another characteristic demanded by revolu­ tionary political practice ("If at first you don't succeed, try, try again"). However, there are also more nuanced theoretical matters at stake here with regard to the topic of repetition. Interestingly, in his most recent discussion of Badiou, Zizek draws attention to the problems generated for Badiouian philosophy by this topic immediately after speaking of the "dimension" of repetition involved in the Benjaminian depiction of the temporal dynamics structuring moments of revolution—more specifi­ cally, the idea that a present revolution is a reactivation and redemption (i.e., a repetition) of past failed upheavals left imprisoned in a virtual, ghostly historical limbo until liberated by this later outbreak of another, subsequent attempt at revolution.1 He explains:

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Perhaps, the reason Badiou neglects this dimension is his all too crude opposition between repetition and the cut of the Event, his dismissal of repetition as an obstacle to the rise of the New, ultimately as the death drive itself, the morbid attachment to some obscure jouissance which entraps the subject in the self-destrucuve vicious cycle.2 Zizek goes o n to claim: It is at this point that one should turn to Deleuze against Badiou, to Deleuze's precise elaborations on repetition as the very form of the emergence of the New. Of course, Badiou is too refined a thinker not to perceive the éventai dimension of repetition: when, in Logiques des mondes, he deploys the three "subjective destinations" of an event (faith­ ful, reactive, obscure), he adds a fourth one, that of "resurrection," the subjective re-activation of an event whose traces were obliterated, "repressed" into the historico-ideological unconscious . . . What matters here . . . is that Badiou shirks from calling this resurrection repetition? In his 2006 sequel to Being and Event, Badiou i n d e e d forges a c o n c e p t of "resurrection." A n d there are some crucial subtleties to this Badiouian concept that merit m e n t i o n in c o n n e c t i o n with Zizek's above assertions (although, it should be noted, Zizek is n o t without evidentiary justifica­ tions in s u p p o r t of these critical claims—for example, in his Handbook of Inaesthetics, Badiou refers to "the u n r e p e a t a b l e singularity of t h e true"). 4 First of all, o n e must r e m e m b e r that, in Logiques des mondes, Badiou tire­ lessly emphasizes again a n d again t h a t the truths revealed by a n d issu­ ing forth from events are timeless, trans-world fragments of eternity. 5 Although "an eternal truth is enveloped in different linguistic a n d con­ ceptual contexts," it is nonetheless eternal insofar as it is irreducible to the m u l t i t u d e of such differing contexts, to the plurality of spatiotempo­ ral worlds across which truths cut like bisecting diagonal lines escaping capture by the planes t h r o u g h which these lines slice. 6 Unlike the tran­ s c e n d e n t eternal truths of Socrates a n d Plato, these Badiouian truths can a n d d o a p p e a r directly within worlds, although, despite this a p p e a r i n g , they r e m a i n u n c o n q u e r a b l y resistant to absorption by their various en­ veloping socio-symbolic contexts. 7 This r e m i n d e r a b o u t the eternal quality of Badiouian truths is im­ p o r t a n t insofar as, in the p o r t i o n of Logiques des mondes referred to by Zizek in which the concept of resurrection arises, Badiou explicitly links his n o t i o n of resurrection to the eternity of a truth. H e insists that a res­ urrection, properly u n d e r s t o o d , is possible only in "a new world." 8 After this, h e invokes the eternal status of truths, arguing that if certain truths

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appear to be lost (i.e., eclipsed or obliterated in the course of the passage of time), this isn't solely due to the powers of the transcendental regimes governing the comings and goings of appearances in given worlds. In other words, truths are far from being entirely at the mercy of the author­ ity of particular linguistic and conceptual contexts; put differently, truths are not reducible to the regulations peculiar to the given worlds in which they either appear or do not appear.9 Instead, Badiou maintains that the decisions and deeds of the four forms of subjectivity catalogued in "Book I" of Logiques des mondes (i.e., the fidelity of the militant subject-of-theevent, the denial of the reactive subject, the occultation of the obscure subject, and the renewed fidelity of the subject-of-the-resurrected-eventsequence) 10 play a part in determining the historical destinies of truths. 11 He immediately proceeds to clarify what he means by "resurrection" in light of these philosophical parameters: "every faithful subject can . . . reincorporate into the éventai present the fragment of truth that the old present had passed under the bar of occultation. It is this reincorpora­ tion that we call resurrection." 12 One of the crucial consequences of this is that Badiouian resurrec­ tion is not quite repetition in any straightforward sense. The structure of the interactions between eternal truths and temporal worlds posited by Badiou necessitates speaking of "an empirical historicization of the eter­ nity of truths."13 That is to say, contra the standard Platonic separation of the eternally true ideas of the "intelligible realm" from the less-than-true temporal incarnations of the "visible realm," Badiou believes that eternal truths immanently and immediately appear. Moreover, if the effects and implications of truths depend on these truths' positions relative to the varying plethora of possible worldly frameworks in which they appear— the conclusions of the analysis of Badiou's delineations of (éventai) sites and events in both Being and Event and Logiques des mondes offered in chapter 1 of this book require accepting this antecedent as true—then the contours of the worlds into which these truths are (re) inserted are far from negligible or irrelevant. And thus the reemergence of a pre­ viously eclipsed eternal truth in a new and different world isn't a rep­ etition qua recurrence of the same once again. The ramifications and reverberations of an eternal truth necessarily will be novel each time it's resurrected in the proper Badiouian sense of resurrection (recalling that Badiou reserves the term resurrection for the reactivation of a truth in a "new world," hence implying that this term doesn't designate the repetition of a truth within the enduring coordinates of the same old world in which that truth perhaps already had come and gone). All of this suggests that Badiou, in gesturing at a dynamic through which time­ less truths undergo processes of historical becoming within which even

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their very re-instantiations introduce inflecting margins of difference, is not quite so distant from Deleuze (or, for that matter, from Lacan) as Zizek alleges him to be. Similarly, in at least one recent context, Badiou, emphasizing that an event's value resides in its sustained implicationeffects rather than its evanescent disruptiveness,14 appears not to shy away from referring to repetition: "Beginnings can . . . be measured by the rebeginnings they authorize."15 What's more, a new online article by him is entitled "Philosophy as Creative Repetition."16 Of course, the Deleuze to whom Zizek appeals, supposedly against Badiou, is the author of the 1968 book Difference and Repetition, a book in which the two terms of its title are made to interpenetrate each other in various fashions. Most notably, Deleuze maintains that repetitions are generative of creative differences, rather than being static iterations of sameness, namely, lifeless, mechanical recurrences of unaltered Ones. 17 However, prior to Deleuze, Lacan articulates propositions according to which repetition and difference, instead of functioning as two antago­ nistic poles of a mutually exclusive opposition, converge and overlap in interesting and important ways (hence Lacan 's publicly proclaimed enthusiasm for Deleuze's Difference and Repetition when it appeared in print—albeit an enthusiasm proclaimed with the caveat that Deleuze, through this work, is helping to disseminate the already established teachings of Vmaître absolu).18 To make an incredibly long story incredibly short, one could say that, for Lacan as for Deleuze, repetitions engender differences.19 Lacan repeatedly insists that repetition qua flawless re-instantiation of One-andthe-Same never actually occurs: "In its essence repetition as repetition of the symbolic sameness is impossible."20 Following Bruce Fink's reading of the notion of repetition in Lacanian theory, one could even argue that the sole possible sense of repetition is "repetition of the symbolic sameness" 21 —and, therefore, that Lacan is claiming repetition strictly speaking to be an impossibility. As Fink suggests, the idea of repetition being nonexistent in the non-Symbolic Real is already expressed in Heraclitus's famous declaration according to which one can never step into the same river twice.22 However, although elements of the symbolic order (seem to) make repetition possible—the reusable marks and traits of this order (first and foremost, the elements of language) produce the sense, through their repeated use, of there being a sameness or unity re-instantiated through recurrent employments of the same signiflers— they simultaneously, in their functioning at the level of diachronic de­ ployment (i.e., use in time), make repetition impossible. Repetition is not only impossible in the (material) Real—it's impossible at the level of the register of the (linguistic) Symbolic too. Apart from both the dynam-

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ics of phenomenological alteration over the course of ontogenetically unfolding experience as well as the shifting contexts surrounding each instance of iteration, a basic structural feature of symbolically mediated reiteration thwarts the recurrence of a given Symbolic constituent being a perfect, unmodified repetition of previous iterations of this constitu­ ent. Every iterated occurrence of a particular mark or trait (S, a signi­ fier) generates, at a minimum, a difference between each of its unique instances of iteration (S p S2, S 3 . . .). 23 In conjunction with Lacan 's various scattered discussions of his con­ cept of the "unary trait" {le trait unaire)—he first introduces this concept, drawn from a reading of Freud's 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in the eighth seminar—one finds an accompanying denial of the possibility of repetition as unaltered recurrence of One-and-the-Same. Lacan tends to define unary traits as iterable Symbolic (or symbolically translatable) features functioning as points of identificatory reference for the ego-ideals organizing the configuration of the (Imaginary) ego itself (for example, components of parental narratives about who or what the young subject-to-be is or ought to be). 24 As such, these traits are par­ tially responsible for conferring upon the ego a degree of coherence and integrity supporting a basic feeling of self-sameness over time, of the continuity of an enduring identity belonging to a "me." But, from Lacan 's perspective, this feeling is an illusory, epiphenomenal residue generated by a play of signifiers ultimately undermining rather than sup­ porting this sense of enduring "me-ness" that these same signifying struc­ tures generate. Lacan, in the ninth seminar, warns against seeing unary traits (qua signifier-like coordinates of identification) as unifying, syn­ thesizing agents establishing any variety of trans-temporal oneness (such as a selfsame, ego-level personal identity) .25 Similarly, in the nineteenth seminar, he maintains that "the unary trait has nothing to do with the 'There is the One' . . . the unary trait is that which marks repetition as such. Repetition does not found any 'All.' "26 The reason for this initially counterintuitive decoupling of Symbolic repetition (as repetition via the unary trait) from the founding of a One-All (i.e., unified sameness) al­ ready has been stated here: repetitions unavoidably and inevitably give rise to differences. Changes and transformations, however little or small, cannot be fended off even through clinging to identical insignias (for instance, proper names or personal pronouns) over time. And yet Lacan doesn't just assert that there is difference in repetition—he correlatively claims that there is repetition in difference (a claim easier to under­ stand in relation to psychoanalytic thought insofar as psychoanalysis is seen as tending to emphasize how select fragments of the past repeat­ edly return in various guises throughout what superficially appear to be

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utterly new and different circumstances in the individual's life history). With his one-liner "There is the One" ÇY a dVUn"),27 Lacan implies that select elements (i.e., certain Ones) recur repeatedly throughout the otherwise ever-differing diachronic-temporal flow of subjective ontogen­ esis. In short, for Lacanian theory, there is neither repetition-withoutdifference nor difference-without-repetition28 (whereas Badiou, by con­ trast, insists precisely on the possibility of difference-without-repetition in the form of éventai breaks with what was and is). What relevance does this detour through Lacanian psychoanalysis have as regards the politico-philosophical issues at stake between Badiou and Zizek? Although Zizek is right to observe that Badiou avoids using the term repetition to designate a reactivation of an event-subject-truth axis (instead calling this reactivation "resurrection"), perhaps, at least in part, due to unwarranted fears based on a misreading of this term's sig­ nificance in psychoanalytic discourse (as Zizek alleges), one could none­ theless argue that Badiou's reasons for refusing to identify a resurrec­ tion as a repetition run along quite similar lines to the trains of thought driving Lacan and Deleuze to deny the possibility of repetition as reinstantiation of One-and-the-Same. To resurrect a previously interrupted event-subject-truth sequence is to resume continuing the unfolding of an aleatory trajectory of enquiring and forcing, to take further steps along uncharted paths unfurling in new worlds (i.e., not to repeat in the sense of re-traversing a well-trodden path in the same old world as before). In inquiring further into why Badiouian resurrection is not repeti­ tion, one might be prompted to reevaluate Badiou's concepts of situation (from Being and Event) and world (from Logiques des mondes). In prior dis­ cussions here (primarily in chapter 1), the terms situation and world have been used, more often than not, as though they are roughly synonymous (just as, parallel to this implicit equivocation, state and transcendental regime have been handled as though they are interchangeable). Although Badiou himself doesn't appear explicitiy to clarify, in Logiques des mondes, how to position the concepts of situation and world with respect to one another, there is a hint about this in the 1998 text Briefings on Existence (a text which, according to Badiou, serves a bridging function between Being and Event and Logiques des mondes).29 Therein, he remarks that "ap­ pearing is nothing but the logic of a situation."30 So, based on his defi­ nition of a world as a place/space within which a particular logic and a certain order of appearances are inextricably intertwined, 31 it would seem that situation and world are indeed roughly synonymous (Badiou employs them as equivalent on at least a couple of occasions).32 More­ over, at one point in Logiques des mondes he speaks of "every situation of being—every 'world,' "33 thus further reinforcing the impression that the

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2006 elaboration of the "logics of worlds" is a more thorough exploration of the 1988 notion of situations and their respective states. However, what if, regardless of Badiou's own tendency to equivocate between situation and world, one proposes to distinguish between these two concept-terms by introducing a discrepancy between them such that one of them is larger and more encompassing in relation to the other? For instance, what if, by having world be the larger and more encom­ passing concept-term in relation to situation, one hypothesizes that there are multiple possible situations for any single given world? In that case, there could be different rates of transformation, multiple-speed tempo­ ral tracks, simultaneously running alongside each other within one par­ ticular situation: not only, as pointed out earlier (see chapter 1, sections 4 and 5), the two or more distributions of change-category statuses across the constellations of multiples constituting the situation in question, but, additionally, the different cadences of change linked to situations and worlds respectively. Or, alternatively, one could speculate that a plethora of worlds could and, indeed, does converge on each single given situation, that certain situations are overdetermined by multiple worlds. Badiou him­ self provides an indirect justification for supposing that this might be the case. At several points in Logiques des mondes (including in the closing paragraphs of this text), he defines human beings as those animals that can and do participate in numerous worlds.34 He declares that "we are open to the infinity of worlds."35 (Correlatively, Badiou claims in this con­ text that a human being is also offered numerous chances truly to live, to be seized by the idea of an event and thereby be transubstantiated into a subject.)36 Rather than simplistically construe Badiou's claim about hu­ manity's polymorphous participation in multiple worlds as positing this participation in the mode of a chronological one-at-a-time process (i.e., a linear sequence in which a human being is in one world at one time, another world at another time, etc., but not in two or more worlds at one and the same time), this assertion regarding the trans-world possibilities of human beings should be interpreted as proposing that such beings (as both persons and groups) dwell within multiple worlds simultaneously. Interpreting Badiou in this way opens up some interesting theoretical options as regards both the conceptualizations of repetition and resur­ rection as well as the overarching issue of theoretically delineating the cadence of change. To begin with, if a single given situation is overdetermined by the simultaneous convergence of multiple worlds operative across it, then a Badiouian resurrection can be reread as being, in certain situations, a Lacanian-Deleuzian repetition that makes a difference. More specifically,

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one of the worlds at work within a situation might be "old" cjua having been around as an enduring, constant backdrop for quite some time. In relation to this "old world," the reactivation of a previously terminated éventai truth-trajectory might be a repetition in the sense of a return or resurgence of what occurred before. However, in all likelihood, the en­ semble of multiple worlds intersecting in the present situation in which a truth-trajectory is reactivated is different than the ensemble of multiple worlds intersecting in the past situation in which this truth-trajectory was previously alive and then extinguished. Consequently, in the cur­ rent situation as a different multi-world nexus, the re-instantiation of an event-subject-truth axis, although a repetition relative to one or several of the worlds continuing to constitute part of a series of situations, has a chance to make a difference insofar as it very well might reverberate differently in relation to the other worlds intertwined with the current situation. Overall, depicting the situation-world connection in this way pro­ vides a more precise and specific explanation for why Badiou and Zizek are justified in their shared conviction that the statist big Other is, de­ spite masquerading as a monolithic apparatus of entrenched and in­ tegrated forces and factors, fundamentally delicate and vulnerable. Its own sprawling complexity—in Badiouian terms, the overdetermined intertwining of a teeming multitude of situations or worlds composing the components of a state's domain escapes the coding and controlling powers of any state system—makes it inevitable that internally generated bugs, conflicts, loopholes, and short circuits will be immanently gener­ ated within and between the very components of the statist Other (this being an aspect of what Derrida has in mind as regards the notion of "autoimmunity" disorders). These (potential) glitches woven into the situational-worldly fabric of any and every (partially) regulated status quo are the intra-systemic Achilles' heels, the structurally inherent sites of an exposed fragility incapable of being eliminated, to be theoretically discerned and practically exploited by the practitioner of a politics of minimal differences aiming to exercise a pre-act/pre-event temporal dis­ cipline of carefully measured patience. Moreover, this systemic complexity of the Other (thanks to which the Other is, in Lacan 's terms, constitutively "barred" qua never inter­ nally consistent) lends political interventions a margin of incalculability. This incalculability makes it such that even what one anticipates will be a futile repetitious gesture repeating a prior failed attempt at injecting novel alterations into a state of affairs might effectively turn out to be a repetition-with-a-difference if the situation-world ensemble within which said gesture is reiterated has shifted imperceptibly but importantly since

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the last failed attempt. More often than not, the sheer magnitude of the immense complexity of the situation-world ensembles within which actors are embedded vastly exceeds the assessing powers of those who are thus embedded. However, this overwhelming complexity need not and should not be an excuse for defeatist discouragement in the face of the prospect of confronting the edifice of what is (along the selfinhibiting lines of: "How can we deliberate and decide on courses of action given the incalculable number of possibilities and variables in­ volved? It's too much to tackle"). Rather, in line with the early Badiou's faith in the masses against the state and Zizek's Lacanian conviction that the big Other does not exist, the statist order's complexity (with which it threatens to overwhelm and subvert itself) ought to inspire deep-seated confidence that the margin of incalculability tied to one's political inter­ ventions has the potential to turn out in favor of those who gamble on system-transforming change. This confidence isn't just a fanciful story, a useful fiction for intervening subjects to tell themselves so as to avoid get­ ting dragged down into a cynical pessimism—this inspiring conviction is fully justified from a descriptive theoretical perspective. By contrast, those who manage to convince themselves that the order of the Other is here to stay, that the statist power of the present is firmly grounded and basically secure, are the ones clinging to a shaky arrangement with quiet desperation. Those who roll the dice betting on act/event-level trans­ formations are, contrary to senseless common sense and vulgar popular opinion, sober realists; today's self-declared "realists" (i.e., those banking on the indefinitely enduring continuity of current circumstances) are the ideologically intoxicated Utopian idealists enthralled by dreams of a nonexistent, unattainable stability. In 1946 Mao unflinchingly declares that, as he puts it with elegant succinctness, "all reactionaries are paper tigers. In appearance, the re­ actionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful."37 Departing from this declaration, he subsequently pleads for a distinction between "tactical" and "strategic" outlooks, for a simultaneous dual-vision political perspective on the part of those en­ gaged in struggling toward revolutionary change: the various short-term tactics mobilized from battle to battle require viewing, with deadly seri­ ousness, the foes fought against as "real tigers," while, at the same time, unshakable faith in the possibility of eventual victory is sustained by a long-term strategy predicated upon the belief in the ultimate weakness of the enemy as a "paper tiger."38 (However, not only might this victory take a lot longer to achieve than expected, but the lengthy road toward it promises to be paved with numerous setbacks and defeats, so that a Mao-

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ist might need to think in Beckett's terms à la "Try again. Fail again. Fail better.") These statements should not be allowed to fall away as verbal ca­ davers into the dusty domain of mere textbook-style historical records. But, taking into consideration the Italian sociologist Alessandro Russo's understanding of Maoism—Russo has a relationship with both Badiou and Lazarus—don't the preceding remarks misread Mao so as (inadvertently) to bury him a second time? Russo develops an interpreta­ tion of certain of Mao's speculations (purportedly to be glimpsed initially in the 1957 text "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," 39 but more obviously audible in remarks from the 1960s and 1970s, especially remarks in connection with the circumstances of the Cultural Revolution) about the future historical (mis)fortunes of class struggle that distinguishes the Maoist view of history from the more Hegelian and teleological prophecies of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist his­ torical/dialectical materialism. He argues that Mao, abandoning the faith of traditional Marxism-Leninism in the certainty of the triumph of com­ munism over capitalism, comes to flirt with a doctrine of "probable de­ feat," namely, a perspective according to which there's a high likelihood of the vanquishing of proletariat revolution by bourgeois reaction. 40 So, in light of Russo's construal of Maoism as distinct from MarxismLeninism, aren't references to Mao in association with anticipations of capitalism's inevitable demise woefully confused and inappropriate? The answer is "No"—and this for four reasons. First, as is evident above, Mao, prior to the mid-1950s, is far from pleading for a defeatist standpoint (even a defeatism of a probabilistic type) relative to the future prospects of the fight against capitalism; his earlier-quoted discussions of both tac­ tical and strategic assessments as well as the difference between real and paper tigers date from 1946, well before the ostensible initial hint about possible defeat in "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People." It's this Mao who is appealed to here. Second, related to the tactical-versus-strategic distinction, Russo neglects to consider at length a corresponding distinction between short-term and long-term defeats. That is to say, particularly considering Mao's reworking of historical dia­ lectics through his conception of contradiction (starting, most notably, in 1937's "On Contradiction," 41 a decisive text for the young Badiou of Théorie de la contradiction—not to mention for his teacher too, Louis Althusser), 42 it wouldn't ever be the case for him that any defeat would be so long-term as to be de facto decisive qua final (one need only recall in this context Mao's invocation of the Chinese fable about "The Fool­ ish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains"). 43 For Marxist dialectics in general, Mao's included, capitalism, no matter how vibrantly victorious it might appear to be at any given historical moment, never can end history

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by rendering itself indestructibly permanent and correlatively closing off the looming eventuality of being deposed by alternative sociopolitical competitors. Third—this follows from the second point—in the Maoist conception of the contradiction-driven dialectical-historical oscillations between victory and defeat, any (probable) defeat will give way to vic­ tory (and vice versa—although this is not to say that what an eventually victorious socialism will be "defeated" by is a resurgent, resurrected capi­ talist enemy). In "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," Mao clearly still endorses this view44—hence complicating matters for Russo's analysis insofar as it traces the emergence of Mao's doctrine of probable defeat to this specific essay. Fourth and finally, the passage from this 1957 text Russo cites to add support to his reading, a passage in which Mao avows that "the question of which will win out, socialism or capitalism, is still not really settled,"45 seems to indicate not so much that Mao truly believes, contra the traditional Marxist-Leninist view of future historical progress, in the probability of the revolutionary Left being defeated by the reactionary Right, but, rather, that he worries about the possible negative outcomes of believing too firmly in the inevi­ tability of socialism's victory. To be more explicit apropos this last point, what concerns the Mao of "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People" is the dangerous risk of complacency on the radical Left, a complacency which the Hegel-inspired teleological visions of Marxist-Leninist historical ma­ terialism easily might induce in some people. If the fundamental dialecti­ cal dynamics of history and the tensions inherently internal to capitalist socioeconomic systems guarantee the emergence of socialist and com­ munist societies at the end of history, why should revolutionaries feel energized by anxious zeal in the face of the particular battles and specific struggles in which they're engaged? Won't the invisible hand of history "do it for us" no matter what, come what may? Such relaxed optimism is what alarms Mao, prompting him to caution that, as it were, history might be undone by revolutionaries being too self-assured that it will turn out as it will. Arguably advocating a perspective strikingly akin to what is elaborated more recently by Jean-Pierre Dupuy (a contemporary thinker occasionally relied upon by Zizek)—according to this paradoxical per­ spective, certain future disasters or defeats can be avoided only by assum­ ing a fatalist stance and acting under the shadow of a thus-hypothesized unavoidable catastrophe 46 —Mao warns that a consequence of taking for granted the ultimate triumph of socialism (and even communism) as an already-settled historical matter could be that "the gravest mistakes will be made and the necessity of waging the struggle in the ideological field

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will be ignored." 47 Additionally, the later texts referred to by Russo in support of his contentions regarding the purportedly Maoist notion of probable defeat (in particular, Mao's 1962 "Speech at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee" 48 and the 1967 "Speech to the Alba­ nian Military Delegation") 49 actually lend further support to the alterna­ tive reading put forward here in which Mao is understood as advancing a Dupuy-style "catastrophism" (albeit, obviously, avant la lettre). This catastrophism points to an absolutely crucial problem directly relevant not only to Marxism-Leninism but also to the political theories of Badiou and Zizek (a problem to be explored in greater depth below): how to be confident without being overconfident (i.e., how to avoid the under-confidence evinced in different manners by cynicism, defeatism, opportunism, quietism, reformism, tailism, and the like without thereby succumbing to such afflictions as certain strains of utopianism and vari­ ants on the "infantile disorder" of "left-wing communism") .50 The difficult balancing act of steering a line between the numerous leftist and right­ ist deviations within Marxist, Leninist, and Maoist politics can be recast in these clear, straightforward terms (Mao himself suggests as much). 51 Still very much under the influence of Hegel and Mao (among others), the Badiou of Théorie du sujet, as already indicated earlier (in chapter 2, section 6), suggests precisely this insofar as he identifies "confidence" as constituting the very core of any ethics of political pursuits departing from Marxism.52 It remains to be seen not only how Badiou's metapolitics (and Zizek's unique brand of heterodox Marxism) contemplates the sort of confidence allegedly essential to leftist political practices, but how these contemplations might affect this same confidence.

§9 Bearing Truth- Matters of Choices Without Guarantees Betting on act/event-level transformations, as a gesture of gambling when the chips seem to be down supported by the conviction that the big Other isn't, so to speak, really so big after all, is a version of the ear­ lier mentioned pre-evental form of forcing (see chapter 1, section 5). Again, whereas Badiou restricts the procedure of forcing to being a postevental process—events first must mysteriously arise, and only thereafter are there subjects who can engage in procedures of forcing that aim to inscribe the implications of events into situations—this project here, in line with its interest in pondering the conditions of possibility for act/

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event-level c h a n g e (and this contra Badiou's prohibition of contemplat­ ing the p r e c o n d i t i o n s for events), believes t h a t it's b o t h valid a n d cru­ cial to conceive of pre-evental varieties of forcing. T h e exposition of the c o n c e p t of forcing offered in "Part VIH" of Being and Event focuses o n the temporal m o d e of the future anterior. (This focus o n the time-tense of the "will have b e e n " recurs elsewhere too, 1 including, in Peut-on penser la politique?, a d e p i c t i o n of political interventions as wagers, as bets or gambles, wagered o n the basis of a calculation regarding an incalculable future, a future t h a t j u s t m i g h t retroactively vindicate such calculated interventions.) 2 Temporality is i n d e e d a crucial c o m p o n e n t of t h e Badiouian c o n c e p t of forçage,3 with Badiou, a p r o p o s politics, insisting that "the future a n t e r i o r is the real political time." 4 T h e militant subject-of-anevent engaged in the faithful labor of forcing operates as if the p r e s e n t situation, with its c o r r e s p o n d i n g state a n d encyclopedia, were already completely reworked from the s t a n d p o i n t of the event's truth. In o t h e r words, such forcing subjects act u n d e r the assumption that it will have b e e n the case t h a t éventai truths, presently indiscernible a n d undecidable as to their veridicality in the here-and-now situation's encyclopedic knowledge-regime, eventually turn o u t to b e exhaustively verified as ve­ ridical. 5 Badiou explains: Every subject generates nominations. Empirically, this point is manifest. What is most explicitly attached to the proper names which designate a subjectivization is an arsenal of words which make up the deployed matrix of faithful marking-out. Think of "faith," "charity," "sacrifice," "salvation" (Saint Paul); or of "party," "revolution," "politics" (Lenin); or of "sets," "ordinals," "cardinals" (Cantor), and of everything which then articulates, stratifies and ramifies these terms. What is the exact function of these terms? Do they solely designate elements presented in the situation? They would then be redundant with regard to the estab­ lished language of the situation. Besides, one can distinguish an ideo­ logical enclosure from the generic procedure of a truth insofar as the terms of the former, via displacements devoid of any signification, do no more than substitute for those already declared appropriate by the situation. In contrast, the names used by a subject—who supports the local configuration of a generic truth—do not, in general, have a referent in the situation. Therefore, they do not double the established language. But then what use are they? These are words which do designate terms, but terms which "will have been" presented in a new situation: the one which results from the addition to the situation of a truth (an indiscern­ ible) of that situation.6

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H e continues: With the resources of the situation, with its multiples, its language, the subject generates names whose referent is in the future anterior: this is what supports belief. Such names "will have been" assigned a referent, or a signification, when the situation will have appeared in which the indiscernible—which is only represented (or included)—is finally pre­ sented as a truth in the first situation. 7 These delineations of forcing are foreshadowed three years earlier in a two-part article (entitled "Six propriétés de la vérité") whose lines of argu­ m e n t a t i o n clearly anticipate certain theses central to Being and Event. In this 1985 article Badiou speaks of "the excessive signifier of what comes to h a p p e n , " 8 namely, those n a m e s ( m e n t i o n e d in the passages from Being and Event q u o t e d immediately above) t h a t will have taken o n a recog­ nized reference/significance in the hypothesized new situation (with its altered encyclopedia) resulting from event-wrought alterations carried out by those subjects faithfully toiling o n behalf of their chosen éventai truth-cause. In this same two-part article, h e also links forcing to a n an­ ticipated future situation in which those strange signifier-traces (includ­ ing an event's n a m e as well as n o m i n a t i o n s of certain powerfully perti­ n e n t consequences flowing from this event) presently employed by the subject-of-an-event—both an event a n d its signifiers are i n d i s c e r n i b l e / u n d e c i d a b l e in the h e r e a n d now (and h e n c e n o t recognized as veridical by the status q u o situation's encyclopedic knowledge-regime)—become veridical q u a verified by a new situational encyclopedia (i.e., subsequently get assigned acknowledged referents a n d significations) .9 In short, as Badiou himself indicates, a subject-of-an-event employs the useful, effective fiction of a world-to-come. More precisely, such a subject, w h e n engaged in forcing, treats this world-to-come (i.e., the an­ ticipated new situation as transformed o n the basis of a given event a n d its truth [s] ) as if it were already h e r e in the present, as if the time of its future arrival is now. This "as if" serves as a lever or fulcrum for moving the n o t yet fully transformed world of today toward a n d into the un­ charted terrain of a new tomorrow. Badiou claims: We can always anticipate the idea of a completed generic truth. The generic being of a truth is never presented. A truth is uncompletable. But what we can know, on a formal level, is that a truth will always have taken place as a generic infinity. This allows the possible fictioning of the effects of such a truth having-taken-place. That is, die subject can

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make the hypothesis of a Universe where this truth, of which the subject is a local point, will have completed its generic totalization. I call the an­ ticipatory hypothesis of the generic being of a truth, a forcing. A forcing is the powerful fiction of a completed truth. Starting with such a fiction, I can force new bits of knowledge, without even verifying this knowledge.10 Part of what forcing involves is a confidence propped up by an invest­ ment (perhaps of an affective sort) in the "anticipatory hypothesis" of a novel situation on the horizon, a different monde-à-venir. (In his recent study of Badiou's philosophy, Fabien Tarby explicitly links the "it will have been true" mode of hypothesizing shared by all forms of forcing to confidence.) 11 Badiou maintains, in the material from Being and Event quoted above in the previous paragraph, that a signifier forcefully de­ ployed by a subject-of-an-event (i.e., a name or trace tied to an eventtruth trajectory) is "what supports belief." Hence, one of the values of forçage is its capacity, as a posited yet-to-come fiction anchoring confident faith in a specific conviction, to inspire courage in subjects, a courage that the Badiou of Théorie du sujet describes as enabling further aleatory steps into the dark unknown (as what isn't counted and coded by any ex­ istent encyclopedic knowledge-regime) of that which is in "excess" of the domain already covered by "law"12 (i.e., by what Badiou will come to call a state-regulated re/presentational situation or a transcendentally struc­ tured world). Hallward describes this Badiouian courage as "the cour­ age to wager on Pascal's model,"13 in other words, an affective fortitude enabling the subject-of-an-event to make choices whose calculability and outcomes aren't given in advance by the existent re/presentational order of the state-covered situation. In this spirit, the conclusion of Logiques des mondes closes with an enthusiastic affirmation of heroism 14 (with Badiou responding to those who, for whatever reasons, purse their lips with disapproving discomfort at his impassioned invocations of courageous militancy in the service of universal truths). 15 Although, in line with a certain philosophical tradi­ tionalism coloring his corpus, Badiou seemingly is not a thinker for whom emotions or feelings are very important—if anything, one might suspect that these forces would be relegated to the denigrated status of crude, vulgar psychological elements of an all-too-human animality to be broken with in and through éventai subjectification—affects are (as Lacan would phrase it) not without their place in his thought. As early as Théorie du sujet, Badiou appeals to specific affects as integrally involved in the dynam­ ics of true transformations. And, starting in his 1993 pamphlet on ethics, the post-1988 Badiou continues to affirm the value of certain emotional hues in the subjective sustenance of éventai truth-trajectories.

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One of the core tenets of Badiou's Ethics is the proposition that the fundamental ethical maxim of any and every "ethics of truths" (with "truth" defined in a Badiouian fashion as a post-evental production) is the injunction, bearing upon subjects-of-events, to "Keep going!", to "Continue!" along their aleatory paths of enquiring and forcing.16 What's more, as indicated earlier, walking these uncertainly situated paths re­ quires a measure of courage, a confidence (and, as per Théorie du sujet, a confidence in this confidence—or, as Badiou puts it in his Ethics, "being faithful to a fidelity')17 reinforced by the traces and names speculatively de­ ployed in connection with the anticipatory hypotheses hazarded by forc­ ing. However, there is an obvious question to ask here, a question Badiou himself poses in a chapter on Beckett in the Handbook of Inaesthetics: Where does the courage of effort come from? I think this is a very important question, because it is in general the question of knowing where the courage of holding to any procedure of truth comes from. The question is ultimately the following: Where does the courage of truth come from?18 On the same page in which he raises this query regarding the origin of subjective fortitude in the face of the uncertain unknowns unfurling dizzyingly beyond the closed, comfortable confines of the predictable statesecured situation, Badiou responds by stating that "the courage of the continuation of effort is drawn from words themselves."19 But, as seen, these aren't any old words—these are the signifiers eagerly and impa­ tiently heralding a new world to come, proudly and assertively announc­ ing, through the mouths of faithful subjects, a not-yet-present situation as though it were already present in the here and now. Elsewhere, in another piece on Beckett, Badiou knots together forcing, naming, and courage. He asserts that "to find the name of what happens demands an invention within language, a poetic forcing"20 (an assertion subsequently reiterated by him in conversation with Critchley) .21 In a sense, all processes of forc­ ing involve poetry qua the creation of new words, phrases, and ways of using language (although this creative activity, no matter how inventive and innovative it is, draws upon representational resources arising from the given circumstances) so as both to baptize a past event not generally recognized by the conventional linguistic-symbolic codes of one's situa­ tion as well as to announce a future situation-yet-to-come hypothesized and anticipated in the present. According to the more technical delinea­ tion of this in Being and Event, the post-evental labors of forcing carried out by militantly faithful subjects-of-events draw upon "excrescent terms" (i.e., represented but not presented terms) not secured at the metastruc-

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tural level by the state's "count of the count."22 These excrescent terms beyond the borders of the knowledge-regime of the state's encyclopedia of acknowledged "normal terms" (i.e., presented and represented terms as items of savoir) are reached for by forcing subjects as representations helping to discern and bring into the light of presented visibility the previously indiscernible and invisible voids dwelling within éventai sites. Through the process of forçage, such excrescent terms—Badiou refers to an "indiscernible excrescence" to designate those excrescent terms within a representational metastructure not governed by a statist count of the count forming an encyclopedia of normal terms as a "language of the situation" 23 —enable void terms to become new singular terms (i.e., presented but not represented terms). But, forcing doesn't stop here. These new singular terms, brought to light with the assistance of cer­ tain excrescent terms, 24 still have yet to be normalized through being assigned corresponding representations in the metastructural appara­ tuses of the state-of-the-situation; the prior, pre-evental encyclopedia of established, recognized knowledge has yet to be changed so as to account for what thus far has counted for nothing in its eyes. Forcing ultimately aims at compelling the transition to a new situation by making truth {vérité) pass into knowledge {savoir), that is to say, by "forcing" the creation of a new representational encyclopedia registering the newly presented existences of previously unregistered (i.e., void, invisible, and inexistent) multiplicities. Immediately after invoking the notion of "poetic forcing," Badiou speaks of the language that names "what happens" (i.e., the past event and its forced future-anterior, top-to-bottom transformation of the world) as a source generating courage.25 This tortured, "ill said" prose of subjectsof-events, a poorly situated and widely unrecognized prose torn out of select pages of the situational metastructure of representations and cre­ atively forged into something novel for the purposes of unlicensed forc­ ing, provides "the courage to continue." 26 So it would seem that the event of nomination comes first (a nomination that names both an appearedand-disappeared prior event as well as a hypothetical situation/world à venir thoroughly transformed by this named prior event and its conse­ quent implications), followed by the possibility of a subsequent subjec­ tive courage leaning on these names and what they anticipate.27 In Logiques des mondes, further evidence surfaces of Badiou tending (at least temporally) to prioritize names over affects in the process of forcing. Therein, he characterizes courage as a capacity to face "points."28 One of the conceptual coordinates added to Badiouian philosophy by this sequel to Being and Event is this concept of the point. In several con­ texts, Badiou, avowedly influenced in his youth by both Sartre (propo-

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nent of a philosophy of freedom celebrating the powers of subjectivity as an autonomous negativity) and Althusser (advocate of a structuralist Marxism denigrating Sartrean-style subjectivity as an ideological illusion secreted by trans-individual sociohistorical mechanisms), confesses that one of his deepest-seated philosophical ambitions has always been and continues to be to succeed at combining these two seemingly antitheti­ cal influences as indispensable parts of a single philosophical orienta­ tion.29 According to Logiques des mondes, some worlds (although not all worlds), as onto-logical situations (i.e., domains/regions within which appearances appear in line with the governing framework of a particular transcendental regime), contain within themselves points qua nodes which, when confronted, force an either/or choice between mutually exclusive alternatives (some other worlds, designated as "atonal," lack points; these flat, grey reality-systems are devoid of immanently embed­ ded internal catalysts for choices not already covered by these same sys­ tems) .30 The concept of the point is one example of Badiou's efforts to think both senses of the term subject (i.e., as simultaneously Sartrean-style autonomous negativity and Althusserian-style structural subjection). In fact, Badiou explicitly mentions Sartre ("the theoretician of absolute lib­ erty") by name in the portion of Logiques des mondes dealing with points (asserting there that Sartre's plays involve a "theater of points" in their staging of scenarios in which "the infinite complexity of nuances" and "apparent chaos of the world" collapse into instances of pure one-or-theother choices) .31 In a manner akin to his description of éventai sites as rare intra-situational loci, Badiou proceeds to contrast the normal run of things in quotidian reality with those exceptional circumstances or occurrences irrupting in the form of intra-worldly points: "The world of ordinary action is not the world of Ideas, of 'yes or no,' of affirmations or of points. It is the variation of occasions, multiform impurity."32 A point functions so as to concentrate and condense this "multiform impurity" (i.e., the varying degrees of existence and plethora of appearances dis­ tributed across a world by its structuring transcendental regime) into two sole possibilities; it polarizes a worldly Many into a dualistic Two.33 As Badiou articulates it, "a point is essentially a binary dramatization of the nuances of appearance." 34 He goes on to add that "to decide is always to filter the infinite through the Two."35 Moreover, Badiou remarks that everyone is familiar with points from their life experiences in the form of inescapable decisions and pressing dilemmas36 (i.e., what the young Maoist Badiou straightforwardly describes as "simple, but fundamental, choices").37 A Badiouian point is not just a node of polarizing concentration/ condensation subsisting within a worldly network; the possibilities for

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either/or binary choices it harbors are possibilities irresolvable within the coordinates of the same worldly network within which it subsists. A point calls for a genuine decision in the strongest sense insofar as the act of choosing in the face of a confronted point cannot appeal automatically to any pre-given laws or rules in the already-there status quo situation of the world; habituated mechanical recurrence to established adjudicating procedures and principles fails to provide an authentic measure of the implications and stakes stretching beyond this node within structure, a node within structure where structure no longer exhaustively determines itself. Badiou maintains that subjects-of-events, in encountering and passing through points (i.e., in facing and making decisions when con­ fronted by these either/or forks in the, as it were, road to Damascus), con­ struct post-evental "bodies" of truth as concrete, materialized constructs through which timeless truths are made able to intervene directly within the temporal locales of worldly realities (with "body" being another con­ ceptual innovation of Logiques des mondes, an innovation foreshadowed by, for instance, earlier descriptions of proletariat organizations as historical bodies materially embodying the accumulated shared memories of class struggle [s]) 38 —"guarantee of connection between subjective time and eternity, the choice, if it is energetic and without condition, localizes the subject in the element of truth."39 In line with the general theme of the immanence of the eternal (as éventai truths) to time running throughout Logiques des mondes, Badiou ties together two related assertions here: (1) decisions taken with respect to points unfold as a diachronic-temporal se­ quence of particular choices in the world; and (2) the event-linked truthsseparate-from-knowledge informing and being formed by these decisions, decisions taken without advance coverage or guarantee by a préexistent worldly order, are timeless qua resistant to being situated with respect to the diachronic-temporal matrices of standard versions of historical time. Hence, points, as potential loci in which the out-of-historical-time eventsubject-truth axis confronts the chrono-logic of the situated world and its history, conjoin the eternal and the temporal. But what is a Badiouian body, and how is this concept connected to that of the point? In the "Dictionary of Concepts" at the back of Logiques des mondes, Badiou defines a body in his sense as a "multiple-being that, under con­ dition of an event, carries a subjective formalism and hence makes this subjective formalism appear in a world"40 (with "subjective formalism" being defined as "the different combinations by which a body enters into a relation with a present"). 41 That is to say, a Badiouian body (as concep­ tualized in "Book VII" of Logiques des mondes, entitled "What Is a Body?") is an "agent" operating within a world on behalf of an éventai truth. 42 If a Badiouian subject is a finite, local instance of an infinite; non-local

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truth,43 then a body is that which concretely materializes within the world the post-evental subject-truth trajectory bisecting this same world. A body bears this trajectory and deploys it in contact with worldly situations. 44 Badiou describes the body as the "materiality of a subject of truth." 45 Obviously, this is a definition of "body" that has no necessary relation to the common meaning of this word (although Badiou might allow that the physical bodies of people, insofar as they give themselves over to ap­ propriation by more-than-physical event-subject-truth sequences, can be transubstantiated from bodies as mere organic entities to bodies as mate­ rial bearers of trans-world truths made immanent to worlds). As outlined previously (in chapter 1, section 1), Logiques des mondes stipulates that, relative to a given world in which assigned degrees of exis­ tence (running from the inexistent as an invisible absence of appearing in a world to the maximally existent as the most intensely visible appear­ ing in a world) are distributed in a certain fashion by that world's tran­ scendental regime, an event revolutionarily renders that which was invis­ ibly inexistent before its happening brilliantly visible as the most palpably existent worldly constituent in the wake of its post-evental aftermath.46 In this vein, Badiou claims that "the elements of a body. . . are those whose identity with the becoming existent of the inexistent is measured by the intensity of their own existence."47 He then states that "a post-evental body is composed of all the elements of a site that invest the totality of their existence in their identity with the trace of the event,"48 adding that "if one employs a military metaphor for it: the body is the ensemble of everything mobilized by the trace of the event."49 (Moreover, in an April 2006 radio interview given to mark the publication of Logiques des mondes, Badiou speaks of parties as political bodies, arguing that there is a con­ temporary crisis affecting these bodies' capacities for action and, hence, demonstrating the need for a new, yet-to-be-specified form of political organization.) 50 A few pages later, Badiou elaborates further: A body, in its totality, is that which gathers the terms of a site maximally engaged in a sort of ontological allegiance to the new appearing of an inexistent which makes a trace of the event. That which is tapped and mobilized by the post-evental sublimation of the inexistent is a body. Its coherence is that of the internal compatibility of its elements, guaran­ teed by their shared ideal subordination to the primordial trace. But the efficacy of a body, oriented toward the consequences (and therefore toward the subjective formalism, which is the art of consequences as the constitution of a new present), plays itself out locally, point by point. The test of a body is always that of an alternative. A point is that which returns the constituents of a body to the challenge of Two.51

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Badiou proceeds to mention what he terms the "organs" of such a body, these being the sub-component parts of a subject-bearing body fash­ ioned so as to address specific challenging problems raised by particular points encountered along the way of a truth-trajectory. Organs are "the immanent synthesis of the regional efficacy of a body."52 One could say that a Badiouian body evolves, sprouting new organs and becoming en­ dowed with greater virulent vitality, through aleatory collisions with vari­ ous points cropping up along its path 53 (as the cliché saying goes, that which doesn't kill it only makes it stronger) : "The efficacy of the subjec­ tive becoming of a body is . . . a tributary of the points of the world that it encounters." 54 What does this detour through the interconnected concepts of points and bodies (as formulated in Logiques des mondes) have to do with the prior guiding thread of discussion, namely, the apparent prioritiza­ tion of signifiers over affects in Badiou's accounts of forcing? The an­ swer resides in "Section 2" of "Book VII" of Logiques des mondes, a section simply entitied "Lacan." Therein, Badiou alleges that the Lacanian no­ tion of corporeality is one according to which the body is ultimately just "the receptacle for the struck blow of the Other" 55 (i.e., the bodily being of the individual is an existence overwritten by the signifiers of the sym­ bolic order). Affect, according to Badiou's version of Lacan 's perspec­ tive on these matters, is therefore nothing more than a quasi-corporeal registration of "blows" coming from the big Other, an embodied effect of the impressions made on corporeal materiality by signifying beings:56 "The body is subordinated to the signifier. On this account, it is for the subject exposition to the Other; there is no action of the body, but only its investment by structure, and the sign of this investment is affect."57 The Badiouian reading of the Lacanian body obviously brings the latter conception of the corporeal into line with treating the body as a concrete bearer of and material support for an event-subject-truth configuration. Badiou clearly acknowledges this thus-established link with Lacan: "We are able to grant to Lacan that the body is the place of the Other, since for us it is nothing but the éventai becoming-Other of the site which com­ mands the possibility of a body of truth." 58 On the next page, he expands upon this link with Lacan: There is the effect of truth only through incorporation. To what? To the new body that the struck blow of the trace electrifies. If... it is precisely through its affect that the human animal recognizes that he partici­ pates, as an incorporated body in some subject of truth, one will say, like Lacan, that "it is as incorporated that structure produces affect" . . . I interconnect without hesitation with Lacan 's construction, which in­ corporates the natural body as a stigmata of the Other.59

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Succinctly stated, Badiou, ventriloquizing t h r o u g h Lacan, posits t h a t names (as signifier-like "traces" emitted by the alterity of events) p r e c e d e affects (as tangible "electrifications" of these éventai traces effectuated t h r o u g h such marks being registered a n d assimilated by subject-bearing bodies); in short, the latter (i.e., affects) are the subsequent effects of t h e former (i.e., signifiers). R e t u r n i n g to t h e example of courage, an affect crucial to t h e strong convictions a n d convinced confidence essential to the subjective labor of forcing, t h e implication h e r e would b e that t h e courage of post-evental subjectivity comes from elsewhere, m o r e specifi­ cally, from the signifier-like inscriptions attributable to events.

§10 Courage Before the Event: The Force of Affects And yet, despite a tendency to treat affects as aftereffects of event-related processes, Badiou, in his Ethics, d o e s n ' t exactly maintain that the n a m e s mobilized by the forcing p r o c e d u r e s e n g a g e d in by subjects-of-events generate affects ex nihilo (whether courage or any o t h e r affects), con­ j u r i n g into existence emotions a n d feelings that were utterly absent in the individual (for lack of a better term, a n d despite the ideological bag­ gage carried by this word) p r i o r to his or h e r transubstantiation into a subject. Instead, ethical perseverance is described t h e r e as h a r n e s s i n g the already-present affective resources of the h u m a n animal: The "technique" of consistency is singular in each case, depending on the "animal" traits of some-one. To the consistency of the subject that he is in part become, having been convoked [requis] and seized by a truth-process, this particular "some-one" will contribute his anguish and agitation, this other his tall stature and cool composure, this other his voracious taste for domination, and these others their melancholy, or timidity . . . All the material of human multiplicity can be fashioned, linked, by a "consistency"—while at the same time, of course, it opposes to this fashioning the worst kinds of inertia, and exposes the "some­ one" to the permanent temptation of giving up, of returning to the mere belonging to the "ordinary" situation, of erasing the effects of the not-known.1 Badiou adds: The place of ethics is indicated by die chronic conflict between two functions of the multiple material that makes up the whole being of a

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"some-one": on the one hand, its simple deployment, his belonging to the situation, or what we might call the principle of interest; on the other, consistency, the linking of the known by the not-known, or what we might call the subjective principle} In the first of these two quotations, Badiou describes affects (and, more generally, the varying capacities and dispositions of particular human animals) as préexistent aspects of persons and not as after-the-fact ef­ fects produced by animal individuality being transformed into a form of post-evental subjectivity with its supporting more-than-biological body. This already-there "material of human multiplicity" (including, as he in­ dicates, the emotions, feelings, and passions of pre-evental individuals) can be harnessed by "the consistency of the subject" (in the terms of Logiques des mondes, by the subjective formalism borne by an eventally charged body). However, as Badiou also observes, affective animality is a double-edged sword: although essential to the enduring coherence of event-subject-truth constellations, these volatile features of human be­ ings inherently entail the risk of betrayals of or reactions against such constellations (through a de-subjectifying return to non-evental "busi­ ness as usual" in the interests of psychological a n d / o r physiological com­ fort) . As Badiou puts it later in his Ethics, "the Immortal exists only in and by the mortal animal." 3 (Similarly, in Théorie du sujet, he asserts that there is always a body where there is a subject, but not vice versa.) 4 In other words, the characteristics of "the mortal animal" (such as the spectrum of this creature's affects) simultaneously shelter the twin potentials to both enable and disrupt éventai subjectification (i.e., the "Immortal"). Furthermore, subjects-of-events cannot come into effective existence without enabling affects buttressing their attachments to events and these events' respective truths. In Ethics, Badiou, following his distinction between "principles of interest" (i.e., affects as gluing individual human animals to known situations, these being the affective interests shaken up and disturbed by the lightning strike of an event) 5 and "subjective principles" (i.e., affects as reinforcing the positions of subjects within post-evental truth-trajectories) invoked in the second of the two block quotations above, refers to subjectively harnessed affects (i.e., subjective principles) as "disinterested interests"; when the feelings and passions of people are decoupled from animal-level self-concern and reorganized through the deployed discipline of a persevering fidelity to a post-evental truth-process, these affective forces are transubstantiated from principles of interest into subjective principles or disinterested interests.6 Badiou is well aware that his ethical reflections on the distinction between the all-too-human person and the "immortal" subject of truth

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sound, at least initially, quite similar to very traditional intellectualist in­ junctions to renounce the impure affects often preached by philosophy from Plato onward. But, through his conception of "affects of truth," he sees himself as rejecting this doctrine of renunciation: Let us call "renunciation" the belief that we must cut back on the pur­ suit of our interests—the pursuit which, outside truth, constitutes the whole of our multiple-being. Is there renunciation when a truth seizes me? Certainly not, since this seizure manifests itself by unequalled in­ tensities of existence. We can name them: in love, there is happiness; in science, there is joy (in Spinoza's sense: intellectual beatitude); in poli­ tics, there is enthusiasm; and in art, there is pleasure. These "affects of truth," at the same moment that they signal the entry of some-one into a subjective composition, render empty all considerations of renuncia­ tion. Experience amply demonstrates the point, more than amply.7 Corresponding to the four conditions generating the truths handled by philosophy (i.e., love, science, politics, and art), Badiou here enumer­ ates four affects: happiness (corresponding to love), joy (correspond­ ing to science), enthusiasm (corresponding to politics), and pleasure (corresponding to art). In relation to these four conditions, the four affects of truth arguably function as both catalysts and by-products at the same time, carrying subjects along in amorous, scientific, political, and artistic truth-procedures as well as being generated in and through these same truth-procedures. Perhaps such affects signal the establish­ ment of a self-reinforcing virtuous circle, a positive feedback-loop, for the subjects of these truth-procedures (for example, enthusiasm draws a political subject further into a more committed engagement with the procedures of a genuine politics, and this further engagement generates further commitment-enhancing enthusiasm). In "Book I" of Logiques des mondes, Badiou, describing specific af­ fects as "local anthropological signs" of "new intra-worldly relations" ushered into existence through subjective fidelities to event-disclosed truths, reiterates these pairings of politics-enthusiasm, art-pleasure, lovehappiness, and science-joy.8 Elsewhere in this work, he lists four different affects that "signal the incorporation of a human animal into the subjec­ tive process of a truth": terror, anxiety, courage, and justice. 9 (It should be noted that, in 1982, Badiou says of such affects that they aren't to be viewed as "states of consciousness," as "virtues," "capacities," a n d / o r "ex­ periences," but rather as "categories of the subject-effect," as "processes" qua ways of doing rather than feeling.) 10 And whereas happiness, joy, enthusiasm, and pleasure are affects tied to specific generic procedures

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of truth-production (i.e., love, science, politics, and art respectively), Badiou doesn't tie terror, anxiety, courage, and justice to particular types of truths in the same way, instead associating the latter four affects with any and every event-generated truth. That is to say, happiness, joy, enthu­ siasm, and pleasure reinforce amorous, scientific, political, and artistic truth-procedures respectively; terror, anxiety, courage, andjustice are in­ volved in the trajectory of every truth (be it amorous, scientific, political, or artistic). Despite this distinction between, as it were, procedure-specific versus procedure-general affects, these are all "affects of truth." (More­ over, this distinction means that Badiou doesn't portray each of the four generic truth-procedures as linked to one and only one corresponding affect; for example, love isn't ridiculously romanticized here as wrapped up with nothing but happiness, since, although it's not without happi­ ness, it also entails, as do all truth-procedures, terror, anxiety, courage, andjustice too.) And insofar as Badiou is willing to grant that these af­ fective phenomena play an indispensable part as enabling conditions facilitating processes unfolding along event-subject-truth lines,11 he is, as he indicates, far from preaching a standard philosophical doctrine of renunciation (as per, for instance, an ethics of pure practical reason purportedly transcending the volatile phenomenal turbulence of human being). However, in both the Handbook of Inaesthetics as well as select por­ tions of Logiques des mondes, there are subtle but noticeable indications that Badiou feels less than completely comfortable with the topic of affect despite his above-summarized concessions regarding the crucial contri­ butions affects make to éventai phenomena. In the Handbook of Inaesthetics, he insists that a vanished event's residual traces can function as names (i.e., as signifying coordinates for post-evental labors of forcing) only if a decision is made to treat these traces as such.12 One must recall here that every Badiouian event, at least according to those versions of Badiou's theory of the event that this project seeks to develop further in fashions not entirely faithful to Badiou, involves, in fact, at least two events (see chapter 1, section 5) : eventx as a first happening (i.e., an initial event ap­ pearing and disappearing) followed, after the fact, by event2 as a second happening (i.e., a subsequent event in which it is decided that the past first happening is, in hindsight, to be recognized and baptized as an event per se). Additionally, Badiou repeatedly describes event-truth ensembles as "undecidable" or "indiscernible" in relation to the established order of what is acknowledged as existing.13 More specifically apropos the present discussion, his account of events stipulates that nothing within existent states-of-situations or knowledge-encyclopedias legitimates and under­ writes the groundless decision without guarantee (as a second event in

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relation to a first event) to elevate a prior occurrence to an éventai status. In fact, insofar as an event involves constituents not counted as existing by the established order of things, there isn't even anything to be decided upon to begin with from the perspective of a state-of-the-situation and/or the transcendental regime of a world. But for those affected in such a way as to feel themselves interpellated from beyond the ordinary reality of their worldly situation by a transpired X, this X and its traces form, in the terminology of Logiques des mondes, points for which yes-or-no deci­ sions are called: is this X an event? If the answer is "yes," is this or that given trace to be treated as intimately connected with this event? Such yes-or-no questions cannot be answered through an appeal to alreadythere situational/worldly frameworks of discernment and classification as means of knowing.14 Unlicensed answers are the sole option here in the absence of any licensed means of understanding and deciding. The Handbook of Inaesthetics speaks of a decision to appropriate traces as names (a decision following closely on the heels of event2 as itself a self-legitimating decision to recognize eventj as an event per se). And Logiques des mondes speaks of such decisions, decisions made in re­ sponse to intra-worldly points, as "without condition." 15 As seen, some of these conditions that point-prompted decisions are "without" have to do with onto-logical structures—in particular, the extant languages and epistemologies of given situations or worlds as conditioning decisions with regard to points (i.e., points that, if decided upon in certain ways, become events and their respective associated signifier-traces). Decisions to treat a past happening as an event and to identify specific traces of said happening as signifiers of this event are not and cannot be condi­ tioned by a state-of-the-situation or the transcendental regime of a world because, in relation to the specificity of the very material at stake in such decisions (as per Being and Event, this material being a combination of singular and void terms—see chapter 1, section 4), these states/regimes offer neither recognition nor rules. (As Monique David-Ménard clari­ fies, there are, in fact, two intermingled varieties of indeterminacy and undecidability at play in the Badiouian account of the event: that pertain­ ing to the event itself [eventj with respect to its surrounding situation/ world, plus that pertaining to the decision to identify this past happening as an event [event2] .) 16 However, an interesting question to raise here is: according to Badiou, are affects (especially as already-there features of the pre-evental human animal) among the conditions from which these decisions-without-condition subtract themselves? Near the end of the seventh and final book of Logiques des mondes, Badiou enumerates five factors necessary for the genesis of a subjecti­ fied post-evental body arising in the wake of an event, a body willing and

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able to confront the salient but thorny forks of various pressing points. In the absence of such a body, an X that could have been an event (with "event" defined in Logiques des mondes as a maximally existent singularity whose ensuing situational/worldly consequences are maximal as well— see chapter 1, section 1) fails actually to become an event given that there is no material support (i.e., body) to bring to bear upon the ex­ istent situation/world the potentially maximal consequences of this ap­ peared and disappeared X. Eventai openings do not necessarily gener­ ate bodies; these openings can be "without consequence." 17 A world in which the genesis of a truth-bearing body is possible must not be atonal, stable, inconsequent, inactive, or inorganic. 18 In other words, there are five conditions of possibility for a body coming to be in a world: (1) the transcendental regime of the world must allow for and create the exis­ tence of points 19 (i.e., tonality); (2) there must have been an event in the world20 (i.e., instability); (3) there must be a sufficient number of elements appropriated by an event and its site for the formation of a co­ herent body capable of post-even tally sustaining the implications of the event21 (i.e., consequentiality); (4) there must be a sufficient number of elements within each constituted body for the efficacious treatment of the post-evental points that surface in connection with the event22 (i.e., activity); and (5) each constituted body must contain appropriate "or­ gans" for engagement with the post-evental points it encounters 23 (i.e., organicity). In light of the query posed at the end of the previous para­ graph, what strikes the eye here is the absence of any explicit reference whatsoever to affects (à la the "affects of truth" spoken of in Ethics, among other places). One might argue that concepts of affectivity are implicit in Badiou's five listed conditions of possibility for the genesis of a subjectified postevental body. In "Section 2" of "Book VII" of Logiques des mondes (the section entitled "Lacan" glossed previously), doesn't Badiou explicitly address the topic of affect via a reading of the position of corporeality in Lacanian theory? Yes—but, as seen, he indicates there that affects are after-the-fact phenomena produced by (rather than preceding as préex­ istent) the prior impact of an event's alterity (as per Badiou's translation of Lacan 's Other into the éventai X alien to human being)—and this contrary to earlier indications in his Ethics to the effect that affects are préexistent enabling factors for the forging and perpetuation of a sub­ ject's forceful post-evental truth-pursuits. Hence, at least for Badiou circa 2006, it seems that affects are not to be considered already-there, preevental conditions for the auto-authorizing gestures erecting the scaf­ folding of event-subject-truth frameworks. They are, rather, subsequent effects generated exclusively in the aftermath of a past event.

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As with so much else in Badiou's thinking, the affects that come to be entangled in event-driven truth-trajectories are, more often than not, conceived of solely as post-evental. First there is event r Then, there is event2. Event2 is the decision to acknowledge eventj as an event strictly speaking. Once this has happened (i.e., following the second event of baptism in which the first event is christened an event per se), there are subsequent occurrences of decisions-without-condition (as described by Badiou in both the Handbook ofanaesthetics and Logiques des mondes) taken with regard to points at which traces present themselves, traces calling for decisions as to whether or not they are associated with the event in question. Those traces decided to be associated with the event thereby become names (i.e., signifier-like marks of the past event mobilized in the course of the éventai subject's post-evental labors of forcing). And, in many contexts, Badiou proposes that affects (especially those affects, like courage, fortifying the ethical consistency of persevering éventai subjec­ tivity) are conditioned, stirred into existence and thereafter nourished, by those post-evental traces-become-names fashioned as a result of un­ conditioned subjective decisions.24 However, in "Book IV" of Logiques des mondes (entitled "Theory of Points"), Badiou asserts (in line with a cluster of arguments advanced earlier here; see chapter 1, sections 4 and 5) that "the declaration of the atonality of a world cannot but be ideological."25 States-of-situations and transcendental regimes of worlds proclaim that their present is without points (i.e., atonal)—they attempt to mask the latent presence of intrasystemic nodes of volatile tension—so as to cultivate their appearance of possessing an enduring monolithic solidity invulnerable to disruption and subversion. As both Badiou and Zizek maintain, this appearance is generally just apparent; the statist big Other usually isn't nearly as "big" as it struggles to seem. In the face of this ideological masquerade, this motivated denial of the existence of situation/world-immanent nuclei of potential event-level change, Badiou encourages those confronting this alleged atonality to have the courage to affirm the existence of at least one point (contrary to the statist declaration of the, as it were, point-less nature of the status quo) within the world through which it is possible to become an "anonymous hero" 26 (i.e., a subject-of-an-event faithful to éventai truth). So perhaps this particular variety of courage could be described as the affective confidence or fortitude of pre-evental human beings, people (as opposed to post-evental more-than-human subjects) stuck in worlds ostensibly still awaiting the arrival of the "il y a" of an event, to risk treating coordinates of the current worldly situation as if these coordinates are points of éventai potentials—and to do so before the tangible promise of an event-level happening becomes visible.

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Zizek also takes up the Badiouian concept of the point. In his recent text "Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate," he argues that "the first task of the emancipatory politics is . . . to distinguish between 'false' and 'true' points, 'false' and 'true' choices."27 As just observed, Ba­ diou identifies one tactic of statist ideology as the gesture of representing contemporary circumstances as atonal (i.e., lacking points, point-less). Zizek supplements this by identifying another ideological tactic with the same end of preventing serious challenges to the established order of things from arising: disguising as genuine choices, as point-like "yes-orno" crossroads of decision, alternatives that offer no real alternative to reigning systems (Badiou and Zizek undoubtedly would concur that the "for us or against us" choices insisted upon by both Bush and bin Laden are perfect examples of false points). Whether by throwing a discourag­ ing wet blanket over the terrain of the present so as to cover and smother any immanent kernels of possible radical transformation of this same present (Badiou) or by creating misleading distractions that confuse and obscure the distinction between authentic points and their inauthentic semblances (Zizek), statist ideologies strive to forestall in advance the arrival of any destabilizing revolutionary changes, to nip the precondi­ tions of potentially momentous upheavals in the bud. Since this tactically nimble and savvy enemy wisely already begins its preemptive offensive during pre-evental time, the fight against it must occur within this time too. Waiting around for the saving grace of an event to fall out of the sky isn't always a promising option. In certain times, the only real option is to make efforts (in Badiou's own terms) to force an event, to precipitate the genesis of genuine change in a seemingly "premature" way. In his Ethics, Badiou, momentarily deviating from his penchant for casting the human animal in a somewhat unflattering light, is willing to grant that certain emotions and feelings forming part of this animal's makeup (i.e., aspects of the individual's pre-evental being) are able to play an important part in cementing in place the conviction and durabil­ ity of a subject-of-an-event. But, generally, Badiou tends to maintain that these "affects of truth" reinforcing post-evental processes come into ef­ fective operation only once decisions-without-condition have been made that create an event-subject-truth configuration. (Additionally, it ought to be observed that Badiou's uses of the concept-term affect, when exam­ ined across the full span of his writings, aren't consistently the same, with Badiou oscillating between, on the one hand, straightforwardly speak­ ing of affects as feeling-states, and, on the other hand, strangely treating them as non-phenomenal, de-psychologized "structures" of subjects [this latter notion begs the question of why he designates them with the word affect].) And yet, taking into consideration what was said in the immedi-

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ately prior paragraphs, are there not ample reasons for thinking through differently the status and role of pre-evental affects? More specifically, as regards those affects justifiably focused on by Badiou in discussions concerning the sorts of movements of change that interest him most, one could contend that, whether faced with ideological declarations of worldly atonality (Badiou) or ideological representations of false points as true ones (Zizek), what is required of those desiring transformations yielding political emancipations is courage and conviction before (and not merely after) éventai occurrences transpire. Logiques des mondes contains an appendix-like section entitled "En­ quiries, Comments, and Digressions." Therein, Badiou mentions the twovolume project of the "young philosopher" Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (the two volumes being Événement et répétition, with a foreword by Badiou, and Uaffect, both published in 2004) .28 He notes that Kacem's work, draw­ ing on Lacanian and Deleuzian concepts in the course of its engage­ ment with Badiouian philosophy, seeks to highlight "the importance of affect in the éventai constitution of a subject."29 So it might sound as though this endeavor here risks reduplicating the philosophical efforts of Kacem. However, despite some overlap with Kacem's labors at select intersecting points of agreement apropos Badiou's treatment of affects, there are certain key moves Kacem doesn't make—indeed, he refuses and rejects such moves—that are central to this present project. Before spelling out the crucial differences between this project and that pursued by Kacem, it would be appropriate briefly to take note of the compelling and valid propositions advanced by him with respect to Badiou. To begin with, Kacem rightly emphasizes the importance of the potent affects of a more-than-merely-sexual jouissance in any and every éventai phenomenon. He justifiably dismisses the interpretive restriction of the semantic scope of this Lacanian term to the domain of sexuality as too narrow, pleading instead for a "subtractive" (in Badiou's sense) un­ derstanding of this notion as an unconditional thrust manifested as the affects of truth associated with each of the four domains of subject-driven truth-production delineated by Badiou and already discussed here previ­ ously.30 Similarly, he insists that affects defy standard Lacanian or Badi­ ouian schémas of theoretical categorization.31 (For instance, with respect to Badiou's distinction between "democratic materialism" [positing that "there are only bodies and languages"] and the "materialist dialectic" [countering that "there are only bodies and languages, except that there are also truths"] as sketched in the opening pages of Logiques des mondes?2 Kacemian affects would constitute a fourth category irreducible to bod­ ies, languages, and/or truths.) Kacem defines affect as the intrusion oî jouissance into the realms

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of representation 33 (in Badiouian parlance, this would be to say simply that affective forces disrupt the state-of-the-situation). And he correlatively speaks of the jouissance of the event.34 (In an essay on the topic of structural change as addressed in the works of Lacan and Badiou, Oliver Feltham expresses skepticism about whether "Badiou's philosophy can account for the role ofjouissance in such change";35 dovetailing with this doubt, it should be observed that Kacem's notion of affective jouissance as sub tractive is nowhere to be found in Badiou's own texts.) In Événement et répétition, Kacem, referring to the title of Badiou's 1988 magnum opus, contends that "affect is the being of the event for the speaking ani­ mal."36 (Early on in the sequel text Laffect, he reiterates this contention 37 and, later in this same text, adds a clarifying reminder that these affects, lending a degree of ontological heft to evanescent events, are irruptive upsurges of a jouissance "beyond the sexual.") 38 For Kacem, "the event is the place of major affects" and it "has as its index affects."39 Minus an ap­ propriate accompanying affective charge, an event is doomed to vanish as an inconsequential transient transgression of the laws of ontology, of being qua being as what is (with Badiou defining the event as an "illegal" multiple whose property of functioning as a set that counts itself as one of its own elements violates the basic set-theoretic rules of l'être en tant qu'être; see chapter 1, section 4). Put differently, if an event fails to stir up a sufficient amount of energy in terms of affects, it will fail to leave last­ ing transformative marks on the world in which it suddenly flashes and then abrupdy vanishes. Additionally, Kacem claims that human beings alone enjoy the capacity to inscribe the affects of a more-than-sexual jouissance (as sub­ tracted from representational states-of-situations) into forms and struc­ tures permitting iterations and repetitions. 40 In other words, those struck by the momentary affective impact of a fleeting event are able to draw out and re-instantiate the affects thus aroused. Such a jouissance-fueled ex­ tenuation of events is what paves the way both for the linking of Badiou's first event (i.e., event^) to the second event of the first event's retroactive recognition by a subject-of-that-specific-event (i.e., event,) as well as for the struggle to bring the implications of éventai currents to bear on the "normality" of the status quo (insofar as the affect-sustained power of repetition keeps events alive so that they can continue to change subse­ quent situations). 41 Obviously, Badiou's conception of fidelity is at stake here. Kacem convincingly describes this faithfulness as a compulsive jouissance overwhelming the event-interpellated person for whom undergo­ ing submission to this experience is akin to the ordeal of falling in love. This subjective fidelity is certainly not a stance endorsed by the individual in a calm and reflective manner through cold cognitive deliberation. If

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an affective investment in an event and its associated elements truly has occurred, it is as though, at least according to Kacem, the subject-of-theevent has no choice but to remain faithfully committed to its chosen event-truth trajectory.42 Along these lines, the affects associated with fi­ delity create and reinforce varieties of heroism. 43 This project endorses all of the above-summarized facets of Kacem's handling of Badiou's philosophy. However, apart from two interrelated assertions made by Kacem that are quite dubious from a psychoanalytic perspective—he insists both that the affective involves a sort of "absolute presence" 44 and that affects are fundamentally honest and incapable of succumbing to repression 45 —there is, from this standpoint here, one major problem with his position: Kacem, concurring with Badiou, de­ nies the possibility of pre-evental prophecies able to anticipate the po­ tential arrivals of events.46 Coupled with this, his references to Badiou's four affects of truth seem to indicate that he accepts the characterization of these affective forces as strictly post-evental.47 Thus, the pre-evental is again problematically neglected and left shrouded in darkness—and this despite the fact that Kacem's previously mentioned theses about the uniquely human ability to entwine the affective with the representational indicate some sort of awareness of the need to examine philosophically the faculties of pre-evental human beings preceding the genesis of postevental subjectivity (with the former arguably having somehow to contain certain conditions for the possibility of the latter). Near the end of Événement et répétition, Kacem alludes to Badiou's discussion of the link between anxiety and courage in Théorie du sujet (more specifically, the idea of courage being the inverse or reverse side of anxiety) .48 In that 1982 text, Badiou characterizes courage as a puttingto-work of anxiety, with the latter depicted (using Lacan 's vocabulary) as an effect of the disruption of the Symbolic by the Real.49 (Kacem's definition of affect as the intrusion of more-than-merely-sexual jouissance into the realms of representation echoes this Badiouian depiction of anx­ iety.) Translated into the terminology of Badiou's later work—Logiques des mondes indeed speaks of "terror" and "anxiety" as the first two affects registering respectively the initial disturbance of an event and the facing up to the yes-or-no points connected with it, affects through which each subject-of-an-event necessarily must pass in the dynamics of éventai subjectification 50 —courage is the affective fortitude able to turn the anxietyinducing shock of an unexpected rupture (as an unsettling interruption of a state-of-the-situation or transcendental regime of a world) into a dé­ ployable program of sustained inquiring and forcing (i.e., an enduring event-subject-truth constellation). In the Badiouian fashion of pairing anxiety and courage, anxiety

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is associated with the instability of an event and courage with both the strength to endure this anxiety and the ability to respond to this upset­ ting affect in ways that entail faithfully tarrying with the éventai cause of anxiety (through the militant fidelity of post-evental subjective labors on behalf of the given event-cause). And yet, what about stable situations and atonal worlds as contexts unruffled by the buffeting blows of events? Badiou's cataloguing of affects arguably ignores another variety of anxi­ ety, one which palpably hangs in the air today: not the anxiety of éventai instability, but the anxiety of non-evental claustrophobia, the agitated, nervous feeling of being trapped in the stasis of a system that seems to be highly resistant to extreme and extensive modifications. Stable situ­ ations and atonal worlds generate a particular type of anxious negative affect different from that provoked by the upheavals of events. If courage should be linked to anxiety, then, if there is non-evental in addition to éventai anxiety, shouldn't another conception of courage, a non-evental one, be forged too? In a January 2007 piece entitled "The Contempo­ rary Figure of the Soldier in Politics and Poetry," Badiou asks, "Is there a place, in a disoriented world, for a new style of heroism?"51 A similarly structured question should be posed here: is there a place, in an appar­ ently established world, for a new kind of bravery? Théorie du sujet con­ tains a remark about courage that can be read as gesturing in this direc­ tion: "All courage returns to passing there where before it hadn't been foreseeable that anyone could find a passage."52 In situations and worlds where it appears that nothing on the order of the éventai is to be found (i.e., contexts seemingly devoid of passages), certain pre-evental human beings might nonetheless be brave enough to wager investing their faith in incredibly uncertain prospects for potential change that have yet actu­ ally to transpire. Sometimes this is the only source of a hope that sustains those who are neither pre-evental persons wholly entangled in the rela­ tional matrices of the status quo situation/world nor post-evental sub­ jects fully subtracted from such relational matrices. As is well known, starting in the seventh seminar, Lacan develops the notion of a state "between-two-deaths" (entre-deux-morts) ,53 Badiouian philosophy ought to be supplemented with a notion of a state "betweentwo-lives," namely, a space within which a human being struggles to ex­ ceed his or her status as an all-too-human individual (along with the entire surrounding environment connected with this identity) while not (at least not yet) being clearly identifiable as a proper subject vis-à-vis a distinct event-level happening. There must be something between what Badiou sharply and starkly contrasts as the living death of non-evental individuality with the immortal life of éventai subjectivity. In a 2006 lec­ ture on "The Truth Procedure in Politics," Badiou speaks of an "arith-

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metic war" between the Two of democratic materialism (i.e., bodies and languages) and the Three of the materialist dialectic (i.e., bodies and languages, plus truths). 54 But with, on the one hand, the bodies and lan­ guages of democratic materialism, and, on the other opposed hand, the additional excess of the trans-corporeal, trans-linguistic truths of the ma­ terialist dialectic, this opposition itself arguably constitutes a Badiouian Two restrictively allowing only for either non-evental corporeal-linguistic subjection or subjectivity as bound up with a more-than-corporeal, morethan-linguistic event and its respective truths. At the risk of igniting an­ other separate arithmetic war between the Two and the Three, this au­ thor would like to suggest the viability of a third materialist position, drawing upon the theoretical resources of psychoanalysis in particular (including those resources proffered by Freud, Lacan, Laplanche, Zizek, and Kacem, among others), focused on an X situated in-between demo­ cratic materialist life and the life of the materialist dialectic. Badiou seems to have no confidence in such a Third, avoiding any mention or acknowledgment of it. What is being called for here is a metapsychological investigation into the affective, libidinal, and identificatory features of the pre-evental human psyche with an eye to discerning what, within these features partly tied to what could be designated as a sort of "consti­ tution" or "nature," harbors the possibility for a readiness or responsive­ ness to the transformative effects of éventai interpellations (this would involve a Badiou-inspired reassessment of psychoanalytic metapsychology and its accompanying theory of subjectivity, a reassessment with real political stakes). Perhaps this third position should be labeled "transcen­ dental materialism," a materialism striving to account for how more-thancorporeal structures of subjectivity immanently surface out of the odd materiality of human corporeality (as a "corpo-Real" to be distinguished from the two bodies either of democratic materialism's bio-politics or Badiou's materialist dialectic) .55 As observed, Badiou, in some of his recent interventions, invokes the themes of war and the soldier, with military metaphors abounding throughout his corpus. Within this same metaphorical register, it's worth dwelling for a moment on the notion of the "military-industrial com­ plex." This phrase, made popular in American political discourse thanks to President Eisenhower's 1961 "Farewell Address to the Nation" (with his words of warning having proven to be powerfully prophetic), tends to connote the sense of a perverse reversal in the supposed proper order of things with respect to the fighting of wars. Instead of the defense estab­ lishment remaining strictly defensive (i.e., waging war solely in response to the provocation of external threats to the nation-state), a militaryindustrial complex is assumed actively to precipitate wars due to its insti-

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tutional and financial interests. When a defense establishment becomes a military-industrial complex, it ceases to be defensive, dishonestly remain­ ing so in name only. Apropos Badiou and the problem of the pre-evental, maybe what is required in contexts apparently lacking and resistant to possibly momentous changes is a militant theoretical collective—this would be the emancipatory inverted double of the figure of the oppres­ sive military-industrial complex—as a war-machine in search of its war. Rather than, as it were, defensively waiting for an extra-philosophical event to spark conflicts and contradictions shaking up the status quo, a pre-evental militant theoretical collective (as a set of philosophical in­ surgents instead of the court of a Platonic philosopher-king, although both of these figurai images reflect the wager of a faith in philosophy's political potentials) should aggressively go on the offensive, struggling to destabilize the seemingly stable through the minimal-yet-massive powers of thought. For this sort of work, one must, at a gut level, believe that true points exist in one's seemingly point-less pre-evental world and that what one selects as promising true points really are true. That is to say, one must have the confidence to disbelieve ideological depictions of the times, especially times tied to potential or actual transformations. For processes of pre-evental forcing, one must be brave enough to risk being wrong. One's struggle to force an event can fail in various ways, perhaps even catastrophically. There are no extant guarantees given in advance that one's world isn't atonal or that discerned choices are indeed the real ones to be made. One's gestures aimed at system-interrupting change might very well fall flat—or, much worse and more discouraging, be ap­ propriated by one's conservative adversaries, co-opted so as to become additional supports for the status quo. During a 1977 public lecture deliv­ ered on the occasion of his assumption of the chair of literary semiology at the Collège de France, Roland Barthes quotes Pasolini, a quotation worth reciting at this point: I believe that before action we must never in any case fear annexation by power and its culture. We must behave as if this dangerous eventual­ ity did not exist. . . But I also believe that afterward we must be able to realize how much we may have been used by power. And then, if our sincerity has been controlled or manipulated, I believe we must have the courage to abjure.56 This groundless bravery prior to acting is something other than the justi­ fied courage sustaining fidelity to a past event already registered as a de­ cisive break with the powers that be.

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Due to the inherent margin of incalculability necessarily obscuring from view the future repercussions and reverberations of interventions targeted at transformation, nothing promises absolutely that such interventions will succeed in bringing about anything other than more of the same business as usual. But, coupled with the theoretical legitimacy of presupposing that Badiouian states aren't as solid as they often appear to be and that Zizekian big Others actually are quite fragile and insubstantial virtualities, this same margin of incalculability, rather than spurring doubt or hopelessness, should be seen as cause for optimism. Although nobody knows for sure what will happen in each instance of each battle waged in wars (however hot or cold) for change, one thing is certain: from the patient perspective of philosophy, time never sides with those who bet on the smooth stasis of any purported "end of history."

Part 2

Slavoj Zizek: From Act to Event

3

The Cynic's Fetish: Zizek and the Dynamics of Belief

§11 What Do You Want Me to Be? The Alienated Subject Meets the Nonexistent Other One of the most obvious and oft-repeated objections to the general methodological procedure of Zizek is that he uncritically assumes the legitimacy of casually sliding back and forth between, on the one hand, Freudian-Lacanian metapsychology, and, on the other hand, analyses of cultural and political phenomena. According to this line of criticism (which, arguably, could just as easily be raised against Freud himself), whereas the former body of concepts is derived from and deals exclusively with the workings of the singular psyche, the latter calls for a separate constellation of ideas specifically custom-tailored to a handling of collec­ tive structures. Isn't it problematic to assume that approaches endemic to the intimacy of the psychoanalytic clinic easily can be exported to or su­ perimposed upon the public sphere of group existence?1 Implicit in this argument is the notion that an essential difference in kind strictly parti­ tions intra-subjective dynamics (i.e., the functioning of the individual mind) from inter-subjective ones (i.e., the functioning of groups within socio-symbolic orders). Zizek is therefore doubly guilty of ignoring this line of demarcation, of ostensibly committing a grotesque category error: not only is one of the hallmarks of Zizek's approach a use of psychoana­ lytic concepts to elucidate cultural entities (and vice versa), but, addi­ tionally, he refuses to acknowledge that anything is wrong with combin­ ing, among other intellectual genres, Lacanian and Marxist theoretical frameworks. Why doesn't he pay more attention to the gap that seem­ ingly separates the psychical from the social, the local from the global? Similarly, why does he treat libidinal economy and political economy as so easily interchangeable with one another? As Zizek correctiy points out, Lacan goes to great lengths to under­ mine, at least as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, the apparent clarity and firmness sometimes attributed to the distinction between individual and collective levels of human existence. For instance, the Lacanian con85

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cept of "extimacy" emphasizes that the innermost, intimate core of a per­ son's psychical being is, at root, an alien, foreign "thing."2 In Lacan's view, an interpretive progression through the successive layers of an analysand's Innenwelt terminates in the de-subjectifying encounter with an inert, un­ digested fragment of some sort of Umwelt, that is, an asubjective exterior­ ity lying at the very heart of the unconscious (this ultimate kernel being conceived of, by the earlier Lacan, as the "desire of the Other" encoded through the Symbolic, while the later Lacan refers to the primordial, trau­ matic Real of das Ding resisting all efforts at representational domestica­ tion) . From a Lacanian perspective, there is no such thing as strictly indi­ vidual psychology per se (although, at the same time, this isn't completely to discard distinctions between the micro/local and the macro/global entirely, dissolving the idiosyncratic individual into the collective group without remainder). The singular person scrutinized by psychoanalysis, in all the richness of his or her memories, identifications, fantasies, and patterns of comportment, is inherently intertwined with (while nonethe­ less still being different from) larger, enveloping matrices of mediation. That is to say, the individual is always, to a greater or lesser extent, transindividual (along the lines of, for instance, Lacan's phrase "in you more than you,"3 as well as Jean Laplanche's theme concerning the "primacy of the Other" in psychoanalysis).4 Similarly, just as the early Freud insists that analytic interpretation never deals with ideational materials as isolable, atomic units—for Freud, each particular node in the vast network of mental contents forming the layers of the psyche is itself a "complex" qua aggregate of multiple associative elements5—so too would Lacan maintain that each individual analysand is shaped by a bundle of numerous intersubjective relations (i.e., bonds with "little-o" others) and trans-subjective structures (i.e., ties to "big-O" Others). Likewise, isn't it the case that La­ can's recourse to figures from topology—the best example in the present discussion is the Klein bottle, a topological entity in which the continuous curvature of its surface encourages and yet simultaneously confounds at­ tempts to identify a distinct interior space6—is meant to emphasize the inadequacy of the crude inside-versus-outside dichotomy underpinning the primitive geometrical picture-thinking of those advocating the strict segregation of individual psychology and sociocultural analysis? Zizek employs these various aspects of Lacanian theory in order to justify himself when faced with charges that he sloppily blurs the bor­ ders between the singular and the social: "There is no primordial direct self-experience which is then, in a secondary move, 'reified' or objectivized in the working of the symbolic order. The subject himself emerges through such a displacement of his innermost self-experience onto the 'reified' symbolic order . . . there is no subject without the minimally 're-

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ified' symbolic institution."7 Zizek does more here than simply address the accusations leveled against him. He puts those making such accusa­ tions on the defensive by contending that not only is it acceptable to os­ cillate between analyses of particular psyches and collective institutions, but that any approach clinging to the belief (whether implicit or explicit) in the effective reality of a purely individual subjectivity, a mind unmediated by its surrounding environs, is stuck adhering to a facile, groundless myth. Additionally, Zizek also maintains that, in the contemporary latecapitalist world, the supposedly peculiar and personal pleasures of the individual, the intra-psychical realm of the libidinal economy, has been turned into an integral part of the public sphere: The stuff of politics is more and more directly the modes of jouissance, the distribution and regulation of jouissance. . . psychoanalysis can no longer maintain the old Freudian skeptical distance towards the publicpolitical domain: the gap between public and private is being progres­ sively abolished, jouissance is directly politicized.8 If the substance upon which psychoanalysis works is indeed, as Lacan labels it, "enjoying substance" (substance jouissante) ? then, according to Zizek, today's cultural, economic, political, and social conditions (condi­ tions in which private pleasure is now a matter of intense public interest) prevent both the advocates and critics of psychoanalysis from being able to claim credibly that the analyst's consulting room is a depoliticized island of intimacy unrelated to the surrounding networks of regulations established by a new "politics oî jouissance" forming an integral compo­ nent of current capitalism. Libidinal economies and political economies are no longer easily separable from each other (if they ever were to begin with). Incidentally, Zizek, on this occasion, approaches psychoanalysis as itself subject to history, as a historicized body of theories and practices in­ fluenced by sociocultural formations and political-economic configura­ tions. But, as will be explored here later, he elsewhere often portrays Lacanian metapsychology as enjoying a trans-historical validity impervious to pressures for significant modifications exerted by shifting historical conditions. Whether Zizek (or anyone else, for that matter) manages to approach a somewhat satisfactory solution to the recurrently debated is­ sue of the degree of historicity qua contextual specificity of psychoanal­ ysis is not a question that will be answered in what follows. However, in Zizek's eyes, the sword that slices through the barrier between the microcosm of the psyche and the macrocosm of the polis is double-edged. He repeatedly denies that Lacan, despite the audible structuralist inflections resonating throughout his teachings from the

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1950s, can be interpreted as some sort of psychoanalytic Durkheim or Lévi-Strauss. In other words, Zizek's reply to his critics doesn't consist in trumpeting the hegemony of the trans-subjective symbolic order while, at the same time, depicting the individuality of the psychical subject as an epiphenomenal residue of the transcendent reality of the big Other. Through highlighting the importance of Lacan 's proclamation that "the big Other does not exist," Zizek makes the paradoxical move of arguing, alongside his rejection of a stable distinction between subjectivity and sociality, that the big Other of the symbolic order only effectively exists (albeit in an illusory, ephemeral fashion) insofar as subjects treat it "as if" it possessed a stable, independent reality as an overarching system of collective mediation (see also chapter 2, section 6). The big Other is, in a manner of speaking, nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. An appropriate small-scale illustration here is a group of people, none of whom wants anything to do with the others, being brought together for a social function such as a party. None of the participants in the party has any desire to be there. In short, the urge or inclination to sustain the social group is nowhere to be found among any of the constituent ele­ ments of the group. And yet, the gathering happens (the party actually takes place and lasts for the specified period of time in spite of everyone's contrary desires). The sole requisite condition for this is that each per­ son believes that the other people there have a desire to engage in this social function. The very glue that holds the entire event together is the fact that each person in attendance attributes to or projects onto his or her respective others the desire to be there (a desire ostensibly absent in each and every person making this attribution or doing this projecting). A belief in the "desire of the Other" (in this case, the subjectively hypothesized/hypostatized "general will" of the collective of others) prompts subjects caught up in this dynamic to apply to themselves the felt pres­ sure of obligation necessary for their de facto acquiescence to the given social arrangement. A virtual, nonexistent desire, a spectral desire with enough power concretely to shape social reality, arises, in a bottom-up, emergent fashion, out of a network of attributions and projections. This desire doesn't exist within any of the particular nodes of the network, and yet nonetheless circulates throughout the network as its unifying force. The odd implication here is that, on this Lacanian-Zizekian ac­ count, banal human reality is an ex nihilo effect produced through the mutual interpellation of two voids wherein each (erroneously) posits the existence of the other. On one side, the "barred S" of subjectivity is con­ jured into being through a resistance generated by and against insertion into the symbolic order's chains of signifiers (i.e., the subject, although perpetually escaping confinement within determinate representations,

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is parasitically d e p e n d e n t u p o n the representational frameworks of the big O t h e r ) ; o n a n o t h e r side, the big Other, supposedly responsible for giving b i r t h to subjectivity, is itself an inexistent fiction or (in Kantian terms) a "transcendental illusion," a function reliant u p o n t h e m a n n e r s in which subjects actively yet unwittingly alienate themselves by reifying it. (Lacan signals this dimension of the grand Autre by "barring" it in ad­ dition to t h e subject.) 1 0 Reality is h e n c e sustained in the space of overlap between the b a r r e d subject a n d the b a r r e d Other. O n e is r e m i n d e d of Lacan's claim that an ideal image of t h e relation between subject a n d O t h e r is two interlocking tori, a unity h e l d together as a consistent whole insofar as each torus passes t h r o u g h the empty space at the c e n t e r of its c o m p l e m e n t a r y p a r t n e r (the core of each of these entities b e i n g utterly vacant). 1 1 T h e entirety of Zizek's corpus is g r o u n d e d o n this m o d e l . As a result, h e assumes that analyses of individuals a n d collectives c a n n o t exist i n d e p e n d e n t l y of each other; each pole of the subject-Other dyad retains a minimal d e g r e e of analyzable consistency t h r o u g h this two-way r a p p o r t (isolating o n e from the other results in the dissolution of b o t h ) . Any as­ sessment of his project, critical or otherwise, must k e e p this in m i n d . Focusing o n the "as if" d i m e n s i o n of the subject's relation to the nonexistent big O t h e r (i.e., the grand Autre that exists only t h r o u g h the positing activity of its subjects) permits Zizek to direct his attention toward a very specific enigma. This p r o b l e m motivates his particular m e t h o d of constantly j u x t a p o s i n g a n d j u m p i n g between intra-subjective a n d intersubjective dimensions: Is it "legitimate" to expand the use of the notions which were originally deployed for the treatment of individuals to collective entities, and to say, for instance, that religion is a "collective compulsive neurosis"? The focus of psychoanalysis is entirely different: the Social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs, is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual him- or herself has to relate, something which the individual him- or herself has to experience as an order which is minimally "reified," externalized. The problem, therefore, is not "how to jump from the individual to the social level"; the problem is: how should the decentered socio-symbolic order of institutionalized practices/beliefs be structured, if the subject is to retain his or her "sanity, " his or her "normal"functioning?'Which delusions should be de­ posited there so that individuals can remain sane? Take the proverbial egotist, cynically dismissing the public system of moral norms: as a rule, such a subject can function only if this system is "out there," publicly recognized—that is to say, in order to be a cynic in private, he has to presuppose the existence of naïve otiier(s) who "really believe."12

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Zizek explains his central theoretical concerns regarding an analysis of ideology in exactly the same m a n n e r elsewhere as well. 13 Casting the rela­ tion between the psychical a n d the social in this precise fashion provides h i m with an elegant reply to a critique of psychoanalysis frequently ar­ ticulated by the same people who protest that metapsychological theories are ill-suited for explaining cultural, e c o n o m i c , a n d political p h e n o m ­ ena. If the collective, socio-symbolic big O t h e r is what it is by virtue of the m o d e s t h r o u g h which its subjects engage with it "as if" it functions as a separate, a u t o n o m o u s o r d e r (i.e., a reified, t r a n s c e n d e n t system), t h e n ignoring the libidinal economy, as the d o m a i n of the drives a n d desires shaping subjectivity, is t a n t a m o u n t to neglecting the very fundaments of the sociopolitical e c o n o m y itself q u a institutionalized grand Autre. (At this level, Zizek's project can be seen as a continuation a n d refined de­ v e l o p m e n t b o t h of the Freudo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School a n d the "libidinal economy" theories prevalent in post-May '68 France.) J u s t as psychical interiority is, from a Lacanian perspective, shaped as a curva­ ture c o n t i n u o u s with the "outer space" of a trans-subjective matrix, so too, a c c o r d i n g to Zizek, m u s t this b r o a d e r exteriority b e theoretically viewed, in a m o m e n t of inverting reflection, as a space whose contours are d e t e r m i n e d by its constituent elements. T h e reciprocity of the partwhole relation between individual microcosm a n d collective macrocosm is absolute (for Zizek, there is "no interior without exterior" and, correlatively, "no exterior without interior"): 1 4 The standard "progressive" criticism of psychoanalysis . . . is that the psychoanalytic explanation of misery and psychic suffering through unconscious libidinal complexes, or even via a direct reference to the "death drive," renders the true causes of destructiveness invisible . . . Instead of the concrete analysis of external, actual social conditions . . . we are thus given the story of unresolved libidinal deadlocks; instead of the analysis of social conditions that lead to war, we are given the "death drive"; instead of the change of social relations, a solution is sought in the inner psychic change, in the "maturation" that should qualify us to accept social reality as it is. In this perspective, the very striving for social change is denounced as an expression of the unresolved Oedipus complex . . . Is not this notion of a rebel who, by way of his "irrational" resistance to social authority, acts out his unresolved psychic tensions ideology at its purest? However . . . such an externalization of the cause into "social conditions" is no less false, in so far as it enables the subject to avoid confronting the real of his or her desire. By means of this externalization of the cause, the subject is no longer engaged m what is happening to him; he entertains towards the trauma a simple external

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relationship: far from stirring up the unacknowledged kernel of his de­ sire, the traumatic event disturbs his balance from outside.15 The key question that Lacanian psychoanalysis enables to be both asked and answered with regard to sociality is thus: how must the subject con­ ceive of his or her surrounding collective milieu in order to accept con­ forming to its strictures?16 Before proceeding further, a brief cautionary note is in order. One might get the impression that the preceding delin­ eation of Zizek's Freudian-Lacanian approach to the subject-Other rap­ port entails the carelessly unqualified abandonment of all level distinc­ tions between, on the one hand, the microcosm of individuality, and, on the other hand, the sociocultural macrocosm. The claim being made is a little more modest and a little less controversial: specifically as far as psychoanalysis is concerned, such level distinctions are "suspended" or "bracketed" as largely irrelevant for analytic investigations and interpre­ tations (although these level distinctions are not denied as untenable or nonexistent outside of the psychoanalytic sphere—it's just that this isn't part of the explanatory jurisdiction of psychoanalysis proper). That is to say, analysis zeros in on the manner in which the externalized, objecti­ fied symbolic order appears, as a reified monolith, to a subject who must "agree" to be subjected to it in order to be the sort of subject that he or she is in relation to this order. As applied to a phenomenon such as ideology, Freudian-Lacanian theory doesn't concern itself directly and in the meth­ odological manners of the social sciences with the objects linked to fields such as history, politics, economics, sociology, and so on. Inquiries into ideology conducted by those disciplines generally attempt to address the trans-individual socio-symbolic system as such, whereas analysis contrib­ utes something different and extra, namely, an insight into how people construct "fantasies" about this system in which they find themselves in­ serted, fantasies enabling them to participate in it (whether sincerely or disingenuously).17 Both sides of the coin, so to speak, require delineation in order for a complete and robust theory of ideology to be articulated.

§12 Question Authority! The Conformist Logic of Cynical Distance Throughout the course of his entire intellectual itinerary, Zizek repeat­ edly underscores the importance of "cynical distance," an attitude of be­ mused or mocking disbelief, for the effective functioning of ideologies 1 (with Peter Sloterdijk's work on cynicism being one of the partial in-

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fluences behind this Zizekian motif).2 Subjects acquiesce to a system of rules, norms, and conventions (i.e., a big Other) only so long as they are somehow able to sustain a minimal sense of sane selfhood or individuality vis-à-vis conceiving of themselves as skeptics reluctantly going along with the run of things amidst a herd of simplistic, gullible believers, namely, amidst others who believe in their place as "subjects supposed to believe": "individuals transpose their belief on to the big Other (embodied in the collective), which therefore believes in their place—individuals remain sane qua individuals, maintaining the distance toward the 'big Other' of the officiai discourse." 3 In explaining "how ideology seems to work today," Zizek observes that "we perform our symbolic mandates with­ out assuming them and 'taking them seriously.' "4 In Zizek's depictions, the subject playing this cynical game of unconsciously pulling the wool over his or her eyes—this cynicism makes de facto deferential obedi­ ence to socio-symbolic authority psychically tolerable—adopts a perspec­ tive identical to that of the fetishist as described by Octave Mannoni (an analyst-student of Lacan) : "I know full well, but nonetheless . . ."5 Today's bourgeois commodity fetishists, imagining themselves to be enlightened yet jaded realistic pragmatists entering a hard-headed "post-ideological" age, forcefully ignore the fact that their position is itself wholly and com­ pletely suffused with ideology.6 Modern cynics are the most fervent of faithful believers,7 clinging to their favored fictions through a cunning series of projections and externalizations. (One should note that, for Zizek, belief isn't an inher­ ent, first-person psychological property or state of mind, but a floating, transitive function capable of multiple forms of displacement.) 8 The gap between what late-capitalist cynics say and what they actually do in terms of socially performed behavior indicates that "the modern subject explic­ itly claims not to believe, while in his unconscious (fantasy) he does so."9 Behind the stylized, fashionable stance of très chic postmodern disbelief in "The System" (or, in popular slang, "The Man") lurks modernity's authoritarian dictum as formulated by Kant in his 1784 essay "What Is Enlightenment?": "Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!"10 The current strategy of capitalist liberal-democratic ideology encourages individuals to be as dismissive as they desire precisely so that they find their conformity bearable as something depersonalized, dis­ avowed, and thereby held at arm's length. Nobody ever presents them­ selves as a conformist; everyone today is an anti-conformist, somehow identifiable as a special individual despite external appearances to the contrary. With all this anti-conformity in the air, it's truly amazing that the socioeconomic machinery of production manages to function even to the slightest degree.

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Zizek himself explicitly employs the psychoanalytic concept of fe­ tishism in his various explanations of the part belief plays in relation to ideology (an employment reinforced by the fact that Marx refers to "commodity fetishism" as a paradigmatic feature of capitalism,11 and that, additionally, Lacan credits Marx with having invented the analytic no­ tion of the symptom). 12 Although Freud limits his best-known discussion of fetishism to its role in sustaining a "disavowal" (Verleugnung)13 of the "reality" of castration—in his 1927 paper on the topic, the fetish (usually an unremarkable quotidian object invested, by the fetishist, with an ex­ traordinary quota of libidinal cathexis) is defined as a substitute for the missing maternal phallus 14 —the implications of this psychical defense mechanism potentially stretch far beyond matters of sexuality alone. The Freudian fetishist doesn't, stricdy speaking, repress the unpleasant idea being defended against; it isn't as though some painful piece of mental content is shunted away into the dark, inaccessible corners of the psyche. Instead, through the process of disavowal (i.e., the stubborn refusal to acknowledge a present state of affairs or piece of evidence), the fetishist succeeds in denying specific features arising within the do­ main of his or her perceptual or intellectual awareness. However, this particular defensive strategy is possible only through the simultaneous, parallel process of fetishization: for Freud, an evident absence in reality, an absence inadmissible for the fetishist (i.e., "castration" as displayed by female anatomy), is eclipsed through an extraneous entity (i.e., the fetish-object) being elevated to the same libidinal status as the original lack being denied (i.e., the nonexistent phallus of the mother). 15 Only through this fetishistic prosthesis, allowing for the avoidance of acknowl­ edging an irrefutable fact, is the fetishist able (unconsciously) to sustain his or her "as if" attitude; deprive the fetishist of the fetish, and disavowal as an effective defense (along with, perhaps, the fetishist's very sense of reality itself) simply collapses. Alongside his assertion that detached cynicism is the paradigmatic attitude of today's postmodern, late-capitalist subject, Zizek identifies fe­ tishism as a nearly universal "pathology" analogous to what Freud de­ scribes when speaking of "cultural neuroses." 16 Following Freud, Zizek posits a strict distinction between repression and the disavowal involved in fetishism as two separate defenses utilized by the psyche. In repression, the subject bars a traumatic memory or unpleasant ideational content from entering the restricted domain of its cognizance. The correlate of repression is the "symptom," namely, a conspicuous but seemingly non­ sensical feature of the person's patterns of thought a n d / o r behavioral routines that results from the repressed material exerting a distorting influence upon the subject's lived, experiential reality. Due to the cen-

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sorship of repression, the conscious person is largely unaware of the sig­ nificance and function of the symptom qua pathological return of the repressed. Fetishists, on the other hand, deliberately and knowingly "en­ joy their symptoms."17 Furthermore, Zizek claims, the fetishist, by clinging to some object endowed with an excessive, disproportionate significance, is able to ap­ pear to others not as a delusional pervert adrift upon the clouds of his or her peculiar fantasies, but rather as a hardened, pragmatic realist. The fe­ tishist is someone who can, whether through stoicism or sarcasm, tolerate the harshness and difficulty of daily existence: "fetishists are not dream­ ers lost in their private worlds, they are thoroughly 'realists,' able to ac­ cept the way things effectively are—since they have their fetish to which they can cling in order to cancel the full impact of reality."18 However, if the fetish-object is taken away from the fetishist, this cynical facade of pragmatic realism disintegrates, plunging the subject into depression, despair, or even psychosis (in other words, the fetishist, bereft of his or her fetish, undergoes what Lacan calls "subjective destitution"). 19 The upshot of all this is the proposal of a specific guideline for a hermeneutics of suspicion to be exercised with respect to the manifest, fashionable attitudes of cynical resignation and pessimistic realism prevalent among the denizens of today's capitalist poleis: "So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it is, one should always coun­ ter such claims with the question: OK, but where is the fetish that enables you to (pretend to) accept reality lthe way it is?1 "20 Naturally, Zizek reminds read­ ers that Marx himself already understood the essentially fetishistic nature of money and commodities. (Marx's descriptions of these entities make reference to "magic," "mystification," and "perversion," to the obfuscation of the actual conditions of material reality by pathological fantasies condensed into the form of objects circulating within the socioeconomic processes of exchange.) 21 The implication is hence that if the relatively small salaries and various little techno-gadget toys of today's late-capitalist subjects were to be taken away from them, their pretense to being real­ istically accepting of the status quo would be dropped immediately.22 In the Zizekian contemporary world, fetishism isn't an aberrant, deviant phenomenon but, instead, a virtually innate structural feature of social reality, a necessary coping technique for subjects subjected to the reign­ ing ideologies. Freud treats the whole range of psychical symptoms, including fe­ tishes, as "compromise formations," namely, as means of sustaining con­ flicts and contradictions whose tensions are embodied, through encoded

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encryptions, within the texture of the symptomatic manifestations them­ selves. The Freudian sexualized fetish-object both is and is not the mater­ nal phallus. The choice of a substitutive stand-in unavoidably testifies to the nonexistence of this eternally absent "thing" conjured up by infantile fantasy life, while, at the same time, protecting the fetishist from an open avowal of this fact (this interprétable duality being the "compromise"). Through his de-sexualized deployment of this Freudian concept, Zizek asserts that everyone requires some sort of "fetish" in order to adhere to the norms and rules of a consensus reality. In this context, the concept of the fetish refers to whatever makes reality bearable for the individual (just as, in the Lacanian generalization of Freud's notions of the Oedipal conflict and the castration complex, "phallus" refers to whatever the child identifies as the variable X possessed by the paternal figure which renders him desirable in the eyes of the maternal figure). The compro­ mise position of Zizekian ideological subjectivity amounts to a situation in which belief is disavowed in being attributed to others (i.e., subjects supposed to believe), while the symptomatic return of this rejected atti­ tude rears its head within the intra-subjective economy as the particular fetish giving the lie to the supposed cynicism of this same subject. Although one might have the distinct impression that these con­ cepts are meant to be specific to the historical conditions of late-capitalist societies, Zizek seemingly speaks of the dynamic enchaining together cynicism, fetishism, and the displacement of belief as an ahistorical neces­ sity, a universal feature of the human condition: "the phenomenon of the 'subject supposed to believe' is . . . universal and structurally necessary."23 He then proceeds to stipulate that, "by means of a fetish, the subject 'be­ lieves through the other.'" 24 So fetishism and the "subject supposed to believe" are apparently intrinsic to any and every human reality. At this level, Zizek alights upon an answer to the question as to why capitalism in particular appears to have become so triumphantly successful in ideolog­ ically marketing itself as the only tenable socioeconomic option around. As Zizek himself remarks, the contemporary political imagination has reached a point of debilitating closure; barring a cataclysmic breakdown prompted by an internal economic implosion or an externally imposed catastrophe (whether imposed by nature or "terror"), capitalism ap­ pears, in shared social fantasies, as the new "thousand-year Reich," as capable of enduring indefinitely in the absence of any contingent trau­ matic disruptions. 25 Predominant collective imaginings concerning con­ temporary politics thus terminate with the forced choice of "capitalism or nothing": either the positive socioeconomic program of capitalist, liberal democratic ideology, or the negative alternative of an anarchic, apocalyptic lack of any system whatsoever (rather than, for example, the

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choice between competing ideological visions such as capitalism versus communism). According to this pervasive mind-set, capitalism may very well be rotten, but it's the sole viable alternative going.26 One cannot help but hear echoes of this dilemma summed up in the title of Lacan 's nineteenth seminar: ". . . ou pire' (". . . or worse").27 One is similarly re­ minded of Winston Churchill's oft-quoted comments regarding democ­ racy (made during his November 11, 1947, speech to the House of Com­ mons) : "No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Zizek singles out money as the epitome of the capitalist fetishobject,28 a point that Marx makes repeatedly throughout the three vol­ umes of Capital. From Marx's perspective, money is nothing other than a particular material commodity that has been elevated into the stand-in for all other possible commodities, 29 serving as "the commodity par excellence"™ (One should note in passing that Lacan 's definition of sub­ limation as the movement whereby "an object is raised to the dignity of the Thing" 31 is strikingly akin to these Marxist formulas.) By empha­ sizing money's status as the paradigmatic fetish-object in conjunction with his psychoanalytic assertions about the ubiquitous nature of the fetish-phenomenon as a feature of bearable human reality, Zizek (in­ advertently) shows why capitalist ideology may indeed, at least for the time being, have decisively defeated its competing rivals. It seizes this victory through achieving what is, perhaps, the most perfect parasitic fusion thus far between, on the one hand, the logic of subjective desire and, on the other hand, the social production and circulation of goods. If, as Zizek sometimes flirts with claiming, the phenomenon of the fe­ tish is something invariantly necessary, then capitalism, by grounding its operative existence upon money as a universal fetish—currency func­ tions as a fetishistic "lowest common denominator," an empty, formal variable capable of substituting for the diverse content of other idiosyn­ cratic fetish-objects circulating throughout the marketplace's networks of exchange—succeeds in tapping into each and every subject's need to cling to some sort of "fetish" as an entity rendering reality tolerable. In fact, in capitalist economies, money repeatedly intervenes as the media­ tor between the subject and his or her fetish-objects. As Marx himself explains in both the Grundnsse and the second book of Capital, capitalist economic agents can even come to view the process of production as an annoying but indispensable means to the end of obtaining money; these agents are so bewitched by currency as the embodied epitome of the commodity fetish that labor and the manufacture of goods deceptively appear as secondary in relation to the now-primary goal of moneymak-

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ing.32 That is to say, Marx observes that money can become a fetish-object, an end in itself independent of its role in facilitating the exchange of all commodities. What's more, this is symptomatic of the fundamental trans­ formation identified by Marx as integral to the very genesis of capitalism proper (à la "the general formula for capital"), namely, the inverting shift wherein, instead of commodities being sold for money to be used for the purpose of purchasing other commodities (abbreviated as the circuit commodity-money-commodity [C-M-C] ), money, now as capital per se, is used to purchase commodities to be sold so as to generate more money as surplus-value added to the initial value of investments (abbreviated as the circuit money-commodity-money [M-C-M] ) .33 Taking all of this into consideration, Zizek offers a supplementary psychoanalytic inflection to Hegel's basic thesis, from the Philosophy of Right, that the most stable incarnation of "civil society" qua sphere of economic activity is the one in which the selfishness of particular subjects is (unconsciously) placed in the service of the larger collective whole.34 In the Zizekian account here, not only does capitalism strengthen itself by, through the cunning of its own reason, harnessing the brute power of individual self-interest as a means of sustaining its overarching eco­ nomic infrastructure (as per Hegel's argument)—it also advertises to everyone the possibility of procuring, through the universal medium of money, whatever precious little objects they require in order to acqui­ esce, whether happily or cynically, to the state of the status quo (and, as just noted, money itself can become the commodity fetish par excel­ lence). However, money is not enough; it's only part of the story. There are other factors also responsible for capitalism's especially effective ex­ ploitation of human desires.

§ 13 What Is to Be Done? The Urgent Task of Curing Commodity Fetishism By emphasizing the co-constitution of subject and Other, individual psyche and collective polis, Zizek extricates himself from one set of problems (i.e., criticisms concerning the validity ofjuxtaposing psychoanalytic and sociopolitical theories) only to create another set of daunting difficulties. If, as Zizek maintains, libidinal and political economies are inextricably intertwined, then what do Freudian-Lacanian theories of drive or desire add to an understanding of sociopolitical issues? This thorny question is quite possibly what propels Zizek into embracing Judeo-Christian theo­ logical motifs simultaneously alongside the intensification of his Marxist

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rhetoric. This religious t u r n of sorts occurs, in his texts, at a r o u n d a b o u t the same time as h e starts speaking of himself as a Marxist (sometimes Leninist) dialectical materialist. T h e utterly counterintuitive n a t u r e of this combination of Christianity a n d virulently atheistic Marxism can per­ haps be r e n d e r e d somewhat m o r e c o m p r e h e n s i b l e in light of Zizek's (unintentional) acknowledgment that psychoanalysis might i n d e e d show all too well that capitalism is supremely effective at co-opting h u m a n de­ sire as the vehicle for its own p e r p e t u a t i o n . As n o t e d , identifying m o n e y as the paradigmatic capitalist fetish-object, universalized in its empty for­ mality as a m e d i u m of exchange for every possible particular object-good, provides p a r t (but n o t all) of the explanation for capitalism's ideological success at the individual libidinal level. In o n e of his brief digressions c o n c e r n i n g Marx d u r i n g the six­ teenth seminar of 1968-69, Lacan alludes to the now-familiar Marxist ob­ servation that, especially in late-capitalism, use-value n o longer governs or even significantly influences the p r o d u c t i o n of goods: "Capitalism is precisely of use for something, a n d we s h o u l d n o t forget it. It's the things it makes that are of n o use . . . This is precisely its problem." 1 Expand­ ing u p o n this point, Zizek identifies capitalism's artificial fabrication of superfluous wants as linked to the Lacanian thesis c o n c e r n i n g the exis­ tence of a foundational, insatiable lack at the h e a r t of h u m a n desire: Therein resides the libidinal economy of the capitalist "consumption": in the production of objects which do not simply meet or satisfy an al­ ready given need, but create the need they claim to satisfy (the publicity usually operates in such a way that the consumer "becomes aware of de­ sires they were not even aware they possessed"), giving the ultimate twist to Marx's old claim that production creates the need for consumption, for the objects it produces. Which is why these objects are no longer . . . constrained to the "natural" series of oral object, anal object, voice, gaze, and phallus, but comprise the proliferating multitude of cultural sublimation, which, however, is strictly correlative to a certain lack—the excess of capitalist consumption always functions as the reaction to a fundamental lack.2 Elsewhere in the same book, Zizek speaks of "the transcendental illusion of desire" 3 a n d "the internal, i n h e r e n t obstacle constitutive of desire as such." 4 This is certainly a far cry from earlier Frankfurt School attempts to incorporate psychoanalysis into Marxism: whereas Marcuse, for example, treats the dysfunctionality of individual libidinal economies as, primarily, a gratuitous feature of capitalism à la a t e m p o r a r y a n d unnecessary set of particular socioeconomic arrangements, 5 Zizek, in his reliance u p o n

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Lacan, is tempted to claim that this dysfunctionality is something innate and ahistorical. 6 However, assessing this matter requires clarifying the Lacanian terms at play here. As a defense against being overwhelmed by an excessive amount of unbearable, de-subjectifying jouissance, the sub­ ject of desire settles into a dynamic governed by the perpetual absence of fulfillment; desire is the "encore" driven along by an eternal "ce n 'est pas ça" a deferral of consummation essentially tied to life's "little pleasures." In other words, according to the Lacanian conception of the libidinal economy, what makes the pleasures of desire tolerable for the subject is that they always appear as partial and incomplete against the backdrop of "something more" (i.e., Lacan's "surplus jouissance" as the ever-receding horizon of more enjoyment yet to come). 7 The flip side of this is that if the subject ever knowingly reached the point of absolute, complete, and full enjoyment, he or she would be traumatized and crushed. Zizek him­ self demonstrates that capitalist consumption works in this very fashion. As a purely quantitative entity, one can always have more money. The capitalist version of what Lacan identifies as fantasies concerning the "jouissance of the Other" is the tendency constantly to compare one's wealth to that of always-wealthier others. Similarly, the multiplication of super­ fluous consumer goods and the carefully planned technological obso­ lescence of various products guarantees that one will always have more things to acquire, that one will always be missing something or other— one's lack is perpetually reinstated in and by the big Other of the market­ place. From a Lacanian standpoint, part of capitalism's strength resides in its artful mimicry, at the level of a collective system supported by a constellation of mass-disseminated fantasies, of a logic operating at the level of the singular subject's psychical constitution itself. Marx's image of capitalism as a "vampire" is thus quite apt.8 It therefore shouldn't come as a surprise that Zizek's Christian turn coincides with the occurrence of some of his odd-sounding references to Leninist Marxism (nothing wards off vampires better than a crucifix)—paraphrasing the late Heidegger, "only a revolutionary god can save us now." Simply put, it would seem­ ingly take nothing less than the divine intervention of a miracle to defeat such a cunning and powerful adversary. Consequently, Zizek is frequently criticized for being a covert con­ servative hiding behind a false facade of fiery Marxist bluster. Judith But­ ler blames his Lacanianism for this, arguing that Lacan's ahistorical tran­ scendentalism (i.e., his portrayal of, for instance, symbolically "castrated" desire and the "bedrock of the Real" as timelessly invariant features of human libidinal nature) leads anyone accepting it pessimistically to de­ ride the prospects for sweeping social, cultural, and political changes. She charges Zizek with having fallen prey to Lacan's ostensibly prema-

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ture, unjustified treatment of transitory aspects of historically mediated phenomena as universal, necessary components of subjectivity. Butler proceeds to indicate that Zizek is rendered unable to imagine certain transformative possibilities foreclosed by the various hasty reifications for which Lacan is evidently responsible. 9 Likewise, Peter Dews main­ tains that Zizek's underlying philosophical convictions make embracing conservatism unavoidable, regardless of Zizek's impassioned protests to the contrary.10 Zizek appears to waver in response to such attacks. His earlier work advocates reading Lacan as a transcendental philosopher of sorts.11 How­ ever, by the end of the 1990s, he repudiates this position as untenable 12 (despite the fact that loaded terms such as transcendental and inherent continue to surface in his recent writings as well). One of the reasons he gives for this change of mind is that "transcendentalizing" Lacan is tantamount to, as he puts it, a "celebration of failure."13 That is to say, elevating aspects of the Lacanian theory of the libidinal economy to the status of universal a priori conditions affecting any and every possible human reality risks encouraging a resigned conservatism as a sense either that nothing really can be changed in any fundamentally "revolutionary" way or that there's no point in trying because people are condemned to lives of dissatisfaction anyway. (Along these lines, Zizek, in his compact book on the Iraq war, highlights how certain ways of invoking the psy­ choanalytic conception of the libidinal economy go hand in hand with sociopolitical quietism.) 14 The problem here is that Zizek concedes too much to critics such as Butler and, in so doing, inadvertently endorses an erroneous assump­ tion. The Lacanian motif of the human libidinal economy as being struc­ tured in response to an irreducible "lack," "failure," or "emptiness" by no means automatically entails inaction or cynicism apropos prospects concerning concrete sociopolitical changes. In fact, quite the opposite is the case: what Freud designates as "discontent in civilization" (and what Lacan traces back to a "discontent prior to civilization" qua something intrinsic to human desire) 15 is precisely one of the driving motors com­ pelling human beings perpetually to modify their status quo. One of the reasons why people don't remain passively riveted to an indefinitely enduring configuration of collective life is that a certain libidinal "restlessness" (perhaps capable of being described, in Lacanian parlance, as an insatiable thirst for a sociopolitically defined "surplus jouissance") always promises to agitate at least some people into striving toward the achievement of various alterations of their present circum­ stances. If desire didn't work this way, if total and complete satisfaction (qua full, absolute jouissance) were indeed capable of being achieved in

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either fantasy or reality, then the transformations of social, political, and economic structures would grind to a screeching halt at a certain point; there really would be an "end of history" in a vulgar Hegelian sense. One shouldn't be misled by the negative connotations and undertones of Lacan's language—the dysfunctionality of the libidinal economy is essen­ tial to the very existence and functionality of those transformative forces bringing themselves to bear upon the political economy Capitalism's in­ creasing effectiveness at silencing calls for change is due to its having hi­ jacked this insatiable restlessness by subliminatorily channeling it into a domain of ever-multiplying, superfluous consumer wants, by turning the lack in/of desire from a socially destabilizing factor into the very engine of market-mediated consumption (an insidious Aufhebung already fore­ seen by Hegel in 1821). Whether or not this manipulative trick can be reversed is an open question. In the first volume of Capital, Marx remarks that "commodities are in love with money."16 Taking into account Zizek's psychoanalytic theses on the necessity of fetishism in human reality, can the deeply entrenched love triangle between the fetishistic subject (i.e., what Zizek identifies as the only "sane" sort of subjectivity in late-capitalist conditions), his or her particular fetish-objects (i.e., specific commodi­ ties fixated upon by individuals), and money as the general medium of exchange for all possible fetish-objects (i.e., as the universal commodity fetish) be broken up? Or is this & folie à trois whose mutual symbiotic sta­ bility will continue to prove resistant against attempts at disruption? Lenin's fundamental materialist question, "What is to be done?" amounts to a basic, stubborn insistence on the primacy of concrete prac­ tice (albeit as steered by the right sort of organization based on a correct theoretical stance). However, in order to guide interventions effectively, it must acquire greater specificity, sharper contextual contours (as Lenin himself would insist). That is to say, each particular situation ought to en­ tail its own version of this question as the query steering coherent leftist action. In light of everything that has been said thus far, the problem that now must be addressed directly—the statement of this problem requires no theoretical technicalities, no intellectual bells and whistles, no ob­ scurantist jargon—is simply: how can people be cured of commodity fe­ tishism? All anti-capitalist modes of praxis should conduct themselves as responses to the challenge of this vexing difficulty. Discerning the means by which to bring about this cure is precisely what must be done today. The various schools of psychoanalysis generally agree that "perver­ sion" (under whose technical/clinical rubric fetishism would be situated) is especially hard to treat, given that most "perverts" don't see themselves as sufferers needing to be cured; they usually don't seek treatment volun­ tarily. The fetishist is fiercely reluctant to surrender the libidinal invest-

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ment in his or her fetish-object(s). In a 2002 text, Zizek cites a perfect political example of the capitalist commodity fetishist's resistance to any "cure" requiring the relinquishment of the attachment to these various fetishized objects: American president George W. Bush's refusal to ac­ cept international environmental agreements (stipulating, for instance, the curtailment of excessive energy usage by the United States) on the grounds that "the sacred American way of life" isn't something to be compromised upon or negotiated away.17 This "way of life" is nothing other than an existence based upon conspicuous consumption, upon the crass materialistic pursuit and accumulation, beyond any reasonable bounds, of mass-produced consumer goods—in other words, upon com­ modity fetishism. Failure to figure out how to wean people off of this ex­ orbitantly expensive teat—the "American lifestyle" is, in the long term, unsustainable for a variety of reasons, and the price of trying to sustain it promises to be quite high—might very well result in a slide into grandscale catastrophe (and not the sort of "good" catastrophe, the revolu­ tionary crisis of capitalism with emancipatory consequences, envisioned by traditional Marxism). The stakes are real.

§14 Waiting for a Miracle: Marx, Lacan, and Fantasies of the Future In both the fifteenth and sixteenth seminars, Lacan warns those who would practice a psychoanalytic hermeneutics of suspicion not always and automatically to go in search of deep, meaningful profundity—the truth is sometimes stupid.1 Later, in the twenty-third seminar, Lacan again underscores the superficial "stupidity" of psychoanalytic truths: "Analysis is . . . the answer to an enigma, and an answer, it must be said . . . which is especially stupid."2 Similarly, Zizek frequently cautions against the ten­ dency to discard old and established ideas in favor of chasing after the most fashionable avant-garde (pseudo-) concepts. (For instance, he de­ nounces much of contemporary theory for having abandoned the in­ sights of Descartes, Kant, the German idealists, Marx, and so on—that is to say, the "post" of postmodernism signals a premature rejection of legacies with continuing validity and relevance.) What about the cliché observation that communism cannot work because of its refusal to be "realistic" about human nature? More to the point apropos Zizek's combination of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis with Marxism, in the closing paragraphs of Civilization and Its Discontents, while speaking about how the "cultural superego" (i.e., the collective

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reservoir of normative templates for the formation of individual con­ science) ignores the limited extent to which the id can be controlled or domesticated, Freud airs his views about the experiment in commu­ nist government that had then been recently launched. Although he ac­ knowledges that modifying the status of property would be, in all likeli­ hood, helpful in forging more harmonious social arrangements, he is clearly pessimistic about the feasibility of ever successfully implementing such plans so long as they are guided by, as he puts it, an "idealistic mis­ conception of human nature." 3 Freud thinks that Marx's portrayal of the link between subjects and the polis sustains vain hopes regarding the extent to which idiosyncratic psyches can be modified in light of revolu­ tionary aims. The obvious message is that any political project that ne­ cessitates a top-to-bottom refashioning of human nature as a condition for its success is doomed to failure. Has the frequent repetition of this indictment against Marxism softened its impact, or does this crude, un­ sophisticated, and hackneyed criticism nonetheless retain an enduring validity? In short, is this stupid observation true despite its stupidity? Of course, part of what distinguishes Zizek from the older Frankfurt School effort at appropriating psychoanalysis for a Marxist agenda is that the fundaments of the psychoanalytic component of his conceptual appara­ tus are drawn from Lacan instead of Freud. Hence, it merits asking: does Lacan share Freud's doubts about the alleged idealistic utopianism (mis) informing Marx's view of human beings? Similarly, is it possible, at one and the same time, both to endorse the metapsychological foundations of Freudian-Lacanian theory and to assume a sincere Marxist stance at the sociopolitical level? One would be hard-pressed to mistake Lacan for a left-wing radical. For instance, in a 1969 public response to the student activists involved in the May '68 revolts, Lacan heaps scorn upon his audience of young "revolutionaries." Making reference to his recently formulated theory of the "four discourses," Lacan famously tells them, "What you, as revolu­ tionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have one." 4 This is not a man who is very optimistic about humanity's capacity for drastic modifications, for the accomplishment of a genuinely revolutionary refashioning of reality. As a Freudian, Lacan is convinced that the past always manages insidi­ ously to reproduce itself in ever-anew present circumstances, that there are specific features of the human constitution and the structure of sub­ jectivity that cannot be vanquished by mere ideological fiat.5 Throughout his seminars of the 1960s, Lacan takes great pleasure in repeatedly not­ ing that revolution has two meanings: 6 whereas the young Parisian radicals think of themselves as embarking on a path of revolution in terms of an overturning of previous orders and values, Lacan smugly reminds them

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that a revolution also can amount to a rotation around a fixed, stable point (i.e., the celestial meaning of revolution). Thus, a revolution might be, in actuality, nothing more than one more turn along the course of an old orbit, a process that leaves the same center in place: " 'revolution' . . . in the use made of it in the mechanics of heavenly bodies, can mean re­ turn to the start."7 Zizek is far from unaware of the tensions between his Lacanianism and his Marxism. On several occasions, he openly acknowledges that Lacan remains stuck within a sort of conservatism, a resigned ac­ ceptance of less-than-ideal conditions based on a deeply ingrained pes­ simism about the prospects for the effectuation of sweeping changes for the better.8 The notion of the "sinthome" in Lacan 's later work (clarified in the twenty-third seminar) best epitomizes this rather bleak outlook. Although psychoanalysis can cure individuals of a myriad number of symptomatic features connected with their cognition and comportment, there are, nonetheless, indissoluble kernels of idiotic, reified jouissance impervious to therapeutic efforts at eliminating them 9 (an idea akin to the later Freud's proclamation that analysis grinds to a halt at the point where it bumps up against the "bedrock of castration"). 10 The inertia of the libidinal economy guarantees that the parameters for change are confined to the boundaries of certain limits, constrained to remain within a relatively narrow bandwidth of possibilities and permutations. If this is characteristic of the views arrived at by Freud and Lacan after years and years of combining the clinical observation of numerous patients with the sustained labor of developing a complex theoretical apparatus responding to these observations, then how can anyone accepting their ideas avoid the conclusion that select features of present circumstances, be they social, cultural, political, or economic, are inevitably going to perpetuate themselves no matter what? Since, according to Lacan, the singular subject and the collective big Other (qua symbolic order) are entirely bound up with each other—Zizek frequently reminds his au­ dience of the Lacanian problematization of this distinction between subject and Other when defending himself against criticisms to the ef­ fect that one cannot transpose concepts from psychoanalysis onto socio­ political phenomena—wouldn't it necessarily follow that social sinthomes thwarting endeavors at collective revolutionary refashioning exist?11 How does Zizek cope with this aspect of Lacan's thought? The odd thing is that despite his numerous enthusiastic proclama­ tions that psychoanalytic conservatism (à la a pessimistic resignation re­ garding the possibility of radical social change) must be overcome in the name of a return to a Marxism with its concrete practical sting restored, a plethora of evidence indicates that Zizek has trouble avoiding the politi-

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cally not-so-revolutionary consequences latent in Lacanian concepts rele­ vant to a n u n d e r s t a n d i n g of collective structures. To begin with, in three roughly c o n t e m p o r a n e o u s texts, Zizek is at pains to distinguish between, o n t h e o n e h a n d , Marx as a critical diagnostician of capitalism (what could b e called "negative Marxism") a n d , o n the o t h e r h a n d , Marx as a visionary h e r a l d i n g a society transfigured b o t h economically a n d politi­ cally (what could b e called "positive Marxism"). In his 2000 b o o k The Fragile Absolute (and r e p e a t e d verbatim in On Belief12 as well as Repeating Lenin,12, b o t h from 2001), h e states: Marx's fundamental mistake was to conclude . . . that a new, higher social order (Communism) is possible, an order that would not only maintain but even raise to a higher degree, and effectively fully release, the potential of the self-increasing spiral of productivity which in capi­ talism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is thwarted again and again by socially destructive economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that—to put it in the standard Derridean terms— this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the "condition of impossibility" of the full deployment of productive forces is simultaneously its "condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism—if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates . . . (here we could envisage a possible Lacanian critique of Marx, focusing on the ambiguous overlap between surplus-value and surplus-enjoyment) .14 H e c o n t i n u e s , a r g u i n g that Marx's positive p r o g r a m for a c o m m u n i s t political o r d e r overseeing t h e e n h a n c e m e n t of post-capitalist e c o n o m i c p r o d u c t i o n is itself a fantasy g e n e r a t e d in a n d by capitalism: So, in a way, the critics of Communism were right when they claimed that Marxian Communism is an impossible fantasy—what they did not perceive is that Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust towards productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the "obstacles" and antagonisms that were—as the sad experience of "actually existing capitalism" demonstrates—the only possible framework of the actual material existence of a society ofpermanent self-enhancing productivity}5

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Zizek bluntly asserts that "Marx's notion of Communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy."16 Marx imagines the possibility of, through the communist revolution, unleashing the full productive forces of eco­ nomic activity, forces supposedly no longer fettered by the intermittent economic crises necessarily precipitated by the fundamental structure of the capitalist order. But, Zizek contends, a Lacanian diagnosis of this Marxist vision of a perfectly and harmoniously functioning economy as a "fantasy" would state the following: there is no retention of the forces of economic productivity without the multitude of obstacles and barri­ ers posed to this same productivity by economic crises (that is to say, the removal of capitalism, as an impediment to production, results in the diminution of production itself). Consequently, the logic exhibited by the Lacanian concept of desire, this logic ostensibly being applicable strictly to the libidinal economy, can be interpreted as displaying itself within theorizations about the political economy too. Zizek concludes from this that the proper way to salvage Marx to­ day is to insist, against certain objections, that Marx's critical description of the dynamics of capitalism can be separated off from his ruminations about a communist society hovering on the historical horizon: "Even if we remove the teleological notion of Communism (the society of com­ pletely unbridled productivity) as the implicit standard by which Marx, as it were, measures the alienation of existing society, the bulk of his 'critique of political economy,' his insight into the self-propelling vicious cycle of capitalist (re) production, survives."17 In Repeating Lenin, he rejects the standard line of Western apologists for Marxism—as is well known, the typical tactic of defending the legitimacy of Marxist theory in the face of apparendy damning empirical evidence is to allege that Soviet com­ munism (not to mention the Maoism of the Cultural Revolution) was a deviant aberration with respect to Marx's ideas themselves—going so far as to speculate that life behind the Iron Curtain would have been even worse had Stalinism succeeded in fully implementing the sociopolitical blueprint of Marx. Zizek depicts a world modeled according to Marx's vision as (borrowing a turn of phrase from the Frankfurt School) a bleak, sterile "fully administered society."18 Similarly, in this same text, Zizek's pessimism about the positive political program of Marxism leads him to conclude that the social conditions of Soviet communism—despite the nominal abolition of private property and discrepancies in income, so­ cial stratification effectively exists in the form of the difference between those who have access to privileges and resources (i.e., the nomenklatura) and those who don't enjoy such benefits—provide a strange preview of upcoming developments in the ongoing evolution of capitalism itself.19

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O n e can u n d e r s t a n d capitalism's progress by, strangely e n o u g h , going "back to the future" t h r o u g h Stalinist society. F r o m a traditional Marxist perspective, the Zizekian move of ex­ tracting t h e descriptive critique of capitalism from its r a p p o r t with t h e "prescriptive" a g e n d a of c o m m u n i s m is n o t only questionable in light of how Marx dialectically weaves t o g e t h e r past, present, a n d future in his historical materialist account of capitalism's socio-economic dynamics— it's a d a n g e r o u s defanging of Marxism. Zizek's own analysis of ideologi­ cal m e c h a n i s m s provides the best elucidation of the risk b e i n g r u n h e r e . T h e "death of c o m m u n i s m " a n d the irrefutable reality of t h e closure of the c o n t e m p o r a r y political imagination that has e n s u e d leave everyone who is dissatisfied with the capitalist system, Zizek included, in t h e diffi­ cult situation of awaiting some vague, u n d e f i n e d event yet to c o m e as t h e "miracle" that will finally break a seemingly u n b r e a k a b l e deadlock, that will disrupt a powerful inertia. Zizek u n d o u b t e d l y has faith that this X will arrive o n e day, a n d this despite his Lacan-inspired reservations con­ cerning sizable swathes of Marxism: Does the illusory fullness of the imaginary fantasy not cover up a struc­ tural gap, and does psychoanalysis not assert the heroic acceptance of the fundamental gap a n d / o r structural impossibility as the very condi­ tion of desire? Is this, exactly, not the "ethics of the Real"—the ethics of accepting the Real of a structural impossibility? However, what Lacan ultimately aims at is precisely the opposite . . . the "Real as impossible" means . . . that THE IMPOSSIBLE DOES HAPPEN, that "miracles" like Love (or political revolution: "in some respects, a revolution is a mir­ acle," Lenin said in 1921) DO occur. From "impossible TO happen" we thus pass to "the impossible HAPPENS."20 A certain r e a d i n g of Lacan gravitates toward a stoical "ethics of the Real": after "traversing the fantasy" a n d u n d e r g o i n g "subjective destitution" t h r o u g h Lacanian psychoanalysis, subjects learn to accept their dissat­ isfaction, lack, unhappiness, a n d so on. T h e analysand realizes that dysfunctionality isn't a result of c o n t i n g e n t pathologies, b u t is instead the necessary, default m o d u s o p e r a n d i of t h e libidinal economy. This reali­ zation transforms the pathos of n e u r o t i c suffering into the banality of quotidian frustration by p r o m p t i n g subjects to r e n o u n c e their fantasies of a jouissance à venir, that is, to stop t o r t u r i n g themselves by m e a s u r i n g actual pleasure a n d pain against the b a c k d r o p of an unrealistic, impos­ sible standard. 2 1 Zizek rejects this reading of Lacan o n the g r o u n d s that it supports

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precisely the sort of resigned pessimism o m n i p r e s e n t in late-capitalist forms of ideological subjectivity. It reinforces the tendency to a b a n d o n hastily anything t h a t sounds Utopian from within the c o n c e p t u a l con­ straints of the p r e s e n t situation. Succinctly put, it encourages discour­ agement. Along these lines, in an interview, Zizek explains his changes of m i n d as regards ideology a n d the category of impossibility thus: I am no longer satisfied with my own old definition of ideology where the point was that ideology is the illusion which fills in the gap of impossibility and inherent impossibility is transposed into an external obstacle, and that therefore what needs to be done is to reassert the original impossibility. This is the ultimate result of a certain transcendentalist logic: you have an a priori void, an original impossibility, and the cheating of ideology is to translate this inherent impossibility into an external obstacle; the illusion is that by overcoming this obstacle you get the Real Thing. I am almost tempted to say that the ultimate ideological operation is the opposite one: that is, the very elevation of something into impossibility as a means of postponing or avoiding en­ countering it.22 H e continues: Again, I am almost tempted to turn the standard formula around. Yes, on the one hand, ideology involves translating impossibility into a par­ ticular historical blockage, thereby sustaining die dream of ultimate fulfillment—a consummate encounter with the Thing. On the other hand . . . ideology also functions as a way of regulating a certain dis­ tance with such an encounter. It sustains at the level of fantasy precisely what it seeks to avoid at the level of actuality: it endeavours to convince us that the Thing cannot ever be encountered, that the Real forever eludes our grasp. So ideology appears to involve both sustenance and avoidance in regard to encountering the Thing. 23 H e immediately adds that "an elevation into impossibility" is "the fun­ d a m e n t a l o p e r a t i o n " u n d e r p i n n i n g "the ideological dimension." 2 4 Ac­ cordingly, Zizek repeatedly defines a u t h e n t i c political practice as involv­ ing "the art of t h e impossible" insofar as a g e n u i n e politics worthy of the n a m e succeeds at changing the very conceptions of what is a n d isn't possible in a given situation—a political intervention accomplishes what before s e e m e d unthinkably impossible. 2 5 Zizek faults his early work for having fallen into the trap of treating the Real as a kind of Kantian noumenality, namely, as an inaccessible di-

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mension that invisibly yet inexorably disrupts the other registers of human reality (i.e., the Imaginary and the Symbolic). Speaking of The Sublime Object of Ideology (his first book in English), he claims that its "philosophical weakness" is that "it basically endorses a quasi-transcendental reading of Lacan, focused on the notion of the Real as the impossible Thingin-itself; in so doing, it opens the way to the celebration of failure: to the idea that every act ultimately misfires, and that the proper ethical stance is heroically to accept this failure."26 The word "act" is crucial here, since it designates that which Zizek relies upon so as to avoid the resigned pes­ simism coloring much of Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Thanks to the notion of the act sketched by Lacan, one doesn't have to accept the Real as a negative limit cordoning off an impossible Beyond that simply must be observed and respected as such; one doesn't have to concede that the subject is always and ultimately a dysfunctional slave to the past, the id, the symbolic order, the drives, the libidinal economy, and so on, given that radical breaks with all these determining factors are possible (despite, from a more traditional psychoanalytic view, the seeming im­ possibility of such total departures into the New). Through a perhaps excessive emphasis on an underdeveloped Lacanian concept, Zizek allows himself to sustain a sort of cynical distance from the present state of the capitalist situation. According to Zizek, an act is an intervention that "makes the impossible happen" by virtue of rewriting the very rules concerning what is and isn't possible in a given reality. With this caveat in place, he can, at one and the same time, stress the impoverishment of the ideological imagination and the bankruptcy of old Marxist political programs—he can acknowledge that extant sce­ narios for displacing capitalism are "impossibilities"—while nonetheless continuing to refuse or disavow this awareness of a stifling contemporary closure (because, as he declares, "the impossible happens"). This would go a long way toward explaining what Sarah Kay, in her introductory overview of Zizek's corpus, highlights as "a striking combination of opti­ mism and pessimism" in Zizekian political thought, namely, "pessimism about the situation as it is, optimism that it could be transformed." 27 (As Zizek admits in a 2003 lecture entitled "Love Without Mercy," he sees present circumstances as "ambiguous," as "partially hopeless, par­ tially hopeful.") What Kay fails to note is that this "striking combination of optimism and pessimism" might very well indicate, in a symptomatic fashion, the effective presence of something akin to an unacknowledged fetishistic split. As long as one continues to criticize capitalism (properly using the tried-and-true resources of a purely negative Marxism) during the indefinitely long period of waiting for the occurrence of the impos­ sible Act-miracle, one is free to be a nonbeliever in the capitalist system,

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leaving belief to, among others, those naive adherents of the "Third Way" or "radical democracy" (perhaps playing the part of Zizek's "subjects supposed to believe"). Isn't there a genuine danger that this particular combination of Marx (qua critic of capitalism) and Lacan (qua theorist of the act) could itself serve as a theoretical fetish-object in Zizek's own precise sense, sustaining a version of the stance of "I know full well, but nonetheless . . ."? As per the title of his fifteenth seminar ("The Psychoanalytic Act"), Lacan devotes the opening sessions of that year's seminar to delineat­ ing a distinction between an "action" {une action) and an "act" {un acte). The former is simply some sort of natural a n d / o r automatic process (for instance, the body's motor activities). The latter, by contrast, involves a dimension over and above that of something like a mundane material occurrence. A proper act has Symbolic repercussions; it transgresses the rules of a symbolic order, thereby destabilizing the big Other in revealingits flaws, inconsistencies, and vulnerabilities. Whereas an action is part of the normal run of things, an act disrupts the predictable cycles governing particular realities, forcing transformations of regulated systems in re­ sponse to its intrusive irruption. 28 Unfortunately, Lacan leaves this notion languishing in a vague, amorphous state. What makes an act possible? How are ontogenetic and phylogenetic threads of historical continuity cleanly and completely severed? Must one jettison certain tenets of metapsychology (such as the more deterministic features of psychoanalytic drive theory) in order to affirm that acts can and do transpire? One remarkable feature of the act that Lacan does indeed go out of his way to underscore is that this disruptive gesture is not the outcome of prior deliberations on the part of self-conscious reflection. Lacan de­ clares that "it is a common dimension of the act not to include in its instant moment the presence of the subject. The passage of the act is that beyond which the subject will rediscover its presence as renewed, but nothing other."29 Is this to say that, in a wholly inexplicable and mys­ terious fashion, an act arises out of an asubjective "nowhere," and only through the retroactive subjectification of this event can one speak of any sort of subject as being engaged with it? The Lacanian notion of the act, although lacking much in the way of conceptual specificity and theo­ retical details, involves two restrictions: (1) an act cannot be anticipated and defined from within the framework of a given symbolic order, since it shatters the parameters of that same framework if and when it happens; and (2) a subject does not actively perform an act, since subjectivity is, as Lacan indicates, a passive aftereffect of such an event. Hence, it seems as though the act is an impossible, miraculous oc­ currence that emerges ex nihilo and befalls individuals who are, at least

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at first, passively subjected to the act's subsequent reverberations. In fact, at various points, Zizek himself highlights these features of the Lacanian theory of the act:30 "We cannot actively decide to accomplish an act, the act surprises the agent itself."31 In The Ticklish Subject, the religious over­ tones of this line of thought become blatant: Absolute/unconditional acts do occur, but not in the (idealist) guise of a self-transparent gesture performed by a subject with a pure Will who fully intends them—they occur, on the conuary, as a totally unpredict­ able tuchê, a miraculous event which shatters our lives. To put it in some­ what pathetic terms, this is how the "divine" dimension is present in our lives, and the different modalities of ethical betrayal relate precisely to the different ways of betraying the act-event: the true source of Evil is not a finite mortal man who acts like God, but a man who denies that divine miracles occur and reduces himself to just another finite mortal being.32 On a purely pragmatic level, such a conception risks conveying a disempowering message: self-conscious, volitional activity on the part of sub­ jects is pointless, since the event of an act transpires in the mode of the anonymous "it happens," rather than as the outcome of intentionally guided forms of praxis. Doesn't the importation of this idea of the act into Marxism turn the concrete political task of actively plotting revo­ lution and its aftermath into helplessly awaiting an abstract, undefined moment of salvation yet to come? In the opening lines of his "Contribu­ tion to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" Marx stipulates that "the basis of irreligious criticism is this: man makes religion; religion does not make man."33 Arguing against Hegel's political thought, Marx con­ tends that Geist is a theosophical specter, an ideologically motivated fan­ tasy hiding the fact that human beings shape their own history behind the inverse of this truth (i.e., that there's a transcendent "Spirit" magi­ cally governing the fate of humanity). Wouldn't Marx raise similar objec­ tions against the Lacanian-Zizekian act, since it threatens to reintroduce a type of alienation as a factor undervaluing and rendering largely vain strategically planned political activities? Perhaps sensing the limitations of the Lacanian delineation of the act-action distinction, Zizek turns to Badiou's theory of the event so as to clarify further his own position. Badiou, in developing his concept of the event, seeks to grant specific sociohistorical contexts their appro­ priate degree of importance while, nonetheless, struggling against the temptation to embrace forms of historicism (including Hegelian forms of Marxism centered on a teleological historical dialectic) entailing a

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contextualizing reduction of all occurrences to an underlying temporal or ontological consistency.34 He acknowledges that each and every event is tied to a particular site (see chapter 1, section 4). Although the situ­ ated determinations of singular sites are conditions for the emergence of events, such occurrences are irreducible to mere extensions of trends stemming from the site itself (see chapter 4, section 16). An event, as the sudden appearance of something completely unprecedented, must be treated as a fundamental discontinuity incapable of being reinscribed back within the prior historical continuum from which it sprang. 35 Ba­ diou maintains that "the event is both situated—it is the event of this or that situation—and supplementary; thus absolutely detached from, or un­ related to, all the rules of the situation."36 Being and Event describes the site of the event as a finite originary locus for an ensuing infinite process: "Set theory ontology. . . affirms . . . that even though presentation can be infinite . . . it is always marked by finitude when it comes to its origin. Here, this finitude is the existence of a site, on the edge of the void; historic­ ity."37 Later, in Saint Paul, Badiou notes that "although the event depends on its site in its being, it must be independent of it in its truth effects"** One could say that the "pure beginning" of the event39 arises within the im­ manence of impure continuity. Zizek's recent writings embrace the Badiouian notion of the event, describing it as "an intervention that cannot be accounted for in terms of its preexisting 'objective conditions.'" 40 He then proceeds to depict the Lacanian act as akin to Badiou's event: "The key point is . . . precisely not to interpret or judge single acts 'together,' not to locate them in a 'wider context,' but to excise them from their historical setting."41 Despite the accuracy and appeal of this theme—both Badiou and Zizek are quite justified in critically questioning a historical contextualism so terribly dominant and pervasive today—it leaves one puzzled, yet again, regard­ ing the status of what Zizek proclaims to be his avowedly Marxist stance. Isn't one of Marx's main points that the revolution of the proletariat is an inevitable historical outcome? Doesn't he ceaselessly maintain that com­ munism eventually will be produced out of dynamics involving conflicts and contradictions immanent to the painful evolution of capitalism itself? If Zizek denies this fundamental Marxist thesis, as well as Marx's "fantasy" of a post-revolutionary communist socioeconomic system, then what re­ mains besides, as Zizek himself might put it, a "Marxism deprived of its Marxism" (à la a "substance deprived of its substance")? One of the rea­ sons why Zizek is generally sympathetic to Badiou is that the notion of the event supposedly encourages confronting, rather than defers or avoids, the "moment of madness" when a decision to act must be made (though ironically, as will be seen shortly, the reverse might really be the case) :

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Historicist evolutionism leads to endless procrastination; the situation is always too complex; there are always more aspects to be accounted for; our weighing of the pros and cons is never over . . . against this stance, the passage to the act involves a gesture of radical and violent simpli­ fication, a cut like that of the proverbial Gordian knot: the magic mo­ ment when the infinite pondering crystallizes itself into a simple "yes" or no. ^ Two simple "yes or no" questions already have been asked and an­ swered by Zizek: "'Yes' or 'no' to capitalism? 'No!'"; "'Yes' or 'no' to communism? 'No!'"—succinctly formulated in Zizekian style, "Capital­ ism or communism? No, thanks." In the passage above, maybe Zizek in­ directly is offering a potent critique of Marx's attempt to formulate a quasi-scientific perspective wherein a (Hegelian-style dialectical) "histori­ cist evolutionism" promises that revolution will come of its own accord based on the internal course of capitalism's conflict-driven development. Just as the Lacanian notion of the act risks encouraging a lazy, inactive complacency by divorcing truly effective interventions from any sort of subjective agency—even if Lacan and Zizek are correct on this point, one could argue that the traditional depiction of the rapport between subjective agency and the act is a necessary fiction, a "noble lie" essen­ tial to inspiring individuals to risk various gambles in the first place—so too could a certain Marxist historicism be construed as falsely absolving individuals of the burden to labor toward sociopolitical change in the present. As argued here earlier (see chapter 2, section 8), the later Mao of what Russo labels the doctrine of "probable defeat" advocates a Dupuystyle positing of future catastrophe as a means of changing (or maybe sustaining) the present course of history by undermining any overconfi­ dent complacency on the part of those actors caught up in leftist battles and struggles. And what Mao perhaps does in relation to Badiouian political thought, Lenin does for Zizek: reinject an urgent sense of pre­ carious agency, an agency not guaranteed by any sort of big Other (in the form of laws of history), back into revolutionary politics (for more on this, see chapter 4, section 16). The danger to be avoided here is that of covering over, through false confidence, what Zizek evocatively refers to as "the abyss of freedom":43 both Marx's more Hegelian emphases on the historical inevitability of the revolution as well as Lacan's asubjective act ex nihilo risk putting subjectivity in a passive, expectant position, stuck simply waiting in a state of alienation for circumstances to do their own work. Furthermore, the Badiouian theory of the event, contrary to Zizek's assertion that it facilitates or empowers decision-making as a sudden pas-

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sage à l'acte (i.e., the violent cutting of the proverbial Gordian knot), en­ tails the same dangers as the Lacanian concept of the act with respect to the status and value of pre-orchestrated political interventions. Badiou repeatedly claims that subjectivity is, strictly speaking, post-evental—that is to say, the subject is an aftereffect of a prior event's impact upon a prevailing state-of-the-situation. Put differently, the subject, on Badiou's account, doesn't precede the event: "I call 'subject' the bearer [le support] of a fidelity, the one who bears a process of truth. The subject, therefore, in no way pre-exists the process. He is absolutely nonexistent in the situation 'before' the event. We might say that the process of truth induces a subject."44 The subject is always the subject of a particular event, and, as such, it comes into being in an éventai après-coup. In emphasizing the post-evental status of the subject, Badiou denies it a role in precipi­ tating the event prior to its occurrence. Badiou's subject-of-the-event is confined to an existence that arises merely in the subsequent wake of an always prior and anonymous éventai "it happened" (itself strikingly akin to the religious notion of a miracle, as is the Zizekian spin on the Lacanian act).

§15 Inventing a New Politics: The Act Between Theory and Practice The height of Zizek's philosophical traditionalism, his fidelity to certain lasting truths too precious to cast away in a postmodern frenzy, is his con­ viction that no worthwhile praxis can emerge prior to the careful and de­ liberate formulation of a correct conceptual framework. His references to the hybrid Lacanian-Badiouian notion of the act-event (qua agentless occurrence not brought about by a subject) are especially strange in light of the fact that he seemingly endorses the view that theory must precede practice, namely, that deliberative reflection is, in a way, primary. Fur­ thermore, the political aims of Zizek's own theoretical endeavor are obvi­ ously not of an orthodox communist nature. He doesn't urge the simple reenactment of the sort of revolution embarked upon by Lenin. Nor is he, as some have alleged, merely interested in being an anti-capitalist and nothing more (an accusation alluding to his abandonment of the posi­ tive Marxist project pointing to the construction of communism). 1 For Zizek, the foremost concrete task to be accomplished today isn't some kind of rebellious acting out, which would, in the end, amount to a se­ ries of impotent, incoherent outbursts.2 Instead, given the contemporary closure of the sociopolitical imagination under the hegemony of liberal

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democratic capitalism, he sees the liberation of thinking itself from its present ideological constraints as the first crucial step that must be taken if anything is to be changed for the better. In a lecture given in Vienna in 2001, Zizek suggests that Marx's call to break out of the sterile closure of abstract intellectual ruminations through direct, concrete action (thesis eleven on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it") must be inverted given the new prevailing conditions of late-capitalism. Nowadays, one must resist suc­ cumbing to the temptation to short-circuit thinking in favor of acting, since all such rushes to action are doomed; they either fail to disrupt capitalism or are co-opted by it (see also chapter 4, section 18). Zizek argues that a genuine materialist embraces the taking of risks with no guarantee whatsoever of a subsequent good result: "True mate­ rialism . . . consists precisely in accepting the chanciness without the im­ plication of the horizon of hidden meaning—the name of this chance is contingency."2' And, reiterating a thesis argued for by Badiou in Peut-on penser la politique?* (a thesis undoubtedly provoked by the center-right tendency, in post-'68 France, to lump together the radical Left and the extreme Right), he claims that the liberal democratic belief system of free-market capitalism uses the bogeyman of "totalitarianism" to delegitimize just this sort of "materialism." People often insist that the danger of re-creating nightmarish Stalinist or fascist dictatorships justifies the avoidance of any daring measures deviating from accepted mainstream political wisdom in the West. In other words, the specter of totalitarian­ ism is invoked so as to silence demands for taking chances by entertain­ ing possibilities pronounced impermissible by capitalist "democracy": "The notion of 'totalitarianism,' far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgap: instead of enabling us to think . . . it re­ lieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking." 5 Zizek continues, noting that "today, reference to the 'totalitarian' threat sustains a kind of unwritten Denkverbot (prohibition against thinking)." 6 Hence, the phrase "repeating Lenin" doesn't refer to the ridiculously anachronistic and ineffective posturing that would be involved in an­ other attempt at launching a communist revolution. For Zizek, it broadly signifies a disruptive break that makes it possible to imagine, once again, viable alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism by removing the vari­ ous obstacles to thinking seriously about options forcefully foreclosed by today's reigning ideologies: " 'Lenin' stands for the compelling FREE­ DOM to suspend the stale existing [post-] ideological coordinates, the debilitating Denkverbot in which we live—it simply means that we are al­ lowed to think again."7 Zizek links liberal democracy's employment of the threat of totali-

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tarianism to a m o r e fundamental rejection of t h e act itself q u a interven­ tion whose c o n s e q u e n c e s c a n n o t safely be anticipated. In Zizek's view, c o n t e m p o r a r y d e m o c r a c y legitimates itself t h r o u g h a pathetic stance in which the avoidance of risk (i.e., of e x t r e m e measures n o t covered by preexisting d e m o c r a t i c consensuses, m e a s u r e s with n o g u a r a n t e e of status-quo-affirming success) is elevated to the status of the high­ est political good. 8 (Badiou similarly c o n t e n d s that the p r e d o m i n a t i n g ethico-political value framework in today's capitalist-democratic societies is a specific nihilistic inversion of Platonism in which the sole good is the m e r e absence of evil, a n d n o t h i n g m o r e . ) 9 Zizek asserts that "what the reference to d e m o c r a c y involves is t h e rejection of radical attempts to 'step outside,' to risk a radical break." 10 T h e refusal to risk a gesture of disruption because it m i g h t n o t t u r n o u t exactly the way o n e envisions it should is the surest bulwark against change: The standard critique concerns the Act's allegedly "absolute" charac­ ter of a radical break, which renders impossible any clear distinction between a properly "ethical" act and, say, a Nazi monstrosity: is it not that an Act is always embedded in a specific socio-symbolic context? The answer to this reproach is clear: of course—an Act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an Act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on the context. . . In what, then, resides the misunderstanding? Why this critique? There is something else which disturbs the critics of the Lacanian notion of Act: true, an Act is always situated in a concrete context—this, however, does not mean that it is fully determined by its context. An Act always involves a radical risk . . . it is a step into the open, with no guarantee about the final outcome—why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates into which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate; they want an Act without risk—not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical "transcen­ dental risk" that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire . . . those who oppose the "absolute Act" effectively oppose the Act as such, they want an Act without the Act.11 However, the p r o b l e m with Lacan 's opposition between acts a n d actions in relation to political c o m m i t m e n t s is that o n e might be t e m p t e d vainly to await an "act w i t h o u t an action." Too s h a r p a distinction b e t w e e n act a n d action enables o n e to d o d g e the central q u e s t i o n — " r e p e a t i n g L e n i n " o u g h t to m e a n tirelessly asking this single question again a n d again in each new historical context, in each u n i q u e c o n j u n c t u r e — o f "What is to b e d o n e ? "

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On the basis of Lacanian theory, one could argue that an act is something whose occurrence generally is determined only retroactively (as per Freud's Nachtràglichkeit and Lacan 's après-coup). It isn't until after a whole series of concrete actions already have been engaged in, and whose effects have temporally unfurled to a sufficient extent, that one is able to assess whether an act actually did happen. One tends to recog­ nize an act as such after the fact (Zizek himself acknowledges this too). 12 Thus, as Lacan insists, acts aren't events brought about in the present by self-conscious volitional agents because, within the immediacy of the here and now, individuals aren't able to determine or decide whether their actions will eventually qualify, through the verdict of subsequent history, as genuine acts strictly speaking. Individuals must first immerse themselves in action, since, without these particular interventions, there would be nothing to grasp later through hindsight as an act. Although an act is indeed not an action (and although far from every action can or does become an act), there is, nonetheless, no act without an action. A politics of the pure act, one that eschews engaging in any specifications concerning actions to be performed, is an empty "politics without poli­ tics." The risk that this position refuses isn't the risk of the "absolute Act" and its always-possible failure—it risks refusing the active specification and performance of actions that might not end up becoming acts. The activity of thinking that Zizek hopes to reinvigorate by toppling certain implicit ideological prohibitions must not allow itself to neglect grap­ pling with the tangible details of particular political programs. Is the pas­ sivity of awaiting the messianic future arrival of the undefined act-miracle the sole viable replacement for Marx's abandoned political project of communism? Perhaps the absence of a detailed practical road map in Zizek's political writings isn't a major shortcoming. Maybe, at least for the time being, the most important task is simply the negativity of the critical struggle, the effort to cure an intellectual constipation resulting from capitalist ideology and thereby truly to open up the space for imagin­ ing authentic alternatives to the prevailing state-of-the-situation. Another definition of materialism offered by Zizek is that it amounts to accepting the internal inherence of what fantasmatically appears as an external deadlock or hindrance 13 (with fantasy itself being defined as the false externalization of some thing within the subject, namely, the illusory projec­ tion of an inner obstacle).14 From this perspective, seeing through ideo­ logical fantasies by learning how to think again outside the confines of current restrictions has, in and of itself, the potential to operate as a form of real revolutionary practice (rather than remaining just an instance of negative or critical intellectual reflection). Why is this the case? Recall-

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ing the earlier analysis of commodity fetishism here, the social efficacy of money as the universal medium of exchange (and the entire political economy grounded upon it) ultimately relies upon nothing more than a kind of "magic," that is, the belief in money's social efficacy by those using it in the processes of exchange. Since the value of currency is, at bottom, reducible to the belief that it has the value attributed to it (and that everyone believes that everyone else believes this as well), derailing capitalism by destroying its essential financial substance is, in a certain respect, as easy as dissolving the mere belief in this substance's powers. The "external" obstacle of the capitalist system exists exclusively on the condition that subjects, whether consciously or unconsciously, "inter­ nally" believe in it; capitalism's life-blood, money, is simply a fetishistic crystallization of a belief in others' belief in the socio-performative force emanating from this same material. And yet this point of capitalism's frail vulnerability is simultaneously the source of its enormous strength; its vampiric symbiosis with human desire, and the fact that the late-capitalist cynic's fetishism enables the disavowal of his or her de facto belief in capi­ talism, make it highly unlikely that people can be persuaded to stop be­ lieving and start thinking, especially since, as Zizek claims, many of these people are convinced that they already have ceased believing. (Hence, as he observes in The Parallax View, contemporary leftist ideology critique shouldn't engage in old Enlightenment-style démystification, but, rather, faced with late-capitalist cynics, should repeat Marx's gesture in his analy­ ses of commodity fetishism and engage in, so to speak, re-mystification, showing these cynics how much they still [unconsciously] believe15—this same observation can be found in Balibar's compact overview of Marx's philosophical significance.)16 The more disquieting possibility to enter­ tain is that some people today, even if one succeeds in exposing them to the underlying logic of their position, might respond in a manner resembling that of the Judas-like character Cypher in the film The Matrix (Cypher opts to embrace enslavement by illusion rather than deal with the discomfort of dwelling in the "desert of the real"). Faced with the choice between living the capitalist lie or grappling with certain unpleas­ ant truths, many individuals might very well deliberately decide to accept what they know full well to be a false pseudo-reality, a deceptively com­ forting fiction ("Capitalist commodity fetishism or the truth? I choose fetishism"). A mystery remains regarding Zizek's unique approach to political thought and its yet-to-be-specified course of action: Why doesn't he take the easy way out and use Lacanian theory to "deconstruct" the traditional theory-practice opposition? Couldn't one maintain, through recourse to Lacan in particular, that theoretical discourse analysis is, in and of itself,

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a means of directly working upon a special sort of materiality lying at the very heart of ideological mechanisms? Answering these questions re­ quires a bit of a detour, a brief return to Lacan. Among both sympathetic exegetes as well as certain wary critics, the notion that a sharp division separates two distinct phases of Lacan's teaching (as transmitted via le Séminaire) has become a matter of widely accepted doxa. On the one hand, during the 1950s, there is the Lacan of the Symbolic, the advocate of a "return to Freud" wherein, through a focus on such early Freudian texts as The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, the unconscious is shown to be "structured like a language"; the libidinal economy and its correlative forms of psychical subjectivity are shaped and controlled by the elaborate play of "signifying chains." This period of Lacanian thought, departing from a valorization of structural linguistics as the "pilot science" promising elegantly to streamline psy­ choanalytic metapsychology, places a great deal of emphasis on the transindividual network of the symbolic order, namely, the big Other within whose web the "subject of the signifier" remains inextricably entangled. On the other hand, according to this quite popular and predominant portrait of the "two Lacans," there is also the Lacan of the Real, the thinker who suddenly realizes that language is "not all," that the struc­ tures of the Symbolic are far from being primary as far as the phenomena relevant to analysis are concerned. Through an abrupt shift that purport­ edly begins in the seventh seminar (1959-60), Lacan demotes linguistic/ structural factors from their previous position of theoretical centrality. The realm of the symbolic order is preceded (sometimes chronologically, sometimes "logically") by the obscure, opaque domain of das Ding, by an X that forever eludes representation and signification while simulta­ neously shaping the movement of the Vorstellungen constitutive of Freud's psychical apparatus. 17 Both Badiou and Zizek each align the Lacan of the Symbolic (i.e., the early Lacan) and the Lacan of the Real (i.e., the late Lacan) with idealism and materialism, respectively. In Théorie du sujet (a text mobi­ lized by Bosteels in a debate with Zizek over Badiou's ambivalence toward Lacan), Badiou, during the course of an effort to reformulate a viable dialectical materialism, is one of the first authors to insist on this divi­ sion within Lacan's oeuvre (he speaks of a trajectory "from the primacy of the symbolic to the consistency of the real"). 18 Moreover, he goes so far as to posit a division internal to the concept of the Real (this split within the Real mirroring the larger split between the Symbolic and the Real): "The line of demarcation between idealism and materialism in Lacan's thought m u s t . . . be drawn through the very concept of the real,

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splitting its core in order to mark off those aspects that remain tied to a structural lack and those that point toward a torsion, or destruction, of the structure itself."19 For Badiou, the Real is, when operating as part of Lacan 's model of "structural causality," the evanescent, vanishing "lost cause" (à la, for instance, the tuché-automaton dynamic from the eleventh seminar) ,20 the originary yet impossibly elusive principle of any closed Symbolic system.21 (Badiou describes this as a version of the Real still ut­ terly dependent upon the structuralist "algebra" of the signifying chain.) However, according to Badiou, another Real besides that hypothesized in the form of a causality of lack exists: there is the Real as material "con­ sistency," a Real that Badiou discerns the vague outlines of in the later Lacan's ruminations about the topological properties of knots (hence the Badiouian contrast between algebra and topology, between an ideal­ ist Real and a materialist Real).22 Zizek likewise highlights these dual faces of the Lacanian Real, although he argues that they represent the recto and verso of one and the same surface: in the Zizekian view, the Real stands for a dialectical "convergence of opposites," being both an inaccessible, withdrawn absence as well as an excessive, overwhelming plenitude. 23 For Zizek, the Real confounds efforts at cognizing it through non-dialecticized oppositions such as ideality versus materiality. Although avowedly indebted to Lacan, Badiou sees him as too mired in a fundamentally idealist worldview (even the later shift to the primacy of the Real nonetheless allegedly preserves the dominance of the Symbolic by delineating the Real primarily in terms of its [non-] inscription within orders of signifiers).24 Speaking of "linguistic ideal­ ism" ("l'idéalisme linguistique/' a phrase also employed by Laplanche in reference to Lacanian theory) 25 as the latest variation or incarnation of this philosophical stance (as the dominant version of idealism marking the twentieth century especially, an idealism of the "linguistic turn"), 26 Badiou accuses Lacan of indulging in "idéalinguisterie" (this Badiouian neologism plays off of a Lacanian one—in the twentieth seminar, Lacan refers to his "abusive" psychoanalytic appropriation of linguistics as '7mguisterie") :27 Language = structure—such is the constitutive declaration, that one cannot confuse with this or that discipline named linguistic, and better again, by Lacan, "linguistene" . . . Although, to claim to broaden this up to the thesis "the world is discourse," this aim of contemporary philosophy would merit being rebaptized "idéalinguisterie. " Assaulting idéalinguisterie is today that which materialism makes its cause.28

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The micro-level solipsism of something like, say, Berkeley's subjectcentered idealism is exchanged, by structuralist modes of analysis, for nothing more than a macro-level solipsism sans subjectivity,29 a solipsistic enclosing whose effectuation forces everything to be filtered through the sieve of signification (whether linguistic or otherwise, as in the exten­ sions of the concept of the signifier in semiotics—a broadening influ­ enced by Lacan himself).30 The material Real is rendered permanently inaccessible by the unavoidable, mediating intervention of the symbolic order and its networks of signiners. However, one might ask, doesn't this line of criticism presuppose a clear contrast between, on the one hand, the ephemeral immateriality of the signifying elements of the Symbolic and, on the other hand, the tangible, concrete materiality designated under the heading of the Real? Does Lacan, during either his "early" or "late" periods, ever embrace dichotomies of this sort? In one of his first philosophical publications (the 1969 text Le concept de modèle), Badiou directly refers to Lacan 's theses regarding "la matérialité du signifiant" in connection with his own treatment of formal sciences as practices en­ twined with the structured "matter" of systematized writings as incarnate configurations of embodied marks and traces.31 Why does Badiou later decline to comment on this aspect of Lacanian theory in his subsequent criticisms of it as being anti-materialist? At least up through Théorie du sujet, he indeed insists that a core axiom of materialism is the primacy/ priority of matter.32 In Théorie du sujet, Badiou can be heard to complain that Lacan 's positions aren't sufficiently historical a n d / o r dialectical.33 But, contrary to what he argues earlier in the same book, this doesn't mean that Lacan is therefore simply an "idealinguist" utterly at odds with materialism tout court. Zizek too (following Jacques-Alain Miller) adheres to the view that a later "Real Lacan" must be distinguished and separated from a prior "Symbolic Lacan." (Zizek often explains this difference with reference to the libidinal economy: the early Lacan fixâtes upon the dialectics of de­ sire as shaped by the Other, while the late Lacan orients himself around the driven, idiotic inertia of the jouissance-lzden sinthome-Dmg.)S4 A sup­ posedly unprecedented "materialist" turn, a break or rupture with the past hegemony of the trans-individual big Other qua symbolic order, in­ troduces an all-important discontinuity into the heart of Lacan's steadily evolving theoretical system. (At this level, the only substantial difference between Badiou and Zizek is that the former, at least in Théorie du sujet, maintains that Lacan never really succeeds, even during his later period, in articulating a genuinely historical/dialectical sort of materialism.) In fact, Zizek ends up conceding to the Badiouian critique the claim that Lacan's earlier work, in which the Symbolic big Other seemingly holds

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sway as what fundamentally underpins the field of analysis, manifests a deep-seated idealism (an idealism ostensibly surpassed in the subsequent elevation of the Real's status within the Lacanian conceptual framework) : "The primacy of the symbolic Order is clearly idealist; it is ultimately a new version of Divine intervention in the natural order."35 On this ac­ count, as with the one offered by Badiou, Lacan 's move from idealism to materialism amounts to a shift of focus from the Symbolic (i.e., the "linguistic" unconscious, the big Other, the métonymie drifting of desire, etc.) to the Real (i.e., das Ding, the monotonous repetition of compul­ sive jouissance, indissoluble pathological features, etc.). In short, the "pri­ macy of the signifier" is idealist through and through. Zizek's defense of Lacan against attacks such as those launched by Badiou involves a sort of "scorched earth tactic." Zizek cedes a certain amount of terrain by granting that Lacan 's structuralist phase tacitly endorses a problematic, condemnable idealism. But Zizek then proceeds to shore up his Laca­ nian position by maintaining that the shift marked by the seventh semi­ nar inaugurates a genuinely materialist outlook incommensurable with the earlier idealist matrix ('Yes, in the 1950s Lacan was, regrettably, an idealist—but starting in the 1960s, everything changes for the better!"). Giving up even this much ground in response to this line of criticism is an unfortunate mistake, since the most basic assumptions informing the critique of the quasi-structuralist Lacan 's "linguistic idealism" are flawed through and through (and flawed in ways directly addressed by Lacan himself). From a proper Lacanian perspective, the very insistence on an op­ position between language (qua structure) and materiality, between the supposedly idealist focus on linguistically mediated cognition and the ap­ peal to the foundational role of some sort of non/extra-linguistic "stuff," is, at least psychoanalytically speaking, untenable. For the early Lacan as much as for the late Lacan, the forcing of a choice such as that between an idealism of the signifier and a materialism of "the Thing" is tanta­ mount to the erroneous endorsement of an utterly false dilemma. The later Lacan's neologism 'jouis-sens' ("enjoy-meant") succinctly signals his rejection of this either/or. 36 Although perhaps harder to discern in the early seminars and écrits from the 1950s, a crucial thread of consistency seamlessly connects the earlier and later phases of Lacan's intellectual itinerary. Motivated by a profound fidelity to the Freudian field, Lacan re­ tains a constant focus, throughout the entire course of his chronological development, on the generally neglected point of overlap between the "immaterial" Symbolic and the "material" Real. Lacanian psychoanalysis, at every stage of its elaboration by Lacan, occupies itself with the specific materiality of the signifying chains constitutive of the unconscious as well

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as of subjectivity.37 In terms of both theory and practice, the Lacan of the 1950s is just as concerned with the derailing of meaningful struc­ tures by "something else" as he is in his teachings during the 1960s and 1970s. Language is, for Lacan, internally self-subverting. Its own material­ ity is responsible for continually diverting and disrupting the conscious, meaning-oriented intentions-to-signify routed through it. Furthermore, Lacan explicitly draws a connection between the alienation of the subject entailed by the analytic theory of the material­ ism of the signifier and Marx's notion of alienation as linked to his his­ torical materialism; Lacan insists that he's no less of a materialist than Marx.38 A Lacanian retort to something along the lines of the Badiouian critique would be to assert, via a Hegelian gesture, that the distinction between linguistic ideality and extra-linguistic materiality is a distinction internal to linguistic idealism itself. In other words, it's Badiou who is the idealist here: by insisting that an analysis centered on Symbolic, language­ like mechanisms is somehow inherently idealist, Badiou betrays himself as a thinker still mired in the traditional, quotidian viewpoint accord­ ing to which linguistic structures are immaterial, ephemeral, weightless pseudo-entities belonging to an individual as mental possessions, rather than ultimately being grounded upon a certain asubjective, "extimate" substance. A genuine, diehard materialist would argue that language it­ self is capable of being dealt with as part of a concrete material domain, that it is no less insubstantial, despite appearances to the contrary, than anything else that could be said to have a minimal degree of ontological status (as per the Lacanian claim that the "ideality" of language's senseeffects arises from the senseless "materiality" of its signifier-constituents and their interplay). Similarly, the various accusations that the Lacanian theory of the signifier is tantamount to a disembodied, abstract formalism ignore the dialectical codependence of form (qua differential linkages between content-nodes) and content (qua the materiality of the content-nodes themselves) at work in Lacan 's thought even during the height of his interest in structuralism. (As Richard Boothby nicely points out, Roman Jakobson 's structural linguistics, upon which Lacan frequently relies, in­ volves a similar, almost paradoxically circular dialectic between the form of signified meaning and the content of phonemic sounds, since, as Boothby observes, "the transmission of meaning in speech depends upon accurate reception of sound, but reception of sound depends upon some preliminary grasp of meaning.") 39 Simply put, when the minimal unit of content is taken, by the speaker a n d / o r the listener, to be the Saussurean sign (as in any extra-analytic discourse where meaning/sense is at stake, this accounting for the vast majority of linguistic contexts), then

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the emergent structural form will entail linkages constrained by concerns over comprehensibility and communicability (in Freudian parlance, the resulting formal network will be of a "secondary process" sort). However, when the minimal unit is taken, by the analyst, to be the Saussurean signifier in its bare, brute, meaningless, and nonsensical materiality (as an acoustic a n d / o r graphic material trace at play within secondary pro­ cess networks), then the resulting form will unfold itself without regard for comprehensibility and communicability (in Freudian parlance, the resulting formal network will be of a "primary process" sort—thus, the Lacanian practice of analyzing chains of material signifiers as detached from their supposedly complementary signifieds does indeed bring one closer to those associational patterns presumed to be characteristic of unconscious thought processes). So, returning to the main thread of this discussion, why does Zizek apparently overlook the materialism associated with Lacan 's theory of the signifier (explicitly present even in his teachings from the beginning of the 1950s) in hastily conceding that the early Lacan is an idealist? And why doesn't Zizek recur to this dimension of Lacanian thought in order to insist, in line with his strategic sense of the need for a contemporary reversal of Marx's "thesis eleven," that the best types of materialist "acts" today, the ones most likely to succeed, are those that take aim at the mate­ rially incarnate versions of capitalism's master signifiers (an omnipresent substance transmitted through, for example, commercial mass media, a "cultural" substance analyzed in excruciating detail by Zizek himself)? Couldn't Lacan 's ideas serve as justifications for the view that theorizing itself is a mode of concrete practice, especially since psychoanalysis ren­ ders problematic standard conceptions of the distinction between think­ ing and acting? The short answer to this last question is "yes"; signifiers, in Lacan 's broad sense, are the material units of ideology in its effective actuality. Hence, intervening in such a way as to alter the configuration of these units would amount to a direct attack upon the very substance of ideology itself. However, the absence of this type of Lacan-underwritten argument in Zizek's political thought indicates something important. Following Lacan, Zizek describes instances of the tactic of "lying in the guise of truth" and points to late-capitalist cynicism as a key example of this (here, cyni­ cally knowing the truth that "the System" is a vacuous sham produces no real change in behavior, no decision to stop acting "as if" this big Other is something with genuine substantiality) .40 Zizek proclaims that "the start­ ing point of the critique of ideology has to be full acknowledgement of the fact that it is easily possible to he in the guise of truth."41 Although the Lacanian blurring of the boundary between theoretical thinking and

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practical acting might very well be completely true, accepting it as true in­ evitably risks strengthening a convenient alibi—the creation of this alibi has long been a fait accompli for which Lacan alone hardly could be held responsible—for the worst sort of intellectualized avoidance of praxis. Academics can reassure themselves convincingly that their inaccessible, abstract musings, the publications of which are perused only by their tiny self-enclosed circle of "ivory tower" colleagues, aren't irrelevant ob­ scurities made possible by tacit complicity with a certain socioeconomic system, but, rather, radical political interventions that promise sweeping changes of the predominating situation. If working on signifiers is the same as working in the streets, then why dirty one's hands bothering with the latter? Consequently, if Zizek is to avoid allowing for a lapse into this comfortable academic illusion, an illusion for which Lacan could all too easily be perverted into offering rationalizing excuses, he must eventu­ ally stipulate a series of "naive" extra-theoretical/extra-discursive actions (actions that hopefully will become acts after their enactment) as part of a coherent political platform for the embattled Left. His rejection of Marx's positive program as anachronistic is not without justifications. But, in the wake of Zizek's clearing of the ground for something New in politics, there is still much to be done. A brief remark by Zizek hints that, despite his somewhat pessimistic assessment of traditional Marxism, he basically agrees with the MarxistLeninist conviction that the demise of capitalism is an inevitable, un­ avoidable historical necessity: "The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical Left proposals are Utopian should thus be that, today, the true Utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes."42 This hurling of the charge of utopianism back at those making it is quite convincing. In fact, any system proclaiming to be the embodiment of "the end of history" in­ variably appears to be Utopian. Given what is known about the merciless march of history, believing that an ultimate, unsurpassable sociopolitical arrangement finally has arrived is almost impossible (in this respect, the Maoist conception of contradiction is more appropriate here) ,43 So, one should indeed accept as true the unlikelihood of capitalism continuing on indefinitely; it must eventually give way to something else, even if this X cannot be envisioned clearly from within the present context. None­ theless, Zizek's own theorizing calls for a great deal of cautious reserva­ tion about the consequences of embracing this outlook as true, of fall­ ing into the trap of (to invoke this motif once more) lying in the guise of truth. Just as the combination of a purely negative, critical Marxism with the anticipation of the miraculous event of the act threatens to turn into an intellectual fetish (in the Zizekian ideological sense of something

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that renders the present reality bearable), so too might acknowledging the truth of capitalism's finitude have the same unfortunate side effect. One can tolerate today's capitalism, because one knows that it cannot last forever; one can passively and patiently wait it out (at one point, Zizek identifies this anticipation of indeterminate change yet to come as a disempowering lure, although he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that his own work on ideology sometimes appears to be enthralled byjust such a lure).44 In both cases, the danger is that the very analyses developed by Zizek in his assault upon late-capitalist ideology might serve to facilitate the sustenance of the cynical distance whose underlying complicity with the current state of affairs he describes so well.

4

From the Spectacular Act to the Vanishing Act: The Politics of Lacanian Theory

§ 16 The Inherent Prematurity of the Political: Badiou, Zizek, and Lenin's Legacy After viewing Astra Taylor's recently released documentary film on him, those familiar with Zizek might be left with the false impression that they've heard it all before. Here as elsewhere, Zizek's approach perhaps risks striking some as being much like that of a professional comedian, not only in terms of content (à la the numerous elements of humor pep­ pered throughout his writings and talks) but also in terms of method. More specifically, at certain moments in the film, it sounds as though he rehearses a series of bits that have been carefully polished through repeated retelling. As has sometimes been claimed, maybe it seems that part of his art resides, like that of a skilled comedian, in slightly modi­ fying the reiterated bits themselves and the transitions between them. However, the impression that there's nothing new said in Zizek! The Movie by its protagonist is wrong. The crucial twist Zizek introduces in Taylor's film has to do with how he presently positions himself with respect to the political dimension of his corpus. He strongly suspects it cannot be the case that the majority of his audience shares with him a passion for Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and German idealist philosophy. Rather, he admits to experienc­ ing himself in relation to this mass as the object of transference-style investments—more specifically, the expectations of left-leaning readers that he will play the part of the brilliant intellectual who, as a secular messiah, finally furnishes them with a succinct formula for the dissolution of capitalism and the ushering in of some sort of reinvigorated variety of socialism. Zizek not only protests in various ways that he doesn't possess such a formula (and that the anticipations of being handed this magic anti-capitalist bullet by him flow from beliefs in nonexistent, fictional solutions woefully underestimating the complexities of the contempo­ rary world)—he cleverly makes a virtue out of this (as he describes it) de127

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centering of his subjectivity that results from his audience pinning their false political hopes on him. Implicitly departing from Lacan 's portrayal of transference as arising from the analysand's conflicted conferral upon the analyst of the status of the "subject supposed to know,"1 Zizek does so by opting, like a Lacanian analyst, to use the enigma of his desire as a magnet to extract from those transferentially relating to him qua the political sujet supposé savoir the structure of the underlying fantasies in­ forming this demand to be provided with a definitive, easily encapsulated response to the problems of late-capitalism. Much like the "Che vuoiV (i.e., the provocative mystery of the desire of the Other) which, accord­ ing to Lacan, is one of the key spurs driving the construction of the for­ mations of the unconscious underpinning desiring subjectivity,2 the ques­ tion "Politically speaking, what does Zizek want?" is not really a question Zizek answers. Instead, this query left hanging is a puzzling riddle he now intends to preserve as such in order to encourage what he hopes will be a searching process of self-analysis in his politically minded readers. Zizek's recent reinvention of himself as an analyst-like object of transferential cathexes stemming from the political fantasies of others not only ingeniously makes a virtue out of the necessity of his lack of control over both the dissemination of his texts (as Derrida might say) as well as the role imputed to him by his audience—this reinvention might also be the response to an impasse internal to the Zizekian theoretical edifice itself. To be more precise, perhaps it's not just his readers who are left asking the question of what Zizek desires politically; maybe this desire is enigmatic for Zizek himself. A survey of his numerous forays into the realm of politics (an endeavor not to be undertaken here) reveals, through the apparent absence of a systematic unity to these scattered interventions (especially when contrasted with the elegant coherence of his ontology and accompanying account of subjectivity), ample evidence in favor of this hypothesis that Zizek too is plagued by the riddle of what he wants at the political level. This is not wrongly to say that he fails to en­ gage with concrete political facts and circumstances. Rather, this is simply to observe that these engagements don't seem to reveal a single under­ lying conceptual-theoretical framework (of course, perhaps one could defend Zizek here by claiming that he's adhering to Lenin's insistence on "concrete analyses of concrete situations"). Anyhow, in this case, Zizek's analysis of his audience is, like any analysis worthy of the name, also an ongoing self-analysis. And, as will be argued here, part of what hinders Zizek from answering the "Che vuoiV query that could self-reflexively be posed by him in relation to the missing details of an explicit, specific, and coherently integrated political program is his theoretical commitment to models of change resembling those proposed by Badiou and based on selective readings of particular notions located in Lacan 's oeuvre.

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Before turning to an examination of certain of his politically moti­ vated borrowings from Lacan 's teachings, a few things ought to be said about Zizek's multifaceted relationship with Badiou (given that, over the years, Zizek has discussed numerous aspects of Badiouian philosophy and politics, what follows here will be based on a very limited sampling of recent Zizekian glosses on Badiou's body of work). Zizek is an active par­ ticipant in the previously outlined debates regarding Badiouian political thought (see chapter 1, section 3), tending to argue against Bosteels's defenses of Badiou and in favor of the Hallward-Bensaïd-Marchart cri­ tique of this allegedly quasi-religious "flash politics." Situating himself as part of the latter camp, Zizek likewise opts to portray Badiou's concept of the event as akin to a miracle (although this portrayal is sometimes shamelessly positive, in line with Zizek's advocacy on behalf of a secular appropriation of select theological ideas) ,3 as well as suspiciously to ques­ tion why, despite resorting to a study of Saint Paul in order to epitomize essential aspects of the event-subject-truth axis, Badiou cautiously avoids adding religion to his list of the generic procedures generating truths. 4 (Eric Santner also pleads for a recognition of the "theological back­ ground" against which Badiou's portrait of event-driven truth-trajectories is painted.) 5 Since his extended discussion of Badiou in the chapter entitled "The Politics of Truth, or Alain Badiou as a Reader of Saint Paul" in the 1999 book The Ticklish Subject, Zizek has added, in the meantime, numer­ ous inflections and nuances to his critical interpretations of Badiouian thought. Of special interest here is the Zizekian perspective on Badiou's politics. In a couple of texts written during the past few years (especially the 2002 afterword to the edited collection of Lenin's 1917 writings and the 2006 book The Parallax View), Zizek embellishes further on his charge that Badiou's break with Marx through the insistence on divorcing poli­ tics (as a generic procedure involving specific events, subjects, and truths) from economics (as a field hopelessly enmeshed in the representational matrices of the state-of-the-situation) basically leads to a purified politics without politics.6 He contends that Badiou and Lazarus make repeated references to Lenin, references that tend to skirt around direct mention of Marx, for a very precise reason: Lenin's rejection of the Marxist (or, as Lenin sees it, pseudo-Marxist) notion that one should wait for the historically ripe revolutionary moment before intervening (i.e., Marx's "scientific" vision, exaggerated by Second International economism, of preordained, inevitable historical progress toward the final, fated victory of the proletariat) is in line with the position of Badiou and Lazarus ac­ cording to which the consideration of political processes (such as revolu­ tions) can and should be kept entirely separate from (Marxist or other) analyses of the ostensibly nonpolitical social, historical, and economic

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domains, d o m a i n s supposedly lacking (the capacity to generate) events, subjects, a n d truths. 7 T h e n Zizek quickly formulates a n o t h e r criticism of Badiou in a footnote c o n t a i n e d in his afterword to Lenin's 1917 writings, a criticism arguably (although n o t obviously) linked to his assertion that the Badiouian preference for Lenin over Marx, based o n the separation of poli­ tics from economics, 8 leads to politics b e i n g deprived of m u c h of its es­ sential political sting. Invoking Benjamin's "Theses o n the Philosophy of History," in particular its c o n c e p t i o n of revolutionary upheavals as arising o u t of a n d retroactively vindicating p r e c e d i n g concatenations of failed, foreclosed m o m e n t s e n t o m b e d within t h e historical past, 9 Zizek states: In so far as these past failures herald their revolutionary redemption to come, they "prognosticate" the future revolutionary miracle which will retroactively redeem them. Furthermore, in so far as Alain Badiou's name for the miracle is "Event" . . . we can deploy from Benjamin's "Theses" a kind of critique avant la lettre of Badiou: an Event does not occur out of nowhere; not only does it take place within what Badiou calls a site événementielle, it is even "prognosticated" by a series of past failed Events.10 This critique of B a d i o u is based o n Zizek's r e a d i n g of t h e Badiouian event as an ex nihilo p h e n o m e n o n , as "an intervention that c a n n o t be accounted for in terms of its pre-existing 'objective conditions.' " n Zizek claims that with Badiou . . . the idea is that event is something that emerges out of nothing. You have in the positive reality of being what Badiou calls site événementielle, the potential site of the event, but the event is, as it were, an abyssal self-grounded autonomous act. You cannot derive event from or reduce it to some order of being.12 According to Badiou's conceptualization of it, t h e éventai site i n d e e d functions as a necessary b u t n o t sufficient condition for the u n e x p e c t e d u p s u r g e of an event (as B e r n a r d Vainqueur puts it, an éventai site is a non-causal c o n d i t i o n for an event). 1 3 In fact, Badiou strictly prohibits the i m m a n e n t , intra-situational delineation of the sufficient condition (s) triggering an event's e m e r g e n c e out of a given site. From his perspec­ tive, if o n e is able positively to delineate such sufficient conditions us­ ing the available resources of extant knowledge in the world (i.e., what h e calls the "encyclopedia" of the situation), 1 4 t h e n o n e is n o t dealing

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with an event qua event. The specifically éventai character of the event (what could be dubbed its "event-ness") resides in its quasi-miraculous inexplicability, its lack of comprehensible (pre) conditions, in relation to the preceding state-of-the-situation with which its respective site is en­ tangled.15 In his short book on Saint Paul, Badiou unhesitatingly affirms that "the event's sudden emergence never follows from the existence of an éventai site. Although it requires conditions of immanence, that sud­ den emergence nevertheless remains of the order of grace."16 Of course, the concepts of site and event are quite closely connected with each other in the organization of the Badiouian philosophical sys­ tem. However, as Zizek's above-quoted remarks accurately indicate (and as Badiou openly admits), an abyss nonetheless separates the event from its site. (One should note that elsewhere, in his 2001 book On Belief, Zizek is seemingly opposed to his previously cited critique, circa 2004, of the miraculous ex nihilo emergence of an event out of a site, dismissing this critique as emblematic of a misguided "standard historicist criticism" of Badiouian philosophy, an objection that, moreover, knocks on the pro­ verbial open door insofar as Badiou freely confesses to rehabilitating a certain notion of grace.) 17 This abyss takes the form of a gap between analyzable, foreseeable cause-and-effect chains unfurling themselves within the domains of the "onto-logical" (Badiou's neologism referring to being as structured by regimes of re/presentation) 18 and the irruption of an ap­ parently uncaused X that seems completely to defy (re) inscription back within these same chains. (Thus, when Bosteels employs the concept of éventai site to buttress with yet another piece of evidence his central con­ tention that Badiou is a committed materialist who carefully avoids posit­ ing a sharp idealist-style split between being and event,19 this is selectively to emphasize the close relation between event and site while downplaying the distant non-relation that nonetheless separates them—to quote the title of Badiou's introduction to his book on Deleuze: "So Near! So Far!") The particular indictment of Badiou that Zizek formulates through refer­ ence to Benjamin is no doubt motivated, at least in part, by the far from unwarranted concern that the pre-evental darkness in which Badiou leaves asubjective individuals enshrouded, a darkness awaiting its own dispersal through the unpredictable arrival of an event's illumination, has the potential to be politically discouraging and disempowering—and this because all that's left to do is to wait for the coming of the éventai happening, a time of indeterminate duration bided by people stuck lin­ gering in historical waiting rooms, stranded loitering around until an event suddenly calls upon them to become its subjects.20 By explicitly pro­ hibiting the possibility of explaining how events arise from sites, Badiou also risks implicitly prohibiting the drawing of lessons from past events so

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as to learn a politically valuable art of prophecy, namely, an aptitude for m a k i n g educated pre-evental guesses (or what Hallward calls " h u n c h e s " [see a p p e n d i x A below] ) a b o u t the hows, whats, a n d wheres of events to c o m e . O n the basis of such guesses, individuals could choose to e n g a g e in a n o t h e r practice of forçage (passed over in silence by Badiou o n the ba­ sis of his philosophical principles) : a pre-evental forcing aimed at extract­ ing or precipitating an event o u t of a site. What's m o r e , this pre-evental forcing should be i n f o r m e d by a critique of ideology o n the lookout for configurations a n d locales internal to situations t h a t m i g h t have possible change-category statuses o t h e r than the ones they a p p e a r to bear within their s u r r o u n d i n g worlds, thus increasing the likelihood of successfully short-circuiting state apparatuses by surgically targeting possible places of ideologically masked vulnerability. R e t u r n i n g to the Zizekian thread of the discussion, an o d d detail cries o u t for attention h e r e . Despite his critical reservations a b o u t t h e potentially tailist a n d / o r quietist consequences of Badiou's b a n o n por­ traying the h a p p e n i n g of events as b e i n g in any way causally linked to their c o r r e s p o n d i n g sites, Zizek sometimes opts to sing the praises of this same Badiouian gesture of insisting u p o n the presence of breaks in the chains of worldly cause-and-effect structures. In his 2003 The Puppet and the Dwarf, h e describes the "time of the Event" as "not a n o t h e r time beyond a n d above the ' n o r m a l ' historical time," b u t as "a kind of i n n e r loop within this time." 2 1 H e proceeds to specify, in what c a n n o t b u t ini­ tially a p p e a r as d e e p solidarity with Badiou, that the question "In what circumstances does the condensed time of the Event emerge?" is a false one: it involves the reinscription of the Event back into the positive historical process. That is to say: we cannot estab­ lish the time of the explosion of the Event through a close "objective" historical analysis (in the style of "when objective contradictions reach such and such a level, things will explode") : diere is no Event outside the engaged subjective decision which creates it—if we wait for the time to become ripe for the Event, the Event will never occur.22 Zizek t h e n immediately cites the O c t o b e r Revolution as his p r i m e ex­ a m p l e of this set of claims a b o u t éventai temporality (and, in line with Bosteels's a n d Toscano's emphases on how the post-evental labors of forc­ ing carried o u t by subjects-of-events are p r o t r a c t e d processes of sustained struggle [see c h a p t e r 1, section 3 above], h e also, in this p o r t i o n of The Puppet and the Dwarf as well as elsewhere, u n d e r s c o r e s that "the real h a r d work awaits us o n the m o r n i n g after," 23 that truly revolutionary occur­ rences require e n d u r i n g discipline in the sobering long shadow cast by

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an explosive, intoxicating happening). 24 This aspect of Badiou's prox­ imity to Lenin is, in Zizek's view, an asset rather than a liability (as per the previously mentioned Zizekian allegation that Badiou uses Lenin's understanding of revolutionary political dynamics to avoid Marx's close linking of politics to history and economics). How is one to make sense of Zizek's vacillations between, on the one hand, criticizing the ex nihilo features of the event in relation to its site (on the basis of his Benjamininspired notion of historically prior failures of events to materialize as causal, catalytic "prognosticators" of actual events in the present) and, on the other hand, appearing to endorse the Badiouian refusal to allow for the grounding of events in their respective situations/worlds? What ex­ plains this tension? Is this an instance of an unspoken split between pre­ scriptive and descriptive levels of analysis—in other words, prescriptively speaking, positing a gap of inexplicability and unpredictability between site and event is objectionable insofar as it is in danger of encouraging political tailism/quietism, but, descriptively speaking, it is indeed the case that such gaps subsist between éventai ruptures and their contex­ tual backgrounds? Before tackling these important questions, invoking the figure of Lenin one more time (albeit in a manner different from Zizek's Badiourelated invocations of him outlined previously) is pertinent at this point As noted, in certain places, Zizek asserts that Badiou keeps Lenin close in order to maintain Marx (qua theorist of the critique of political economy) at a distance. However, at another, more obvious level, Badiou could not be further from a figure of Lenin that Zizek himself takes great care to highlight approvingly. It should be observed that Badiou's theory of the event is directly at odds with the tacit conceptions of event and forcing to be found within Lenin's thought. Zizek's fashion of interpreting the significance of Lenin and his legacy lays great stress upon the theme that the time for revolution is rarely, if ever, ripe, that waiting around for the evolutionary historical progression toward the "right moment" ends up justifying an interminable forestalling of active, direct intervention. 25 Hence, a Leninist perspective on (political) events would be quite distinct from that put forward by the post-1988 Badiou himself. The Zizekian interpretation of Lenin's writings suggests something already proposed here: in certain circumstances, forcing must precede, rather than simply follow, an event. A forcing prior to the actual event itself must seize an opportunity arising by chance for disruption (i.e., some sort of structural flaw or historical vulnerability, the "weakest link" as a proverbial chink in the armor of the status quo) inadvertently presented by the reigning state-of-the-situation. This point of weakness within a state's constellation must be grasped firmly beforehand (steered by the discerning gaze of

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one not fooled, not taken in, by the préexistent distribution of relations and roles as influenced by statist ideologies) in order to spark an event's occurrence. Badiou, by contrast, describes the labor of forcing as trans­ piring only after the fact of an éventai occurrence; the already-past event is identified following its having appeared and disappeared, and exclu­ sively in the aftermath of this vanished winking can the work of stretching out the effects of its truth-consequences through forcing move forward under the guidance of subjects-of-the-event. From a traditional Marxist-Leninist perspective, the politicoideological risks run by Badiou are very high indeed. In forging a notion of forcing as something that is restricted merely to operating in the wake of an event (i.e., as a strictly post-evental process), Badiou treats events (including political ones) as anonymous and mysterious happenings. Badiouian events cannot be forced into occurring; as others have justifiably described them, such moments just pop up within the current scene as out-of-nowhere miracles. This sort of purposive refusal to think through in precise details the preconditions for the genesis of events is incom­ patible with Lenin's insistence that, in initiating a revolution, one must "prematurely" force an event before it actually transpires spontaneously (in the mode of organically emerging out of the defiles of sociohistorical trends) by deliberately and nimbly exploiting whatever small chances there are in a situation despite the overall absence of the "proper condi­ tions" for this event's blooming. In short, Badiou's adamant insistence on there being a theoretically unbridgeable divide between an event and its pre-evental background (including his position that all subjects, with their capacities for forcing, are post-evental) forecloses considering how concrete forms of engaged praxis might, in certain instances, participate in precipitating in advance an ensuing éventai sequence.

§17 Out of Which Nowhere? Badiou's Trans-Ontological Event versus Zizek's Eventai Ontology With the preceding observations concerning aspects of Zizek's position­ ing of himself with respect to Badiou in mind, it's now possible to grasp adequately certain threads of argumentation pertaining to Badiouian philosophy laid out in The Parallax View. One of Zizek's agendas in this text is the stipulation of what an authentic, defensible materialist philo­ sophical platform involves. Zizek claims therein that "from the mate­ rialist standpoint, an Event emerges 'out of nowhere' within a specific constellation of Being—the space of an Event is the minimal 'empty' dis-

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tance between two beings, the 'other' dimension which shines through this gap."1 Although there is a superficial appearance of inconsistency between this statement and his criticisms of the ex nihilo character of the Badiouian event cited earlier, this tension is, as will soon become clear, merely apparent; the key to dissolving what here seems like a contradic­ tion resides in Zizek's linking of this "nowhere" (as in "out of nowhere") to fundamental aspects of being per se, to fissures and splits immanent to l'être en tant qu'être. More specifically, Zizek, treating Lacan's declaration "Le grand Autre n'existe pas" as an axiom for the construction of a general ontology,2 asserts that genuine materialism (as opposed to variants of idealism, however unapologetic or disguised) requires accepting the full ontological consequences of the big Other's nonexistence. What does this mean? Zizek explains: That is the difference between idealism and materialism: for the ideal­ ist, we experience our situation as "open" insofar as we are engaged in it, while the same situation appears "closed" from the standpoint of finality, that is, from the eternal point of view of the omnipotent and all-knowing God who alone can perceive the world as a closed totality; for the materialist, the "openness" goes all the way down, that is, neces­ sity is not the underlying universal law that secretiy regulates the chaotic interplay of appearances—it is the "All" itself which is non-All, inconsis­ tent, marked by an irreducible contingency3 In the Zizekian reading of Lacanian theory, the phrase big Other is con­ strued as simultaneously referring to a number of different but related things (Lacan himself uses this phrase in multiple ways as well). Here, the big Other's nonexistence designates the absence of any sort of ultimate One-All, an onto-theological totality holding being qua being together as an organic whole, a unified cosmos. Zizek's ontology is that of an Otherless being, a groundless acosmos devoid of inner consistency and shot through with antagonisms, cracks, fissures, and splits. Elsewhere, with reference to the figure of the crucified Christ, Zizek explicitly ties mate­ rialism to the concession that the big Other does not exist:4 "The singular point of the emergence of materialism is signaled by Christ's words on the cross: 'Father, why hast thou forsaken me?'—in this moment of total abandonment, the subject experiences and fully assumes the nonexistence of the big Other."5 At least in this, he and Badiou are on roughly the same page given the latter's set-theoretic portrayal of l'être en tant qu'être as a non-totalizable proliferation of multiplicities, of infinite varieties of infin­ ities, lacking any bound closure in the direction of either the macrocosm (an upper limit) or the microcosm (a lower limit). And yet, their shared acosmism qua unqualified rejection of every

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sort of possible onto-theological One-All notwithstanding, Zizek n o n e ­ theless employs his m a n n e r of distinguishing between idealism a n d ma­ terialism (as articulated in The Parallax View) b o t h to paint a picture of Badiou as a closet idealist a n d to call into question the legitimacy of the Badiouian move of outsourcing ontology from philosophy to m a t h e ­ matics. Moreover, Zizek's accusation of idealism directed against Badi­ ouian philosophy is based o n Badiou's p r o h i b i t i o n of considering t h e pre-evental p r o d u c t i o n of an event, the genesis of an event o u t of (mate­ rial) being: Badiou . . . asserts the radical "dualism" between Event and the order of being. It is here, in this terrain, that we should locate today's struggle between idealism and materialism: idealism posits an ideal Event which cannot be accounted for in terms of its material (pre) conditions, while the materialist wager is that we can get "behind" the event and explore how Event explodes out of the gap in/of the order of Being.6 Badiou, in the intricate elaboration of his m a t h e m a t i z e d ontology, con­ sistently portrays b e i n g q u a being as the "not O n e " of an "inconsistent multiplicity" without any overarching, t r a n s c e n d e n t O t h e r or underlying, g r o u n d i n g foundation. 7 And, as recently as his foreword to Q u e n t i n Meillassoux's 2006 b o o k Après lafinitude: Essai sur la nécessité de la contingence, Badiou, endorsing the central thesis of this work, argues in favor of a ma­ terialism (un) g r o u n d e d o n the idea t h a t everything which is ultimately rests on a (non-) f o u n d a t i o n of radical chaos, o n telos-less contingencies without any final law of necessity. 8 (The late Althusser's sketch of a project for the construction of an "aleatory materialism" involving a "philosophy of the e n c o u n t e r " [a philosophy of the event, in Badiou's language] also could be m e n t i o n e d in this context. 9 However, as Bosteels insightfully suggests in an interview with Badiou, p e r h a p s Althusser the teacher be­ came, d u r i n g the early 1980s, the s t u d e n t of his s t u d e n t in this case, drawing inspiration for his aleatory materialism from Badiou's e m e r g i n g philosophical apparatus.) 1 0 Despite all this, Zizek claims to detect, in the distinction between b e i n g a n d event, the h i d d e n kernel of a certain sort of idealism that tries to pass itself off as a variant of materialism. To b e m o r e precise, Zizek's a r g u m e n t is that Badiou's n e e d philosophically to prohibit the theoretical delineation of the (pre-evental) e m e r g e n c e of the éventai o u t of t h e ontological, a p r o h i b i t i o n Zizek identifies as be­ traying the allegedly idealist core buried within the h e a r t of Badiouian philosophy, is an inevitable, necessary by-product of mathematizing on­ tology, of insisting t h a t set theory is the sole "science" u p to the task of thinking l'être en tant qu'être. In Organs Without Bodies, Zizek describes what

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h e sees as the p r o p e r m a n n e r in which g e n u i n e materialism would ac­ c o m m o d a t e the p h e n o m e n a Badiou struggles to grasp via his f u n d a m e n ­ tal distinction between being a n d event: The materialist solution is . . . that the Event is nothing but its own in­ scription into the order of Being, a cut/rupture in the order of Being on account of which Being cannot ever form a consistent All. There is no Beyond of Being that inscribes itself into the order of Being. There "is" nothing but the order of Being . . . An Event does not curve the space of Being through its inscription into it: on the contrary, an Event is nothing but this curvature of the space of Being. "All there is" is the interstice, the nonself-coincidence, of Being, namely, the ontological nonclosure of the order of Being. What this means at the ontological level is that, ultimately, one should reject Badiou's notion of mathe­ matics (the theory of pure multiplicity) as the only consistent ontology (science of Being): if mathematics is ontology, then, to account for the gap between Being and Event, one either remains stuck in dualism or one has to dismiss the Event as an ultimately illusory local occurrence within the encompassing order of Being. Against this notion of multi­ plicity, one should assert as the ultimate ontological given the gap that separates the One from within.11 In The Parallax View, w h e n Zizek asserts that materialism attempts (un­ like Badiouian philosophy) to think the preconditions for t h e surfacing of events o u t of being, the line of a r g u m e n t a t i o n in this q u o t a t i o n im­ mediately above is r e p e a t e d almost verbatim. 1 2 Zizek's p o i n t is that Ba­ diou's identification of events as distinctively exceptional insofar as they are instances of what is n o t b e i n g q u a being 1 3 (i.e., an other-than-being that nevertheless is n o t nothing) relies, w h e n all is said a n d d o n e , o n the elementary decision to distinguish between being a n d non-being. ( O n e could claim, as Zizek insinuates, that a hallmark of materialism is a re­ fusal to allow for the possibility of this gesture of setting apart a category of other-than-being beyond being, a gesture that marks the first step o n the p a t h back to idealism.) F u r t h e r m o r e , this Zizekian angle of criticism suggests that b i n d i n g the o r d e r of b e i n g to the inflexible, u n b e n d i n g skeleton of rigorous mathematics entails i m p u t i n g too m u c h order, regu­ larity, a n d lawfulness to being, namely, the d e p l o y m e n t of a n ontology that depicts l'être en tant qu'être as structured t h r o u g h a n d t h r o u g h (and in such a fashion as to permit exhaustive formalization). O p p o s i n g himself to what h e takes to be Badiou's position in matters ontological, Zizek, in his m o r e Hegelian manner, proposes an Otherless ontology in which those dimensions Badiou seeks to capture at the level of non-being (i.e.,

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events as irruptions of radical newness) are to b e found within the do­ m a i n of b e i n g itself, a being whose internally conflicted fragility leaves it o p e n to i m m a n e n t breaks forming parts of its unstable processes of self-sundering.

§18 Do Nothing! Opting for Aggressive Passivity But n o t only does all of this s o u n d r a t h e r abstract a n d obscure—it seems to lack obvious relevance for an analysis of political theory à la Badiou a n d Zizek. W h a t implications, if any, d o these discussions of ontology have for politics? Fortunately, Zizek himself takes the trouble to spell o u t the political p e r t i n e n c e of these philosophical musings. In his es­ say "Lenin's Choice," h e has a couple of things to say a b o u t the links between ontology a n d politics in Badiouian philosophy. At o n e point, Zizek quickly p r o c e e d s from challenging Badiou's strict partitioning of political from social spheres to questioning the validity of the posited gap between t h e ontological a n d the éventai: Alain Badiou goes wrong when he insists on a strict frontier between the Political and the Social (the domain of State, of history)—he con­ cedes too much: namely, that society exists. Against this concession, we should endorse the thesis, articulated by Laclau and Mouffe, that "so­ ciety doesn't exist"—that society is not a positive field, since the gap of the Political is inscribed into its very foundations (Marx's name for the political which traverses the entire social body is "class struggle"). Ba­ diou concedes too much when he accepts that there is the order of Be­ ing, and then goes on to how an Event is possible. Just as society doesn't exist, we should formulate the basic materialist thesis that "the world doesn't exist" (or, in Badiou's terms, that there is no order of Being). 1 O n e of the claims advanced h e r e is that the b e i n g of any a n d every so­ cial field—in Badiou's parlance, a sociohistorical situation as structured either by a presentational count-as-one with its c o r r e s p o n d i n g represen­ tational state or by a world with its appearances configured a n d organized via a transcendental r e g i m e — s h o u l d n o t b e theorized as a h o m o g e n e ­ ous, stable network of relations against which exceptional points of irruptive éventai newness collide, a solid slab of extant existence s u r r o u n d i n g éventai sites q u a r a r e loci of internal exclusion within state-regulated sociohistorical situations/worlds. ( O n e certainly could debate with Zizek

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as to whether Badiou is guilty of such a theoretical supposition.) As will soon be explained in greater detail, Zizek's Marx-influenced political deployment of his ontologized version of the Lacanian thesis regard­ ing the big Other's nonexistence leads him to portray the underlying being of the social body (i.e., the symbolic Other) as a jumble of con­ flicts and tensions. As heterogeneous and inconsistent, split and fissured in its very (non-) essence, the not-whole ensembles of social strata always contain, within their midst, a plethora of political (or, at a minimum, proto-political) potentials. From this Zizekian perspective, society alwaysalready harbors the political in-itself, an in-itself with the ability to be­ come for-itself under the right circumstances. (Of course, a Bosteels-type rebuttal to the above would be to contend, perhaps invoking aspects of Badiou's Théorie du sujet, that this very shift from the socially immanent proto-political in-itself to the fully political for-itself involves a torsion through which a break between the social and the political proper is in­ ternally produced out of the not-whole social body itself—perhaps akin to the earlier-invoked Schellingian dynamic of the immanent genesis of the thereafter transcendent [see chapter 1, section 2].) But what about Zizek's leap from this Marxist-Lacanian problematization of the Badiouian manner of divorcing the political from the so­ cial to his assertion, ostensibly contra Badiou, that "there is no order of Being"? Later on in "Lenin's Choice," Zizek observes that the Badiouian separation of politics from society (à la a politics "purified" of any depen­ dence upon empirical factors and forces tied to the historical, the eco­ nomic, the cultural, and so on—a politics Badiou has taken to describing as "non-expressive" qua not limited to manifesting préexistent social is­ sues) 2 is based upon the distinction between being and event: In Badiou, the root of this notion of pure "politics," radically autono­ mous with regard to history, society, economy, State, even Party, is his opposition between Being and Event—the space of an Event is the minimally "empty" distance between beings, the "other" dimension which shines through this gap.3 The last lines of this quotation reappear verbatim in a previously cited passage from The Parallax View (a passage situated in the context of a dis­ cussion concerning the precise differences between idealism and materi­ alism, a discussion in which Badiou is accused of being an idealist despite his fierce objections to the contrary). A crucial interpretive question im­ mediately presents itself here: is the characterization of the concept of event following the dash ("the space of an Event is the minimally 'empty' distance between beings, the 'other' dimension which shines through

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this gap") m e a n t to b e a representation of Badiou's specification of it or a statement of Zizek's own version of this notion? T h e latter seems to b e the case (especially in light of this statement's s u b s e q u e n t r e c u r r e n c e in 2006). Zizek thinks of this depiction of events as anti-Badiouian— t h e f r a g m e n t e d field of l'être en tant qu'être is p e r m e a t e d by what o n e could call "event potentials" insofar as Zizek's Otherless ontology por­ trays being itself as delicate a n d unstable—because, based on his philo­ sophical framework's ontological c o m m i t m e n t s , h e refuses to maintain a sharp distinction between being a n d n o n - b e i n g (recalling that Badiou does i n d e e d recognize such a difference to the e x t e n t that h e identifies t h e éventai as what-is-not-being-qua-being or what is other-than-being [see c h a p t e r 1, section 4 ] ) . From the Zizekian standpoint, the ordinary being of society is n o t to be opposed to the extraordinary event of poli­ tics—the very "substance" of the former (as an insubstantial inexistence) consists of (even if it usually works to conceal) t h e negativity at play in t h e antagonisms a n d clashes of the latter (this is a n o t h e r place where Badiou a n d Badiouians w o u l d n ' t b e without responses). Elsewhere, Zizek further develops this line of criticism t h r o u g h ref­ e r e n c e to Badiou's opposition between a politics of purification (involv­ ing forceful des true tiveness) a n d o n e of subtraction as laid o u t in t h e discussion of "the passion of the real" in his 2005 text Le siècle (see chap­ ter 1, section 4). H e alleges that Badiou, in o r d e r to preserve a clear-cut distinction between b e i n g a n d event, shies away from m a k i n g a clean break with passion-driven purification: In Le siècle, Badiou seems to oscillate between the plea for a direct fidelity to the twentieth-century "passion of the Real" and the prospect of passing from the politics of purification to the politics of subtrac­ tion. While he makes it fully clear that the horrors of the twentieth century, from the Holocaust to gulag, are a necessary outcome of the purification-mode of the "passion of the Real," and while he admits that protests against it are fully legitimate . . . he nonetheless stops short of renouncing it. Why? Because the consequent following of the logic of subtraction would have forced him to abandon the very frame of the opposition between Being and Event. Within the logic of subtraction, the Event is not external to the order of Being but located in the "minimal differ­ ence" inherent to the order of Being itself. Here, the parallel is strict between Badiou's two versions of the "passion of the Real" and the two main versions of the Real in Lacan: the Real as the destructive vortex, the inaccessible/impossible hard kernel that we cannot approach too much . . . and the Real as the pure Schein of a minimal difference, as another dimension that shines through between the gaps of the incon­ sistent reality.4

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On one level, Zizek's critique of Badiou is part of a process of self-critique. More specifically, through the parallel he draws between the Badiouian and Lacanian depictions of the Real, Zizek is here repudiating certain of his own renditions of this category (i.e., the notion of the Real as an "inaccessible/impossible hard kernel," a notion Zizek rejects as too closely resembling that of Kantian noumena) .5 Additionally, he definitely prefers the Badiouian politics of subtraction (supposedly requiring an "eventalized" being qua Otherless ontological domain permeated by fis­ sures and splits) to a purified politics tethered to an untenably strict partitioning of being and event. In more concrete political terms (and assuming that the Badiouian distinction between society and politics re­ flects that between being and event), one of the possible implications of this Zizekian stance vis-à-vis Badiou is the thesis that the resources for the initiation and sustenance of robust, full-fledged political sequences (i.e., the political for-itself) already (as the political in-itself) lie within the préexistent inconsistencies (i.e., the antagonisms and conflicts) of the not-whole social body. The tension-ridden differences saturating society, if employed properly, provide the very fulcrums and levers of genuine political change, rather than such change being possible (as some of Ba­ diou's formulations indicate) solely through a violent tearing away from the extant fabric of what exists within the spheres of the cultural, eco­ nomic, historical, and social status quo. Thus, it would seem that Zizek's political thought, as compared with Badiouian politics, allows for the Stipulation of a much more factually grounded and detailed program for brass-tacks, quotidian actions. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, this impres­ sion isn't entirely accurate. In several relatively recent reflections on political matters, Zizek, defying certain expectations, issues an impassioned call for inaction 6 (a call echoed in the title of one of his articles: "A Plea for 'Passive Aggressivity'"). He depicts the frenetic activism of various groups and or­ ganizations in what is left of leftism today as a type of "interpassivity,"7 namely, an "aggressive passivity"8 wherein one plunges into a blind flurry of movements in such a fashion that one's sociopolitical perpetual mo­ tion ensures that nothing really changes in any fundamental way. (In a letter from Marx's later years [1879], Marx and Engels somewhat simi­ larly speak of "people who, ostensibly engaged in indefatigable activity, not only do nothing themselves but try to prevent anything happening at all except—chatter.") 9 Along these lines, Zizek insists that the traditional Marxist injunction to escape from the lifeless enclosure of intangible theoretical speculations and jump into the domain of nitty-gritty, on-theground praxis requires inversion in light of the different circumstances presented by late-capitalism today (see chapter 3, section 15). In Zizek's view, the impatient desire to do away with the frustrations facing the con-

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temporary Left by hastily leaping from the exhausting labors of political or philosophical thinking (labors that sometimes a p p e a r to be hopeless a n d futile) to the cheap-and-easy instant ethico-moral gratification of p e r f o r m i n g a series of pragmatic non-intellectual actions goes n o w h e r e fast. Every activist project, in the absence of the p r o p e r conceptual guid­ ance provided by a thoroughly developed critique of late-capitalism in all its aspects (a critique Zizek seems to feel isn't yet fully formulated), is d e a d o n arrival. Such projects generally lack the potential to i n d u c e dysfunctions in t h e capitalist system (in fact, if anything, these reformist interventions, seen from a traditional Marxist-Leninist angle, t e n d to aid a n d abet the p e r p e t u a t i o n of the c u r r e n t system by preventing its most egregious injustices from contributing to t h e provocation of real systemt h r e a t e n i n g crises) .10 Against this "aggressive passivity" of pseudo-radical, anti-intellectual activism, Zizek argues that, at least for the time being, a tactical retreat into inactivity is t h e necessary p r e c o n d i t i o n for any possible act t h a t would have the potential to disrupt the workings of things as they pres­ ently stand. As h e puts it in his book-length c o m m e n t a r y o n the Iraq war, "The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to with­ draw from the compulsion to act, to ' d o n o t h i n g ' — t h u s o p e n i n g u p the space for a different kind of activity."11 Elsewhere, h e similarly states: We all know the pop-psychological notion of "passive-aggressive behav­ iour" . . . perhaps this attitude of passive aggressivity is a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard "interpassive" mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change. In such a constellation, the first truly critical ("aggressive," violent) step is to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participate—this is the necessary first step that, as it were, clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coor­ dinates of today's constellation.12 In this passage, Zizek deploys a Lacan-derived distinction central to his political t h o u g h t : t h e false activity of actions versus the true activity of acts. In How to Read Lacan, h e rearticulates, almost verbatim, the above remarks: Even in much of today's progressive politics, the danger is not passiv­ ity but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active and to participate. People intervene all the time, attempting to "do something," academics parucipate in meaningless debates; the truly difficult thing is to step back

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and to withdraw from it. Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence—just to engage us in a dialogue, to make sure that our ominous passivity is broken. Against such an interpassive mode, in which we are active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate. This first step clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the scene.13 A counterintuitive reversal of the vulgar quotidian view according to which practice is harder than theory—the latter is usually portrayed as easy and self-indulgent in comparison with the sweat and blood expended in the course of nontheoretical work conducted outside of the comfort­ able confines of the "ivory tower"—is operative here. From the Zizekian perspective, rushing out into the streets to join in a frenzy of impassioned concrete praxis is, at least nowadays, the temptation to be avoided, rather than the temptation of remaining within the distanced domain of intel­ lectual labors. Along these lines, Zizek, in The Parallax View, approvingly cites Badiou's fifteenth thesis on contemporary art:14 "It is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible that which Empire already recognizes as existent."15 Arguably, Zizek's conclusion that, in the current situation, inaction is preferable to action (at least to the false "pseudo-activity" of "aggressive passivity") is derived not only from careful observations of contemporary sociopolitical circumstances—another factor driving Zizek into this posi­ tion is his mode of distinguishing between actions and acts (a distinction inspired by and drawn from certain elements of Lacan's theoretical edi­ fice) . Moreover, the crux and thrust of this action-versus-act dichotomy, its basic gist, marks a point of profound affinity (despite all their differ­ ences) between Badiou and Zizek apropos the topic of how a situation gets changed, how it succumbs to radical transformation. Zizek draws attention to the striking similarities between his version of the Lacanian notion of act and Badiou's central concept of event,16 going so far as to identify Badiou as "the theorist of the Act."17 Likewise, Badiou, in reso­ nance with key features of the Zizekian description of acts (and echoing some of his own earlier pronouncements regarding the modalities of politics),18 speaks in recent writings of the processes that unfold along event-subject-truth axes as being endeavors to, as it were, make the im­ possible possible19—politically speaking, to alter the status quo to such an extent that what before seemed unthinkable under the constraints of an established regime becomes a realized actuality (correlatively but conversely, he contends that any truly emancipatory politics strives to render all non-egalitarian principles and practices "impossible" in the

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new situations and worlds it struggles to create). 20 In this same vein, Badiou insists that events don't "realize" possibilities; rather, events "create" possibilities21 (precisely there where, before an event, nothing seemed possible). But, if one returns to Lacan, how are acts contrasted with actions in his teachings? In what ways and to what extent is Zizek's interpreta­ tion of this aspect of Lacanian theory, motivated in part by political con­ siderations and concerns, indebted to elements of Lacan 's corpus? Are other readings of Lacan possible that would productively problematize the models of change promoted in the form of both the Zizekian act and the Badiouian event? Given that the answer to this last question is affir­ mative, it's worth taking some time to answer all three of these questions in the order in which they're posed here.

§ 19 The Genealogy of the Act: Returning to Lacan As with many key words recurring throughout the lengthy span of Lacan's elaborations of his teachings, the term act is a nodal signifier in La­ canian discourse, a signifier whose consistent reiteration over time risks concealing an unstable, less than fully consistent set of shifting significa­ tions assigned to it. As early as the first seminar of 1953-54, Lacan utilizes this word in connection with his notion of "full speech" as a performa­ tive saying, namely, a speech act in which the speaker (as well as the ad­ dressee of such a speech act) is transformed in his or her very subjectivity by what he or she says (or, in the case of the addressee, by what he or she hears) : "Each time a man speaks to another in an authentic and full manner . . . something takes place which changes the nature of the two beings present." 1 In the contemporaneous écrit "Response to Jean Hyppolite's Commentary on Freud's 'Verneinung' " (drawn from the first seminar), the performatively established equivalence between (the act of) speaking and what is spoken (of) serves as the very definition of "full speech": "For full speech is defined by the fact that it is identical to what it speaks about." 2 If the human subject is a symbolic-linguistic being through and through, a parlêtre, then a performative speech act, in which a speaker becomes what he or she says in the very act of saying it, is a form of creation ex nihilo, the inauguration out of nowhere of a new dimen­ sion of subjectivity.3 These aspects of Lacan 's 1950s-era usage of the term act do indeed faintly foreshadow the sense that this term later takes on in his 1960s-era theorizations (in which the 1959-60 shift of emphasis from

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the register of the Symbolic to that of the Real effectuated in the seventh seminar subsequently has global repercussions for the various sectors of Lacan's conceptual apparatus). Already in 1954, the act evokes the idea of a groundless founding performance, a self-constituting intervention. 4 Later on, in, for instance, the opening session of the eighth seminar of 1960-61, Lacan declares that "in the beginning was the word" (playing off the original Christian one-liner against Goethe's reworded "In the beginning was the deed" ["Im Anfang war die Tat"]5—this biblical line also plays an important part in Lacan's rapprochement between Christianity and psychoanalysis) .6 He returns to this formulation in the fifteenth sem­ inar devoted to the topic of "The Psychoanalytic Act," specifying there that, at the level of the act, word and deed are equivalent (i.e., as in per­ formative speech acts, saying a word is doing a deed insofar as this saying is an act of creation) .7 Even as late as the twenty-second seminar of 197475, Lacan associates the act with a saying (dire).8 However, the first seminar also contains a remark about acts that cuts against the general grain of the mid-1960s notion of the act dear to Zizek, the notion of the act according to which the act, unlike an action, is a Real gesture neither covered in advance through being enframed by a préexistent symbolic order nor containable by this same order once it occurs. Implicitly equating the act with what clinical analysts of vari­ ous stripes refer to as "acting out," Lacan, speaking of analytic patients, notes that "if they act, it is with their analyst in mind." 9 That is to say, an act committed by an analysand is a conscious or unconscious solicitation of a response from an Other thus solicited, a deed meant and readymade to be interpreted by the analyst, endowed with a definite signifi­ cance fixed by its place within the already-established inter-subjective and trans-subjective structures in which the analytic process itself is situated. Here an act means something in relation to the prior coordinates of the Imaginary-Symbolic reality of the transference-saturated rapport with the figure of the analyst-Other. There is evidence that, at least up through the eleventh seminar of 1964, Lacan allows for the word act sometimes to refer to an outburst precipitated by a préexistent structural arrangement. (By contrast, as will soon be seen, the acts spoken of in later seminars are interventions that, as proper acts per se, cannot be comprehended or explained as out­ growths of the prior mediating matrices of any incarnation of the func­ tion of the big Other.) For example, in the second seminar, Lacan de­ scribes acts as requiring the background of a synchronie framework a n d / or Symbolic past in order to emerge. 10 In the eleventh seminar, echoing a line of thought located in the third and fourth seminars,11 the act is again linked to acting out insofar as it's portrayed as an instance of repetition

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in which a Real having yet to be symbolized is simultaneously revealed and concealed by doings that transpire in the absence of appropriate sayings; so long as this Real remains imprisoned in the unsaid, it will repetitively make its silenced present felt—it will show itself—through deeds in place of words.12 Furthermore, Lacan 's various indications regarding his understand­ ing of the analytic phrase acting out support the claim here that such em­ ployments of the word act (as found in, among other texts, seminars 1, 2, and 11) aim to highlight the same set of phenomena as this phrase forming part of the vocabulary of all analytic schools. Acting à la acting out is, according to Lacan, implicitly to address a provocatively enigmatic message-to-be-deciphered to a receiver (in clinical cases, the analyst), an unconscious addressing through doing rather than saying that stages a fantasy-like scenario transpiring within the already-there presence of socio-symbolic mediums of meaning. 13 Such overdetermined actions pre­ suppose the establishment of the transferential relationship to another, and these showings through the deed of doing rather than the word of saying tend to appear there where the analyst's transference interpreta­ tions have missed something important, a Real left languishing in the unsaid that nonetheless doesn't quietly tolerate this neglect.14 ("Moi, la vérité, je park"; the truth passed over in silence by interpretation will nois­ ily make itself heard one way or another, virtually shouting at the analyst through striking behavior enacted outside the consulting room.) However, as a sort of Hegelian dialectical felix culpa (i.e., a misstep into falsity and error necessary on the way to truth and correctness), those interpretive oversights of the analyst-Other (oversights accidentally ignoring repressed kernels of the analysand-subject's being) that prompt an episode of acting out on the part of the patient succeed in eliciting a "just response" from the unconscious in question. 15 Lacan categorically encapsulates the core of the concept of acting out in the tenth seminar: "Acting out is essentially something, in the conduct of the subject, that shows itself. The demonstrative accent of every acting out, its orienta­ tion toward the Other, should be noticed."16 The essence of acting out is a veiled unveiling unconsciously displaying to another something to be witnessed by this audience; 17 it's a "savage transference" 18 (i.e., a brutal, violent enactment that, despite its substitution of acting for thinking, is nevertheless meant to be received and read by an addressee, even transferentially to pull the addressee onto the stage of a fantasmatic scene). 19 Also in the tenth seminar, Lacan distinguishes between the jouissance of the symptom and acting out: whereas the latter calls for interpretation, the former is idiotically self-sufficient and, hence, without want or wish for being understood by an Other.20 (In characterizing symptoms this

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way via a contrast with instances of acting out, Lacan abandons his ear­ lier 1950s depiction, writ large across the span of many of his écrits, of the analytic symptom as a message-to-be-deciphered qua node of coded overdetermination awaiting interpretive deliverance into speech.21 In his fa­ mous "Rome Discourse" of 1953, he even hints at an equivalence between symptoms and instances of acting out, both being cases of unconscious efforts to address a significance with the potential to be spoken.) 22 The crucial distinguishing detail of an occurrence of acting out is that this is a non-self-aware piece of conduct infused with a meaning-to-be-interpreted within a préexistent horizon of shared meaning between two or more participants in an Imaginary-Symbolic reality. As will become apparent, this detail is the primary contrasting factor separating Lacan 's 1960s ver­ sion of the act from acting out. Starting in the fourteenth seminar of 1966-67, but drawing on con­ ceptual resources and precursors from previous years of le Séminaire, La­ can distinguishes between acting out and the act proper.23 (Much of what he says regarding the latter in the fifteenth seminar is set up in this im­ mediately prior seminar.) Already in the fifth seminar, he differentiates between a "gesture" (geste) and a mere movement, linking the former to the Symbolic-linguistic dimension of the signifier24 (as he later does with the act in the fifteenth seminar) .25 Along the same lines, in the tenth sem­ inar, he insists that an act per se is neither simply a sensory-motor process within the material Real nor the "realization of the subject" qua manifest expression of an underlying, already-there subjective intention or state.26 Rather, an act is an action that conjures into existence a signifying struc­ ture into which desire then, after the (f)act, inscribes itself.27 Thus, as this 1963 claim indicates, the subject as a desiring being comes into existence in the wake of the act, instead of the act reflecting a previously present form of subjectivity. In the years that follow, Lacan repeatedly stipulates that an act in his sense isn't an action as a straightforward item of behav­ ior or comportment; Lacanian acts aren't just physical movements or the activities of motor discharges.28 He also tirelessly reiterates that acts are inherently linked to the register of the Symbolic, to the status of the signifier. As with his earlier 1950s association of acts with performative speech-events, Lacan, in the fourteenth seminar, describes an act as a gesture of symbolization in which the subject is equivalent to the signifiers mobilized by this gesture; and he proceeds to add here that a shift of Symbolic surfaces occurs in a genuine act, that a "mutation" of the subject transpires through such a deed.29 In the next session of the same seminar, right on the heels of these remarks about the act, he maintains that, after passing through a "true act," the subject emerges transformed, that this authentic gesture modifies the very configuration of subjectiv-

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ity30—a point that becomes central to the account of the act offered in the opening sessions of the fifteenth seminar, in which traversing the act is a trajectory through which the acting person is changed at the level of his or her subjective structure. 31 Also in the fourteenth seminar, Lacan posits that an act can be thought only after the (f)act; with an act, first there is the doing, and exclusively in the aftermath of this deed is it possible for what has been done to be taken up by subjective (and subjectifying) reflection.32 But, in this vein, he says several things that appear to problematize the very possibility of even an après-coup subjectification of the act, going so far as to propose that such deeds cannot retroactively be recognized and com­ prehended by the subject created or changed by these same gestures. Lacan speaks of an effect of "disavowal" (Verleugnung) ensuing in the wake of an act, an inability on the part of the subject of the act to acknowledge and register the deed to which its being is tied.33 He even claims that the act is necessarily misrecognized by the subject it engenders. 34 As pointed out above, Zizek sometimes exhibits a tendency to equivocate between the Lacanian act and the Badiouian event. However, there are certain features of Lacan 's own glosses on this notion, such as its after-the-fact opacity for its corresponding subject-effect, which, at least at first glance, seem to render it incompatible with Badiou's concept of the event (first and foremost, Badiou's specification that an event subsequently gives rise to a subject retroactively recognizing it and being able faithfully to elabo­ rate the event's truth-consequences). And yet, what might be identified as Zizek's Badiouianization of the Lacanian act (i.e., his reading of facets of the Badiouian event back into Lacan 's mid-1960s characterizations of acts) is not without ample textual justifications. In the first two sessions of the fifteenth seminar, Lacan distinguishes between an act and an action by stipulating that the former, unlike the latter, isn't part of the normal run of things. Whereas an action is a piece of behavior or process of movement that fits within the preestablished socio-symbolic frame—as with acting out, an action presupposes an already-existent big Other guaranteeing a shared hori­ zon of meaning—an act is disruptive. The act's disruption, as a piece of the Real, shakes up and undermines the socio-symbolic Other, forcing changes upon extant configurations of reality.35 Elsewhere, in his 1960 écrit "Remarks on Daniel Lagache's Presen­ tation: 'Psychoanalysis and Personality Structure,' " Lacan proposes that "we must realize the extent to which the advent of the subject who speaks banishes the subject of knowledge."36 How is this particular proposition relevant here? One should begin by considering two antecedents: (1) if "the subject of knowledge" is the individual of connaissance (noting that

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Lacan says here "le sujet de la connaissance"2,1 and not "le sujet du savoir" which would be a different matter altogether), namely, the ego-level "self" on familiar terms of acquaintance with itself and its Imaginary-Symbolic reality; and (2) if "the advent of the subject who speaks" is an act qua performative dire—then the following consequent indeed follows: the act proper conjures into existence an after-the-(f)act subjectivity in a Real dynamic not covered or prompted by the predictable quotidian workings of known reality. In two other texts roughly contemporaneous with his seminar on the psychoanalytic act—significantly, at this same time, Lacan is in the process of setting forth the "founding acts" of his new school (the École freudienne de Paris), a founding unauthorized by the established authority of the International Psychoanalytic Association—further evi­ dence is available supporting the Lacanian legitimacy of Zizek's blend­ ing of the act with Badiou's theory of the event. Lacan 's "Discours à l'École freudienne de Paris" contains the assertion that, just as there is no Other of the Other and no truth of the truth, so too is there no act of the act38—in other words, acting essentially involves taking the risk of a gesture with no meta-level guarantee of being appropriate, correct, just, right, successful, and so on (i.e., stepping out into unknown territory not already counted and secured by a big Other or, in Badiou's language, a representational state-of-the-situation). 'In his summary of the fourteenth seminar, Lacan associates the act with "counter-sense" (contresens)39—that is to say, an act goes against (common) sense insofar as it's a deed whose implications defy comprehension from within the confines of the preceding symbolic order with which this act breaks and then threatens to destabilize. Addi­ tionally, a few years later in the seventeenth seminar, Lacan even seems to anticipate the Badiouian theme of the "illegality" of the event (see chapter 1, section 4) by hinting that the act is an act to the extent that it simultaneously transpires within a field saturated by the signifiers of laws while nonetheless transgressing these same laws.40 Before proceeding further, there's one other striking similarity between Lacan and Badiou worth appreciating. Lacan emphasizes that subjects-of-acts aren't part of a single subjective continuity, a homoge­ neous continuum of subjective identity unifying these disparate happen­ ings and doings.41 Presumably, different subjects emerge from different acts and endure for an uncertain amount of time. Along similar thematic lines, at the level of both subjective ontogenesis and collective phylogen­ esis (à la human history), Lacan favors models of, as it were, punctuated as opposed to gradual evolution. Put more precisely, as regards subjec­ tive ontogenesis, in his 1964 discussion of "tychic" causality (i.e., the Real cause qua tuché, as opposed to the Symbolic law qua automaton), he por­ trays discontinuous psychosexual "development" as driven along by alea-

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tory traumatic blows, rather than as the spontaneous maturational flower­ ing of hard-wired, preordained stages.42 Apropos collective phylogenesis, in a 1967 presentation, Lacan mentions the history of ideas, arguing that one would be wrong to see this history as a continuous, steady unfolding of new ideas out of old ones, a movement in which what comes before internally generates out of itself what comes after.43 Rather, there are "breaks" and "ruptures" which govern the marching rhythm of historical sequences.44 One cannot help but hear resonances with these themes in Badiou's philosophy, given its denial of the existence of the continuum of a single historical-temporal One-All (see chapter 1, section 2) as well as its depiction of the subject as a rare, transitory phenomenon (perhaps one could call it a "transient transcendence") 45 arising intermittently. Further­ more, just as Lacan speaks of disparate subjects-of-acts, so too does Badiou favor viewing subjects as incommensurable with each other insofar as a subject is what it is in relation to a unique subjectifying event—there is no single subject because there is no single event (or, worded another way, there are as many distinct subjects as there are singular events).46 As already observed, there are, despite the features common to the Lacanian act and the Badiouian event illuminated by Zizek, various other facets of Lacan's notion of the act that one would be hard-pressed to portray as compatible with Badiou's theory of the event. What's more, these divergent features distinguishing act from event are pregnant with important implications for thinking through political issues. In his justwritten paper "Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate," Zizek, depart­ ing from a reading of chapter 1 above ("The Quick and the Dead: Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation"), underscores an observation made earlier here: the Badiouian account of events forbids the possibility of, as Zizek puts it, "an event which succeeds through the self-erasure of its éventai dimension" 47 (i.e., a change that so radically redistributes the assignation of change-category statuses within the field in which it occurs that it retroactively revokes its own [apparent] éventai status). Whereas Badiou (save for the exception of one passing remark in Peut-on penser la politique?48 a remark whose implications this project aims to explore) pro­ hibits this idea of, so to speak, a vanishing event (to be more precise, an event that neither is retroactively recognized as an event nor gives birth to a visible post-evental subjective embodiment), Lacan, especially from the mid-1960s onward, practically insists that any authentic act is a van­ ishing act. In the fifteenth seminar, he even directly refers to the realm of politics, claiming that the performative dire of a true political act (as opposed to a minor action sanctioned within the realm of the preestablished state) requires that the actor become the "waste product" of his or her gesture of ushering in a new order within the world.49 The epitome of

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the political act is revolution (on this point at least, Badiou and Zizek are on the same Lacanian page), and the paradigm of the genuine actor up to the task of such an act is the hero of tragedy,50 that is, a self-sacrificing figure. (In the twenty-fifth seminar of 1977-78, for example, Lacan con­ nects the act to the tragedy of Oedipus and the possibility of killing one's father, thus indicating that the act involves destroying the old paternal order and, in so doing, also undoing one's own being as a subjectified individual.) 51 By 1971 Lacan is willing to use even stronger imagery, de­ claring that suicide is the incarnation of an "accomplished act."52 This emphasis on the self-sacrificial dimension of the act comes further to the fore in Lacan 's elaborations concerning the specifically psychoanalytic act (i.e., the axis of intervention of the practicing analyst) and the consequences of the "discourse of the analyst" (as one of the four discourses delineated in the seventeenth seminar). In the fifteenth semi­ nar, the analyst's act is associated with the production of a certain waste53 {déchet—this could also be translated "wretch," a translation not without justification in light of the conception of the end of analysis as involving the dissolution of the transference, a dissolution stripping the figure of the analyst of his or her transferentially attributed idealized status). In the sixteenth seminar, the act of the analyst is said to displace him or her from the new space that this same gesture creates and opens. 54 Then, in the seventeenth seminar, Lacan clarifies that the discourse of the ana­ lyst (i.e., the structure of the particular social bond between speaking beings sustained by the analyst occupying a certain position vis-à-vis the analysand) results in the analyst becoming the "reject" (signified by the concept-matheme a) of the discursive arrangement established and sus­ tained by the analyst's angle for acting.55 Interestingly, insofar as Lacan 's concept of the act is theoretically entangled with his thoughts about what is essential in the analyst's in­ terventions to the extent that these interventions facilitate movement toward the conclusion of the analytic process, his later discussions of the psychoanalytic act and the discourse of the analyst can be elucidated further by returning to some of his earliest writings—in particular, the essay on the mirror stage. In the concluding sentence of perhaps his most famous écrit, Lacan clearly demarcates the limits of analytic practice in terms of where analysis leaves off: In the subject to subject recourse we preserve, psychoanalysis can ac­ company the patient to the ecstatic limit of the "Thou art that" where the cipher of his mortal destiny is revealed to him, but it is not in our sole power as practitioners to bring him to the point where the true journey begins.56

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As is c o m m o n knowledge, with the F r e n c h sentence "Tu es cela"51 {"Thou art that"), Lacan plays u p o n a h o m o p h o n y between "Tu es" a n d "tuer" between "Thou art that" a n d "Kill that" Summarizing too m u c h too quickly, o n e could say that, at least for Lacan h e r e circa 1949, the analytic work of p i n p o i n t i n g the n o d a l points in the analysand's network of identifica­ tions results in a falling away of these identificatory anchors; bringing to light the d e t e r m i n a n t s of the moi allows for the taking of distance from t h e old skeleton of the ego. More t h a n this, t h o u g h , Lacan also invokes t h e notion of leading the patient to a face-to-face confrontation with "his mortal destiny." In t h e 1955 écrit "Variations o n t h e Standard Treatment," what this confrontation involves becomes clearer: In order for the transference relationship to escape these effects, the analyst would have to strip the narcissistic image of his own ego of all the forms of desire by which that image has been constituted, reduc­ ing it to the only face that sustains it behind their masks: the face of the absolute master, death. 58 Lacan continues: It is thus clearly here that the analysis of the ego finds its ideal terminus: that in which the subject, having refound the origins of his ego in an imaginary regression, comes, by the progression of remembering, to its end in analysis—namely, the subjectification of his death. 59 A few years later, d u r i n g the penultimate session of the seventh seminar o n "The Ethics of Psychoanalysis," Lacan explains in greater detail t h e links connecting t h e e n d of analysis, the dissolution of the transference, the role of the analyst, a n d the analysand's repositioning with respect to his or h e r mortality. H e states: Shouldn't the true termination of an analysis—and by that I mean the kind that prepares you to become an analyst—in the end confront the one who undergoes it with the reality of the human condition? It is precisely this, that in connection with anguish, Freud designated as the level at which its signal is produced, namely, Hilflosigkeit or distress, the state in which man is in that relationship to himself which is his own death . . . and can expect help from no one. 60 T h e t e r m i n a t i o n of t h e analytic process, a c c o r d i n g to Lacan, o u g h t to fuse t h e "Tu es" a n d t h e "Tuer" t h r o u g h b r i n g i n g a b o u t a m o m e n t a r y e n c o u n t e r with t h e analysand's inescapable, "ownmost" (to resort to a

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Heideggerian term appropriate in a context in which Lacan is alluding to the concept of "being-towards-death" as found in Being and Time) mortal being. In a state of complete helplessness before death as the "absolute master," the lone individual has to realize that nobody can come to his or her rescue. The transferential relationship to the analyst, as an Other related to in this manner precisely in part because of anticipations and expectations regarding the salvation supposedly promised by the end of analysis (i.e., "the cure," conceived in any number of different fash­ ions) , must dissolve in this confrontation prompting a "subjectification of death," a confrontation in which the analysand-subject must accept that neither the analyst-Other nor anyone else finally can provide a saving absolution from the condition of being condemned to mortal finitude. The "anguish" of this concluding moment of analysis arises from the profound sense of isolation and solitude that the renunciation of faith in the powers of all forms of the big Other brings about ('You are utterly alone. Nothing can help you now"). In a manner of speaking, the analyst, through the consummated act of assisting in bringing the analysis to a close, commits suicide, eliminating his or her position as an addressable Other for the analysand in the transference. Subsequently echoing these themes in a setting outside the four walls of the clinical consulting room, Lacan, in the opening lines of his 1964 "Acte de fondation" announcing the establishment of the École française de psychanalyse (soon to become the École freudienne de Pans) after his expulsion from the International Psychoanalytic Association, describes himself as performing this found­ ing act in his allegedly solitary "relation to the psychoanalytic cause."61 In the midst of the collective sociopolitical gesture of creating a new school, he professes to be entirely on his Otherless own. Throughout much of the above, the act is associated with a funda­ mental loneliness. Each of the analyst's acts in analysis occurs in isola­ tion insofar as no overarching theoretical or institutional authority can vouch in advance for the correctness of these interventions. Both the analyst and the analysand, at the end of analysis, are left uncovered and unprotected by the impotent Other in the face-off with "the reality of the human condition" as grounded upon the "anguish" of "helplessness" under the shadow of inevitable death. The act of terminating an anal­ ysis is tied to the all-consuming destruction of the layers of accumulated inter-subjective relations of identification constituting the moi, leaving the individual, however briefly, floating in the unanchored void of an anonymous, faceless form of subjectivity. The advent of this excruciat­ ingly accentuated loneliness involves two parallel processes: the analyst's withdrawal as an addressable Other through "suicidal" self-effacement, and the analysand's corresponding confrontation with the deafening si-

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lence of solitary mortal being. Near the time of his own death, Lacan remarks that "the psychoanalyst is horrified by his act."62 An atmosphere of pathos permeates Lacan 's discourse regarding the analytic act. It should now be quite obvious why Lacan insists that all authentic acts are vanishing acts (by stark contrast with Badiou's denial of the exis­ tence of, as it were, vanishing events; a Badiouian event, as an event in his precise technical sense, must leave behind names and traces of its hap­ pening, marks taken up by subjects who persist in the event's aftermath as the representative laborers on behalf of a particular eventally disclosed truth—see chapter 1, section 5 and chapter 2, sections 9 and 10). The analyst's act, as conducive to dissolving the transference (a dissolving that functions as an essential aspect of ending the analysis), must erase his or her figurai presence vis-à-vis the patient. Such self-erasure has to occur if the analysand-subject is completely to exit the transference by "traversing the fantasy" that the analyst-Other holds in reserve, tucked away in the back corner of his or her pocket, a magic remedy for the elimination of sufferings inherent to being human (i.e., the hidden, secret knowledge of the subject supposed to know). On one occasion in Le siècle, Badiou too speaks of sacrifice: "If you think that the world can and should ab­ solutely change, that there is neither a nature of things to respect nor pre-formed subjects to uphold, you admit that the individual can be sac­ rificed."63 However, there is an important terminological detail to note here: given his distinction between the individual and the subject,64 Ba­ diou is not saying that the subject (which, for him, is always the subject of a specific event) should be sacrificed. One's all-too-human individuality (as a mortal animal-creature) is sacrificed to greater or lesser extents in becoming a subject-of-an-event indifferent to one's individual being. But for Badiou, a subject, as a subject-of-an-event, is what it is through endur­ ing as a finite fragment of an infinite truth. 65 Furthermore, in light of the manner in which Lacan draws the boundary line between where analysis stops and the indeterminate be­ yond of post-analysis starts—the first attempt to draw this line is the clos­ ing remark about the "Thou art that" in the essay on the mirror stage— additional differences between the Lacanian act and the Badiouian event seem to surface. To begin with a merely apparent difference, the decisive, concluding "Tu es cela" might sound as though it presents too revelatory a model of truth when compared with Badiou's insistence, articulated in Saint Paul, that "truth is a process, and not an illumination."66 However, this difference isn't a genuine one insofar as, although the gesture of terminating an analysis with the punctuation of a full stop can appear to be abrupt and sudden (i.e., ending with the blazing-fast lightning strike of a revelation), this leap, involving a leap off the couch, is a moment

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of culmination long in preparation throughout the arduous, day-by-day process of the analytic work, a working-through usually lasting a good number of years. (For any clinical analyst, whether Freudian, Lacanian, or otherwise, it is well understood that shocking, rapid-fire deliveries of illumination-like interpretive revelations are utterly unproductive for patients—a lesson learned through the practices of Freud and the early Kleinians.) Another apparent difference, from a more Badiouian stand­ point, is that, to put this in Badiou's own vernacular, Lacan 's emphasis on the analysand's solitary confrontation with mortality ("Tuer cela"), both as the figurative death of the ego at the end of analysis and the literal death of the analysand sometime in the future, stresses "destruction" rather than "subtraction" (as per Badiou's distinction between destruction as negative qua violent/defensive negation and subtraction as affirmative qua creative/positive negation). 67 But Lacan isn't in the least bit inter­ ested in preaching a variant on the maudlin, morose, and melodramatic existentialist gospel of resolute being-towards-death. Instead, his point is that (again to employ Badiou's terms) the destruction terminating a thorough analysis is a precondition for a possible genuine subtraction to come. Lacan refrains from saying much about the subtractive dimension because, as hinted at earlier here, to do so would be to interfere with the post-analytic subject's own labors to construct something creatively novel on the (groundless) ground cleared by the peeling apart of prior ego structures. In refusing to continue posturing as yet another "supposed to know" agent representing a fraudulently authoritative big Other, the analyst must remain silent apropos the potential subtractions to which he or she leaves patients after their analyses are over. If anything, for Lacan, destruction is of concern to the extent that it's the means through which analysts actually can lead analysands to the ability to assemble new subtractive constructions. That is to say, in analysis, destruction is important thanks to subtraction; and furthermore, subtraction is too important to be prescribed by the pontifications of any sort of posturing know-it-all, whether an analyst or someone else. As for the somewhat more authentic (as opposed to apparent) dif­ ferences between Lacan and Badiou in this present context, Lacanian psychoanalysis, from the perspective of Badiou's philosophy, could be said, at best, to end there where, among other things, politics has the chance of perhaps beginning (and the reason for contrasting Lacan 's analytic act with Badiou's event [more specifically, events in politics] is to highlight the subtleties at stake in Zizek's politicization of the Laca­ nian act and corresponding association of this with the Badiouian event). Badiou might concede that the concluding vaporization of the ego in the fires of the negative affects arising from the Hilflosigkeit of Todesangst

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prepares the way for possible subjectification insofar as the analysand's individuality has been thereby prepared for the ordeal of self-sacrifice (qua the sacrifice of individuality in the assumption of an éventai sub­ jectivity). And yet the rhetoric and imagery of human finitude (in this case, Lacan's emphasis on the place of mortality during the termination of an analysis) sits uneasily with Badiou; he frequently inveighs against discourses of death, against post-Kantian obsessing about the finite status of subjectivity.68 And, apropos the topic of the political, Badiou categori­ cally declares that "every politics of emancipation rejects finitude, rejects 'being towards death.' "69

§20 Fall on Your Own Sword! Sacrificing the Enjoyment of Sacrifice Itself The most elegantly succinct articulation of the crux of the differences here separating Badiou from Lacan would be: the collective affirmation of life in politics (Badiou) against the solitary embracing of death in analysis (Lacan). Additionally, whereas Lacan stresses the isolation in­ volved for both analyst and analysand in the act of ending analysis—the analyst reduces him or herself to a "reject" or "waste product" and the analysand correspondingly is subjectified through giving up hope in any Other or others—Badiou insists upon the collective, trans-individual di­ mension as what is distinctive about politics, as what distinguishes it from Badiou's other three "generic procedures" of truth-production (i.e., art, love, and science)} For Badiou, the mortal individual can become an im­ mortal subject through serving as a finite moment of an infinite truth, be this truth artistic, amorous, scientific, or political. For instance, in being taken up into the group body of an emancipatory political formation (in Logiques des mondes, Badiou develops a theory of "bodies" qua support­ ing subjective embodiments of truths in relation to events;2 see chap­ ter 2, section 9), the individual is plugged into the eternity of what the young Badiou identifies as "communist invariants"3 (i.e., recurrent lowest common denominators of radically egalitarian resistances to and revolts against non-egalitarian arrangements of governance). Contra Lacan, the sole dimension of one's being to be sacrificed in a properly political ges­ ture is the axis of individuality qua selfish, mortal animality; through this gesture, Badiou claims, an immortalization-effect transpires in which one thereby becomes a fragmentary moment of eternal justice for all, in which one fully lives. (In Logiques des mondes, Badiou defines true life as more than mere existence as a non-subjectified person embedded within

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the statist transcendental regime of a truthless world;4 Zizek is quite sym­ pathetic to this Badiouian definition of what it is to live.)5 Rather than de­ stroying one's subjectivity, passing through the act (in this case, through answering the call of a political event) makes one into a more-than-finite, more-than-mortal subject. Of course, Badiou's invectives against finitude and death bring up the controversies at stake in Zizek's criticisms of him on this matter (a detailed story unto itself that has been told at length elsewhere;6 hence, an exegesis of the entirety of this Badiouian-Zizekian debate won't be recapitulated here). To be brief, at the heart of this dispute are not fini­ tude and death per se, but rather the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic concept of the death drive (Todestrieb). Badiou erroneously lumps this concept together with everything else linked to the fact of human mortal­ ity.7 Against this hasty Badiouian equivocation between death and death drive, Zizek presents two interlinked claims. First, the Todestrieb, instead of designating something thoroughly bound up with the human animal's physical finitude, is a psychoanalytic term referring to certain "immortal," "metaphysical" facets of psychical being operating with a supreme, serene disregard for the finite, mortal animality of the human individual's weak flesh.8 (Behind this contention lurks Zizek's fundamental theoretical the­ sis asserting the equivalence between the Freudian-Lacanian psychoana­ lytic death drive and the subject as an autonomous negativity delineated by late-modern German philosophy.) 9 Second, this death drive is a sort of "vanishing mediator," a mediator Badiou disavows despite (according to Zizek) its alleged necessity as a transitional factor/moment intervening between and conjoining Badiou's central non-dialecticized conceptual pairs, such as both being and event as well as individual and subject.10 Along these lines, assuming that the Todestrieb of psychoanalytic metapsychology is a name for subjectivity qua the void of a radical negativity irreducible to any and every form of positive inscription or representa­ tion, Zizek insists on distinguishing between "subject" (as this negative X) and "subjectification" (in this case, Badiou's subject-of-the-event as a positivized incarnation of an event-driven truth-trajectory—with Zizek alleging this to be a secondary crystallization, at the level of inscriptions and representations, of the subject-as-void).11 In Zizek's view, Badiou si­ multaneously presupposes and yet explicitly dismisses an underlying neg­ ativity (i.e., the death drive-like subject-as-void) serving as a precondition for the positive instantiations of event-revealed truths embodied and en­ acted by subjects-of-events (i.e., those "subjectified" by the interpellation of events) .12 He sees the Badiouian turning away from the negative force of the Todestrieb as prompted by an unjustified equivocation between "two notions of negativity: 'pure' self-relating negativity and negativity as an

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ethico-practical failure, as a betrayal of a positive project"13 (for Zizek, the former negativity can and does fight against the latter negativity). Broadly speaking, from the Zizekian perspective, the negative (here, the Lacanian subject as a radicalized version of German idealist subjectivity) makes possible the positive (in this instance, Badiou's person or people subjectified by an event so as to become militantly engaged on behalf of a specific truth-cause). This returns the discussion to the question of why Zizek's reliance on particular aspects of the Lacanian act leads him to endorse what he calls, borrowing from the vocabulary of vulgar popular psychology, "pas­ sive aggression" (i.e., the refusal to get caught up in the "aggressive pas­ sivity" of modes of hyperactive activism lamentably leaving in place the ideological coordinates of the present state of affairs). Consonant with his above insistence, insisted upon in the face of what he takes to be Badiou's illegitimate disavowal of the subject-as-void (a pre-subjectified subject arguably functioning as the possibility condition for the subjec­ tified subject-of-the-event), Zizek believes that the current ideological slate must first be wiped clean through a thorough theoretical critique, through critical thinking rather than uncritical doing, before anything genuinely transformative in a radical sense is possible. In short, negativity must precede positivity. Without the preceding negative labor of clearing openings, any interventions striving to institute a positive "new order" are doomed to failure or co-optation.14 However, there's another reason for this Zizekian rallying cry to inaction. As regards Lacan 's notion of the act, one must acknowledge an important difference between what could be described as the spectacu­ lar act versus the vanishing act. The spectacular act would be the act as a dramatic, thunderous deed smashing the status quo system to pieces in one cataclysmic blow (a deed whose aftermath is then overseen by a postact subject), whereas the vanishing act would be the act as a self-effacing event in which neither a monument to its own happening nor any sort of prominently visible subjective avatar remains behind. Of course, Lacan himself often conflates these two dimensions of the act, flirting with romanticizing the heroic-tragic posture of becoming the post-act figure of the aestheticized martyr subjectified through self-destruction. (One need only recall his famous reading of Sophocles' Antigone, in which he observes how "Antigone herself . . . fascinates us, Antigone in her un­ bearable splendor.") 15 In those places where he remains enthralled by the spectacular side of the Lacanian act, Zizek is in danger of paralyzing himself into inaction by raising the bar so high for what would constitute an authentically revolutionary intervention that no foreseeable possible courses of action in the reality of the contemporary sociopolitical world

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stand a chance of measuring up to the demanded magnitude of a "real act" (for more on this risk, see appendix A below). But at the same time, Lacan's descriptions of the analytic act (issuing from the position of the discourse of the analyst) point to the possibility of a modest but nonethe­ less revolutionary vanishing act as an auto-erasing moment that gener­ ates true change precisely through quietiy receding into the background. And Zizek himself, in his practice, provides an exemplary example of just this sort of vanishing analytic act. The analysis here comes full circle back to this chapter's point of departure, that is, the reference to what is new in Taylor's documentary film on Zizek. Zizek's technique of playing with those members of his audience in the reading public clinging to their hopes and anticipations that he will someday soon provide them with the "magic formula" for the dissolution of capitalism and the creation of a renewed socialism is a per­ fect illustration of a political vanishing act modeled on Lacanian psycho­ analysis. As Zizek admits, in this role, he tries to occupy the position of the analyst by artfully manipulating others' fantasy-driven transferential expectations. Presumably, if this role-playing is patterned after Lacan's portrayal of the positioning of the analyst in relation to the end of anal­ ysis (involving acts that aim at catalyzing the analysand's confrontation with subjectivity beyond the ego through the dissolution of the transfer­ ence qua detachment from any mooring in the Other), then, as seems to be the case, Zizek is struggling to de-idealize himself in the eyes of those others invested in him as a left-wing intellectual messiah, a savior (with savoir [faire] ) supposedly promising to deliver them from the clutches of capital (or, in Lacanian parlance, a "subject supposed to know" how to change fundamentally the situation of politics today). Through interventions striving to help peel away layers of political fantasies from his transferentially saturated public persona, Zizek acts in a manner analogous to the Lacanian analyst. He appears to be moving in the direction of vanishing as a political figure (or, at least, so he says in the "Park Bench" extra segment of the DVD version of Zizek! The Movie), but vanishing in a productive fashion, a fashion that hopefully will prompt his politically minded readers to ask themselves what is at stake in their particular investments in him. In passing through the decentering of his subjectivity and the ensuing reduction of himself to the object of others' fantasies (a), Zizek's practice here illustrates the modesty sometimes re­ quired if one wants to accomplish an efficacious intervention targeted in the direction of real change. Perhaps one of the valuable, yet to be fully appreciated political lessons of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the understanding that, in certain cases, the narcissistic "secondary gain" (to resort to Freud's language) of

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savoring the pathos of being a post-act/event subject through the sacri­ fice of one's all-too-human individuality (i.e., the jouissance of the spec­ tacular act) has to be sacrificed itself (through a vanishing act) in the name of a greater cause's chance to succeed. The Lacanian analyst allows (and even encourages) the analysand to decenter the analyst's subjec­ tivity and thereby reduce him or her to a—this would be a definition of the basic technical role of transference in clinical analysis couched in Lacan 's terminology—so as, eventually, to be reduced to less than a, namely, to withdraw as object or Other and thus destabilize the field of the analysand's attachments. Only in this way, according to Lacan, can analysis accomplish its ends at the end of analysis. In the terminal phases of the analytic work, the subject-figure of the analyst itself becomes an obstacle to authentic transformation. Opening the space for genuine post-analytic change requires the analyst's silent "suicide" qua quiet re­ cession into the background following the consummated immolation of the transferential fantasy-figures constructed by the analysand (a depic­ tion of Lacanian clinical technique apropos the handling of transference and termination with which Zizek agrees). 16 What if, in the realm of the political, there are circumstances when the persistence of visible forms of post-act/event subjectivity comes to function as an impediment rather than a facilitator of act/event-driven transformations? What if an actor/agent, in order to be politically effec­ tive, must fall on his or her own sword, permitting him or herself and his or her deeds to be deprived of the glorious credit for revolutionary change and passed over in silence by the recorders of history, to be robbed of the slightest smidgen of sacrificial splendor? In short, maybe, in the name of real change, it's sometimes necessary to accept the unenjoyable or even (as Lacan puts it) horrifying prospect of being reduced to less than a, to the nothingness of a retroactively mis/unrecognized non-status (certainly not recognized in hindsight as meriting the status of act, event, or subject thereof), ungratefully shunned or denigrated by one's successors—or even simply forgotten about altogether.

Appendix A

"Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!" Some Brief Remarks on and Responses to Zizek's "Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate"

In his new textual intervention "Badiou: Notes from an O n g o i n g De­ bate," Zizek directly engages with my r e a d i n g of Badiou elaborated h e r e in c h a p t e r 1 ("The Quick a n d the Dead: Badiou a n d the Split Speeds of Transformation"). While agreeing with m u c h of what I advance in this analysis of Badiou's account of c h a n g e , h e also interjects several points of a d d i t i o n a l clarification in t h e course of his commentary, clarifica­ tions to which I would like to a d d my own c o m m e n t s in t u r n . Citing my remarks a b o u t how statist ideology can a n d does sometimes a d o p t the strategy either of falsely eventalizing the non-evental (for instance, in late-capitalism's dishonest self-portrait of its m o n o t o n o u s whirlwind of c o n s t a n t transformation as involving g e n u i n e alteration) or of de­ ceptively d e p i c t i n g t h e real éventai sites e m b e d d e d within its d o m a i n as b e i n g devoid of the potential for giving rise to an event q u a radical r u p t u r e with the state-of-the-situation, Zizek stipulates: Perhaps, this line of thought needs just one qualification . . . Would it not rather be that one of the ideological strategies is to fully admit the threatening character of a dysfunction, and to treat it as an external intrusion, not as the necessary result of the system's inner dynamics? The model is here, of course, the Fascist notion of social antagonisms as the result of a foreign intruder—Jews—disturbing the organic totality of the social edifice.1 T h e only t h i n g I have reservations a b o u t h e r e is the wording of the rhe­ torical question posed in this passage ("Would it n o t r a t h e r b e . . . ?"). W h e n it comes to (as p e r the title of a 1994 collection edited by Zizek) m a p p i n g ideology, the task must involve, d u e to the insidious, multifac161

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eted dynamics of ideological processes and strategies, letting a thousand flowers bloom (to paraphrase Mao). In other words, despite this "not rather," Zizek and I shouldn't be construed as offering competing, mu­ tually exclusive depictions of ideology. Yes, Zizek is indeed quite correct that, in Nazism, a locus within the sociopolitical body is (mis)identi­ fied as potentially detrimental to the very existence of the system itself; "Jewishness" is treated by this particular fascist ideological matrix as, in Badiouian parlance, a possible éventai site (albeit, as Zizek notes, one misrepresented as a foreign intrusion rather than a product of the in­ timate, immanent dynamics of fascist society) that must be dealt with swiftly and harshly in order to squelch any risk of the possibility of it un­ dermining the Nazi life-world. However, this is only one of many tactics for regulating what I have called the "cadence of change" available to a statist system. The two that I identify in my critical reading of Badiou are other available tactics. And Zizek's utterly crucial and incredibly useful notion of "cynical distance" (as a type of "inherent transgression") 2 is a further contribution to anatomizing the proliferation of ideological mechanisms, the complex twists and turns, the branching and forking trajectories, within the domains of ideology today. Given this proliferation, only a parallel proliferation of accounts and analyses within the fields of the theorization of ideology can hope to provide the conceptual resources for grasping our contemporary cir­ cumstances. When all is said and done, the sole consistency statist systems care about is the temporal consistency of their own perpetuated exis­ tence; logical consistency among the various ideological constellations constructed by such systems is less of a concern. In other words, statist ideologies pay no heed to the constraints signaled in the phrase "not rather." (On yet another level, psychoanalysis proves to be highly rele­ vant to the analysis of ideologies insofar as the deployment and develop­ ment of these ideologies, like the primary process mentation-dynamics of unconscious thinking [for psychoanalytic metapsychology, unconscious thinking doesn't obey the rules observed by conscious thinking as sec­ ondary process mentation, such as the law of noncontradiction], can be comprehended only by an interpretive approach operating outside the constraints of ordinary, bivalent logic.) Theory, if it is to have any chance whatsoever of keeping pace with its subtly shifting objects of interroga­ tion, must mirror these shifts through, so to speak, the blooming multi­ plication of a thousand theories of (a thousand) ideologies. Before moving on to the next set of important issues, there's a de­ tail that ought to be noted in passing. Putting his finger on my use of the phrase minimal difference in my examination of Badiou (in this case, the difference between the change-category statuses simultaneously assigned

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to a given multiple by both statist ideology and non-statist views), Zizek observes: No wonder Johnston uses here the Deleuzian term "minimal differ­ ence" . . . when we pass from the notion of crisis as occasional contin­ gent malfunctioning of the system to the notion of crisis as the symptomal point at which the "truth" of the system becomes visible, we are talking about one and the same actual event—the difference is purely virtual, it does not concern any of its actual properties, but only the way this event is supplemented by the virtual tapestry of its ideological and notional background.3 Although the Deleuzian idea of the virtual as employed here by Zizek quite accurately captures the gist of my thesis regarding the double in­ scription of potentially éventai sites (i.e., the claim that multiples harbor­ ing the possibility of events can and are situated in at least two typologies of change/transformation at one and the same time), part of my posi­ tion involves the assertion that, on a certain level, Badiou too presup­ poses and hints at this structure of ideological double inscription. As cited in chapter 1 (see section 4), Badiou himself, in Le siècle, resorts to speaking of a "minimal" or "minuscule" difference at stake in the "poli­ tics of subtraction" (as opposed to the "politics of destruction" driven by the "passion of the real"). If this sort of difference is a hallmark of Deleuze's philosophy, then I would claim there is a Deleuzian line of thought quietly winding its way through specific sectors of Badiouian philosophy. Furthermore, in my view, if Badiou's notion of a subtractive politics focused on discerning minimal/minuscule differences is to mean anything clear and concrete, it must be linked up with his under­ developed allusion (located in, most notably, the Handbook of Inaesthetics and also cited in chapter 1, section 4) to a "figurai preparation," namely, "a pre-evental figure" that prefigures the perhaps imminent happening of an event hovering on the situational horizon. To be more exact, my contention is that these pre-evental harbinger-figures are to be found among precisely those multiples subjected to ideological double inscrip­ tions, with the difference-to-be-discerned by the practitioner of a politics of subtraction being that between a multiple's statist change-category status (whether categorized as éventai or non-evental, depending on the particular ideological tactic mobilized) and this same multiple's other change-category status apparent to a non-statist gaze. To employ Zizek's own phraseology, this is to look upon one's political situation with a cer­ tain sort of "parallax view." Zizek proceeds elegantly to summarize this contention of mine re-

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garding the productive political assessment of this change-category status difference. H e describes "the art of a politics of minimal difference" as to be able to identify and then do focus on a minimal (ideological, legislative, etc.) measure which, prima facie, not only does not ques­ tion that system's premises, but even seems to merely apply to its actual functioning its own principles and thus render it more self-consistent; however, a critico-ideological parallax view leads us to surmise that this minimal measure, while in no way disturbing the system's explicit mode of functioning, effectively "moves its underground," introduces a crack in its foundations. 4 H e t h e n goes o n to invoke my n o t i o n of a "pre-evental discipline of time" (as opposed to Badiou's association of a "discipline of time" exclusively with the post-evental labors of a subject-of-an-event). Regarding this no­ t i o n — a n d Zizek declares that "today, m o r e t h a n ever, we effectively n e e d what J o h n s t o n calls a 'pre-evental discipline of t i m e ' " 5 — h e warns of the d a n g e r that it can be tricked into e n t e r i n g t h e service of justifying politi­ cally disempowering hesitations a n d inaction: There is, however, a limit to this strategy: if followed thoroughly, it ends up in a kind of "active quietism": while forever postponing the Big Act, all one does is to engage in small interventions with the secret hope that somehow, inexplicably, by means of a magic "jump from quantity to quality," they will lead to global radical change. This strategy has to be supplemented by the readiness and ability to discern the moment when the possibility of the Big Change is approaching, and, at that point, to quickly change the strategy, take the risk and engage in total struggle. In other words, one should not forget that, in politics, "major repercus­ sions" do not come by themselves: true, one has to lay the ground for them by means of the patient work, but one should also know to seize the moment when it arrives.6 I will start by saying that I completely agree with Zizek's insistence that the non-statist, pre-evental a c t o r / a g e n t must be ready, willing, a n d able promptly to alter tactical a p p r o a c h e s in response to t h e unpredictably shifting terrain of u n f o l d i n g circumstances a n d situations. O n c e t h e patient gaze of t h e "parallax view" deployed by a subtractive politics of m i n i m a l differences senses that, p e r h a p s after a p r o t r a c t e d p e r i o d of waiting to i n t e r v e n e while t h i n k i n g things t h r o u g h , it has successfully sifted t h r o u g h the veils of ideology so as to single o u t those intra-systemic n o d e s really possessing the promise a n d enjoying the opportunity to b e

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sites of genuine éventai change (places where, just maybe, there possibly can occur "a magic jump from quantity to quality' "), then the time to act truly is now (even if, as Zizek points out in his Lenin-inspired rejection of the perspective according to which one must bide one's time until sociohistorical conditions have "matured"/"ripened" and the "right moment" spontaneously emerges out of the defiles of chronological development, the present here-and-now doesn't seem to be the appropriate time to pass from thinking to doing) ? However, there is a series of observations I want to elaborate here in response to other aspects of the passage quoted above. To begin with, just as I fully endorse Zizek's vehement demand that the practitioner of a politics of minimal differences be prepared to leap (often as a sort of leap of faith) from theoretical assessment to practical intervention when the opening for revolutionarily forcing through a "premature" systemdestabilizing dysfunction seems suddenly to present itself, so too do I concur that my articulations of what is entailed by a "pre-evental disci­ pline of time" could be manipulated so as to become yet another excuse for sticking forever to the course of minor adjustments and refinements, for remaining stuck in the position that Zizek elsewhere describes as in­ volving the "pseudo-activity" of "passive aggression" (see chapter 4, sec­ tion 18). This "passive aggression" designates the hurling of oneself into a frantic swirl of activities so as to forestall rather than facilitate change, all the while operating under the illusion that such "active quietism" isn't quietism because, as this variety of self-deception depicts these frenetic endeavors, one of these little activities will somehow miraculously come to catalyze the big "magic j u m p from quantity to quality,'" namely, the unexpected, abrupt stumbling upon a minor action that simultaneously functions as a major act (as per the Lacan-derived distinction between acts and actions). This form of quietism pinpointed by Zizek puts off acts in favor of actions by banking on another form of double inscription: just as specific multiples can be éventai sites or events and non-even tal components of a state-mediated situation at one and the same time, so too can a single given gesture simultaneously be an action a n d / o r a (po­ tential) act. And yet, even though this (potential) double inscription of certain actions (as simultaneously actions and acts) can be and is readily appro­ priated by varieties of a quietism in bad faith, this doesn't mean that it isn't nonetheless true (recalling that Zizek himself sometimes declares that an indispensable tenet of any contemporary critical analysis of ide­ ology today must depart from the assumption that one can, as Lacan puts it, "lie in the guise of truth," that is, marshal truths to the cause of various versions of conscious and unconscious [self-] deception; see chapter 3,

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section 15). In fact, as pointed out here earlier (see chapter 3, sections 14 and 15), there are also certain risks run by Zizek's politico-theoretical deployment of the Lacan-inspired notion of the act. Appreciating what these risks are requires briefly sketching the contours of select details of this Lacanian concept. As I explain in chapter 3, section 14, certain of Lacan 's characterizations of acts, ones approvingly underscored in many of Zizek's reflections on sociopolitical change, depict them as unforesee­ able occurrences irrupting apparently out of nowhere, as magical mo­ ments of grace to which subjects can relate only post festum. In several previous contexts—implicitly breaking in certain ways with Lacan, his above-quoted invocation of the "Big Act" in "Badiou: Notes from an On­ going Debate" avoids the ideological dangers spelled out in what fol­ lows below by speaking of such an intervention as being informed and directed by a prior politico-theoretical surveillance of circumstances— Zizek explicitly emphasizes and endorses these aspects of Lacan 's act, insisting that individuals are caught unawares by acts, surprised by the unexpected happening of a miraculous, seemingly impossible gesture of separating off from a prior reality-horizon.8 As should be obvious from summarizing this Lacanian notion thus, there is a definite danger that, as with the Badiouian event, the Lacanian-Zizekian act, transposed from the analytic clinic to the public sphere of politics—although analysis is far from a depoliticized affair of purely private intimacy, its scope and concerns aren't simply the same as or coextensive with those of politics— could easily create the sad sense that there's no hope one's actions can have any effect on the cadence of change (i.e., that one's seemingly small actions are akin to an example from everyday life invoked by Zizek on several occasions: the futile pushing of the "close door" button on an ele­ vator whose doors will close when they close regardless of whether or not the button is pushed—the asubjective genesis of the act/event will hap­ pen when it happens regardless of the interventions of agents). Both Badiou's insistence that subjectivity is strictly post-evental (a consequence of this insistence is that subjects cannot struggle beforehand actively to pre­ cipitate the occurrence of an event before it occurs) and Lacan's similar treatment of the subject as a post-act effect inadvertently flirt with en­ couraging quietist discouragement or Johnny-come-lately tailism. Lacan and Badiou, given their shared focus on what comes after the act/event and corresponding motivated neglect of what comes before, are each in danger of leaving people stranded passively awaiting the apparently ex nihilo saving grace of acts and/or events. To the extent that his own conception of the act closely resembles these aspects of Lacanian and Badiouian thought—again, the most recent indications are that he is moving away from his prior proximity

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to these two key interlocutors on this point—Zizek likewise offers up a vision of the forces and factors driving transformation that implicitly abandons the conviction that people are capable of, under the guidance of deliberate premeditation, pushing for radical act/event-level change before the seemingly unconditioned, quasi-divine blessing of the trans­ formational "il y a" From a particular sort of Marxist-Leninist position, the lowest common denominators shared between Lacanian acts and Badiouian events are quite troubling. More specifically, as suggested in chapter 3, it's far from inconceivable that these somewhat similar depic­ tions of revolutionary transformations could lead to or reinforce an attentiste stance in political actors, namely, a disempowering, alienating fatal­ ism however encouragingly optimistic or discouragingly pessimistic. This line of argumentation applies to earlier instances in Zizek's work where he associates the Lacanian act with the Badiouian event in the process of promoting a picture of change emphasizing miraculous moments when the seemingly impossible inexplicably becomes an actu­ alized possibility.9 But he now declares that, as regards the necessity of passing to the "Big Act" through a kind of rapid carpe-diem shift of tac­ tics from patient theoretical assessment (steered by analyses stemming from a sub tractive politics of minimal differences focused on loci of ideo­ logical double inscription) to lightning-fast offensives, " 'major repercus­ sions' do not come by themselves." In other words, the times both before and after an act/event must each involve their own modes of sustained, disciplined labor, carefully organized struggles dedicated to the promises and potentials of real transformations. Hence, although he continues up through the present to use the term act (i.e., the same term that, in his prior writings, is explicitly tied to Lacan 's definition of this notion within the parameters of his psychoanalytic apparatus), Zizek's current utilization of this concept-word differs from his previous Lacan-inflected citations of it in one very significant respect: by admitting the need for a "pre-evental discipline of time" (which could also be referred to as a "pre-act" discipline) linked to a probing theoretical assessment of the ideological state-of-the-situation, Zizek moves away from a celebration of the act as an unforeseen, out-of-nowhere miracle and back toward a more, as it were, sober and atheistic Marxist-Leninist understanding of effective revolutionary interventions as non-miraculous points of cul­ mination condensing a combination of preceding arduous intellectual and practical work with the unpredictable workings of intra-situational chance and contingencies. Additionally, I claim that just as Zizek is justified in chiding those who avoid taking radical steps due to fear of the unforeseen, possibly-notdemocratic future consequences of such interventions as wanting an "act

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without the act,"10 so too would one be justified in cautioning that a fetishization of the "Big Act" also could lead to quietist paralysis. In chapter 3, section 15,1 justify this contention by insisting that if indeed, as Lacan and Zizek maintain, an act qua act is identifiable solely after the (f)act, then turning one's nose up at actions in the here and now because none of them looks like an act at present—this would be to practice a politics without politics of the pure act, a (non-) practice of passively waiting for circumstances to serve up a suitably grand program of heroic deeds to be done—would be to resign oneself, whether one realizes it or not, to no "Big Acts" ever arriving. Why? As I put it above, one cannot have an act without an action, since acts are particular actions with unusually radical consequences and ramifications emerging clearly and distinctly into view subsequent to the performance of the action in question. But, to further nuance things, maybe, although acts almost always appear as such only après-coup, there are extremely rare instances in which an action is rightly recognized in the present as something that will have been an act (of course, speaking of the act thus is to deviate from Lacan's 1960s characterizations of it). That is to say, my wager at this point is that it might be possible, through the critical-theoretical vision of a subtractive politics of minimal differences, to recognize a possible act/event before (rather than exclusively after) the fact—or, at a minimum, on the basis of educated guesses ("educated" in the sense of informed by an ideology critique), to gamble by treating elements of one's current situational circumstances as potentially éventai. Furthermore, the contention here is certainly not that Zizek himself is guilty of promoting a politics without politics of the pure act. Instead, the assertion is that the strict Lacanian definition of an act (as found in Lacan's teachings from the mid-1960s), if employed without any qualifications within the domain of political discourse, is at least as vulnerable to appropriation by varieties of quietism in bad faith as my previous recommendation that a subtractive politics of minimal differences should focus on searching for varieties of presently possible interventions that, although initially appearing to be nothing more than non-evental actions (maybe due to the distorting influences of statist ideology), might perhaps, through the retroactive vindication of post-act/event hindsight, appear to have turned out to be more than mere actions. This leads to my closing proposition: no critical theoretical analysis of ideology is immune from the threat of being appropriated by ideo­ logically duplicitous rationalizations of quietism or tailism. Not only is it possible, as Zizek's Lacanian theory of ideological mechanisms posits, to lie in the guise of truth, but any truth can be twisted into a tool for engendering an acceptance of the status quo (even if this acceptance is

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disguised as, for instance, the mocking pseudo-rebelliousness of "cynical distance"). Of course, Zizek is warranted to warn that a pre-act/event discipline of time, practiced by a subtractive politics of minimal differ­ ences, is liable to encourage those who secretly or unconsciously wish to be discouraged (i.e., the moderate left-wing quietists in bad faith) to remain complacently in place while appearing quickly to move "progres­ sively" toward a hazy, vague "somewhere else" through the inactive activ­ ity of being "aggressively passive" by enacting a series of actions that they only feign to hope will retroactively turn out to have been acts. Indeed, this form of quietist procrastination, of permanently putting off and in­ terminably delaying the possibility of any real passage à l'acte, is easily able to co-opt a pre-act/event discipline of time. Such a tactical co-opting is especially appealing to those who wish to see themselves as radical leftists but don't actually want sociopolitical reality to call their bluff, to take their actions seriously enough to risk turning them into acts proper. Unfortunately, my reading of Badiou's account of change even provides such pseudo-radicals with a retort to the labeling of them as "pseudo" by virtue of their alleged aggressive passivity: "Who is to say that our present minor actions won't become, through the unforeseeable hindsight of subsequent history, major acts after the fact? Nothing rules out our being retroactively crowned the truest of radicals by the unpredictable future effects of our current interventions." No amount of added theoretical stipulations or attached conceptual caveats can eliminate the danger of this ideologically motivated appropriation of the situational surveillance called for by a subtractive politics of minimal differences, an appropria­ tion that perversely twists the reasons behind and methods of this sur­ veillance into apologies for (to paraphrase a famous George W. Bush one-liner coined by his former speechwriter Michael Gerson) the soft defeatism of lowered expectations. This defeatism protests that it isn't defeatism by paying lip service to the idea that "big changes" are needed today But this is defeatism all the same, since it resigns itself to the sup­ posedly unavoidable modesty, while waiting for the forever à venir open­ ing for real transformations, of safely keeping its interventions within the sanctioned realm of acceptable debates and reforms. However, if, apropos Badiou, I am indeed justified in maintain­ ing that events can redraw the lines of division between events and nonevents in various ways (including the possible scenario of the vanishing event in which an event's ensuing redistribution of change-category sta­ tuses comes to revoke its own éventai status in the eyes of those living in its shadow), so too would I equally be justified in maintaining that acts can redraw the lines of division between acts and actions-as-non-acts (al­ lowing for the possibility of a vanishing act). As asserted above, without

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actions, there are no acts. Moreover, if a vanishing act is granted as a possibility—Zizek's agreement with certain key features of my reading of Badiou requires him to grant this possibility—then, looking back to the past, it might very well be the case that many prior doings meeting the shared Badiouian-Zizekian criteria for qualifying as the event of an act have been later either demoted to the status of non-evental actions (if these doings managed to get and remain recorded throughout the pro­ cesses of historical re-transcriptions of the past) or erased from collective memory altogether as seemingly too banal and trivial to merit being no­ ticed. The relatively recent shift in historiographie trends from "big" to "little" histories—this is the shift from tales centered on towering influ­ ential figures and spectacularly visible happenings to narratives pinpoint­ ing the origin of the way things are to seemingly small factors (James Burke's now-defunct "Connections" column in the magazine Scientific American and his public-television miniseries based on the column ar­ guably provide the best popularized version of this historiographie art of unearthing the minuscule differences that ended up making not-sominuscule differences)—furnishes many possible examples of (to use a phrase Zizek borrows from Jameson) vanishing mediators as éventai points retroactively rendered apparently non-evental. In other words, we are not only haunted by the Benjaminian revenants of unfulfilled revo­ lutionary potentials from previous periods of history (Zizek sometimes refers to Benjamin apropos this conception of the relation between past and present), 11 but we also live among the specters of fulfilled upheavals that, in the ensuing turbulent storms, disappeared into historical thin air in part thanks to their very success in changing the world. Succinctly stated, there are ghosts of consummated revolutions past, not just ghosts of past potential-but-thwarted revolutions. How is this brief discussion of vanishing acts and self-effacing events relevant in connection with the previous observations about ideology critique and its always-possible appropriation by the insidious tendrils of related species of quietism willing and able to lie in the guise of truth? It's difficult to avoid detecting in the Lacanian notion of the act (as well as the Zizekian idea of the "Big Act") resonances evoking the shock of the spectacular, the sublime excess of a violent shattering of that which is—in short, the striking, awe-inspiring grandeur of an absolutely radical and transformative deed. In distinguishing acts from actions, Lacan and Zizek appear to raise the bar for what counts as an efficacious interven­ tion aiming at change quite high—perhaps, if it's a question here strictly of the perceived risk of quietist appropriation, too high. That is to say, just as the situational surveillance of the subtractive politics of minimal differences is vulnerable to being pressed into serving as a rationalizing

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apology for t h e soft defeatism of lowered expectations, so too are calls for "passing to the act," t h r o u g h insisting that only a g r a n d gesture can save us now, equally vulnerable to quietist appropriation. In his piece o n Badiou, Zizek accurately diagnoses this very danger: Progressive liberals today often complain that they would like to join a "revolution" (a more radical emancipatory political movement), but no matter how desperately they search for it, they just "don't see it" (they don't see anywhere in the social space a political agent with a will and strength to seriously engage in such activity). While there is a moment of truth in it, one should nonetheless also add that the very attitude of these liberals is in itself part of a problem: if one just waits to "see" a revolutionary moment, it will, of course, never arise, and one will never see it.12 It's easy to imagine a "progressive liberal" who succeeds at interminably delaying the p e r f o r m a n c e of anything revolutionary, who remains chron­ ically blind to the possibility for an éventai d e e d realized within the realm of status q u o circumstances, precisely because h e or she expects (from a p r e - a c t / e v e n t perspective) this yet-to-be-enacted intervention to have in advance the glaringly visible features of a dramatic, over-the-top spec­ tacle. To p a r a p h r a s e a well-known Kantian declaration, if Zizek is right that the situational surveillance of the subtractive politics of m i n i m a l dif­ ferences without the readiness to seize the m o m e n t for the initiation of the "Big Act" is politically empty (qua apolitically ineffective), t h e n o n e would also b e correct to say that the readiness to seize the m o m e n t for the initiation of the "Big Act" without the situational surveillance of the subtractive politics of minimal differences is blind. O n e version of the latter position would b e the above-mentioned "liberal" u n a b l e "to 'see' a revolutionary m o m e n t . " T h e Lacanian-Zizekian act, if sought after by a p r e - a c t / e v e n t gaze o n the lookout for s o m e t h i n g with the spectacular ap­ p e a r a n c e of a "Big Act" as an ex nihilo absolute exit from the constraints of the present, is likely n o t to a p p e a r before this gaze. All it will observe, blinded by t h e fantasmatic brilliance of the anticipated yet-to-come mir­ acle of the act making the impossible possible, are seemingly less-thanevental sites for interventions that it can't imagine a n d is u n a b l e to envi­ sion as having the slightest h o p e of b e c o m i n g acts. However, this is to fall prey to t h e e r r o r of failing to realize t h a t s o m e of t h e constituents of o n e ' s situation are probably ideologically d o u b l e inscribed (or, at least, potentially d o u b l e inscribable). M o r e spe­ cifically, this is the mistake of assuming that an act a n d / o r event will ap­ p e a r to b e such (i.e., an act a n d / o r event) within the limited h o r i z o n of

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the present pre-act/event reality as denned and demarcated by the reign­ ing state-of-the-situation. But, as argued, statist ideology can re/present the elements and parts of its situational field as having change-category statuses in such away that it makes the éventai seem less-than-evental and vice versa (ditto for acts and less-than-acts). So, in donning the lenses of a critical approach to this ideological distribution of assigned types of potential for change, one has a real chance to see through the repre­ sentational schémas of the socio-symbolic big Other, to glimpse virtual layers of other possible change-category statuses linked to the powers and tendencies circulating throughout one's current circumstances— succinctiy stated, to see that what now appears to be an action or a nonevent might harbor the explosive possibility to become something more. This involves venturing what Hallward refers to as "hunches," namely, pre-act/event "preliminary anticipations" of weak links and contradic­ tions internally plaguing the current state-of-the-situation.13 The fact that the various theoretical delineations of the complex rapport between ideologies and interventions sketched by Zizek and my­ self are all equally exposed to the omnipresent threat of quietist appro­ priation compels an important acknowledgment: correct theories aren't enough. Of course, as should be clear from the preceding discussion, the mere impulse to activity by itself, without the guidance of a sufficiently complex and nuanced critique of ideology grounded on a philosophi­ cally well-cultivated body of political thought, ends up vainly spinning its wheels and sputtering out in directionless impotence (à la aggres­ sive passivity) ; or, worse still, such intellectually unsupervised urges push people into forms of activism either already integrated into the estab­ lished system or else ready-made to be easily co-opted by said order. As Zizek emphasizes in one of the extra segments on the DVD version of Zizek! The Movie, it's crucial to recognize that, as per the title of this seg­ ment, "Theory Matters." And yet, at the same time, no matter how care­ fully one constructs one's critical conceptual apparatus, there's no sure­ fire, one hundred percent guaranteed inoculation against the infectious disease of quietism and other, related political maladies. When it comes to unconscious convictions and perspectives regard­ ing how things are (convictions and perspectives running contrary to the content of conscious protests that real change is supposedly desired), a cliché saying is quite appropriate (especially in light of Zizek's mention of "will and strength" in the passage quoted several paragraphs above) : where there's a will, there's a way. Each and every theoretical truth about the ideology supporting the present state of affairs can be hijacked by networks of unconscious beliefs and investments in the status quo so as to become a lie in the guise of truth, a "true lie" leading to and foster-

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ing various forms of defeatist acquiescence. The only defense against this is the countervailing will, over and above the formulation of correct theories of ideology, to fight against the all-too-human temptation to ca­ pitulate in bad faith to the established order of things. Paraphrasing Kant once again, without theory, the will is blind; but without the will, theory is empty . . . or even worse, it becomes a dangerously deceptive and dis­ simulating apologist for the powers that be.

Appendix B

Slavoj Zizek, "An Answer to Two Questions"

I took very seriously the long series of Adrian Johnston's questions—so seriously, in fact, that already my effort to answer two of them spilled over into a long text. Here, then, are my two answers. Each of them addresses a general question (return to pure philosophy after the long reign of anti-philosophy; return to materialism after the long reign of transcendental fmitude). Each of them approaches the question through the prism of the debate with a singular philosophy (the thought of Alain Badiou and of his pupil Quentin Meillassoux). And, last but not least, the true focus of each answer is Hegel, my unconditional fidelity to He­ gel's breakthrough, to his unique position, in the history of philosophy, between traditional philosophical metaphysics and the post-Hegelian anti-philosophy. 1. When you talk about returning to doing pure philosophy/theory after having spent a substantial amount of time in recent years addressing sociopolitical circumstances and issues, what do you have in mind? What sorts of philosophical/ theoretical work are you most urgently concerned with accomplishing in the years to come? My permanent debate with Badiou could also be read as a series of variations on the motif: how to redeem Hegel, how to reclaim him for today's universe of radical contingency. Let me begin with the very complex and ambiguous relationship between inconsistency and truth in Badiou's thought. As Peter Hallward pointed out in his review oi Logiques des mondes, for Badiou, "Inconsistency is a category of truth, rather than knowledge or experience": 1 reality is, at its most elementary ontological level, an inconsistent multiplicity that no One can totalize into a consis­ tent unity. Of course, reality always appears to us within a determinate situation, as a particular world whose consistency is regulated by its tran­ scendental features. But, as Badiou put it, a truth is this minimal consistency (a part, an immanence without con­ cept) which indicates in the situation the inconsistency that makes its being . . . Since the groundless ground of what is presented is inconsis­ tency a truth will be that which, from within the presented and as a pari 174

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of the presented, brings forth the inconsistency upon which, ultimately, the consistency of presentation depends. 2 H e r e is how Hallward deploys t h e consequences of this n o t i o n of t r u t h as inconsistency: Perhaps the two most important general notions that underlie this philosophy of truth are fidelity and inconsistency. However varied the circumstances of its production, a truth always involves a fidelity to in­ consistency. The semantic tension between these terms is only apparent. Fidelity: a principled commitment, variously maintained, to the infinite and universalisable implications of a disruptive event. Inconsistency: the presumption, variously occasioned, that such disruption touches on the very being of being. Inconsistency is the ontological basis, so to speak, of a determined wager on the infinitely revolutionary orientation and destiny of thought. Fidelity is the subjective discipline required to sus­ tain this destiny and thus to affirm an "immortality" that Badiou some­ times associates with the legacy of Saint Paul and Pascal. Inconsistency is what there is and fidelity is a response to what happens, but it is only by being faithful to the consequences of what happens that we can think the truth of what there is. In every case, "the truth of the situation is its inconsistency," and "a truth does not draw its support from consistency but from inconsistency."3 T h e t e r m "inconsistency" is h e r e used in two n o t clearly distinguished senses. First, t h e r e is inconsistency as the "true ontological f o u n d a t i o n of any multiple-being," that is, "a multiple-deployment that n o unity can gather"; inconsistency is h e r e the starting point, the zero-level of p u r e presence, t h a t which is subsequently c o u n t e d as o n e , organized into a w o r l d — t h a t which subsequently appears within a given transcendental horizon. T h e n t h e r e is inconsistency as the symptomal k n o t of a world, the excess which c a n n o t be a c c o u n t e d for in its terms. (Exactly t h e same ambiguity characterizes the Lacanian Real.) A little bit of clumsy elementary reasoning may be useful h e r e : if inconsistency is "what t h e r e is" a n d fidelity is fidelity to inconsistency, does this t h e n m e a n that Badiouian fidelity to a Truth-Event ultimately is fidelity to what t h e r e is? Is t h e n a Truth-Event only the intervention of in­ consistent multiplicity into a consistent situation, the index of how every totalizing representation of the inconsistent multiplicity fails to capture it fully? If this is the case, t h e n we are back in the standard post-Hegelian universe of the productivity of a life-process which is always in excess over its re-presentations, so that re-presentations (situations, Worlds, totaliza-

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tions) are like temporary envelopes which are to be discarded when the productive force of presence overgrows them. At this level, inconsistency as the symptomal point of a situation is simply an index of the failure of this situation, an index of the need to drop it. We can even accommodate at this level Badiou's notion of the symptomal point as "nothing (the element without place) which becomes all": the symptomal point is the element within a situation which counts for nothing within its (transcen­ dental) coordinates; through the éventai revolution, this nothing (the "part of no-part") becomes All, that is, the basic structuring principle of a new situation (like the proletariat before and after revolution). How­ ever, considered in this way, Event is only a passage from one to another World, a founding of a new World, a "World in becoming"—the whole process can be grasped in the terms of the opposition between the incon­ sistent multiplicity of Being and the consistency of a World as a form of appearance of multiplicity. This couple is, however, obviously not "strong enough" to provide the coordinates for Badiou's notion of Truth-Event: a Truth-Event is not only the "revenge" of inconsistency upon a consistent situation; the fidel­ ity to a Truth-Event is a work of imposing a new order onto the multi­ plicity of Being, that is, Truth is a "project" which is enforced upon the unnamable of a situation. In a way, Truth is even more forcefully impos­ ing of itself than a World: there is no preestablished harmony between Being and Event, that is, the enforcing of a Truth onto the multiple reality in no way "expresses" the "inner truth" of reality itself. There is thus a potential tension between truth as a fidelity to in­ consistency and Truth as enforcing a project upon being; that is to say, the key dilemma is: is it enough to define an Event as the intrusion of inconsistency into a consistent situation, as the return of its repressed in the guise of a symptomal torsion, of an excessive element which for­ mally belongs to a situation but lacks a proper place in it (Rancière's "part of no-part")? Is it not that such points of symptomal torsion are not yet Events themselves but only what Badiou calls "éventai sites," possible places where an Event can occur? If, however, Truth is an Order enforced, imposed on the multi­ plicity of being, the question arises: How does Truth differ from a World? Can Truth become a World? (Badiou's ambiguity as noted by Alberto Toscano—while, for him, an Event is the point of inconsistency and subversion of a World, he ends up calling for a new World against the capitalist atonal worldlessness—is symptomatic of this subterranean link between World and Truth-Event.) To put it bluntly: does an Event, like every situation (or World), also have (or rather, generate) its point of symptomal torsion, so that a Truth-Event is merely the passage between

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one and another World? The answer, of course, is "No." The Truth en­ forced upon a situation is of a radically different nature than a World. Again, to put it bluntly: a World is historical, a transcendental-historical organization of a sphere of Being, while—as Badiou repeatedly empha­ sizes in his unabashedly Platonic way—Truth is eternal—in enforcing it one enforces onto reality an eternal Idea. We are thus dealing with two radically different levels: World is a formation of human finitude, "hermeneutic" (a horizon of meaning) ; the éventai Truth is eternal, the trans-historical persistence of an eternal Idea which continues to haunt us "in all possible worlds" (as they put it in modal logic). Both World and Truth-Event are modes of appearing: a World consists of the transcendental coordinates of appearing, while a TruthEvent (or an immortal Idea) is something that, rather than appearing, "shines through," transpires in reality. The status of the World is herme­ neutic, it provides the horizon of sense that determines our experience of reality, while the status of the Idea is real, it is a virtual-immovable X whose traces are discernible in reality. In other words, the universality of a World is always "false" in the Marxist critico-ideological sense: every World is based upon an exclusion or "repression" which can be detected through its points of symptomal torsion, while the universality of Truth is unconditional, that is, it is not based upon a constitutive exception, it does not generate its own point of symptomal torsion. Badiou takes this claim literally: at the beginning of Logiques des mondes, he takes the example of the horse as an object of visual art, en­ deavoring to demonstrate how the two historical extremes, the famous Lascaux prehistoric cave drawings of a horse and Picasso's horses, both render the same "eternal Idea" of a horse. A much more crucial case here is that of politics, of the big Events of modern emancipatory poli­ tics: the French Revolution, the October Revolution, the Chinese Cul­ tural Revolution. In all these cases, Badiou staunchly opposes (what he perceives as) the "Hegelian" reading which interprets the final failure of these Events as the result of their immanent limitation, so that the fail­ ure of the Event is its "truth": because of the immanent limitation of its egalitarian project, the French Revolution had to end in the reign of the bourgeois market—this reign was the "truth" of the enthusiastic dreams which propelled the revolutionaries; the October Revolution had to end in Stalinism; the Cultural Revolution had to end in the recent capitalist explosion . . . In all these cases, the interpretive method is the same, that of a "symptomal reading" which sees in what appears to the engaged participants as the failure or betrayal of their project the realization of the very truth of this project. The disappointed revolutionaries are thus dismissed as hysterical "beautiful souls" who refuse to recognize in the

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catastrophe they deplore the outcome and "truth" of their own acts. It is easy to discern in this the motif of the Cunning of Reason: the revolution­ aries were the instruments of historical Necessity, tools in the realization of something they despised . . . For Badiou, on the contrary, the failure of a revolution simply indi­ cates the exhaustion of a sequence; it doesn't in anyway divulge its truth, its fateful limitation. Let us take the Cultural Revolution: we can read it at two different levels. If we read it as a part of historical reality (being), we can easily submit it to a "dialectical" analysis which perceives the fi­ nal outcome of a historical process as its "truth": the ultimate failure of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to the inherent inconsistency of the very project ("notion") of Cultural Revolution—it is the explicationdeployment-actualization of these inconsistencies (in the same way that, for Marx, the vulgar, non-heroic, capitalist daily life of profit-seeking is the "truth" of the Jacobin noble revolutionary heroism). If, however, we analyze it as an Event, as an enactment of the eternal Idea of egalitarian Justice, then the ultimate factual result of the Cultural Revolution, its catastrophic failure and reversal into the recent capitalist explosion, does not exhaust the real of the Cultural Revolution: the eternal Idea of the Cultural Revolution survives its defeat in sociohistorical reality, it contin­ ues to lead the underground spectral life of the ghosts of failed Utopias which haunt future generations, patiently awaiting its next resurrection. This brings us back to Robespierre, who expressed in a touching way the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, without which, as it was clear to Robespierre, a revolution "is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime." This faith is most poignantly expressed in Robespierre's very last speech on 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution: But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that com­ passionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world's first republic.4 Does the same not hold even more for the last big installment in the life of this Idea, the Maoist Cultural Revolution? Without this Idea which sus­ tained the revolutionary enthusiasm, the Cultural Revolution was even to a greater degree "just a noisy crime that destroys another crime." One

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should recall h e r e Hegel's sublime words o n the F r e n c h Revolution from his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: It has been said that the French revolution resulted from philosophy, and it is not without reason that philosophy has been called Weltweisheit/world wisdom; for it is not only truth in and for itself, as the pure essence of things, but also truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world. We should not, therefore, contradict the asser­ tion that the revolution received its first impulse from philosophy . . . Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets re­ volved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centers in his head, i.e., in thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality . . . not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accord­ ingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking being shared in the jubila­ tion of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accom­ plished. 5 This, of course, did n o t prevent Hegel from coldly analyzing the i n n e r necessity of this explosion of abstract freedom to turn into its opposite, the self-destructive revolutionary terror; however, o n e should never for­ get t h a t Hegel's critique is i m m a n e n t , accepting the basic principle of the F r e n c h Revolution (and its key supplement, the Haiti Revolution). A n d o n e s h o u l d d o exactly t h e same a p r o p o s the O c t o b e r Revolution (and later, t h e Chinese Revolution) : it was, as Badiou p o i n t e d out, the first case in the entire history of h u m a n i t y of the successful revolt of t h e exploited p o o r — t h e y were the zero-level m e m b e r s of the new society, they set t h e standards. T h e revolution stabilized itself into a new social order; a new world was created a n d miraculously survived for decades a m i d u n t h i n k a b l e e c o n o m i c a n d military pressure a n d isolation. This was effectively "a glorious mental dawn. All thinking being s h a r e d in the jubilation of this epoch." Against all hierarchic orders, egalitarian univer­ sality directly came to power. T h e r e is a basic philosophical d i l e m m a which underlies this alter­ native. It may seem that the only c o n s e q u e n t Hegelian s t a n d p o i n t is the o n e which measures the n o t i o n by the success or failure of its actualiza­ tion, so that, in the perspective of the total mediation of the essence by its a p p e a r a n c e , any transcendence of the idea over its actualization is dis­ credited. T h e consequence of this is that, if we insist o n the eternal Idea which survives its historical defeat, this necessarily entails—in Hegel-

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ese—a regression from the level of the Notion as the fully actualized unity of essence and appearance to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its appearing. Is it so, however? One can also claim that the excess of the Utopian Idea which survives its historical defeat does not contradict the total mediation of Idea and its appearing: the basic Hege­ lian insight according to which the failure of reality to fully actualize an Idea is simultaneously the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself continues to hold. What one should add is only that the gap separating Idea from its actualization signals a gap within this Idea itself. However, in what, precisely, does this gap consist? The ambiguity of Lacan 's motif "Kant avec Sade" can be of some help here. One should turn around the commonplace reading of "Kant avec Sade" according to which the Sadean perversion is the "truth" of Kant, more "radical" than Kant, that it draws out the consequences Kant himself did not have the courage to confront. It is not in this sense that Sade is the truth of Kant; on the contrary, the Sadean perversion emerges as the result of the Kantian compromise, of Kant's avoiding the conse­ quences of his breakthrough. Sade is the symptom of Kant. While it is true that Kant retreated from drawing all the consequences of his ethical revo­ lution, the space for the figure of Sade is opened up by this compromise of Kant, by his unwillingness to go to the end, to retain the full fidelity to his philosophical breakthrough. Far from being simply and directly "the truth of Kant," Sade is the symptom of how Kant betrayed the truth of his own discovery—the obscene Sadean jouisseur is a stigma bearing witness to Kant's ethical compromise; the apparent "radicality" of this figure (the willingness of the Sadean hero to go to the end in his Will to Enjoy) is a mask of its exact opposite. In other words, the true horror is not a Sadean orgy, but the real core of the Kantian ethic itself—to para­ phrase Brecht yet again, what is the miserable Evil of a Sadean group orgy in comparison with the "diabolical Evil" that pertains to a pure ethical act? And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for the relationship between the Chinese Cultural Revolution and today's explosion of capitalist de­ velopment as its "truth": this explosion is also a sign that Mao retreated from drawing all the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, that is, the space for the capitalist explosion was opened up by this compromise, by Mao's unwillingness to go to the end, to retain the full fidelity to the idea of the Cultural Revolution. And the lesson both times is, in the case of Kant as well as in the case of Mao, the same one, from Beckett's Worstward Ho: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."6 "Symptom" functions here in a different way from the "symptomal point" of a situation: while, in the second case, "symptom" indicates the failure/falsity of the situation as such and is thereby its "truth," in the

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first case, "symptom" does not indicate the failure of the Idea as such, but the failure of the subject's fidelity to the Idea—the figure of Sade as a Kantian indicates that Kant was not consequent in following to the end his own philosophical axioms. In the second case, symptom is "the truth of . . . ," while, in the first case, it bears witness to the fact that the subject "compromised (gave way with regard to) his desire." Let us take another "symptom": Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism. The pre­ dominant Cultural Studies critical reading of Wagner interprets his antiSemitism as the "truth" of his project, as the key which allows us to un­ earth what is false even in Wagner's most sublime visions and musical achievements. But one can also read it as an indication of Wagner's in­ consequence, of his infidelity to his own project, and demonstrate how the very narrative and musical texture of his work undermines it. (For example, the central figure of his entire work, the hero condemned to the obscene immortality of endless wandering and seeking for redemp­ tion in death, is clearly a figure of the Wandering Jew.) The question is not which of these two logics of symptom is the right one—it depends on what type of universality or totality we are dealing with. In the case of capitalism, the Marxist view that crises, wars, and other "deviant" phenomena are its "truth" fully holds. Democracy is a more ambiguous case—an exemplary case of this ambiguity is the legendary study of "authoritarian personality" in which Adorno partic­ ipated. The features of the "authoritarian personality" are clearly op­ posed to the standard figure of the "open" democratic personality, and the underlying dilemma is: are these two types of personality opposites of a struggle, so that we should fight for one against the other, or is the "authoritarian" personality the symptomal "truth" of the "democratic" personality? Along these lines, the very shift from Adorno to Habermas apropos modernity can be formulated in these terms: the core of Adorno and Horkheimer's "dialectics of enlightenment" is that phenomena like fascism are the "symptoms" of modernity, its necessary consequence (which is why, as Horkheimer put it in his memorable line, those who do not want to talk [critically] about liberalism should also keep quiet about fascism), while, for Habermas, they are "symptoms"/indicators of the fact that modernity remained an "unfinished project," that it did not yet deploy all its potentials. But do we not, with this logic of Idea as an "unfinished project," commit ourselves to Derrida's notion of a gap between the spectral Idea that continues to haunt historical reality and the Idea in its positive form, as a determinate program to be realized? Every determinate form of the Idea, every translation of the Idea into a positive program, betrays its spectral core of a messianic Promise . . . We are thus back in the pseudo-

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Kantian Levinasian waters of eternal Truth as a regulative Idea which is forever "to come," never here in its full actuality . . . Is this the only solu­ tion? There is, however, a different way to read the "eternality" of the Idea. Recall that, for Hegel, the "resolution" of a contradiction is not simply the abolition of difference, but its full admission: in dialectical "reconciliation," difference is not erased, but admitted as such. It took even Lacan a long time to reach this insight. Throughout his develop­ ment, Lacan was looking for a "quilting point," a link that would hold together or at least mediate between S (the symbolic semblance) and J (the real of jouissance). The main solution is to elevate phallus into the signifier of the lack of signifier which, as the signifier of castration, holds the place of jouissance within the symbolic order; then, there is objet a itself as the surplus enjoyment generated by the loss of jouissance which is the obverse of the entry into the symbolic order, as jouissance located not on the side of the real jouissance but, paradoxically, on the side of the symbolic. In "Lituraterre," he finally drops this search for the symbolic pineal gland (the gland which, for Descartes, marks the bodily point at which body and soul interact) and endorses the Hegelian solution: it is the gap itself forever separating S and] that holds them together, since this gap is constitutive of both of them: the Symbolic arises through the gap that separates it from full jouissance, and this jouissance itself is a specter pro­ duced by the gaps and holes in the Symbolic. To designate this interde­ pendence, Lacan introduces the term littorale, standing for the letter in its "coast-like" dimension and thereby "figuring that one domain" which "in its entirety makes for the other a frontier, because of their being for­ eign to each other, to the extent of not falling into a reciprocal relation. Is the edge of the hole in knowledge not what it traces?"7 So when Lacan says that "between knowledge and jouissance, there is a littoral,"* one should hear in this the evocation of jouis-sense (enjoymeant), of a letter reduced to a sinthome, a signifying formula of en­ joyment. Therein resides the late Lacan's final "Hegelian" insight: the convergence of the two incompatible dimensions (the Real and the Sym­ bolic) is sustained by their very divergence, that is, difference is consti­ tutive of what it differentiates. Or, to put it in more formal terms: it is the very intersection between the two fields which constitutes them. It is along these lines that, in his reading of Paul, Badiou provides a perspicu­ ous interpretation of the subjective passage from Law to love. In both cases, we are dealing with division, with a "divided subject"; however, the modality of the division is thoroughly different. The subject of the Law is "decentered" in the sense that it is caught in the self-destructive vicious

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cycle of sin a n d Law in which o n e pole e n g e n d e r s its opposite. Paul pro­ vided the unsurpassable description of this e n t a n g l e m e n t in R o m a n s 7: We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin. What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, m my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am! It is thus n o t that I am merely t o r n between the two opposites, law a n d sin; the p r o b l e m is that I c a n n o t even clearly distinguish t h e m : I want to follow the law, a n d I e n d u p in sin. This vicious cycle is (not so m u c h overcome as) b r o k e n , o n e breaks o u t of it, with the experience of love— m o r e precisely, with the experience of the radical gap that separates love from the Law. T h e r e i n resides the radical difference between the couple law/sin a n d the couple law/love. T h e gap that separates law a n d sin is n o t a real difference: their t r u t h is their m u t u a l implication or confu­ sion—law generates sin a n d feeds o n it, a n d so on, o n e c a n n o t ever draw a clear line of separation between the two. It is only with the couple law/ love that we attain real difference; these two m o m e n t s are radically sepa­ rate, they are n o t "mediated," o n e is n o t the form of a p p e a r a n c e of its opposite. In o t h e r words, the difference between the two couples (law/ sin a n d law/love) is n o t substantial, b u t purely formal; we are dealing with the same c o n t e n t in its two modalities. In its i n d i s t i n c t i o n / m e d i a tion, the couple is the o n e of law/sin; in the radical distinction of the two, it is law/love. It is therefore w r o n g to ask the question: "Are we t h e n forever c o n d e m n e d to the split between Law a n d love? W h a t a b o u t the synthesis between Law a n d love?" T h e split between Law a n d sin is of a radically different n a t u r e than the split between Law a n d love. Instead of the vicious cycle of mutual reinforcement, we get a clear distinction of two different d o m a i n s . O n c e we b e c o m e fully aware of the d i m e n s i o n of love in its radical difference from the Law, love has in a way already won, since this difference is visible only w h e n o n e already dwells in love, from the s t a n d p o i n t of love. In this precise sense, there is n o n e e d for a

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further "synthesis" between Law and love. Paradoxically, their "synthesis" already is the very experience of their radical split. It is along these lines that one should oppose "eternal Idea" as the inaccessible Goal to "eternal Idea" as a principle of division—or, as Badiou put it (in his seminar on Plato, December 5, 2007): "The idea is that which allows a division." In a confused and disoriented "complex" situa­ tion, an Idea renders its contours clear, allowing us to draw a line of divi­ sion with reference to the antagonism which underlies the situation. The "eternity" of the Idea does not rely on the "spurious infinity" of endlessly approaching the impossible goal; the "eternity" of an Idea is the eternity of division. It is this feature which makes Idea non-All ("feminine" with regard to Lacan 's "formulas of sexuation"): an Idea compels us to divide without any preexisting encompassing unity—more precisely (and para­ doxically), every unity is here a form of division. The Kantian "regulative Idea" is on the side of desire with its for­ ever eluding object-cause: with every object, the desiring subject experi­ ences a "ce n'est pas ça / this is not THAT—what I really want," every posi­ tive determinate object falls short of the elusive spectral X after which desire runs. With Idea as the principle of division, we are on the side of drive: the "eternity" of the Idea is nothing other than the repetitive in­ sistence of drive. The consequences of this flaw in Badiou's line of argumentation concern politics also. Let me begin with two of Hallward's critical points against which one can defend Badiou. The first one concerns Badiou's notion of invisibility, of "counting-for-nothing," of the symptomal ele­ ment of the social edifice (what Rancière called the "part of no-part"): Practical political work is more often concerned with people or situa­ tions who are not so much invisible or unseen so much as under-seen or mis-seen—oppressed and exploited, rather than simply excluded; they do not count for nothing so much as for very little. This difference involves more than nuance. As several generations of emancipatory thinkers have argued, modern forms of power do not merely exclude or prohibit but rather modulate, guide or enhance the behaviour and norms conducive to the status quo; the model of power that seems tac­ itly to inform Badiou's recent work, by contrast, still appears to pre-date Foucault, if not Gramsci.9 In this choice of "Badiou versus Foucault," one should nonetheless insist on a dimension ignored by the Foucauldian approach, a dimension on which Badiou's notion of invisibility focuses. That is to say, in the Fou­ cauldian notion of productive power, a power which does not work in an

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exclusionary way, but in an enabling/regulatory way, there is no room for Badiou's notion of the point of inconsistency (or the "symptomal torsion") of a situation, the element of a situation for which there is no proper place (with) in the situation, not for accidental reasons but be­ cause its dislocation/exclusion is constitutive of this situation. Take the case of the proletariat: of course the working class is "visible" in multiple ways within the capitalist world (as those who freely sell their work on the market; as a potential rabble; as faithful and disciplined servants of capi­ talist managers, etc.). However, none of these modes of visibility covers up the symptomal role of the proletariat as the "part of no-part" of the capitalist universe. Badiou's "invisibility" is thus the obverse of visibility within the hegemonic ideological space; it is what has to remain invisible so that the visible is visible. Or, to put it in another, more traditional way: what there is no place for in the Foucauldian approach is the notion of a double-faced symptomal element, an element whose one face is to be a marginal accident of a situation, and whose other face is to be (to stand for) the truth of this same situation. This is why Lacan claimed that Marx invented the (Freudian) no­ tion of a symptom. For both Marx and Freud, the way to the truth of a system (of society, of psyche) leads through what necessarily appears a "pathological" marginal and accidental distortion of this system: slips of the tongue, dreams, symptoms, economic crises. The Freudian Uncon­ scious is thus "invisible" in an exactly homologous way, which is why there is no place for it in Foucault's edifice. This is why Foucault's rejection of what he calls the Freudian "repression hypothesis," his notion of regu­ latory power discourses which generate sexuality in their very practice of describing and regulating it, misses the (Freudian) point. Freud and Lacan were well aware that there is no repression without the return of the repressed, that the repressive discourse generates what it represses. However, what this discourse represses is not what it appears to repress; it is not what this discourse itself portrays as the threatening X which it tries to control. The figures of "sexuality" that this discourse portrays as the threat to be controlled—like the figure of the Woman, of her uncon­ trolled sexuality as a threat to the masculine order—are themselves fantasmatic mystifications. What this discourse "represses" is (among other things) its own contamination by what it tries to control—say, the way the sacrifice of sexuality sexualizes sacrifice itself, or the way the effort to con­ trol sexuality sexualizes this controlling activity itself. Sexuality is thus of course not "invisible"; it is controlled and regulated. What is "invisible" is the sexualization of this very work of control. "Invisible" is not the elusive object we try to control, but the mode of our own participation in it. The second critical point concerns the very ontological fundamen-

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tals of Badiou's philosophical edifice, t h e relationship between Being a n d beings: Badiou assumes but does not account for the status of the middle and mediating term—the status of beings {étants). Neither Badiou's ontology nor his logic seem to provide any clear place for ordinary ontic reality. What appears in our various Parisian worlds, clearly, are not instances of pure being or multiplicity, but people. Depending on the transcenden­ tal configuration of their world, these people can then appear or exist as tranquil workers, patriotic heroes or rebellious insurgents, but in each case the transcendental appears to take the elementary ontic status of its inhabitants for granted. Between the being of a pure multiplicity and an appearing as docile or insurgent lies an abyss without mediation. The space that in other philosophies might be filled by an account of material actualisation or emergent self-realization (or any number of al­ ternatives) is one that Badiou, so far, prefers to consign to contingency. If the transcendental of a world determines the ways in which its objects may appear, Badiou seems to presume a meta-transcendental register which simply gives a world the ontic raw material of its objects . . .10 T h e gist of Hallward's a r g u m e n t is clear: t h e ontological structure of a purely formal m a t h e m a t i c a l multiplicity is n o t e n o u g h to provide (ac­ c o u n t for) t h e "raw material," the ontic density of beings, of positive entities (material objects) c a u g h t into a world, organized t h r o u g h its transcendental frame . . . Convincing as it appears, this a r g u m e n t n o n e ­ theless imputes to Badiou's n o t i o n of t h e "transcendental" a perspectival status: it only works if, in a traditional Kantian way, we conceive t h e transcendental as t h e network which structures o u r perspective o n n o u m e n a l reality. If, however, we follow Badiou a n d conceive World— the transcendental structuring principle—as strictly i m m a n e n t to ontic reality, t h e n we have to conclude that beings, in their very material den­ sity a n d wealth of property, exist ALWAYS a n d ONLY as part of a World a n d its d e t e r m i n a t e situation. Beings are n o t a n e u t r a l "raw stuff" getting c a u g h t into o n e a n d t h e n a n o t h e r t r a n s c e n d e n t a l n e t w o r k — t h e n e u ­ tral "stuff" outside every situation is only t h e mathematical multiplicity. T h e r e is a n o t h e r i m p o r t a n t c o n s e q u e n c e to b e drawn from this absolute i m m a n e n c e of t h e transcendental: o n e should totally reject any p o t i o n of the symptomal p o i n t of a situation as the effect of the resistance of t h e inconsistent multiplicity of ontic reality to getting caught into the grid of transcendental consistency. T h e p o i n t of inconsistency, of the "symp­ tomal torsion" of a situation, is generated by its very i m m a n e n t transcen­ dental structure.

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Where, then, does Badiou's flaw reside? Badiou reacted to the "ob­ scure disaster" of the fall of socialist regimes—and, more generally, to the exhaustion of the revolutionary event of the twentieth century—by making a step from history to ontology: it is important to note how it was only after this "obscure disaster" that, in his theoretical edifice, he started to play with the double meaning of the term "state [état] "—the "state of things" and State as the apparatus of social power. The danger of this move is that, byway of establishing a direct link, a short circuit, as it were, between a particular historical form of social organization and a basic ontological feature of the universe, it (implicitly, at least) ontologizeseternalizes state as a form of political organization: (the political) state becomes something we should resist, subtract ourselves from, act at a distance from, but simultaneously something which cannot ever be abol­ ished (save in Utopian dreams). Is this step from history to ontology, from State qua political apparatus to state qua state of things, this short circuit State = state, not an elementary ideological operation? Due to this short circuit between state and State, Badiou gets caught in the typical Kantian ambiguity apropos the question: is the injunction to abandon the form of Party-State, to subtract oneself from State, to act in the interstices of State, an a priori necessity of radical emancipatory politics as such, or is it just the expression of a certain (our) historical moment, the one of the global defeat of radical politics? In other words, when Badiou interprets the failure of the Cultural Revolution as the ex­ haustion of the "Leninist" Party-State revolutionary paradigm, does he mean by this that this paradigm was appropriate for its period (the twen­ tieth century) and is no longer appropriate for our period, or does he mean that our historical moment has the privilege of granting us the insight into a universal feature of radical emancipatory politics which was obfuscated in previous epochs (which is why the "Leninist" paradigm ended up in a dismal failure, in an "obscure disaster")? Badiou is ambigu­ ous here: sometimes he implies that we are dealing with a succession of historical epochs, and sometimes (say, when he talks about the end of History, of global politics, even conceiving it as the last consequence of the "death of God," and emphasizes that politics should be a local intervention into a local situation) that we are dealing with an a priori necessity. To put it in yet another way, what is wrong with state-representation is not that it contaminates/mystifies the presence of the productive Real, but quite the opposite: it constitutes it (or, rather, its illusion). The State (apparatus) does not contaminate (or parasitize upon) the "apolitical" spheres of economy, of private life, of sexuality, and so on; it constitutes them as apolitical or pre-political—the ultimate task of state appara-

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tuses is to depoliticize these spheres, to regulate their apolitical status by m e a n s of coercive a n d ideological apparatuses. This is why, in a p r o p e r Marxist perspective, the ill-famed "abolition of the State" does n o t aim at a depoliticization of society, b u t (in a first step, at least) at its radical a n d t h o r o u g h "politicization": o n e does n o t "abolish t h e state" by getting rid of its excess in a transparent-harmonious self-organization of society, b u t by "abolishing" the specter of apolitical spheres, that is, by demonstrating how "there is n o t h i n g which is n o t political," u p to people's most intimate d r e a m s . No wonder, t h e n , that, in a c c o r d a n c e with his relying o n t h e couple p r e s e n t a t i o n / r e p r e s e n t a t i o n , Badiou exempts—with a malicious afterthought, o n e is t e m p t e d to say subtracts—economy (the sphere of "servicing the goods," of production-exchange-distribution) from the d o m a i n of Truth. Does this e x e m p t i o n also n o t imply that e c o n o m y is a sphere of productive p r e s e n c e prior to its (political) representation? Badiou thereby accepts the depoliticization of e c o n o m y as a fact, n o t as an effect of ideological censorship, that is, h e ignores the fundamental Marxist insight that e c o n o m y is always POLITICAL economy. A n o t h e r politico-philosophical aspect of Badiou's flaw was devel­ o p e d by Alenka Z u p a n c i c in h e r s u p e r b essay " T h e Fifth Condition": Badiou's u n p r o b l e m a t i c reliance on the couple p r e s e n t a t i o n / r e p r e s e n ­ tation. It is this reliance which makes h i m strangely solidary with antiphilosophers, whose basic motif is precisely the assertion of a p u r e pres­ e n c e (of the Real Life of society for Marx, of Existence for Kierkegaard, of Will for S c h o p e n h a u e r a n d Nietzsche, etc.) irreducible a n d excessive with regard to the network of philosophical c o n c e p t s / r e p r e s e n t a t i o n s . T h e big motif of the post-Hegelian anti-philosophy is the excess of the pre-conceptual productivity of Presence over its representation: r e p r e ­ sentation is r e d u c e d to the "mirror of representation" (the title of o n e of Baudrillard's early books) which reflects in a distorted way its productive ground: The post-Hegelian philosophy (or, if one prefers, anti-philosophy) started off with this fundamental claim: symbolic representations which were traditionally considered as access to the truth and to the real of Being do in fact alienate us from Being and deform it (or our percep­ tion of it). And classical philosophy (or "metaphysics") was suddenly recognised as the queen of this representative misrepresentation. Indeed, if one were to name one central issue that distinguishes the rise of modern thought it is perhaps none other than precisely the issue of representation (and the question of the One and/or Multiple is part of this issue), its profound interrogation, and the whole conse­ quent turn against (the logic of) representation. This is perhaps most

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perceptible in (modern) art, which frontally attacked the notion of art as representation . . . In politics, this also was a central issue: who repre­ sents people and how they can be properly represented? Why are some represented and some not? And what if the very idea of representation is the source of society's evils and its alienation? The realm of politics is especially interesting in this respect since the introduction of a "repre­ sentative" system coincided with the very questioning of its pertinence. Something similar took place in respect to the generic procedure of love: a simultaneous demand that love be properly represented by the institution of marriage (the new imperative that one should marry out of love), and a massive "observation" that this is in fact impossible, i.e., that marriage can never truly represent the real of love.11 In "post-structuralism," the relation b e t w e e n t h e two terms is t u r n e d a r o u n d : p r e s e n c e itself is d e n o u n c e d as t h e illusionary result of a dis­ persed productive process defined as anti-presence, as a process of selfdiffering, a n d so on; however, t h e encompassing framework remains that of p r o d u c t i o n versus representation, of a productive process o c c l u d e d b y / i n the false transparency of its representation. ( T h e underlying p r o b ­ lem h e r e is t h e o n e of how to relate the couple, fundamental in Badiou's ontology, of presentation a n d representation to the triad of Being, World, a n d Event. M o r e precisely, insofar as Being n a m e s the presence of incon­ sistent multiplicity a n d World its representation, its organization into a consistent situation regulated by its i m m a n e n t transcendentals, how is Event to b e conceived with r e g a r d to t h e couple of presentation a n d rep­ resentation?) "Idealism" or "metaphysics" are the n a m e s for t h e illusion that the circle of representation can close u p o n itself, totally obliterating t h e traces of its d e c e n t e r e d p r o d u c t i o n process. Anti-philosophy devel­ ops h e r e its own version of the logic of "suture": it conceives suture as t h e m o d e in which the exterior is inscribed in the interior, thus "suturing" the field, p r o d u c i n g the effect of self-enclosure with n o n e e d for a n ex­ terior, effacing the traces of its own p r o d u c t i o n ; traces of the p r o d u c t i o n process, its gaps, its mechanisms, are obliterated, so that the p r o d u c t can a p p e a r as a naturalized organic whole. However, the m u c h m o r e crucial aspect is t h e obverse o n e : n o t only "no interior without exterior," b u t also "no exterior without interior." T h e r e i n resides already t h e lesson of Kant's transcendental idealism: in o r d e r to a p p e a r as a consistent Whole, external reality has to be "sutured" by a subjective element, a n artificial s u p p l e m e n t that has to be a d d e d to it in o r d e r to generate t h e effect of reality, like t h e p a i n t e d b a c k g r o u n d that confers o n a scene t h e illusory effect of "reality." This is the objet petit a for Lacan: the subjective e l e m e n t constitutive of objective-external reality.

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The matrix of an external site of production that inscribes itself into the domain of illusions it generates has thus to be supplemented: this matrix simply does not account for the emergence of the SUBJECT. According to the standard (cinematic) suture theory, the "subject" is the illusory stand-in, WITHIN the domain of the constituted-generated, for its absent cause, for its production process: "subject" is the imaginary agent which, while dwelling inside the space of the constituted phenom­ ena, is (mis) perceived as their generator. This, however, is not what the Lacanian "barred subject" is about: in the standard suture theory, the subject is that which represents, within the constituted space, its absent cause/outside (production process), while the Lacanian subject can be conceptualized solely when we take into account how the very externality of the generative process ex-sists only insofar as the stand-in of the con­ stituted domain is present in it. The notion of reflexivity might be of some help here: to put it suc­ cinctly, "suture" means that external difference is always an internal one, that the external limitation of a field of phenomena always reflects itself within this field, as its inherent impossibility to fully become itself. To take the elementary example of sexual difference: in a patriarchal so­ ciety, the external limit/opposition that divides women from man also functions as the inherent obstacle which prevents women from fully real­ izing their potentials. We can see how, in this precise sense, suture is the exact opposite of the illusory self-enclosed totality that successfully erases the decentered traces of its production process: suture means precisely that such self-enclosure is a priori impossible, that the excluded external­ ity always leaves its traces within—or, to put it in the standard Freudian terms, that there is no repression (from the scene of phenomenal selfexperience) without the return of the repressed. This is what Lacan aims at in his persistent reference to the to­ rus and other variations of Môbius-strip-like structures in which the rela­ tionship between inside and outside is inverted: if we want to grasp the minimal structure of subjectivity, the clear-cut opposition between inner subjective experience and outer objective reality is not sufficient—there is an excess on both sides. On the one hand, we should accept the les­ son of Kant's transcendental idealism: out of the confused multitude of impressions, "objective reality" emerges through the intervention of the subject's transcendental act. In other words, Kant does not deny the distinction between the multitude of subjective impressions and objec­ tive reality; his point is merely that this very distinction results from the intervention of a subjective gesture of transcendental constitution. In a homologous way, Lacan's "Master Signifier" is the "subjective" signifying feature which sustains the very "objective" symbolic structure: if we ab-

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stract from the objective symbolic order this subjective excess, the very objectivity of this order disintegrates. Lacan 's claim that the "imaginary" number (the square root of -1) is the "meaning of phallus," its signified, is often referred to as the outstanding example of Lacan 's intellectual imposture. So what does he mean by it? The paradox of the square root of - 1 is that it is an "impos­ sible" number whose value cannot ever be positivized, but which none­ theless "functions." What does this have to do with the phallus? Precisely insofar as it is the signifier of the impossible fullness of meaning, phallus is a "signifier without signified"—the "minus 1," the supplementary fea­ ture which sticks out from the series of "normal" signifiers, the element in which excess and lack coincide. The impossible fullness at the level of meaning (of the signified) is sustained by the void (the castrating dimension) at the level of the signifier; we encounter the "meaning of phallus" when, apropos some notion, we enthusiastically feel that "this is IT, the true thing, the true meaning," although we are never able to ex­ plicate WHAT, precisely, this meaning IS. For example, in a political dis­ course, the Master Signifier (Our Nation) is this kind of empty signifier which stands for the impossible fullness of meaning; that is, its meaning is "imaginary" in the sense that its content is impossible to positivize— when you ask a member of the Nation to define in what the identity of his Nation consists, his ultimate answer will always be "I cannot say it, you must feel it, it is IT, that which our lives really are about." We can now see how Lacan 's definition of the signifier as that which "represents the subject for another signifier," in its very convoluted selfreferential form {explanandum resurges in explanans), relies on a very precise rehabilitation of the centrality of representation—not represen­ tation as a secondary mirror of a primordial productive process, but rep­ resentation as something reflexively inscribed into the very represented dimension of the productive process. What this means is that the gap, the self-referentially convoluted twist, is operative already in the "produc­ tive presence" itself. To put it in classic Marxist terms, it is not enough to demonstrate how politico-ideological struggles are a theater of shadows reflecting the "true reality" of the economic process. One should supple­ ment it with how the politico-ideological struggle is inscribed into the very heart of the economic process (this is what Marx called "class struggle"; this is why he speaks of "political economy," and one of the names of this strange "ideology" in the very heart of the economic process, of the "illu­ sion" which sustains reality itself, is "commodity fetishism"). Furthermore, what this means is that one should leave behind the standard notion of the One (in all its different guises, up to the Master Signifier) as a secondary "totalization" of the primordially dispersed in-

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consistent field of productivity. To put the paradox in its most radical form: it is the very One which introduces inconsistency proper—without One, there would have been just flat indifferent multiplicity. "One" is originally THE signifier of (self-) division, the ultimate supplement/ex­ cess; by way of re-marking the preexisting real, the One divides it from itself, it introduces its noncoincidence with itself. Consequently, to radi­ calize things even more, the Lacanian One as the Master Signifier is stricto sensu the signifier of its own impossibility. Lacan makes this point clear when he emphasizes how every One, every Master Signifier, is simultaneously S (A), a signifier of the lack of/in the Other, of its inconsistency. So it is not only that there is Other because the One cannot ever fully coin­ cide with itself—there is One (Lacan's "Ya dVUn") because the Other is "barred," lacking/inconsistent: Lacan's Sv the (in)famous "master signifier" or "phallic signifier" is, paradoxically, the only way to write that "the One is not" and that what "is" is the void that constitutes the original disjunction in the midst of every count-for-one. The count-for-one is always already two. St is the matheme of what one can describe as "the One is not." It writes that "the One is not" by presenting the very thing that prevents it from be­ ing One. This is what Sj says: the One is not; yet what is is not a pure multiple, but two. This is perhaps Lacan's crucial insight: if there is something on which one could lean in order to leave the "ontology of the One" behind, this something is not simply the multiple, but a Two.12 Everything hinges on this crucial point: the predominant deconstructionist/historicist "democratically materialist" anti-philosophy extols multiplicity and abhors "binary logic," seeing in the Two just a mirrorlike redoubling of the One. (This is why anti-philosophers like to criticize He­ gel's succession of multiplicity, opposition, and contradiction from the beginning of his "logic of essence" as the exemplary case of the gradual subordination of the multiple to the One.) Materialist dialectics knows that multiplicity without the Two is just the multiplicity of Ones, the mo­ notonous night of a plurality in which all cows are black. What the antiphilosophical extolling of multiplicity is missing is the noncoincidence of the One with itself, the noncoincidence which makes the One the very form of appearance of its opposite: it is not only that the complexity of its situation undermines every One—much more radically, it is the very oneness of the One which redoubles it, functioning as the excess over the simple one. The function of void is crucial here: what explodes every One from within is not a complexity which subverts its unity, but the fact that a void is a part of every One; the signifier-One, the signifier which

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unifies/totalizes a multiplicity, is the point of inscription into this multi­ plicity of its own void. This is why every name is ultimately tautological: a "rose" designates an object with a series of properties, but what holds all these properties together, what makes them the properties of the same One, is ultimately the name itself. Consequently, the One as the "empty signifier" is the point at which, as Lacan put it, the signifier falls into its signified. Recall the old Polish anti-communist joke: "Socialism is the synthesis of the highest achievements of all previous historical epochs: from tribal society, it took barbarism, from antiquity, it took slavery, from feudalism, it took relations of domination, from capitalism, it took ex­ ploitation, and from socialism, it took the name . . ." Does the same not hold for the anti-Semitic image of the Jew? From the rich bankers, it took financial speculations, from capitalists, it took exploitation, from lawyers, it took legal trickery, from corrupted journalists, it took media manipulation, from the poor, it took indifference toward washing one's body, from sexual libertines, it took promiscuity, and from the Jews, it took the name . . . Or take the shark in Spielberg's Jaws: from the foreign immigrants, it took their threat to American small-town daily life, from natural catastrophes, it took their blind destructive rage, from big capital, it took the ravaging effects of an unknown cause on the daily lives of or­ dinary people, and from the shark, it took its image . . . In all these cases, the "signifier falls into the signified" in the precise sense that the name is included in the object it designates. (In a strictly homologous way, for Badiou, an Event includes its name in its definition.) Imagine a confused situation of social disintegration, in which the cohesive power of ideology loses its efficiency. In such a situation, the Master is the one who invents a new signifier, the famous "quilting point," which again stabilizes the situation and makes it readable; the university discourse that then elaborates the network of Knowledge which sustains this readability by definition presupposes and relies on the initial gesture of the Master. The Master adds no new positive content—he merely adds a signifier which all of a sudden turns disorder into order, into "new har­ mony," as Rimbaud would have put it. Think about anti-Semitism in the Germany of the 1920s: people experienced themselves as disoriented, thrown into undeserved military defeat, economic crisis which melted away their life savings, political inefficiency, moral degeneration . . . and the Nazis provided a single agent which accounted for it all—the Jew, the Jewish plot. Therein resides the magic of a Master: although there is nothing new at the level of positive content, "nothing is quite the same" after he pronounces his Word . . . Recall how, in order to illustrate le point de capiton, Lacan quotes the famous lines from Racine's Athalie: "Je crains Dieu, cher Abner, et je n'ai point d'autre crainte." / "I fear God,

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my dear Abner, and have no other fears." All fears are exchanged for one fear, that is, it is the very fear of God which makes me fearless in all other worldly matters. The same reversal that gives rise to a new Master Signifier is at work in ideology: in anti-Semitism, all fears (of economic crisis, of moral degradation . . .) are exchanged for the fear of the Jew— je crains le Juif, cher citoyen, et je n'ai point d'autre crainte . . . And is not the same logic also discernible in a horror film like Spielberg's Jaws? I fear the shark, my friend, and have no other fears . . . It is in this precise sense that one should agree with Brecht, who once wrote that there is no dialectics without humor. The dialectical re­ versals are deeply connected to comical twists and unexpected shifts of perspective. In his book on jokes, Freud refers to the well-known story of a middleman who tries to convince a young man to marry a woman he represents; his strategy is to reinterpret every objection into an instance of praise. When the man says, "But the woman is ugly!" he answers, "So you will not have to worry that she will deceive you with others!" "She is poor!" "So she will be accustomed not to spend too much of your money!" and so on, until finally, when the man formulates a reproach impossible to reinterpret in this way, the middleman explodes: "But what do you want? Perfection? Nobody is totally without a fault!" Would it not also be possible to discern in this joke the underlying structure of the legitimization of a Real Socialist regime? "There is not enough meat and rich food in the stores!" "So you don't have to worry about getting fat and suffering a heart attack!" "There are not enough interesting theatri­ cal and cinema performances or good books available!" "Does this not enable you to cultivate all the more the art of intense social life, visiting friends and neighbors?" "The secret police exert total control over my life!" "So you can just relax and lead a life safe from worries!" and so on, until . . . "But the air is so polluted from the nearby factory that all my children have life-threatening lung diseases!" "What do you want? No system is without a fault!" Lacan is here a radical Hegelian (unknown to himself, no doubt) : there is multiplicity because the One doesn't coincide with itself. One can see, now, in what precise sense one is to conceive of Lacan's thesis according to which what is "primordially repressed" is the binary signi­ fier (that of Vorstellungsrepràsentanz) : what the symbolic order precludes is the full harmonious presence of the couple of Master signifiers, Sj-S^ as yin-yang or any other two symmetrical "fundamental principles." The fact that "there is no sexual relationship" means precisely that the secondary signifier (that of the Woman) is "primordially repressed," and what we get in the place of this repression, what fills in its gap, is the multitude of the "returns

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of the repressed, " the series of the "ordinary " signifiers. In Woody Allen's Tolstoyparody Love and Death, the first association that automatically pops up, of course, is: "If Tolstoy, where, then, is Dostoyevsky?" In the film, Dostoyevsky (the "binary signifier" to Tolstoy) remains "repressed." However, the price paid for it is that a conversation in the middle of the film acci­ dentally includes the titles of all Dostoyevsky's main novels: "Is that man still in the underground?" "You mean one of the Karamazov brothers?" 'Yes, that idiot!" "Well, he did commit his crime and was punished for it!" "I know, he was a gambler who always risked too much!" and so on. Here we encounter the "return of the repressed," that is, the series of signifiers which fills in the gap of the repressed binary signifier "Dos­ toyevsky" This is why the standard deconstructionist criticism according to which Lacan 's theory of sexual difference falls into the trap of "binary logic" totally misses the point. Lacan's la femme n'existe pas aims precisely at undermining the "binary" polar couple of Masculine and Feminine. The original split is not between the One and the Other, but is strictly inherent to the One; it is the split between the One and its empty place of inscription (this is how one should read Kafka's famous statement that the Messiah will come one day after his arrival). This is also how one should conceive the link between the split inherent to the One and the explosion of the multiple: the multiple is not the primordial ontological fact; the "transcendental" genesis of the multiple resides in the lack of the binary signifier, that is, the multiple emerges as the series of attempts to fill in the gap of the missing binary signifier. The difference between S1 and S2 is thus not the difference of two opposed poles within the same field, but, rather, the cut within this field—the cut of the level at which the process occurs—inherent to the one term; the original couple is not that of two signifiers, but that of the signifier and its reduplicatio, that is, the minimal difference between a signifier and the place of its inscrip­ tion, between one and zero. This is why the Hegelian dialectical "syn­ thesis" has to be clearly delimited from the "synthesis-of-the-opposites" model with which it is, as a rule, identified. In the opposition between Freud and Jung, Freud was here a true Hegelian, in contrast to Jung's pseudo-Hegelian "compensation theory": Whenever life proceeds one-sidedly in any given direction, the selfregulation of the organism produces in the unconscious an accumula­ tion of all those factors which play too small a part in the individual's conscious existence. For this reason I have put forward the compen­ sation theory of the unconscious as a complement to the repression theory.13

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It is easy to perceive how this relates to neurotic symptoms and therapy: when the ego gets too narrow and rigid, excluding from its scope the ("irrational") tendencies that do not fit its (self-)image, these tendencies return in the guise of neurotic symptoms. Say, when a man curtails his feminine "shadow" (anima), cutting it off his identity, it returns to haunt him in the guise of monstrous and obscene feminine figures in which he is not able to recognize himself, and experiences them as brutal foreign intrusions. The goal of therapy is therefore not to fight these symptoms, to eliminate them, but to integrate them into a wider Self that transcends the narrow confines of ego. These symptoms stand for forces that are not in themselves evil and destructive; what makes them such is the false perspective of the ego, or, as Hegel would have put it, evil resides in the very gaze that perceives evil everywhere around itself. So when the ego is haunted by neurotic symptoms, the task of the therapist is to make the patient see how his ego is part of the problem, not its solution: the ego should shift its perspective and recognize in its symptoms the violent expression of the disavowed part of itself. The true illness is that of the ego itself, and neurotic symptoms are desperate attempts at a cure, at­ tempts to reestablish the balance disturbed by the ego's narrow frame which excluded crucial parts of the Self's content: "A neurosis is truly removed only when it has removed the false attitude of the ego. We do not cure it—it cures us. A man is ill, but the illness is nature's attempt to heal him, and what the neurotic flings away as absolutely worthless con­ tains the true gold we should never have found elsewhere."14 No wonder that some partisans ofJung see in this "compensation theory" a Hegelian background: It was Hegel who argued that the only way a battle could cease between a thesis and an antithesis was through the construction of a synthesis that would include elements from both sides and transcend the opposition. Although Jung denied that Hegel was an influence of his thought, it is hard to imagine Jungian thought without the Hegelian model that sees conflict overcome through the creation of a transcendent "third" which is neither thesis nor antithesis but a new entity in which both are included.15 Here, however, Jung was, for once, right: there effectively is no trace of Hegel in Jung's "compensation theory." This dismissal may appear too fast, since many formulations ofJung effectively recall Hegel's notion of the reconciliation of the subject with its alienated substance, that is, of how the subject has to recognize in the foreign power that he fights the misrecognized part of his own substance. This dialectic of recognition ef-

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fectively belongs to the young Hegel; it found its definitive expression in the Jena-period fragments on love and reconciliation, and, later, in He­ gel's reading of Antigone as the tragic confrontation of the two opposed positions, Antigone's and Creon's, which are both blinded by their onesidedness and thus unable to recognize the moment of their own truth in the opposite force, that is, the fact that, by attacking the opponent, they are undermining their own substance. Here is Jung's most "Hegelian" formulation: "The individual is faced with the necessity of recognizing and accepting what is different and strange as a part of his own life, as a kindof'also-I."' 16 From today's historical experience, it is easy to perceive the limita­ tions of such a notion of reconciliation—it is sufficient to try to apply it to the struggle between the Nazis and the Jews. Again, in a first ap­ proach, the Jungian notion of "shadow" as the misrecognized alter ego seems fitting here: is there not effectively a strange echoing and redou­ bling between the Nazi elevation of Aryan Germans and the Jewish selfperception as the chosen nation? Was it not already Schoenberg who dismissed Nazi racism as a miserable imitation of the Jewish identity as the chosen people? However, is it not obscene to say that each of the two parties should recognize in its opponent its own truth and substance, its own second Self? The only thing this could mean for the Jews is that they should recognize how, in the guise of the Nazi hatred of them, they suffer the reaction to the fact that they excluded themselves from their identitârian organic communal life and abandoned themselves to rootless alienated existence . . . It is immediately clear what is wrong here: what is missing is the radical asymmetry of the opposed poles. While (the antiSemite figure of) the "Jew" effectively is a kind of "symptom" of Nazism, Nazism is definitely not in any symmetrical way a symptom of Judaism, the return of its repressed, its inner truth—that is, it is an obscenity to say that, in their struggle against Nazism, the Jews "fling away as absolutely worthless the true gold they should never have found elsewhere." The opposition of poles thus conceals the fact that one of the poles already is the unity of the two—so, for Hegel, there is no need for a third element to bring the two together. (Another example from today's political conflicts offers itself here: in the struggle between market liber­ alism and state interventionism, each side should recognize its need for the other. Only an effective state guarantees the conditions for market interplay, and only a thriving market economy provides resources for an efficient state. However, this very example also indicates the limitation of such a logic: what if the antagonism reaches such a strength that recon­ ciliation is not feasible? What if the only true solution is to change the entire field?)

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Crucial here is the shift in the status of the "excess": in the standard space of anti-philosophy, "excess" names the excess of productive pres­ ence over its representation, that X which eludes totalization-throughrepresentation. Once we accomplish the step toward the gap in the space of productive presence itself, the excess becomes the excess of represen­ tation itself, an excess which always-already supplements productive pres­ ence. A simple political reference can make this point clear: the Master (a King, a Leader) at the center of a social body, the One who totalizes it, is simultaneously the excess imposed on it from outside. All the struggle of the center of power against the marginal excesses threatening its sta­ bility cannot ever obfuscate the fact, visible once we accomplish a paral­ lax shift of our view, that the original excess is that of the central One itself—as Lacan would have put it, the One is always-already extimate with regard to what it unifies. The One totalizes the field it unifies byway of "condensing" in itself the very excess that threatens this field. Italo Calvino's "A King Listens"17 focuses on the sense of hearing. In an anonymous kingdom, the royal palace becomes a giant ear and the king, obsessed and paralyzed by fears of rebellion, tries to hear every fragile sound that reverberates in his palace: footsteps of the servants, whispers and conversations, fanfare trumpets at the raising of the flag, ceremonies, sounds of the city at the outskirts of the palace, riots, rumble of the rifles, and so on. He cannot see their source, but is obsessed by interpreting their meaning and the destiny they are predicting. This state of interpretive paranoia only seems to halt when he hears something that completely enchants him: through the window, the wind brings a sing­ ing voice of a woman, a voice of pure beauty, unique and irreplaceable. For the king, it is the sound of freedom; he steps out of the palace into the open space and mingles there with the crowd . . . The first thing to bear in mind here is that this king is not the traditional monarch, but a modern totalitarian tyrant. The traditional king doesn't care about his environment; he arrogantly ignores it and leaves the worry and care to prevent plots to his ministers. It is the modern Leader who is obsessed by plots—"to rule is to interpret" is a perfect formula of Stalinism, THE system of endless paranoiac hermeneutics. So when the king is seduced by the pure feminine voice of immediate life-pleasure, this is obviously (although, unfortunately, not for Calvino himself) a fantasy—precisely the fantasy of breaking out of the closed circle of representations and of rejoining the pure outside of the innocent presence of the feminine voice which is in excess of the self-mirroring prison-house of representa­ tions, that is, which needs no interpretation, but merely gives body to the voice which enjoys its own exercise. What is missing here is the way this innocent externality of the voice is itself already reflexively marked by the

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mirror of interpretive representations. This is why one can imagine what the story's ending really is, what is missing in Calvino's narrative: when the king exits the palace, following the voice, he is immediately arrested; the feminine voice was an instrument of the plotters to lure him out of the safety of the guarded palace. One can be sure that, after a thorough police interrogation, the woman would have sung a different song . . . The same insight can also be formulated in the terms of settheoretical axiomatics: a set B is considered to be part of set A (its sub­ set) if all the elements of B also belong to A and, as is generally known, the number of the elements of B is always larger than the number of the elements of A—every A has more subsets (parts) than elements. Let us say that A is composed of three elements, a, b, and c; the corresponding number of B comprises all possible combinations of a, b, and c (a alone, b alone, c alone, a + b, a + c, b + c), plus a + b + c (since a set is by defi­ nition a part of itself), plus the empty set, which is always a part of every set—altogether eight subsets. Cantor generalized this axiom, applying it also to infinite sets, which gives rise to the proliferation of infinities. Perhaps this abstract axiom provides the principle for why the formu­ lation of the full genome of a human organism in no way entails that we can master the way this organism functions: the spelling-out of the full genome gives only the elements of the set, saying nothing about the much larger number of its subsets (which come closer to rendering how the genes effectively determine the organism) . . . This excess of subsets over elements justifies Meillassoux's designation of the proliferation of infinities as the "Cantorian non-All"18—and the term "non-All" should be taken here in its strict Lacanian sense. This brings us back to anti-philosophy, to the post-Hegelian cut in the history of philosophy. What happened "after Hegel" was not simply that the One of re-presentation was no longer able to totalize the multi­ plicity of present reality; what happened was something much more pre­ cise. The One (of the Master Signifier) lost its ability to "condense" (or, to put it in Freudian terms of libidinal investment, to "bind") the excess, to (re)mark it, to effectively function as its stand-in, its placeholder. So the excess became "unbound," a threat to the representative system in all its guises, from the rabble in politics to "free sex" in love relations— something which was either feared and controlled or celebrated as the site of freedom and resistance: A spectre of excess starts haunting the society, in its different spheres; and its "spectral" form is in no way insignificant. The Master's discourse (or, if one prefers, the authority of the One) is a social bond in which this excessive element is, if one may say so, in the "ideal" place, in the

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service of the hegemonic power of the One, which reigns by assuming the very excessiveness of excess. What happens with the destitu­ tion of this bond is, so to speak, that the ghost of excess escapes from the bottle. The process could be said to have started with the French revolution, to have reached its full extent in the nineteenth century, and to have continued through a part of the twenUeth century. The nineteenth century in particular was deeply haunted by this excessive element in all possible forms, from the conceptual to the phantasma­ goric . . . all serious thinkers sought to think at a maximal proximity to, if not in a direct confrontation with, this excess. A "tarrying with the excess" thus became the most prominent figure of thought. Utopias, designed to eliminate social and other injustice, mostly proposed to achieve this by eliminating this very excess. To a certain extent, even Marx was tempted by the possibility of eliminating, once and for all, the excessive, disharmonious element of society—the element in which he himself recognised its truth, its real and its symptom.19 This critical reference to Marx is crucial h e r e . Precisely as Marxists, o n behalf of o u r fidelity to Marx's work, we should discern the mistake of Marx: h e perceived how capitalism u n l e a s h e d the breathtaking dynamics of self-enhancing productivity—see his fascinated descriptions of how, in capitalism, "all things solid melt into thin air," of how capitalism is t h e greatest revolutionizer in the entire history of humanity. O n the o t h e r h a n d , h e also clearly perceived how this capitalist dynamics is p r o p e l l e d by its own i n n e r obstacle or antagonism; the ultimate limit of capitalism (of the capitalist self-propelling productivity) is Capital itself, that is, the capitalist incessant d e v e l o p m e n t a n d revolutionizing of its own material conditions, the m a d d a n c e of its u n c o n d i t i o n a l spiral of productivity, is ultimately n o t h i n g b u t a desperate flight forward to escape its own debilitating i n h e r e n t contradiction . . . Marx's f u n d a m e n t a l mistake was to conclude, from these insights, that a new, h i g h e r social o r d e r (com­ m u n i s m ) is possible, a n o r d e r that would n o t only maintain, b u t even raise to a h i g h e r d e g r e e a n d effectively fully release the potential of t h e self-increasing spiral of productivity which, in capitalism, on account of its i n h e r e n t obstacle ("contradiction"), is again a n d again thwarted by socially destructive e c o n o m i c crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to p u t it in the s t a n d a r d Derridean terms, this i n h e r e n t o b s t a c l e / antagonism as the "condition of impossibility" of the full deployment of t h e productive forces is simultaneously its "condition of possibility": if we abolish the obstacle, t h e i n h e r e n t contradiction of capitalism, we do n o t get the fully u n l e a s h e d drive to productivity finally delivered of its imped­ iment, b u t we lose precisely this productivity that s e e m e d to be g e n e r a t e d

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a n d simultaneously thwarted by capitalism—if we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates. T h e r e i n resides Lacan 's f u n d a m e n t a l r e p r o a c h to Marx, which focuses on the a m b i g u o u s overlapping between surplus-value a n d surplus enjoyment. As we have j u s t seen, Badiou himself is ambiguous h e r e : a l t h o u g h h e (correctly) e n d e a v o r s to reassert p h i l o s o p h y against t h e postphilosophical "passion of the real," h e r e m a i n s all too i n d e b t e d to the post-philosophical topos of r e p r e s e n t a t i o n as the mystifying m i r r o r of the productive real, of the re-presentative meta-structure as the site of the "counting-as-One" of the inconsistent multiplicity of presence: The problem of representation as meta-structure, and the consequent imperative to restrain oneself from representation or to pull oneself away from the "state," is something that belongs to a different ontology than the ontology of the pure multiple, of infinity and of contingency. It could only concern a universe in which the éventai statement "God is dead" for whatever reason does not hold true. In an infinite contin­ gent universe (or "situation"), by contrast, there is no necessity for the "counting of the count itself" to be situated on a meta-level. It can very well be situated on the same level as the counting-for-one itself, only separated from it by an irreducible interval (and it is this interval that Lacan calls the Real). Moreover, this is precisely what makes a situation "infinite." What makes it infinite is not the exclusion of any operation of representation (which would "want" to count it for one and thus to close it upon itself) but its inclusion. What makes any particular "pre­ sentation" infinite is precisely that it already includes representation. 20 In o t h e r words, the Hegelian "actual infinity" is the infinity g e n e r a t e d by the self-relating of a totality, by t h e short circuit which makes a totality an e l e m e n t of itself (or, rather, which makes it a genus of its own spe­ cies), which makes re-presentation p a r t of p r e s e n c e / p r e s e n t a t i o n itself. This p o i n t also can be m a d e apropos the properly dialectical n o t i o n of abstraction: what makes Hegel's "concrete universality" infinite is that it includes "abstractions" into concrete reality itself, as its immanent constituents. T h a t is to say, what is, for Hegel, t h e elementary move of philosophy with regard to abstraction? It is to a b a n d o n t h e c o m m o n s e n s e empiricist n o ­ tion of abstraction as a step away from the wealth of concrete empirical reality with its irreducible multiplicity of features: life is green, concepts are grey—they dissect a n d mortify concrete reality. (This c o m m o n s e n s e notion even has its pseudo-dialectical version, according to which such "abstraction" is a feature of m e r e U n d e r s t a n d i n g , while "dialectics" recu­ perates the wealth of reality.) Philosophical t h o u g h t p r o p e r begins w h e n

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we become aware of how such a process of "abstraction " is inherent to reality itself: the tension between empirical reality and its "abstract" notional de­ terminations is immanent to reality, it is a feature of "things themselves." Therein resides the anti-nominalist accent of philosophical thinking— for example, the basic insight of Marx's "critique of political economy" is that the abstraction of the value of a commodity is its "objective" con­ stituent. This brings us, unexpectedly, to the question: what is a dialecti­ cal self-deployment of a notion? Imagine, as a starting point, our being caught up in a complex and confused empirical situation which we try to understand so as to bring some order into it. Since we never start from the zero-point of pure pre-notional experience, we begin with the double movement of directly applying to this situation the abstract-universal notions at our disposal, and of analyzing the situation, comparing its elements among themselves and with our previous experiences, gener­ alizing, formulating empirical universals. Sooner or later, we become aware of inconsistencies in the notional schemes we use to understand the situation: something which should have been a subordinate species seems to encompass and dominate the entire field; different classifica­ tions and categorizations clash, without us being able to decide which one is more "true"; and so on. In our spontaneous mind-frame, we dis­ miss such inconsistencies as signs of the deficiency of our understand­ ing: reality is much too rich and complex for our abstract categories, we will never be able to deploy a notional network able to capture its entire wealth . . . Then, however, if we have a refined theoretical sense, we sooner or later notice something strange and unexpected: it is not possible to clearly distinguish the inconsistencies of our notion of an object from the inconsistencies which are immanent to this object it­ self. The "thing itself" is inconsistent, full of tensions, struggling between its different determinations, and the deployment of these tensions, this struggle, is what makes it "alive." Take a particular state: when it malfunc­ tions, it is as if its particular (specific) features are in tension with the universal Idea of the State. Or take the Cartesian cogito: the difference between me as a particular person embedded in a particular life-world and myself as abstract Subject is part of my very particular identity, since to act as abstract Subject is a feature that characterizes individuals in modern Western society. Recall Adorno's old, well-known analysis of the antagonistic char­ acter of the notion of society: in a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (the Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic no­ tion and the Durkheimian organicist notion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreducible. We seem to be dealing with a

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true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher "dialectical synthesis," and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself. However, in a second approach, one should merely take note of how this radical antinomy which seems to preclude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF—the fundamental feature of today's society IS the irreconcilable antagonism between Totality and the individ­ ual. Here again, what appears as the conflict between two "abstractions" of our mind reveals itself as a tension in the thing itself. A similar case of Hegelian "contradiction" is the notion of "liberal­ ism" as it functions in today's discourse. Its many meanings focus around two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free market individualism, op­ position to strong state regulation, etc.) and political libertarian liber­ alism (accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.); in the United States, Republicans are more liberal in the first sense and Demo­ crats in the second sense. The point is, of course, that while one cannot decide through closer analysis which is the "true" liberalism, one also can­ not resolve the deadlock by way of trying to propose a kind of "higher" dialectical synthesis or by way of "avoiding the confusion" through in­ sisting on a clear distinction between the two senses of the term. The tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that "liberalism" endeavors to designate—it is constitutive of this notion—so this ambiguity, far from signaling the limitation of our knowledge, signals the innermost "truth" of the notion of liberalism. What happens here is not that "abstractions" lose their abstract character and are drowned within full concrete reality; they remain "abstractions" and relate to each other as "abstractions." In philosophical terms, we can formulate this passage from the antiphilosophical substantial Real to the purely formal Real qua the imma­ nent gap of representations as the passage from Kant to Hegel. No won­ der Schopenhauer, the key figure of the nineteenth century, claimed just to prolong Kant in his interpretation of Will as the Kantian noumenal Thing; the Kantian unknowable Thing which escapes our cognitive grasp and is accessible only in practical view, at the level of practical reason, is the first figure of the post-philosophical Real. What happens in Hegel is that the Real is thoroughly de-substantialized: it is not the transcendent X which resists symbolic representations, but the immanent gap, rupture, inconsistency, the "curvature" of the space of representations itself. This brings us finally to Hegel, to his absolutely unique position in the history of philosophy. The ultimate anti-Hegelian argument is the very fact of the post-Hegelian break: what even the most fanatical parti­ san of Hegel cannot deny is that something changed after Hegel, that a new era of thought began which can no longer be accounted for in the

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Hegelian terms of absolute conceptual mediation; this rupture occurs in different guises, from Schelling's assertion of the abyss of pre-logical Will (vulgarized later by Schopenhauer) and Kierkegaard's insistence on the uniqueness of faith and subjectivity, through Marx's assertion of actual socioeconomic life-process and the full autonomization of mathematicized natural sciences, up to Freud's motif of the "death drive" as a rep­ etition that insists beyond all dialectical mediation. Something happened here; there is a clear break between before and after. And while one can argue that Hegel already announces this break, that he is the last of the idealist metaphysicians and the first of the post-metaphysical historicists, one cannot really be a Hegelian after this break; Hegelianism has lost its innocence forever. To act like a full Hegelian today is the same as writing tonal music after the Schoenberg revolution. The predominant Hegelian strategy that is emerging as a reaction to this scarecrow image of Hegel as the Absolute Idealist is the "deflated" image of Hegel freed of ontological-metaphysical commitments, reduced to a general theory of discourse, of possibilities of argumentation. This approach is best exemplified by the so-called Pittsburgh Hegelians (Brandom, McDowell) : no wonder Habermas praises Brandom, since Habermas also avoids directly approaching the "big" ontological question ("are humans REALLY a subspecies of animals—is Darwinism true?"), the question of God or Nature, of idealism or materialism. It would be easy to prove that Habermas's neo-Kantian avoidance of ontological commit­ ment is in itself necessarily ambiguous: while Habermasians treat natu­ ralism as the obscene secret not to be publicly admitted ("of course man developed from nature, of course Darwin was right. . ."), this obscure secret is a lie, it covers up the idealist FORM of thought (the a priori tran­ scendental of communication which cannot be deduced from natural being). The truth is here in the form, the same as with Marx's old ex­ ample of royalists in the republican form: while Habermasians secretly think they are really materialists, the truth is in the idealist form of their thinking. Such a "deflated" image of Hegel is not enough. One should ap­ proach the post-Hegelian break in more direct terms. True, there is a break, but in this break, Hegel is the "vanishing mediator" between its "before" and its "after," between traditional metaphysics and postmetaphysical nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought. That is to say, something happens in Hegel, a breakthrough into a unique dimension of thought, which is obliterated, rendered invisible in its true dimension, by post-metaphysical thought. This obliteration leaves an empty space which has to be filled in so that the continuity of the development of philosophy can be reestablished. But filled in with what? The index of

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this obliteration is the ridiculous image of Hegel as the absurd "absolute idealist" who "pretended to know everything," to possess absolute Knowl­ edge, to read the mind of God, to deduce the entirety of reality out of the self-movement of (his) Mind—this image is an exemplary case of what Freud called Deck-Erinnerung (screen-memory), a fantasy-formation des­ tined to cover up a traumatic truth. In this sense, the post-Hegelian turn to "concrete reality, irreducible to notional mediation" should rather be read as a desperate posthumous revenge of metaphysics, as an attempt to reinstall metaphysics, although in the inverted form of the primacy of concrete reality. In what, then, resides Hegel's uniqueness? Hegel's thought stands for the moment of passage between philosophy as the Master's dis­ course, the philosophy of the One that totalizes the multiplicity, and antiphilosophy, which asserts the Real that escapes the grasp of the One. On the one hand, he clearly breaks with the metaphysical logic of countingfor-One; on the other hand, he does not allow for any excess external to the field of notional representations. For Hegel, totalization-in-One always fails, the One is always-already in excess with regard to itself, it is itself the subversion of what it purports to achieve, and it is this tension internal to the One, this Two-ness which makes the One One and simul­ taneously dislocates it, that is the movens of the "dialectical process." In other words, Hegel effectively denies that there is a Real external to the network of notional representations (which is why he is regularly misread as an "absolute idealist" in the sense of the self-enclosed circle of the to­ tality of the Notion). However, the Real does not disappear here in the global self-relating play of symbolic representations; it returns with a ven­ geance as the immanent gap or obstacle on account of which representa­ tions cannot ever totalize themselves, on account of which they are "nonAll." (At the very outset of philosophy, Plato also approached this non-All of the field of logos in his Parmenides. This is why Parmenides occupies a unique place between early and late Plato: a gap becomes visible here which Plato desperately tries to fill in in his late dialogues. Parmenides is a proto-version of Hegel's logic, truly readable only retroactively, from the standpoint of Hegel's logic. Its eight [or nine] hypotheses are the first version of the complete [AND non-All—complete in the sense of "no exceptions"] set of categories, and, as in Hegel's logic, it is meaningless to ask which hypothesis is "true"—"true" is the conclusion [nothing ex­ ists. . .], which throws us back into the entire movement.) The same ambiguity holds for Deleuze who, from Logic of Sense to Anti-Oedipus, "regresses" to the logic of productive presence and its re­ presentation. 21 This logic, which clearly dominates the entire notional apparatus of Anti-Oedipus, with its oppositions of molecular and molar, of

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p r o d u c t i o n a n d its theater of representation, can be discerned in the rad­ ically c h a n g e d status of "pseudo-cause," o n e of Deleuze's key concepts. Since Anti-Oedipus is a study of capitalism, n o w o n d e r that the s u p r e m e e x a m p l e of "pseudo-cause" is Capital itself; Deleuze refers h e r e to t h e well-known passage from the first volume of Marx's Capital, which deals with the passage from m o n e y to capital. In t h e circulation of capital, which has the form M-C-M (the capitalist starts with m o n e y which h e in­ vests into c o m m o d i t i e s — l a b o r force, raw materials, technology, etc.—in o r d e r to sell the p r o d u c t s for m o r e m o n e y ) , capital exists (has the form of) either m o n e y or commodities: If we pin down the specific forms of appearance assumed in turn by selfvalorizing value in the course of its life, we reach the following elucida­ tion: capital is money, capital is commodities. In truth, however, value is here the subject of a process in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it changes its own magnitude, throws off surplus-value from itself considered as original value, and thus valorizes itself independently. For the movement in the course of which it adds surplus-value is its own movement, its valorization is therefore self-valorization [Selbstverwertung]. By virtue of being value, it has acquired the occult ability to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or at least lays golden eggs.22 Marx continues: As the dominant subject [ubergreifendes Subjekt] of this process, in which it alternately assumes and loses the form of money and the form of com­ modities, but preserves and expands itself through all these changes, value requires above all an independent form by means of which its identity with itself may be asserted. Only in the shape of money does it possess this form. Money therefore forms the starting-point and the conclusion of every valorization process . . . in die circulation M-C-M, value suddenly presents itself as a self-moving substance which passes through a process of its own, and for which commodities and money are both mere forms. But there is more to come: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it now enters into a private relationship with itself, as it were. It differentiates itself as original from itself as surplus-value, just as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son, although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person; for only by the surplus-value of £10 does the £100 originally advanced become capital, and as soon as this has hap-

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pened, as soon as the son has been created and, through the son, the father, their difference vanishes again, and both become one, £110.23 This passage from Capital is full of (not merely) ironic references to He­ gel which point to the notion of the Hegelian idealist dialectics as the mystified "expression" of capital's circulation: with this passage, moneyas-substance becomes money-as-subject, the "abstract" universality of money (universal equivalent of all commodities) becomes the "concrete" universality of a self-mediating/self-engendering movement. In this way, the endless self-propelling circulation of capital reaches the level of the Hegelian "true infinity": every relation to external otherness is subsumed into a "private relation with itself." From this viewpoint, the "material­ ist reversal of Hegel" resides in breaking this self-enclosed circle of selfmediation and admitting a radical Otherness, not engendered by the capital itself, as the source of the profit (the additional £10) : it is the "decentered" labor force and its exploitation. In this precise sense, capital is a "pseudo-cause": it appears to engender itself, to function as a selfengendering totality, as its own cause, and this appearance obfuscates its decentered "absent cause," the labor which produces surplus-value. This is why Deleuze praises British empiricists for insisting upon external cau­ sality, or rather, the externality of relations between things with regard to these things themselves—against the German idealist tradition of inter­ nal causality, of the development of a thing as an expression/deployment of its inner potentials, or, as Hegel would have put it, the development from In-itself to For-itself. For Deleuze, on the contrary, there is no con­ tinuity between In-itself and For-itself. This is also the basic insight of his interpretation of Hitchcock's films: in a typical Hitchcockian plot, the life of the hero is all of a sudden perturbed when he discovers that, due to some contingent change in external circumstances, his social identity is radically changed. (For example, at the beginning of North by Northwest, Roger O. Thornhill, an ordinary publicity manager, is mistakenly identi­ fied as—in reality the nonexistent—U.S. secret agent George Kaplan.) Are, however, things as simple and clear as that? This formula works only if we remain within the field of the opposition between presence and re-presentation: exclusively in this case, "pseudo-cause" appears as the point of "suture" of the field of re-presentation, as the imaginary Cause which completes the self-sufficient circularity of the sphere of re­ presentation and thus obfuscates its decentered real causes. This use of "pseudo-cause" displaces and obfuscates its original use. Deleuze intro­ duced the notion of "pseudo-cause" as the answer to a precise problem in his ontology of the virtual: how to combine this unambiguous affirma-

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tion of the Virtual as t h e site of p r o d u c t i o n which generates constituted reality with the n o less u n a m b i g u o u s statement that "the virtual is produced o u t of the actual": Multiplicities should not be conceived as possessing the capacity to actively interact with one another through these series. Deleuze thinks about them as endowed with only a mere capacity to be affected, since they are, in his words, "impassive entities—impassive results." The neu­ trality or sterility of multiplicities may be explained in the following way. Although their divergent universality makes them independent of any particular mechanism (the same multiplicity may be actualized by sev­ eral causal mechanisms) they do depend on the empirical fact that some causal mechanism or another actually exists . . . they are not transcendent but immanent entities . . . Deleuze views multiplicities as incorporeal effects of corporeal causes, that is, as historical results of actual causes possessing no causal powers of their own. On the other hand, as he writes, "to the extent that they differ in nature from these causes, they enter, with one another, into relations of quasi-causality. Together they enter into a rela­ tion with a quasi-cause which is itself incorporeal and assures them a very special independence." . . . Unlike actual capacities, which are always ca­ pacities to affect and be affected, virtual affects are sharply divided into a pure capacity to be affected (displayed by impassible multiplicities) and a pure capacity to affect.2A T h e concept of quasi-cause is that which prevents a regression into simple reductionism; it designates the p u r e agency of transcendental causality. Let us take Deleuze's own example from his Time-Image: the e m e r g e n c e of cinematic neorealism. O n e can, of course, explain neorealism by a set of historical circumstances (the t r a u m a of World War II, etc.). How­ ever, there is an excess in the e m e r g e n c e of the New: neorealism is a n Event which c a n n o t simply b e r e d u c e d to its material/historical causes, a n d the "quasi-cause" is the cause of this excess, t h e cause of that which makes an Event (an e m e r g e n c e of the New) irreducible to its historical circumstances. O n e can also say that the quasi-cause is the second-level, the meta-cause of the very excess of the effect over its (corporeal) causes. This is how o n e s h o u l d u n d e r s t a n d what Deleuze says a b o u t b e i n g af­ fected: insofar as t h e i n c o r p o r e a l Event is a p u r e affect (an impassiveneutral-sterile result), a n d insofar as s o m e t h i n g New (a new Event, a n Event of/as the New) can e m e r g e only if the chain of its corporeal causes is n o t complete, one should postulate, over and above the network of corporeal causes, a pure, transcendental capacity to affect. This is also why Lacan ap­ preciated so m u c h The Logic of Sense: is the Deleuzian quasi-cause n o t the

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exact equivalent of Lacan 's objet petit a, this pure, immaterial, spectral entity which serves as the object-cause of desire? One should be very precise here in order not to miss the point: Deleuze is not affirming a simple psychophysical dualism in the sense of someone like John Searle; he is not offering two different "descriptions" of the same event. It is not that the same process (say, a speech activity) can be described in a strictly naturalistic way, as a neuronal and bodily process embedded in its actual causality, or, as it were, "from within," at the level of meaning, where the causality ("I answer your question because I understand it") is pseudo-causality. In such an approach, the material-corporeal causality remains complete, while the basic premise of Deleuze's ontology is precisely that corporeal causality is NOT com­ plete; in the emergence of the New, something occurs which CANNOT be properly described at the level of corporeal causes and effects. Quasicause is not the illusory theater of shadows, like a child who thinks he is magically making a toy run, unaware of the mechanic causality which effectively does the work; on the contrary, the quasi-cause fills in the gap of corporeal causality. In this strict sense, and insofar as the Event is the Sense-Event, quasi-cause is nonsense as inherent to Sense: if a speech could have been reduced to its sense, then it would fall into reality—the relationship between Sense and its designated reality would have been simply that of objects in the world. Nonsense is that which maintains the autonomy of the level of sense, of its surface flow of pure becoming, with regard to the designated reality ("referent"). And does this not bring us back to the unfortunate "phallic signifier" as the "pure" signifier without signified? Is the Lacanian phallus not precisely the point of nonsense sustaining the flow of sense? As such, phallus is the "transcendental signifier"—nonsense within the field of sense—which distributes and regulates the series of Sense. Its "transcendental" status means that there is nothing "substantial" about it. Phallus is the semblance par excellence. What the phallus "causes" is the gap that separates the surface-event from bodily density; it is the "pseudocause" that sustains the autonomy of the field of Sense with regard to its true, effective, bodily cause. One should recall here Adorno's obser­ vation on how the notion of transcendental constitution results from a kind of perspectival inversion: what the subject (mis)perceives as his constitutive power is actually his impotence, his incapacity to reach be­ yond the imposed limitations of his horizon. The transcendental consti­ tutive power is a pseudo-power representing the flip side of the subject's blindness concerning true bodily causes. Phallus qua cause is the pure semblance of a cause. There is no structure without the "phallic" moment as the crossing-

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point of the two series (of signifier and signified), as the point of the short circuit at which—as Lacan puts it in a very precise way—"the sig­ nifier falls into the signified." The point of nonsense within the field of Sense is the point at which the signifier's cause is inscribed into the field of Sense. Without this short circuit, the signifier's structure would act as an external bodily cause and would thus be unable to produce the effect of Sense. On that account, the two series (of the signifier and the signi­ fied) always contain a paradoxical entity that is "doubly inscribed" (i.e., that is simultaneously surplus and lack) : a surplus of the signifier over the signified (the empty signifier without a signified) and the lack of the signified (the point of nonsense within the field of Sense).25 "Pseudo-cause" is thus not a "mere quasi-cause," an "illusory cause" in contrast to "real" causes; rather, it gives body to (fills in) the gap in the order of real causes (and not only the gap in the order of representation). This is what complicates the simplistic notion of "suture" as the placeholder of the absent production process within the order of re-presentations. Back to the Marxist reference to Hegel: no wonder, then, that— from Marx himself through Lukâcs to the Frankfurt School—this ref­ erence is profoundly ambiguous, oscillating between two extremes: (1) the notion of Hegel's logic as the speculative-mystified articulation of the "logic of Capital" (Capital is the actual Substance-Subject, the his­ torical Absolute which posits its own presuppositions and thus engenders itself); and (2) the notion of Hegel's logic as the idealist-mystified logic of the revolutionary process of emancipation (exemplary in Lukâcs 's History and Class Consciousness; proletariat is the actual Subject of history destined to appropriate the alienated historical Substance through the revolutionary act—which is why Lukâcs has to elevate Kantian transcen­ dental formalism into the ideal expression of capitalist social reality, so that Hegel already appears as its mystified overcoming). We find this ambiguity already in Marx himself, who, in the above-quoted passage from Capital, presents capital as a Hegelian self-generating "concrete uni­ versality," while, in the famous fragment on the pre-capitalist modes of production from the Grundrisse, he conceives the entire historical process in Hegelian terms as a gradual emergence of the alienated subjectivity which, through communist revolution, unites itself with its substantial presuppositions. From his early writings (the—once—famous philosophicaleconomical manuscripts from 1844), Marx succumbs to the (Feuerbachian) temptation of formulating "alienation" and class society in the terms of the mirror-reversal of the "proper" relation of causality: in capitalism, the subject is enslaved to its own product, "dead labor" (capital) rules over "living labor" (the workers' productivity)—predicate becomes

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subject of its own true subject, the effect becomes the cause of its own cause . . . What if, however, this "capitalist reversal" (the effect retroac­ tively subsumes its cause, the process that generates capital appears as its own subordinated moment) is grounded in a more fundamental "re­ versal" which is constitutive of subjectivity as such? What if subjectivity IS an effect which retroactively posits its cause, a "predicate reversed into subject"? What this means, with regard to the topic of productive pres­ ence and its re-presentation, is that there is no subject-of-presence which precedes representation: subject as such is an effect of representation (which is why Lacan rehabilitates representation in his very definition of the signifier as that which "represents the subject for another signi­ fier") . The dialectical reversal is thus more complex than it may appear; at its most radical, it is not only the reversal of a predicate (the reason against shifts into the reason for), but the shift of the very predicate into the position of subject. Let us clarify this key feature of the Hegelian dia­ lectic apropos the well-known male-chauvinist notion of how, in contrast to man's firm self-identity, "the essence of woman is dispersed, elusive, displaced." The thing to do here is to move from this claim that the es­ sence of woman is forever dispersed to the more radical claim that this dispersion/displacement AS SUCH IS the "essence offemininity" This is what Hegel deployed as the dialectical shift in which the predicate itself turns into the subject—a shift which, again, can be retold as a version of the Rabinovitch joke: "I found the essence of femininity." "But one cannot find it, femininity is dispersed, displaced . . . " "Well, this dispersion IS the essence of femininity . . . " And "subject" is notjust an example here, but the very formal struc­ ture of it: subject "as such" is a subjectivized predicate; subject not only is always-already displaced, and so on, it IS this displacement. The su­ preme case of this shift constitutive of the dimension of subjectivity is that of supposition. Lacan first deployed the notion of the analyst as the "subject supposed to know" which arises through transference (supposed to know what?—the meaning of the patient's symptoms). However, he soon realizes that he is dealing with a more general structure of suppo­ sition, in which a figure of the Other is not only supposed to know, but can also believe, enjoy, cry, and laugh, or even NOT know for us (from the Tibetan prayer wheels to TV canned laughter). This structure of pre­ supposition is not infinite; it is strictly limited, constrained by the four elements of discourse: Sx—subject supposed to believe; S2—subject sup­ posed to know; a—subject supposed to enjoy . . . and what about $? Do we get a "subject supposed to be subject"? What would this mean? What if we read it as standing for the very structure of supposition? It is not only that the subject is supposed to have a quality, to do or undergo some-

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thing (to know, enjoy . . .)—the subject itself is a supposition, that is, the subject is never directly "given" as a positive substantial entity, we never directly encounter it, it is merely a flickering void "supposed" between the two signifiers. (We encounter here again the Hegelian passage from subject to predicate: from the subject supposed to . . . to the subject it­ self as a supposition.) That is to say, what, precisely, is a "subject"? Let us imagine a proposition, a statement—how and when does this state­ ment get "subjectivized"?—when some reflexive feature inscribes into it the subjective attitude. In this precise sense, a signifier "represents the subject for another signifier." The subject is the absent X that has to be supposed in order to account for this reflexive twist, for this distortion. And Lacan goes here to the end: the subject is not only supposed by the external observer-listener of a signifying chain; it is IN ITSELF A SUP­ POSITION. The subject is inaccessible to itself as Thing, in its noumenal identity, and, as such, it is forever haunted by itself as object. What are all Doppelganger figures if not figures of myself as an object that haunts me? In other words, not only are others a supposition to me (I can only suppose their existence beneath the reflexive distortion of a signifying chain), I myself am no less a supposition to myself: something to be presumed (there must be an X that "I am," the "I or he or it (the thing) that thinks," as Kant put it), but never directly accessible. Hume's famous observation that, no matter how close and deep I look into myself, all I will find there are specific ideas, particular mental states, perceptions, emotions, and so on, never a "Self," misses the point: this non-accessibility to itself as an object is constitutive of being a "self." To conclude this long debate on Badiou, all the topics we dealt with intersect in the fundamental ambiguity of Badiouian ontology: how do Event and Being relate ontologically? Badiou, as a materialist, is aware of the idealist danger that lurks in the assertion of their radical heterogene­ ity, of the irreducibility of the Event to the order of Being: We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle. What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situaUon, nothing but a fragment of being.26

However, one should go a step further here than Badiou is ready to go: there is no Beyond of Being which inscribes itself into the order of Be­ ing—there is nothing but the order of Being. One should recall here yet

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again the paradox of Einstein's general theory of relativity, in which mat­ ter does not curve space, but is an effect of space's curvature: an Event does not curve the space of Being through its inscription into it—on the contrary, an event is NOTHING BUT this curvature of the space of Being. "All there is" is the interstice, the non-self-coincidence, of Being, that is, the ontological non-closure of the order of Being.27 The differ­ ence between Event and Being is the difference on account of which the "same" series of real occurrences which, in the eyes of a neutral ob­ server, are just part of the ordinary reality, are in the eyes of an engaged participant the inscriptions of the fidelity to an Event. For example, the "same" occurrences (fights on the streets of Saint Petersburg) which, to a neutral historian, are just violent twists and turns in Russian history, are, for an engaged revolutionary, parts of the epochal Event of the October Revolution. But, again, how are we then to grasp the thesis that "an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being"} Why, if it is a part of the situation, is it then irreducible to this situation? Why can't it be causally "deduced" from it? The underlying philosophical choice is here again: Kant or Hegel, Kantian transcendental finitude or Hegelian speculative infinity. From the Kantian view, an Event appears as irreducible to its situation (to the order of Being) on account of the radical finitude of the subject who is "touched by the grace" of an Event and engaged to it. Here enters Badiou's distinction between the multi­ plicity of Being and a particular World (situation, mode of Appearance of Being), the distinction which basically corresponds to Kant's distinc­ tion between In-itself and For-us. As Meillassoux has demonstrated, the only In-itself admissible within our scientific modern universe is the Initself of the radically contingent mathematicized multiplicity; and there are no Events at the level of the multiplicity of Being—any talk about Events at the level of Being would bring us back to the pre-modern no­ tion of Sense immanent to reality. But then again, the very difference of Event and Being hinges on the finitude of our subjectivity: ultimately, it is simply that, on account of our finitude, we cannot adopt the neutral view over the infinity of Being, a view which would enable us to locate Event as a "fragment of being" within the totality of being. The only alter­ native to this Kantian perspective is a Hegelian one: one can and should fully assert creation ex nihilo in a materialist (non-obscurantist) way, if one asserts the non-All (ontological incompleteness) of reality. From this standpoint, an Event is irreducible to the order of Being (or to a situation with regard to which it is Event)—it is also m-itself NOT just a fragment of being"not because it is grounded in some "higher" spiritual reality, but because it emerges out of the void in the order of being.

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2. What does it mean to be a materialist in the early twenty-first century ? To ask again today a question posed before by Engels and Lenin: where do we stand at present in terms of the split between idealism and materialism, both philosophically and politically ? I think that the philosopher who addressed this question in the most pertinent way is Quentin Meillassoux in his After Finitude. In his forceful return to the "naive" question of the existence and cognizability of reality in its independence from our (human) mind, Meillassoux's argumentation often sounds like a repetition of Lenin's ill-famed Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (as when, in an exact echo of Lenin, he ultimately reduces Kantian transcendentalism to a repackaged version of Berkeley's solipsism) ; After Finitude effectively can be read as "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism rewritten for the twenty-first century." This is why Meillassoux starts with the naive but urgent question of the status of "ancestrality": how can transcendental philosophy (for which all reality is subjectively constituted) account for statements about natural processes which took place prior to the rise of humanity on the Earth, from the beginning of our universe (Big Bang) to fossils from the early stages of life on the Earth? Within the transcendental approach, the ultimate hori­ zon of subjectivity is that of our finitude, that is, we cannot reach beyond (or abstract from) our engagement with the world. Here is Heidegger's ambiguous formulation of this obscure point: "I often ask myself—this has for a long time been a fundamental question for me—what nature would be without man—must it not resonate through him in order to attain its ownmost potency."28 (Note that this passage is from the time immediately after Heidegger's lectures on The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics from 1929 to 1930, where is also formulated a Schellingian hypothesis that perhaps animals are, in a hitherto unknown way, aware of their lack, of the "poorness" of their relating to the world—perhaps there is an infinite pain pervading the entirety of living nature: "If depri­ vation in certain forms is a kind of suffering, and poverty and deprivation of world belongs to the animal's being, then a kind of pain and suffering would have to permeate the whole animal realm and the realm of life in general."29) Meillassoux is well aware of the finesses of the transcendental ap­ proach, that is, he is well aware that Kant's transcendental constitution is not the same as the Berkeleyan pre-transcendental notion of the ob­ server who directiy (ontically) "creates" what it observes. He is further­ more well aware that the minimal feature of the position he is attacking is "correlationism": the idea that subject and object (or, to put it in less subjectivist terms, man and reality) only exist (more precisely: are only given to us) as correlated, in their interrelationship. There is no subject

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outside its engagement with reality; we are "beings-in-the-world." And for this very reason, every reality disclosed to us is always-aiready a reality dis­ closed within a certain life-world—or, as the young Georg Lukâcs put it in Marxist terms, nature is always-already a social-historical category. This "correlationism" can be further grounded in a multitude of positions: subjectivism (subject, its self-division, as the origin of the subject-object; as Fichte put it, every object which opposes the subject is the result of the subject's self-limitation); the positing of the subject-object (cor)rela­ tion itself as the Absolute (basically, post-Kantian German idealism, es­ pecially Schelling's "philosophy of identity"); and finally, the standard twentieth-century position, the acceptance of the correlation itself as the unsurpassable horizon, the mark of the finitude of the human condition. However, what all these positions share is their inability to provide a satis­ fying account of the status of "ancestrality": a cosmological description of what went on millions of years ago, before the formation of our solar system, is not really what it claims to be, a description of what went on millions of years ago, before the rise of humanity, but a description of how this past appears within the horizon of our human existence—our position is always-already included in what is described. Against this background, Meillassoux convincingly argues that the recent rise of irrational religious orientations within philosophy ("postsecular" thought) is not a regression to pre-modern times, but a neces­ sary outcome of Western critical reason. In the Kantian version of the Enlightenment, the critical use of reason was always aimed also at rea­ son itself: the critique of religion ended up as the critique of reason, as reason's self-limitation which again opened up a space for religious faith, only this time not for the "God of Philosophers," the God whose existence and features can be demonstrated or at least circumscribed by our reasoning, but for the paradoxically abyssal God qua radical Other­ ness, totally beyond logos. The first to make this move was Kant himself, who famously claimed that he had to limit reason (human knowledge) to create the space for morality. Today the emblematic figure of this orientation is, of course, Levinas, the central point of reference for all postmodern-deconstructionist theologies of a "God beyond Being." Derrida's theological turn brought this orientation to its climax: the radical deconstruction of the entire metaphysical tradition has to accomplish a reflexive turn and render thematic its own "undeconstructible" con­ ditions. The presupposition of this "death of the death of God" is thus that the consequent Enlightenment leads to its self-negation: the critique which first targets religious and all other metaphysical superstitions has to end up by negating its own metaphysical presuppositions, its own trust in a rational deterministic world which inexorably leads to progress: "In

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Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the world of Enlightenment Reason and Hegelian Absolute Knowledge is left far behind. They each foresee in his own way the madness of the twentieth century whose genocidal violence made a mockery of Hegel's sanguine view of history as the autobiography of the Spirit of time."30 In this way, as one can expect, even Nietzsche, the fiercest critic of Christianity, can be enlisted to support the postmodern "theological turn": When Nietzsche says "God is dead," he's saying that there is no center, no single, overarching principle that explains things. There's just a multiplicity of fictions or interpretations. Well, if there's no single over­ arching principle, that means science is also one more interpretation, and it doesn't have an exclusive right to absolute truth. But, if that's true, then non-scientific ways of thinking about the world, including religious ways, resurface.31 It is effectively true that the now-predominant "skepticism" about secular narratives of Enlightenment is the obverse of the "post-secular" turn in which religion appears as a key "site of resistance" against the alienations of what is perceived as a singularly Western modernity. Religion stands here for an "auratic" belief in "God," a word which should be read as de­ prived of any positive onto-teleological status: God is no longer the High­ est Being watching over our destiny, but a name for radical openness, for the hope of change, for the always-to-come Otherness, and so on. Ac­ cording to Meillassoux, what lies at the origin of this "death of the death of God" is the mistake of Kantian criticism: Kant confused the rejection of philosophical dogmatism (à la Leibniz) with the rejection of all philo­ sophical (rational, conceptual) reference to the Absolute, as if the Abso­ lute and radical contingency are incompatible. When Kant prohibits our thinking the Absolute (since the noumenal is beyond the grasp of our reason), the Absolute itself does NOT thereby disappear—such a criti­ cal delimitation of human knowledge opens up a new discursive space for the access to the Absolute, "the only proviso being that nothing in these discourses resembles a rational justification of their validity ,"32 In this way, "the victorious critique of ideologies has been transformed into a renewed argument for blind faith."33 The ruthless critique of every dogmatism culminated in an unexpected resurgence of credo qua absurdum. We had to leave out here many wonderful lines of thought in After Finitude—for example, Meillassoux's precise and perspicuous deduction of why it follows from the assertion of the radical contingency of Being that "there is something and not nothing": the jump from universal no­ tion to actual empirical reality is always contingent, that is, the actual

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existence of an entity cannot be deployed from the inner necessity of its notion. What this means is that if a Being is necessary, then it can always not exist. If, however, Being is radically contingent, then something (con­ tingent) HAS to exist. (Is this not a variation of the old insight into how existence does not follow from a true universal judgment? If "unicorns have one horn" is true, it can still be true that no unicorns exist; but if "some unicorns have one horn" is true, then at least one unicorn has to exist.) This insight is connected to Meillassoux's reversal of the ontological proof of God: it is the very radical contingency of Being which allows us to make ajump from notion to reality, that is, to prove that some (con­ tingent) entity necessarily HAS to exist. And, in contrast to the standard opinion on Hegel (unfortunately taken over by Meillassoux), Hegel's rehabilitation of the ontological proof of God in no way also rehabilitates the "illegitimate" jump from notion to actual existence—Hegel can pass to the existence of "something and not nothing" precisely because his starting point is the pure contingency of Being. In another ambiguous (mis) reading of Hegel, Meillassoux is right in opposing contradiction and the movement of evolution (against the standard notion of movement as the deployment of a contradiction and noncontradiction as immovable self-identity): the universe which would assert fully the reality of contradiction would be an immovable, self-identical universe in which contradictory features would immediately coincide. Things move, change in time, precisely because they cannot be directly A and not-A—they can only gradually change from A to not-A. There is time because the principle of identity, of noncontradiction, re­ sists the direct assertion of contradiction. This is why Hegel is not a phi­ losopher of evolution, of movement and development: Hegel's system is "static"; every evolution is contained in the atemporal self-identity of a Notion. Where Meillassoux falls short is in reading this atemporality in an all too "immediate" way: he fails to grasp how, for Hegel, "contradic­ tion" is not opposed to identity, but is its very core. "Contradiction" not only is the real-impossible on account of which no entity can be fully selfidentical; "contradiction" is pure self-identity as such, the tautological coincidence of form and content, of genus and species, in the assertion of identity. There is time, there is development, precisely because opposites CANNOT directly coincide. Therein already resides the lesson of the very beginning of logic: how do we pass from the first identity of opposites, of Being and Nothing, to Becoming (which then stabilizes itself in Something[s])? If Being and Nothing are identical, if they overlap, why move forward at all?—precisely because Being and Nothing are not directly identical: Being is a form, the first formal-notional determina­ tion, whose only content is Nothing; the couple Being/Nothing forms

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the highest contradiction which is impossible, and to resolve this impos­ sibility, this deadlock, one passes into Becoming, into oscillation between the two poles. The crux of After Finitude is the mutual implication of the contingency of necessity and the necessity of contingency: not only is every necessity con­ tingent (groundless, "without reason," and under the shadow of the per­ manent possibility of its collapse) but, even more strongly, the only thing that is absolutely necessary is the contingency (of the laws of nature, of their necessity). The beauty and strength of Meillassoux's argument is that the conclusion he draws from this unconditional assertion of con­ tingency is not some kind of universalized agnostic relativism but, on the contrary, the assertion of the cognitive accessibility of reality in-itself, the way it is independently of human existence. The "finitude" to which the title alludes is the finitude of the Kantian transcendental subject which constitutes phenomenal "objective reality": Meillassoux's aim is nothing less than to demonstrate—after Kant, that is, taking into account the Kantian revolution—the possibility of the cognition of the noumenal In-itself. He rehabilitates the old distinction between "primary" proper­ ties of objects, which belong to objects independently of their being per­ ceived by humans, and their "secondary" properties (color, taste, etc.), which exist only in human perception. The basic criterion of this distinc­ tion is a scientific one, that is, the possibility of describing an object in mathematized terms: "All those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object in itself "M According to Meillassoux, the greatest irony of the entire history of philosophy is the misnomer of the Kantian turn in philosophy as a "Copernican revolution": his turn is, on the contrary, a Ptolemaic counterrevolution against the Galilean decentering of the universe from the me­ dieval Earth-centered meaningful and teleologically ordered Whole to the "grey" infinite scientific universe adequately rendered only in mathe­ matical formulas. Although Kant's original task (as he formulated it in his Critique ofPure Reason) was to provide ontological grounding for the (ob­ vious) universal validity of the modern (Newtonian) science, his "ground­ ing" is nothing but the negation of the very basic ontological premise of modern science: while natural science purports to describe reality the way it "really is," independently of our observation and of meanings we project onto it on account of the interested character of our observation, the transcendental "grounding" of the natural sciences claims that the very independent "objective reality" described by the sciences hinges on a subjective transcendental frame, is subjectively constituted, or that the very "disinterested," neutral character of science is sustained by certain

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interests or practical attitudes (say, for Heidegger, the attitude of tech­ nological manipulation and exploitation of nature). Meillassoux is very clear about how his primary target here is not so much Kant himself as those twentieth-century philosophers, from Husserl to Heidegger, who emphasize the "naïveté" of the natural sciences, their crude "naturalism," the "abstract" character of their description of reality; as it was exempiarily deployed by late Husserl and early Heidegger, the scientific "objec­ tive" approach to reality is always-already grounded in our (human) im­ mersion into a concrete historical life-world (Lebenswelt)—that is, we do not encounter things primarily as objects of neutral observation, but as something "ready-at-hand," something which belongs to the whole of our practical-engaged existence. (This transcendental critique-grounding of the natural sciences and their "objectivism" also can be given a distinctly Marxist touch when the natural sciences are grasped as rooted in a his­ torical collective praxis.) The dilemma that arises here can also be put in the terms of the traditional distinction between genesis and value (of a scientific proposi­ tion). A partisan of scientific objectivism would, in all probability, accept most of the claims about how science is always-already rooted in a con­ crete historical life-world, and so on; he would add only that while these claims adequately describe the empirical genesis of the natural sciences, it is epistemologically illegitimate to perceive them as something which also affects their cognitive validity. A somewhat simplified example: while it is probably true that Galilean physics could not have arisen outside the development of the capitalist market economy and of the prospect of technological domination over nature, this fact does not invalidate the objective truth of Galileo's scientific discoveries—they hold indepen­ dently of their contingent origin. For a transcendental philosopher, how­ ever, the link between scientific knowledge and its historical presupposi­ tions concerns the very epistemological status of scientific knowledge: natural sciences do not describe and/or explain reality "the way it is inde­ pendently of us"; they describe and/or explain reality the way it appears ONLY from within a certain historically specified horizon of meaning, and are therefore stricto sensu meaningless outside this horizon. Are, however, things as clear as that with regard to Kant's "Ptole­ maic counterrevolution"? Both Kant and Freud claim to repeat the "Copernican turn" in their respective domains. With regard to Freud, the meaning of this reference seems clear and simple: in the same way that Copernicus demonstrated that our Earth is not the center of the universe, but a planet revolving around the Sun (and is, in this sense, "decentered," turning around another center), Freud also demonstrated that the (conscious) ego is not the center of the human psyche but, ul-

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timately, an epiphenomenon, a satellite turning around the true center, the unconscious or the id . . . With Kant, things are more ambiguous—in a first approach (upon which Meillassoux relies), it cannot but appear that he actually did the exact opposite of the Copernican turn: is not the key premise of his transcendental approach that the conditions of possi­ bility of our experience of objects are at the same time the conditions of possibility of these objects themselves, so that instead of a subject who, in its cognition, has to accommodate itself to some external, "decentered" measure of truth, the objects have to follow the subject, that is, it is the subject itself who, from its central position, constitutes the objects of knowledge? However, if one reads Kant's reference to Copernicus closely, one cannot fail to notice how Kant's emphasis is not on the shift of the substantial fixed Center, but on something quite different—on the status of the subject itself: We should then be proceeding precisely on the lines of Copernicus' pri­ mary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the move­ ments of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved round the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest.35 The precise German terms ("die Zuschauer sich drehen—not so much "turn around another center" as "turn/rotate around themselves")56 make it clear what interests Kant: the subject loses its substantial stability/identity and is reduced to the pure substanceless void of the self-rotating abys­ sal vortex called "transcendental apperception." And it is against this background that one can locate Lacan 's "return to Freud": to put it as succinctly as possible, what Lacan does is to read the Freudian refer­ ence to the Copernican turn in the original Kantian sense, as asserting not the simple displacement of the center from the ego to the id or the unconscious as the "true" substantial focus of the human psyche, but the transformation of the subject itself from the self-identical substantial Ego, the psychological subject full of emotions, instincts, dispositions, and so on, into what Lacan called the "barred subject ($), " the vortex of the self-relating negativity of desire. In this precise sense, the subject of the unconscious is none other than the Cartesian cogito. How then does Meillassoux accomplish the shift, the reversal, from the transcendental-correlationist closure to the opening of our knowl­ edge toward the In-itself, to the accessibility of the In-itself? The ultimate horizon of transcendental correlationism is that of facticity: things are the way they are uohne Warum," as Angelus Silesius put it. Our unsurpassable finitude means that, ultimately, things appear to us the way they do for

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no reason—there is no necessity in the specific mode of their appearing; there is always the possibility that they could (have) turn(ed) out other­ wise. It was Heidegger who brought to its extreme this line of reasoning which has a long history in modern thought, from its beginnings in Duns Scotus and Descartes (who both advocated the radical "voluntarism" of divine creation: there is no Reason whose necessity limits God's freedom; if God were to decide so, two plus two would have been five and not four) through figures like the late Schelling (who, against Hegel, insisted on the utter contingency of the act of creation: God also could have decided not to create the world; the ultimate reality is the abyss of the divine free­ dom) . There is a link here between the apparent opposites of the "irra­ tional" (decisionist/voluntarist) assertion of radical contingency and of the scientific universe of natural laws: for modern mathematized science, every (discovered) necessity is contingent; there is no necessity of the ne­ cessity itself (which is why Pope Benedict XVI was in a way right to accuse modern science of "irrationalism" and to see in Christianity a defense of Reason against scientific "irrationality"). Heidegger's "Er-Eignis" the Event/Arrival of a new historical epoch, of a new mode of the disclosure of Being—or, to put it in inadequate but nonetheless appropriate terms, of a new transcendental horizon of meaning—asserts the radical facticity/contingency of the Transcendental. There is no Necessity, no Reason, no Why in why reality is disclosed to us in this and not another transcen­ dental horizon of meaning, no deeper logical process which regulates the succession of the epochs of Being. The history of Being is an abyssal game—that is, Er-Eignis is not a "deeper" Ground or Agent regulating the succession of the historical appearances of Being, but is these ap­ pearances themselves as abyssal Events, as something which, in the most radical sense imaginable, "just happens." The mistake of transcendental correlationism does not reside in this full assertion of facticity (i.e., of radical ontological contingency) but, on the contrary, in the (philosophically inconsistent, self-contradicting) limitation of this facticity. Correlationism reads the ultimate facticity, the "ohne Warum" of our reality as the indelible mark of our finitude, on ac­ count of which we are forever condemned to remain caught in the Veil of Ignorance separating us from the unknowable Absolute. It is here that Meillassoux performs a properly speculative-Hegelian tour de force, demonstrating how the way out of this deadlock is not to bypass it by way of claiming how we nonetheless can penetrate the Veil of Ignorance and reach the Absolute, but to assert it and extrapolate all its consequences. The problem with transcendental agnosticism concerning the In-itself is not that it is too radically skeptical, that it "goes too far," but, on the con­ trary, that it remains stuck halfway.

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In what, then, does Meillassoux's operation consist? Recall the el­ ementary logic of the Hegelian dialectical reversal best exemplified by the joke about Rabinovitch from the defunct Soviet Union: Rabinovitch wants to emigrate from the Soviet Union for two reasons: "First, I fear that if the socialist order disintegrates, all the blame for the communist crimes will be put on us, the Jews." To the state bureaucrat's exclamation "But nothing will ever change in the Soviet Union! Socialism is here to stay forever!" Rabinovitch calmly answers: "This is my second reason!" The very problem—obstacle—retroactively appears as its own solution, since what prevents us from directly accessing the Thing is this Thing itself. Is the logic of the final reversal not exactly the same as that of Adorno's analysis of the antagonistic character of the notion of society? In a first approach, the split between the two notions of society (the Anglo-Saxon individualistic-nominalistic notion and the Durkheimian organicist no­ tion of society as a totality which preexists individuals) seems irreduc­ ible; we seem to be dealing with a true Kantian antinomy which cannot be resolved via a higher "dialectical synthesis" and which elevates society into an inaccessible Thing-in-itself. However, in a second approach, one should merely take note of how this radical antinomy which seems to pre­ clude our access to the Thing ALREADY IS THE THING ITSELF—the fundamental feature of today's society is the irréconciliable antagonism between Totality and the individual. Meillassoux does exactly the same with regard to the experience of facticity and/or absolute contingency: he transposes what appears to transcendental partisans of finitude as the limitation of our knowledge (the insight that we can be totally wrong about our knowledge, that reality in itself can be totally different from our notion of it) into the most basic positive ontological property of reality itself; the absolute "is simply the capacity-to-be-other as such, as theorized by the agnostic. The absolute is the possible transition, devoid of reason, of my state toward any other state what­ soever. But this possibility is no longer a 'possibility of ignorance'; viz., a possibility that is merely the result of my inability to know . . . rather, it is the knowledge of the very real possibility"37 in the heart of the In-itself: We must show why thought, far from experiencing its intrinsic limits through facticity, experiences rather its knowledge of the absolute through facticity. We must grasp in facticity not the inaccessibility of the absolute but the unveiling of the in-itself and the eternal property of what is, as opposed to the mark of the perennial deficiency in the thought of what is.38 In this way,

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facticity will be revealed to be a knowledge of the absolute because we are going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly took to be an incapacity

in thought. In other words, instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity.39 The paradox of this quasi-magical reversal of epistemological obstacle into ontological premise is that "it is through facticity, and through fac­ ticity alone, that we are able to make our way towards the absolute." 40 The radical contingency of reality, this "open possibility, this 'everything is equally possible,' is an absolute that cannot be de-absolutized without being thought as absolute once more." 41 Here one should also establish a link with the great conflict about how to interpret indeterminacy in quantum physics: for the "orthodox" quantum physicists, this epistemological indeterminacy is simultaneously ontological, a property of "reality" itself which is "in itself" indeterminate, while for those, from Einstein onward, who persist in classical "realismof-necessity," the epistemological indeterminacy can only mean that quan­ tum physics doesn't offer a complete description of reality, that is, that there are some hidden variables it doesn't take into account. To put it in a somewhat problematic and exaggerated way, the Einsteinian critics try to re-Kantianize quantum physics, excluding from its grasp reality in-itself. Meillassoux is well aware that quantum physics, with its uncertainty principle and the assertion of the role the observer plays in the collapse of the wave function, seems to undermine the notion of objective reality independent of any observer and thus gives an unexpected boost to Kant­ ian transcendentalism. However, as he points out, their similarity is de­ ceptive, obfuscating a fundamental difference: "Certainly, the presence of an observer may eventually affect the effectuation of a physical law, as is the case for some of the laws of quantum physics—but the very fact that an observer can influence the law is itself a property of the law which is not supposed to depend upon the existence of an observer."42 In short, while, in Kant's transcendentalism, the "observer"-subject constitutes what he observes, in quantum physics, the observer's active role itself is reinscribed into physical reality. How, then, can this access to the absolute be reconciled with the obvious limitation of our knowledge of reality? A reference to Brecht can be of some use here: in one of his reflections about the stage, Brecht fe­ rociously opposed the idea that the background of the stage should ren­ der the impenetrable depth of the All of Reality as the obscure Origin of Things out of which all things we see and know appear as fragments. For

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Brecht, the background of a stage should ideally be empty, white, signal­ ing that, behind what we see and experience, there is no secret Origin or Ground. This in no way implies that reality is transparent to us, that we "know all"; of course there are infinite blanks, but the point is that these blanks are just that, blanks, things we simply do not know, not a substantial "deeper" reality. Now we come to the properly speculative crux of Meillassoux's argu­ mentation: how does Meillassouxjustify this passage from (or reversal of) epistemological limitation to (or into) positive ontological feature? As we have seen, the transcendental critic conceives facticity as the mark of our fmitude, of our cognitive limitation, of our inability to access the abso­ lute In-itself; to us, to our finite reason, reality appears contingent, ohne Warum, but, considered in itself, it may well be true that reality is noncontingent (regulated by a deep spiritual or natural necessity), so that we are mere puppets of a transcendent mechanism, or that our Self is itself generating the reality it perceives, and so on. In other words, for the transcendentalist, there is always the radical "possibility of ignorance'':43 we are ignorant of how reality really is; there is always the possibility that reality is radically other than what it appears to us to be. How, then, does Meil­ lassoux make the step from this epistemological limitation to the unique access to the Absolute? In a deeply Hegelian way, he locates within this very point the paradoxical overlapping of possibility and actuality: How are you able to think this "possibility of ignorance" . . . ? The truth is that you are only able to think this possibility of ignorance because you have actually thought the absoluteness of this possibility, which is to say, its non-correlational character.44 The ontological proof of God is here turned around in a materialist way: it is not that the very fact that we can think the possibility of a Supreme Being entails its actuality; it is, on the contrary, the very fact that we can think the possibility of the absolute contingency of reality, the possibility of its being-other, of the radical gap between the way reality appears to us and the way it is in itself, that entails its actuality; that is, it entails that reality in itself is radically contingent. In both cases, we are dealing with the direct passage from notion to existence, with existence as a part of the notion. However, in the case of the ontological proof of God, the term that mediates between possibility (of thinking) and actuality is perfection (the very notion of a perfect being includes its existence), while, in the case of Meillassoux's passage from notion to existence, the mediating term is imperfection. If we can think our knowledge of reality (i.e., the way reality

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appears to us) as radically failed, as radically different from the Absolute, then this gap (between for-us and in-itself) must be part of the Absolute itself so that the very feature that seemed forever to keep us away from the Absolute is the ONLY feature which DIRECTLY unites us with the Absolute. A n d is exactly the same shift n o t at the very core of t h e Christian experience? It is t h e very radical separation of m a n from God which unites us with God, since, in the figure of Christ, God is thoroughly separated FROM HIMSELF. T h e p o i n t is thus n o t to "overcome" the gap which separates us from God, b u t to take n o t e of how this gap is internal to God himself (Christianity as the ultimate version of the Rabinovitch j o k e ) : only w h e n I e x p e r i e n c e the infinite pain of separation from G o d d o I share an experience with God himself (Christ o n the Cross). Two things are to be n o t e d h e r e . First, Meillassoux frequently a n d systematically uses Hegelian terms, even (and especially) in his critique of Hegel. For example, h e repeatedly characterizes his own position as "speculative" (in the sense of the post-Kantian assertion of the accessibil­ ity to o u r knowledge of the Absolute) in contrast to "metaphysical" precritical dogmatism (which claims access to t r a n s c e n d e n t absolute neces­ sity) . Paradoxically, Hegel counts for h i m as "metaphysical," a l t h o u g h it was precisely Hegel who deployed the "metaphysical," the "critical" (in the sense of Kantian criticism), a n d the "speculative" as the t h r e e basic stances of t h o u g h t toward reality, m a k i n g it clear that his own "specu­ lative" stance can arise only w h e n o n e fully accepts the lesson of criti­ cism. N o w o n d e r that Meillassoux, following Hegel, designates his own position as that of "absolute knowledge," characterized in a thoroughly Hegelian way as "the principle of a n auto-limitation or auto-normalization of the omnipotence of chaos"Ab—in short, as the rise of necessity o u t of con­ tingency: We can only hope to develop an absolute knowledge—a knowledge of chaos which would not simply keep repeating that everything is pos­ sible—on condition that we produce necessary propositions about it be­ sides that of its omnipotence. But this requires that we discover norms or laws to which chaos itself is subject. Yet there is nothing over and above the power of chaos that could constrain it to submit to a norm. If chaos is subject to constraints, then this can only be a constraint which comes from the nature of chaos itself, from its own omnipotence . . . in order for an entity to be contingent and un-necessary in this way, it cannot be anything whatsoever. This is to say that in order to be contingent and un­ necessary, the entity must conform to certain determinate conditions, which can then be construed as so many absolute properties of what is.46

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Is this n o t exactly Hegel's p r o g r a m ? At the b e g i n n i n g of his Logic, we have the process of B e c o m i n g (the unity of Being a n d N o t h i n g n e s s ) , which is the thoroughly c o n t i n g e n t process of g e n e r a t i n g the multiplicity of Somethings. T h e "spurious infinity" of Somethings a n d SomethingO t h e r s is chaos at its purest, with n o necessity whatsoever underlying or regulating it, a n d the entire d e v e l o p m e n t of Hegel's Logic is the deploy­ m e n t of the i m m a n e n t process of "auto-limitation or auto-normalization of the omnipotence of chaos": "We t h e n begin to u n d e r s t a n d what the rational discourse a b o u t u n r e a s o n — a n u n r e a s o n which is n o t irrational—would consist in: it would b e discourse that aims to establish the constraints to which the entity m u s t submit in o r d e r to exercise its capacity-not-to-be a n d its capacity-to-be-other." 47 This "capacity-to-be-other," as expressed in t h e gap that separates for-us a n d In-itself (i.e., in t h e possibility t h a t reality-in-itself is totally different from the way it appears to us), is the self-distance of the In-itself, t h a t is, the NEGATIVITY in the very heart of Being—this is what Meillassoux signals in his wonderfully dense proposition that "the thing-in-itself is n o t h i n g o t h e r t h a n t h e facticity of the t r a n s c e n d e n t a l forms of rep­ resentation," 4 8 that is, it is n o t h i n g o t h e r t h a n the radically c o n t i n g e n t character of o u r frame of reality. To see reality the way it "really is" is n o t to see a n o t h e r " d e e p e r " reality b e n e a t h it, b u t to see this same reality in its t h o r o u g h contingency. So why does Meillassoux n o t openly admit the Hegelian n a t u r e of his b r e a k t h r o u g h ? T h e first answer, at least, is a simple one: h e endorses the standard r e a d i n g of Hegelian dialectics as the description of the necessary self-deployment of the Notion: Hegelian metaphysics maintains the necessity of a moment of irreme­ diable contingency in the unfolding of the absolute; a moment which occurs in the midst of nature as the pure contingency, the reality devoid of actuality, the sheer finitude whose chaos and gratuitousness are recal­ citrant to the labour of the Notion . . . But this contingency is deduced from the unfolding of the absolute, which in itself, qua rational totality, is devoid of contingency. Thus, in Hegel, the necessity of contingency is not derived from contingency as such and contingency alone, but from a Whole that is ontologically superior to the latter.49 Meillassoux h e r e crucially simplifies the properly Hegelian relationship between necessity a n d contingency. In a first a p p r o a c h , it appears that their encompassing unity is necessity, that is, that necessity itself posits a n d mediates c o n t i n g e n c y as the external field in which it expressesactualizes itself; c o n t i n g e n c y itself is necessary, t h e result of the selfexternalization a n d self-mediation of the n o t i o n a l necessity. However,

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it is crucial to supplement this unity with the opposite one, with contin­ gency as the encompassing unity of itself and necessity: the very eleva­ tion of a necessity into the structuring principle of the contingent field of multiplicity is a contingent act—one can almost say: the outcome of a contingent ("open") struggle for hegemony. This shift corresponds to the shift from S to $, from substance to subject. The starting point is a contingent multitude; through its self-mediation ("spontaneous selforganization"), contingency engenders-posits its immanent necessity, in the same way that Essence is the result of the self-mediation of Being. Once Essence emerges, it retroactively "posits its own presuppositions," that is, it sublates its presuppositions into subordinated moments of its self-reproduction (Being is transubstantiated into Appearance). How­ ever, this positing is retroactive. Consequently, not only does Hegel (quite consistentiy with his prem­ ises) deduce the necessity of contingency, that is, how the Idea necessarily externalizes itself (acquires reality) in phenomena which are genuinely contingent. He also (and this aspect is often neglected by many of his commentators) develops the opposite—and, theoretically, much more interesting—aspect, that of the contingency of necessity. That is to say, when Hegel describes the progress from "external" contingent appearance to its "inner" necessary essence, the appearance's "self-internalization" through self-reflection, he is thereby not describing the discovery of some preexisting inner Essence, the penetration toward something that was already there (this, exactly, would have been a "reification" of the Essence), but a "performative" process of constructing (forming) that which is "discovered." Or, as Hegel puts it in his Loge, in the process of reflection, the very "return" to the lost or hidden Ground produces what it returns to. What this means is that it is not only the inner necessity that is the unity of itself and contingency as its opposite, necessarily positing contingency as its moment. It is also contingency which is the encompass­ ing unity of itself and its opposite, necessity; that is to say, the very process through which necessity arises out of necessity is a contingent process. The same goes for the relation between Law and its (criminal) transgression—here a comparison of Hegel with G. K. Chesterton can be instructive. In The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton deployed the dialectics of crime: We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are es­ sentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essen­ tial ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it But philosophers dislike property as prop-

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erty; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy But philosophers despise mar­ riage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people's . . . The common criminal is a bad man, but at least he is, as it were, a conditional good man. He says that if only a certain obstacle be removed—say a wealthy uncle—he is then prepared to accept the universe and to praise God. He is a reformer, but not an anarchist. He wishes to cleanse the edifice, but not to destroy it. But the evil philosopher is not trying to alter things, but to annihilate them.50 This provocative analysis demonstrates the limitation of Chesterton, his n o t b e i n g Hegelian e n o u g h : what h e d o e s n ' t get is that universal(ized) crime is no longer a crime—it sublates (negates/overcomes) itself as crime and turns from transgression into a new order. H e is right to claim that, com­ p a r e d to the "entirely lawless" philosopher, burglars, bigamists, murder­ ers even, are essentially moral: a thief is a "conditionally good m a n " — h e doesn't deny property AS SUCH, h e j u s t wants m o r e of it for himself a n d is t h e n quite ready to respect it. However, t h e conclusion to b e drawn from this is that CRIME IS AS SUCH "ESSENTIALLY MORAL," that it wants j u s t a particular illegal r e o r d e r i n g of t h e global moral o r d e r which s h o u l d r e m a i n . A n d , in a truly Hegelian spirit, o n e should b r i n g this proposition (of t h e "essential morality" of crime) to its i m m a n e n t rever­ sal: n o t only is crime "essentially moral" (in Hegelese, an i n h e r e n t m o ­ m e n t of the d e p l o y m e n t of the i n n e r antagonisms a n d "contradictions" of t h e very n o t i o n of m o r a l order, n o t s o m e t h i n g t h a t disturbs m o r a l o r d e r from outside, as a n accidental intrusion), b u t morality itself is essentially criminal—again, n o t only in the sense that the universal moral o r d e r necessarily "negates itself" in particular crimes, but, m o r e radically, in t h e sense that the way morality (in the case of theft, property) asserts itself is already in itself a crime; "property IS theft," as they used to say in the n i n e t e e n t h century. T h a t is to say, o n e should pass from theft as a particular criminal violation of the universal form of property to this form itself as a crimi­ nal violation. W h a t Chesterton fails to perceive is that t h e "universalized crime" that h e projects into "lawless m o d e r n philosophy" a n d its political equivalent, the "anarchist" m o v e m e n t that aims at destroying the totality of civilized life, ALREADY EXISTS IN T H E GUISE O F T H E EXISTING RULE O F LAW, so that the antagonism between Law a n d crime reveals

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itself to be inherent to crime, the antagonism between universal and par­ ticular crime. This brings us to Meillassoux's basic strategic move (and a deeply Hegelian one at that) from the gap that separates us (finite humans) from the In-itself to the gap that is immanent to the In-itself. This move is strictly correlative to Lacan 's move from desire to drive: drive is "tran­ scendental," its space is that of the fantasy which fills in the void of the lost primordial Object (Thing)—in short, desire is Kantian, drive is Hegelian. The Lacanian objet a as the object which overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss (so that all its fantasmatic incarnations, from breasts to voice and gaze, are métonymie figurations of the void, of nothing), remains within the horizon of desire—the true object-cause of desire is the void filled in by its fantasmatic incarnations. While, as Lacan emphasizes, objet a is also the object of drive, the rela­ tionship here is thoroughly different: although, in both cases, the link between object and loss is crucial, in the case of objet a as the object-cause of desire, we have an object which is originally lost, which coincides with its own loss, which emerges as lost, while, in the case of objet a as the object of drive, the "object" IS DIRECTLY THE LOSS ITSELF—in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say, the weird movement called "drive" is not driven by the "impossible" quest for the lost object; it is a push directly to enact the ((loss"—the gap, cut, distance—itself. There is thus a DOUBLE distinction to be drawn here: not only between objet a in its fantasmatic and post-fantasmatic status, but also, within this post-fantasmatic domain itself, between the lost objectcause of desire and the object-loss of drive. What this means is that it is wrong to claim that the "pure" death drive would have been the impossible "total" will to (self-) destruction, the ecstatic self-annihilation in which the subject would have rejoined the fullness of the maternal Thing, but that this will is not realizable, that it gets blocked, stuck to a "partial object." Such a notion retranslates the death drive into the terms of desire and its lost object: it is in desire that the positive object is a métonymie stand-in for the void of the impossible Thing; it is in desire that the aspiration to fullness is transferred to partial objects—this is what Lacan called the metonymy of desire. One has to be very precise here if we are not to miss Lacan 's point (and thereby confuse desire and drive) : drive is not an infinite longing for the Thing which gets fixated onto a partial object; "drive" IS this fixation itself in which resides the "deathly" dimension of every drive. Drive is not a universal thrust (toward the incestuous Thing) braked and broken up; it IS this brake itself, a brake on instinct, its "stuckness," as Eric Santner would have put

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it.51 The elementary matrix of drive is NOT that of transcending all particular objects toward the void of the Thing (which is then accessible only via its métonymie stand-ins), but that of our libido getting "stuck" onto a particular object, condemned to circulate around it forever. Consequently, the concept of drive makes the alternative "either burned by the Thing or maintaining a distance" false: in a drive, the "thing itself" is a circulation around the void (or, rather, hole, not void). To put it even more pointedly, the object of drive is not related to the Thing as a filler of its void. Drive is literally a countermovement to desire; it does not strive toward impossible fullness and, being forced to renounce it, gets stuck onto a partial object as its remainder. Drive is quite literally the very "drive99 to BREAK the All of continuity in which we are embedded, to introduce a radical imbalance into it, and the difference between drive and desire is precisely that, in desire, this cut, this fixation onto a partial object, is, as it were, "transcendentalized," transposed into a stand-in for the void of the Thing.

Notes

There are two sets of abbreviations I use when citing certain works. All citations of Freud, in reference to the Standard Edition, are abbreviated as SE, followed by the volume number and the page number (e.g., Freud, SE 21:154). The abbreviation system for Lacan 's seminars is a little more complicated. All seminars are abbrevi­ ated S, followed by the Roman numeral of the volume number. For those semi­ nars available in English (seminars 1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 17, and 20), I give the page numbers of the volumes as published by W. W. Norton and Company (e.g., Lacan, SXI256). For those seminars published in French in book form but not translated into English (seminars 4,5,8,10,16, and 23), the listed page numbers refer to the French editions published by Editions du Seuil (e.g., Lacan, 5X52). As for the rest of the seminars, the dates of the seminar sessions (month/day/year) are listed in place of page numbers (e.g., Lacan, SXIX 5/10/72).

Preface 1. Benjamin 1969,257. 2. Benjamin 1969, 258. 3. Ross 2002, 2-3, 11, 73-74, 96-99, 109-13. 4. Marx 1977a, 209-10; Marx and Engels 1977a, 223-24. 5. Mao 1967b, 37. 6. Benjamin 1969, 258-59. 7. Stalin 1940, 13, 40-41, 43-44. 8. Bensaïd 1990, 29-30, 216-17, 231-32. 9. Benjamin 1969, 254. 10. Benjamin 1969, 253-54, 262, 264. 11. Bensaïd 1990, 222, 249. 12. Benjamin 1969, 253. 13. Gramsci 2000, 208, 212-17. 14. Gramsci 2000, 190-202. 15. Weizman 2006. 16. The Economist 2006. 17. Jameson 1991, xii, xiv-xv. 18. Lenin 2002b, 117-18, 121-23. 19. Badiou 1982, 333; Badiou 1985b, 95-97. 20. Bosteels 2005b, 578, 581. 231

232 NOTES

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PAGES

x v i i i - x x i x

21. Meillassoux 2008b. 22. Badiou 2005b, 162-63. 23. Badiou 1975, 21, 40-41, 76-79; Badiou, Bellassen, and Mossot 1978, 46, 88. 24. Badiou 1985b, 67-69, 76-78, 112-15. 25. Badiou 1998, 10-12. 26. Lenin 2002c, 145, 156. 27. Badiou 2006i, 153, 155, 158. 28. Johnston 2008, 126-28. 29. Marx 1976, 103. 30. Lenin 2002a, 16. 31. Marcuse 1955, 5, 133-34, 136; Marcuse 1970, 63-64. 32. Bensaïd 1990, 74-75, 190, 224-25. 33. Badiou 2005f, xxxix, 10-11, 23, 55, 61-62. 34. Rancière 1991,15-18, 34-36, 71-73,101-3,105-6,109; Rancière 2006, 44, 46-49, 59-62, 78-82, 84, 94-97. 35. Badiou 1999a, 66, 79-80; Badiou 2005d, 14. 36. Hegel 1967, 13. 37. Balibar 2007, 40-41. 38. Badiou 2007d, 9. 39. Bosteels 2005b, 596. 40. Badiou 1975, 81; Badiou 1985b, 84; Badiou 2003a, 122-23. 41. Badiou 1975, 17-19. 42.Jamesonl981,9. 43. Marx 1977c, 572. 44. Balibar 2007, 1-2, 4, 6, 108, 116-17. 45. Marx 1977d, 583-84; Marx 1977e, 593. 46. Lukâcs 1971, 1, 3-4, 12-15. 47. Lukâcs 1971, 24. 48. Zizek 2008, 3. 49. Lenin 1969, 25.

Introduction 1. Zizek 1993, 4; Johnston 2005a, 85. 2. Badiou 2006i, 588. 3. Badiou 2006i, 588. 4. Badiou 2004a, 9. 5. Badiou 2005e, 40-41. 6. L'Organisation Politique 2001. 7. Badiou 1985b, 12, 108-9; Badiou 2001b, 95-96; Badiou 2003h, 86-87; Badiou 2003e, 73-74; Badiou 2003a, 124; Badiou 2005f, 122, 144-45, 149-50; Badiou 2006k, 321; Badiou 2006e. 8. Zizek 1998, 51-52; Zizek 2002e, 297; Zizek 2004c, 75-76.

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9. Zizek 2001e, 73-76; Zizek 2006a, 328. 10. Bosteels 2005a, 224-25. 11. Zizek 1999e, 128-29; Zizek 2001a, 117; Zizek 2002f, 101-2; Johnston 2005a, 85. 12. Badiou 1985b, 18, 67; Badiou 2003h, 73; Badiou 2003g, 181; Badiou 2005f, 23. 13. Hallward 2005, 784. 14. Badiou 1999b, 114-15; Badiou 2003j, 57-58, 70-71; Badiou 2003g, 181; Badiou 2003a, 122-23; Tarby 2005b, 27, 33; Tarby 2005a, 10. 15. Badiou 1975, 26, 41, 110; Badiou 1982, 21, 150-51. 16. Badiou 1999b, 115. 17. Hallward 2003, xxxiii, 37, 50, 250, 284-85, 371; Johnston 2003; John­ ston 2005a, 123.

Chapter 1, §1 1. Badiou 1985b, 17-18, 31, 34; Zizek 2001a, 3; Zizek 2004a, 79; Johnston 2004c, 277-78. 2. Badiou 2005f, 26, 28, 55; Badiou 2003h, 88-89; Badiou 2006i, 35-36, 544-45, 547. 3. Badiou 2005b, 209. 4. Bosteels 2002b, 205. 5. Badiou 1975, 109-10; Badiou, Bellassen, and Mossot 1978, 44. 6. Badiou 2005a, 252-53. 7. Bosteels 2004b, 152. 8. Badiou 1985b, 18. 9. Badiou 2005f, 7-8; Badiou 2004a, 18. 10. Badiou 2005f, 101. 11. Badiou 2005f, 117. 12. Badiou 2003a, 126. 13. Badiou 2005f, 146-47. 14. Badiou 2003j, 63. 15. Badiou 2003j, 71. 16. Badiou 2000, 64; Badiou 2004f, 112. 17. Lazarus 1996, 50, 102, 152; Lecercle 1999, 8; Toscano 2004, 202, 214. 18. Lazarus 1996, 20. 19. Lazarus 1996, 156. 20. Lazarus 1996, 59. 21. Badiou 2003h, 61. 22. Badiou 2001a, 72. 23. Badiou 2003a, 132. 24. Badiou 2006b, 252-53. 25. Badiou 2006i, 395. 26. Badiou 2003a, 131.

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27. Badiou 2006j, 282. 28. Badiou 2006i, 415-16. 29. Badiou 2006j, 283. 30. Badiou 2006i, 400, 417-18, 601; Badiou 2006j, 288-89. 31. Badiou 2006i, 379. 32. Badiou 2006i, 397-98, 416, 600-601; Badiou 2006j, 286-87; Badiou 2006b, 251. 33. Badiou 2006i, 389, 393. 34. Badiou 2006f. 35. Badiou 2006f. 36. Badiou 2006i, 380. 37. Badiou 2006i, 377. 38. Badiou 2006i, 382. 39. Badiou 2006i, 93.

Chapter 1, §2 1. Badiou 1982,110; Badiou 2006i, 531. 2. Badiou 1999a, 35. 3. Badiou 2005b, 210. 4. Badiou 1994,118. 5. Badiou 2005d, 61. 6. Hallward 2003,158. 7. Badiou 2008, 28, 36-37. 8. Badiou 2006b, 250. 9. Hallward 2003, 157; Strathausen 2005, 279. 10. Badiou 2006i, 17, 532; Badiou 2006b, 249. 11. Badiou 20061,17. 12. Badiou 2005f, 117. 13. Badiou 2006i, 407. 14. Badiou 2006i, 531. 15. Schelling 1936,16-17. 16. Schelling 1936, 18. 17. Badiou 1985b, 69. 18. Lazarus 1996, 48. 19. Badiou 1985b, 69. 20. Lazarus 1996, 141-42. 21. Badiou 2005h, 151-52. 22. Badiou 2004a, 13. 23. Badiou 2004a, 16. 24. Badiou 2004a, 17. 25. Badiou 2005f, 105; Badiou 2005h, 155.

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Chapter 1, §3 1. Badiou 2004a, 18. 2. Badiou 2005h, 152. 3. Bosteels 2004b, 150-51; Bosteels 2005b, 578. 4. Bosteels 2004b, 153-54. 5. Bosteels 2004a, 103. 6. Hallward 2003, 29. 7. Hallward 2003, 30. 8. Hallward 2003, 43. 9. Badiou 1985b, 77; Badiou 2005f, 72; Badiou 2003a, 131; Badiou 2006i, 408. 10. Badiou 2006i, 389, 391, 399, 413. 11. Badiou 2006i, 389; Badiou 1990b, 23. 12. Badiou 2006i, 399. 13. Badiou and Balmès 1976, 75. 14. Bosteels 2002b, 198-99; Bosteels 2005b, 603. 15. Strathausen 2005, 279. 16.Toscano2004, 202. 17. Toscano 2004, 210-11. 18. Bosteels 2005c, 764-65. 19. Bosteels 2002b, 206-7. 20. Badiou 2005b, 232. 21. Badiou 2006b, 253. 22. Hallward 2002, 303; Johnston 2003. 23. Hallward 2003, 50, 250; Tarby 2005b, 15. 24. Hallward 2003, xxxii. 25. Hallward 2003, 241. 26. Hallward 2003, 241-42. 27. Bensaïd 2004, 97. 28. Bensaïd 2004, 105. 29. Bensaïd 2004, 102-3; Marchart 2005, 119-20. 30. Badiou 2005d, 61. 31. Hallward 2003, 371. 32. Johnston 2003. 33. Bensaïd 2004, 98, 101. 34. Marchart 2005, 114. 35. Marchart 2005, 116-17. 36. Badiou 2006i, 534. 37. Badiou 2006i, 536. 38. Badiou 2001b, 123. 39. Hallward 2003, 274. 40. Marchart 2005, 125. 41. Bosteels 2005b, 615, 617. 42. Bosteels 2005b, 607-8. 43. Bosteels 2002a, 262.

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Chapter 1, §4 1. Badiou 2005d, 120. 2. Badiou 1998,12. 3. Badiou 2006i, 40. 4. Badiou 2005b, 400, 403, 406-8. 5. Badiou 2005h, 82-85, 89. 6. Badiou 2005h, 85, 98. 7. Badiou 2007b. 8. Badiou 2005h, 98. 9. Badiou 2005c, 82. 10. Badiou 2006i, 42, 534-35; Badiou 2006f. 11. Hallward 2003, 28, 274-75; Hallward 2002, 296. 12. Hallward 2003, 322. 13. Johnston 2003. 14. Eagleton 2003, 46. 15. Badiou 2006i, 618. 16. Badiou 2006i, 401. 17. Badiou 2005b, 173. 18. Badiou 2005b, 173. 19. Badiou 2005b, 173-74; Tarby 2005a, 99-100. 20. Badiou 2005b, 174. 21. Badiou 2005f, 23. 22. Badiou 2005b, 83-84, 94, 103, 174. 23. Badiou 2005b, 175. 24. Badiou 2005b, 99-101, 507, 522, 526. 25. Badiou 2005b, 175. 26. Badiou 2006i, 608. 27. Badiou 2005b, 179. 28. Badiou 2005b, 178-79. 29. Badiou 2005b, 176. 30. Badiou 2006i, 383; Badiou 2006j, 274, 280. 31. Tarby 2005b, 40. 32. Badiou 2005b, 179-81, 184, 189-90. 33. Badiou 2006i, 383. 34. Badiou 2006i, 388-89. 35. Badiou 2006j, 279-80, 282, 284-85; Badiou 2006b, 251 36. Badiou 2006i, 389. 37. Hallward 2003, 96. 38. Badiou 2004b, 104. 39. Badiou 2005b, 207; Hallward 2003, 128. 40. Badiou 2003j, 14-15, 43, 57. 41. Badiou 2006i, 65-67. 42. Marx 1977b, 543.

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31-39

Chapter 1, §5 l.Hallward 2002, 308. 2. Badiou 2003a, 122. 3. Badiou 2003a, 124-25. 4. Hallward 2005, 772. 5. Badiou 2005e, 41. 6. Badiou 1991, 29-30; Johnston 2005a, 105. 7. Badiou 2001b, 116. 8. Badiou 2005b, 206, 209; Tarby 2005b, 87. 9. Badiou 1985b, 101. 10. Badiou 2003a, 133. 11. Badiou 2006i, 593, 609, 615, 618. 12. Badiou 1990b, 9. 13. Badiou and Critchley 2007, 364. 14. Tarby 2005b, 205. 15. Lacan, SXI128. 16. Badiou 2005b, 210. 17. Badiou 2005b, 210. 18. Badiou 2004a, 48. 19. Badiou 2004a, 48. 20. Lacan, SXIV 5/10/67. 21. Badiou 2004a, 48-49. 22. Badiou 2005b, 211. 23. Badiou 2006e. 24. Johnston 2005a, 126-28. 25. Badiou 1999a, 108; Badiou 2003h, 61-62; Badiou 2005f, 93-94; Badiou 2006e; Tarby 2005b, 22.

Chapter 2, §6 1. Badiou 2004d, 76, 78-80, 84. 2. Badiou and Balmès 1976, 47-51, 53-54. 3. Mao 1967b, 45. 4. Mao 1967b, 46. 5. Badiou and Balmès 1976, 50. 6. Badiou 1982, 345. 7. Badiou 1982, 338. 8. Badiou 1982, 341. 9. Lacan, SVII14. 10. Badiou 2005d, 135. 11. Badiou 2005d, 136. 12. Badiou 2005b, 93. 13. Hallward 2003, 96-97, 225. 14. Badiou 2005f, 145.

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39-48

15. Badiou 2005f, 145. 16. Badiou 2005f, 145. 17. Mao 1967b, 44-45. 18. Badiou 2005f, 144. 19. Badiou 2005f, 148. 20. Zizek 1992, 58; Zizek 1996, 137; Zizek 1999a, 13; Zizek 2000b, 258; Zizek 2002a, lxviii-lxix. 21. Johnston 2008,180,189, 208. 22. Zizek 2007b, 10. 23. Zizek 2007b, 11. 24. Zizek 2000a, 26. 25. Zizek 2000a, 26. 26. Derrida 2003, 95. 27. Johnston 2008,170-71, 208.

Chapter 2, §7 1. Badiou 2003f, 158. 2. Badiou 2003f, 158-59. 3. Badiou 2003f, 160. 4. Badiou 2003f, 160. 5. Badiou 2006i, 69-70, 81. 6. Badiou 2005f, 138; Badiou 2003f, 144-45; Badiou 2005h, 45; Badiou 2006i, 34; Zizek 2004a, 84; Zizek 2006a, 326. 7. Badiou 1975,17. 8. Badiou 2005h, 142. 9. Zizek 2002f, 40-41.

Chapter 2, §8 1. Zizek 2007a. 2. Zizek 2007a. 3. Zizek 2007a. 4. Badiou 2005d, 137. 5. Badiou 2006i, 17-18, 42, 46, 593. 6. Badiou 2006i, 21. 7. Badiou 2006i, 22; Badiou 2006b, 249. 8. Badiou 2006i, 74. 9. Badiou 2006i, 75. 10. Badiou 2006i, 87. 11. Badiou 2006i, 75. 12. Badiou 2006i, 75. 13. Badiou 2006i, 76.

239

14. Badiou 2006j, 284-85. 15. Badiou 2006J, 285. 16. Badiou 2007e. 17. Deleuze 1994, 17, 286. 18. Lacan, SXW 218-19. 19. Dor 1992, 84, 87, 91-92; Safouan 2001, 189-90. 20. Lacan 1970, 192. 21. Fink 1995, 223, 225. 22. Fink 1995, 224. 23. Lacan, .SX/V 2/15/67; Lacan, SXW 121, 126-27; Lacan, SXWI 45-46; Johnston 2005b, 152-53, 189-90, 193, 215, 252, 320. 24. Lacan, SVIII 417-18; Lacan, SIX 2/28/62; Lacan, SX 52; Lacan, SXI 256; Lacan, SXII 2/3/65; Lacan, SXIX 5/10/72; Lacan 2006m, 567; Johnston 2008, 54-55, 212-14, 218-20, 224-26. 25. Lacan, SiX 11/29/61. 26. Lacan, SXIX 5/10/72. 27. Lacan, SXIX 4/19/72. 28. Johnston 2008, 246. 29. Badiou 2006c, xii. 30. Badiou 2006d, 164. 31. Badiou 2002, 9-12; Badiou 2006i, 612. 32. Badiou 2002, 10; Badiou 2007c, 103. 33. Badiou 2006i, 111. 34. Badiou 2006i, 124, 536. 35. Badiou 2006i, 536. 36. Badiou 2006i, 536. 37. Mao 1967b, 39. 38. Mao 1967b, 40, 42-43. 39. Mao 197ld, 464. 40. Russo 2002, 318-20, 322, 325. 4L Mao 1971a, 125-26. 42. Althusser 2005a, 94, 101; Althusser 2005b, 182-83, 194-95, 201-2, 210-11. 43. Mao 1971b, 320-21. 44. Mao 197ld, 442-44, 446. 45. Mao 197ld, 464. 46. Dupuy 2002, 50, 63, 82, 84-87, 116, 141-43, 161-67, 215-16; Dupuy 2005, 17-20, 100-104, 106-7. 47. Mao 197ld, 464. 48. Mao 1962. 49. Mao 1967a. 50. Lenin 1971b, 524-25, 575-76, 581, 588. 51. Mao 1971c, 352-53. 52. Badiou 1982, 338.

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Chapter 2, §9 1. Badiou 1991, 31; Badiou 1992, 206-7. 2. Badiou 1985b, 107. 3. Barker 2002, 109. 4. Badiou 1985b, 107. 5. Hallward 2003, 135-37; Brassier 2004, 54; Gibson 2006, 60, 84, 136. 6. Badiou 2005b, 397-98. 7. Badiou 2005b, 398. 8. Badiou 1985a, 123. 9. Badiou 1985a, 141; Tarby 2005b, 116. 10. Badiou 2003d, 65. 11. Tarby 2005b, 17-18. 12. Badiou 1982, 310. 13. Hallward 2003, 38. 14. Badiou 2006i, 536-37. 15. Badiou 2001-02; Badiou 2007a. 16. Badiou 2001a, 44, 47, 50, 90-91; Badiou 2003b, 11; Gibson 2006, 72-73, 97. 17. Badiou 2001a, 47. 18. Badiou 2005d, 106. 19. Badiou 2005d, 106. 20. Badiou 20031,114. 21. Badiou and Critchley 2007, 364. 22. Badiou 2005b, 93-94, 99-101, 507. 23. Badiou 2005b, 327, 329, 407. 24. Badiou 2005b, 378. 25. Badiou 2003i, 114-15. 26. Badiou 20031,114. 27. Tarby 2005a, 107-8. 28. Badiou 2006i, 96. 29. Badiou 1995, 7; Badiou 2005a, 242. 30. Badiou 2006i, 442-43, 601, 612. 31. Badiou 2006i, 426. 32. Badiou 20061, 427. 33. Badiou 2006i, 438-39, 461, 614. 34. Badiou 20061, 459. 35. Badiou 20061, 459. 36. Badiou 2006b, 322. 37. Badiou 1970, 38. 38. Badiou and Balmès 1976, 98, 106-7. 39. Badiou 20061, 454. 40. Badiou 2006i, 606. 41. Badiou 2006i, 609. 42. Badiou 2006i, 473, 475. 43. Badiou 1991, 25; Tarby 2005b, 17; Tarby 2005a, 106.

NOTES

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65-73

44. Badiou 2006i, 53, 55; Badiou 2006b, 252. 45. Badiou 2006i, 505. 46. Badiou 2007c, 104. 47. Badiou 2006i, 489. 48. Badiou 2006i, 489. 49. Badiou 2006i, 489. 50. Badiou 2006f. 51. Badiou 2006i, 492. 52. Badiou 2006i, 493. 53. Badiou 2006i, 525. 54. Badiou 2006i, 476. 55. Badiou 2006i, 499. 56. Badiou 2006i, 500. 57. Badiou 2006i, 500. 58. Badiou 2006i, 501. 59. Badiou 2006i, 502. Chapter 2, §10 1. Badiou 2001a, 48. 2. Badiou 2001a, 48. 3. Badiou 2001a, 84. 4. Badiou 1982, 306. 5. Tarby 2005b, 146. 6. Badiou 2001a, 48-49. 7. Badiou 2001a, 53. 8. Badiou 2006i, 85-86. 9. Badiou 2006i, 96-97. 10. Badiou 1982, 307.

11. Badiou 2006i, 98-99. 12. Badiou 2005d, 130. 13. Badiou 2005b, 201-2, 512, 525; Tarby 2005a, 29. 14. Badiou 2005b, 328-29. 15. Badiou 2006i, 454. 16. David-Ménard 2002, 36-37. 17. Badiou 2006i, 512. 18. Badiou 2006i, 514. 19. Badiou 2006i, 512-13. 20. Badiou 2006i, 513. 21. Badiou 2006i, 513-14. 22. Badiou 2006i, 514. 23. Badiou 2006i, 514. 24. Badiou 2006i, 97. 25. Badiou 2006i, 445. 26. Badiou 2006i, 445.

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74-89

27. Zizek 2007a. 28. Badiou 2006i, 550. 29. Badiou 2006i, 550. 30. Kacem 2004b, 230-31. 31. Kacem 2004a, 172-73. 32. Badiou 2006i, 9-10,12-13,15. 33. Kacem 2004b, 171. 34. Kacem 2004b, 198; Kacem 2004a, 92-93. 35. Feltham 2006,192. 36. Kacem 2004b, 199. 37. Kacem 2004a, 16. 38. Kacem 2004a, 178. 39. Kacem 2004a, 182. 40. Kacem 2004a, 163,169. 41. Kacem 2004a, 163-64. 42. Kacem 2004b, 153. 43. Kacem 2004b, 242. 44. Kacem 2004a, 165,174,177-78,182. 45. Kacem 2004a, 176. 46. Kacem 2004b, 203. 47. Kacem 2004b, 218-19. 48. Kacem 2004b, 224. 49. Badiou 1982,176-77. 50. Badiou 2006i, 96-99. 51. Badiou 2007a. 52. Badiou 1982, 310. 53. Lacan, SVII 320; Lacan, SVIII122. 54. Badiou 20061. 55. Johnston 2004a, 228; Johnston 2004b, 250-51; Johnston 2005b, 266, 340-41; Johnston 2006, 36-37, 46-47, 51-53; Johnston 2008, xxiii-xxiv, xxvi, 273-75. 56. Barthes 1982, 468.

Chapter 3, §11 l.Nicol 2001,152. 2. Lacan, SVII 139; Lacan, SXVI 224-25, 249; Miller 1994, 75-76. 3. Lacan, 5X7 268. 4. Laplanche 1999,135. 5. Freud, S£ 1:327. 6. Lacan, SXII1/6/65. 7. Zizek 2000a, 27. 8. Zizek 2004a, 113. 9. Lacan, SXX 23-24. 10. Lacan, SXX 131.

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11. Lacan, SIX 5/23/62, 5/30/62. 12. Zizek 2002a, lxxii. 13. Zizek 2001e, 113-14. 14. Zizek 2001b, 55. 15. Zizek 1999, 59-60. 16. Zizek 2001e, 113-14. 17. Kay 2003, 135.

Chapters, §12 1. Zizek 1989, 33; Zizek 2002b, 251; Zizek 1992, x; Zizek 1996, 200-201. 2. Sloterdijk 1987, 3-5. 3. Zizek 2002a, lxx. 4. Zizek 2002f, 70. 5. Mannoni 1969, 12-13, 32. 6. Zizek 1999c, 68; Kay 2003, 134-35, 151. 7. Zizek 2003c, 8. 8. Zizek 1997b, 106, 108. 9. Zizek 2002a, ciii. 10. Kant 1983, 45-46. 11. Marx 1976, 163-77. 12. Lacan, SXVIII 6/16/71; Lacan, SXIX 1/19/72; Lacan, SXXWI3/18/80. 13. Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, 118-19. 14. Freud, SE 21: 152-53. 15. Freud, SE 21: 154. 16. Freud, SE 13: 186-87; Freud, SE 21: 43-44. 17. Zizek 2001d, 13-14; Zizek 2001b, 166. 18. Zizek 2001d, 14. 19. Zizek 2001d, 14. 20. Zizek 2001d, 15. 21. Marx 1981, 966, 968-69. 22. Zizek 1999c, 68. 23. Zizek 1997b, 106. 24. Zizek 1997b, 120. 25. Zizek 1998, 66-67, 73. 26. Zizek 1999c, 55; Zizek 2000c, 10. 27. Lacan, SXIX 12/8/71. 28. Zizek 1989, 18; Zizek 1996, 4; Zizek 1997b, 105, 120; Zizek 2001b, 166. 29. Marx 1976, 162-63; Marx 1978, 114, 128, 463; Marx 1973, 213-14. 30. Marx 1981, 516. 31. Lacan, SWI112. 32. Marx 1978, 137; Marx 1973, 332. 33. Marx 1976, 247-57. 34. Hegel 1967, §186-87 (124-25), §199 (129-30).

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Chapter 3, §13 1. Lacan, SXW 239. 2. Zizek 2001d, 21. 3. Zizek 2001d, 68. 4. Zizek 2001d, 76. 5. Marcuse 1955, 137-39. 6. Harpham 2003, 462. ■ 7. Lacan 2006n, 694-95, 699; Lacan, SXX 111-12. 8. Marx 1976, 342, 367, 415-16. 9. Buder 1993, 195-96, 198-99, 206; Buder 2000, 152-53. 10. Dews 1995, 252; Dews 1999, 22. 11. Zizek 1993, 3. 12. Zizek 1999e, 276-77. 13. Zizek 2002a, xii. 14. Zizek 2004a, 104. 15. Johnston 2005b, xxxiv, 242. 16. Marx 1976, 202. 17. Zizek 2002e, 328.

Chapter 3, §14 1. Lacan, SXV11/22/67; Lacan, SXW 41. 2. Lacan, SXXIII1Z 3. Freud, SE 21: 143. 4. Lacan 1990b, 127. 5. Valente 2003, 157. 6. Lacan, SXW 238. 7. Lacan, SXVII55. 8. Zizek 2001a, 8; Zizek 2003a, 486; Kay 2003, 132. 9. Lacan, SXXIII19, 22. 10. Freud, SE 23: 252-53. 11. Valente 2003, 154-55. 12. Zizek 2001d, 18-19. 13. Zizek 2001e, 78-79. 14. Zizek 2000c, 17-18. 15. Zizek 2000c, 18. 16. Zizek 2000c, 19. 17. Zizek 2000c, 19. 18. Zizek 2001e, 40-41. 19. Zizek 2001e, 96. 20. Zizek 2001d, 83-84. 21. Fink 2002, 34-36. 22. Zizek and Daly 2004, 70. 23. Zizek and Daly 2004, 70-71.

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24. Zizek and Daly 2004, 71. 25. Zizek 1998, 45; Zizek 2004a, 39, 80-81. 26. Zizek 2002a, xii. 27. Kay 2003,154. 28. Lacan, SXV11/15/67,11/22/67. 29. Lacan, SAY 11/29/67. 30. Zizek 1999e, 374-75. 31. Zizek 2001d, 144. 32. Zizek 1999e, 376. 33. Marx 1964, 43. 34. Badiou 1999b, 114-15. 35. Badiou 2005b, 178-79. 36. Badiou 2001a, 68. 37. Badiou 2005b, 187. 38. Badiou 2003j, 23. 39. Badiou 2003j, 49. 40. Zizek 2001a, 117. 41. Zizek 2002f, 130. 42. Zizek 2002f, 101-2. 43. Zizek 1997a, 31. 44. Badiou 2001a, 43.

Chapter 3, §15 1. Homer 2001,15. 2. Zizek 2004a, 72. 3. Zizek 2002a, lii. 4. Badiou 1985b, 17-18, 31, 34. 5. Zizek 2001a, 3. 6. Zizek 2001a, 3. 7. Zizek 2001a, 3. 8. Zizek 2004a, 79, 87. 9. Badiou 2001a, 8-9. 10. Zizek 2004a, 81-82. 11. Zizek 2002f, 152-53. 12. Zizek 2002b, 222. 13. Zizek 2001e, 22-23. 14. Zizek 2000a, 16. 15. Zizek 2006a, 351-52. 16. Balibar 2007, 60. 17. Lacan, SVII57-58; Miller 2000,18-19. 18. Badiou 1982, 150-51. 19. Bosteels 2002b, 183. 20. Lacan, SXI53-54,128. 21. Badiou 1982, 77, 80, 82.

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22. Badiou 1982, 243-44, 248. 23. Zizek 1988, 77; Zizek 1989, 169; Zizek 1996, 97; Johnston 2008, 109, 146-47. 24. Bosteels 2001, 222-23, 228; Bosteels 2002b, 180-81. 25. Laplanche 1987, 134. 26. Badiou 1982, 204. 27. Lacan, SXX 15, 101. 28. Badiou 1982, 204. 29. Badiou 1982, 204. 30. Miller 1977-78, 25; Johnston 2002, 51-52, 57-58, 63-64. 31. Badiou 1969, 53-54. 32. Badiou 1975, 76-78; Badiou 1982, 206, 208-9, 232, 236. 33. Badiou 1982, 247-49. 34. Zizek 1999b, 13-14; Zizek 2002a, lxvii. 35. Zizek 2000c, 92. 36. Lacan 1990a, 16. 37. Lacan 2006d, 248; Lacan 20061, 496; Lacan 2001b, 137-38; Lacan 2001c, 199; Lacan 1970, 187; Lacan, SI 244; Lacan, SU 82; Lacan, SIII32; Lacan, SIX 1/10/62; Lacan, SXTV 2/1/67, 5/10/67. 38. Lacan 2001d, 224. 39. Boothby 2001, 237-38. 40. Zizek 1999c, 61-62. 41. Zizek 1999c, 61. 42. Zizek 2001e, 101. 43. Mao 1971a, 94, 98, 115. 44. Zizek 2004a, 113-14.

Chapter 4, §16 1. Lacan, SX7 230-33. 2. Lacan, SW 4/15/59; Lacan 2006n, 690. 3. Zizek 1999e, 135; Zizek 2002e, 325. 4. Zizek 1999e, 143-44; Zizek 2004d, 170-71. 5. Santner 2005, 110-11. 6. Zizek and Daly 2004, 144-45. 7. Zizek 2002e, 270-72; Zizek 2006a, 325-27. 8. Badiou 2006f. 9. Benjamin 1969, 262-64. 10. Zizek 2002e, 325. 11. Zizek 2001a, 117. 12. Zizek and Daly 2004, 136. 13. Vainqueur 2002, 326. 14. Badiou 1999a, 37. 15. Johnston 2005a, 123. 16. Badiou 2003J, 71.

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17. Zizek 2001d, 112. 18. Badiou 2006d, 115,119; Badiou 2006i, 48,112. 19. Bosteels 2004a, 103-4. 20. Johnston 2005a, 127-28. 21. Zizek 2003c, 134. 22. Zizek 2003e, 135. 23. Zizek 2003e, 135. 24. Zizek 2004b, 211-12. 25. Zizek 2002d, 4-6, 8-10; Zizek and Daly 2004,163-64.

Chapters §17 1. Zizek 2006a, 56. 2. Johnston 2008,180,189, 208. 3. Zizek 2006a, 79. 4. Zizek 2001e, 23; Zizek 2003c, 171. 5. Zizek 2002e, 180. 6. Zizek 2006a, 166. 7. Badiou 1982, 232-33; Badiou 2005b, 27-28, 44-45; Badiou 2006d, 35-37. 8. Badiou 2006a, 10-11. 9. Althusser 2005c, 180-81; Althusser 2006,167-70,193-96. 10. Badiou 2005a, 250. 11. Zizek 2004b, 107. . 12. Zizek 2006a, 167. 13. Badiou 2006b, 253.

Chapter 4, §18 1. Zizek 2002e, 182. 2. Badiou 2005g, 2; Hallward 2005, 780. 3. Zizek 2002e, 272. 4. Zizek 2004b, 104. 5. Zizek 1989, 173; Zizek 1999e, 276-77; Zizek 2002f, 31-32; Zizek 2003c, 67; Zizek and Daly 2004, 65-66. 6. Johnston 2004c, 277. 7. Zizek 1997b, 112-13; Zizek 2001e, 11-12. 8. Zizek 2006b, 223. 9. Marx and Engels 1977b, 573. 10. Zizek 2004a, 72; Zizek 2006c, 238. 11. Zizek 2004a, 72. 12. Zizek 2006b, 223. 13. Zizek 2007b, 26-27. 14. Zizek 2006a, 334.

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15. Badiou 2004c. 16. Zizek 2002f, 101-2, 130; Zizek and Daly 2004, 136. 17. Zizek 2002f, 101. 18. Badiou 1982, 333; Badiou 1985b, 95-97. 19. Badiou 2004a, 46-47; Badiou 2006i, 413. 20. Badiou 2005f, 93-94, 112. 21. Badiou 2006J, 288.

Chapter 4, §19 1. Lacan, 5/109. 2. Lacan 2006g, 319. 3. Lacan, SI 230. 4. Lacan, SI 263. 5. Lacan, SVIII12. 6. Lacan 2005c, 89-91. 7. Lacan, SXV1/10/68. 8. Lacan, SXXII3/18/75. 9. Lacan, SI 246. 10. Lacan, SU 289, 292-93. 11. Lacan, SIII80-81; Lacan, 5/7163. 12. Lacan, SXI50. 13. Lacan, SI 246; Lacan, 57420-21. 14. Lacan, SV 433-34, 489; Lacan, 5 X ^ 3 / 8 / 6 7 . 15. Lacan, SVIII 397. 16. Lacan, 5X145. 17. Lacan, SX 146; Lacan, SXIV 3/8/67. 18. Lacan, 5X148, 165. 19. Lacan, 5X77/7 1/20/71. 20. Lacan, 5X147-48. 21. Lacan 2006b, 84; Lacan 2006c, 194-95; Lacan 2006d, 215-16, 222-23, 232, 243; Lacan 2006f, 310-11; Lacan 2006h, 348, 355; Lacan 2006i, 373; Lacan 2006], 391; Lacan 2006k, 439. 22. Lacan 2006d, 219-20. 23. Lacan, 5X772/22/67. 24. Lacan, SV 475. 25. Lacan, 5 X 7 3 / 2 0 / 6 8 . 26. Lacan, 5X 366-67. 27. Lacan, 5X367. 28. Lacan, 5X772/15/67; Lacan 2005a, 33. 29. Lacan, SXIV 2/15/67. 30. Lacan, 5X772/22/67. 31. Lacan, 5X711/29/67; Lacan 2001h, 375. 32. Lacan, SXIV 6/7/67. 33. Lacan, 5X772/15/67.

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34. Lacan, SXIV 2/22/67. 35. Lacan, 5X711/15/67, 11/22/67. 36. Lacan 2006m, 572. 37. Lacan 1966b, 683. 38. Lacan 2001f, 265. 39. Lacan 2001g, 325. 40. Lacan, SXWI125-26. 41. Lacan, SXW/65. 42. Lacan, SXI64. 43. Lacan 2005b, 117. 44. Lacan 2005b, 120-21. 45. Johnston 2006, 48; Johnston 2008, 111, 113, 122, 286-87. 46. Badiou 1991, 25, 27; Badiou 2001a, 44; Badiou 2003c, 56; Badiou 2003g, 175; Tarby 2005b, 41, 85; Tarby 2005a, 79, 107. 47. Zizek 2007a. 48. Badiou 1985b, 69. 49. Lacan, SXV1/17/68. 50. Lacan, SXV 3/20/68. 51. Lacan, SXXV 4/11/78. 52. Lacan, SXIX 11/11/71. 53. Lacan, SXV 12/6/67. 54. Lacan, SXW 354. 55. Lacan, SXWI 42-43. 56. Lacan 2006a, 81. 57. Lacan 1966a, 100. 58. Lacan 2006e, 289. 59. Lacan 2006e, 289. 60. Lacan, SWI303-4. 61. Lacan 2001e, 229. 62. Lacan, SXXWI1/24/80. 63. Badiou 2005h, 142. 64. Badiou 2001a, 41; Badiou 2001b, 128-29. 65. Badiou 1990a, 43-44; Badiou 1991, 25; Badiou 2000, 81, 89-90; Badiou 2003g, 182-83. 66. Badiou 2003j, 15. 67. Badiou 2007b. 68. Badiou 1999b, 123-24; Badiou 2006d, 30; Badiou 2006i, 283-84. 69. Badiou 2005f, 142-43.

Chapter 4, §20 1. Badiou 2005f, 141-42; Badiou 2006h, 58; Tarby 2005b, 133-34; Tarby 2005a, 116. 2. Badiou 2006i, 473, 475, 505, 525, 602, 606. 3. Badiou and Balmès 1976, 67; Badiou 2003h, 62.

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4. Badiou 2006i, 529-30, 602. 5. Zizek 2002f, 69-70, 89; Zizek 2003c, 95, 98; Zizek and Daly 2004, 107. 6. Johnston 2005a, 118-23. 7. Badiou 2003J, 79-80; Badiou 2006i, 530-31; Zizek 1999e, 145. 8. Zizek 1989, 4-5; Zizek 1997b, 30-31, 89; Zizek 1999e, 66, 293-94; Zizek 1999d, 211; Zizek 2001d, 104; Zizek 2001c, 103; Zizek 2002c, 106-7; Johnston 2005b, 329, 368-69. 9. Zizek 1991, 37; Zizek 1996, 121-22; Zizek 2000d, 29; Zizek 2003c, 7 9 80; Zizek and Daly 2004, 61, 63-65; Zizek 2003b; Johnston 2008, 105, 109, 126, 181-94, 222-23, 236-38. 10. Zizek 1999e, 160, 169; Zizek 2001c, 96. 11. Zizek 1999e, 159-60. 12. Zizek 1999e, 163-64; Zizek 2002a, lxxxiii, lxxxviii. 13. Zizek 2006a, 64. 14. Johnston 2004c, 277. 15. Lacan, SVII247. 16. Zizek 2003c, 169-70.

Appendix A 1. Zizek 2007a. 2. Zizek 1989, 33; Zizek 2002b, 251; Zizek 1992, x; Zizek 1996, 200-201; Zizek 2003c, 8. 3. Zizek 2007a. 4. Zizek 2007a. 5. Zizek 2007a. 6. Zizek 2007a. 7. Zizek 2002d, 4-6, 8-10; Zizek 2003c, 135; Zizek and Daly 2004, 163-64. 8. Zizek 1998, 45; Zizek 1999e, 374-76; Zizek 2001d, 144; Zizek 2004a, 39, 80-81. 9. Zizek 1999e, 135; Zizek 2001d, 83-84, 112; Zizek 2002f, 101-2, 130. 10. Zizek 2002f, 152-53. 11. Zizek 1999e, 20; Zizek 2000c, 89-90. 12. Zizek 2007a. 13. Hallward 2005, 781-82.

Appendix B 1. Hallward 2008, 100. 2. Badiou 1989, 90, 88. 3. Hallward 2008, 98-99. 4. Robespierre 2007, 129-30. 5. Hegel 1981, 263. 6. Beckett 1992, 101.

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7. Lacan 2001a, 14. 8. Lacan 2001a, 16. 9. Hallward 2008, 117-18. 10. Hallward 2008, 118. 11.Zupancic 2004, 197-98. 12. Zupancic 2004, 200. 13. Jung 1959, 21. 14. Jung 1959, 361. 15. Stacey2006,81. 16. Jung 1970, 764. 17. Calvino 1993. 18. Meillassoux 2008a, 127. 19. Zupancic 2004, 196-97. 20. Zupancic 2004, 200. 21. For an outstanding description of this "regression," see Peter Klepec, "On Deleuze's Conception of Quasi-Cause," Filozofski Vestnik 29, no. 1 (2008): 25-40 (in Slovene). 22. Marx 1976, 255. 23. Marx 1976, 255-56. 24. DeLanda 2002, 75. 25. I dealt in detail with this topic in my Organs Without Bodies (New York: Routledge, 2004). 26. Badiou 2004e, 43. 27. Which is why one should ask the key question: is there a Being without Event, simply external to it, or is every order of Being the disavowal-obliteration of a founding Event, a "perverse" je sais bien, mais quand même . . . , a réductionréinscription of the Event into the causal order of Being? 28. Heidegger 1990, 44. 29. Heidegger 1995, 271. 30. Caputo 2001, 55. 31. Caputo and Vattimo 2007, 133. 32. Meillassoux 2008a, 44-45. 33. Meillassoux 2008a, 49. 34. Meillassoux 2008a, 3. 35. Kant 1965, 22 (B xvi-xvii). 36. For a good account of the false translations of this key passage, see Ge­ rard Guest, La tournure de Vévénement (Berlin: Duncker und Humboldt, 1994). 37. Meillassoux 2008a, 56. 38. Meillassoux 2008a, 52. 39. Meillassoux 2008a, 53. 40. Meillassoux 2008a, 63. 41. Meillassoux 2008a, 58. 42. Meillassoux 2008a, 114. 43. Meillassoux 2008a, 58. 44. Meillassoux 2008a, 58. 45. Meillassoux 2008a, 66.

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46. Meillassoux 2008a, 66. 47. Meillassoux 2008a, 66. 48. Meillassoux 2008a, 76. 49. Meillassoux 2008a, 80. 50. Chesterton 1986, 45-46. 51.Santner2001.

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Index

Not all occurrences of references to the following figures, due to the frequency with which they're referenced, are indexed Alain Badiou, Signund Freud, G W F Hegel, Jacques Lacan, Mao Tse-Tung, Karl Marx, and Slavoj Zizek. The same holds here for mentions of such frequently used terms as appearance{s), capitalism/late-capitalism, dialectics/dialectical, event/éventai, ideology/ideological, revolution/revolutionary, situation(s), truth(s), unconscious, and world/worldly. Adorno, Theodor W., 181, 202, 209, 222 affect, xxxii, 38, 60, 74-75 Allen, Woody, 195 Al-Qaeda, 43-46 Althusser, Louis, 55, 63, 136 interpellation, 71, 76, 79, 157 anti-Semitism, 181, 193-94, 197 Aristotle, xxii authoritarian personality, 181 Badiou, Alain: affect, xxxi, 60, 62, 66-78 affects of truth, 69-70, 72-75, 77 algebra vs. topology, 120 anti-philosophy, 174, 188-89, 192, 198-99, 203, 205 anxiety, 69-70, 77-78 atonality, 63, 72-75, 78, 80, 176 axiom, 31 becoming, 8 being qua being {l'être en tant qu'être), 10, 14, 24-25, 27, 76, 135-37,140 being there {être-là), 24, 28 being vs existence, 26-28 being vs non-being, 25-26, 137-38, 140 body, 34, 41, 64-68, 71-72, 150, 156 category theory, 24 communist invariants, 156 conditions of philosophy/generic pro­ cedures, xxi, 10, 38, 69, 75, 129, 156 confidence, 37-38, 57, 60-61, 67, 80 consequence, 33, 72 count of the count, 62, 149

counting-for-one ( compter-pour-un), 138, 149, 175, 201, 205 courage, 38, 40, 60-62, 67, 69-70, 73, 75, 77-78, 80 death/finitude/mortality, 68, 78, 154, 156-57, 177 deed/occurrence {fait), 8-9, 27 democratic materialism, 75, 79, 192 destruction, 21, 30, 34, 140, 155, 163 directive, 31 discipline, 34-35, 68 disinterested interests, 68 encyclopedia, 58-60, 62, 70, 130 enquiry/inquiry, 18-19, 31, 51, 61, 77 ethics of truths, 61 éventai site, 8, 24-30, 35, 48, 62-63, 112, 130-33, 138, 161-63, 165, 176 excrescent multiples/multiplicities/ terms, 61-62 faith/fidelity, 15-16, 18, 28, 30, 33, 35, 48, 58, 60-61, 68-69, 73, 76-78, 80, 148, 175-76 forcing {forçage), 15-16, 18, 20-21, 3233, 51, 57-62, 66-67, 70, 72-74, 77, 80,132-34 genenc, 35, 38, 41 grace, 18-19, 74, 131, 166, 213 heroism, 60, 73, 77-78 history, xxx, 9-14, 17-18, 20-21, 25, 30, 34, 48, 64, 111-12, 133, 139, 141, 150, 177, 187 idea, 52, 177-78, 184 idéalinguistene, 120-23 idealism, 119-23, 131,136-37, 139, 212 269

270

illegality, 27, 76, 149 immortality, 68, 78, 156-57, 177 inconsistency/inconsistent multiplicity, 136, 174-76, 185-86, 189 individual/person vs. subject, 45, 6668, 73-74, 77-79, 131, 154-57, 160 inexistent/mvisible, 9, 25, 27-28, 62, 65, 184-85 intervention, 33-34, 58 materialist dialectic, 75, 79, 192 mathematics, 10, 14, 24, 34-35, 13637, 186 metapolitics, xx-xxii, 9, 20, 38, 43, 57 metastructure, 25, 39, 62, 201 modification, 8-10, 24, 27, 29, 32 name/naming, 27, 33-34, 59-62, 67, 70-71, 73, 154, 193 nature, 25 negation, 21, 155 non-being/nothingness, 15, 25-26 non-expressive politics, 139 normal multiples/multiplicities/terms, 25,62 obscure disaster, 187 obscure subject, 44, 48 onto-logical, 63, 71, 131 organ, 66, 72 passion of the real, 21, 30, 34, 140, 163, 201 phenomenology/phenomenologic(al),24, 27, 38 point, 62-64, 66, 71-75, 77, 80 politics-without-the-party-state, xxix, 65,187 principles of interest, 68 reactive subject, 48 reflexive multiple/multiplicity, 27-28 religion, 17-18,114,129 resurrection, 47-48, 51-52 separation/subtraction, xxx-xxxi, 5, 7, 11, 13-19, 21-23, 30-31, 34, 71, 7 5 76, 78, 140-41, 155, 163-64, 167-71, 187-88 set theory, 24-25, 27, 38, 76, 135-36 singular multiples/multiplicities/ terms, 25-26, 29, 62, 71 singularity, 8-9, 11, 26, 28, 72 site, 8, 12, 27-31, 35, 46, 48, 53, 112, 171 situation and world, 51-54

state/state-of-the-situation, xxix, 9, 1 3 16, 20, 22-23, 25-43, 46, 51-54, 58, 60-62, 70-71, 73-74, 76-77, 80, 114, 117, 129, 131-34, 138, 149, 157, 161, 163, 165, 167, 172, 187 strong singularity, 9, 24, 27 subject-of-the-event, 10, 15-16, 19, 21, 28, 30, 32-35, 38, 45, 48, 52, 57-62, 64, 67-68, 72-74, 76-77, 114, 13132, 134, 148, 150, 154, 156-58, 160, 164 subjective principles, 68 time/temporality, xxxi, 10-16, 18, 20-22, 28, 30, 32-35, 48, 58-59, 64, 111,150 trace, 15, 33, 35, 59-61, 67, 70-71, 73, 154 transcendental/transcendental regime, 9-10, 15, 24-28, 31, 36, 38, 48, 51, 60, 63, 65, 71-73, 77, 138, 157, 17477, 186, 189 universal/universality, 22 unnameable, 176 void, 26, 29, 62, 71 weak singularity, 8-9, 24, 27 Badiou's textsBeing and Event, xviii, xxx, 6,8, 11, 14-16, 21, 23-25, 27, 33-35, 38-39, 47-48,51,58-62,71,76,112 "Beyond Formalisation," 8, 24, 31 Briefings on Existence, 51 "Can Change Be Thought?," 6, 11, 136 Circonstances 2, 13-14, 34 Circonstances 3, 21-22 Le concept de modèle, 121 "The Contemporary Figure of the Sol­ dier in Politics and Poetry," 78 De l'idéologie, 6, 29 Deleuze, 131 "Destruction, Negation, Subtraction," 21 Ethics, 8, 23, 32, 60-61, 67-68, 72, 74 Handbook of Inaesthetics, 20, 47, 61, 7071, 73, 163 Logiques des mondes, xxviii, 8-11, 1516, 18, 21, 24-27, 33, 38, 44, 47-48, 51-52, 60, 62-66, 68-73, 75, 77, 156, 174, 177 Metapolitics, 7, 11, 39-41

INDEX

Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégélienne, 6 "Of an Obscure Disaster," 7 Peut-on penser la politique^ xviii, 5, 13, 33,58,115, 150 "Philosophy as Creative Repetition," 49 "Politics and Philosophy," 32 Saint Paul, 112, 129, 131, 154, 182 Le siècle, 13-14, 21, 34, 140, 154, 163 " Six propriétés de la vérité" 59 Théorie de la contradiction, 6, 55 Théorie du sujet, xxx, 10, 14, 21, 37, 57, 60-61, 68, 77-78, 119, 121,139 "The Truth Procedure in Politics," 78 Balibar, Etienne, xxi, 118 Barthes, Roland, 80 Baudrillard, Jean, 188 Beckett, Samuel, 55, 61, 180 Benedict XVI, Pope, 221 Benjamin, Walter, xiii-xx, 46, 130-31, 133, 170 Bensaid, Daniel, 17-20, 129 Bergson, Henri, 9 Berkeley, George, 121, 214 Bin Laden, Osama, 44-45, 74 bio-politics/bio-power, 45, 79 Blair, Tony, xxix Boothby, Richard, 123 Bosteels, Bruno, xxi, xxix, 14-20, 119, 129, 131-32, 136,139 Brandom, Robert, 204 Brecht, Bertolt, 180, 194, 223-24 Burke, James, 170 Bush, George W., 45, 74, 102, 169 Butler, Judith, 99-100 Calvino, Italo, 198-99 Cantor, Georg, 34, 199 Chesterton, G K., 227-28 Chinese Revolution, 179 Christ/Christianity, 30, 97-99, 135, 145, 216, 221, 225 Churchill, Winston, 96 Clinton, William J., xxix Collège de France, 80 Communism, xv, xix, xxiii, xxvii, 35, 38, 55-57, 96, 102-3,105-7, 112-15, 117,200,210 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 218-20 corpo-Real, 79

Critchley, Simon, 33, 61 Cultural Revolution, xiii, 55, 106, 17778, 180, 187 Darwin, Charles, 204 David-Ménard, Monique, 71 defeatism, xvii, xx, 54-55, 57, 169, 171, 173 Deleuze, Gilles, xvi, 9, 43, 49, 51-52, 75, 163 Anti-Oedipus, 205-6 Cinema II The Time-Image, 208 Difference and Repetition, 49 disjunctive synthesis, 43-45 Logic of Sense, 205, 208 pseudo/quasi-cause, 206-10 democracy, xxx, 45, 92, 95-96, 114-16, 167, 181 Derrida, Jacques, xvi, xxii, 42-43, 128, 181,200,215 autoimmunity, 42-43, 46, 53 Descartes, René, 102, 182, 202, 220-21 Dews, Peter, 100 dialectical materialism, 55, 98, 119, 121 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 195 Duns Scotus, John, 221 Dupuy, Jean-Pierre, 56-57, 113 Durkheim, Emile, 42, 88, 202, 222 Eagleton, Terry, 23-24, 29, 31-32 economism, xiv, xvi, xix-xx, xxiii, 129 Einstein, Albert, 213, 223 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 79 Engels, Frederick, 141 fantasy, 91, 95, 99-100, 105-7, 112, 117, 128, 146,159-60, 185, 198, 205, 229 fascism, 45, 115, 162, 181 Feltham, Oliver, 76 fetishism, 92-98, 101-2, 109-10, 118, 125,168 Feuerbach, Ludwig Andreas, 210 FichteJ. G,215 Fink, Bruce, 49 Foucault, Michel, xvi, 184-85 Frankfurt School, 90, 98, 103, 106, 210 French Revolution, 30, 44, 177, 179 Freud, Sigmund: binding (Bindung), 199 castration, 93, 95, 104, 182, 191

272

compromise formation, 94-95 cultural neuroses, 93 cultural superego, 102-3 death drive (Todestrieb), 157, 204, 229 deferred action (Nachtràglichkeit), 117 disavowal ( Verleugnung), 93, 109, 118, 148 drive (Tneb), 90, 97, 109-10, 184, 229-30 id, 103, 109, 220 ideational representation (Vorstellung), 119 Innenweltvs. Umwelt, 86 Oedipus complex, 95 primary vs. secondary processes, 124, 162 primordial repression, 194 repression ( Verdràngung), 77, 93-94, 146, 176-77, 185, 190, 195, 197 screen memory (Deck-Erinnerung), 205 secondary gain, 159 Vorstellungsreprasentanz, 194 working-through (Durcharbeitung), 155 Freud's texts: Civilization and Its Discontents, 102 "Fetishism," 93 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, 50 Interpretation ofDreams, The, 119 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 119, 194 Psychopathology ofEveryday Life, The, 119 Freudo-Marxism, 90 Furet, François, 30 Future anterior/retroaction, xv, xviixviii, 23, 31, 33-34, 58, 60, 76, 110, 114, 117, 130, 148, 150, 160, 168-69, 205,211,227 Galileo Galilei, 218-19 German idealism, xxiii, 102, 127, 158, 207, 215 Gerson, Michael, 169 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 145 Gould, Stephen J., xxx Gramsci, Antonio, xvi Habermas,Jurgen, 181, 204 Haitian Revolution, 179

Hallward, Peter, xxx, 11, 14-20, 23, 3 1 32, 60, 129, 132, 172, 174-75, 184, 186 specified vs. specific, 12, 22-23, 29, 31 Hegel, G.W F. absolute, 205, 225 abstraction, 201-2 Antigone, 197 beautiful soul, 177 coincidence/convergence of opposites, 120, 179, 192,195, 197, 203, 217,227 concrete universality, 201, 207, 210 contradiction, 217-18, 228 cunning of reason, 97, 178 end of history, xx, 55-56, 81, 101, 125, 187 Geist/ Weltgeist, xviii-xix, 111 necessity and contingency, xviii, 174, 217, 221, 225-27 Owl of Minerva, xxi recognition/reconciliation, 196-97 speculation/speculative, 210, 213, 221, 225 spurious vs. true infinity, 184, 207, 226 sublation (Aufliebung), xx, 101, 227-28 Hegel's texts: Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 179 Logic, 226-27 Philosophy of Right, 97 Heidegger, Martin, xxii, 99, 153, 214, 219,221 being-towards-death, 153, 155 Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, The, 214 Heraclitus, 49 historical materialism, xv, xviii, xx, xxiii, 55-56, 107, 121, 123 Hitchcock, Alfred, 207 Hitler, Adolph, xiv Horkheimer, Max, 181 House of Commons, 96 Hume, David, 212 Husserl, Edmund, 219 International Psychoanalytic Association, 149, 153 Israeli Defense Forces, xvi

273 INDEX

Jakobson, Roman, 123 Jameson, Frederic, xvi, xxiii, 170 vanishing mediator, 157, 170, 204 Jung, Carl Gustav, 195-97 Kacem, Mehdi Belhaj, 75-77, 79 Laffect, 75-76 Événement et répétition, 75-77 Kafka, Franz, 195 Kant, Immanuel, xxiii, 102, 171, 173, 187, 203-4, 210, 212, 225 antinomy, 203, 222 critique, 216, 225 Critique of Pure Reason, 218 ethics/morality, 180-81, 215 finitude, 156, 213-14, 218, 220-22, 224, 229 noumena(l)/in-itself, 108, 141, 203, 214, 216, 218, 220-26, 229 reason, 215-16, 224 regulative idea(l), 182, 184 transcendental/transcendental ideal­ ism, 186, 189-90, 210, 213-14, 21820, 222-24, 229 transcendental apperception, 220 transcendental illusion, 89 "What Is Enlightenment?," 92 Kay, Sarah, 109 Kierkegaard, S0ren, 188, 204 Klein, Melanie, 155 Lacan, Jacques act (vs. action), xix, xxix, xxxi, 37, 109-14, 116-17, 142-51, 153-59, 165-68, 170-72 acting out, 145-48 Antigone, 158 après-coup, 34, 117, 148, 168 barred Other, 53, 89, 192 barred/split subject ($), 88-89, 190, 211,220,227 between-two-deaths (entre-deux-morts), 78 big Other/symbolic order, xxix, 37, 41-43, 46, 49, 53-54, 57, 66, 72-73, 80, 85-86, 88-92, 97, 99, 104, 10910, 113, 119, 121-22, 124, 128, 13536, 139-41, 145-46, 148-49, 153-56, 159-60, 172, 182, 191-92, 194, 211

"The big Other does not exist" ("Le grand Autre n'existe pas"), 41, 54, 88, 135,139 body, 66, 72 Chevuoi?, 128 counter-sense (contresens), 149 death/mortality, 152-56 desire, 37-38, 96-101, 106, 118, 12122, 128, 147,180-81, 184, 209, 220, 229-30 desire of the Other, 86, 88, 90 discourse of the analyst, 151, 159 discourse of the master, 205 discourse of the university, 193 École française de psychanalyse, 153 École freudienne de Paris, 149, 153 ego (moi), 50, 149, 152-53, 155, 159 end of analysis/termination, 151-56, 159-60 enjoying substance (substancejouissante), 87 ethics of the Real, 107 extimacy (extimité), 86, 123, 198 four discourses, 103, 151 full speech, 144 gesture (geste), 147 Imaginary, 40, 50, 109, 145, 147, 149, 207 "In you more than you," 86 jouissance, 15-111 87, 99-100, 104, 107, 121-22, 146, 160,182 jouissance of the Other, 99 jouis-sens, 122, 182 Klein bottle, 86 knowledge (savoir) vs. truth (vérité), xxix, 62, 64 letter, 182 linguisterie, 120 littoral, 182 lost cause, 34, 120 lying in the guise of truth, 124-25, 165, 168, 170,172 master signifier (Sj), 124, 190-92, 194-95, 199,211 materialism, 122-24 "Me, the truth, I speak" ("Moi, la vérité, je parlé'), 146 Môbius stnp, 190 non/not-all, 119, 184, 199, 205, 213

274

object a {objetpetit a), 151, 159-60, 182,189,209,211,229 Oedipus, 151 phallus, 93, 95, 182, 191,209 quilting point {point de capiton), 182, 193 Real, 34, 49, 77, 86, 99, 108-9, 119-22, 141, 145-49, 175, 177-78, 182, 187, 203, 205, 207, 217 return to Freud, 119, 220 sexuation/sexual difference, 184, 195 sinthome, 104, 121, 182 speaking being {parlêtre), 38, 144, 151 subject of knowledge {sujet de la connaissance), 148-49 subject of the signifier, 33, 88, 119, 191,211-12 subject of the unconscious, 220 subject supposed to know {sujet supposé savoir), 128, 154-55, 159, 211-12 subjective destitution, 94, 107 surplus jouissance, 99-100, 182, 201 Symbolic, 40, 49-50, 77, 86, 109-10, 119-23, 145, 147, 149, 182, 190, 203,205 "There is no Other of the Other," 149 "There is no sexual relationship" {"II n'y a pas de rapport sexuel"), 194 "There is the One" {"Ya d'l'Un"), 51, 192 Thing {dasDing), 86, 96, 119, 121-22, 212, 229-30 topology, 86 torus, 89, 190 transcendentalism, 98-100, 109, 230 transference, 128, 145-46, 151-54, 159-60,211 traversing the fantasy, 107, 154 tuchévs. automaton, 120, 149 unary trait ( le trait unaire), 50 Lacan 's texts: "Acte de fondation," 153 "Discours à l'École freudienne de Paris," 149 "The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis," 147 "Kant with Sade," 180

"La logique du fantasme Compte rendu du Séminaire 1966-196 7, " 149 " Lituraterre" 182 "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the /Function as Revealed in Psychoana­ lytic Experience," 151, 154 "Remarks on Daniel Lagache's Presen­ tation. 'Psychoanalysis and Personal­ ity Structure,'" 148 "Response to Jean Hyppolite's Com­ mentary on Freud's 'Verneinung,'" 144 "Variations on the Standard Treat­ ment," 152 Seminar I, 144-46 Seminar II, 145-46 Seminar III, 145 Seminar TV, 145 Seminar V, 147 Seminar VII, 37, 78, 119, 122, 144-45, 152 Seminar VIII, 50, 145 Seminar IX, 50 Seminar X, 146-47 Seminar XI, 34, 120, 145-46 Seminar XIV, 34, 147-48 Seminar XV, 102, 110, 145, 147-51 Seminar XVI, 9%, 102,151 Seminar XVII, 149, 151 Seminar XIX, 50, 96 Seminar XX, 120 Seminar XXII, 145 Seminar XXIII, 102,104 Seminar XXV, 151 Laclau, Ernesto, xxix, 5 Laplanche J e a n , 79, 86, 120 Lascaux, 177 Lazarus, Sylvain, 6-7, 13, 55, 129 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 216 Lenin, V. I , ix, xvii-xx, xxiii-xxiv, xxx, 57, 98-99, 101, 113-16, 128-30, 133-34, 165, 187 Materialism and Empino-Cnticism, 214 Levinas, Emmanuel, 182, 215 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 41-42, 88 libidinal economy, 37, 85, 87, 90, 97-101, 104, 106-7, 109, 119, 121 Lukâcs, Georg, xxiii-xxiv, 210, 215 Lynch, David, 41

275

Mannoni, Octave, 92 Mao Tse-Tung contradiction, 125 probable defeat, 55-57, 113 strategy vs. tactics, 54-55 Mao's texts: "The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains," 55 "On Contradiction," 55 "On the Correct Handling of Contra­ dictions Among the People," 55-56 "Speech at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee," 57 "Speech to the Albanian Military Dele­ gation," 57 Marchart, Oliver, 17-20, 129 Marcuse, Herbert, xix, 98 Marx, Karl: abolition of the state, 188 alienation, 111,113, 123, 210 capital, 37, 97, 159, 193, 200, 206-7, 210-11 class conflict/struggle, xv, xviii, xx, 55, 64, 191 commodity fetishism, 92-94, 96-98, 101-2,118,191 dead vs living labor, 210 general formula for capital, 97, 206 infrastructure vs. superstructure, xvi, xxiii money, 94, 96-99, 101, 118, 206-7 surplus-value, 97, 201, 207 Thesis Eleven on Feuerbach, 115, 124, 141 use-value, 98 Marx's texts: Capital, 96, 101, 206-7, 210 Civil War in France, The, 30 Communist Manifesto, The, xiv "Contribution to the Critique of He­ gel's Philosophy of Right" 111 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), 210 Grundnsse, 96, 210 Poverty of Philosophy, The, xiv Marxism-Leninism, xv, xix-xx, 55-57, 125, 134, 142, 167 Matrix, The, 118 May '68, xiii, xvii-xviii, 90, 103, 115

McDowell, John, 204 Meillassoux, Quentin, 136, 174, 199, 213-14, 219, 229 absolute, 216, 218, 221-25 ancestrality, 214-15 contingency and necessity, 136, 21618,221-26 contradiction, 217 correlationism, 214-15, 220-21 facticity, 220-22, 224 metaphysics, 225 possibility and actuality, 224 post-secular thought, 215-16 primary vs. secondary properties, 218 speculation/speculative, 224-25 metadialectics, xxii military-industrial complex, 79-80 Miller, Jacques-Alain, 121 minimal/minuscule difference, 21, 31, 42, 53, 162,164-65, 167-71, 195 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, xiv Mouffe, Chantai, xxix Nazism, 44, 162, 193, 197 neurosis, 107, 196 New Philosophers {nouveauxphilosophes), xvii Newton, Isaac, 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xxiii, 45, 188, 215 nihilism, 43-45, 116 nomenklatura, 106 October Revolution, 132, 177, 179, 213 One-All, 11-12, 44, 50, 135-36, 150 L'Organisation Politique, xxii, 31 parallax, xxx, 13, 19, 163-64, 198 Paris Commune, xiii Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 80 People's Liberation Army, 39 perversion, 94, 101 Picasso, Pablo, 177 Plato, xxiii, 34,47-48,69,80,116,177,184 Parmenides, 205 political economy, xxiii, 85, 87, 90, 97, 101,106,118,133,188,191,202 postmodernism, xvi, xxiii, 12, 92-93, 102, 114,215-16 post-structuralism, xvi, 189

276

pre-act/event(al), xxxi, 18-22, 29-32, 35, 42, 53, 57-58, 62, 68, 71-75, 77-80, 131-34,136-37, 163-65, 167, 169, 171-72 psychosis, 94 Ptolemy, 218-19 quietism, xviii, xx, xxxii, 35, 57, 100, 132-33, 165-66, 168-72 Rabinovitchjoke, 211, 222, 225 Racine, Jean, 193 radical democracy, xxix, 5, 110 Rancière, Jacques, xiii, xxi part of no-part, 176, 184-85 Realpolitik, xvii, 17 repetition, xxx, 7, 46, 48-53, 76, 145-46, 184, 204 Riefenstahl, Leni, xiv Rimbaud, Arthur, 193 Robespierre, Maximilien, 178 Russo, Alessandro, 55-57, 113 Sade, Marquis de, 180-81 Saint Paul, 183 Santner, Eric, 129, 229 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 11, 62-63 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 123-24 Schelling, F. W. J., 12, 14, 139, 204, 21415,221 Schoenberg, Arnold, 197, 204 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 188, 203-4 Searle, John, 209 Second International, xiv, 129 September 11, 2001 (9/11), 42-46 Silesius, Angelus, 220 Sloterdijk, Peter, 91 Socialism, 56, 127, 159, 187, 194 Socrates, xxiv, 47 Sophocles, 158 Spielberg, Steven, 193-94 Spinoza, Baruch, 12 Stalin, Joseph, xiv, xxviii, 106-7, 115, 177, 198 diamat, xiv-xv Strathausen, Carsten, 16 structuralism, 41, 63, 87, 120-23 subjecufication, 60, 68, 71-72, 77, 86, 99, 110, 148, 150-51, 153, 156-58, 211-12

sublimation, 96, 101 suture, 189-90, 207, 210 symptom/symptomal, 93-95, 104, 109, 146-47, 175-77, 180-81, 184-86, 196-97,211 tailism, xviii, xx, 57, 132-33, 166, 168 Tarby, Fabien, 60 Taylor, Astra, 127, 159 terror(ism), 44-46, 69-70, 77, 95, 179 Third Way, xxix, 110 Tiananmen Square, 40 Tolstoy, Leo, 195 Toscano, Alberto, 16, 18, 132, 176 totalitarianism, 5, 115-16, 198 transcendental materialism, 79 utopia/utopianism, xv, xviii-xx, 21, 54, 57, 103, 108, 125, 178, 180, 187 Vainqueur, Bernard, 130 vanishing act/event, 33-34, 150, 154, 158-60, 169-70 vs. spectacular act, 158, 160, 170-71 Wagner, Richard, 181 war on terror, 43 will, xxxii, 38, 172-73, 203-4, 229 ZizekL The Movie, 127, 159, 172 Zizek, Slavoj: abyss of freedom, 113 act, xviii-xx, xxviii-xxxi, 109, 111-14, 116-17, 124-25, 142-45, 148-50, 155, 158-59, 166-72 aggressive passivity and passive aggres­ sion, 141-43, 158, 165, 169, 172 Christianity/religion, 97-99, 111, 114, 129, 135 cynicism/cynical distance, 91-95, 97, 100,109,118,124,126,162,169 discipline, 132, 167 impossibility, 108-9, 166-67, 171 inherent transgression, 162 interpassivity, 141 materialism, 115, 117, 120-22, 124, 134-37, 139, 174 ontology, 41, 128, 135, 137-41 passage à l'acte, 113-14, 169 Real, 120, 141

277

repeating Lenin, 115-16 subject supposed to believe, 92, 95, 110 subject vs. subjectification, 157-58 theory and practice, 114, 118, 124-25, 141-43, 158, 165 Zizek's texts: Art of the Ridiculous Sublime, The, 41 "Badiou," 74, 150, 161, 166 On Belief, 105, 131 Fragile Absolute, The, 105 How to Read Lacan, 41, 142 Iraq, 100, 142

"Love Without Mercy," 109 Mapping Ideology, 161 Organs Without Bodies, 136 ParalUix View, The, 118, 129, 134, 13637, 139, 143 "A Plea for 'Passive Aggressivity,'" 141 Puppet and the Dwarf, The, 132 Repeating Lenin, 105-6 Revolution at the Gates, 129-30, 138-39 Sublime Object of Ideology, The, 5, 109 Tarrying with the Negative, xxviii Ticklish Subject, The, 111, 129 Zupancic, Alenka, 188

About the Author

Adrian Johnston is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque and an assistant teaching analyst at the Emory Psychoanalytic Institute in Adanta. He is the author, most recendy, oîZizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (2008), also from Northwestern University Press.