501.hoe - Heidt - Solt - Levkovitz - Neg.BadIou Index

Seven Week Seniors BADIOU
Michigan 2006 1
BADIOU INDEX
EXPLANATION:
badiou index ....................................................................................................................................................................
1
explanation .......................................................................................................................................................................
2
SHELLS:
identity politics lnc module ............................................................................................................................................
4
ethics bad I nc Module .............................................6
......................................................................................................
generic I nc (READ WITH EITHER MODULE) .........................................................................................................9
LINKS:
......................................................................................................................................................................11
link: ethics
......................................................................................................................................................................12
link: rights
link: human rights .........................................................................................................................................................14
link: humanitarian intervention ...................................................................................................................................16
link: obligation to the other/levinas ............................................................................................................................. 17
link: identity politics ..................................................................................................................................................... 22
link: citizenship ............................................................................................................................................................. 26
link: deconstruction ...................................................................................................................................................... 27
link: terrorism ...............................................................................................................................................................28
IMPACT:
impact: terrorism ..........................................................................................................................................................29
impact: key to meaningful existence ............................................................................................................................ 30
impact: human rights kills millions/at: no spec alt ..................................................................................................... 31
impact: perpetual war ...................................................................................................................................................32
ALTERNATIVE:
alternative solves ........................................................................................................................................................... 33
alternative solves/ at: perm ...........................................................................................................................................34
alterntative solves oppression .......................................................................................................................................35
at: alternative impractical ............................................................................................................................................ 36
at: no specific alternative ..............................................................................................................................................37
at: permutation ..............................................................................................................................................................38
at: democracy better than alternative ....................................................................................................................... 41
AT: ANSWERS
at: hegemony outweighs
. ....................................................................................................... ....................................... 42
"
..................................................................................................................................................................... 43
at: n i h ~ l ~ s m
at: badiou allows for the holocaust .............................................................................................................................. 45
at: suffering now. need rights .................................................................................................................................. 48
at: rights are sometimes good (women. slaves etc) ............................................................................................... 4 9
at: must respond to evil .................................................................................................................................................50
at: generic aff zizek cards .............................................................................................................................................51
at: generic aff porno bad cards ..................................................................................................................................... 52
at: habermas ............................................................................................................................................................ 53
at: pragmatism .............................................................................................................................................................. 54
at: our speech act is fidelity to an event ....................................................................................................................... 55
at: our aff is the truth event ................................................................................................................................ .........56
at: badiou's universals are authoritarian ....................................................................................... ........................... 58
"
at: badiou is intolerant of difference ............................................................................................................................ 61
at: truth event can be evil ............................................................................................................................................. 62
at: impossible to determine what is universal .............................................................................................................63
at: terrorism outweighs ................................................................................................................................................. 64
AFFIRMATIVE
aff: at: badiou's ethics ................................................................................................................................................... 65
aff: badiou's politics fail ............................................................................................................................................... 66
a m permutation ............................................................................................................................................................69
aff: alternative unworkable and communist ...............................................................................................................70
Elliot. Lasky. Logan. Will

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
EXPLANATION
What are the modules?
READ THE CORRECT MODULE (EXPLANATION BELOW) THEN THE GENERIC INC.
What can I run this against?
1) Any aff that claims to uphold a universal ethic-Levinas, must intervene in genocide, any other
deontological obligation.
2) Any aff that promotes identity politics (like queer movements1DADT or feminism/women in
combat if either claims that patriarchy or homophobia is the root cause of all violence etc). **The
identity politics bad cards could also be simple case turns.
Why are there not that many impacts in the file?
All of the link cards are also basically impactslpotentially at: aff answers-read the whole file-the impacts
are decent.
Where else can I get affirmative answers?
The aff K toolbox file has more.
What blocks do I need to write?
Aside from generic blocks you need for all Ks, you also need to defend the fact that the neg is obviously
not engaging in a true political act either and Badiou is very anti-capitalist so you need to get that covered
as well.
What do I need to know about Badiou to run this argument?
Badiou is frustrated with both postmodern relativism/deconstructiodthedenial of truth (which he sees as

too weak to transform politics-he insultingly calls them sophists) and fundamentalists who believe in
absolute truth (like Bush, the Nazis, or other dogmatists which he sees as very dangerous). His solution is
to say that individuals (subjects) must strive for what is universal (true for all-very egalitarian) by
immersing themselves in political action (fidelity to an event). This immersion requires political action
(not armchair philosophy) and involves risk to the subject as their worldview may be transformed by the
event. (I would characterize the aff harms as the event requiring intervention). The result would be an
infinite multitude of subjects grasping for universals-so, there is no absolute truth but we are at least
obliged to search for universalism/egalitarianism in our own quests. This alternative may sound familiar
because it is the basis of what Zizek calls ?he Act."
This political strategy therefore links to either opposing pole in philosophy:

a) identity politics-which he sees as a weak form of relativism that looks for what is true of the
subset of humanity (women, gays, etc) rather than what is true for all, and
b) universal ethics-such as must always stand for the other-a dangerous universal that imposes
itself b'efore the event.
By maintaining this tension between the major poles of modem philosophy, this K is pretty strategic.
Generic aff indicts of postmodernism do not apply (for instance, he sees Rorty as too liberal) so the K
requires specialized work on the part of the aff.
If I were interested in running this argument very often, I would do a bit of background reading first-
reading Badiou's book Ethics for myself (no need to re-cut it--done very well here-but it would make
sure that you knew what was up).
Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
IDENTITY POLITICS INC MODULE
Real justice can never be formed on the basis of singular identity claims-for instance, Nazism was the
ultimate in identity politics. To resist this fragmentary search for singular experiences of oppression, we
should search for the universal truth ofthe situation.
Badiou '03 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Grdduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, p.1 1- 12).
1Un the one hand, every truth procedure breaks with the axiomatic
principle that governs the situation and organizes its repetitive series. A
truth ~rocedureinterru~tsrepetition and can therefore not be supported
I I L L _I
by the abstract permanence proper to a unity of the count. A truth is al-

ways, according to the dominant law of the count, subtracted from th'e
count.'Lonsequentiy, no ruth can be sustained through capital's homo-
geneous expansion.
, the other hand, neither can a truth procedure take root in
~ u ton
the element of identity. For if it is true that every truth erupts as singular,
its singularity is immediately universalizable. Universalizable singularity
necessarily breaks with identitarian singularity.
That there are intertwined histories, different cultures and, more
generally, differences already abundant in one and the "same" individual,
that the world is multicolored, that one must let people live, eat, dress,
imagine, love in whichever way they please, is not the issue, whatever cer-
tain disingenuous simpletons may want us to think. Such liberal truisms
are cheap, and one would only like to see those who proclaim them not
react so violently whenever confronted with the slightest serious attempt
to dissent from their own puny liberal difference. Contemporary cos-
mopolitanism is a beneficent reality. We simply ask that its partisans not
get themselves worked up at the sight of a young veiled woman, lest w;
begin to fear that what they redly desire, far from a real web of shifting
differences, is the uniform dictatorship of what they take to be "moder-
n1tf7
P
It is a question of knowing what identitarian and cornmunitarian
categoYies have to do with truth procedures, with political procedures for
example. We reply: these categories must be abmtedfrom the
mlngwhlch no truth has the sli~htestb c e of establishing its persist-
.
ence and accruing its immanent infinity.
i
We know, moreover, that the
most consequential instances of identitarian politics, such as Nazism, are

bellicose and criminal. The idea that one can wield such categories inno-
Zentiy, even in the form of French 'kpublican" identity, is inconsisten;.
Onewill, of necessity end up oscillating between the abstract universal of
,
cap1tal and Iocallzed persecutions. ,

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
IDENTITY POLITICS 1 NC MODULE
Identity politics, in their denial of universalism and embrace of relativist calls for justice, reduce all politics
and culture to banal equivalencies. Politics in this frame devolves into authoritarian management of
identity.
Badiou '03 (Alain. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, p. 12-1 3)
- .
Cko;, far from returning toward an appropriation of this typology,
identitarian or minoritarian logic merely proposes a variant on its nomi-
nal ocdusron by capital. It inveighs against every generic concept of sit,
putting" the concept of culture in its place, conceived as culture of the
group, as the sublective or representatwe glue tor the group's exlstence,3
culture that addresses only itself and remains ootentiallv nonuniversdiz-
abIe. Moreover, it does not hesitate to posit that this culture's constitutive
elements are only fully comprehensible on the condition that one belong .
to the subset in question. Whence catastrophic pronouncements of the
sort: only a homosexual can "understand" what a homosexual is, only an
-
Arab can understand what an Arab is, and so forth. If, as we believe, only -
truths (thought) allow mua to be distinguished from the human animal
&at underlies it is no exaggeration to say that such rninoritarian
pronouncements are genuinely barbaric. In the case of science, cultural-
ism promotes the technical particularity of subsets to the equivalent of ,
scientific thought, so that antibiotics, Shamanism, the laying on of
hands, or emollient herbal teas all become of equal worth. In the case of
politics, the consideration of identitarian traits provides the basis for de-
termination, be it the state's or rhe protestor's, and finally ir is a matter of 1
stipulating, through law or brute force, an authoritarian management of
J

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant

political operators. Lastly, in the case of love, there will be the comple-
mentary demands, either for the genetic right to have such and suc5 a
form of specialized sexual behavior recognized as a minoritarian identity;
or tor the return, pure and simple, to archaic, culturally established con- J
ce~tions.such as that of strict conlutzality, the confinement of women,

I J U J
and so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes ap-

parent when homosexual protest concerns the right to be reincluded in
the grand traditionalism of marriage and the family, or to take responsi-
bility for the defrocking of a priest with the Pope's blessing.
L
The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene-

itv of ca~italand identitarian motest) are in a relation of reciprocal main-
tenance and mirroring. Who will maintain the self-evident superiority ot
The competent-cultivated-sexually liberated manager? But who will de-
fend the corrupt-religious-polygamistterrorist? Or eulogize the cultural-
-
marginal-homeopathic-media-friendlytranssexual?Each figure gains its
rotating legitimacy from the other's discredit. Yet at the same time, each
draws on the resources of the other, since the transformation of the most
typical, most recent communitarian identities into advertising selling
points and salable images has for its counrerpart the ever more refined
*
competence that the most insular or most violent groups display when lt
~
comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintain in^ a lar~e-scale

arms commerce.
BreAng with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identi-
tarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particu-
larity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formu-
lated: What are the condtions for a aniversal sin~ularity?
r P - - n - - - i c-" A:- :- - - . - - - : - - I - - I-:-

Michigan 2006
L-1-
ETHICS BAD 1NC MODULE
Universal ethics must be rejected for three reasons:
1) In order to justify intervention, ethics paternalistically holds victims in contempt as unable to save
then~selves.Moreover, appealing to survival reduces the value of life to mere biology, denying
our capacity to strive for truth (or what Badiou calls the lmmortal in each of us). This re-creates
oppression of the "ethical" West over a sub-human mass of victims.
Badiou, 93 (Alain Badiou is a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics, page 10-13).
resistance, unlike that of a horse, lies not in his fragile body

,The heart of the question concerns the presumption oi n but in his stubborn determination to remain what h e is
universal human Subiect. capable of reducing ethical issies - that is to say, precisely something other than a victim,
--
&matters of human rights and humanitarian actions.
We have seen that ethics subordinates the identification
other than a being-fordeath, and thus: something other than
n mortal baing.
ofyhis subject to the universal recognition of the evil that is An immortal: this is what the worst situations that can be
done to him. Ethics thus defines man us a victim. It will be inflicted upon Man show him to be, In so far as he d~stih-
bbjected: 'No! You are torgetting the active subject, the one wishes himself within the varied and rapaciotls flux of life.
that intervenes against
- barbarism!' So let us be precise: man In order to think any aspect of Man, we must begin from
, a
u
is the being who is capable of ~eco~pizing
himself as a ~rictim. this principle. So if 'rights of man' exist, they are sorely ndt
It is thk definition that we must proclaim imacceptablr - n 7
for three reasons in particular: misery. They are the rights of the Immortal, affirmed in
1. In the first place, because the status of victim, of -their own right, or the rights of the Infinite, exercised over
the contingency of suffering and death. The fact that in the
suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, equates man with end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters
his animal mibstructure, it reduces him to the level of a Man's identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms
living organism pure and simple (life being, as Bichat savs, himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of
nothing other than 'the set of functions that resist death') .3 wanting-tebe-an-animal to which circumstances may expose
To he sure, humanity is an animal species. It is mortal and him. And we know that every human being is capable of
predatory. But neither of these attributes can distinguish being this immortal - unpredictably, be it in circumstances
humanity within the world of the living. In his role as great or small, for truths important or secondary. In each
executioner, man is an animal abjection, but we must have case, subjectivation is immortal, and makes Man. Bevond
the courage to add that in his role as victim, he is generally
worth little more. The stories told by survivors of torture4
this there is only a biological species. 2 'w
_ r f t
feathers', whose charms are not obvio~is.)
forcefully underline the point: if the torturers and bureau-
crats of the dungeons and the camps are able to treat their
- . 4 If we do not set out from this point (which can be
summarized, very simply, as the assertion that Man thinks,
Gctims like animals destined for the slaughterhouse, with
- . - - . . - - that Man is a tissue of truths), if we equate Man e
whom they themselves, the well-nourished criminals, have- . - simple reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed
nothing in common, it is because the victims have indeed to a conclusion quite opposite to the one that the principle
become such animals. M'hat had to be done for this to
of life seems to imply. For this 'living being' is in reality
happen has indeed been done. That some nevertheless cTntemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt. jVho cap
remain human beings, and testify to that effect, is a con- -
fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions, interven-
firmed fact. But this is always achieved precisely through
6normous effort, an effort acknowledged by witnesses (in
tions, embarkations of charitable &gzonnaires, the Subject
presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims,
whom it excites a radiant recognition) as an almost incom-
the haggard animal exposed on television screens, On the
prehensible resistance on the part of that which, in them,
side of the benetactors. conscience and the imnerat-ive to
of virtim. This is where we are
&PS not coin rid^ with thp i d m t i t ~
to tind Man, if we are detelmined to think him [la pmspr]:

in what ensures, as Varlam Shalamov puts in his Storips c,f
-
ixtervene.i\nd why does this splitting always assign the
same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see t h a t this
ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind
Lifv in the Cumps,Qhat we are dealing with an animal whc3cr

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? Since the

7
barbarity of the situation is considered only in terms of
'human rights' - whereas in fact we are always dealing with
a political situation, one that calls for a political thought-
practice, one that is peopled by its own authentic actors - it
is perceived, from the heights of our apparent civil peace,
as the uncivilized that demands of the civilized a civilizing
htervention. Every intenrention in the name of a civilizatidn
requires an initial contempt*for the situation as a whole,
including its victims. And this is why the reign of 'ethics'
coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonial-
I
ism and imperialism, with today's sordid self-satisfaction in

the 'West', with the insistent argument according to which
the misery of the Third World is the result of its own
incompetence, its own inanity - in short, of its subhumanip.
1 4

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006 BADIOU
7
2) Ethical obligations create deeply conservative politics. Instead of working towards more radical
alternatives, we follow an ethical rule born of the present order. This attempt to freeze politics is
the real source of Evil.
Switzerland, Ethics, page 1 3- J 4).
( Z T 5 3 h e second place, because if the ethical 'consensus' J
is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that eLJery

effort to unite people around a positive idea of the ~ o o d ,
let alone to identify Man with projects of' this kind, becorner
in fact the real source of evil itseIf; Such is the accusat~on
so often repeated over the last fifteenyears: every revol- !
u l ,
into totalitarian nightmare. every wll to mscrlbe an idea of
justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the
Good creates Evil."
This is sophistry at its most devastating. For if o u r
only agenda is an ethical engagement against an Evil we
recognize a priori, how are we to envisage any transtorma-
Gon of the way things are? From what source will man drak
the strength to be the irnfnortal that he is7 What shall be
the destiny of thought, since we know very well that it must
be affirmative invention or nothing at all? In reality, the
price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism. The ethical
conce~tionof man, besides the fact that its foundation is
1
.
I
either biological (images of victims) or 'Mr'estern' (the self-

satisfaction of the armed benefactor), prohibits every broad,
positive vision of possibili s. What is vaunted here, what
ethics legitimates, is in fact the conservation by the so-called
'nTest' of what it possesses. It is squarely astride these
possessions (material possessions, but also possession of its
own being) that ethics determines Evil to be, in a certain
* _I
sense, simply that which it does not own and enjoy [ r e qui
n 'est pas ce dont elle jouit]. But Man, as immortal, is sustained
by the incalculable and the un-possessed. He is sustained by
non-being [non-idant]. To forbid him to imagine the Good,
to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards tbe
realization of unknown possibilities, to think what might he
in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to
1
forbid him humanity as such. PA
L

Michigan 2006
8
3) Ethical principles remove us from the urgency of particular political needs-instead of being
faithful to a unique event, instead of involving ourselves in the immortal process of striving for the
truth of this issue-ethics asks us to ignore specifics and judge within a pre-given framework,
reducing us all to a subhuman mass.
Switzerland, Ethics, page 14- 15).
C 3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determina-

tion of Evil, ethics prevents iuelf from thinking the singul&-
ity of situations as such, which is the obligatory starting
point of all properly human action. Thus, for instance, the
doctor won over to 'ethical' ideology wi11 ponder, in meet-
ings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding
'the sick', conceived of in exactly the same way as the
partisan of human rights conceives ol tne ~ndlstinctcrowd
of victims - the 'human' totality of subhuman entities [ r k l s ] .
But the same doctor will have no difficulty in accepting; the
fact that this particular person is not treated at the hospital.
and accorded all necessary measures, Decause he or she is
-
witllout legal residency papers, or not a contributor to
> - -
Social Security. Once agziin, 'collective' responsibility

demands it! Mrhat is erased in the process is the fact that
there is only one medical situation, the clinical situation,'
and there is no need for an 'ethics' (but only for a clear
vision of this situation) to understand that in these circum-
- .
stances a doctor is a doctor only if he deals with the
situation according to the rule of maximum possibility - to
treat this person who demands treatment of him (no inter-
vention here!) as thoroughly as he can, using everything he
knows and with all the means at his disposal, without taking
anything else into consideration. And if he is to be pre-
vented from giving treatment because of the State budget,
because of death rates or laws goveilling immigration, then
let them send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic
duty would oblige him to resist them, with force if necessary.
- - - - - - - - commissions'
'Ethical- - -- and other 1-uminatioi~son 'health-
.-. .
m
care ex~enses'or 'managerial
1 ., responsibility', since thev itre
radically exterior to the one situation that is genuinJ'i.
medical, can in reality only prevent us from being faithful to
it. For to be faithful to this sit~~ation means: to treat it r-i@f
)O me
thls sitiration, to the greatest possible extent, the affirn~ari\~e
humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immor-
tal-fo
-- -

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
GENERIC INC
Hence our alternative: reject the affirmative.
This act of rejecting ethics opens us up to affirming humanity as capable of striving for truth by engaging in
political action that is unique to the needs of a particular situation-what Badiou calls fidelity to an event.
Badiou, 93 (Aiain Badiou is a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics, page 16).
We must reject the ideological framework of 'ethics', and

concede nothing to the negative and victimary definition of
-
man. This framework equates man with a simple m o r d
animal, it is the symptom of a disturbing conservatism, and
- because of its abstract, statistical generality - it prevents
us from thinking the singularity of situations
1 will advance three opposing theses: k
Thesis 1: A k a is to be identified by his affirmative
thought, by the singular tnlths ofwhich he is capable, by
the Immortal which makes of him the most resilient
-*
a Thesis 2: It is from our positive capability for Good, and
thus from our boundarv-breaking treatment of ~ossi-
I V
bilities and our refusal of conservatism, including the

tonservation of being, that we are to identify Evil - not
-
vice versa.
Thesis 3: All humanitv has its root in the identification in
thought [en pmsie] of singular situations. There is no
ethics in general. There are only - eventually - ethics of
-
processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation,

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
GENERlC 1NC
The affirmative claim to have a piece of universal truth that cannot be contested by lived experience of
those engaged in political action, which cannot be resisted through fidelity to a unique event, is what
Badiou calls a simulacrum of the truth. These sirnulacrums demand the allegiance of everyone--creating
an "us" of ethical insiders vs a "them" of outsiders. This is the root of war, racism, and genocide.
4x I I I the case of Nazism. the void made its return heul(lrr
(U'hen a radical break in a situation, under names hc - lrlr p i 3 e g e d name in particr~lxr,the name ' F ~ v ' .The-re
rowed from real truth-processes, convokes not the void but were certainly others as well: the Gyps~es,the mentally ill,
the 'full' particular~tyor presumed substance of that sity- - c
homosexuals, communists. . . . But the name 'Tew' was thP

ation, we are dealing with a s i m u l n m n oftruth. --C
name of names, serving to designate those people whose

=:. -.
-
7
'Simulacrum' must be understood here in its strong disappearance created, around that presumed German sub-
---
sense: ---- formal traits of a truth are at work in the
all the
- stance promoted by the 'National Socialist revolution' sini-
simlrIacrurn. Not only a universal nomination of the event, u K i . n n t i w o l ; l d sumceote shesubstance.
-- - . -
inducing the power of a radical break, but also the 'obliga- p t o it;
- -
tion'
...-..
of
- a fidelity, and the promotion of a simulucmm ofthe o E o u s link with universalism, in particular with r e m l u tic~~~-
subj~ct,erected - without the advent of any ~rnmortaf- at-y universalism - to what was in effect already void [-ctid>]
above the human animality of the others, of those who are about this name - that is, what was connected to the zt?zitrm~olit~
a ; b i & r i - .i - b rtnd etemz[y of truths. Nevertheless, inasmuch as ~t senred to
stance whose promotion and domination the simulacrum- ozanize the extenhination, the name 'Jew' was a political
.
event i - -..
s i -creation of the Nazis, without any pre-existing referent. It is
a name whose meaning no one can share with the Nazis. a
Fidelity
- - to a sirnulacn~m, unlike fidelity to an
-
a-
event,.
regulates its break with the situation not by the universality G-- G n x o tlle.
-
pIlP
o7tK.e v o i n , S u f 6 y t h e pazicularity --- of an abstract set s j ~ y l a c r u m and hence t e z i s m

[~snnb(then-the 'Arvans'). Its invari a ~ . p o I i t i c aseguenc
l
operation is the unending construction of this set, and it o u t even in this respect, we have to recognize that this
hzs n o o t h e r a n s of doing this than that of 'voiding' what firocess mimics an actual truth-process. Every fidelity ro '111
surror~ndsit. The void, 'avoided' [rhnssP') by the simulacrous authentic event names the adversaries of its perseveranc.e.
promotion of an 'event-substance', here returns, with its Contrary to consensual ethics, which tries to avoid ditisio~~s,
r~nivel-sality,as what must be accomplished in order that the ethic of truths is always more or less militant, combati\x=.
this substance can be. This is to say that what is addressed
y
For the concrete manifestation of its heterogeneity to opin-
'to everyone' (and 'everyone , here, is necessarily that which ions and established knowledges is the struggle against a11
domot belong to the G e m a n communitarian substance - sorts of efforts at interruption, at corruption, at the retul-n
1
-s substance is not an 'everyone' but, rather, som-e to the immediate interests of the human animal, at the
'E? Y
. -.-- q h o dominate 'everyone ) is death, or that deferred humiliation and repression of the Immortal who arises as
form -.. .
substance.
-
of death which is slavery in the service of the ~ e r m a n sltbject. The ethic of truths presumes recognition of i1lt.v~
efforts, and thus the singular operation of naming enemies.
-
-...
~encFfidelityto the simulacrum (and it demands of the The 'National Socialist revolution' simulacrum enco~~~.agt.tl
non~inationsof this kind, in particular the nominatlol~or
'few' belonging to the German substance prolonged sacri-
fices and commitments, since it really does have the form 'Jew'. But the simulacrum's subversion of the true e v e n t
of a fidelity) has as its content war and massacre. These are c o n t i n ~ ~ ewith
s these namings. For the enemy of a tn1.e
JIL. !: .-rmeanl' m an m& *rep make p e very real [ t ~ i r subjective fidelity is precisely the closed set [ensembk], the
lu rkll',of such a fidelity.) srlhstance of the situation, the comm~mity.The values of
-- ----..
-
truth, of its hazardous c o u r s e ~ t unive?fal
-
s
to be erected against t h e c x f i - < o f inertia.
- ,
- -. . - - - --
- "
'aiHGss, are
-
c o n ..
Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
-
Every invocation of' blood and soil, of race, of custom, of
community, works directly against truths; and it is this ve+ I have pursued the example of Nazism because it enrers
collection [msemble] that is named as the enemy in the ethic to a significant extent into that 'ethical' configuration (OF
o 5 1 ' t ' h j which pro- 'radical Evil') opposed by the ethic of truths. Mhat is ai
motes the community, blood, race, and so on, names as & issue here is the simulacrum of an event that gives rise to d
e n e n n p r e 5 i s 6 1 y - pzitical fidelity. Such a simulacrum is possible only thanK
to the success of political revolutions that were genuii~ely
G abstract universality and eternity of truths, the address
t .-,
:
,
.-
e v e T e d ) . But simulacra*
otL
.-
oreov over, the two processes treat what is thus named in ~ z k e dto all the other possible kinds of truth-processes also
exist. The reader may find it useful to identify them. For
diametrically opposite ways. For however hostile to a truth
he might be, in the ethic of truths every 'some-one' is always example, we can see how certain sexual passions are simu-
represented as capable of becoming the Immortal that he lacra of the amorous event. There can be no doubt that on
is. So we may fight against the judgements and opinions he this account they bring with them terror and violence.
exchanges with others for the purpose of corrupting every Likewise, brutal obscurantist preachings present themselves
as the simulacra of science, with obviously damaging results.
fidelity, but not against his pmon - which, under the
circumstances, is insignificant, and to which, in any case, And so on. But in each case, these violent damages are
unintelligible if we do not understand them in relation to
every t n ~ t his ultimately addressed. By contrast, the void
the truth-processes whose simulacra they maniuu1ate.a
with which those who are faithful to a simulacrum strive to I
m
sur-round its alleged substance must be a real void, obtained In sum, our first definition of Evil is this: - Evil i s the
-- --
- +- -
by cutting into the flesh itself. And since it is not the process of a s~mulacrumof truth. And in its essence, uiiiTeP
subjective advent of an Immortal, so fidelity to the simula- a' name otits invention, it is terror directed at everyone.)
- --.
cnirn - that appalling imitation of truths - presume d
nothing more about those they designate as the enemy than

their s l t is
tks- this existence that will have to bear the return or thg
- ......
void. This is why the exercise of fidelity to the simulacrum
issecessarily the exercise of terror. Understand by terroc,
here,
-.- . not the political concept of Terror, linked (in a
universalizable couple) to the concept of Virtue by the
Immortals of the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety,kt
the- nure and simple red~lctionof all to their being-for-
--.
1
r e a$d
ing must be [pot17 QUP
substance soit, rien n.e dozt ctrej.
Elliot, Lasky, Logan, WiH

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: ETHICS
Ethics cannot be formulated from an armchair- they must be grappled with by a subject in the singular
involvement with an event.
Barker 02 ( Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy
at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical In~roduction,p. f 40)
G e r e , then, we have the Evil variants of Good, understood as the

dialectical momentun1 of the process of truth itself, in three stages:
1) the everzt which denies the void and tends towards 'terror' or
'simulacrum'; 2) the fidelity which passively yields to its desire in an
act of 'betrayal'; and 3) the totalitarian accession of tnrtlz to the point
of 'disaster' (E, 63). For the militant practitioner of ethics (and for
Badiou there can be no other kind), given the fact that Evil remains
immanent to Good - a simulacrum as it were - Good must not be
regarded as the mere avoidance of Evil. The only means of truly
avolaina" evil, so to speak - particularly given the fact that every
truth, as well as being undecidable, is also indiscernible and
unnameable - is to (attempt to) appreciate the perils of not standing
up to it. The act of the informed decision (or perception) is naturally
perilous here and risks regression (although of course there are
always risks ...). For given the ethical practitioner's uncertain attach-
ment to the event, we might say that the subject is rorced to tind out J
ror itself, this siJe of (rather than beyond) Good and Evil, w b t ethics
d E , 75). In this sense, finally, 'The Good is Good only inasmuch as
it doesn't pretend to render the world good.' The notebooks on
ethics are not a bible, nor must they be read as one.
In highlighting
- - the constitutive political dimension to ethics,
Badiou's Ethics avoids lapsing into the kind of abstract moral
reasoning which tends - in the 'analytic' tradition - to distort the b
.field of enquiry. No longer is it a question of what the individual

would do in some ideal worla with adequate time tor retlection.
Instead, for Badiou ethics becomes a question of being catapulted
'tnto the here and now, ana or rollowlng tnrough the consequences
-.-.
nf -,r l p p ; r i r \ o - r r r h i r h :c s l r ~ r a x ~3 cl r ~ a r l x rr t ~ r i r l ~-dt n t h p limit XF far
of its actions. Ethics, from this militant standpoint, cannot take an

effective back seat when it comes to determining what is right
(unlike the journalist who claims to enable the facts to 'speak for
themselves'). Of course, the question which we have been dealing
with here all along involves the anlbivnle~lcrwhich returns to afflict
the ethical practitioner in the service of truth, in any one of its four
realms, although politics is the one which will continue to interest
us for the remainder of this book.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: RIGHTS
Rights trivialize our collective humanity and make real, individual ethics impossible.
at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical introduction, p. 1 35- 1 36)
with the Ego-ideal, had never actually happened. It is a strange and
bitter irony that these once revolutionary ideas attacking t h e notion
of the human essence are today widely regarded as having emerged
in a period of intense ideology, or as evidence of their authors'
remote indifference to the pragmatics4 of Western democracy (El
8-10). From Badiou's perspective, in order to escape this misrepre-
sentation and return ethics to its "proper- ground
- philosophy mu:$
C
once again be made to seize the event of the militant act; theory 2
For Badiou, philosophy is made possible, and must be made to begin, must be reunited witK practice.
at the moment where the sophists and their perverse social and l r is rrom Kant that we lnnerit the founding urinci~lesof ethics as
cultural side-effects (journalists and critics, the public relations
industry, capital-parliamentarism in general) would appear to have
thought locked in a stranglehold. But what are the actual discourses ideal notion of hurhan conduct in mindI5is the extent to which this
of Evil? In Badiou's short work Ethics (1993) - which he lends the doctrine makes -z victim. The human being is not an end in itself.
subtitle Essay on the Utzerstandi~rgof Evil - we find the author in It is a negative dialectic which seeks to make man alternate between
characteristically militant mode, embarking on another one of his saviour and victim of human suffering and injustice. Here, right is
balance-sheet assessments, this time of a set of negative conse- forced to lead the fight against Evil, a fight with little understanding
quences for the practice of modern ethics. For Badiou ethics has --- .
of what constitutes Good. Today public opinion has never been
become far too thoughtless in its definitions and discre- more confident in its ability to identify
. injustice,
. and to mount cars
field of application, a victim of too many journalistic platitudes <o for the universal condemnation of 'criminal acts'. But where iustice
defend effectively the universal rights of ~ l s n .Badiou rejects 1
itself is concerned the ethical Darameters are far from clear (AM.
outright the doctrine of universal or natural human rights - which
he regards as having resulted largely from the failure of the revolu- - 109). Is this uncertainty a symptom of the public's inability tp
acquire an etnical conscience, let alone actually adopt one for Good? . . . - . .
tionary project of Marxism - and its replacement by the ideology of J Badiou strikes a strong
" chord here. At everv level of ~ u b l i clife the
liberal humanitarianism and the law of the global market (El 7). The
intellectual scene reflects the failure. Today, in the realm of philos-
ophy as in politics, it is as if ~ouca;lt's announcement of the 'death
- -
rules binding- individuals into various pseudo-social contracts of
mutual rights and res~onsibilities (consumer rights, workvtace -
rights, parental rights, animal rights) threaten to trivialise our collec-
of man', Or Althusser's 'process without a subject', or Lacanls split tive humanity. Lew. p[ppp with the hnornin~legal industry whi$
supports it, rather than right, more than ever dictates the path of
ethics as 'ethical policy', a policy which, at the limit, is nothing more
than the capacity of a constitutional government to keep its subjects
in order Lalong with any 'outsiders' it deems worthy of attention
beyond its immediate jurisdiction).
Against this paltry vision of -as a 'mortal animal' who
requires constant supervision by the laws of the State, Badiou heralds
'the rights of the Immortal, asserting for themse
the Infinite exercising X e i r sovereig
~ l l f f e r i nand
~ death' I F 141 R P ~ ~ P - f o r - d ~ a ~t hP, I F P I I ~ ~ Jhad
~ P I ~ ~
\

Michigan 2006 13
LINK: RIGHTS
Rights stand in opposition to Badiou's ethics:

a) rights are designed to protect an empty subject but Badiou sees the subject as compelled to act
and not be a passive victim waiting for the state, and
b) ethics emerge in particular situations, they cannot be derived from a pre-determined principle
like rights.
Barker 02 ( Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department o f Philosophy
at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 138)
Clearly, then, these subtmctions from ethics exclude all the usual
founding assumptions about the human being as the possessor of
-
- Any such rinhts merelv amount to the
certain inalienable rights.
right r~otto be (offended, mistreated, threatened. tortured, etc.). with
Badiou, this standard conception of right is clearly nothing of the
kind, and depends rather on the lack of an infinite set of particular
rinhts.
" Ethics must therefore begin. " ,
not with abstractions which
would seek to distinguish between primary and secondary r~ghts,but
from the concrete demands of any given situation. Following the
Hegelian and Maoist models, then: from the particular to the
universal. There is also a debt to Spinoza in Badiou's approach to
ethics, since if the 'human animal' is 'convened by circumstances to
becorne subiect', 'to enter into the comuosition of a subiect' , .(E,. 371.,,
t r t v where-- ---
a thing acts accoralng to the force of its very own reasonn6However,

for Badiou the circumstances of becoming are not ultimately the
circumstances of the ordinary, everyday world (what Spinoza calls
'nature'). The subiect - which ordinarilv is not - in order to suruass r
itself (its indifferentkature) in becoming what it is, must harness the
.
historical supr>lement of the truth-event (E, 38). Henceforth, for the
duration ot its existence (in this new realm of beinn). the subiect is
1
"'I
(it's the same thing now) in a way which

tuation where it finds itself. As we have
already seen, this procedure where, in a set of historical circum-
stances, the subiect manages " to rallv selflesslv to the enter~rise
x - - 0 1
Z t h is callen 'fidelity'. Singularity, therefore, is where ethics must
$egin,
*
since ethics always involves the new emergence of a subiect
(E, 38-40]. Finally, the consensus surrounding what is or is not, does
or does not involve ethics, can have no part of and gain no access to
truth. Ethics is a constniction, must be constructed, in the here and
now. It is not concerned wlth foundinx ,=.
a u n l v e r s or
~ human
conduct, and so takes no account of the possiDle n e g a r l v e n s e -
-
quences that a given set of principles may inadvertently u n l e a s ,

Michigan 2006 14
LINK: HUMAN RIGHTS

Human rights now stands in cooperation with conservative power-all those who oppose rights are labeled
as terrorists to be exterminated without trying to comprehend the reasons why they are violent. In this way,
the ideals of rights give way to brutal politics.
Meister 02 [Robert, Professor of Philosophy @ UC Santa Cruz, "Human Rights and the Politics of
Victimhood," Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 16, Iss. 2, pg. 9 1, proquest]
This theme in much of present-day Human Rights Discourse is most directly understandable as an effort to
depoliticize the unresolved victim-beneficiary issues of the revolutionary/counterrevolutionary politics that
drove the Cold War. It seeks to represent these issues as superseded by a moral consensus on the means
used to resolve them: violent or nonviolent, constitutional or "terrorist."l2 The political effect of recent
Human Rights Discourse is to marginalize as "terrorists" those on both sides of the old conflict who are still
willing: to fight on. Terrorism-the remnant of twentieth-centurv "inhumanitv"-is now the phenomenon
a~ainstwhich all civilized nations in the twentv-first century can agree to make "war." The main point,
today, of call ing a movement or regime "terrorist" is to drain it of its twentieth-century political content and
context. Indeed, struggles for political andor cultural autonomy that might recently have claimed the
mantle of human rights are now described (looking forward) as morally equivalent to crimes against
humanity insofar as they engage in acts of "terror" or are hesitant in condemning terrorism elsewhere. In its
new proximity to power. the mainstream human riphts establishment speaks with increasing hostility
toward movements that it might once have sought to comprehend. As we begin this new century, Human
Rights Discourse is in danger of devolving from an aspirational ideal to an implicit compromise that allows
the victims of past iniustice a moral victory on the understanding that the ongoing beneficiaries get to keep
their gains without fear of terrorism. The movement aims, of course, to persuade the passive supporters of
the old order to abjure illegitimate means of counterrevolutionar~politics-the repressive and fraudulent
techniques of power that they once condoned or ignored. Insofar as the aim is also to reconcile these
passive supporters (including many beneficiaries) with the victims of past injustice, it nevertheless
advances the counterrevo1utionary project by other means. The new culture of respect for human rights
would. thus, reassure the beneficiary that the (former) victim no lonper poses this threat, and maybe never
-
did. For the victim who was morally undamaged andor subsequently "healed," the past would be truly over
once its horrors were acknowledged by national consensus. This sought-after consensus on the moral
meaning of the past comes at the expense, however, of cutting off future claims that would normally seem
to follow from it. To put the point crudely, the cost of achieving a moral consensus that the past was evil is
to reach a political consensus that the evil is past. In practice. this political consensus operates to constrain
debate in societies that regard themselves as "recovering" from horrible histories. It means that
unreconciled victims who continue to demand redistribution at the expense of beneficiaries will be accused
of undermining the consensus that the evil is past; it also means that continuing beneficiaries who act on
their fears that victims are still unreconciled will be accused of undermining the consensus that the past was
evil by "blaming the victim.' Indeed, the substantive meaning of evil itself has changed in the human rights
culture that is widely believed to have superseded the Cold War. "Evil" is no longer widely understood to
be a system of social injustice that can have ongoing structural effects, even after the structure is
dismantled. Rather, evil is described as a time that is past-or can be put in the past. The present way that
born-again adherents to human rights address surviving victims of past evil is to project a distinction
between the "good" (undamaged) and "bad" (unreconciled or recalcitrant) members of the victimized
groups. To the extent that the emergent human rights proiect aims to enlist the support of the good victims
in repressing the bad victims as terrorists (andlor criminals, depending on the type ofjudicial process they
will receive), it is, srima facie, a continuation. by other means, of the twentieth-century proiect of
counterrevolution.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: HUMAN RIGHTS

The politics of human rights justifies massive violence-the powerful can wage wars against the inhuman
masses outside the circle of rights holders.
Meister 02 [Robert, Professor of Philosophy @ UC Santa Cruz, "Human Rights and the Politics of
Victimhood," Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 16, Iss. 2, pg. 91, proquest]
The anti-messianic message of the Human Rights Discourse is not entirely the Drograrn of peace and
reconciliation that it might seem to be on the surface. It is, also, a declaration of war against a new enemv.
Carl Schmitt first pointed this out in his criticism of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, outlawing war. "The
solemn declaration of outlawing war," he asserted, "does not abolish the friend-enemy distinction, but, on
the contrary, opens new possibilities by giving an international hostis declaration new content and new
vigor."30 This criticism applied equally, in Schmitt's view, to the human rights consensus expressed by the
Treaty of Versailles, in 191 9, which established the League of Nations: When a state fghts its political
enemy in the name of humanity it...seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent ... in the
same way that one can misuse peace, justice, progress. and civilization in order to claim these as one's own
and to deny the same to the enemv.31 Although Schmitt's own political agenda, which led to a defense of
Nazism, is ultimately despicable, he nevertheless provides a helpful guide to the ideological significance of
Human Rights Discourse at a moment of U.S. military and economic hegemony at the end of the Cold War.
This move is, as he well understood, a way to create new political alliances by shifting enemies. The
underlying intent of such an international consensus to protect human rights is not to assert a selfconfident
universality, but rather to represent what Schmitt called "a potential or actual alliance, that is, a
coalition."32 In the present conjuncture, he is worth quoting at length on this point: It is...erroneous to
believe that a political position founded on economic superiority is "essentially unwarlike"... [It] will
naturally attempt to sustain a worldwide condition which enables it to apply and manage, unmolested, its
economic means, e.g., terminating credit, embargoing raw materials, destroying the currencies of others,
and so on. Every attempt of a people to withdraw itself from the effects of such "peacefhl methods" is
considered by this imperialism as extraeconomic power.... Modem means of annihilation have been
produced by enormous investments of capital and intelligence, surely to be used if necessary.33
Schmitt anticipated the rhetorical demands that Human Rights Discourse would place on liberal politicians
still fighting, as Woodrow Wilson did, "to make the world safe for democracyw-but now in the name of a
"world community" defending "humanity" as such. As he explains: For the application of such means, a
new and essentially pacifist vocabulary has been created. War is condemned but executions, sanctions,
punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures to assure peace
remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated
to be an outlaw of humanity.... But this allegedly non-political... system cannot escape the logic of the
political.34 Schmitt's analysis, above, might be read today as a forecast: Although we are now able to fight
wars only on the condition that they are not described as such, these wars do not thereby "escape the logic
of the political ." Schmitt's powerful critique of the depoliticizing project of what was, in his time, the
precursor to Human Rights Discourse went some way toward repoliticizing it, at least in Weimar Germany.
Perhaps because of his own dalliance in the politics of victimhood in its most pernicious form, Schmitt did
not fully understand a deeper implication of his own argument: that adopting a Human Rinhts Discourse
gives survivors of past barbarity the consciousness of victims. It is they. the newlv vulnerable, who must
now be protected from being violated by the "inhuman." "Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat;'
Schmitt says. "To... invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as
denying the enemy the ~ualityof being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war
can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity."35

Michigan 2006 16
LINK: HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION

Humanitarian intervention is bad:
a) the call to intervene drains situations of their potentially radical political content, and
b) the world is divided into heroic saviors and barbaric victims, and
c) good is defined as only the opposition to evil, which is a conservative notion that resists positive
projections of alternative futures.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj iiiek, Waiting for
Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).
Ethics-cogently translated by Peter Hallward, who also provides a pertinent introduction and appends a
probing interview with the author-is, if anything, even more exhilarating than Saint Paul. Badiou begins
from a critiaue of the discourse of human rights. This ethics has the virtue of being simple and self-evident:
the ethical imperative is to prevent suffering. But Badiou exposes its hollowness by staging it. While the
ethic of human rights obviously presupposes a human subiect posited as universal, in practice this subiect is
radically split between victim and benefactor. And at this point it might raise our suspicions that the
location of this split is remarkably consistent: the benefactor is always "usH-the armed Western
democracies or our allies. who have suddenly acquired the right to intervene. (Badiou does not address the
hypocrisy of using the language of human rights to justify intervention in situations where the "Western
democracies" are in fact responsible for the situation in the first place, or of the reluctance to intervene
where there is little strategic benefit. If the ethics itself were justifiable, then the hypocrisy would have to
be addressed as a separate issue.) This "humanitarian" intervention, moreover, can only conceive
humanity--or at least the victim-as an animal: "the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated,
dying body, equates man with his animal substructure" (Ethics, 11). What is foreclosed at the outset is any
possibility of conceiving the situation of "abuse" as political. (Think of the current situation in Haiti.) Since
what is taken into account is only animal suffering and never the political situation that determines it. the
attitude of humanitarian intervention is, despite initial appearances, one of profound contempt: violations of
human rights require not political analysis, but only the identification of barbarism. The ethical orientation
of human r i ~ h t sis purely negative: it has no conception of the good other than the absence of evil. of
suffering. Lacking any imperative to inquire into the good, it discourages any substantial consideration of
alternatives to the status quo. The exclusive concern of human rights with the question of evil-its practical
identification of the human being with "that which can suffer evilH--means that any attempt to base a
political proiect on a conception of the good (which might, it is true, involve a share of suffering, not least
on the part of those who uphold it) is deemed "uto~ian,"doomed to transform itself into its opposite, a
totalitarian nightmare. To begin from the good. therefore, leads directly to evil. For Badiou, this is
"sophistry at its most devastating" (Ethics, 13), and the second half of the book is an attempt to think
through an ethics that would begin from the good.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: OBLIGATION TO THE OTHERlLEVlNAS
Ethics centered on the Other collapses into an obligation to help the Other become like us. It is a revival of
the imperialist imperative of: "Become like me and 1 will respect your difference."
Badiou, 93 (Alain Badiou is a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
( o u r suspicions are fint aroused when we see that the

self-declared apostles of ethics and of the 'right to differ-
ence' are clearly horrified b~ any vigorou.~~
sustained diffh-ence.
For them, African customs are barbaric, Muslims are dread-
ful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter of
fact, this celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a pod
other - which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us?
t
Respect for differences, of course! But on condition that

2
the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market

economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the
enjlronment. . . . That is to say: I respect differences, but
only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects,
just as I do, the said differences. Just as there can be 'no J
freedom for the enemies of freedom'. so there can be

no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in
not respecting differences. To prove the point, just con-
J
sider the obsessive resentment expressed by the partisans

of ethics regarding anything that resembles an Islamic
'fundamen taIist7.
The problem is that the 'respect for differences' and the
ethics of human rights
" do seem to define an idcntitv! And
J
that as a result, the respect for differences applies only to

h o s e differences that are reasonably consistent with this
identity (which, after all, is nothing other than the identity
-
of a wealthy - albeit visibly declining - 'West'). Even immi-
grants in this country [France], as seen by the partisans of
ethics, are acceptably different only when they are 'inte-
grated', only if they seek integration (which seems to mean,
if vou think about it: only if they want to suppress their
difference). It might well be that ethical ideology, detached
from the religious teachings which at least conferred upon
it thc fullness of a 'revealed' identity, is simply the final
imperative of a conquer in^ civilization: 'Become like nle i
and I will respect your difference.' )

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: OBLIGATION TO THE OTHERILEVINAS
Infinite obligation to the Other is nonsense because there is no universal "Other." Instead, humanity is
composed of an infinite series of n~ultiplepolitical situations.
The truth is that, in the context of a system of thought that

is both a-religious and genuinely contemporary with the
truths of our time, the whole ethical predication based
upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply
abandoned. For the real question - and it is an extraordi:
narily difficult one - is much more that of recognizing the
Same.
Let us posit our axioms. There is no God. Which also
means: the One is not. The multiple 'without-one' - every
multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of
multiples - is the law of being. The only stopping point is
-
the void. The infinite, as Pascal had already realized, is the
banal reality of every situation, not the predicate of ah
transcendence. For the infinite, as Cantor demonstrated
with the creation of set theory, is actually only the most
general form of multiple-being [itre-multiple]. In fact, e x
-
situation, inasmuch as it is, is a multiple composed of an
infinity of elements, each one of which is itself a multiple.
considered in then simple belonging to a situation (to an
infinite multiple), the animals of the species Homo sapiens J
are ordinary mu1tiplicities.

What, then, are we to make of the other, of differences,
and of their ethicaI recognlooni
Infinite alterity is qulte simply what there is. Any experi-
ence at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences.
Even the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by n o
means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentia-
tions, and Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said:
'I am another.' There are as many differences, say, between
a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as
between myself and anybody at all, including myself.
As many, but also, then, neither more nor less3

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: OBLIGATION TO THE OTHERILEVINAS
Ethics of the "Other" makes little intellectual sense in a world where cultures are highly intermixed. These
ethics also construct the differences that they try to overcome through the initial act of labeling a self and
an other.
Contemporary ethics kicks up a big fuss about 'cultural'

d?fferences. Its conception of the 'other' is informed main$
by this kind of differences., Its great ideal is the peacef~il
coexistence of cultural, religious, and national 'comrnani-
ties', the refusal of 'exclusion'.
But what we must recognize is that these differences hold
no Interest for thought, that they amount to nothing more
than the infinite and selfevident multiplicity of human-
kind, as obvious in the difference between me and rn? 4
c o u s 6 from Lyon as it is between the Shi'ite 'community'

of Iraq and the IaL w-
l h e objective (or historical) foun'dation of contemporary
ethics is culturalism, in truth a tourist's fascination for the
diversity of morals, customs and beliefs. And in particular,
for the irreducible medley of imaginary formations (relig-
ions, sexual representations, incarnations of authority . . .).
Yes, the essential 'objective' basis of ethics rests on a vulgar
sociology, directly inherited from the astonishme~~t of the
colonial encounter with savages. And we must not forget
that there are also savages among us (the drug addicts of
the banlieues, religious sects - the whole journalistic para-
phernalia of menacing internal alterity), confronted by an
ethics that offers, without changing its means of investi-
gation, its 'recognition' and its social workers.
Against these trifling descriptions (of a reality that is both
obvious and inconsistent in itself), genuine thought should
affirm the following principle: since differences are what
there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that
which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what
truths depose, or render insignificant. No light 1s shed on
any concrete situation by the notion of the 'recognlt~onot
the other'. Every modern collective configuration involve's
people from everywhere, who have their different ways of
eating and speaking, who wear different sorts of headgear,
follow different religions, have complex and varied relations
to sexuality, prefer authority or disorder, and such IS the
way of the world.)
c.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: OBLIGATION TO THE OTHERlLEVlNAS
Our capacity to strive for a universal, to strive for the truth of a particular situation, is what makes our lives
meaningful. Giving up on this project by embracing all "Others" is a relativistic destruction of genuine
ethics.
Philosophically, if the other doesn't matter it is indeed

because the difficulty lies on the side of the Same. The
Same, in effect, is not what is (i.e. the infinite multipliciry
of differences) but what comes to be. I have already named
that in regard to which only the advent of the Same occurs:
-
it is a truth. Pnly a truth is, as soch, indifferent to dif/mces.
This is something we have always known, even if sophists of
every age have always attempted to obscure its certainty: a
truth is the same for all.
What is to be postula'ted for one and all, what I have
called our 'being immortal', certainly is not covered by the
Iogic of 'cultural' differences as insignificant as they are
.
massive. It is our ca~acitvfor truth - our ca~acitvto be that
-- -
-
- -
'same' that a truth convokes to its.own 'sampness'. Or in other

words, depending on the circumstances, our capacity for
science, love, politics or art, since all tn~ths,in my view, fill
under one or another of these universal names.
It is only through a genuine perversion, for which we wiIl
pay a terrible historical price, that we have sought to
elaborate an 'ethics' on the basis of ciiltural relativism. For
this is to pretend that a merely continnent state of things
can
-- - found
- a Law.
T
-heone -
ethics,is of truths in the plural or,
more ~reciselv.the onlv ethics is of processes of truth, of
the labour-that brings some truths into the world. Ethics
must be taken in the sense presumed by Lacan when,
against Kant and the notion of a general morality, he
discusses the ethics of psychoanalysis. Ethics does not exist.
There is only the ethic-ot(of politics, of love, of science, of
art).
There is not, in fact, one single Subject, but as many
subjects as there are truths, and as many subjective types as
there are procedures of truths.
As for me, J identify four f~indamentalsubjective 'types':
political, scientific, artistic, and amorous [amourcrux].
Every human animal, by participating in a given singular
tn~tli,is inscribed in one of these four types.
A philosophy sets out to construct a space of tlzought in
which the different subjective types, expressed by the singu-
lar truths of its time, coexist. But this coexistence is not a
unification - that is why it is impossible to speak of one i
Ethics. 1
Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Wili

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: OBLIGATION TO THE OTHERILEVJNAS

The ethics of the obligation to the other fall flat in the face of real situations-in practice, this ethic denies
differences of any real significance.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj iiiek, Waiting for
What guarantees the otherness of the other in the absence of the Absolutely Other? Nothing, which means
it can only be posited. What this implies, first of all, is that the ineffable other is a product of my own
thought and therefore not other at all. Second, we are compelled to ask: why this will to otherness? Once
again, Badiou critiques the laicized, multiculturalist version of this ethics by staging it. In its everyday
form, without the support of the Altogether Other, the ethics of difference bifurcates as soon as it is put into
&. Its attitude towards any rigorously sustained difference is entirely different from the attitude it
believes itself to have towards difference-as-such. A rigorouslv sustained reli~iousdifference?
Fundamentalism. Rinorously sustained political difference? Extremism. Rigorously sustained cultural
difference? Barbarism. "As a matter of fact, this celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a good other-
which is to say what. exactly, if not the same as us?" (Ethics, 24). The only acceptable difference is one that
also merely "accepts" difference. This restriction means that the discourse of the other is effectively a
discourse of the Same: a cosmopolitan fantasy of liberal-democratic, free-market society: "nothing other
than the identity of a wealthy-albeit visibly declining-'West"' (24).
Infinite obligation to the other will fail as a political strategy-resistance to the other is a critical
component of social change.
Badiou, 02 (Translated/Interviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).
ht~://www,cabinetma~azine.or~/issues/5/alainbadiou.php
I must particularly insist that the formula "respect for the Other" has nothing to do with any serious
definition of Good and Evil. What does "respect for the Other" mean when one is at war against an enemy,
when one is brutally left by a woman for someone else, when one must judge the works of a mediocre
"artist," when science is faced with obscurantist sects, etc.? Very often. it is the "respect for Others" that is
iniurious, that is Evil. Especially when it is resistance against others. or even hatred of others, that drives a
subiectivel~iust action. And it's always in these kinds of circumstances (violent conflicts, brutal changes,
passionate loves. artistic creations) that the question of Evil can be truly asked for a subiect. Evil does not
exist either as nature or as law. It exists, and varies, in the singular becoming of the True.
Elliot, Lasky, Logan, WiH

Seven Week Seniors
R1lichigan2006
LINK: IDENTITY POLITICS
Identity politics are the ultimate basis of banal homogeneity-as each group demands recognition, they
mark themselves as a new territory needing distinctive fashion, specialty magazines, perhaps a their own
cable channel. The foolish and fragmentary nature of this political strategy is highlighted by the endless
categories of identity that demand recognition.
Badiou '03 (Alain. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Sainr Paul: The Foundorion of Universalism, p.9-I 1 )
Our world is in no way as "compleFas those who wish to ensure
its perpetuation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, ~ e r f e c tsimple.
-J
l~
Qn the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of cap-
ital, fulfilling one of Marx's inspired predictions: the world finally confg-
4
urea!, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the
rule of an abstract homogenization. Everything that circulates falls under

the unity of a count, while inversely, only what lets itself be counted in J
&is way can c~rculate.Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a par-
*
adox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the
phantasm of instantaneous cultural communication, laws and regulations
forbidding the circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere. So.
it is that in France, never have fewer foreigners settled than in the recent
period! Free circulation of what lets itself be counted, yes, and above all
of capital, which is the count of the count. Free circulation of that un-
countable infiniry constituted by a singular human life, never! For capi-
talist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that
has no considerutionfir any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indiffer-
ent to the persistent infinity of existence as ir is to the evenral becoming
of truths.
O n the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed
identities, and the culturalist and rejativist ideology that accompanies this J
fragmentation.
-- -

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
-
Both processes are perfectly intertwined. For each identification
(the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that pro-
vides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more
captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more
amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, thah
a community and its territory or territories. The semblance of a non-
equivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process.
What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this up-
surge-taking the form o t cornmunlties demanding recognition and ;o-
,
kabs! And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a god-
send! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate
'~uslims,married priests, ecolo~istyuppies, the sub sive unemployed,
prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorizes new prod-
-
ucts, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, "free" radio sta-
tions, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady "public debates"
at peak viewing times. Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorializa-
tion requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a perma-
nent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its prin-
ciple of movement to homogenize its space of action: identities.
V I -,
more-
- - - -
over, that never demand anythlng but the rlght to be exposed in the same
way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist
- .
logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of
communities or minorities form an arriculated whole.
This articulation plays a constraining role relative to every truth

procedure. It is organically without truth. \
.-

Michigan 2006
u*I
Identity politics and other forms of relativism collapse into justifications for capitalism because that is the
only ideology capable of acconiniodating such disparate visions of justice. Only the search for universal
truths can resist this trend.
Badiou '03 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Snint Paul: The Foundation qf Universc~lirnz,p.6-7)
- , effect, does our contemporary situation consist of! The

C ~ h a tin
~roeressive reduction of the question of truth (and hence, of thought)
1 U - to
a linguistic form, judgment-a point on which Anglophone analytical
t
Ideology and the herrneneutical tradition both concur (the analytlcl

hermeneutic doublet is the straightjacket of contemporary academic phi-
losophy)--ends up in a cultural and historical relativism that today con-
stitutes at once a topic of public opinion, a .'political'' motivation, and a
framework for research in the human sciences. 'i'he exrreme forms of this
relativism, already at work, claim to relegate mathematics itself to a;
"~ccidental"setup, to which any number of obscurantist or symbolically
trivial apparatus& could be rendered equivalent, provided one is able to
name the subset of humanity that supports this apparatus, and, better
still, that one has reasons for believing this subset to be made up of vic-
tims. All access to the universal, which neither tolerates assignation to
the p'artfcular, nor marntalns any direct relation with the status-
&ether it be that of dominator or victim--of the sites from whlch its
proposition emerges, collapses when confronied with this intersection
-
between cuIturafist ideology and the "victim&" [victimire]conception
of man.
-
What is the real unifying factor behind this attempt to promote the
cultural vlrtue of oppressed subsets, this invocation of language in ordG
.
to extol communitarian particularisms (which, besides language, always
..
, s r e f e r a c r , r e l w , or

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
It will be objected that, in the present case, for us "truth" designates

a mere fable. Granted, but what is important is the subjective gesture
grasped in its founding power with respect to the generic conditions of
universality. That the content of the fable must be abandoned leaves as irs
remainder the form of these conditions and, in particular, the ruin of
every attempt to assign the discourse of truth to preconstituted historical
aggregates.
To sharply separate each truth procedure from the cultural "his-
toricity'' wherein opinion presumes to dissolve it: such is the operation in
which Paul is our guide.
To rethink this gesture, to unravel its twists and turns, to enliven
its singularity, its instituting force, is without doubt a contemporary ne-
cessitv. -
tary abstraction, whose false universality has absolutely no difficulty ac-

commodating the kaleidoscope of communitarianisms. The lengthy years
of communist dictatorship will have had the merit of showing that fi-
nancial globalization, the absolute sovereignty of capital's empry univer-
sality, had as its only genuine enemy another universal project, albeit a
corrupt and bloodstained one: that only Lenin and Mao rrulyfrigtened
those who proposed to boast unreservediy about the merits of liberalism
and the general equivalent, or the democratic virtues of commercial com-
munication. The senescent collapse of the USSR, the paradigm of social-
ist States, provisionally suspended fear, unleashed empty abstraction, de-
based thought in general. And it is certainly not by renouncing the
concrete universality of truths in order to affirm the rights of "minori-
ties," be they racial, religious, national, o r sexual, that the devastation Gill
be slowed down. No, we wrll not allow the rights of true-thought to have
as their only instance monetarist tree exchange and its mediocre political
appendage, capitalist-parliamentarmism, whose squaiol is e ~ e rmorc
poorly
-
dissimulated behind the fine word "democracy.',

Michigan 2006 a3.3
'l'his is why Paul, himselk the contemporary of a monumental fig-

ure of the destruction of all politics (the beginnings of that military des-
potism known as "the Roman Empire"), interests us in the highest de- J
gree. He is the one who, assigning to the universal a specific connection

of law and the subject, asks himself with the most extreme rigor what
-
price is to be paid for this assignment, by the law as well as by the subject.
This interrogation is precisely our own. Supposing we were able to re:
found the connection between truth and the subject, then what consei
quences must we have the strength to hold fast to, on the side of trut6
(event& LevenementielLeJand hazardous) as well as on the side of the sub-
- ject (rare and heroic)?
C
It is by confronting this question, and no other, that philosophy

A
can a s s -
;ng up the worst. lhat it can measure up to the times in which we l ~ v e
C
otherwise than by flattering their savage inertia. , J
In the case of our own country, France, of the public destiny of its
Stare, what can we point to in the way of a noticeable tendency of the last
fifieen years? Norwithstanding, of course, the constant expansion of cap-
, i d ' s automatic functioning that shelters behind the signifiers of Europe

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006

ldentity politics are mutually exclusive with Badiou's alternative.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to fruth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis /
London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European
Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy).
Every invocation "of custom. of communitv. works directly against truths" (E, 67; cf. PP, 19). Badiou
reiects categorically the idea that true understanding is a function of belonging to a given community. This
idea results in "catastrophic statements, on the model: only a homosexual can 'understand' what a
homosexual is. only an Arab an Arab, etc." (SP, 13). No community, be it real or virtual, corresponds to
philosophy, and all genuine philosophy is characterized by the "indifference of its address, " its lack of
explicit destination, partner, or disciple. Mindful of Heideggerrs notorious political engagement, Badiou is
especially wary of any effort to "inscribe philosophy in historv" or identify its appeal with a articular
cultural tradition or group (C, 85,75-76). Philosophy and communal specificity are mutually exclusive:
"Every particularity is a conformation, a conformism, " whereas every truth is a nonconforming. Hence the
search for a rigorously generic form of community, roughly in line with Blanchot's communaute
inavouable, Nancy's communautk dbsoeuvree, and Agamben s coming community, so many variations of a
f
pure presentation without presence. 89 The only community consistent with truth would be a "communism
of singularities, " a community of "extreme particularity." 90 Nothing is more opposed to the truth of
community than knowledge of a communitarian substance, be it French, Jewish, Arab, or Western. As
Deleuze might put it, philosophy must affirm the necessary detemtorialization of truth. "I see nothing but
national if not religious reaction, " Badiou writes, "in the use of expressions like 'the Arab community,' 'the
Jewish community,' 'the Protestant community.' The cultural idea, the heavy sociological idea of the self-
contained and respectable multiplicity of cultures ..., is foreign to thought. The thing itself, in politics, is
acultural, as is every thought and every truth." 91 What may distinguish Badiou s critique of the communal
f
is the rigor with which he cames it through to its admittedly unfashionable concIusion: "The whole ethical
predication based upon recognition of the other must be purely and simply abandoned. For the real
question-and it is an extraordinarily difficult one-is much more that of recognizing the Same." 92 An
ontology of infinite multiplicity posits alterity-infinite alterity-as the very substance of what is. So,
"differences being what there is, and every truth being the coming to be of that which is not yet, differences
are then precisely what every truth deposes, or makes appear insignificant." Difference is what there is; the
Same is what comes to be, as truth, as "indifferent to differences" (E, 27). True iustice is either for a11 or
not at all.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: IDENITTY POLlTICS

ldentoty politics is a contradiction in terms. Emphasizing particular identity categories can never be the
foundation for liberation because truly political moves must search for the universal.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis 1
London 2003, Professor of Modem European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modem European
The very notion of identity politics is thus an explicit contradiction in terms. The OP regularly condemns
the articulation of a "'French' identity that authorizes discrimination or persecution" of any kind; the only
legitimate national unit is one that counts all of its elements as one, regardless of ethnocultural particularity.
26 The left-liberal insistence on the vacuous "right to remain 'the same as ourselves' has no chance against
the abstract universaIity" of contemporary capital, and does nothing more than "organize an inclusion in
what it pretends to oppose." 27 Of course. it has often been argued that if we are oppressed as Arab, as
woman. as black, as homosexual. and so on, this oppression will not end until these particular categories
have been revalued. 28 Badiou's response to this line of attack is worth quoting at length: When 1 hear
people say, "We are oppressed as blacks, as women, " I have only one problem: what exactly is meant by
"black" or "women"? ... Can this identity, in itself, function in a progressive fashion, that is, other than as a
property invented by the oppressors themselves? ... I understand very well what "black" means for those
who use that predicate in a logic of differentiation, oppression, and separation, just as I understand very
well what "French" means when Le Pen uses the word, when he champions national preference, France for
the French, exclusion of Arabs, etc.. .. Negritude, for example, as incarnated by CCsaire and Senghor,
consisted essentially of reworking exactly those traditionaI predicates once used to designate black people:
as intuitive, as natural, as primitive, as living by rhythm rather than by concepts, etc.. .. I understand why
this kind of movement took place, why it was necessary. It was a very strong, very beautifid, and very
necessary movement. But having said that, it is not something that can be inscribed as such in politics. I
think it is a matter of poetics, of culture, of turning the subiective situation u ~ s i d edown. It doesn't provide
a possible framework for political initiative. The progressive formulation of a cause that engages cultural or
communal predicates. linked to incontestable situations of oppression and humiliation. presumes that we
propose these predicates, these particularities, these singularities, these communal qualities, in such a wav
that they become situated in another space and become heterogeneous to their ordinary oppressive
operation. I never know in advance what quality, what particularity, is capable of becoming political or not;
1 have no preconceptions on that score. What I do know is that there must be a progressive meaning to
these particularities, a meaning that is intelligible to all. Otherwise, we have something that has its raison
d'ftre, but that is necessarily of the order of a demand for integration, that is, of a demand that one's
particularity be valued in the existing state of things.. ..

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: ClTlZENSHlP
Citizenship designations only exist for persecution of the non-citizen-the law, designed to be a universal
7
recognition of the rights and values of all humanity, is split from within into law for "us ' and separate law
for "them". The use of such categories aIlowed for the holocaust.
Badiou '03 (Aiain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Soint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, p.8-9)
G a s , the only ;hing we can point to by way of reply to this question

is the permanent installation of Le Pen's party,* a truly national singular-
ity, whose equivalent we have to go all the way to Austria to find, hardly
a flattering comparison. And whar constitutes this party's unique maxim!
The maxim that none of the parliamentary parries dare directly oppose,
so that they all vote for or tolerate those increasingly villainous laws that
are implacably deduced from it? The maxim in question is: "France for
the French." In the case of the State, this leads back to what served as the
paradoxical name given by PCtain to a puppet state, zealous servant of the
Nazi occupier: the French State. How does the noxious question "What
is a French person?" come to iktall itself at the heart of the public
sphere? But everyone knows there is no tenable answer to this question
other than through the persecution of those people arbitrarily designated
as the non-French. 'She unique politicalreal proper to the word "French,"
when the latter is upheld as a founding category in the State, is the in-
creasingly insistent installation of relentlessly discriminatory measures
targeting people who are here, or who are trying to live here. And it is
particularly striking that this persecutory real proper to identitarian logic
(the Law is only valid for the French) gathers under the same banner-as
is shown by the sorry affair of the@ulard**-resigned advocates of capi-
talist devastation (persecution is inevitable because unemployment pri-
cludes all hospitality) and advocates of a "French republic" as ghostly as
it is exceptional (foreigners are only tolerable so long as they "integrateyy
themselves into the magnificent model presented to them by our pure in- .
*A reference to Jean-MarieLe Pen's Front National, an extreme right-wing
party that continues to enjoy significant electoral success in France.-Trans.
**L'affairedufoulard refers to a controversy over the wearing of the tradi-
tional Muslim headscarf @ulard) by young Arab women in French secondary
schools. Since the French educational system explicitly prohibits the wearing of
religious garb or paraphernalia in class, some teachers protested and refused to
teach students who insisted on wearing the headscarf, arguing that tolerating the
infraction of one ethnic group provided a dangerous precedent that could only
incite students of other religious denominations to follow suit, thereby under-
mining the French educational system's secular ethos.-Trans.
&bba.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
stitutions, our astonishing systems of education and representation).

Proof that, so far as peoples' real lives and what happens to them is con-
cerned, there exists a despicable complicity between the globalized logic
of capital and French identitarian kanaticism.
What is being constructed betore our very eyes is the communita-
r i z a t i o n u nt
neutrality. 'l'he State 1s supposed to assure itself primarily and perma-
nently of the genealogically, religiously, and racially verifiable identity of
v p s
k e n three, d~stlncrregrons of the law, according to whether the latter are'
&uly French, integrated or integratable foreigners, or finally foreigners
who are declared to be unintegrated, or even unintegratable. The law
thereby falls under the control of a "national" model devoid of any real
principle, unIess it be that of the persecutions it initiates. Abandoning all
hiversa1 principle, identitarian verification-which is never anyrhing
but police monitoring-comes to take precedence over the definition or
application of the law. This means that, just as under PCtain, when min-
isters saw nothing wrong in surrept~tiouslydefining the Jew as prototype
of the non-French, all legislation would be accompanied by the required
identitarian protocols, and subsets of the population would come to be
defined each time by their special status. 'lhis arrangement is taking iis
course, as successive governments each bring to it their own special
touch. We are dealing with a rampant "PCtaini~ation'~ of the State.
How clearly Paul's statement rings out under these conditions! A 1
genuinely stupefying statement when one knows the rules of the ancient
world: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free:
there is neither male nor female" (Gal. 3.28)! And how appropriate, for
we who will unpr~blematicall~ replace God by this or that truth, and
Good by the service this truth requires, the maxim "Glory, honor, and
peace for every one that does good, ro the Jew first and also to the Greek.
For God shows no partiality" (Rom. 2.10). \

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: DECONSTRUCTfON
Badiou's notion of a truth event is mutually exclusive with the extreme skepticism of deconstruction.
Zizek 99 (Slavoj, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School in Saas-
Fee, Switzerland, The ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, p. 133- 135)
~ n ofkBadiou's great theses is that the pure multiple lacks the dignity
of the proper object of thought: from Stalin to Derrida, philosophical
common sense has always insisted o n infinite complexity (everything is
interconnected; reality is so complex that it is accessible to us only in
approximations . . .).sm
n- deconstructionism i ~ e l f
as the latest version of this common-sense motif of infinite complexity.
Among the advocates of 'anti-essentialist' postmodern identity politic-r
6xample, one often encounters the insistence that there is no 'woman 5
general', there are only white middle-class women, black single mothers,
lesbians, and so on. One should reject such 'insights' as banalities unw0.r-
thy of being objects of thought. The problem of philosophical thought
lies precisely in how the universality of 'woman' emerges out of a i s
endless multitude. Thus, one can also rehabilitate the flegelian differen;;
between bad (spurious) and proper infinity: the first refers to common-
sense infinite complexity; the second concerns the infinity of an Event,
which, precisely, transcends the 'infinite complexity' of its context. Jn
exactly the same way one can distinguish between historicism and historic-
ity proper: histolicism refers to the set of economic, political, cultural,
and so on, circumstances whose complex interaction allows us to account
for the Event to be explained, while historicity proper involves the specific
temporality of the Event and its aftermath, the span between the Event
and its final End (between Christ's death and the Last Judgement,
between Revolution and Communism, between falling in love and the
accomplished bliss of living together. . .).
Perhaps the gap separating Badiou from the standard postmode?
deconstructionist political theorists is ultimately created by the fact that
the latter remain within the confines of the pessimistic wisdom of the
failed encounter: is not the ultimate deconstructionist lesson that every
enthusiastic encounter with the Real Thing, every pathetic identification
of a positive empirical Event with it, is a delusive semblance sustained by
the short circuit between a contingent positive element and the preceding
universal Void? In it, we momentarily succumb to the illusion that the

Seven Week Seniors BADlOU
Michigan 2006 2;z C L 4 4 T i b 1 ~ 1sob8
t~ 153-13s 17.
3'
promise of impossible Fullness is actually realized - that, to paraphrase
Derrida, democracy is no longer merely t5 venir but has actually arrived;
from this, deconstructionists draw the conclusion that the principal
ethico-political duty is to maintain the gap between the Void of the central
impossibility and every positive content giving body to it - that is, never
fulIy to succumb to the enthusiasm of hasty identification of a positive
Event with the redemptive Promise that is always 'to come'. In this
deconstructionist stance, admiration for the Revolution in its utopian
enthusiastic aspect goes hand in hand with the conservative melancholic
insight that enthusiasm inevitably turns into its opposite, into the worst
terror, the moment we endeavour to transpose it into the positive struc-
turing principle of social reality.
It may seem that Badiou remains within this framework: does not he
also warn against the disastre of the revolutionary temptation to confound
the Truth-Event with the order of Being: of the attempt to 'ontologize'
Tnith into the ontolofical principle of the order of Being? However,
things are more cornpl&: ~adiou';position is that although the uniyprs?l
Order has the status of a semblance. from time to time, in a contincent w
and unpredictable way, a 'miracle' can happen in the gulse of a Tfi-$=

G e n t that deservedIy shames a postmodernist sceptic. What he has in
mlnd is a very precise political experience. For example, in France, during
the first Mitterrand government in the early 1980s, all well-meaning
Leftists were sceptical about Minister of justice Robert Badinter's inten-
tion to abolish the death penalty and introduce other progressive refoms
of the penal code. Their stance was Yes, of course we support him; but is
the situation yet ripe for it? Will the people, terrified by the rising crime
rate, be willing to swallow it? Isn't this a case of idealistic obstinacy that
can only weaken our government, and do us more harm than good?'.
Badinter simply ignored the catastrophic predictions of the opinion polls,
and persisted - with the surprising result that, all of a sudden, it was the
majority of the people who changed their minds and started to support
him.
A similar event happened in Italy in the mid 1970s, when there was a
referendum on divorce. In private, the Left, even the Communists - who,
of course, supported the right to divorce - were sceptical about the
outcome, fearing that the majority of people were not yet mature enough,
that they would be frightened by the intense Catholic propaganda depict-
ing abandoned children and mothers, and so on. To the great surprise of
everyone, however, the referendum was a great setback for the Church
and the Right, since a considerable majority of 60 per cent voted for the
right to divorce. Events like this do occur in politics, and they are
authentic Events belying snarnerul -post-ideologicalrealism': they are 'hi3
rnomentaly enthusiastic outbunts occasionally dlsturblng the ' s u i
depressive/ conlbr misr/.uuhtanan run ot th~ngs,only to be followed by ah-
inexorable sobering disillusionment 'the morning after'; on the contk*,
--
& - . e r u l'hey are the moment of Truth in the overall structure of deception a i do
G t , that 'nothing really happens', that the Truth-Event is a passing,
--.a
illusory short circuit, a false identification to be dispelled sooner or later
by the reassertion of difference or, at best, the fleeting promise of the
Redemption-to-come, towards which we have to maintain a proper dis-
tance in order to avoid catastrophic 'totalitarian' consequences; against
this structural scepticism, Badiou is fullyj~~stifiedin insisting that - to ute
the term with its full theological weight - mzrncles do happen. . . . j
. ---
4
Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
LINK: TERRORISM
The politics of the war on terrorism creates a simplistic division into rigid moral categories of Good vs Evil
that function as propaganda-resisting investigation of the causes of violence. Such thoughtlessness
generates perpetual warfare.
Badiou, 02 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Theory and Event, 6:2, "Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts").
It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word "terrorist" is an intrinsically
propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political
situations, their causes and their consequences. In fact, it is a term that has become essentially formal. No
longer does "terrorist" designate either a political orientation or the possibilities of such and such a
situation, but rather, and exclusively. the form of the act. And it does so according to three criteria. It is first and foremost -- for
-
public opinion and those concerned with shaping it a spectacular, non-State action, which emerges from clandestine networks, really or mythologically.
Secondly, it is a violent action aiming to kill andlor destroy. Lastly, it is an action which makes no distinction between civilians and non-civilians. This
formaiism goes hand-in-hand with Kant's moral formalism. That is the reason why a "moral philosophy" specialist like Monique Canto believed she
could declare that the absolute condemnation of "terrorist" actions and the symmetrical approval of reprisals, including those of Sharon in Palestine,
could and should precede all critrcal examination of the situation and be abstracted from general political consideration. As it is a matter of "terrorism",
expfained this iron lady of a new breed, to explain is already to justify. It is convenient to punish without delay and without
further examination. Henceforth, "terrorism" qualifies an action as being the formal figure of Evil. That is
exactly. moreover, the way Bush conceived of the expenditure of vengeance right from the start: Good
(factually speaking, State terrorism of villages and ancient cities of Central Asia) against Evil (non-State
terrorism of "Western" buildings). At this crucial point. as all rationality risks folding beneath the
immensity of such propanandistic evidence, one must be carehl to be sure of the details and, in particular,
to examine the effects of the nominal chain induced by the passage from the adiective "terrorist" -- as the
formal qualification of an action -- to the substantive "terrorism". Indeed, such is the moment when,
insidiously, form becomes substance. Three kinds of effect are thereby rendered possible: a subject-effect
(facing "terrorism" is a "we" avenging itself); an alterity-effect (this "terrorism" is the other of Civilisation,
the barbarous Islam); and finally, a periodisation-effect (now commences the long "war against
terrorism").... My thesis is that, in the formal representation it makes of itself, the American imperial power
privileees the form of war as an attestation -- the only one -- of its existence. Moreover, one observes today
that the vowerful subjective unity that canies (away) the Americans in their desire for vengeance and war is
constructed immediately around the flag and the army. The United States has become a hegemonic power
in and thr0u~;hWar: from the civil war, called the war of Secession (the first modem war by its industrial means and the number of deaths); then
the two World Wars; and finally the uninterrupted continuation of local wars and military interventions of all kinds since the Korean War up until the
present ransacking of Afghanistan, passing via Lebanon, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Libya, Panama, Barbados, the Gulf War, and Serbia, not to mention
their persistent support for Israel in its war without end against the Palestinians. Of course, one will hasten to add that the USA won the day in the Cold
War against the USSR on the terrain of military rivalry (Reagan's Star Wars project pushed the Russians to throw in the towel) and are understood to be
doing the same thing against China, by the imposition of an exhausting armament race (that is the only sense of the pharaoh-like anti-missile shield
project) by means of which one hopes to discourage any project of great magnitude. This should remind us, in these times of economic obsession, that in
the last instance power continues to be military. Even the USSR, albeit it ruined, insofar as it was considered as an important military power (and above
all by the Americans), continued to co-direct the world. Today the USA has the monopoly on the aggressive financial backing of enormous forces of
destruction, and does not hesitate to serve itself with them. And the consequences of that can be seen, including (notably) in the idea that the American
--
people has of itself and of what must be done. Let's hope that the Europeans - and the Chinese draw the imperative lesson from the situation: servitude
is promised to those who do not watch careful~yover their armed forces. Being forged in this way out of the continual barbarity
of war -- leaving aside the genocide of the Indians and the importation of tens of millions of black slaves --
the USA quite naturally considers that the only riposte worthy of them is a spectacular staging of power.
Truly speaking;, the adversary matters little and may be entirely removed fiom the initial crime. The pure
capacity to destroy this or that will do the job. even if at the end what is left is a few thousand miserable
devils or a phantomatic "government". Provided, in sum. that the appearance of victory is overwhelmine,
any war is convenient. What we have here (and will also have if the USA continues in Somalia and in Iraq
etc.,) is war as pure form. as the theatrical capture of an adversary ("Terrorism") in its essence vague and
elusive. The war against nothing: itself removed from the very idea of war.
Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Wilt

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
IMAPACT: TERRORISM
Terrorism is the inevitable result of the nihilistic values of capitalist ideology.
Badiou, 02 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Theory and Event, 6:2, "Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts").
There is a synthesis since, to our mind, the principal actors are of the same kind. Yes. Bin Laden, or
whoever financed the crime. on the one hand, and the foundations of the American superpower. on the
other. belong, to the same world -- nihilistic -- of money, of blind power, of cynical rivalry, of the "hidden
gold" of primary resources, of total scorn for the everyday lives of people, and of the arrogance of self-
certitude. based on the void. And of moral and religious platitudes plated onto all that: on both sides Good,
Evil, and God serve as rhetorical ornaments in iousts of financial ferocity and schemes for hegemonic
power. There is a disjunction in that it is inevitably under the form of crime that these actors seek and find
each other. Whether the crime is the d~recating,secretly machinated and suicidal crime of New York, or
crimes of State -- Kabul, Kandahar, and elsewhere -- reinforced with anaesthetised machines brinping death
to others and zero death to oneself. The mass crime is the exact inverse of the imperial brutality. It -- real or
borrowed -- personnel (Bin Laden. the Taliban etc). come directly from the cookhouses of that American
hegemony. which educated and financed it, iust as it desires a place of choice in the system -- it is the
reverse side of the coin. At that point religion is nothing but a demagogic vocabulary worth neither more nor less that the populist "anti-
capitalism" slogans of fascists in the thirties. One speaks for the "disinherited" Muslims, but wants to become a billionaire Saudi Arabian, that is to say
American, just as one had the "German Worker" on one's lips solely in order to become the State commensal of canon merchants. On Bush's side, one is
--
with God, The Good, Democracy, and also America (it's the same thing) tracking down Evil but in reality it is a matter of reminding all those
disobedient imperial creatures that they will be reduced to ashes if they think about undermining the Master. If not them, then their parents. And if not
their parents, then those accursed with whom they live. And if not them then their hosts, no matter, any unfortunates vaguely resembling them will do. As
the Defence Secretary, Rumsfeld, declared with the fiank speech of an imperialist in chase, it is a matter of killing as many people as possible. It must be
said that some of those suave American professors lent him a helping hand in asking whether or not, considering the circumstances, it wouldn't be usefit1
to use torture - to which some even more refined American professors objected that it would be in any case preferable to expedite the suspects to allied
countries where torture is an official method. Upon the latest news, we hear that they are being rounded up, drugged and chained for transportation to the
--
thousands of celis hastily constructed in a base at Guantanamo, Cuba appreciate the irony. In the same Way as the crime of New
York, America's war is unconnected to any law and indifferent to any project. On both sides. it is a matter
of striking blindly to demonstrate the strike capacity. It is a matter of bloody and nihilistic games of power
without purpose and without truth. All the formal traits of the crime of New York indicate its nihilistic
character: the sacralisation 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
behind the crime. For affirmative, liberating, non-nihilistic political violence is not only always claimed,
but finds its essence in claiming. In 194 1, when the first resistance fighters killed a German officer or blew
up a pylon, it was only ever to say "it's us, the Resistance! Resistance exists and will continue to strike
back!" The tract, saying who did what, must accompany the act (acte). Violence is, to forge a neologism, a
Tract(e).[3] There is none of any of that today. The act remains unnamed and anonymous just like the
culprits. We see in that tbe infallible sign of a sort of fascist nihilism. And opposite it we have the nihilism
proper to the old name of "capital". Das Kapital. The latter is nihilist in its extensive form -- the market
having become world-wide -- in its fetishisation of the formalism of communication. and in its extreme
political poverty, that is to say, in the absence of any proiect other than its perpetuation -- the perpetuation
of American hegemony and vassality, as comfortable as possible. for the others.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
IMPACT: KEY TO MEANINGFUL EXISTENCE
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of lllinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj ziiek, Waiting for
Now, for Badiou, the genuine problem of ethics, the question of the good, is entirely bound up with the
status of truth. For the only thing that distinguishes human from animal is the vocation for truth: outside of
this vocation. humanity is simply. like anv other predatory animal "whose charms are not obvious" (Ethics,
12), beneath good and evil, The human subiect does not preexist truth: on the contrary, there is "only a
.
particular kind of animal, convoked by certain circumstances, to become a subject. . . At a certain
moment, everything he is-his body, his abilities-is called upon to enable the passing of a truth along its
path" (41). Only in relation to truth does humanity become capable of good or evil.

Michigan 2006 31
IMPACT: HUMAN RIGHTS KILLS MILLIONS/AT: NO SPEC ALT

Promoting human rights and democracy as the only viable politics allows millions to die from brutal
economic inequalities. And, their demand that we have a more specific alternative dooms us to
maintaining status quo power relations-the onus is on them to prove that their political vision has positive
content, not on us to say that we have a specific alternative.
Badiou, 02 (Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland

Translated/lnterviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
h~://www.cabinetma~azine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.hp, On Evil: An interview with Alain Badiou).
Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system. ~arlimentarianism,as the only natural and
acceptable solutions. Everv revolutionary idea is considered utopian and ultimately criminal. We are made
to believe that the global spread of ca~italismand what gets called "democrac~"is the dream of all
humanity. And also that the whole world wants the authority of the American Empire, and its military
police, NATO. In truth, our leaders and propagandists know verv well that liberal capitalism is an
inegalitarian regime, uniust, and unacceptable for the vast majoritv of humanity. And they know too that
our "democracy" is an illusion: Where is the power of the people? Where is the political Dower for third
world peasants. the European working class, the poor everywhere? We live in a contradiction: a brutal state
of affairs, urofoundly inegalitarian-where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone-is presented
to us as ideal. To iustify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal
or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not
live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our
democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not
criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist
declarations like Milosevic. We kill lraqis with our airplanes. but we don't cut their throats with machetes
like they do in Rwanda, etc. That's why the idea of Evil has become essential. No intellectual will actually
defend the brutal power of money and the accompanying political disdain for the disenfranchised, or for
manual laborers, but many agree to say that real Evil is elsewhere. Who indeed today would defend the
Stalinist terror, the African genocides, the Latin American torturers? Nobody. It's there that the consensus
concerning Evil is decisive. Under the pretext of not accepting Evil. we end up making believe that we
have. if not the Good. at least the best possible state of affairs-even if this best is not so great. The refrain
of "human rights" is no thin^ other than the ideology of modem liberal capitalism: We won't massacre you,
we won't torture you in caves, so keep quiet and worship the golden calf. As for those who don't want to
worship it. or who don't believe in our superiority, there's always the American army and its European
minions to make them be quiet.

Michigan 2006 32
IMPACT: PERPETUAL WAR

A failure to search for the universal nature of Good and Evil collapses such distinctions-allowing the
West to wage perpetual war on enemy outsiders.
Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERlCAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ
Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223-238 ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477-2876 n2004 Taylor & Francis
Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uWiournals)
From the moment we begin to live indistinctly in the war of democracies against Islamic terrorism, which
is to sav, quite simply. the war of Good (democratic) against Evil (dictatorial), operations of war -
expeditions, bombings - don't need to be any more solemnl~announced than do police
raids on petty criminals. By the same token, assassinating heads of state, their wives, children, and
grandchildren, or putting a price on their heads like in a western, no longer surprises anyone. Thus, little by
little the continuity of war comes to be established. the declaration of which, in times past. showed that, on
the contrary, war was the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity renders war and peace
indistin~uishable.This means that the question of the protagonists of the state of war is more and more
obscure. "Terrorists," "rogue states." "dictatorships," "lslamists": iust what are these ideological entities?
Who identifies them, who proclaims them? Traditionally, there were two kinds of war: on the one hand,
symmetrical war, between comparable imperial powers, like the two world wars of the twentieth century,
or like the cold war between the USA and the USSR; on the other hand, non-symmetrical or
dissymmetrical wars between an imperial power and popular forces theoretically much weaker in terms of
military power - either wars of colonial conquest (the conquest of Algeria, the Rif war, or the
extermination of the Indians in North America), or wars of national liberation (Vietnam, Algeria, and so
forth). Today, we can talk about dissymmetrical wars, but without the political identity of the dissymmetry
being really conceivable. The proof for this lies in the fact that invasion and occupation ooerations
(Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, and so on) are explicitly presented as liberations - and this despite the fact that
the local populations don't see things in that way at all. In fact. now the concent of war only designates the
use of violence, disposed in variable dissymmetries. The only invariable trait is dissymmetry: only the
weak are targeted, and as soon as the shadow of power can be seen (North Korea's atomic bomb, the
Russia of brutal extortions in Chechnya, the heavy hand of the Chinese in Tibet), war - war which might
risk actually becoming war, and not the peace of the police, or peace/war (la pe 'guerre apre 's 1'upre 's-
perre?)-is not on the agenda. In fact, if the American wars don't constitute any kind of present, it's
because, being politically unconnected to any dialectic, whether interimperialist, whether according to the
warlrevolution schema, they are not really distinguishable from the continuity of "peace." And by "peace"
is meant American, or "western," peace, democratic peace/war, whose entire content is the comfort of the
above-mentioned "democrats"against the barbarian aaaressiveness of the poor.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
ALTERNATIVE SOLVES
Radical questioning does and has produced new forms of politics-any past failures of revolutionary
thought are reasons to re-dedicate ourselves, not to give in to the savage and destructive nihilism of status
quo politics.

Translatedllnterviewed by Christoph Cox & MoHy Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
http://www.cabinetmap;azine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php, On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).
Note that even Churchill said that democracy (that is to say the regime of liberal capitalism) was not at all
the best of political regimes, but rather the least bad. Philosophy has always been critical of commonly held
opinions and of what seems obvious. Accept what you've got because all the rest belongs to Evil is an
obvious idea, which should therefore be immediately examined and critiqued. My personal position is the
following: It is necessaw to examine. in a detailed way. the contemporary theory of Evil, the ideology of
human rights, the concept of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there leads in the direction of
the real emancipation of hurnanitv. It is necessary to reconstruct rights, in everydav life as in politics, of
Truth and of the Good. Our ability to once again have real ideas and real proiects depends on it.
You sav that. for liberal capitalism. evil is always elsewhere, the dreaded other, something that liberal
capitalism believes it has thankfully banished and kept at bay. ... My position is obviously that this
"reasoning" is purely illusory ideology. First, liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Ouite the
contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. Second, the Communist revolutions of the 20th
century have represented grandiose efforts to create a completely different historical and political universe.
Politics is not the management of the power of the State. Politics is first the invention and the exercise of an
absolutely new and concrete reality. Politics is the creation of thought. The Lenin who wrote What is to be
Done?, the Trotsky who wrote History of the Russian Revolution, and the Mao Zedong who wrote On the
Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People are intellectual geniuses, comparable to Freud or
Einstein. Certainly, the politics of emancipation, or egalitarian politics, have not, thus far, been able to
resolve the problem of the power of the State. They have exercised a terror that is finally useless. But that
should encourage us to pick up the question where they left it off. rather than to rally to the ca~italist,
imperialist enemy.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
ALTERNATIVE SOLVES1 AT: PERM
Fidelity to an event must stand apart from the state-it is an individual grasping at the truth of the situation
at hand through real, lived intervention. It is a totalitarian fiction to claim that the individual fails in the face
of the state-a struggle with truth undermines the ideological state apparatus and forces a response.
at Cardiff University. AIain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, pa6-87, 102, 109)
6 h e fidelity procedure, employing this form of judgement, is a

subjective operation, although Badiou refuses to allow it the status of
'a capacity, a subjective trait, [or] a virtue'. Instead, he explains,
'Fidelity is a functional relation to the event' which succeeds the
manifestly pr0ven.l Similarly the objective existence of a fidelity

operator (a noun or proper name linked to the preceding interven-
tion) is quite different from the way in which this operator actually
functions during the course of an evaluation. Can we therefore say
that fidelity, as a body or institution, enjoys relative autonomy from
the state? 'A fidelity is strongly distinct, from the state,' Badiou
explains, 'if it is in some way u n a s s i m l e to a defined function of
the state, if its result is a part which, from the point of view of the
state, is particularly lacking in sense' (EE, 263). One need merely
recall the 'slippage' (gNssement)hf the Cultural Revolution in China,
that mass signifying chain which in due course went off the rails, as
the most striking example of the unassignable in question. Of
course, in general, in the wider (objective) scheme of things, the
fidelity procedure changes nothing, and exposes no part of the state
apparatus, since the state simply counts as one multiples which are
'already discerned'. The fidelity procedure in the end always has the
'backing' of the state apparatus. 'Certainly,' Badiou acknowledges
'fidelity, as procedure, is not.'
At each instant however, an eventmental fidelity is seizable in a

) provisional result, which consists in effective inquests where it is
registered that multiples are, or are not, related [connexes] to the
event. (EE, 259-60)
There will always be those who question the integrity of mass polit-
ical movements, whether for alleged stage management or
ultimatelv for sellinn out to a higher Dower. Yet this is vreciselv w h s
u u x
the fidelitv ~rocedureunderstands and, hrtherrnore, founds itseIt od

~L
this deconstructive 'principle'. The state is 'only a crude approxima-

tion, in actual fact nil, of what fidelity is capable of'. Fidelity stands?
for degrees of relative autonomy - synonymous with the flourishink
of the many student movement; of 1968 -which are merely akin to
finite exercises in a kind of hyper-self-criticism. Rather than
providing reasons for beinginon-being we might say that the fidelity
procedure dispenses alibis for past behaviour. Either the multiple was
(reportedly) there at the site of the event or was not, and can there-
fore be connected, as a fidelity operator ('counter-revolutionary',
Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will m?fl J\J e 5\ , ,

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
'revisionist', 'fascist'), to the supernumerary name of the event

(lImperialism', 'the Twentieth Congress', 'the Third Reich') or it
cannot. There is no equivocation and no right of appeal. Fidelity is
surrounded with all the accoutrements of the state; it presents itself as
a- 'counter-state'
- - -- -
- - or 'sub-state' (EE, 258). What ultimately makes the
difference is the measure of distinction between sub-state and the
state itself, as well as the hazardous trajectory which leads out of order
to chaos.
The relentless circularity of the dialectic (from order to apparent
chaos and back again) provides good reason to highlight the political
significance of fidelity and its deductive procedures. Politics is not, A
after all, undermined by the truism that its current agenda is bound,
sooner or later, to become outdated. On the contrary, the strength of
the political intervention instead rests in defiing the law of nature (and
interrogating mrth), thereby puttlng otf the possibility of defeat until
L
e--
. (This is what art also aspires to in its 'suspension of
disbelief'.) For Badiou, politics - which (dis)appears as an ungras-
pable ontological agency - 'puts the State at a distance' (AM, 1 6 0 ) . 2
this sense we might say that fidelity is a part of the bod? ~oliticitself.
Politics is not a question of 'right' or 'lefttf good or bad, or

needless to say of voicing opinions in the lanmane of the situation'
('parliamentarism' for Rousseau). Such is nowadays more than ever 3
*
the vocation of the career politicians and their army of public rela-
tions ex~erts.Instead. nolitirq as a
politics, and one which is just as likely to end up confounding the

subject with heavy doses of scientism as in spreading enlightenment
(e.g. the dogmatic exaltation of socialist planning during China's
Great Leap Forward in May 1958). Truth has no particular interests.
It reveals itself while remaining indifferent to any consequences. Its
only condition is that the whole people raithlully and logicalI1
devote themselves to ~ t cause,
s believing that there is truth, even and
the situation in which they find themselves.

. - * .
.-- -
especially at times where truth is wholly absent - indiscernible - i6
-

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
:. The subject's 'point of application is precisely the errancy of the

statist excess' (EE, 468). The subject is not the one counted for by
the state; it is not re-presented. Instead, the subject is that singular
multiple which escapes counting, and whose local traiectory is a
therefore 'strictly unassinnable'. The fact that the state always

counts at least one multiple which doesn't belong to the situat'on
means that the state is quantitatively larger, and hence diffe ent /
from, the situation which it counts. However. we must avoid the
common misconception that the subiect is simnlv dominated by
{he State as the totalitarian fiction suggests. Adopting Althusser's
terminology, the subject is what induces the State to guarantee the
power of its own ideological apparatus iordinarily indifferent to
individuals), and to hold inquests into truth whenever 'misrecog-
nition' occurs; whenever subjects threaten to escape the systemi
t T pndincr nn d i r p r t l v frnm t h i c a n irnn-rc- -- c--m-l limit n m p r w p q
Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
ALTERNTATIVE SOLVES OPPRESSION
Badiou's open system of ethics as searching for truth is the best means of discovering social bonds that can
create genuine egalitarianism-allowing us to seize power from oppressive state systems.
at Cardiff University. Alnin Badiou: A Cn'fical Introduction, p. 147- 148)
- m o w does Balibar's theory of the State constitution stand along- tion which encourages a dynamic and expanding equilibrium of
side Badiou's, and can we find any key areas of mutual agreement desires where every opinion has an equal chance of counting in the
between these two ex-'Althusserians'? The most general area of democratic sphere. With Badiou we have an ethics of truths which
difference involves Balibar's 'aporetic' approach to the question of hunts down those exceptional political statements in order t o 4
the masses. Balibar refuses to see any principle underlying the subtract from them their egalitarian core, thereby striking ii blow for
masses' conduct, since the latter are synonymous with the power of justice against the passive democracy of the State. Overall we might
the State. Badiou, on the other hand, regards the masses (ideally) as say that the general area of agreement lies in the fact that, in each
the bearers o f the category of justice, to which the State remains case, 'democracy' remains a rational possibility. In particufar, for
indifferent (AM, 114). Two divergent theories of the State, then, each both Balibar and Badiou, it is love as an amorous feeling twvards or
of which is placed in the service of a distinctive ethics. With Balibar encounter with one's fellow man - a recognition that the fraternal
we have an ethics - or 'ethic' in the sense o f praxis - of communica- part that is held in common between human beings is so~nehow
'greater' than the whole of their differences - which forges the social
bond. However, on the precise nature of the ratio of this bond their
respective paths diverge somewhat. In Balibar's case we are dealing
with an objective illusion wherein one ir?tagitzes that the love one feels
for an object (an abstract egalitarian ideal, say) is shared by others.
Crucially, love in this sense is wholly ambivalent, wildly \?acillating
between itself and its inherent opposite, hate.18 On this evidence we
might say that a 'communist' peace would be really indistinct from
a 'fascist' one. Therefore, the challenge for Balibar is to construct a
prescriptive political framework capable of operating without repres-
sion in a utilitarian public sphere where the free exchange of
opinions is more likely than not to result in the self-limitation of
extreme views.
In Badiou's case what we are dealing with, on the other hand -
and what we have been dealing with more or less consistently
throughout this book - is a subjective reality. The social contract is
forever being conditioned, worked on practically from within by the
political militants, in readiness for the occurrence of the truth-event.
' e n
two natural adversaries (a group of stu=ts mounting a boycott of
university tees, for instance) which retrieves the latent communist
axiom of equality from within the social process. Here we have a
particular call for social justice ('free education for all!') which strikes
a chord with the whole -people - (students and non-students a ~ i k e ) . ~
si( infinite, de-finite, in seizing back tat
least a part of) the State power directly into the hands of the peo~lp.
horeover, In this encounter between students and the university
authorities there is an invariant connection (of comrnullist hope)
which is shared by all, and where any difference of opinioll is purely
incidental. Momentarily, at least.
For Badiou, the challenge is to develop and deepen an ethical

practice, not in any utwtarlan or cornrnunltarian sense - since the
latter would merely risk 'forcing' a politicai manifesto prematurely,
perhaps giv~ngrise to various brands of State-sponsored populis&lg
- but In tne sense of a politics capable of coilrbntirlg r-epressiorr; a
politics which, in its extreme singularity, holds itself open to seizure
s
b~ Truth. ,

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: ALTERNATIVE IMPRACTICAL

The alternative would have very concrete political implications. The search for universals is radically
egalitarian and makes it very easy to identify status quo injustices.
Badiou, 02 (Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,

Translated/lnterviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
http://www.cabinetmanazine.org/issues/5/aIainbadiou.php, On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).
In response to an earIier question, you remarked that "[ilt is necessary to reconstruct rights, in everyday life
as in politics, of Truth and of the Good." {Interviewer! Can you say more about how the ethic of truths
might get mobilized in practical terms, and how this might constitute an alternative to the current
conception of "human rights"? Take the nearest example: the terrible criminal attack in New York in
September, with its thousands of casualties. If you reason in terms of the morality of human rights, you say,
with President Bush: "These are terrorist criminals. This is a struggle of Good against Evil." But are Bush's
policies, in Palestine or Iraq for example, really Good? And, in saying that these people are Evil, or that
they don't respect human rights, do we understand anything about the mindset of those who killed
themselves with their bombs? Isn't there a lot of despair and violence in the world caused by the fact that
the politics of Western powers, and of the American government in particular, are umrly destitute of
ingenuity and value? In the face of crimes, terrible crimes, we should think and act according to concrete
political Truths, rather than be guided by the stereotypes of any sort of morality. The whole world
understands that the real question is the following: (Badious responds): Why do the politics of the Western
powers, of NATO, of Europe and the USA, appear completelv unjust to two out of three inhabitants of the
planet? Why are five thousand American deaths considered a cause for war, while five hundred thousand
dead in Rwanda and a projected ten million dead from AIDS in Africa do not, in our opinion, merit
outrage? Why is the bombardment of civilians in the US Evil. while the bombardment of Baghdad or
Belgrade today, or that of Hanoi or Panama in the past, is Good? The ethic of Truths that I propose
proceeds from concrete situations, rather than from an abstract right, or a spectacular Evil. The whole world
understands these situations. and the whole world can act in a disinterested fashion prompted by the
injustice of these situations. Evil in politics is easy to see: It's absolute inequality with respect to life,
wealth, power. Good is equality. How long can we accept the fact that what is needed for running water,
a
schools,~hospitals,and food enough for allhumanity is sum that corresponds to the amount spent by
wealthy Western countries on perfume in a year? This is not a question of human rights and moraliti. It is a
question of the fundamental battle for equality of all people, against the law of profit. whether personal or
national.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: NO SPECIFIC ALTERNATIVE
Their demand for a specific alternative fundamentally misses the point. Our argument is that politics
cannot be conducted by an armchair philosopher wielding pre-determined principles. Fidelity to an event
requires actual political engagement that requires the subject to risk old conceptions and search for what is
universal in that particular situation.
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, p. I 07- 109)
). In reality, the Pauline break has a bearing upon the formal condi-
tions and the inevitable consequences of a consciousness-of-truth rooted
in a pure evenr, detached from every objectivist assignation to the partic-
ular laws of a world or society yet concretely destined to become in-
scribed within a world and within a society. What Paul must be given ex-
clusive credit for establishing is that the fidelity to such an event exists :
-only through the termination of con~munitarianparticularisms and the ,
aetermination of a subject-of-troth who indistinguishes the One and the ,
&forall." T'hus, unlike effective truth procedures (science, art, politics,
love), the Pauline break does not base itself upon the production of a uni-
-venal. Its bearing. in a mythological context implacably reduced to a sin- -

gle point, a single statement (Christ is resurrected), pertains rather to the
laws of universality in This is why it can be called a theoretical
break, it being understood that in this instance "theoretical" is not being '
opposed to "practical," but to real. Paul is a founder, in that he is one of .
the very first theoreticians of the universal.
,A second difficulty is then that Paul could be identified as a
philosopher. I have myself maintained that what is proper to philosophy
is not the production of universal truths, but rather the organization of
their synthetic reception by forging and reformulating the category of
Truth. Auguste C o n ~ t edefined the philosopher as one who "specialized
in generalities." Is not Paul someone who specializes in the general cate-
gories of a11 universalism?
We will suspend this objection by claiming that Paul is not a ,
philosopher precisely because he assigns his thought to a singular event,
rather than a set of conceptual generalities. That this singular event is of ,
the order of a fable prohibits Paul from being an arrist, or a scientist, or a
revolutionary of the State, but also prohibits all access to philosophical
subjectivity, which either subordinates itself to conceptual foundation or
auto-foundation, or places itself under the condition of reaitruth proce-
.
dures. For Paul, the truth event repudiates philosophical Truth, while for
us the fictitious dimension of this event repudiates its pretension to real
truth.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
Accordingly, we must say: Pazr l is nn fintiphilosophicaltheoretician of

univcrsoli~.That the event (or pure act) invoked by antiphilosophers is
ES does not present a poblcrn. It is equally so in Pascal (it is the
same as Paul's), or in Nietzsche (Nietzsche5 "grand politics" did not break
the history of the world in two; it was Nietzsche who was broken).
Antiphilosopher of genius, Paul warns the philosopher that the
condsions for the universal cannor be conceptual, either in origin, or in
So far as the origin is concerned, it is necessary that an event, which --

C
is a sort of grace supernumerary to every particularity, be what one pr
ceeds from in order to cast off differences.
So far as the destination is concerned, it can be neither predicative >I
nor judlciai. I here is no authul;Ly LcTulL w h k h tne result oi a truth pro- 5
J
-
cedure could bc brought to trial. A truth never appertains to Critique. It 1
is supported only by itself and is the correlare of a new type of subject; 7
neither transcendental nor substantial, entirely defined as militant of tke
-
1
truth in question. a
i
This is why, as Paul testifies in exemplary fashion, universalism, ,
which is an absolute (nonrelarive) subjective production, ind~stlngulshes,
saving and doing, thought and power. Thought becomes universal only
by addressing itself to all others, and it effectuates itself as power through
I
rhis address. But the moment all, including the solitary militant, are ;
counted accor&ng to the universal, it follows that what takes place is the
-. .
subsumption of the Other by the Same. Paul demonstrates in detail how
a universal thought, proceeding on the basis of the worldly proliferation '
of alterities (the Jew, the Greek, women, men, slaves, free men, and so
on), produces a Sameness and an Equality (there is no Longer either Jew,
'
or Greek, and so on). The production of equality and the casting off, in
I
thought, of differences are the material signs of the universa

'
I
Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: PERMUTATlON
Our alternative of fidelity to an event is mutually exclusive:
a) It is a call to dive into specific circumstances in terms of what makes them unique-the opposite
o f trying to impose universalism.
b) A genuine response to particular needs puts the ethical agent at risk o f discovering a new truth that
changes how they see the world-their ethics presuppose a fixed subject who rigidly applies rules
to situations.
Badiou, 93 (Alain Badiou is a professor of Philosophy at the Euroaean Graduate School in Saas-Fee.
Switzerland, Ethics, pane 40-44). From which 'decision', then, stems the process of - a truth?
.. --f
P
If there is no ethics 'in general', that is because there is no From the decision to relate henceforth to the situation from ....-
a-
&ststrict
.- Subject, who would adopt it as his shield. -
~ h ~ t e - the
2 perspective of its mental [hhzementid su#!emt.
a particular kind of animal, convoked by certain cir- this a fidelity. To be faithful to an event is to move within
Let us .- call
-
,.-,. L "
A
cumstances to become a subject - or rather, to e n t e r m e the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking =, -.-
---.----
(although all thought is a practice, a putting to the test) the-
A<
c o r n p o s i n g ~ h ~ T h i s i s a a gVeh t .
moment, everything he is - his body, his abilities - is called situation 'according to' the event. And this, of course -..-* -
upon to enable the passing of a truth along its path, This is since the event was excluded by all the regular laws of the
when the human animal is convoked [reguis] to be the situation - compels the subject to invent a new way of being
immortal that he was not yet. and acting in the situation.
What are these 'circumstances'? They are the circum- It is clear that under the efiect of a loving encounter, if I
want to be reallz, faithful to it, I must completely rework my
stances of a truth. But what are we to understand by that? 1;
ordinary way of 'living' my situation. If I want to be f a i t h f ~ ~ l
is clear that what there is [ce qa'il y a] (multiples, infinite
to the event of the 'Cultural Revolution', then J must at
merences, 'objective' situations - for example, the ordi-
least practise politics (in particular the relation with the
nary state of relation to the other, before a loving encoun-
workers) in an entirely different manner from that pro-
ter) cannot define such a circumstance. In this kind of
posed by the socialist and trade-unionist traditions. And
objectivity, every animal gets by as best it can. We must
again, Berg and Webern, faithful to the musical event
surmose. then. that whatever convokes someone to - - -
tne-
-- -
' I '
known by the name of 'Schoenberg', cannot continue with
composition of a subject is something extra, something that
$n.-de-sit?clc!neo-Romanticism as if nothing had happened.
happens in situations as something that they and the nsual
After Einstein's texts of 1905, if I am faithful to their radisz!
way of behaving in them cannot account for. Let us say that
a szd~ject,which goes beyond the animal (although the
hoveltv. I, cannot continue to wractise physics within
J * I - ._"_its..
classical framework, and so on. An evental fidelity is a .-real
animal remains its sole foundation [support]) needs some- *. %
break (both thought and practised) in the specific order

thing to have happened, something that cannot be reduced
within which the event took place (be it political, loving;
to ~ t ordinary
s inscription in 'what there is'. Let us call this
artistic or scientific . . .).
supplemenl an ment, and let us distinguish multiple-being,
I shall call 'truth' (a truth) the real process of a fidelity
where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions),
to an event: that which this fidelity jwoduces in the situation.
from the event, which compels us to decide a n m way of
For example, the politics of the French Maoists between
-
being.' Such events are well and truly attested: the French
Revolution of 7792, the meeting- of Heloise and Abklard,
1966 and 1976, which tried to think and practise a f i d e l i ~
to two entangIed events: the CuItural Revolution in China,
Galilee's creation of physics, Haydn's invention of the classt
and May '68 in France. Or so-called 'contemporary' music
caI musical style. . . . But also: the Cultural Revolution in
(a name as ubiquitous as it is strange), which is fidelity to
China (1965-67), a personal amorous passion, the creation
the great Viennese composers of the early twentieth cen-
of Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the
tury. Or the algebraic geometry of the 1950s and 1960s,
invention of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg. . . .
faithful to the concept of a Universe (in Grothendieck's
sense of the term), and so forth. Essentially, a truth is the
material course traced, within the situation, by the evental
supplementation. It is thus an immanent break. 'Irnma,nect'
heccause a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere =----=-..
else
- there is no heaven of truths. 'Break' because what enables
the truth-process - the event - meant nothingacc%rding
-
. ..
Cofi5'\nue~ ro the prevailing language and established kn&iec& if_
the situation.
Elliot, Lasky --h.-.., -.'..
1 a- .,- w;\\
Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
M'e might say, then,

_.- - .
that- a truth~rocess
to the instituted knowledges
-- ^.. .-
is heterogeneous
of the situation. Or - to use an
- -
u
-
expression of Lacan's - that it punches a 'hole [trouiel'jn-
these knowledges.
T c a l l 'subject' the bearer [IP suflofl] of a fidelity, the one
whobears a process of truth. The subject, therefore, in
-
wa).pre-exists the process. He is absoioreiy nonexntenT-a.*
the situation 'before' the event. We might say that tile
of truth ilulzrces a subject.
T i s important to understand that the 'subject', thus
conceived, does not overlap with the psychological subject,
nor even with the reflexive subject (in Descartes's sense)
or the transcendental subject (in Kant's sense). For ex-
ample, the subject induced by fidelity to an amorous
encounter, the subject of love, is not the 'lo\ring' subject
described by the classical moralists. For this kind of psycho-
logical subject falls within the province of human nature,
within the logic of passion, whereas what I am talking about
has no 'natulal' preexistence. The lovers as such enter into
the composition of one loving subject, who exr~edsthem both.
In the same way, the subject of a revolutionary politics is
not the individuaI militant - any more, by the way, than it is
the chimera of a class-subject. It is a singular production,
which has taken different names (sometimes 'Party', some-
times not). To be sure, the militant enters illto the compo-
sition of this subject, but once again it exceeds him (it is
precisely this excess that makes it come to pass as
immortal).
01-again, the subject of an artistic process is not the artist
(the 'genius', etc.). In fact, the subject-points of art are
works of art. And the artist enters into the composition of
these subjects (the works are 'his'), without our being able
in any sense to reduce them to 'him' (and besides, which
'hin~'would this be?).
Events are irreducible singularities, the 'beyond-the-lay'
of situations. Each faithful truth-process is an entirely
invented irnmanen t break with the situation. ~ u b j eti, c
-.- - ----- --
wEch are the local occurrences of the truth-process
('points' of truth), are p a __-_-_ r h c u l a r ' r ' ~. . ~- ~. - p a r a b l e
. ... . .. . .
- I
inductions
-

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: PERMUTATION
The permutation is impossible because universal ethics are inherently conservative-all new possibilities
are subordinated to a rigid principle.
?,%ether we think of it as the consensual remesentation of - ,
Evil or as concern for the other, ethics designates above 3 (Right from the first moment in the constitution of con-
:he incapacity, so typical of the contemporary w o r l d , A tekporary subjectivity (as 'public opinion'), ethics has nolp
name and strive for a Good. M7e should go even further, played its accompanying role. For from the beginning it
and say that the reign of ethics is one svrnDtom of a universe confirms the absence of anv Drolect. of any emanci~atow
-
ruled by a distinctive [sinpliire] combination of resi.gnation politics, or any genuinely collect~vecause. By block~ng,111
in the face of necessity together with a purely negative, if the name of Evil and of human rights, the way towards the
not destructive, will. It is this combination that shouid be positive prescription of possibilities, the way towards the
designated as nihilism. Good as the superhumanity of humanity, towards the i
Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefei-s Immortal as the master of time, it accepts the play of
to will nothingness rather than to will nothing at all. I will necessity as the objective basis for all judgements of value.
reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, I'he celebrated 'end of ideologies' heralded ever-ywfiere
which is like a kind of understudy [doublure] of blind as the good news which opens the way for the 'return of
necessity. ethics' signifies in fact an espousal of the twistings and
turnings of necessity, and an extraordinary impoverishment
of the active, militant value of principles.
I Ethics as the servant of necessity T L a ' iminq from the
penera1 feeling. ~rovoked bv the sight of atrocities. which
C The modem name for necessity is, as everyone knows,
'economics'. Economic objectivity - which shorlld be called
0 u 1 / U
replaces the 'old ideological divisions', is a powerful contrib

utor to subjectwe resignation and acceptance of the statui
b!. its name: the logic of Capital - is the basis from which quo. For what every emancipatory project does, what everji'
our parliamentary regimes organize a subjectivity and a emergence ot hltherto unknown possibllltles does, 1s to put
public opinion condemned in advance to ratify what seems an end to consensus. How, indeea, cou?a tne incalculable
necessary. Unemployment, the anarchy of production, int- novelty of a truth, and the hole that it bores in established
qualities, the complete devaluation of manual work, the knowledges, be lnscnbed in a situation without encounter-
persecution of foreigners: all this fits together as part of a ing resolute opposition? Precisely because a truth, in its
debased consensus regarding a state of things as changeable invention, is the only thing that is for all, so it can actually
as the weather (the predictions of economic 'science' being be achieved only against dominant opinions, since these
still more uncertain than those of meteorology), yet appar- always work for the benefit of some rather than all. These
ently shaped by inflexible and interminable external privileged few certainly benefit from their position, their
constraint. capital, their control of the media, and so on. But in
Parliamentary politics as practised today does not in anv particular, they wield the inert power of reality and time [ d e
way consist of setting objectives inspired by principles and la rialzte' et du temps] against that which is only, like every
of inventing the means to attain them. It consists of turning truth, the hazardous, precarious advent of a possibility of
the spectacle of the economy into the object of an apathetic the Intemporal. As Mao Tse-tung used to say, with his
(though obviously unstable) public consensus. In itself, the customary simplicity: 'If you have an idea, one will have to
economy is neither good nor bad; it is the place of no value split into two.' Yet ethics explicitly presents itself as the
(other than commercial value, and of money as general spiritual supplement of the consensus. The 'splitting into
form of equivalence). It simply ' r ~ ~ n mores' or less well. two' horrifies it (it smacks of ideology, it's passi. . .). Ethic!
Routine politics is the subjective or valorizing moment of is thus part of what prohibits any idea, any coherent nr-
this neutral exteriority. For the possibilities whose develop- 01 thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and
ment it pretends to organize are in reality circumscribed
and annulled, in advance, by the external neutrality of the
-
akmvmons si tuations with mere humanitarian p a t tle -
(which, as we have said, does not itself contain any positive
economic referent - in such a way that subjectivity in idea ofhomanity).)
general is inevitably dragged down into a kind of belligert-111
impotence, the emptiness of which is filled by elections and
the 'sound-bites' of party leaders.
hil~ot,Lasky, Logan, Will
Michigan 2006 40
AT: PERMUTATION
Tying the truth of an event to traditional politics risks disaster. For instance, Nazism and Stalinism were
both politics of absolute truth. Rather, truth must remain in dialectical tension with its sophistic opposite of
relativism. This means that the ethical subject searches for the universal but does not enforce that universal
on others.
at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 1 34- 135)
(But there is a paradox at work here, perhaps an aporia, and a

potentially dangerous one at that, since what seizes by chance and
without warning can all too easily be taken up by W P and
enacted as the rule of law. In such circumstances where ~hilosouhvis
elevated to the heights of ethical responsibility ('the philosopher-king
named by Plato') disaster looms. 'Disaster in philosophical thought is
the order of the day when philosophy presents itself as being, not a
seizure of truths, but a sitlrntiorr of trflth' (C. , There we encounter
. , 70).
the jump from logic to ontology. As we will recall from our earlier
chapters, the situation is the set of circumstances, infinitely multiple,
which is interrupted and named 'after the event'. In light of what we
have also said above, the situation is seized from the outside before
being 'sutured' to politics, art, science or love as one of the four condi-
tions of its truth. The 'suture' is a concept derived from Lacan, and
Badiou emulovs it to define the tendencv , of ~hilosouhvto 'rleleaate
x L 2 " its
such or such of its conditions' at times when its intellec-
tual circuit becomes 'blocked' (MP, 41). In the nineteenth century for
example, 'between Hegel and Nietzsche', we mainly encounter the
positivist suture, which pretends to be able to manage time scientifi-
cally, thereby playing into the hands of the 'diffuse religiosity' of
capitalist industry. There is also, in the same epoch, the suture of
philosophy to politics, where we discover Marx's commitment to
philosophy as the practical Inearls to change the world. And of
course, what has overtaken both science and Marxism in the twen-
tieth century - largely as a result of Heidegger's influence, although
continued in the philosophy of Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze - is
the suture of pl~ilosoyhyto art: the 'age of the poets' (MP, 42-58).
The suture always brings about a reduction of thought - synony-
mous with a 'heightening of the void' - which turns out to have a
"triple effect': truth is made I ) ecstatic, 2) sacred and 3) terroristic
-(C, 71-2). Taken together, these three aspects add up to the concept
of disaster.7.lft?rougr1f i e larrer pertains primarily to thought, disaster
finds expression in empirical effects, while 'Reciprocally, every real
disaster, in particular historical, contai~~s a philosopheme which
joins together ecstasy, the sacred and terror.'
G ~ r m a npeople to estabiu a new world orde

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: DEMOCRACY BETTER THAN ALTERNATIVE

Democracy is an excuse for a naked exercise of power-a narrow majority in a powerful nation is able to
determine the fate of the world-that is hardly true democracy.
Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ
Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223-238 ISSN 1740-9292 printIlSSN 1477-2876 c2004 Taylor & Francis
Ltd http://www. tandf.co.uWiournals)
The present situation is that of a regulation to be found - a difficult task - between the American power
game (which is the reality - financial and military - of the "international community") and the
parliamentary game of the UN.The decision belongs to the realm of power (the American government and
its British poodle decided to invade Iraq), but the fiction demands a parliamentary vote, at the Security
Council or at the UN General Assembly. Decided without h a v i n ~been voted, deprived of maiority or
parliamentary cover, the aggression being prepared makes the supposed subiect uneasy, it disrupts the
consensus the post-postwar has arrived at regarding "values": human rights. humanism. humanitarianism,
democratic interventions. and other nonsense. For what constitutes the essence of parliamentary fiction. of
politics as representative delegation and the counting of votes? Obviously, the existence of an opposition.
Today at the UN, Chirac is making France play the saving role of the opposition. Its mission is less that of
preventing aggression (the French government accepts the myth of the "weapons of mass destruction,"
maintains the ridiculous suspense of the "inspections," considers the departure of Saddam Hussein to be a
great idea, etc.) than of making itself the herald of parliamentary legitimacy. In short: its mission is that of
saving, against naked reality, the well-meaning moral fiction of the "international community" - renamed,
by Chirac, "multilateralism." Let's say that France is working on the parliamentarizing of American power,
a power which it recognizes elsewhere as being the only one capable of deciding and bringing off a war of
aggression - a war that is, in principle, abject, but about which only the procedure of its legitimization is
disputed. War must not only be decided by those who are goinn to wage it. It must also be voted for by
those who don't have the means to waPe it. Parliamentarianism - "modern democracy"- is iust that:
replacing. the political principles accord in^ to which situations might be evaluated, with the juridical
fetishism of a maiority vote. It is a consensual lack of power given the task of providing propaganda for
naked power.

Michigan 2006 42
AT: HEGEMONY OUTWEIGHS

Hegemony saves lives only very selectively-millions are allowed to die from AIDS while mass
interventions are justified if US interests are threatened in even a small way. The result is overwhelming
violence without limit.
Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ
Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223-238 1SSN 1740-9292 print/lSSN 1477-2876. page: Taylor & Francis
Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk~~ournals)
-
In fact, the United States is an imperialist power without an empire, a hegemony without territoriality. I
propose the term "zoning" [zonage] to convey its relation to the world: every place in the world can be
considered by the American government as a zone of vital interest. or as a zone of total disinterest,
according to fluctuations in the consideration of its "democratic" comfort. You could die by the thousands
without America raising an eyebrow (thus. for years. AIDS in Africa). or, on the other hand. have to endure
the build-UP of a colossal army in the middle of the desert (Iraq today). Zonage means that American
military intervention resembles a raid much more than a colonial-type intervention. It's about vast
incursions, particularly brutal in nature, that are as brief as possible. Kill people in large numbers, beat
them into a stupor, smash them until their last gasp. then return home to enjoy the comfort vou've so
skillfullv defended in a provisionally "strategic" zone: this is how the USA thinks about its power, and
about how to use it. The time will certainly come for us to conceptualize this assertion: the metaphysics of
American power is a metaphysics of limitlessness. The great imperial theories of the nineteenth century
were always theories of dividing, dividing up the world, creating boundaries. For the USA, there are no
limits. Nixon's advisers, as Noam Chomsky points out, were already proclaimina this under the name of
"the politics o f the madman." The USA must impose upon the rest of the world the belief that it - the
United States - is capable ofanything. and estlecially of what is neither rational nor foreseeable. The
excessive quality of the interventions aims at getting the adversarv to reaIize that the American retaliation
can be totally unrelated to what was initially at stake. The adversary will deem it preferable to concede
management of the disputed zone, for a time, to the " mad' power. The invasion of Iraq, currently under
preparation, is a figure of that madness. It shows that, for American governments, there are neither
countries, nor States, nor peoples. There are only zones, where one is justified in destroying evervthing if
there is, in those zones, the slightest question of the idea - an empty one, besides - of American comfort.

Seven Week Seniors
BADIOU
Michigan 2006
43
AT: NIHILISM
Universal ethics are nihilist because life is reduced to biological survival as the West decides who lives or
dies based on rigid principles. Our alternative of rejecting ethics to open up space for humanity to strive
for that which makes us immortal (our ability to strive for the truth of a particular situation) is the opposite
of nihilism.
We should be more struck than we usually are by a rema&

that often recurs in articles and commentaries devoted -.-.to -.
t K w a r in the former Y~~eoslavia:

C--
it is pointed out - with a
kind of subjective
., excitement, an ornamental ~ a t h o-
I
s that
-a
these atrocities are taking place 'only two hours by plane

from Paris'. The authors of these texts invoke, natu&ll7;a71
-'rights of man', ethics, humanitarian intervention,-ih;
the
fact that Evil (thought to have been exorcized by the
. . *.-
collawse of 'totalitarianisms') is makinn a terrible cornebGk.

0
- - -
But then the observation seems ludicrous: if it is a matt&-Gf

e x c a l principles, of the victimary essence of Man, of the
fact that 'rights are universal and imprescriptible', why
should we care about the length of the flight? is the
7-
recognition of the other' all the more intense if this other
is in some sense almost within my reach?
In this pathos of proximity, we can almost sense the
trembling equivocationl halfway between fear ar@ enjoy-
&t,
---
of finally perceiving so close tc us horror and des~rus-
tion, war and- cynicis . Here ethical ideoloffy has at i p
Zsposal, almost knocking on the protected gates of civilized
s&--%-o@
itl -- yet delicious =&bination of a col;?-
@ex -O&er ( ~ r o a t s ~, i r b sand
, those enigmatic ' ~ u s l i ~ s '
of Bosnia) and an avowed Evil. History has delivered the
ethical dish to our very door.
Ethics feeds too much on Evil and the Other ---- not to take.
sil&rpleasure in seeing them close up (in a silence that is
the abject underside of its prattle). For at the core 01 lllr
r to decide who-_,
E r h i c s is nihilist beca~iseits underlying conviction is that

the only thing that can really happen to someone is d e a t c
And it is certainly true that in so far as we deny truths,.,,we
thereby challenge the immortal disjunction that they effect
-
I r a n y given situation, Between Man as the possible bask
for the uncertainty [aka] of truths, or Man as being-for-
.
- - .-
.- .
-or-happiness,
___._-..
--I
it is the same ?hindZyo!~
have to choose. It is the samechoice that divid,es philosc~phv *
from 'ethic$, or the

. - .
courage
.-
of mthsfrorn
.- ,__ . .
nihilism.)
..
- - . - - L L - u _ _ - '

Michigan 2006
YY
AT: NIHILISM
Ethics are nihilist because they are a conservative denial of our ability to discover new truths and because
they uphold a vision of Western mastery over life and death. Our alternative allows us to strive for an
emancipatory politics that is the only means of escaping nihilism.
\The root of the problem is that, in a certain ruLee\er?-

definition
--. .. -.
.
of Man based on happiness is nihilist. It is clear 1Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced bv the fact
I .
- J ------
that.... the external barricades erected to protect our. sickly t6at our soctetres are without a future that can be presenfFd
-4
--
prosperity have as theirinternal cotmterpart, aqainst the
+
as universal, ethics oscillates between two c o m o l e m e n ~ ~

1 I
-_ _ . driive, the der$orySnd cornpljcit b & r f ,etGi@l

Zhilist- d d a l recognition f o i
commissions. the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our ' ~ e s t e s
. _-
_i
-
When a prime minister,' the political eulogist of a civic position - the inteweaving. of - - an
; unbridled and impassive
ethics, declares that France 'cannot welcome [acrz~eillir]all
the misery of the world', he is careful not to tell us abolit
economv , riconomie
-
e n
and a murderous desire that ,
sauvag~]
Dromotes -
- -
with a discourse of la%;
----- --- and
----1 shrouds. , i n T n~
a ~ n t e g r amastery
l ...- - - -
of life - or agatn,
the criteria and the methods that will allow us to distinguish
the part of the said misery that we welcome from that part that -
doomswha of death.
- I d be better named - since it speaks
- . .
which we will request - no doubt from within detention .
centres - to return to its place of death, so that we might Greek - a 'eu-oudknose'.a smug nihilism.
continue to enjoy those unshared riches which, as we know. Against this we can set only that which is not yet in being,
-
-
.
condition both our happiness and our 'ethics'. And in the but which our thought declares itself able to conceive.
- -
same way, it is certainly impossible to settle on stable.
'responsible', and of course 'collective' criteria in the name
-
Every age - and in the end, none is worth more than any
other - has its own figure of nihilism. The names change,
2
of which commissions on bio-ethics will distinguish between but always under these names ('ethics', for example);;
..""*
eugenics and euthanasia, between the scientific improve- find the articulation of conservative propaeanda with an
- --
merit of the white man and his happiness, and the elimina- obscure
- desire for catastrophe.
tion 'with dignity' of monsters, of those who suffer tm- - 1
become unpleasant to behold. decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against
Chance, the circumstances of life, the tangle of beliefs. ihe desire Ior notnlngness, that we tear ourselves awayTro~n .. -..-
combined with the rigorous and impartial treatment with-
out exception of the clinical situation, is worth a thousand
nihilism. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed
5 p e v loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation,
--
times more than the pompous, made-for-media conscrip-
tion of bioe thical authorities [instances] - a conscriptlon
-
every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipato~?
plitics, is the sole p r i n c i p l e l a g a l n s t t h e $ -
whose place of work, whose very name, have a nasty smell ~ v d whose
l real content is the deciding of death - of an
about them. ethic of tmths. )
N Ethical nihilism between conservatism

and the death drive

Seven Week Seniors BADlOU
Michigan 2006
45
AT: BADlOU ALLOWS FOR THE HOLOCAUST
Trying to identify evil as an a prior category makes the dangerous move of removing it from its political
context-for instance, it is not enough to say that the Nazis were evil-their specific political trajectory in
its singular form of exterminationist Anti-Semitism is what made them evil.
One of the singr~laritiesof Nazi politics was its p~rrise
Kri, then the w h o c point is to situate [ l o c a l r ~ t ~tth]
proclamation of the historical community that was to be
singularity. Fundamentally, those who uphold the ideolop
endowed with a conquering subjectivity And it was this
of human rights try to situate it directly in Evil, in keeping
proclamation that enabled its subjective victory, and put
with their objectives of pure opinion. We have seen that this
extermination on the agenda.
attempt at the religious absolutization of Evil is incoherent:
oreo over.
*"%
it is vew threatening, - like anything that puts Thus we are entitled to say, in this case, that the link
between politics and Evil emerges precisely from the wav
thought up against an impassable 'limit'. Ebr the realrty of
both the collective [ensemble] (the thematics of cornm~lni-
(<;inimitable is constant imitation, and by dint of seeing
ties) and the being-with (the thematics of consensus, of'
m - -- en everywhere we forget that he is dead, and that what
shared norms) are taken in to consideration.
is happening before our eyes is the creation of new singular-
.-- - - .- But what matters is that the singularity of the Evil derives,
-
ities ot Evil.
h fact, to think the singularity of the extermination is to in the final analysis, from the singularity of a political
sequence.
think, first of all, the singularity of Nazism as a political
-- - This takes us back to the subordination of Evil - if not
s e E n c e . This is the whole problem. Hitler was able to
C
directly to the Good, at least to the processes that lay claim
conduct the extermination as a colossal militarized oper-
to it. Nazi politics was not a truth-process, but it was only in
ation because he had taken power, and he took power in the
so far as it could be represented as such that it 'seized' the
name of a politics whose categories included the term 'Jew .
German situation. So that even in the case of this Evil,
The defenders of ethical ideology are so determined o
which I would call extreme Father than radical, the intelfi-
locate the singularity of the extermination directly in ? :il
gibilih of its 'subjective' being, the question of the 'some-
that they generally deny, categorically, that Nazism was a
ones' who were able to participate in its horrifving
poi'ltzal sequence. But this position is both feeble and
- ,- -.- execution as if accomplishing a duty, needs to be referred
cowardly.
-- . Feeble, because the constitution of Nazism as a hack to the intrinsic dimensions of the process of political
'massive' subjectivity m t e g r a r t . a.
truth. \
~oliticalconfi~uratlonis what made the extermlnatlon pass-
- -- - "
ible, and then inevitable; Cowardly, because it is impossible
to think ~oliticsthrough to the end if we refi~seto envisige
,ti% possibility of political s e q u e n c e s ~ o ~ e ~ acategor-
..__. nlc
s l ~a sies
-d n a
- --.."- J
of the 'democracy of human rights' are fond -with Hannah

Arendt - of defining as the stage of a 'being-
together'. It is with regard to this definition, incidentally,
that they fail to grasp the political essence of Nazism. But
this definition is merely a fairy-tale - all the more so since
;the being-together must first determine the collective
[ensemble] concerned, and this is the whole question.
Nobody desired the being-together of the Germans more
than Hitler. The Nazi category of the 'Jew' served to name
the German interior, the space of a being-together, via the
(arbitrary yet prescriptive) constr~ictionof an exterior that
could be monitored from the interior -just as the certainty
of bring 'all French together' presupposes that we pel-se-
cute, here and now, those who fall under the categoq- of
'illegal immigrant'.

Michigan 2006 qb
AT: BADIOU ALLOWS FOR THE HOLOCAUST
Badiou's characterization of the holocaust demands that we recognize the horror of the event as a singular
political disaster-it is those who treat it as an inexplicable moral aberration and not a concrete set of
political circumstances that risk misunderstanding and silencing that history.
at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 132)
finti-f la ton ism, rather than Platonism itself, has today surpassed
itself in marking the closure of modem philosophy. However, we
should resist the-temptation to believe that any philosophy opposed
to Platonism (implicitly or explicitly) can be deployed in anticipa-
tion of its own collapse. For wouldn't this all too soon and all too
easily lead - as in the case of the apologists of Heidegger's flirtation
with Fascism - to a situation where the aberrations of a once great
thinker are accepted on the grounds of a minor indiscretion (the cult
of the flawed g e n i u ~ ) ?Badiou
~ is wise to this ethical perversion
which would seek to make philosophy a closed enterprise outside the
realm of history. For Badiou, philosophy begins here, at the very moment
when i& historical and universal enterprise of truth is declared impossible.
For example, consider the question of the Jewish Holocaust, which
for Lyotard stands 'as an event beyond the resources of Hegel's
phil~sophy'.~ Today, the idea that 'Auschwitz' is the name of an
event somehow beyond the experience of human suffering, and as
-
a o n e which cannot be adequately spoken about or understood,
has become a cliche of modern journalism which invariably succeeds
?n blinding onlookers to the fact that the Holocaust was a politicalt
Zotivated act. The consequences of this cliche are multiple, but virtu-
g l y all are politicallv disastrous. For there is little
claimink as Lyotard does, that only a moment of sublime silence
could testify to the victims of the Holocaust, and the equally esoteric
and somewhat nrotesaue ~ r o ~ o s i t i oth n& the Holocaust. as such,
never actually happened. The silence of philosophy does not in this
case mark a just silence. It is a silence which proves instead that in a
certain set of historical circumstances philosophy did not act.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: BADlOU ALLOWS FOR THE HOLOCAUST
Badiou's concept of universal equality would have made the holocaust impossible- Nazism is founded
upon radical difference.
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. p. 1 09- 1 10)
ainst universalism conceived ot as production of the %me, it has
recently been claimed thaj the latter found its emblem, if not its culmi-
nation, in the death camps, where everyone, having- been reduced to a'
-
5
body on the verge of death, was absolutely equal to everyone else. 1 h ~ s
2
"argument" is fraudulent, for two major reasons. The first is that, in read-
Fng Primo Levi or Shalamov, one sees that, on the contrary, the death
. -- . .
camp produces exorbitant differences at every instant, that it turns the

3ightest fragment of reality into an absolute difference between life and
death, and this incessant differentiation of the minute is a torture. The ,
".
- .- . . - . . .
tions of t h o uU~ has
t Dower
L
-
second, more direcrly relevant to l'aul, 1s that one of the necessary condi-
(which. let us remind ourseIves, is Iove) consists
;n he who is a militant of the truth identifying- - himself, as well as every-
bne else, on the basis ot the universal. Theprodmtion of't/?e Same ir itref
internal to the Lazrr of the Same. But the Nazis' production of extermina-
tory abattoirs obeyed the opposGe principle: the "rneanitlg" proper to the
mass production of Jewish corpses was that of delimiring the existence of
- b
the master race as absolute difference. The address to the other of the "as
oneself" (love the other as yourself) was what the Nazis wanted to abol-
ish. The German Aryan's "as oneself" was precisely what could not be
projected anywhere, a closed substance, continuously driven to verify its
own closure, both in and outside itself, through carnage3

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: SUFFERING NOW, NEED RIGHTS
Rights are part of the self-satisfied rhetoric of the West-they represent unbridled pursuit of self-interest
and competition under the guise of ethics and emancipation.
Switzerland, Ethics, page 7-1 0).
f i ' h e n those who uphold the contemporary ideologv Ethics is conceived here both as an a priori ability t o
'ethics' tell us that the return to Man and his rights has discern Evil (for according to the modern wage of ethics,
delivered us from the 'fatal abstractions' inspired by 'the
i
Evil - or the negative - is primary: we presume a consensus
ideologies' of the past, they have some nerve. I would be .
regarding what is barbarian), and as the ultimate principle
of judgement, in particular political judgement: good is
deli~hted
0
- -
to
---
see todav so constant
- - - - -
- / -
an attention aid to
I
concrete sitrlations, so sustained and so patient a cancel-11 Ghat intervenes visibly against an Evil that is identifiable a
for the real [ l e rid], so much time devoted to an activist priori. Law [droit] itself is' first of all law 'against' Evil. If 'the
inquiry into the situation of the most varied kinds of people rule of law' [Etnt de droit] is obligatory, that is because i t
- often the furthest removed, it might seem, from the alone authorizes a space for the identification of Evil (this
normal environment of intellectuals - as that we witnessed is the 'freedom of opinion' which, in the ethical vision, is
in the years between 1965 and 1980. first and foremost the freedom to designate Evil) and
provides the means of arbitration when the issue is not
In reality, there is no lack of proof for the fact that the
clear (the apparatus of judicial precautions).
thkmatics of the 'death of man' are compatible with rebef-
The presuppositions of this cluster of convictions are
fion. a radical dissatisfaction with the established order. and
clear.
a fiiIiy committed engagement in the real ot situations [duns
E i e de.s ~ situations], while bv contrast. the theme of ethics
1. We posit a general human subject, such that whatever
and of human rights is compatible with the self-satisfied b
evil befalls him is universally identifiable (even if this univer-

egoism of the affluent West, with advertising, and with
sality often goes by the altogether paradoxical name of
senice rendered to the powers that be. Such are the facts.
'public opinion'), such that this subject is both, on the one
To elucidate these facts, we must examine the founda-
hand, a passive, pathetic [j9~thitiq7~e], or reflexive subject -
tions of today's 'ethical' orientation.
he who suffers - and, on the other, the active, determining
?he explicit reference of this orientation, in the corpus of
classical philosophy, is Kant.* Our contemporary moment is subject of judgement - he who, in identifjrlng suffering,
defined by an immense 'return to Kant'. In truth, the variety knows that it must be stopped by all available means.
and the detail of this return are *labyrinthine in their 2. Politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspec-
complexity; here I wi1I concern myself only with the 'aver- tive that really matters in this conception of things: the
age' version of the doctrine. sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of
What essentially is retained from Kant (or from an image the circumstances.
of Kant, or, better still, from theonits of 'natural law') is 3. Evil is that from which the Good is derived, not the
the idea that there exist formally representable imperati; other way round.
demands that are to be subjected neither to em~irical 4. 'Human rights' are rights to non-Evil: rights not to
J I -
be offended or mistreated with respect to one's life (the

considerations nor to the examination or siruations; that
these im~erativesa ~ ~tol cases v of offence. of crime. of Evil: horrors of murder and execution), one's body (the horrors
1 1 I
that these imperatives must be punished by national and of torture, cruelty and famine), or one's cultural identity
international law; that, as a result, governments are obliged (the horrors of the humiliation of women, of minorities,
to include them in their legslation, and to accept the full etc.).
legal range of their implications; that if they do not, we are
jr~stifiedin forcing their compliance (the right to hurnani-
B
tarian interference, or to le 1 interference).

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
The power of this doctrine rests, at first glance, in its self-

evidence. Indeed. we know from exwerience that suffering1
1
is highly visible. The eighteen th-century theoreticians had

already made pity - identification with the suffering of
a living being - the mainspring of the relation with the
A-
other. That political leaders are discp%ited chiefly by their

corruption, indifference or cruelty was a fact already noted
by the Greek theorists of tyranny. That it is easier to
establish consensus regarding what is evil rather than
regarding what is good is a fact already established by the
experience of the Church: it was always easier for church
leaders to indicate what was forbidden - indeed, to content
themselves with such abstinences - than to try to figure out
what should be done. It is certainly true, moreover, that
every politics worthy of the name finds its point of departure
in the way people represent their lives and rights.
It' might seem, then, that we have here a body of self-
evident principles capable of cementing a global consensus,
and of imposing themselves strongly.
Yet we must insist that it is not so; that this .'ethics' is
inconsistent, and that the - perfectly obvious - reality of the
situation is characterized in fact by the unrestrained pursuit
of self-interest, the disappearance or extreme fragility of
e'mancipatory politics, the multiplication of 'ethnic' con-
flicts, and the un~versalityof unbridled competition.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: RIGHTS ARE SOMETIMES GOOD (WOMEN, SLAVES ETC)

Badiou does not always reject rights. His argument is just that the value of rights and morality cannot be
pre-determined because the means to alleviate suffering can only be seen from within a situation.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to trzrth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis /
London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modem European
There is, in particular, no blandly "humanizing" mechanism adequate to this purpose. Since evew truth
springs from an exception to the rules, we must rehse, in principle. the idea of any automatic or inherent
rights of PdttR. 14 NO less than Lacan and iiiek, Badiou displaces the facile emphasis on human rights
from the center of ethics bv accepting that fidelity to truth need have "nothing to do with the 'interests' of
the animal. is indifferent to its verpetuation. and has eternity as its destiny." 15 Human rights, if they exist
at all, can be onlv exceptional rights, asserted and affirmed in their ~ositivityrather than deduced,
nenativelv, from the requirements of survival. Failure to make this distinction s i m ~ l yconfuses human and
animal rights in a single calculus of suffering. Any given question of rights, then, is always particular to a
truth procedure. The multiplicity of procedures rules out in advance the possibilitv of a single,
transcendental morality. Badiou refuses to subordinate the particularity of political sequences, say, to
universal moral iud~mentsof the kind "violence is always wrong." Since any political truth is an effort to
realize the universal within the ~articularitvof a situation. the pursuit of means appropriate to this
universality must be internal to that situation. The unity of theory and practice in Badiou's concept of truth
corn~elsthe foreclosure of any abstract notion of morality per se (any deliberation as to what I should do).
However transcendent its authority, mere morality remains a matter of the world. Morality calculates
interests and benefits. What Badiou defends as ethics always involves, one way or another, a decision to
forego the world, that is, to forego calculation--and so to accept a fully logical obligation, though one
based only on chance. Unsurprisingly, Pascal's analysis of choice is for Badiou an exemplary piece of true
ethical reasoning.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: MUST RESPOND TO EVIL
Evil cannot be recognized a priori--evil is the absence of the Good, or the absence of truth. Since truth
emerges from political engagement, or from fidelity to an event, then Good and Evil can only be identified
after the fact.
Badiou, 93 (Alain Badiou is a professor of Philosolphy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Switzerland, Ethics, page 58-6 1).
M%at provokes the emergence of the Good - and, b ~ .
'Considered in terns of its mere nature alone, the -human
. - -
-? simp& consequence, Evil - exclusively concerns th& rare
animal must be lumped in the same category as its biologi-
existence of' truth-processes. Transfixed by an immanent
cal corn-
hsi systematic killer Dursues, in the giant break, the human animal finds its principle of survival - its
- -.-h a s he constructs, interests of st~rvivaland satisfaction interest - disorganized. We might say, then, if we accept
ant
neither more nor lessestimable than those of moles or tiger
that some-one can enter into the composition of a subject -
beetles. He has shown himself to be the most wily of of truth, that the Good is, strictly speaking, the internal
agmals, the most patient, the most obstinately dedicated to norm of a prolonged disorganization of life.
the cruel desires of his own power. Above all, he has In any case, everyone knows this: the routines of surviva!
succeeded in harnessing to the service of his mortal life his are indifferent to any Good you might care to mention.
C
own peculiar ability - his ability to take up a position along *

Every pursuit of an interest has success as its only source of
the course of tnrths such that he acquires an Immortal legitimacy. On the other hand, if I 'fall in love' (the word-
aspect. This is what Plato had already anticipated, when he 'fall' indicates disorganization in the walk of life), &f I am
indicated that the duty of those who escape from his famous seized by the sleepless fury of a thought [pensie],or if some
cave, dazzled by the sun of the Idea, was to retnm to the radical political sn
eg
-a
-
incompatible with eve<,
shadows and to help their conlpanions in servitude to ~rnrnediateprinciple of interest - then I find myself corn-
profit from that by which, on the threshold of this dark pelled to measure life, my life as a socialized human animal,'
world, they had been seized. Only today can we fdIy assess against something other than itself. And this above aII'when;
what this return means: it is that of Galilean physics back beyond the joyful or enthusiastic clarity of the seizing, it
towards technical machinery, or of atomic theory back becomes a matter of finding out if, and how, I am- to
towards bombs and nuclear power plants. The rett11-n of continue along the path of vital disorganization, thereby
disinterested-interest towards brute interest, the forcing granting to this primordial disorganization a seconda~yand
of knowledges by a few tnlths. At the end of which the paradoxical organization, that very organization which we
human animal has become the absolute master of his have called 'ethical consistency'.
environment - which is, after all, nothing but a fairly
<If Evil exists, we must conceive it from the starting point
mediocre planet.
- of the Good. Without consideration of the tiood, and thus
Thus conceived (and this is what we know him to be), it 07 truths, there remains only the cruel innocence of life,
is clear that the hrlman animal, 'in itself, implies no value which is beneath Good and beneath Evil.
F ~ d ~ e m e n Nietzsche
t. is no doubt right, once he has As a result - and however strange the suggestion may
.
assessed humanity in terms of the norm of its vital power, seem - it is absolutely essential that Evil be a possible
to declare it essentially innocent, foreign in itself to both dimension of truths. We cannot be satisfied, on this w o i ~ ~ t .
Good and Evil. His delusion is to imagine a superhumanity with the overly facile Platonic solution: Evil as the simple 1
restored to this innocence, once delivered from the shad- absence of truth, Evil as ignorance of the Good. For the
owy, lifedestroying enterprise led by the powerful figure of very idea of ignorance is hard to grasp. For whom is a truth
the Priest.' No: no life, no natural power, can be beyond absent? For the human animal as such, absorbed in the
Good and Evil. We should say, rather, that everylife, pursuit of his interests, there is no truth, only opinions,
e
-
inclrldin~that of the human&ml,is-b&-eT?ZZod and through which he is socialized. As for the subject, the
~vil. Immortal, he cannot lack the truth, since it is from the
t n ~ t hand the tnlth alone, given as faithful t r a j e c t o ~ thilr
,
he constitutes himself.
If Evil is, all the same, identifiable as a form of moltiple-
being, - it must then be that it arises as the (bossibh) -~ffert
1 r
oj'
- - - -.!
--JJ
%P Good itself: That is to say: it is only because there al;

--
tnzths, and only to the extent that there are subiects of
these truths, that there is Evil. > J

Michigan 2006
SI
AT: GENERIC AFF ZlZEK CARDS
Our alternative of fidelity to an event is and enactment of the Lacanian notion of an authentic political act.
It pre-supposes a de-centered subject who follows the ethical maxim of "do not give up on your desire" as
they risk their safe explanation of the world by engaging in the potentially transformative act of immersing
themselves in a unique political situation.
Badiou, 93 (Alain Badiou is a professor of Philo y at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee,
Lacan touched on this point when he ~ r o ~ o s ehis
1 1
d
ethical maxim: 'do not e v e up on your cieslre' ['~PTZY
- - - - - -
What sllould we understand now by 'consistency'? Simplv, r6dm-sur son.dkstr']. For desire is constit~~tive of the subject
q t h e n o t h m n [de l'insu].For if the 'some-
that there is a hzi~ of the unconscious; it is thus the not-known par uxr~ll&;ir
one' enters into the composition of a subject ortruth only such that 'do not give up on your desii-e' rightly means:
by exposing himself 'entirely' to a post-evental fideli -- -
'do not give up on that part of yourself that do
then there remains the problem of knowing what he, this know'. We might add that the ordeal of the not-known ,is
'some-one', will berom,ethrough this testing experience. -
the distant effect of the evental supplement, the p u n c t K
The ordinary behaviour of the human animal is a i p g [trout+] of 'soine-onee by a fidel* to &hir v3niched
-
matter of what Spinoza calls 'perseverance in being', s!lpplement,nd that 'do not give lip' means, in the el?cl:
which is nothing other than the pursuit of interest,-or
the conservation of self. This perseverance is the law that
do yooponr own p n r ~ r s .
But since the truth-process is fid&tv. then if D0.Yet
- &
governs some-one in so far as he knows himself. But the give up' is the maxim of consistency - and thus of the
test of truth does not fall under this law. To belong to -
ethic of a truth - we might well say that it is a matter, for
- - -
the situation is everyone's natural destiny, but to belong

to the composition of a subject of truth concerns a
the 'some-one', of bein,qfizit4fi~lto a fidelity. And he tail
manage this only by adhering to his own principle of
- -_ _
particular route, a sustained break, and it is very difficult continuity, the ~erse\~erance in being of what he i s . - * ~ q
to know how this composition is to be superimposed :inking (for such, precisely, is consistency) the known byn
upon or combined with the simple perseverance-of3elf. the not-known.
1 shall call 'consistency' (or 'subjective consistency') - It is now an easy matter to spell out the ethic of a
the principle of this superimposition, or this combi- truth: 'Do all that YOU can to persevere in that \;hi&
nation. That is to say, the manner in which our devotee exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the intez%--
of mathematics will engage his perseverance in that tion. Seize in your being that which has seized a n d
which breaks or opposes this perseverance, which is his broken you.' - *
belonging to a mtth-process. Or the manner in which The 'technique' of consistency is singular in each case,
our lover will be entirely 'himself' in the sustained testing dei&ding on h e 'animal' traits of the some-one. To the
of his inscription in a subject of love. consistency of the subject that he is in part become, having
M'hen all is said and done, consistency is the engage- been convoked [requzs] and seized by a truth-process, this
ment of one's sing~~larity (the animal 'some-one') in the particular 'some-one' will contribute his anguish and
continuation of a subject of truth. Or again: it is to agitation, this other his tall stature and cool composure,
submit the perseverance of what is known to a duration this other his voracious taste for domination, and these
[dure'd peculiar to the not-kno\vn. others their melancholy, or timidity. . . . All the material
of human multiplicity can be fashioneb, linked, by a
%onsistency'-while at the same time, of course, it opposes
to this fashioning the worst kinds of inertia, and exposes
- V
the 'some-one' to the permanent temptation of giving up,

ofretu-longing to the 'ordinary'
situation. of erasing the effects of the not-known. :

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: GENERIC AFF POMO BAD CARDS
We agree, postmodemism is unworkable. T o move forward from the impasse of the end of grand narratives
and the incapacitating politics of relativism, we claim that individuals can strive to find universals within
particular political struggles.
Badiou 92 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland,
Manifestofor Philosophy, p. 58-59).
fl shall put forth this paradox: philosophy has not

known until quite ercen-
since it has left the field open, to aits
oT&e poem, to doubt about its own legittmacy. It has

not known how to make thought out of 6e fact that
xam has become irreversibly 'master and possessor of
nature' and that it is here neither a matter of loss nor
of oblivion, but of its supreme destination-albeit fea-
-+'
tured, sW, in the stupid opacity of computed timq.
Philoso hy has left the 'Cartesian meditation' incorn-
plete y going astray in the aestheticization of willing
and the pathos of completion, the destiny of oblivion
and the lost trace. It pas not cared to r e c p e in a
- s the absoluteness of the multiple
A d the non-being of the bond. It has clung to lan-
guage. to literature. to writing j k t as to the last possi-
ble -wresentatives of an a priorl determination of
experience, or to the presmed place of a clearing of
E&-g. it has declared since Nieiz.sche that what had
begun %to was reaching its hMight, but this
arrogant declaration concealed the powerlessness 6
continue this beginning. Philosophv denounces or
showers praise upon 'nihlbtic modernity' only to the
extent of the difacultv it has itseU in -grasphg - -where
current positivities pass in transit, and given its hab$
il% to conceive that we have blfndly entered into a new
-7 - - - - - - - -
phase of the d o m e of Truth, at of the multiple-

without-One, or of bgmentay, infinite and in*
'cernible totalities. 'Nihilism' is a least-worst s i g d e r .
The true question remains: What has hau~enedto

hilosophy for it to refuse with a shudder the liberty
*J
@ d strength a desacralizhg epoch offered it?
L

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: HABERMAS
Communicative action cannot capture what it means to truly be ethical-fidelity to an event is a forms of
action with an unknown result-it is an agent looking for a particular truth that risks transformation. It is
therefore not something that can be talked out in a debate. - .
k. Every truth, as we have seen, deposes constituted knowl- - -
edges, and thus opposes o~inions.For what we call Confirmation of the point is provided by the concrete
- -
opinions are representations without tr~lth,the anarch& circumstances in which someone is seized by a fidelity:
debris of circulating knowledge. an amorous encounter, the sudden feeling that this
Now opinions are the cement of sociality [socialitel. poem was addressed to you, a scientific theory whose
They are what sustain all human animals, without excep initiaIly obscure beauty overwhelms you, or the active
tion, and we cannot function otherwise: the weather; the intelligence of a political place. . . . Philosophy is no
latest film; children's diseases; poor salaries; the govern- exception here, since eveIyone knows that to endure the
ment's villainy; the performance of the IocaI football requirement of a philosophically disinterested-interest,
team; television; holidays; atrocities far away or close to you have to have encountered, at least once in your life,
home; the setbacks suffered b y the Republican school the voice of a Master.
system; the latest album by some hard-rock group; the As a result, the ethic of a truth is the corndetc
delicate state of one's soul; whether or not there are too opposite of an 'ethics of communication'. It is an ethic
-.-
many immigrants; neurotic symptoms; institutional suc- of the Real, if it is true that - as Lacan suggests --all
cess; good little recipes; what you've been reading; shops access to the Real is of the order of an encounter. And
in which you find what you need at a good price; cars; consistency, which is the content of the ethical maxim
sex; sunshine. . . . M'hat would become of us, miserable 'Keep going!' [Continuer.'J,keeps going only by following
creatures, if all this did not circulate and recur among the thread of this Real.
the animals of the City? To what depressing silence We might put it like this: 'Never forget what you have
woilld we condemn ourselves? Opinion is the priman encountered.' But we can say this only if we understand
material of all ronzmuniratzon. that not-forgetting is not a memory (ah! the unbearable,
We are all familiar wit11 the prestigelenjoyed by this journalistic 'ethics of memory'!) . Not-forgetting consists
term today, and we know that some see 111 ~t the iounda- of thinking and practising the arrangement of my
tion of democracy and ethics. Yes, it is often maintained multiple-being according to the Immortal which it holds,
4
that what matters is to 'communicate', that an ernicd is- and which the piercing through [ t r a n s ~ m ~oft ]an
'cornmunicatiye ethics'.' If we ask: coinrnunicate, fine: encounter has composed as subject.
but communicate what?, then it is easy to answer: opin- In one of my previous books, my formula was: 'Love
--
ions, opinions regarding the whole expanse of multiples what you will never believe twice' [ A i m m que jamais
vous ne croira h x f o ~ s ] In - -is
. ~ this the ethic of a truth .
that this special multiple, the human animal, explores in
the stubborn determination of his interests. absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general,
Opinions zuithout an ounru of !ruth - or, indeed, of which is itself nothing but a schema of opinion. For ;hi
falsehood. Opinion is beneath the true and the false. maxim of opinion is: 'Love only that which you have
precisely because its sole office is to be communicable. always believed.'_
M'hat arises from a truth-process, by contrast, cannot 6e
communicated [ ne se romm unzque pas]. Coinlntulication
iGnited only to opinions (and again, we are unable to
manage without them). In all that concerns truths, there
--
must be an e?zco~~nter. The Im~nortalthat I am capable of
being cannot be spurred in me by the effects of cornmu-
-
nicative socialin/, it must be direct/? seized by fidelity.
*
is to say: broken, in its multiple-being, by the course of
'l'hat
an immanent break, and convoked [reqz~isf, finally, with

or without knowing it, by the evental siipplement. To
enter into the cornpositiorl of a subject of truth can only
be something that happpns to i,
Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: PRAGMATISM
Their claim to be pragmatic is backwards. Externalizing ethics by forming it as a principle of what the
state should do distracts us from what we can do here and now. For instance, we speculate about
promoting democracy and rights abroad rather than dealing with oppressed immigrants living in our
communities.
(4nd in the same way, the 'concern for the other' signifies
--.
that it is not a matter - that it is never a matter - of .
...
"..
A,.
*.
prescribing hitherto unexplored possibilities for our situ- --.-
ation, and ultimately for onrselves. The Law (human rights,

itc.) is always already there. It regulates judgements gi2
opinions concerning the evil that happens in some variable
elsewhere. But there is n o question of reconsidering tg
foundation of this 'Law', of going right back to the coiGi- ,__. _....-
----
-
vative identity that sustains it.
As everyone knows, France - which, under Vichy,
approved a law regulating the status of the Jews, and which
-- . ...-
at this very morneilt is voting to approve laws for the racial
identification
-- ofh
tat-n
a- goes by. . the ...
name of 'illegal immigrant' [inzmigrP' clandestin]; .France
_ . ._
which is subjectively dominated by fear and impotence - is

7 - -.. - >.- ,
an 'island o f law and liberty'. Ethics is the ideology of this
ing a-e~ag
-- cowardly- self-satisfaction, it.
.,
sterilizes every collective gathering aroond=orous con-

cFt!on [pense'e] of what can (and thus must) be done - . 12{e
.
a i w . And in this, once --axaip,. ~ ~ p a-
it is n p ~ m?re_than - .
serviiive cco9nse~sus.
But what must be understood is that this resignation in
the face of (economic) necessities is neither the only nor
the worst component of the public spirit held together b!-
nothi&gness,whose
__--
--.-c-_"___
other
- name
- -
is: death drive.)
-- -
EHiot, Lasky, Logan, Will

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: OUR SPEECH ACT IS FIDELITY TO AN EVENT

Advocating something in a debate doe snot demonstrate fideIity to an event for two reasons:
a) fidelity can only be demonstrated through action, not speech
b) fidelity involves risk to the subject that they will see a new vision of the truth, they have
approached it in the opposite way by claiming to have the truth first.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis /
Philosophy, Middlesex Uni veristy).
Individuals become subiects in Badiou's sense of the word if and only if this invention. conceived as a new
criterion for action, is further consistent with a properly universal principle-that is, only if it is an
invention with which everyone can in principle identify. Only such a principle can become the truth of a
new sequence. Truth is thus a matter of conviction first and foremost, and every subject demonstrates
"what a conviction is capable of, here, now, and forever" (SP, 31). The word truth (vkritk), as Badiou uses
it, connotes something close to the English expressions "to be true to something" or "to be faithful to
something." What Badiou calls subiectivization essentially describes the experience of identification with a
cause. or better, the active experience of conversion or commitment to a cause-a cause with which one
can identify oneself without reserve. "Either YOU participate, declare the founding event, and draw the
consequences, or YOU remain outside it, " he writes. "This distinction without intermediary or mediation is
7
entirely subjective ' (SP, 22). The identity of the subiect rests entirely, unconditionallv. on this
commitment. I am, because I am (or we are) struggling (for a new society, a new art, a new scientific order,
etc.). It is only in such rare moments of pure engagement, Badiou suggests. that we become all that we can
be, that is, that we are carried bevond our normal limits, beyond the ranpe of predictable response. Only in
this unpredictable domain, this domain of pure action, is one hllv a subiect rather than an obiect. Frantz
Fanon's incisive account of the irreducibly militant process of decolonization provides a good illustration of
the sort of engagement Badiou has in mind: under the constraints imposed by a divisive and oppressive
regime, "decolonisation transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors, with
the grandiose glare of history's floodlights upon them." As with every truth procedure, such "decolonisation
is the veritable creation of new people." 10

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: OUR AFF IS THE TRUTH EVENT
Truth can only be determined by the individual subject, through fidelity to a particular event, which
requires distance from ethical and statist law. Therefore, pxe-constituted principles are definitionally
incapable of being true in Badiou's sense of the term.
Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. p. 1 4- 1 5 )
~Paul'sgeneral procedure is the following: if there has been an event,

and if truth consists in declaring it and then in being faithful to this dec-
laration, two consequences ensue. First, since truth is evental, or of the
brder of what occurs, it is singular. It is neither structural, nor axiomatic,
;or legal. No available generaliry can account for it, nor structure the
subject who clams to toiiow in its wake. ~onsequently,there cannot be
a law of truth. Second. truth being " inscribed on the basis of a declaration
that is in essence subjective, no preconstituted subset can support it;
nothing comrnunitarian or historically established can lend its substance
to the process of truth. Truth is diagonal relative to every communitarian
gubset; it neither claims authority from, nor (this is obviously the most
delicate point) constitutes any identity. It is offered to all, or addressed to
everyone, without a condition of belonging being able to limit this offer,
or this address.
Once the texts transmitted to us are all seen as local interventions,
and hence governed by localized tactical stakes, Paul's problematic, how-
ever sinewy its articulation, implacably follows the requirements of truth
as universal singularity:
I. The Christian subject does not preexist the event he declares
(Christ's resurrection). Thus, the extrinsic conditions of his exis-
tence or identity will be argued against. He will be required to be
neither Jewish (or circumcised), nor Greek (or wise). This is the
theory of discourses (there are three: the Jewish, the Greek, the
new). No more than he will be required to be from this or that so-
cial class (theory of equality before truth), or this or that sex (the-
ory of women).
2. Truth is entirely subjective (it is of the order of a declaration that
testifies to a conviction relative to the event). Thus, every sub-

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
sumption of its becoming under a law will be argued againsr. It will

be necessary to proceed at once via a radical critique of Jewish law,
which has become obsolete and harmful, and of Greek law as the
subordination of destiny to the cosmic order, which has never been
anything bur a "learned" ignorance of the paths of salvation.
3. Fidelity to the declaration is crucial, for truth is a process, and
not an illumination. In order ro think it, one requires three con-
cepts: one that names rhe subject at the point of declaration (pisti,
generally translated as "faith," but which is more appropriately ren-
dered as "convictiony');one that names the subject at the point of
his conviction's militant address (agape generally translated as
"charity," but more appropriately rendered as "love"); lastly, one
that names the subject according to the force of displacement con-
ferred upon him through the assumption of the truth procedure's
completed [achevk] character (elpir, generally translated as "hope,"
but more appropriately rendered as "certainty").
4. A truth is of itself indifferent to the state of the situation, to the
Roman
- - - ----- - State
-
- -- - - for exarn~le.This means that it is subtracted from the
1
oreanizarion of subsets prescribed by that state. I h e subjectivity

U
correspond~ngto t h ~ ssubtract~onconstitutes a necessary dtstance

from the State and from what corresponds to the State in people's
.
consciousness: the apparatus of opinion. One must not argue
A A - about
opinions, lJaui says. A truth 1s a conientrated and serious proce-
dure, which must never enter into competition with established
opinions.
There is not one of these maxims which, setting aside the content
of the event, cannot be appropriated for our situation and our philo-
sophical tasks. All that remains is to deploy their underlying conceptual
organization, while giving credit to him who, deciding that none was ex-
empt from what a truth demands and disjoining the true from the Law,
provoked--entirJy alone-a cultural revolution upon which we stdl de-
Elliot. Laskv. Loean. Will

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: OUR AFF IS THE TRUTH EVENT
They misunderstand Badiou if they think that truth can be pre-determined-the universal significance of an
event can only be determined by a subject after they have engaged in real political struggle.
at Cardiff University. A lain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p .94)
Gadiou's concept of truth is derived from Lacan. Truth is always post-

eventmental and retroactive. It illuminates what was, or would have
been, resulting from an intervention, so bearing witness to what
h a p p e n e d n , strongly
Hegelian-in
- principle, between truth and knowledge. For Badiou 'a
truth is always that which makes a hole in a knowledge'. 'l'hetask is
therefore 'to think the relation - which is rather an un-relation -
between, on the one hand a post-eventmental fidelity, and on the v
other hand a fixed state ot know1eage ...' (kk,5bl).
The key to the problem is the mode by which a fidelity procedure

traverses the existing knowledge, starting from this supernumerary
point that is the name of the event. (EE, 361)
There is a complete end in itself to wisdom that Hegel named the

'End of History'. Man's assumption of knowledge marks the supreme
dilemma for philosophy since, in attaining it, man, as historical indi-
vidual, risks being annihilated (along with philosophy). Both Lacan
and, following him, Badiou, recognise the dilemma. The fulfilment
of knowledge - is, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, a 'strange
surplus'. For Lacan, the 'subject supposed to know' is not the end of
history but the beginning - of desire.17 There is, historically speaking,
always a gap in knowledge which demands to be filled. This desire
for what ultimately cannot be known is what Lacan calls truth, and
is accomplished in the act of true or 'full speech. The aim of true
J
speech is to expose (the illusion of) the limits of language, to break

through the 'language barrier'.18 Completeness is always the illusion
that truth stands f o r 1

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: BADIOU'S UNIVERSALS ARE AUTHORITARIAN
By positing truth as universal but dependent on an event, Badiou avoids both postmodem relativism and
universal absolutism.
Fee, Switzerland, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, p.131-1 32)
I Here Badion is clearly and radically opposea to ure postmodern anti-
t _..-
._.
Platonic thrust whose basic dogma is that the era when it was st111possigti
to base a political movement on a direct reference to some eternal

metaphysical or transcendental truth is definitely over: the experienczx
-.--
our centurv , Droves that such a reference to some meta~hvsicala Dnon
A I I
can lead only to catastrophic 'totalitanan' social consequences. E'

reason, the only solution 1s to accept that we live in a new era deprived3
C
-.
metaphysical certainties, in an era of contingency and conjectures, i n 2

'risk society' in which politics is a matter of phronesk, of strategic judge-
ments and dialogue, not of applying fundamental cognitive insights. . . .
m ~ a d i o is u aiming at, against this postmodern h a , is the
resuscitation of the fiolztics of funiversnl)
1 J '
Truth in todav's conditions of
I
g n i conungency.e'l.hus
h - B modem conditions
of multiplicity and conungency, not only -but the Dr&erly
the infinite Truth is 'eternal' and meta--w,
regard to the temporal of Being; it is a flash of another dimension
transcending the positivity of BeingJ

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: BADJOU'S CONCEPT OF EVIL IS EMPTY

The politics of liberation depend upon our ability to move beyond definitions of Evil-we need to focus on
the positive content of a future vision. In other words, it is far more important to consider how the
alternative produces the Good than to define Evil.

Translated/Interviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
http://www.cabinetma~azine.or~/issues/5/alainbadiou.php,On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).
Were I to reverse the tables, as you suggest, I would leave everything in place. To say that liberal
capitalism is Evil would not change anything. I would still be subordinating politics to humanistic and
Christian morality: I would say: "Let's fight against Evil." But I've had enough of "fighting; against." of
"deconstructing," of "surpassing," of "putting an end to," etc. MY philosophv desires affirmation. I want to
fight for; I want to know what I have for the Good and to put it to work. I refuse to be content with the
"least evil." It is very fashionable right now to be modest, not to think big. Grandeur is considered a
metaphysical evil. Me, I am for grandeur, I am for heroism. I am for the affirmation of the thought and the
deed. Certainly, it is necessary to propose another theory of Evil. But that is to say, essentially, another
theory of the Good. Evil would be to compromise on the question of the Good. To eive u~ is always Evil.
.
To renounce liberation politics, renounce a passionate love, renounce an artistic creation.. . Evil is the
moment when I lack the strength to be true to the Good that compels me. The real auestion underlying the
question of Evil is the following: What is the Good? All my philosoph~strives to answer this question. For
complex reasons. I give the Good the name "Truths" (in the plural). A Truth is a concrete process that starts
by an upheaval (an encounter, a general revolt, a sumrising new invention), and develops as fidelity to the
novelty thus experimented. A Truth is the subiective development of that which is at once both new and
universal. New: that which is unforeseen by the order of creation. Universal: that which can interest,
rightly, every human individual, according to his pure humanity (which I call his generic humanity). To
become a subiect (and not remain a simple human animal), is to participate in the coming into being of a
universal novelty. That requires effort, endurance, sometimes self-denial. 1 often say it's necessary to be the
"activist" of a Truth. There is Evil each time egoism leads to the renunciation of a Truth. Then, one is de-
subjectivized. Egoistic self-interest carries one away, risking the interruption of the whole progress of a
truth (and thus of the Good).

Michigan 2006 60
AT: BADIOU'S CONCEPT OF EVIL IS EMPTY

Evil cannot be pre-determined-it is always situational. No formal rule is able to stand up to the infinite
situations that a subject may face.

Translatedllnterviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
htt~://www.cabinetma~azine.or~/issues/5/alainbadiou.ph~,On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).
I maintain that the natural state of the human animal has nothing to do with Good or Evil. And I maintain
that the kind of formal moral obligation described in Kant's categorical imperative does not actually exist.
Take the example of torture. In a civilization as sophisticated as the Roman Empire, not only is torture not
considered an Evil, it is actually appreciated as a spectacle. In arenas, people are devoured by tigers; they
are burned alive; the audience rejoices to see combatants cut each other's throats. How, then, could we
think that torture is Evil for every human animal? Aren't we the same animal as Sencea or Marcus
Aurelius? I should add that the armed forces of my country, France, with the approval of the governments
of the era and the majority of public opinion, tortured all the prisoners during the Algerian War. The rehsal
of torture is a historical and cultural phenomenon, not at all a natural one. In a general way, the human
animal knows cruelty as well as it knows pity; the one is just as natural as the other, and neither one has
anything to do with Good or Evil. One knows of crucial situations where cruelty is necessary and usehl,
and of other situations where pity is nothing but a form of contempt for others. You won't find anything in
the structure of the human animal on which to base the concept of Evil, nor, moreover, that of the Good.
But the formal solution isn't any better. Indeed. the obligation to be a subiect doesn't have any meaning, for
the following, reason: The possibility of becoming a subiect does not depend on us. but on that which
occurs in circumstances that are always singular. The distinction between Good and Evil already supposes
a subiect. and thus can't apply to it. It's always for a subject, not a pre-subjectivized human animal, that Evil
is possible. For exam~le.if, during the occupation of France bv the Nazis, I ioin the Resistance. 1 become a
subiect of History in the making. From the inside of this subiectivization, I can tell what is Evil (to betray
my cornrades. to coliaborate with the Nazis. etc.). I can also decide what is Good outside of the habitual
norms. Thus the writer Marguerite Duras has recounted how, for reasons tied to the resistance to the Nazis,
she participated in acts of tomre against traitors. The whole distinction between Good and Evil arises fiom
inside a becoming-subject, and varies with this becoming (which I myself call philosophy, the becoming of
a Truth). To summarize: There is no natural definition of Evil; Evil is always that which, in a particular
situation. tends to weaken or destroy a subject. And the conception of Evil is thus entirely dependent on the
events from which a subiect constitutes itself. It is the subject who prescribes what Evil is, not a natural
idea of Evil that defines what a "moral" subject is. There is also no formal imperative fiom which to define
Evil, even negatively. In fact, all imperatives presume that the subject of the imperative is already
constituted, and in specific circumstances. And thus there can be no imperative to become a subject, except
as an absolutely vacuous statement. That is also why there is no general form of Evil. because Evil does not
exist except as a judgment made. by a subiect. on a situation, and on the consequences of his own actions in
this situation. So the same act (to kill, for example) may be Evil in a certain subjective context, and a
necessity of the Good in another.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: BADIOU IS INTOLERANT OF DIFFERENCE

Badiou is not intolerant of difference-he just does not think that it should be fetishized and made into the
locus of a political strategy1
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj i i i e k , Waiting for
Does Badiou's suspicion of the ethics of difference imply a hostility to difference as such? No. On the
contrary, differences are simply the stuff of which the world is made. The point, rather, is that fetishizing
difference is as ideological as the cruel attempt to suppress it. As we saw in Badiou s version of Saint Paul,
f
any truth will simply be indifferent to such differences that exist, while at the same time-precisely
because it is addressed uniformly to all and therefore admits no tolerant "agreement to disagreet -
f
introducing a new cleavage between those caught up in this truth and those who refuse it.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: TRUTH EVENT CAN BE EVIL

Truth events are emancipatory because they search for something truly universal-this quest makes it easy
to see why the Nazi's were the opposite-they denied universalism in the most fundamental way possible
by leaving out Jews.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj kiiek, Waiting for
If one's own support of a truth is fundamentally a matter of decision. what is to distinguish untruth from
truth? Didn't, for example, at least some Germans (Heidegger is the obvious example) believe that, far from
representing a monstrous falsehood, their partici_~ation in a fascist movement was fidelity to an event, the
Nazi seizure of power in 1933? "[Wlhen all is said and done, it is obvious that reaction, even the forces of
death, can be stamped with the creative force of an event" (Ethics, Ivii). Since mere predation is beneath
good and evil, evil must take its sense from some perversion of a truth-procedure; and since a truth-
procedure has essentially three parts (the event, fidelity to the event, and the truth this fidelity constructs),
there are three ways a truth-procedure can be perverted into evil. The first is the substitution of a
simulacrum for the event, the second is betrayal of a real event, and the third is to ascribe to the tmth-
process total power. It seems to me that these three modes of evil are meant to correspond primarily to
three volitical evils, although only the first is spelled out. The "revolution" of National Socialism was a
simulacrum of [End Page 2991 the previous revolutions of 1792 and 1917: because it convokes the
plenitude of an ethnic "Germany" instead of the (univenalizable) exclusion on which this plenitude was
founded, it blocks any possible truth-procedure. In a strange echo of Heideggerts scandalous paragraph on
the gas chambers, the (ontic) extermination of the Jews appears here as the effect of an (ontological)
blockage of truth: inasmuch as "Jew" names the address to all that Nazism cannot make, its referent must
be eliminated. The second evil, that of betrayal, could be taken to refer to the abandonment of the
revolutionarv movements in the Third World-the corruption of the political class in Angola after the
MPLA took power, or the strange quiescence of some Brazilian radicals in the face of the military
dictatorship in the late 1960s. The third evil ascribes total power to the truth-process-as though a truth,
rather than reconfiguring the situation from which it emerges. could actively become the situation,
subiectina evervthin~to a single rule. The referent here would seem to be Left absolutism.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006
AT: IMPOSSIBLE TO DETERMINE WHAT IS UNIVERSAL
It is possible to detect true universals-if fidelity to the event causes the subject to question the old order,
they are striving towards a new truth-if they are striving to save the old order, then it is simulacrum.
Fee, Switzerland, The ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, p. 138-1 39)
-are we to draw-idemarcstion-KE-between a t&e Event and its

semblance? Is not Badiou compelled to rely here on a 'metap-
opposlhon between l'ruth and its sembiance? ngaln, tne answerlnvoIves
the way an Event relates to the Situation whose 'I'ruth it a r t i c u I a t e s i ~ m
.
was a pseudo-Event a n d t h e October KevoIuhon was an authentic Een'f,
- .. .. _-=-_y
-l;
_ -
because only the latter related to the very foundations of the Situation ... .. 4 of
c c t r a s t to
Nazism, which staged a pseudo-Event preciselv in order to save &
capitalist order. The Nazi strategy was 'to change things so that, ...at... their
w --
most fundamental, they can remain the same'. 5

Michigan 2006 64
AT: TERRORISM OUTWEIGHS

American hegemony is terrorism on a global scale.

Translated/Interviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02,
http:l/www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.Dhp, On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).
Terror is a political tool that has been in use as long as human societies have existed. It should therefore be
judged as a political tool, and not submitted to infantilizing moral judgment. It should be added that there
are different types of terror. Our liberal countries know how to use it perfectly. The colossal American
army exerts terrorist blackmail on a global scale, and prisons and executions exert an interior blackmail no
less violent.

Michigan 2006 65
AFF: AT: BADIOU'S ETHICS

Badiou's concept of ethics fails because it is impossible to make qualitative distinctions between different
sorts of evil-leading to absurd results.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of lllinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Ziiek, Waiting for
This apparatus is a powerful lens, and there can be no doubt that Badiou is describing something important;
perhaps it is even an aspect of evil. But is it really Evil (Mal) itself? Badiou's evil. like his truth. is
indifferent to content, a merely formal label. In its formalism, its insistence on fidelity to any Event
whatever-on "ethical consistencyt' itself as a value-Badiou's good is almost an aesthetic rather than an
ethical category. (At one point, in an echo of Kant's purposeless purpose, ethical consistency is even
described as "disinterested interest.") While there is something undeniably attractive in ethical consistency
(and something ugly in its lack). the most important thing for a modern ethics may be to push these
sentimental considerations aside. The value of ethical consistency is authorized by Lacan's well-known
dictum not to give up on one's desire [ne pas ceder sur son dksir]. But we should not forget that this maxim
derives from the reading of Antigone in SCminaire VII. Yes, Sophocles' Antigone, in her awful ethical
consistency, is a captivating figure. Brecht's Galileo, on the other hand, in his opportunism and wavering
inconsistency, is a bit distasteful. But Antigone is a reactionary, and Galileo invents physics. Further,
Badiou has no way of sorting out different evils beyond his tripartite division. Ethics tells us what Nazism
and scientific obscurantism have in common. But an ethics would have to be able to tell them apart. The
distinction between. say, the abandonment of a social movement by its leader and the abandonment of a
poem by its author cannot be made without some kind of qualitative supplement. Since, as we shall see,
Badiou's philosophy is predicated precisely on the subtraction from consideration of all qualitative
predicates, this supplement can only be vulgar, non-philosophical. Perhaps the supdement it requires is the
language of human rights, which, whatever its faults, can tell the difference between a concentration camp
and a creationist textbook.

Michigan 2006 66
AFF: BADIOU'S POLITICS FAIL

Badiou is not politically useful because his alternative is too vague-he says that the event side steps the
state but any alternative politics must be able to reform the state to succeed.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj eitek, Waiting for
Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-3 19).
Badiou's ontology cannot usefully displace the dialectic. Because the Event must descend like a grace,
Badiou's ontology can only describe situations and never History. Since the event emeryes from outside of
the state of the situation, it is rigorously untheorizable: as we saw above, it is theorized as untheorizable.
Despite every protestation to the contrarv, Badiou's system cannot address the question "What is to be
done?" because the only thing to do is to wait for the Event. What happens when the precipitation of the
Event is preciselv what needs to be done? Yes. we can be faithful to a previous event, as Badiou says Lenin
was to the Paris Commune. But surely this solution mitigates the power of the Event as the irruption of the
void into this situation. The dialectic, on the other hand, conceives the void as immanent contradiction.
While both contradiction and void are immanent to the situation, contradiction has the tremendous
advantage of having movement built in, as it were: the Event does not appear out of an immanent nowhere,
but is already fully present in itself in the situation, which it explodes in the movement to for-itself.
Meanwhile, the question of the dialectic leads us back to the twofold meaning of "state": both the law and
order that govern knowledge, and law and order in the everyday sense. This identification authorizes
Badiou's antistatism, forcefully reflected in his own political commitment, the Organisation Politique
(whose members do not vote), which has made limited [End Page 3061 but effective interventions into the
status of immigrant workers. In Badiou's system, nothing can happen within the state of a situation;
innovation can only emerge from an evental site, constitutively excluded from the state. But can a
principled indifference to the state ground a politics? The state surely has the function of suppressing the
anarchic possibilities inherent in the (national) situation. But it can also suppress the possibilities exploited
by an anarchic capitalism. It is well known that the current rightist "small-government" movement is an
assault on the class compromise represented by the Keynesian state. To be sure, one should be suspicious
of that compromise and what it excluded. But it also protected workers against some of capitalism's more
baleful effects. As with Ethics, Badiou is certainly describing something: the utopian moment of a total
break with the state may be a part of any ~enuinepolitical transformation. But, unless we are talking about
the sad old interplay of transgression and limit-which posited the state as basically permanent, with
transgression as its permanent suspension-this anarchic moment says nothing about the new state of
affairs that will ultimately be imposed on the generic set it constructs. Surely the configuration of that state
will be paramount-in which case state vower has to be fought for, not merely evaded.

Michigan 2006 67

Badiou's system fails-he has no way to overcome the enormous power he attributes to capitalism.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Ziiek, Waiting for
But what is strange is the vehemence with which Badiou maintains his distance from the economic-from
what classical Marxism called the "base," the elements of a situation that pertain to its own reproduction. It
is perfectly orthodox to say that there can be no purely economic intervention in the economy: even with
the best intentions, the World Bank could not solve the problem of Third World poverty. However, in
Badiou's system the economy is not merely reduced to one aspect among many, but actively dismissed
from consideration. Material reproduction is reduced to the sneering Lacanian contempt for "leservice des
biens," the servicing of goods which pertains to the human animal beneath good and evil. Why should
Badiou fully endorse Marx's analysis of the world economy ("there is no need for a revision of Marxism
itself," [Ethics, 971) while keeping Marx's entire problematic at arm's length? In fact. capitalism is the point
of impasse in Badiou's own system, the problem which cannot be actively thought without mave danger to
the system as a whole. Cavital's great power, the tremendous ease with which it colonizes (geographic,
cultural, psychic) territory, is precisely that it seizes situations at their evental site. In their paraphrase o f a brilliant but
much-maligned passage in Marx's Grundrisse, Deleuze and Guattari insist that "capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their
terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes."2 Is this flow that eludes every society's codes not identical with
generic multiplicity, the void which, eluding every representation, nonetheless haunts every situation? Does not capitalism make its entry at a society's
point of impasse-social relations already haunted by variously dissimulated exploitation-and revolutionize them into the capital-labor relation? A
safely non-Orientalist version of this would be the eruption from modernist art's evental site-the art market, which belonged to the situation of
modernism while being excluded from its represented state--of what we might call the "Warhol-event," which inaugurates the transition from the formal
to the real subsumption of (artistic) labor under Capital. It makes perfect sense to say that this transition is the truth of the [End Page 3081 Warhoi-event.
As we saw earlier, the real subsumption of labor under Capital, the conversion of every relation into a monetary relation, is the origin of formal equality:
that is, the foundation of universalism. And far from pertaining to mere animal life beneath the level of the truth-procedure, capitalj~mitself fits
perfectly the form of the revolutionary Event. It would then appear that capitalism is. like religion,
eliminated from the art-politics-science-love series only bv fiat. And why is this? Because the economic,
the "servicing of goods," cannot enter Badiou's system without immediately assuming the status of a cause.
Excluded from direct consideration, capitalism as a condition of set theory is perfectly innocuous; its
preconditional status belongs to a different order than what it conditions. It opens up a mode of
presentation, but what is presented existed all along: look at Paul, for example. But included as the product
of a truth-procedure, capitalism immediately appears as the basis for all the others: it is, in fact, the
revolutionary imption of Capital (in whatever society) that conditions any modern process of science, art,
love, or politics. If Badiou's svstem were to consider capitalism directly, some elements. those pertaining to
the "base," would appear to have more weight than others-the "superstructure." The effects of such an
inclusion of capitalism in Badiou's system-an inclusion which nothing prevents-would be catastrouhic.
Radical universality (as opposed to the historicallv conditioned universalitv imposed by the emergence of
capitalism) would become unthinkable. The "eternity" of truth would yield to historicism.

Seven Week Seniors
Michigan 2006

Unfortunately for Badiou, his great enemy of capitalism fits perfectly within what he considers a truth
event-the alternative merely re-creates the status quo.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Ziiek, Waiting for
Badiou cannot think Capital precisely because Capital has already thought Badiou. And let's face it: despite
Badiou's inspiring presentation, nothing is more native to capitalism than his basic narrative matrix. The
violent seizure of the subiect by an idea, fidelity to it in the absence of any guarantee, and ultimate
transformation of the state of the situation: these are the elements of the narrative of entrepreneurial risk,
"revolutionary innovation," the "transformation of the industrv." and so on. In pushing away material
reproduction, Badiou merely adapts this narrative to the needs of intellectuals, who, in Badiou's conception,
have a monopoly over much of the field of truth.
Failure to cope with the power of capitalism dooms any ethical system to failure.
Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj if ek, Waiting for
The problem with this ethics-as Brecht showed us, with ethics in general-is that, under capitalism, the
only fully consistent ethical position is ruthless self-interest. There is no ethical position that is both
minimally compassionate and fully ethically consistent. Mauler in Saint Joan is doomed to make money
from all of his generous impulses; the good woman of Szechwan can only help her neighbors by taking
advantage of them. In fact, this split constitutes part of capitalism's dynamism. The ideolonical force of
capitalism is that so many people are given a subiective interest in maintaining the stability of capitalism,
even if this interest involves competing with neighbors who share an "objective" interest in ending it. Any
"owting out" is at present simply quixotic, and only ~ossibleon the basis of substantial privilege. Plainly,
professors want tenured positions, for the same reason the unemployed want jobs: because they exist. (As
for playing the stock market, this criticism buys neoliberal rhetoric hook, line, and sinker: most academics
who "play the stock market" do so because universities, like many other U.S. employers, have shifted the
burden of risk from their own retirement systems onto the individual employees.)

Michigan 2006 69
AFF: PERMUTATION
The state and the revolutionary political subject can cooperate in Badiou's conception of the alternative.
Hallward, 03(Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis /
Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy),
We know that Badiou's early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has considerably evolved. Just
how far it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains resolutely anticonsensual,
anti-"re-presentative, " and thus antidemocratic (in the ordinary sense of the word). Democracy has
become the central ideological category of the neo-liberal status quo, and any genuine "philosophy today is
above all something that enables people to have done with the 'democratic' submission to the world as it
is." 66 But he seems more willing, now, to engage with this submission on its own terms. La Distance
politique again offers the most precise points de repkre. On the one hand, the OP remains suspicious of any
political campaign-for instance, an electoral contest or petition movement-that operates as a "prisoner of
the parliamentary space." 67 It remains "an absolute necessity [of politicsl not to have the state as norm.
The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics." On the other hand, however. it is now
equally clear that "their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of volitical
thought." 68 The OP now conceives itself in a tense, nondialectical "vis-A-vis" with the state, a stance that
rejects an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses "any antagonistic
conception of their operation-a conception that smacks of classism." There is no more choice to be made
between the state and revolution; the "vis-a-vis demands the presence of the two terms and not the
annihilation of one of the two." 69

Michigan 2006 70
AFF: ALTERNATIVE UNWORKABLE AND COMMUNIST

Badiou's alternative of radical egalitarianism is unworkable and is based on a failed model of communism.
Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis 1
London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European
Badiou's politics have always been about "collective emancipation, or the problem of the reign of Iiberty in
infinite situations" (DO, 54; cf. TC, 60). His political goals have remained consistent over the years, since
"every historical event is communist, to the degree that 'communist' designates the transtemporal
subjectivity of emancipation, the egalitarian passion, the Idea of justice, the will to break with the
compromises of the service des biens, the deposition of egoism, an intolerance of oppression, the wish to
impose a withering away of the state. The absolute preeminence of multiple presentation over
representation." 84 What has changed is communism's mode of existence. In Badiou's earlier work, the
practical (if ultimately unattainable) goal was always to effect the actual, historical achievement of stateless
community. Today, in order to preserve politics' "intrinsic relation to truth" (DO, 48), Badiou has had to let
go of almost any sort of political engagement with the economic and the social. He continues to declare a
wholly egalitarian politics, but as reserved for a strictly subiective plane. The unqualified iustice of a
generic communism, first proposed in Marx's 1844 Manuscripts and conceived in Badiou's own terms as
the advent of "pure presentation, " as the "undivided authority of the infinite. or the advent of the collective
as such" (AM, 91 ). remains the only valid subjective norm for Badiou's pojitical thought. This subjective
norm has become ever more distant, however, from the day-to-day business of "objective" oolitics: the
programmatic pursuit of the generic ideal is itself now dismissed as a "Romantic" dream leading to
"fraternity terror" (AM, 10 1).

501.hoe - Heidt - Solt - Levkovitz - Neg.BadIou Index

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Seven Week Seniors BADIOU

Elliot. Lasky. Logan. Will

What can I run this against?

Why are there not that many impacts in the file?

Where else can I get affirmative answers?

The aff K toolbox file has more.

What blocks do I need to write?

What do I need to know about Badiou to run this argument?

Badiou is frustrated with both postmodern relativism/deconstructiodthedenial of truth (which he sees as

This political strategy therefore links to either opposing pole in philosophy:

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

IDENTITY POLITICS INC MODULE

by the abstract permanence proper to a unity of the count. A truth is al-

most consequential instances of identitarian politics, such as Nazism, are

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

IDENTITY POLITICS 1 NC MODULE

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

these traits (national, religious, sexual, and so on) considered as dominant

ce~tions.such as that of strict conlutzality, the confinement of women,

and so forth. It is perfectly possible to combine the two, as becomes ap-

The two components of the articulated whole (abstract homogene-

comes to speculating on the financial markets or maintain in^ a lar~e-scale

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

Universal ethics must be rejected for three reasons:

resistance, unlike that of a horse, lies not in his fragile body

to tind Man, if we are detelmined to think him [la pmspr]:

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? Since the

ism and imperialism, with today's sordid self-satisfaction in

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

( Z T 5 3 h e second place, because if the ethical 'consensus' J

is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that eLJery

either biological (images of victims) or 'Mr'estern' (the self-

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

C 3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determina-

Social Security. Once agziin, 'collective' responsibility

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

Hence our alternative: reject the affirmative.

We must reject the ideological framework of 'ethics', and

bilities and our refusal of conservatism, including the

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

homosexuals, communists. . . . But the name 'Tew' was thP

name of names, serving to designate those people whose

o7tK.e v o i n , S u f 6 y t h e pazicularity --- of an abstract set s j ~ y l a c r u m and hence t e z i s m

nothing more about those they designate as the enemy than

substance soit, rien n.e dozt ctrej.

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, WiH

G e r e , then, we have the Evil variants of Good, understood as the

.field of enquiry. No longer is it a question of what the individual

nf -,r l p p ; r i r \ o - r r r h i r h :c s l r ~ r a x ~3 cl r ~ a r l x rr t ~ r i r l ~-dt n t h p limit XF far

of its actions. Ethics, from this militant standpoint, cannot take an

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

Rights stand in opposition to Badiou's ethics:

a thing acts accoralng to the force of its very own reasonn6However,

(it's the same thing now) in a way which

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

LINK: HUMAN RIGHTS

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

LINK: HUMAN RIGHTS

Elliot, Lasky, Logan, Will

LINK: HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION