Preface

• Motivations: an urgently felt need for a critique of the false self-evidence with which
the workings of the European Justice Court, of UN-interventionism, … is
argumented for
• “Essay sur la conscience du Mal” summarizes the ethical dimension of Badiou's
other work “Being & Event”
• Announcing the place of the subject in relation to the event: subjectivation of both
good and evil.
• A note on the evolution of Badiou's thought towards more interconnectivity between
operators: “In Being and Event I only reached the point of prescribing what should
be the being of truth events, notably generic multiplicities. In the sequel to that work
– Logic of worlds- the trajectory of a truth, which takes a given event as its point of
departure, should no longer be seen independent of the logic which transforms our
faithfulness to this event.”
~

Introduction
a brief history of the concept of ethics:
1. Stoics: wisdom is the ability to distinguish those things over which we can exercise
control, from those things which will remain independent of us, and consequently the
wise direct acts of will towards the former and not let him- or herself be unsettled by
the latter.
2. modernity, in relation to the Cartesian subject, equates ethics with morality, in other
words 'Kantian practical reason' Ethics is the basis for judging the actions of the
subject (which is taken to mean both individual and collective)
3. Hegel distinguishes morality (judgement after the act, or premeditated activity) from
ethics (immediate action, the instantaneous determined mind)
4. present day vulgarized and vague terms of ethics: normalization, normed
commentary, institutionalized
The commonplace and media- reference to ethics is in fact a nihilist denial of all thought.
In stead this book proposes ethics as the persistent maxim in our continued dealing with
singular events. In stead of reducing ethics to conservative good conscience, it will stand for
truths in their multiplicity.
-----------------I Humanity?----------------
To start critisizing the “human-rights-ethics” Badiou calls to mind the situation it evolved out
of:

What is the meaning of this title:

− questioning the projection of a self-evident nature on the concept of and the given
realization of human rights
 − questioning the idea of a generally recognizable human subject.
− questioning the grounds for such ideas on this 'evident nature': the supposed ruins of
Marxism and its historical perspective on social engagement.
− opposing, with organized commitment, the liberal defense of individual rights

1. The death of Man

M Foucault's subject is a historical construct and not an eternal evident; as a practical
consequence he agitated for the rights of the imprisoned;
Althusser, contrary to the perception of Hegel, saw history not as the becoming absolute of
the Spirit, nor the rise of a substance-subject, but rather a rationally ordered process without
subject, needing a science – historical materialism- to clarify it. This science can be called
“theoretical anti-humanism”, and shows an obligation to constantly redefine the essence of
emancipatory politics.
Lacan: the subject is not the source of moral nor ethics and needs to be differentiated into
an 'I' – imaginary unity - and a split Subject, without an absolutely given “nature”; there can
be no generic norm which determines the concept of human subject, and a fortiori no
philosophical imperative, obedience to which would be the criterium for a cure. With this
view he fought against the normal moralization of american psychoanalysis which was seen
to be subjected to a conception of “the american way of life”
2. Fundaments of the “human-rights ethic”
1. A return to Kant: the existence of formally representable imperatives that prevail over
empirical considerations; these imperatives concern punishment, crime, evil,...
Ethics is then the ability to ascertain a-priori where evil resides, and define good as that
which intervenes against this definite evil.
the presuppositions of this neo-Kantian ethics are as follows:
− “division of ethical labor”: the pathetical subject, suffering from evil – the active
subject that recognizes evil and knows that it has to put a halt to it by all means
− politics is subjected to ethics: indignation and pity; spectatorship in the middle of
circumstances
− Good is deduced from a definition of evil
− human-rights are the right to not be subjected to evil
2. Already 18th century philosophy identified as the core of all relation with the other, “the
empathic relation with the other as suffering living being”, in one word: the feeling of
“pity”.
Evil – looking at historical ethics discourse – appears to be more readily identifiable than
good
3. Man: Living animal, or immortal singularity?
The ethics described in the above, defines man as that which is able to recognize itself as
suffering [victim]
Why is this definition unacceptable?
1.
− in history we find the animal character of both evil and its victim, even if a
victim can, with greatest effort lift himself up “into humanity” again. This
resistance to becoming animal, and resilient desire to remain what it is, makes
man into something else than “a mortal being”
− if there is anything like human-rights then they must be related to the rights of
the immortal, the infinite, over the contingence of death, against the wish to be
animal [that is, the wish to not be conscious of one's own mortality]
Subjectivation is immortal and is constitutive of man
− “human-rights-ethics”, in the concrete instance of humanitarian
interventionism, is symptomized in the denial of local politics and the
ideology which uses the name “ poverty” for the situation it thinks to fight,
and reducing this situation to “causes”, to “faults of the victim”.
2.
− a contradiction in terms: from any “human-rights-ethical” consensus founded
on the a priori recognition of evil, it would follow that each attempt to unite
man around a tangible concept of good, should itself be a source of evil:
revolutionary projects, that is projects and new ideas in opposition of that
consensus, would, according to that consensus, result in totalitarian terror.
− the effect of this consensual contradiction is an inability to answer the simple
question of what can be the source of inspiration for the aforementioned effort
man must make to stay with his or her immortality, or inspiration for any
thought at all, since we know that these thoughts must be the invention of new
form!
− Man, as immortal being, takes its support from the incalculable, the un-
posessed. The interventionism that we practice seems, on the contrary,
concerned with the maintaining of the capitalist ideology of possession and
simply also of the goods we have capitalized.
3.
− the present consensual definition of ethics or negative definition of good
through the definition of evil, denies the possibilities of thinking any
singularity
− example the case of medicine: the single patient versus the ethical
management

4. Some principles
− proposition 1: man procures an identity through affirmative thought, and the
singular truth he is capable of. Through his aspiration to immortality
− proposition 2: Evil can only be ascertained through the tangible capacity for
good. thus through the capacity for expansive interpretation of what is
possible and for the rejection of conservatism even when this concerns being
itself. And not the other way round!
 − proposition 3: There is no generic ethics. Only -perhaps- an ethics of the
processes which allow one to meet situations in their singularity.

-----------------II Does the Other exist?----------------

The above principles might be countered by stating that no ethics can be founded on
subjectivation; that from the start ethics should be the ethics of the other; this II. chapter
investigates the objections to historical materialist ethics built on such an invocation of the
other.
The original starting point of the ethics of the other is Lévinas' ethical radicalism.
1. Lévinas' ethics
Greek metaphysics have subordinated thought to the logic of the Same, of substance and
identity. Jewish Law is the name for something that comes before the Same, before the
objective discerning of regularities or identity. Law does not tell me what is, but what the
existence of the others imposes on me.
As phenomenon of the other par excellence Lévinas proposes the face, not as the place of
mimetic recognition, rather of an epiphany to which I am destined, and the place of the I
subordinated to this epiphany. To the point that this ethics is the new name of a thinking
which gives up its reasonable apprehensions, in favor of this prophetic subjection.
2. 'Ethics of Difference'
In the common sense interpretation of Lévinas' ethics (be it conscious or not) we are left
with just a series of oppositions: recognition of the other ↔ racism; ethics of difference ↔
substantialist nationalism, or sexism; 'multiculturalism' ↔ a monistic model of behavior and
intellect. To sum up: the tolerance-chat, which is very far from the concept of Lévinas'
ethics.
3. From the Other to the Altogether-Other
What guarantees the truth of this 'original subjection to an epiphany'? This anti-ontological
phenomenology?
The grasping of the self, as theorized by Lacan under the concept of the Mirror stage,
demands in itself already an extreme form of auto-amnesia. The role of the death-drive and
narcissism in the constitution of the I at the mirror stage, make it impossible to establish any
ethics at that place of interfacial law.
The prevailing of the Other on the Same requires that the experience of alterity be
guaranteed ontologically, as a distance. Ethics then is the experience of bridging this
distance. But in everyday experience the appearance of the others finitude can certainly be
re-appropriated as similarity or imitation, and thus be reduced to the logic of the Same. The
other always resembles me so much that it seems impossible to axiomatize the necessity of
openness to the other.
Thus Lévinas must posit the Altogether-Other, as transcendental support for the immediate,
phenomenal Other. This Altogether-Other is the ethical name for God. No ethics without
God, the ineffable. But, because his ethics is inseparable from the conception of the
Altogether-Other, in fact Lévinas thus leaves no place for philosophy, nor for theology, no
place for thought.
And in doing so he makes the distance between his ethics and everything that is thinkable,
all the more immeasurable.
4. Ethics as disbanded religion
What can be the reason for the failure of a practice of Lévinasian ethics without its religious
dimension? Perhaps that instead of this transcendental basis, the human-rights ethics, and its
'respect for difference' define a particular identity? And remaining unconscious, this
identification (which therefor also remains infantile) wants to extend to the point of
appropriating the other.
5. Return to the Same
Recognition of the Same, there becomes the difficult task of man. A new axiom: Infinity is
the banal reality of the everyday situation. God doesn't exist. There is but multiplicities.
There is no One.
The infinite (Altogether-) Other, is simply (excuse the pun) what there is.
6. 'Cultural' differences and culturalism
As a critique against a futile practice of cultural differences, original thought should explain
the following: given the universal presence of “difference”, and because every truth is a
coming-to-be of what is not yet, “differences” are exactly the sediment that one can find in
every retrospect on truth, and are thus rendered insignificant. There is not one concrete
situation that can be resolved by recognition of the differences, recognition of the other.
7. From the Same to Truths
Truth is indifferent for differences.
The only real ethics is that of the efforts which have produced some truths into this world.
There is no ethics in Cultural Relativism that would be capable of encompassing our
immortal striving.
Ethics is always the ethics of … (of psychoanalysis, as Lacan countered Kant, of politics, of
art, …)
III. Ethics as figure of Nihilism
Nihilism as the desire for the void, for blind necessity. (in reference to Nietzsche's remark
that man prefers to want the void, rather than to want nothing.
1. Ethics as servant of necessity
The modern name for necessity is 'economy'.
Contemporary politics is far from any activity coupling goal-seeking with the search for
means and conditions to realize those goals. Politics today boils down to the translation of
the economic spectacle in order for it be sufferable by its spectators. The potentials which
politics claims to regulate, are in effect being restrained, by the neutralizing externalization
constituted in politics reference to economy. This policy is accompanied by the absence of
any ethical social project, of any emancipatory motivation. In short it keeps repeating the
announcement of the end of all ideologies. Ethical in the two (opposite) senses of the word:
1. the banal sense, which blocks a priori any social project, in name of its supposed
resistance against evil; 2. ethical in the sense that I propose here, because commonplace
subjectivity supposes that each and every ethics should always function only as the guide
for politics and never the other way round.
Consensual ethics is spawned by the horror spectacle. Fear as the drive for ethics.
Truth as something that holds universally, necessarily will find enemies in those few that
hold and defend opinions which by definition only they profit from.
The Law is not 'already-made', but rather déjà-donnée. But this cannot be an excuse to let
'compassion for the other' become the restraint on all projects to explore untried strategies
within ourselves! Because under that restraint Law just turns into “human rights”, an
instrument to regulate a correspondence between judgements and opinions.
This restraint, this not-thinking, not-wanting, is – as Nietzsche showed – inevitably becomes
the shape of “wanting nothingness”, or in other words “submission to an ideology of
impotence will turn into death drive”.
2. Ethics as Western mastering of Death
The case of the Balkan wars:
press commentaries state “so close they live, but so far from 'us' … these
victims and their executioners”
this closeness of a combination of an other without clear contours and this Evil
at our safe-haven's doorstep, has been made into the perfect food for our
'human-rights' ethics
It feeds the power inherent to this ethics, the power to decide who lives and
who dies.
Truth as a category in those things that befalls us, is ignored if one's ethics is based on the
assumption that the only thing that can befall us, is death. (Badiou calls the latter ethics
'Being-for-death')
To choose for a conception of truth as a thing that befalls us, is both choosing to demark
philosophy from ethics, and divide 'courage for truth' from 'nihilism'.
3. Bio-ethics (Euthanasia and Eugenics)
Euthanasia, dying in dignity? When and how can we, in name of our concept of
happiness, kill someone? The common debate of opinions on this topic rests on an
exclusive combination of 'being for death' and the concept of dignity. It thus prohibits
thought about dignified suffering, or dignified pain. It does this in line with the
contemporary ideology of youth and slick efficiency.
The supposed need for political obsession with bio-ethics, should raise suspicions, because
any definition of what is 'human' which is based on the definition of the prefix 'eu-', of what
is 'good', will in some certain sense be nihilist, because of the contradiction it tries to
encompass, in disrespect of truth. Because of the contradiction in claiming a politics of
euthanasia but refusing to recognize its eugenics dimension.
4. Ethical Nihilism between conservatism and death drive
There is no progress, no one time is better than any other. Every epoch has its figure of
nihilism (sophism, …, 'human-rights-ethics')
We can only escape nihilism's grasp by investing truths against the beliefs of conservatism.
IV. Ethics of Truths
1. Being, Event, Truth, Subject
Subject = becoming subject, or even better: Subject = entering the composition of a
subject, in order, at some point, to produce access to a truth that befalls our being.
Truth is not reduced to objective givens (that is the multiplicities and infinite differences
that make up the everyday, as said above)
There must be a supplement, in order for the animal to be called into subject-becoming. This
supplement will be called “event”. A supplement in an radical sense, that it forces me to
break with the rules and ideologies I was forced to hold in the reality before it was
supplemented by this event. Truth is the process of fidelity to that event.
The subject of this truth is not the psychological subject, neither the reflecting (Descartes)
nor transcendental (Kant). It is a subject that exceeds any given human nature. For instance
the subject of love is a subject who exceeds both lovers. (and it is this excess, that makes
them exist as immortals)
2. Formal definition of an ethics of a truth
The Ethics of a Truth is that which provides consistency to the presence of some-one, in the
forming of the subject which has been induced by its event.
to unfold this formula:
1) Who is this 'some-one' ? a being, which under the established regulation of
multiplicities, belongs to the species, which comes under scrutiny in the truth
befalling on this regulation. What we can know of this being, is entirely
engaged in all the goings-on of that regulation. But the truth opens a gap in
this known multiplicity. Thus some-one can be at the same time imbedded in
the situation and impregnated by the truth-in-becoming
2) What do we mean with “consistency” ? Simply that there must be a law
governing the unknown, or more precisely: governing the effort of combining
the unknown with the known; the (Spinozian) 'perseverance in being' with the
effort of becoming-subject. For instance Lacan's “ne cédez sur son désir”
3. The experience of ethical 'consistency'
1) disinterested interest

2)opinion is the necessary raw material for all communication. But for truth there must be
meeting!!

Never forget what you have met. This “not-forgetting” does not mean 'remembering', rather
it is the thought and practice of the subjection of my multiplicity to the immortality which it
holds in its grasp, and which is conduced to subject-becoming at the moment of penetration
by a meeting.
4. Ascesitism?
Happiness ↔ renunciation? hedonism ↔ ascetisism?
The experience of being in the grasp of an event is that of an intensified consciousness of
existence! Joy, love, enthusiasm, intellectual bliss...!!!!
Undecidable question of self denial!
asocial character of extreme indifference to opinion (which was defined above as the
necessary raw material for communication)
This social self-excommunication is at the same time a cut with self-interest, seeing as the
contours of the latter is entirely determined by public opinion.
The some-one which is taken in to compose the subject of a truth, is also the some-one
driven by self-interest. But the conscious representation this some-one has of himself, in
order to guide his self-interest, is a fiction. A fiction often itself only held together by self-
interest, but nonetheless a fiction, which thus can be subordinated to the demand for
consistency from the Immortal subject-becoming, rather than remain occupied with the
socialized animal it is.
The other risk one takes in entering the composition of a truth's subject, is that of toppling
the fictitious assemblage that is the self-image, and to remain faithful to the truth event, than
means to radically give up interest in that self-image. In that case one might speak of
asceticism. Still then, this asceticism is actually the epiphany of the truth-subject as a pure
desire for a self.

V The Problem of Evil

A) Living, truth, Good
The faithfulness to truth is prefigured Plato's Cave-allegory, in the moment 'the liberated
seer” returns to the cave, after having been dazzled by the light outside, to help his
companions who are still enslaved by the play of shadows on the back wall of the cave. This
moment is realized for instance in the return of the relativistic phyicist, from theory, to the
construction of nuclear technology or arms.
All beings, whether human or animal (and thus the distinction in fact is irrelevant), precedes
an notion of Good and Evil. Truth and Evil are only correlated with Truth-processes.
Paralyzed by a rupture, beings are confronted with the disorganization of their survival
efforts.
Good is the internal norm of a consistent pursuit of disorganization. (Take also the example
of love)
“For whom can there be 'absence of truth' - for which beings? Neither for the animal,
because it is only involved in the pursuit of its own needs, nor for the subject because it only
exists for a particular given truth.” So 'absence of truth' can not be a definition of Evil, as
tried by Plato. But in the same logic, also Evil can only exist as a consequence of
subjectivation in response to a given truth. Evil can be said to be a deregulation of the
power of Truth. From this Evil inherits the quality of truth, that makes it impossible to
recognize it a-priori, in advance or by frozen consensus.
Lévinas and also the proponents of all ethical ideology, always need to make a step of
'radicalization' (Lévinas clarifies the primacy of 'openness for the other' by the statement of
the “Entirely Different”, of an transcendental god) The paradox of Nazism as an example
that says 'never again', by which all actions must be judged, but which is incomparable by
definition, is in fact the paradox of all philosophical practices of radicalization.
B) The existence of Evil
“In the comparison of Holocaust and Stalinism the meaningless category of totalitarianism
is coined to lump together the Holocaust and the Gulag.” But both exterminations should be
seen in their singular and irreducible nature. And we must do the work of locating this
singularity. Human-rights ideologists locate this singularity in Evil itself.
The proponents of human-rights-ideology are so fixed on their locating of that singularity in
Evil itself, that they will deny categorically that Nazism was at all a political movement. But
it is exactly because Nazism could establish itself as a massive subjectivation, in which the
word “Jew” was a constitutive thought- (!) element, that this Nazism was able to proceed
and 'make necessary' the extermination of 'The Jew'. It is cowardly to try to think through
any notion of politics, without considering the existence of a politics of which the organic
categories and subjective prescriptions are in fact criminal. Hana Arendt's defines politics as
the stage of a being-together. But questioning the concept of 'being-together' is exactly what
should be the basis for defining the ensemble (the set) of beings which comes together. The
Nazi category of 'The Jew' served the purpose of defining the 'German' set, within the space
of potential being-together, by the arbitrary prescription of an outside which under the name
of 'outside' must be persecuted from within the German inside. What made the Nazi regime
singular was, amongst other things, the determining of a conquering subjectivity powered by
the proclamation of a sharply contoured (historical) community. […]
[This shows] that the singularity of Evil derives here from the way both the collective (the
ensemble) and the 'being-together' (the consensual sharing of norms) is conceptualized.
The Nazi politics was representable as a truth process, and thus could posses the German
situation.
In general:
1) evil exists
2) it should be distinguished from the violence that all human animal beings apply to
obstinately pursue their lives. This violence precedes all distinction between Good
and Evil
3) there is no such thing as radical Evil which might be a clarification of the former
distinction in 2)
4) Evil can only be distinguished from the above predatory banality, from the
perspective of Good, so from the way a subject+animal is understood from within a
truth process.
5) …
6) …
7) a truth-ethics, meaning, the principle of consistency which is the motor of 'the
fidelity to the fidelity' to that truth, is the only thing that can avert the Evil brought
into the space of possibility by that singular truth.

C) Return to the Event, Fidelity and Truth

1) the event is situated. What is the relation between the event and that for which it is an
event? This relation is the emptiness of the preceding situation. The event names the
un-known in a situation of knowledge circulation.
 In the preface we read a commentary of Badiou on this terminology, correcting with
respect to previous versions of this discourse in Being and Event (?) “Presently I can
no longer hold that the only trace of an event in the situation upon which this event
effects, is the name that is given to that event. That [old] theory assumed that there is
not one event, but two: (the event-event and the naming-event) and thus not just one
subject, but two (the subject that names the event, and the subject that remains
faithful to the event). I thus state that an event is implicative in the sense that a
symbolic expression detaches itself from the event, and lives on, after the event has
already disappeared.
2) concerning fidelity: Because of the disinterested self-interest which ultimately drives
fidelity -even if it is only in the form of a fictional identity- the continuation of the
being-subject of a human animal will always remain uncertain. In this uncertainty
lays the chance of a truth-ethics.
3) The power of a truth is the power to break. To hit a hole into the circulation of
knowledge. We call this 'forcing'. A truth acts from distance on the situation it breaks
and on the communication of opinions. But this doesn't express the truth, neither
does it introduce any 'progress' of those opinions, rather it transforms the codes of
this communication.
the example of mathematics and its truths, which are reabsorbed into the state of opinions,
in the form of question in an examination for selection procedures in the ENS etc.
These three dimensions of truth-processes are the ground for three names of Evil:
- to imagine that the event does not call up the void, but rather its plenitude , that is Evil in
the sense of terror , or simulacrum.
- betrayal to oneself, to the immortal one is. because one is not able to live up to the fidelity
required by a truth process
- imagining the truth as a total power, can be called Evil as Catastrophe

D) Sketch of a theory of evil

1. Simulacrum and terror
Because of the flash-like character of the event, one can say that what remains of that truth
within the situation it might go on to force, can be called a trace, or a name. This name may
be abused to create a simulacrum of an event, when adopted by a plenitude, which has some
formal congruence with the truth procedure originally named thus.
The void is the absolute neutrality of being. Nobody can be forced or excluded by the void.
But even the name of the void can return into the discourse of a simulacrum.
Nazism abused the name 'Jew' It was a name that connotes revolutionary universalism, and
as such names that which is void in that name. The singularity of Nazism is that it used this
name for the organization of an extermination, a use that supposes the simulacrum and
fidelity to that simulacrum. But even in this Nazism manages to simulate a truth procedure.
Contrary to consensual ethics, truth ethics is always combative and militant, in conflict with
ruling perceptions. A truth-ethics supposes the recognition of the value of such a division of
opinions as an attempt to stay faithful to a truth. In this division comes a point where one
gives a name to the enemy of a truth. All appeal to names such as “Blood”, “Honor”, and
“Land” constitute a closed set which in a real truth-ethics is exactly the enemy.
 However hostile he or she is to a truth, the truth-process always represents him or her as
capable of becoming the immortal that they are. Terror on the opposite hand, is the
reduction of each and every being to its banal being-for-death.
2. Betrayal
The internal betrayal of a truth, is more then a simple renunciation. To betray it, one must
always deny it ever existed, and return to the situation of opinions, which, self-interested as
they are, must be entirely constituted of such a denial.
3. The unnameable
1. Is the power of a truth potentially totalitarian?
Opinions examine the elements of a situation, with what we could call an object-language.
Truth does this too, but without self-interest. It seeks to endow this element with a certain
eternity. Moreover, Opinions contradict each other, whereas truth is the consistency of a
subject-of-language.
The internal reserve that averts the absolute power of a truth-process lays in the
unnameable. An event can take away the name of an element of the situation and designate
it as unnameable. The subject-language which comes to re-articulate the arangement of
opinions, must be true to this reserve as well.

2. Is there totalitarian force in the subject-language?

Total power 'in hands of' a truth-subject, means that the consistency or coherence of that
subject can organize the whole world. In other words: it would be a truth that abolishes
opinion. And consequently: the Immortal would negate the human animal.
Every truth presumes, in the composition of the truth-subject it induces, the preservation of
the 'some-one', the always two-sided human animal caught up in truth.
!!! Good is good only in as far as it does not aspire to render the world good. It's only being
lies in the situated advent of a singular truth.
Every absolutization of the power of a truth, organizes an Evil. Not only does this destroy that
truth (for the will to eliminate opinion is the same as that to eliminate the human animal, ie. its
being.)
… this absolutization also interrupts the truth-process for which it stands, since it fails to preserve
the duality of interests – that of interest pure and disinterested interest.

We call this limit of a truth's power “the unnameable” of that truth. The unnameable is not
so in itself, for there is no limit to communication, it is potentially accessible to the language
of the situation. The unnameable is such, only for the subject-language, it is not susceptable
for being made Eternal.
Examples:
− sexual pleasure is inaccessible to the power of language
− For Mathematics, which represents non-contradictory thought par excellence, it is
indeed impossible to prove its non-contradiction from within mathematics
− The community and the collective are the unnameable of political truths
 − Kitsch is arts way of making place for the unnameable

FOR THE MOMENT, I LEAVE OUT FROM THIS SUMMARY THE CONCLUSION
AND THE APPENDIX

SOME COMMENTS OF MY OWN

Facing 'Ethics of Truths' and also 'Being and Event', the main Lack which I feel has to be
investigated, is that it simply seems to let time prevail over all. Truths slowly turn into
established regulation, through their time under the process of formalization, and soon
become the animal which must be invested into the next event. Even if such a critique is
quickly pushed aside by letting this time be layered, immersed into the spaces of the different
steps in the process of formalization - “There is no future, no present, no past. There is
consistency” at first glance this role of time in “Being and Event” seems to miss a potential of
space and its multiplication.
To start answering the problem of space, I would try to make sense
out of a substitution for the terms 'animal' an 'immortal': putting in
their place respectively the words 'sphere' and 'foam'. The animal in
Badious discourse, is obviously not the cliche characterized by lack of
ratio (see for instance in the Ethics - Verso edition 2001, p81 : "to
name simply implies that human beings are in a position to
communicate about the elements [of a situation], to socialize their
existence and arrange them in terms of their interests.
Second: In “the concept of model” we find a critique on the bourgeois conception of
knowledge production as driven by genius. Strange then that at first glance we find this same
conception in Badiou's examples of knowledge production in the arts. These examples are
always focused on names. Might this be addressed in the exactly that last question of the essay
(before its conclusion): that of the unnamable. There is a gap of course between, on the one
hand, the concept of names in relation to the question of the absolutization of truth-ethics, and
on the other, that of naming artistic events by their involvement with the someone-artist. But
the investigation of what and who that someone might be, could throw a light on the price of
naming their appearance in art-history.