{∅,S̸} ∈ {$}?: Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting for Something to Happen

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil By Alain Badiou. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2002

Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism By Alain Badiou. Trans. Ray Brassier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003

Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy By Alain Badiou. Trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum, 2003

Badiou: A Subject to Truth By Peter Hallward. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003

On Belief By Slavoj Žižek. New York: Routledge, 2001

Repeating Lenin By Slavoj Žižek. Zagreb: Bastard Books, 2001

Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 By Slavoj Žižek. London: Verso, 2002

The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity By Slavoj Žižek. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003

Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences By Slavoj Žižek. New York: Routledge, 2004

Conversations with Žižek. By Slavoj Žižek and Glyn Daly. Cambridge: Polity, 2004

There is a growing awareness on the left that liberalism is dying in its sleep. By the time this essay appears in print, we will know whether the governing Right has blundered its way out of power; if it has, what will take its place will be nothing like traditional liberalism. For a time, there was even serious talk of a kind of coalition candidacy that would ignore ideological differences (because there were no substantial ones) in order to guarantee a return to responsible management. Of course this empirical demise, in one country, is nothing compared to the profounder death implied by the more conspicuous death of Communism. For if Communism as an ideological enemy virtually required liberalism as Capitalism's answer to the socialist promise, the new enemy is declared nonideological: even those who talk sincerely about "hearts and minds" insist that there is nothing ideological at stake in anti-American violence, only nihilism, resentment, fanaticism, or fundamentalism. But if the enemy is nonideological, there can be no ideological response, no liberal alternative offered to someone else's radical temptation. The only possible response is brutal reprisal, and any squeamishness in the face of this violence is a strictly private matter.

Of course, all of this is at the level of appearances, since both the responsible management of the economy and the political instrumentalization of religion (and in the current situation "democracy" is an abstract value of strictly the same order as politicized religion) are thoroughly ideological. Despite all appearances, then, the discrediting of liberalism—not by the Left, which has been working on this for over a century, but by a Right which no longer has any need for it—may be an opportunity for a more robust Left, one which is no longer required to genuflect before the liberal language of rights and respect for differences: a language which has existed, at least since Schiller ("everything—even the tool which serves—is a free citizen, having equal rights with the noblest"), as an alternative to a genuine politics (Schiller 1967, 219). A contemporary politics which revolves precisely around the problem of that "tool which serves" has been the goal of both Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou, whose writings occupy the gap left by liberalism in different ways. Slavoj Žižek has clearly exploited this opening as his writings have become more unambiguously political in the past several years. The history of Alain Badiou's work bears witness to this phenomenon in a different way: Badiou, who has been ignored by Anglophone audiences for several decades, is suddenly the subject of reading groups at the hipper graduate programs, and his work since his major theoretical statement L'être et l'événement (1988, soon to come out in English translation by Oliver Feltham...