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5 1 The Quick and the Dead: Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation§1 The Challenge of Change: Alterations from Within Two particular lowest common denominators, among many, of Badiou and Žižek’s ways of thinking politics are of interest here: one, their shared conviction that any genuine reworking of a system, in terms of real and true political transformations, can issue only from the unprecedented occurrence of a gesture separate or subtracted from the ordinary, quotidian run of things in the status quo of a given situated socio-symbolic reality; and two, their penchant, especially at the level of their choices of adjectives and metaphors helping to structure the articulation of their political discourses, for sharply splitting the speeds of collective transformation between the stagnant stasis of system-complicit behaviors and the kinetic lightning flash of system-shattering interventions. This study begins, in part 1, with a focus on Badiou, after which, in part 2, attention will be turned to Žižek—not for the reasonless reason that B alphabetically comes before Ž, but rather because Žižek’s politics draws much inspiration , both implicitly as well as explicitly, from Badiou’s philosophy. For instance, apart from enthusiastically appropriating the Badiouian concept of event, Žižek borrows his denunciations of the liberal democratic use of the word totalitarianism as a form of ideological blackmail, a “prohibition against thinking” ultimately aimed at preventing the contemplation of alternatives to present-day late-capitalism, from Badiou’s 1985 bookPeut-on penser la politique?1 (Moreover, this particular borrowing from Badiou involves Žižek being implicitly self-critical of his initial radical democratic sympathies, a symptom of which is the fact that Ernesto Laclau wrote a preface to Žižek’s 1989 debut book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology.) Given the complications arising from the fact that Badiou has changed his mind several times as regards various ideas and topics linked to the terrain of politics (and given that this analysis isn’t 6 A L A I N B A D I O U meant to be primarily an exhaustive summary of Badiouian politics as an isolated whole), the interpretation proffered here will strategically limit itself to basing its assertions mainly on Badiou’s writings from 1985 up through the present (thereby largely neglecting such early Maoist texts as Théorie de la contradiction [1975] and De l’idéologie [1976]). Remarks found in the 1996 book Anthropologie du nom, written by Badiou’s ally and fellow activist Sylvain Lazarus, will also be taken into consideration here, given the extent to which Badiou acknowledges relying on the ideas of Lazarus apropos several key matters in political thought.2 In Being and Event, Badiou links his theory of the event to the thesis that “there is some newness in being.”3 And, in a recently published interview entitled “Can Change Be Thought?” he declares that all of his philosophical endeavors ultimately are animated by a desire to theorize how it’s possible for novelty to surface within situations.4 (At least as early as his youthful Maoist texts Théorie de la contradiction and Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégélienne from the 1970s, a concern with the New is quite evident.)5 He explains himself thus: Really, in the end, I have only one question: what is the new in a situation ? My unique philosophical question, I would say, is the following: can we think that there is something new in the situation, not outside the situation nor the new somewhere else, but can we really think through novelty and treat it in the situation? The system of philosophical answers that I elaborate, whatever its complexity may be, is subordinated to that question and to no other. Even when there is event, structure, formalism, mathematics, multiplicity, and so on, this is exclusively destined, in my eyes, to think through the new in terms of the situation.6 The most important feature to note in this statement is the constraint Badiou places upon himself in relation to this task of philosophically grasping newness in its strongest sense: the new must be conceived as immanently arising out of specific “situations,” rather than as swooping in from some unspecified transcendent other place in order to modify externally the coordinates of a particular status quo reality as an agent of alteration essentially foreign to the given site of change.7 However, certain of what might be described as Badiou’s “aesthetic...

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