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  • Badiou Abridged1
  • Andrew J. Taggart (bio)

One of the running complaints lodged against French antihumanism is that it has no suitable way of thinking about freedom. Critiquing the humanist tradition whose pretension was that the world was comprehensible only through our conceptions of it, antihumanists also felt compelled to give up the notion of freedom, the uncaused cause or spontaneity, grounded upon autonomous subjectivity. Yet if every-thing—every thought, every action, every apprehension of natural phenomena—is either constituted by language or determined by power, then how was genuine change possible? For many poststructuralists, one plausible answer came from the realm of aesthetics. Certain limit experiences such as the sublime, the traumatic, or the disastrous were events that belied our linguistic conceptions and that did not properly mesh with the way the world normally functioned. In some versions, an event was a contingent occurrence that the performative register of language produced and that had material or aesthetic effects; in others, it was a happening that took place in and shook the world to its core. Either way, an event broke through the current state of affairs, tore us from ourselves, and forced us to think and act without pre-given criteria, without knowledge of the consequences, and without norms to guide us.2 Understood in this fashion, an event served as a necessary condition for ethics, occasionally for politics.

Because he takes part in this antihumanist framework and because his philosophy is also a philosophy of the event, the French philosopher Alain Badiou should look very familiar. It is here, though, that all prima facie comparisons with French poststructuralism come to an end. For Badiou, events are relatively rare. For instance, he commonly cites only four political events from the past 200 years: the Jacobin Revolution in 1794, the Revolution of 1848, the October Revolution of 1917, and the [End Page 297] events of May '68 and Maoism. What's more, they are limited in species: events only ever occur in the domains of politics, art, science, and love and have as their modern names L'Organisation Politique, the avant-garde, Gödel and Cohen, and Lacan, respectively.3 Third, events of themselves do not endure; they begin and end in an instant. Indeed, events exist without us, but it is we who acknowledge their existence. Lastly, events have no immediate effect on the world. They only take on significance once we declare that they have happened; and they only "persist" so long as we take them up. In order to speak about the "persistence" of events, Badiou believes that it is necessary to re-claim those long abolished concepts, subjectivity and truth.

Thus, although Badiou's philosophy begins with events, these are more mechanisms for change than change itself. It would be more accurate to say that Badiou's philosophy is centered on subjectivity and truth (Hallward xxi-xxxvi). Insomuch as we live on under state control, we are mortal creatures, individuals constituted by ideology. But we become subjects once we declare that an event has happened. A subject, then, is that which maintains the integrity of a particular event. Much like the Nietzschean overman or a religious convert bodying forth the Word of God, a subject heroically carries an unverifiable event, remains faithful to it through will and conviction, and follows a line of inquiry with the end—in no way guaranteed from the beginning—of bringing novelty and possibility into the world. Likewise, Badiou distinguishes truth from knowledge. How we conduct ourselves with others in the business of living is through opinions and knowledge; our statements, albeit of various kinds, bear in large part on how we get on within the world and under the aegis of state power, how we continue in our common, lackaday routines, and how we shoulder the burden of existence and pursue our self-interest.4 Knowledge is mere doxa. Truth, on the other hand, is the passionate, consuming process of investigation undertaken by a subject in its flight from the current state of affairs. In Badiou's "ascetic" philosophy, any break from what is the case is also and immediately a break within the self.

Since his "mathematical turn...

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