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161 Appendix A “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom!” Some Brief Remarks on and Responses to Žižek’s “Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate” In his new textual intervention “Badiou: Notes from an Ongoing Debate ,” Žižek directly engages with my reading of Badiou elaborated here in chapter 1 (“The Quick and the Dead: Badiou and the Split Speeds of Transformation”). While agreeing with much of what I advance in this analysis of Badiou’s account of change, he also interjects several points of additional clarification in the course of his commentary, clarifications to which I would like to add my own comments in turn. Citing my remarks about how statist ideology can and does sometimes adopt the strategy either of falsely eventalizing the non-evental (for instance, in late-capitalism’s dishonest self-portrait of its monotonous whirlwind of constant transformation as involving genuine alteration) or of deceptively depicting the real evental sites embedded within its domain as being devoid of the potential for giving rise to an event qua radical rupture with the state-of-the-situation, Žižek stipulates: Perhaps, this line of thought needs just one qualification . . . Would it not rather be that one of the ideological strategies is to fully admit the threatening character of a dysfunction, and to treat it as an external intrusion, not as the necessary result of the system’s inner dynamics? The model is here, of course, the Fascist notion of social antagonisms as the result of a foreign intruder—Jews—disturbing the organic totality of the social edifice.1 The only thing I have reservations about here is the wording of the rhetorical question posed in this passage (“Would it not rather be . . . ?”). When it comes to (as per the title of a 1994 collection edited by Žižek) mapping ideology, the task must involve, due to the insidious, multifac- 162 A P P E N D I X A eted dynamics of ideological processes and strategies, letting a thousand flowers bloom (to paraphrase Mao). In other words, despite this “not rather,” Žižek and I shouldn’t be construed as offering competing, mutually exclusive depictions of ideology. Yes, Žižek is indeed quite correct that, in Nazism, a locus within the sociopolitical body is (mis)identified as potentially detrimental to the very existence of the system itself; “Jewishness” is treated by this particular fascist ideological matrix as, in Badiouian parlance, a possible evental site (albeit, as Žižek notes, one misrepresented as a foreign intrusion rather than a product of the intimate , immanent dynamics of fascist society) that must be dealt with swiftly and harshly in order to squelch any risk of the possibility of it undermining the Nazi life-world. However, this is only one of many tactics for regulating what I have called the “cadence of change” available to a statist system. The two that I identify in my critical reading of Badiou are other available tactics. And Žižek’s utterly crucial and incredibly useful notion of “cynical distance” (as a type of “inherent transgression”)2 is a further contribution to anatomizing the proliferation of ideological mechanisms, the complex twists and turns, the branching and forking trajectories, within the domains of ideology today. Given this proliferation, only a parallel proliferation of accounts and analyses within the fields of the theorization of ideology can hope to provide the conceptual resources for grasping our contemporary circumstances . When all is said and done, the sole consistency statist systems care about is the temporal consistency of their own perpetuated existence ; logical consistency among the various ideological constellations constructed by such systems is less of a concern. In other words, statist ideologies pay no heed to the constraints signaled in the phrase “not rather.” (On yet another level, psychoanalysis proves to be highly relevant to the analysis of ideologies insofar as the deployment and development of these ideologies, like the primary process mentation-dynamics of unconscious thinking [for psychoanalytic metapsychology, unconscious thinking doesn’t obey the rules observed by conscious thinking as secondary process mentation, such as the law of noncontradiction], can be comprehended only by an interpretive approach operating outside the constraints of ordinary, bivalent logic.) Theory, if it is to have any chance whatsoever of keeping pace with its subtly shifting objects of interrogation , must mirror these shifts through, so to speak, the blooming multiplication of a thousand theories of (a thousand) ideologies. Before moving on to the next set of important issues, there’s a detail that...

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