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174 Appendix B Slavoj Žižek, “An Answer to Two Questions” I took very seriously the long series of Adrian Johnston’s questions—so seriously, in fact, that already my effort to answer two of them spilled over into a long text. Here, then, are my two answers. Each of them addresses a general question (return to pure philosophy after the long reign of anti-philosophy; return to materialism after the long reign of transcendental finitude). Each of them approaches the question through the prism of the debate with a singular philosophy (the thought of Alain Badiou and of his pupil Quentin Meillassoux). And, last but not least, the true focus of each answer is Hegel, my unconditional fidelity to Hegel ’s breakthrough, to his unique position, in the history of philosophy, between traditional philosophical metaphysics and the post-Hegelian anti-philosophy. 1. When you talk about returning to doing pure philosophy/theory after having spent a substantial amount of time in recent years addressing sociopolitical circumstances and issues, what do you have in mind? What sorts of philosophical/ theoretical work are you most urgently concerned with accomplishing in the years to come? My permanent debate with Badiou could also be read as a series of variations on the motif: how to redeem Hegel, how to reclaim him for today’s universe of radical contingency. Let me begin with the very complex and ambiguous relationship between inconsistency and truth in Badiou’s thought. As Peter Hallward pointed out in his review of Logiques des mondes, for Badiou, “Inconsistency is a category of truth, rather than knowledge or experience”:1 reality is, at its most elementary ontological level, an inconsistent multiplicity that no One can totalize into a consistent unity. Of course, reality always appears to us within a determinate situation, as a particular world whose consistency is regulated by its transcendental features. But, as Badiou put it, a truth is this minimal consistency (a part, an immanence without concept ) which indicates in the situation the inconsistency that makes its being . . . Since the groundless ground of what is presented is inconsistency , a truth will be that which, from within the presented and as a part 175 A P P E N D I X B of the presented, brings forth the inconsistency upon which, ultimately, the consistency of presentation depends.2 Here is how Hallward deploys the consequences of this notion of truth as inconsistency: Perhaps the two most important general notions that underlie this philosophy of truth are fidelity and inconsistency. However varied the circumstances of its production, a truth always involves a fidelity to inconsistency . The semantic tension between these terms is only apparent. Fidelity: a principled commitment, variously maintained, to the infinite and universalisable implications of a disruptive event. Inconsistency: the presumption, variously occasioned, that such disruption touches on the very being of being. Inconsistency is the ontological basis, so to speak, of a determined wager on the infinitely revolutionary orientation and destiny of thought. Fidelity is the subjective discipline required to sustain this destiny and thus to affirm an “immortality” that Badiou sometimes associates with the legacy of Saint Paul and Pascal. Inconsistency is what there is and fidelity is a response to what happens, but it is only by being faithful to the consequences of what happens that we can think the truth of what there is. In every case, “the truth of the situation is its inconsistency,” and “a truth does not draw its support from consistency but from inconsistency.”3 The term “inconsistency” is here used in two not clearly distinguished senses. First, there is inconsistency as the “true ontological foundation of any multiple-being,” that is, “a multiple-deployment that no unity can gather”; inconsistency is here the starting point, the zero-level of pure presence, that which is subsequently counted as one, organized into a world—that which subsequently appears within a given transcendental horizon. Then there is inconsistency as the symptomal knot of a world, the excess which cannot be accounted for in its terms. (Exactly the same ambiguity characterizes the Lacanian Real.) A little bit of clumsy elementary reasoning may be useful here: if inconsistency is “what there is” and fidelity is fidelity to inconsistency, does this then mean that Badiouian fidelity to a Truth-Event ultimately is fidelity to what there is? Is then a Truth-Event only the intervention of inconsistent multiplicity into a consistent situation, the index of how every totalizing representation of the inconsistent multiplicity fails...

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