Human animal and the ethics of militant engagement (notes and thoughts)

During our last reading of ‘The Century’ several points were made worth discussing a bit further. Firstly, it was mentioned that Badiou might be an inspiration for various left-wing activist groups currently active in France, that act in disregard to the concrete circumstances and the well-being of their comrades. I think it would help to find out more about these groups, what actions they do and how they interpret the texts unless the person was not talking about Oragnisation Politique itself! This would be funny indeed… Secondly, the issue of the “human animal”, finitude and vulnerability came up. Because Badiou utterly dismisses human suffering, victims and finitude and refuses to see anything else behind them other then forms of the so-called ideological “democratic materialism”, ‘romanticism’ or ‘nihilist ethics’, he might be reinstating an oppressive, white, male, heterosexual Universalism. I think some of these can be valid, but I am also hesitant to dismiss Badiou’s project so quickly. It was also suggested to look at Karen Barad in relation to the ‘post-human performativity’. I haven’t read the Barad’s text and don’t know what’s going on there, but if the argument goes saying specificity, finitude and vulnerability of the body can be the site of resistance against the abstract machine of capitalist universalistic process of reification and the phallogocentric unification or the making into One, then a lot can be said. Anyways, an input from the ‘post-humanist, performative’ perspective would be useful. From my side, here are some study notes and commentaries on the topic. Firstly, I’ll mention briefly how Badiou’s a-humanism sees finitude (I’ll leave more for the later posts and discussions). Secondly, I’ll summarize the so-called ethics of truth, the problems that go with it, and finally, the possible modifications taken from Laclau and Chakrabarty that, I suppose, can be helpful.

The  ‘worldliness’ of infinity and animalist conservatism

From my understanding, there seem to be mainly two problems with finitude for Badiou:

1. The articulation of human finitude can only proceed by positing the One-All infinite as the background (e.g. God or Universe etc). One, totality and unity have religious connotations. However, we know since Cantor, that there is no single infinity, there are multiple infinities of infinities; it is impossible to construct a set of all sets or define the set itself. In other words, One is not, one exists only as an operation of counting something as this or that i.e. as one, but it is a mistake to believe that there is some wholeness, there are only operations. This insight of the worldliness of infinity, that every situation is infinite and the ability of set theory to think without totalities is taken paradigmatically by Badiou as it enables certain non-mastery in philosophy. Now, multiplicities (or situations) can be inconsistent (not counted as one and chaotic) and they can also consist (counted as one). The consistent multiplicities can however also relate between each other. They way they relate is through logics of being immersed in relational networks (always being-there). The relationality designate the way being appears i.e. through various intensities and degrees. Since, Death, for Badiou, is a consequence- it is something that happens from external causes (entropy is nothing other then processes, interactions or relations)- it means that it (and existence) is a category of becoming-appearance and not of a multiple pertinent to the ontological category of being qua being i.e. of being in its presentation. Death and existence are logical concepts, while being and non-being are ontological. I guess, it means simply that death is a ‘contingency imposed’- a possibility: ‘it is an affection of appearance [intensity of being-there] which makes one pass from an existence in a situation that can be positively evaluated (even if it is not maximal) to a minimal existence that is to say an existence that is null relative to the situation.’ (Existence and Death, Discourse 24:1, 72) In order to liberate ourselves from God or One (Universal History, phallic signifier, Whole), the argument goes, we need to tear existence away from ‘being pinned to the ultimate signifier of its submission to death” (ED, 66) and affirm that being is always woven out of infinities. An individual can partake in this infinity by attaching him/herself to something called the truth procedure. A brilliant idea suggested here would have a futurist dystopia involving armies of genetically bred and cybernetically enhanced ‘subjects to truth” who would not falter in the fidelity to their event. One can imagine the whole technologies geared at the detection of evental sites and subsequent management of the cycles of evental occurrences. All that for the betterment and multiplication of the emancipated super-humanity. Anyways.

2. This brings to the second problem with finitude. Not only is it a religious concept (event though all the secularists and atheists will deny this, the point being that there is still the Other who authorizes and enables these very discourses of the denial itself), but it is also that finitude, is seen, to be deeply subservient to the ruling ideology of ‘Democratic materialism’ of: consensus, dialogues, human rights, parliamentary routines and the unbound rule of capital and its imperialist logic. According to this materialism there are only bodies and languages i.e. cultures, races, genders, ethnic groups etc. What is the current so- called ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ if not the operation of oneing, through the worrying biologization of difference, categorization of people racially? Suddenly, there is ‘too much’ threatening diversity, they have to be all counted-as-one and made consist. It is here that politics under late capitalism transforms itself more and more into bio-management: bio-engineering, bio-ethics, bio-diversity, bio-consumerism etc. The anthropological, biological, finite body (made out of enumerable properties of : race, language, gender etc) is precisely what fits best the cataloguing logic of surplus value maximization as well as the needs of various Ideological State Apparatuses in order to reproduce themselves. However, there aren’t only languages, cultures, races, genders etc. there are also truths and events that proclaim (relative) universality, whose consequences are infinite; they fracture the existing encyclopedia (knowledge) and (can) change the situation. Because it is possible to derive infinite inventive consequences from the event and its truth one can become subject to this infinity or in a sense its ‘particle’. I don’t see why, from this perspective, the affirmation of finitude itself cant be something radical in certain, specific situations. However, in the situation of bio-capitalism the interests of the ‘human-animal’ are those of conservation, preservation and multiplication of its minute pleasures and fantasies (like writing blog entries for example.) It is also, as we have seen the totalization of a multiple, which is untotaliziable, by means of establishing an imaginary One. This has further implications because the differences are constitutive of the order of things, everything is different, ontology is difference (the one is not) difference does not constitute anything new in itself: ‘it is a law of being qua being that the least local difference entails an absolute global difference’ (ED 7) It means that the demand for particularity (where differences are different locally and globally in the logical order of appearance of being-there) as the Dutch, as a child as a woman or as a black (a universality in its own right) must not automatically lead to any progressive politics or even be counted as politics proper (differences are not different locally and globally in the ontological order of being qua being). The subaltern cannot speak not because she is not included or represented, but rather because within the whole (Eurocentric) ideological matrix, there is no way to understand what he/she is talking about because, from the perspective of this ideological situation, the subaltern simply doesn’t exist. Politically speaking, much of particularism is often conservative, since the particular can always be simply granted its demands without changing the larger state of the situation. The things are different when the demands link in chains of equivalences, to use Laclau’s term, following a certain event, where certain specific ones become the ‘surface of inscription for the plurality of other demands’ or as Badiou puts it, as the process of naming ‘attributes to a particular difference the role of naming something entirely incommensurable with itself’ (In Lacalau’s Ethics of Militant Engagement) The particularity for Badiou can be that of support for the universality, it never gets subsumed from above, as it happens in liberal, institutional Laws, it is rather the construction of the immanent universality from below: between the particular and the universal there is ‘only a relation of support, but not a relation of transitivity. You can’t go from the one to the other, even if one seems to be ‘carried’ by the other…. It is not because a term is a communal predicate, nor even because there is a victim in a particular situation, that it is automatically, or even easily, transformed into a political category (Politics and Philosophy, 118-19).

Before continuing…

I have to say now, that I don’t think that the questions of finitude are solved at all and neither does the employment of set theory frees us from God (see 1). Allah is beyond One and multiple, while at least in Orthodox Christianity God is irreducible to the Trinity or the Holy Spirit. Moreover Cantor himself believed that the impossibility of having a set of all sets is spiritual. Therefore, I tend to read Badiou more and more as a militant, liberation Theologician and less as an atheist, ex-maoist, in the similar way as one can perhaps read Ali Schariarti, Gustavo Gutierrez and perhaps Schluessler Fiorenza. From this perspective- to which I tend to be, at times, quite sympathetic- the dispensability with the ‘worldliness’, transcendence or a counter to the laws, histories, archives, identities and languages is not a problem at all, even though, of course, for many, such things are merely fantasies with the long history of oppressive connotations. As one lecture advert, that I recently encountered a somewhere on the net, maintained Badiou’s privileging of the idea, act, and form over knowledge continues the genealogy of western, idealist tradition of ‘phonocentrism’ and patriarchy that always seeks to dominate the feminine, mnemonic and the archival. I don’t know, but I can’t have much sympathy for historicism, its archives and storage rooms either. Like Dipesh Chakrabarty was saying, the anti-colonization movements had to break with ‘their’ histories and the archives written by the colonizers and their developmentalist discourses in order to assert emancipation. What does it mean to make such a break if not to assume a form of autonomy? Secondly, the issues of universality and truth procedure raise a lot of questions. For Badiou universality is incommensurable and in-different to the specificities that support it, arguably, like the birth of Christian universality that was indifferent to the differences between the Greek philosophical knowledge and the Jewish divine Law. In the similar sense, the universality of love, for Badiou, neither segregates nor fuses the sexes, but eliminates them altogether. All of these solutions have great formal, mathematical beauty to them, but, at the same time, such purities have evident problems. In terms of universals, just how much are they incommensurable? In terms of truths, how does one make true from the false? As many have already pointed out, the most evident, problem consists in Badiou’s anti-dialectical, binary structuralism as well as the denegration of relations and processes right on the ontological level.

Ethics of Truth(s)

The criterion of truth and its ethics, seem to be the most problematic aspects of Badiou’s work. Truth here is not the truth of knowledge established through confirmation, coherence or correspondence, but rather a hole in knowledge, an innovation, which demands a long end persistent work of fidelity to the event of its occurrence in order for it to come fully into the world or rather to transform it altogether. Because it is such a shuttering innovation, there are no parameters with which one can prescribe how or when it can occur, since such prescriptions would always be made from the normativity of the current situation. I guess there is a resemblance to the way anomaly functions in Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions. As the recognition of the anomaly plunges the Normal science and its paradigm into a crisis and eventually gives birth to a new paradigm, while destroying the old one, the scientific community does become split into the Badiouen Two. On the one hand there are those who pursue the radical implications of the inconsistencies or those who at least recognize the problem and see that there is no going back (relation of connected to the event) and those who cling to the old paradigm and maintain that the anomalous inconsistencies can be integrated into the old scientific worldview, in other words, persisting that the event did not take place (relation of disconnection). As the individual(s) engages with the process of maintaining the fidelity to the evental occurrence he/she becomes the collective we-subject (of a truth).The we-subject doesn’t mean some uniformal zombification and conformism: ‘in the same situation and for the same event there may exist different criteria of connection that define different fidelities’ (Being and Event, 258). There is also no universal framework of justice and normative ethics (as for example in Rawls Theory of Justice) there are as “many subjects as there are truths, and as many subjective types as there are procedures of truth” (E 28) Truth pronounces the void of the situation, what is the Same or universal (no doubt offensive words for many concerned with difference and specificities) in a given situation, which is in-different to the differences of the multiplicities. As Hallward sums up: ‘every universality is exceptional, has its origin in one point, is assembled step by step, is the consequences of a decision, is a category of the subject, is a matter of being true rather then of knowing’ (Badiou: a subject to truth, 251)

Directionless evolution

Just to make some terminological points clear, for Badiou, the void permeates every situation, it is included in its every sub-set, but it is impossible to identify or localize it. Thus, in the capitalist situation, the void is the generic humanity. We cannot know what this generic humanity is, in our daily lives we only relate in terms of particularities (profession, gender, race, ethnicity etc.) classified by the disciplining apparatuses (epistemes, paradigms, archives etc.) Nevertheless, the unrepresentable void can be named in the process of subjectivization through the (collective) truth procedure of the event. Some situations can also contain elements, which maximally border on the void; they are on the ‘edge’ and the situation counts them as purely nothing. These elements (groups or an individual) are indiscernible from the perspective of the sate-of-the-situation, which dismisses them as simply ‘barbarians’, ‘terrorists’, ‘mob’ or ‘hysterical femisnists’. The inhabitants of this space constitute the ‘evental site’ from which an event can, but does not have to occur. So, in the capitalist situation, to use Marxist vocabulary, the void would be the generic humanity, the edge of the void is inhabited by the ‘working class’ (whatever this is) and its name is ‘proletariat’. In the similar sense the intersexuality or “third sex” can be the name articulating the void of what the normative situation would recognize only as ‘abnormal’ or simply nothing. Hallward interprets the Truth exactly as the process that ‘exposes and represents the void of a situation’. (my italics) With this emphasis on representation it is easy to imagine the Civil Rights movements, South African and Palestinian uprisings. I think one can also perhaps misunderstand the event and its truth procedure as- in the political situation- being about the self-empowerment of the oppressed people, while ignoring the a-humanism of the event and its transcendent, virtual dimension: ‘event is a multiple such that it is made up of, on the one hand, all the multiples which belong to the [evental] site, and on the other hand the event itself.’ (Being and Event 179) Therefore, in order for the event to occur there has to be a breakdown of the ontological reproductive system of a particular situation itself i.e. the eruption of the evanescent event as the multiple belonging to itself, which also mobilizes the ‘inhabitants of the void’ for the production of the new knowledge. It is the inhuman supplement of self-belonging outlawed by the ontological machinery and irreducible to the human efforts and unrelated to the situation, which despite all of its anti-dialctical problems and miraculous connotations is something very much worth maintaining for the reasons I hope to express later. At the same time, when Badiou says the ‘universal singularity is unfinishable or open [...] indifferent to our mortality and fragility’ it resembles again the idea of Kuhn’s directionless, evolution of the scientific progress away from the existing paradigms, but not towards and closer to any objective, total Truth, since this objective Truth and what we tend to think as facts that define it are always continuously redefined by the emergence of new anomalies, discoveries and paradigms. (SSR 184) (The possibilities of the non-paradigmatic science, which Kuhn himself detects in Chinese medieval Astronomy, but eurocentrically disregards as unscientific (even though it made important discoveries way before the European so-called ‘systematisation’) can be another interesting area to link with Badiou’s notion of the truth procedures.) The question then that Kuhn asks is: ‘what does it mean for progress and development to have no aim’ can be asked of Badiou as well. Where does the subject sized by the truth procedure actually go if the direction of this truth procedure is not transcendentally guaranteed as ethically good, how to distinguish a true event of say the Intifada, the Russian revolution or the Zapatista uprising and their authentic truth procedures from a pseudo-events like National Socialism?

Three forms of evil

In Ethics Badiou says that the distortion of truth- something he terms ‘evil’- can take 3 forms: betrayal (the abandonment of fidelity to the event), simulacrum (the nomination not of the void of the situation, but of the positive fullness e.g. community), and disaster (the totalization of a truth). I think the betrayal of truth, is simple enough to accept, but the things are quite complicated with simulacrum and disaster. In the case of simulacra, Badiou’s solution to distinguish the “Hitler” pseudo-event from a true one would be to say, that a pseudo-event does not articulate the void of the situation, which is universal, but rather names the substantial, positive particularity i.e. the German Volk, ‘its soil, its blood, its race’. (E 73) The name therefore has to remains empty because what it proclaims through the event, does not correspond to anything that is representable within the counting of the situation. This is the reason why Badiou uses the declaration of belief in Christ’s resurrection by the early Christians to make the point about the extreme subjective nature of the truth procedure. As Ernesto Laclau puts it, the name is ‘a signifier without a signified’ (Ethics of Militant Engagement, in Think Again. 123) The disaster occurs when the indiscernible element of truth (its void), called the unnameable, is named and forced to be discerned e.g. Mao’s Cultural Revolution or the attempt by the Avant-guards at the total integration of art into life as well as I guess, a scientist taking a creationist turn seeking to explain out the uncertainty principle with the divine design. Therefore, the truth procedure must show certain restrain (!) and moderation (!!) by not naming the unnameamble, or in other words, not fully objectify the subjective, if it is not to collapse in a disaster. In the political sense (and judging from some reports on the activities of Organisation Politique) that would mean resisting the institutionalization of the movement into a party or certain non-possessiveness in the love. The whole point of The Century is that ‘the passion for the real’ got overdone, too little restrain and moderation. It seems there is no way to ensure that Truth will remain incorruptible and it may even resemble a Russian roulette since: “all the formal traits of a truth are at work in the simulacrum. Not only a universal nomination of the event, inducing the power of a radical break, but also the ‘obligation’ of a fidelity, and the promotion of a simulacrum of the subject, erected’ (E 74). This intuitive horror is of course exactly the horror of confronting the madness of the Real itself, which Badiou seeks to uphold and not foreclose. The politics of Truth consists in the acknowledgement of the immanent possibility of this danger and not of trying to cover it with normative rules and prescriptions. The ethics would be to equally resist making into an identity or an object the generic subjectivity. After Beckettian imperatives of ‘Continue’ and ‘Go on’ such appeals at ‘management’ of the unnamenable seems surprising as it seems to point towards some other not-fully theorized principle. How is it possible for the subject pursuing truth to restrain? As several commentators have noted, Hallward, Gillespie, Critchley, Laclau and others there seems to be a problem in Badiou’s treatment of relations; the void and its relation to the situation is nothing, which is difficult to imagine in the real situation, while the situations themselves remain in a kind of splendid isolation from one another. If we come down from the heights of mathematic abstractness, what would it mean for example, for communism to resist institutionalization? We might consider all the anarchist-autonomist prescriptions in this matter, but then maybe we should also stop playing the ‘beautiful souls’ in certain contexts and consider the matter of the State (of the situation) and the situation in its presentation, just as well as the evental site and the situation dialectically? In the recent conference at Birbeck Bruno Bosteels applied exactly such a dialectical reading.

Multiplicities of sites/chains-of-equivalences

In EME Lacalu introduces certain useful displacements of Badiou’s thought that help overcome: structuralist binaries, lack of relationality as well as the problems to do with ethics, even though he brings a moral ingredient in the end as well. First of all, Laclau redefines the event to a certain extent. It is not as we have seen the presentation of the unpresentable plus an innovative component that erupts, but naming the unnameable through a plurality of linked, equivalent particularities and the reconstruction of ’the principle of situationality [ordering or count as one] as such around a new core’, since, Laclau writes, ‘what confronts us [in the case of what Gramsci called organic crisis] are not particular sites defining (delimiting) what is unrepresentable within the general field of representation, but rather the fact that the very logic of representation has lost its structural abilities’ (125). Taking these points into account has important implications for the theory of the event and its ethics. The first implication is that it is impossible to differentiate within Badiou’s system between the simulacrum and the true event on the basis of the void/plenum distinction, because the void in the real situation is never pure, but is rather always filled by particularities. In other words the distinction between Nazism and Communism on such basis alone is not tenable. In the workers’ Solidarnost movement certain symbols served to represent a large set of democratic demands they became the embodiment of the universality as such. The demands of the sans-papiers are also particular demands and it can also be the case that the hegemony can grant them certain concessions and that they would become simply normal members. This means that there is no single evental site of universality and no natural name of the void in a situation. The universality occurs when many other elements (e.g. individuals) from different evental sites link up in ‘chains of equivalences’ having certain particularity to stand in for the universal. The generic truth-procedure now becomes much more complicated. It is not simply that the elements in the situation are split in the post-evental time into the binary of the unconverted (unconnected) and the converted (connected) as Badiou’s strict adherence to the laws of logic maintains, but that this process of the construction of truth involves deliberation: various struggles, dialogues, half-converted and the oscillating subjects between connection and disconnection. Again, from such perspective it is not possible to differentiate between Nazism and Communism on the basis that some addresses the particular and the other the universal void precisely becaus, Laclau argues, the hegemonic-universality (not a negative term) consists of chains of particular equivalents. Now, how would we differentiate between Nazism and Communism then? Laclau suggests there is a difference between the ethical (ontological) and the moral (or ontic), between the principle of ordering and order. It is because, as we have seen, with sans-papiers and Solidarnost the binaries contaminate each other: the situation contaminates the site, the universal the particular, the pre-existing individual is not fully replaced by the subject and event and truth do not erase the pre-evental world. They rather allow the individuals to engage in the process of ontological ordering to transform the situation around the new core through a ‘radical ethical investment’. This investment should be thought in two ways: ethically and morally. Firstly, ethics (of truth) itself, does not have any normative content, but because the subject is not pure, is ‘a part of the situation and of the lack inherent in the letter’, it would have to have the moral reference of the situation (as well as liberal legalism?), where the truth procedure would ‘involve a radical investment, where two terms have to be given equal weight’. (134) It sounds reasonable, although I would suspect that the contingency of each situation would also involve, at certain points, one being stronger then the other. This however brings up another important issue, which is the problem of the multiple, competing universalities: Muslim, Bhuddist, Christian etc. Badiou’s does not seem to give any satisfactory answer, since for any particular situation there can be only one truth, which in the situation of world religions is a pure madness. Perhaps, the way out of this is not the recipe of a secular, liberal state as the solution to all problems, but rather the practice of translation, which would allow for the inter-contamination of the universals.

Translation without the third term and counter-universality

In Provincializing Europe Dipesh Chakrabarty suggests two models of translation: one being performed through the third term like for example the H2O formula or the abstract labour in capital and those that do not require such a homogenizing middle term. Now both Badiou and Laclau have the preference for some names or signifiers to ‘represent’ the others. In Chakrabarty’s second model this does not happen. This type of translation resembles barter rather than the exchange of commodities: ‘based on very local, particular, one-for-one exchanges…There are no overarching censoring/limiting/defining systems of thought that neutralize and relegate differences to the margins, nothing like an overarching category of ‘religion’ that is supposed to remain unaffected by differences between the entities it seeks to name and thereby contain. The very obscurity of the translation process allows the incorporation of that which remains untranslatable’. (PE 85-6) Such model of translation is something we can learn from the ‘non-moderns’, Chakrabarty argues quoting Eaton: “the sixteenth century poet Haji Muhammad identified the Arabic Allah with Gosai (Skt. ‘Master’) Saiyid Murtaza idnentified the Prophet’s daughter Fatima with Jagat-janani (Skt. ‘Mother of the World’), and Saiyid Sultan identified the God of Adam, Abraham, and Moses with Prabhu (Skt. ‘Lord’)” (84) These local ‘one-for-one exchange’ practices of translation without-the-third-term that maintain the untranslatable ‘obscurity’ are indispensable for the post-evental generic procedures, but also the pre-evental phase that would happen on the level of particularity and locality. Such work would prepare ground or produce names (but also practices) that could be later used to link together various chains of equivalences (i.e. evetnal sites) or/and nominate an event, but also act in the post-evental process by establishing equivalences between various different universalities. We do need the universal term, void, or the empty signifier nevertheless, in order to crystallize various chains of equivalences in a counter-universal that would mobilize various elements for the construction of the new generic set (new society, new knowledge etc). Since, we have the ‘ethical investment’ of universality consisting of two parts: of the moral and ethical, we can now say that the moral part would need to heavily include not only the possibilities of moral judgment alone, but also the practices and archives of translation without-the-third-term. Now, the meaning of Badiou’s evil of the totalization of truth become much more clear: it is simply the ‘interruption of the process of equivalential construction [which] turns a single site [from the plurality of sites] into an absolute place of enunciation of truth’.(135) We can add that such a totalization also means the subsumption or integration (overtones intended) of the ‘obscure’ and untranslatable element.

Back to ontology

Laclau goes further to sketch out how his modify Badiou’s ontology in order to finally include relations, something Badiou’s set theory lacks as we have already seen. Such ontology would be based on linguistics. This means that the situation would be constructed through the differential relations ‘consituting the objective field’ of combinations on the one hand, but the evental sites (and their universality) on the other hand, would be constituted through the relations of analogy or the relations of substitution: “in example of Solidarnosc the ‘event’ took place through the aggregation of a plurality of ‘sites’ on the basis of their analogy in the common opposition to an oppressive regime. And what is this substitution through analogy but a metaphorical aggregation? Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche (and especially catachresis as their common denominator) are not categories describing adornments of language, as classical philosophy had it, but ontological categories describing the constitution of objectivity as such. (137) Laclau’s essay finishes abruptly by saying that set theoretical ontology can be integrated into the wider one based on rhetoric (relations of substitution and combination) and that the sequel is in on the way. Since the EME was written in 2003 it seems worthy having a look at how things have progressed since then, even though I seem to have an instinctual preference for the dominance of the maximally de-anthropomorphised mathematics in this domain, rather then the ontology based on figures of speech, which would, I think, send us back into the psychoanalytical/deconstructionist hell of the Other, metonymy of desire and joussance. Having said that, I am naturally glad to read that metaphor, metonymy etc. receive ontological credentials as it gives my ‘visual aphorisms’ some reassurance of philosophical legitimacy, not being merely about a religious, evental-simulacra, passive nihilism, sublimation or humanist phenomenology, but the ‘constitution of objectivity as such’. To be continued...