From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Bad Subjects are Sublime
Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 10:01:58 -0600


Steve/Glen,

Steve, I know that Jason Barker has written a book entitled "Badiou:
Strong Thought" which I haven't read yet, but it's on my list. Is this
the text you are referring to? Would you summarize Barker's take on
Badiou a little more fully.

Regarding the essay by Scott Schaffer that Glen sent, I thought it was a
fair summary of "Ethics".  If I was critique the essay, it would be more
for its omissions than anything else.  What comes through, for me at
least, in reading of "Ethics" is the emphasis Badiou places on the
figure he calls the "Immortal" in contradistinction to the figure of the
"animal".  

His example is a classic one. A man in a prison camp who resists,
thereby awakens to a sense of his and other's humanity beyond the
current conditions to which they are subjugated.  In fidelity to this
truth, one becomes an "Immortal" to the extent that one is no longer
ruled by one's ordinary interest and desires, but only by the principle
of realizing a truth that transforms the situation in something else. 

In some ways, there is something very traditional about this example. It
is a commonplace of the kind of heroism found in books and movies
everywhere. When one's awakens to oneself as a human subject, one who is
no longer defined by appetites and desires, but by a new thing, called
by the Christians love and by the philosophers Reason - a rebirth that
changes everything. 

In this guise, the figure has appeared in Aristotle's ethics as the
Great Soul, in Spinoza's ethics as the virtuous man, the one who
recognizes necessity and is able to rise above it, becoming free through
the practice of understanding and intellectual love. 

It is also, paradoxically, the movement found in Levinas. He writes of
the subject selfishly pursuing it own interests until the Face confronts
it with its forlornness. Thereafter the subject no longer exists merely
for itself, but always in terms of the Other. The ground has been shaken
and then overthrown. 

The point is this. What Levinas and Badiou share in common is a
recognition that the ethical begins when a kind of breakage occurs in an
immediate situation. In Levinas, however, this break occurs through the
witnessing of the Other as a Face. In Badiou it occurs through the
witnessing of the Other as a Truth.  Both forms of alterity compel the
creation of a subject no longer bound to narrow self-interest alone. 

This also seems to relate to Lyotard and his various meditations on the
sublime.  The subject itself is rendered sublime in the figure of the
enfans, the inhuman and the intractable, subjects which can not be
re-presented, but which must only be witnessed and testified to. Just as
Kant, in the third critique, recognized in the sublime the birth of the
ethical, as the human subject awoke from the immediate pain of
conflicting faculties to the realization of its transcendental vocation,
so for Lyotard it is the encounter with the sublime allows us to
"rewrite modernity". 

The multitude remains a political subject, but it is composed in a
molecular way of sublime Immortals who by refusing the re-presentations
of what is and the attendant injustice and inequality of those
conditions begin by obeying a 'ethics of truth' and acting in
paralogical ways.  Politics remains as a kind of linking of ethical
subjects.

eric