Date: Mon, 02 Dec 2002 19:57:12 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: Bad Subjects are Sublime


All

Looking at this and another earlier email - I'm aware of the incoherence 
I am leaving i n the wake of my fingers...

sorry (especially to eric)

best
steve

steve.devos wrote:

> Eric
>
> I'll think about the ability to synthesize the Barker reading of 
> Badiou. - Yes it is the text I'm referring to...
>
> What is Badiou against? We can state that he is contrary to the 
> determinism of Wittgenstein and the Postmodern attack on 
> metanarratives, with the resultant philosophy no longer understood as 
> being defined by or about 'Truth', conventionality, rules, the 
> localisation of truths. Truth as multiple lines - on the one side 
> there is the relation of Philosophical Truth to truths scientific and 
> artistic and on the other their is the reconstruction of a politics 
> able to struggle against repression,  which in its singularity remains 
> capable of being open to 'Truth'. I think that you are conflating two 
> oppositional positions - In Ethics Badiou is in his normal militant 
> mode of opperation, attacking the practices of liberal and 
> conservative ethical positions. For Badiou here ethics has become 
> thoughtless in its definitions and completely irrelevant in its lack 
> of militancy and the normal area of definition. Ethics has become the 
> victim of endless platitudes that suggest that we should defend the 
> liberal-humanitarian understanding of the universal 'rights of man',  
> an understanding which Badiou, along with ourselves should reject. 
> Badiou believes that human rights is a result of the 'law of the 
> global market' - this is recognisably true and as such needs much 
> severer questioning thanh Badiou is capable of giving it - possibly 
> because he has not escaped sufficiently from the human realm... 
> Levinas (see ethics 18-23) suffers from the same moral conservatism 
> that the majority of modern ethicists and there liberal fellow 
> travellers suffer from - a denial of Truth (masked behind a 
> requirement for the theological Other to exist which does not) and the 
> consequent localisation of truth as universal.
>
> "...finally the community and the collective are the unameables of 
> political truth: every attempt 'politically' to name a community 
> induces a disastrous 'Evil' (which can be seen in the extreme example 
> of Nazism as in the reactionary usage of the work 'American', whose 
> entire purpose is to persecute some of those who live....) What 
> matters here is the genral principle: Evil is this case is to want, at 
> all costs and under conditions of a truth, to force the naming of the 
> unameable..."  (P86)
>
> Need I add then that Badiou states that as such 'Radical Evil' does 
> not exist, that it is a singular historical construction....
>
> I suspect a paragraph on Levinas is necessary - but.. Lyotard and the 
> Sublime - nice reference to the usually unspoken Lyotard as ethicist...
>
> regards
> steve
>
>
> Eric wrote:
>
>> 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
>>  
>>
>>
>
>