Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:14:32 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: [postanarchism] Veroli: "An Ethics for Activists?" (Group Reading of Badiou?)


After looking a little into Badiou, I would be
interested in doing a group reading of his book
Ethics, it is interesting that he brings together
Lacan and Derrida with what both of the reviewers
below (the second review is considerably more in
depth) find to be an anti-statist radical politic,
certainly it sounds like it would be relevant to the
subject matter of the list...

Jason

***

AN ETHICS FOR ACTIVISTS?
French Philosopher Proposes Something New

by Nicolas Veroli 

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil 
by Alain Badiou 
(Verso) $16.00 

The study of good and evil in human conduct--is
usually written from the standpoint of the status quo,
by those most attached to its continuation. It asks:
What rights must we (the state bureaucrats or the
economic elite) grant to the citizens? What
responsibilities do we (Westerners, whites, men) have
toward "minorities"? And so on. In short, ethics
generally marks the concessions that the law of Being
must make to the clamor of becoming. 

Philosopher Alain Badiou's new little book (it's about
100 pages) puts an end to all that. Written as an
introduction for French high-school students (who must
study philosophy in the 12th grade), Badiou's book
makes a clean break with the statist tradition in
ethics and proposes, instead, an entirely new
perspective. In essence, Badiou asks, "What if,
instead of supposing that the existing world is
unchangeable, and that the role of ethical behavior is
to adapt to this necessary evil as best we can, we
were to think of it as the attempt to create a
specific good adapted to every specific situation?" 

Hence Badiou's book is meant to help us all decide how
to be "faithful to the event"--i.e., to persevere in
the construction of a good that a specific event in
our lives gave us a glimpse of. For Badiou personally,
as an intellectual and an activist, that event is
clearly the student uprising of May 1968. For us, here
in Seattle, it may very well be the anti-WTO protest
of 1999. In the dark times we are living through, it
is worth remembering the virtue of this kind of
fidelity. 

The maxim for Badiou's ethics? "Activists of the
world, keep going!" 

***

Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Alain Badiou
Scott Schaffer 

Monday, September 23 2002, 8:13 AM

------------------------------------------------------------------------


When I first heard of Alain Badiou’s newest
intervention (and one of his first works to be
intended for a general audience), I was excited. The
title was provocative: How often does one attempt to
understand evil? Generally, and in recent months in
particular, Evil is something to be invoked, a label
to be applied to another person or group that one
wants to condemn in some way or for some reason. But
to understand Evil? Not in American society, at least.


Evil, though, appears to be but a bit player in
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Or at
least that’s how it seems. The book begins with
crucial philosophical questions that seem to be even
more crucial in the Bush Years (redux): Is the concept
of Man dead? If so, can there be an "ethics" that
comes from a historical situation in which Man is
dead? And can that ethics be derived from the
philosophical underpinnings of universal human rights,
which seem to be asserted almost at the drop of a hat?


To Badiou’s mind, there is a fundamental tension that
undergirds all of these questions, namely that between
a Kantian conception of ethics, in which we seek the
ability to apply the set of rules that motivates our
own actions to everyone and a Lévinasian ethics,
motivated by our concern for and care of the other.
This tension, one that amounts to the tension between
the extreme poles of moral absolutism and ethical
relativism, is linked by Badiou to the tension between
universality and particularity, between Human Rights
and a culturally relative sense of "the human," and to
what others have called a "clash of civilizations."
More poignantly, though, Badiou claims that the
Kantian version of ethics amounts to "the
self-satisfied egoism of the affluent West, with
advertising, and with service rendered to the powers
that be", while the Lévinasian ethics’ concern for
cultural differences and multiculturalism is hindered
as an ethical discourse: 

Contemporary ethics kicks up a big fuss about
‘cultural’ differences. Its conception of the ‘other’
is informed mainly by this kind of differences. Its
great ideal is the peaceful coexistence of cultural,
religious, and national ‘communities,’ the refusal of
‘exclusion.’ 

But what we must recognize is that these differences
hold no interest for thought, that they amount to
nothing more than the infinite and self-evident
multiplicity of humankind, as obvious in the
difference between me and my cousin from Lyon as it is
between the Shi’ite ‘community’ of Iraq and the fat
cowboys from Texas. 

This amazingly prescient statement (given that the
book was written in 1998) highlights Badiou’s real
problem with contemporary ethical discourses – namely,
that they emphasize resignation, a betrayal of human
capacities, and, most importantly, that they rely upon
the notion that ethics is what brings human beings out
of Evil and into the Good instead of the other way
around. 

In fact, Badiou’s essential claim about Evil is that
it derives specifically from the Good – or rather,
that our ability to discern what is Evil in the world
depends on our inherent capability for Good. The
impact of this inversion is remarkable, taking out
both human rights (which Badiou claims are rights to
"non-Evil," based as it is on getting out of Evil) and
the emphasis on cultural differences in the same
philosophical explosion. 

Ethics, in both modes that Badiou describes, amounts
to not much more than a figure of nihilism, a
subjugation to the status quo and to the standing
order of things. Kantian ethics relies upon a parallel
of the Nietzschean "will to power," the will to make
the world entirely the same. Taking this position on
amounts to rescinding our own capacity to construct
the world in a unique way. Lévinasian ethics, by
contrast, with its fetishization of "cultural
differences," entails surrendering to what is a brute
fact of human existence – we are of course all
different from one another, and so what? Neither mode
of ethics, Badiou argues, is sufficient for human
existence today. 

For Badiou, the real goal is the creation of an ethics
of truth: not the universal, positivistic sense of
Truth that postmodernists decry (and, in so doing,
take truths out of any equation), but rather a truth
that derives from our response to a given situation.
In this undertaking, Evil represents a corruption of
the truth, a betrayal, a delusion, or a form of
terror. 

The ethics of truth Badiou develops amounts to "the
continuation of a truth-process – or, to be more
precise and complex, that which lends consistency to
the presence of some-one in the composition of the
subject induced by the process of this truth." This
statement condenses the key points of Badiou’s
argument: it insists on the significance of desire and
becoming in the development of our subjectivity; it
underscores the importance of fidelity to a cause; and
it advocates a willingness to risk ourselves and our
desire in the pursuit of what is not known.
Ultimately, then, the ethics of truth Badiou develops
adds up to the following injunction: "Do all that you
can to persevere in that which exceeds your
perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in
your being that which has seized and broken you." 

In this ethics of truth, the valuable concerns of both
universalist ethics and postmodernisms – that is, the
warding off of Evil and the balance between
particularity and generality – appear to be satisfied.
Badiou’s ethics of truth is designed, he claims, to
ward off Evil, not by positing it as the a priori of
the human animal but by showing that Evil is only
possible insofar as we are capable of Good. And by
emphasizing the process of truth construction rather
than the absolutism of truth, Badiou is able to ensure
that our capacity to act, albeit in an asocial (or,
better put, an extra-social) kind of way, is
maintained. 

Evil returns at the end of the book, where it becomes
clear what Badiou is really on about. The bête noire
here has more to do with the delusion and deception of
individuals by the collectivities to which they belong
than it does with what is normally thought of as Evil.
Simulacrum, betrayal and disaster: these are the names
of Evil for Badiou, and specific social and historical
events (the Nazi regime and the Holocaust, the
tendency of former revolutionaries to claim that they
"used to be lost," Nietzsche, and the Chinese Cultural
Revolution are the examples he relies upon) are merely
instances of these forms of evil. Truth, then, can
only be found in working through a process, while
simultaneously not betraying our fidelity to the goal
at hand andnot submitting to extremism of any sort.
Badiou regards this as a liberating approach. 

His book is, of course, difficult. It requires a
near-inversion of everything the usual reader of a
work like this is trained to think, and its reliance
on Lacan and Derrida in spots might very well delude
readers into thinking that Badiou’s real intention is
deconstructive rather than reconstructive. However,
there is one key element yet to be mentioned about the
book that is its saving grace – a lengthy interview,
conducted with Peter Hallward in 1997, about Badiou’s
political experiences, upbringing and involvement. 

When read against the more philosophical work within
Ethics, all becomes clear. Badiou’s revolutionary
experience, dating back to May 1968, and the
reflections so many intellectuals undertook after the
failure of the student movements in France, have come
to roost in his philosophical stance. Badiou is
anti-party, anti-state, anti-identity politics,
anti-fealty to any kind of ossifying and objective
group that claims to speak for another "objective"
group…in other words, Badiou appears to be exclusively
dedicated to what needs to be done at a particular
moment in history. His L’Organisation Politique is
actively involved in fighting a number of political
battles within France, and La Distance Politique, the
bulletin of the OP, is almost exclusively devoted to
analyzing and arguing for "what is to be done." Badiou
labels this work the "subjective condition of my
philosophy", and as such, it fills in many of the
blanks that the philosophical part of the book leaves
in the reader’s mind. 

In sum, Badiou’s philosophy and politics – and they
should be linked, so read the interviews first – come
down to this: struggle for the principles of a
collective liberation and against the hegemonic
principles of the Western cultural and economic order.
Or, to put it another way, "emancipatory politics
always consists in making seem possible precisely that
which, from within the situation, is declared to be
impossible." And whether that sentiment derives from
Marx, Lenin, Lacan, or Badiou himself, it is a
necessary sentiment in our time, and Badiou’s Ethics
goes a long way toward inspiring it. 

Ethics is available from Verso 




===="Being at one is god-like and good, but human, too human, the 
        mania
     Which insists there is only the One, one country, one truth and
         one way."

- Friedrich Hölderlin, 1799

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