From Decision to Event: Complicating Badiou’s Politics of Truth
In: Cultural and Ethical Turns: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Culture, Politics and EthicsSearch for other papers by John McSweeney in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
In Being and Event, Alain Badiou elaborates subjectivity as a ‘truth procedure’ in fidelity to an event, which avoids the mere repetition of difference that he considers to afflict much recent (‘postmodern’) thought.1 As Badiou’s work continues to grow in influence, questions nonetheless continue to be raised regarding the adequacy of this conception of the subject to the complexity of human subjectivity. While this debate is enjoined largely on the new theoretical terrain of Badiou’s recent Logics of Worlds, this chapter asks a more Derridean question of Badiou: what is the status of the ontology of Being and Event? Examining the interrelation of decision and event in this work, the chapter argues that Badiou’s ontology is complicated by a performativity that affects both the relation of decision and event and his conception of subjectivity as comprising moments of ‘subjectivisation’ and ‘subjective process.’ Comparing Badiou’s work to that of the later Foucault, the chapter argues that the dynamics of Being and Event can be fully understood only if one allows for a performative but untheorised ‘subjective ethos’ at play in his text, which operates upon the subjective response to the event, rather than being consequent upon the event as such. The chapter thus argues that Badiou’s effort to distinguish the properly political from the cultural must be reconceived as a political gesture, rooted in the cultural matrix of a subjective ethos.