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→In the work of Slavoj Žižek
Although the Badiouian Truth relies upon a subjective intervention, this is not to say that it is personal or contingent. In Badiou’s own terms, “he who is a militant of truth identif[ies] himself … on the basis of the universal” (Badiou 2003: 109). Žižek insists on this point: although Truth is contingent in so far as it emerges from a concrete historical situation, “in every concrete and contingent situation there is ''one and only Truth''” (''TS'': 131). For Žižek, Badiou’s notion of a universal, infinite truth is a crucial retort to deconstructionism and to the advocates of anti-essentialist postmodernism. Badiou’s insight also allows Žižek to distinguish between historicism and “historicity proper”: whereas the former refers to a specific set of historical circumstances that lead to, and explain, the Event, the latter “involves the specific temporality of the Event and its aftermath, the span between the Event and its final End” (''TS'': 133) – between Christ’s death and the Last Judgement, between revolution and communism, and so forth.
It is the relation between Event and mortality that drives a wedge between Žižek and Badiou. Badiou’s theoretical edifice is built upon an anti-dialectical – and what Žižek criticizes as Kantian – opposition between two orders, Being and Event, and therefore finitude and immortality. His Event is radically separated from the death-drive, and linked instead with infinity, immortality and subjective constitution. Lacan’s [[The Act|act]], on the contrary, is inextricable from mortality, the death-drive and, to use Lacan’s own words, “destruction beyond putrefaction” (''SVII'': 268). Instead of an opposition between Being and Event, Lacan insists on an “in-between” space – the “between two deaths”, the monstrous state of ''[[lamella]]'' – that bridges this gap. The subject’s immortality, for Lacan and Žižek after him, can emerge only from human finitude. Badiou’s distance from Lacan on this point is the principal weakness of his philosophy according to Žižek: “What remains beyond Badiou’s reach is [the] ‘domain beyond the good’, in which a human being encounters the death-drive at the utmost limit of human experience, and pays the price by undergoing a radical ‘subjective destitution’, by being reduced to an excremental remainder” (''TS'': 161). For Žižek, the Lacanian subject’s “limit-experience” sets them apart from the Badiouian subject (''ibid''.). Since the death-drive is essential to any rupture from the symbolic order, the Lacanian act is a better basis for Badiou’s notions of a new political practice than his own Event.
In ''[[The Parallax View]]'', Žižek moves beyond negotiating between Lacan’s and Badiou’s theories and places himself in a more direct relationship with Badiou’s then-unpublished ''[[Logic of Worlds]]''. Žižek’s primary focus is on Badiou’s politics of prescription, mediated through Peter Hallward’s essay on that subject (Hallward 2005). As he explains, the Truth-Event is posited in Badiou’s theory as a point of departure from which new codes of action are directly put into place (PV: 322). The Badiouian Truth, in this sense, is treated as already realized. Its future power is anticipated by the subject’s fidelity in the present. Hence Badiou’s primary example of a subject of/to Truth is Paul, an apostle rather than a prophet: he announces that the Event has come, not that it is to come. Žižek finds this politics useful on a number of levels. First, it allows a clear distinction between radical emancipatory politics and the predominant status quo politics: whereas the former is an Event that at once stems from, and leads to, a universal Truth, the latter is a State, which according to Žižek is enforced and (im)mobilized by means of fear, whether of immigrants, crime or ecological catastrophes (''PV'': 323). Second, the possibility of a universal, immortal Truth serves him in his struggle against the humorously termed “gang of democracy-to-come deconstructionist-postsecular-Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects” (''PV'': 11). Žižek offers two examples of successful practitioners of prescriptive political acts: John Brown in the context of abolitionism in nineteenth-century America, and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero in the context of political equality of women in twenty-first-century Spain.
