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[[Alain Badiou]] ([[born ]] 1937, Rabat, Morocco) is a prominent [[France|French]] [[left-wing]] [[philosopher]] formerly [[chair ]] of [[Philosophy]] at the [[École Normale Supérieure]] (ENS).

Badiou was trained formally as a [[philosopher]] as a student at the ENS from 1956 to 1961, a period during which he took courses at the [[University of Paris|Sorbonne]]. He had a lively and constant interest in [[mathematics]]. He was politically [[active ]] very early on, and was one of the founding members of the [[United Socialist Party (France)|United Socialist Party]] (PSU), an offshoot of the [[French Communist Party]]. The PSU was particularly active in the [[struggle ]] for the [[decolonization]] of [[Algeria]]. He wrote his first novel, [[Almagestes]], in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by [[Louis Althusser]] and grew increasingly influenced by [[Jacques Lacan]].

The student uprisings of [[May 1968]] had a huge impact on Badiou. While [[1968 ]] politicized many [[intellectual]]s, it served to reinforce Badiou's commitment to the [[far left]], and he continued to organize [[communist]] and [[Maoist]] groups such as the UCFML. In 1969 he joined the faculty of [[University of Paris]] VIII ([[Vincennes]]-Saint Denis), which was a bastion of counter-[[cultural ]] [[thought]]. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors [[Gilles Deleuze]] and [[Jean-François Lyotard]], whose [[leftist]] philosophy he considered an unhealthy deviation of more main-line [[Marxism]]. In 1988 he published what is now considered by many to be his major [[statement]], ''L'être et l'événement''. He took up his current [[position ]] at the ENS in 1999. He is also associated with a [[number ]] of [[other ]] institutions, such as the [[European Graduate School]] and the [[Collège International de Philosophie]]. He is now a member of "L'Organisation Politique" which he founded with some comrades from the Maoist UCFML in 1985.

<blockquote>''[[Main Page]]: [[Articles by Alain Badiou]]''</blockquote>

The [[French ]] philosopher [[Alain ]] Badiou has played a crucial [[role ]] in Žižek’s [[work]], particularly since 1999, when he devoted an entire chapter of ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'' to Badiou’s ''[[Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism]]'' (1997). In [[recent ]] years, Žižek’s dialogue with Badiou has become increasingly active, culminating in ''[[The Parallax View]]'' and ''[[In Defense of Lost Causes]]'', both of which include detailed responses to Badiou’s ''[[Logics of Worlds]]'' (2006).

Why is Badiou’s work so important to Žižek? Broadly, Badiou’s [[political ]] and [[philosophical ]] engagement as a revolutionary leftist has been a key influence on Žižek in his attempt to [[think ]] a political [[project ]] that constitutes an “alternative to [[global ]] [[capitalism ]] and its [[ideological ]] [[supplement]], [[liberal]]-democratic multiculturalism” (''TS'': 4). Badiou, like Žižek, sees the [[discourse ]] of [[multiculturalism ]] as an impediment to authentic forms of [[resistance ]] (Badiou 2001: 20). Like Žižek, too, he is a universalist, an “anti-anti-essentialist” who vindicates the possibility of a [[universal]], immortal [[Truth ]] (''PV'': 323). These points of contact, though, are conjugated with divergences: among other things, Žižek criticizes Badiou for his supposed Kantian [[idealism]], his omission of Marxism from his otherwise communist perspective and even his philosophy’s [[lack ]] of radical potential.

How are these ambivalent relations played out in Žižek’s [[texts]]? In ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', Žižek upholds Badiou’s [[politics ]] of Truth and his “pathbreaking [[reading ]] of St Paul” (''TS'': 3), while re-inscribing [[them ]] into a [[Lacanian ]] [[psychoanalytical ]] framework. As Žižek points out, the core of Badiou’s philosophy is the opposition between [[Being ]] and [[Event]], which he theorizes in [[mathematical ]] [[terms]], using Cantorian set [[theory]]. Being, or Being-as-Being, is for Badiou an “irreducible multiplicity” (Badiou 1999: 104), a pure, inconsistent, unstructured [[multitude ]] of elements. These existent elements [[form ]] a “situation”, a positive [[ontological ]] [[order ]] accessible to [[Knowledge]], a “consistent presented multiplicity” (''ibid''. 2005: 522), or what Žižek in Lacanian terms calls the [[symbolic ]] order. When these elements are collected together under a shared term (like Victorian [[society]], modern art or capitalism), they are, in Badiou’s terms, “counted as One” (''ibid''.: 24). From this count-as-One arises a [[representation ]] of the presented [[multiplicity]], a metastructure that Badiou terms the “state “[[state]] of the situation”, referring at once to the political state and the general status quo. Since “it is formally [[impossible ]] … for everything which is included (every subset) to belong to the situation” (''ibid.'': 97), there is an [[excess ]] of representation over presentation, of the state over the [[situation]].

This excess is reformulated in Žižek’s terms as the “symptom”, and exemplified by an [[economic ]] crisis in the [[system ]] of capitalism (''TS'': 131). It is this excess that opens the [[space ]] for an Event, or in Žižek’s terms the “traumatic “[[traumatic]] [[encounter ]] with the Real”, the Lacanian ''[[Objet (petit) a|objet petit a]]'' (''TS'': 141). The Event, which belongs to the [[domain ]] of non-Being, suddenly renders [[visible ]] what was [[repressed ]] or made invisible by the state. In turn, the Truth is constituted through the active [[intervention ]] of a [[subject]], who chooses to be faithful to its potential for disrupting consensual knowledge and instituting a new order of Being. In Badiou’s [[Christian ]] paradigm, Christ’s Resurrection is the Event that emerges from the foundational [[void ]] of Being-as-Being, and St [[Paul ]] is the subject of the Truth-Event.

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 “[[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 “[[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.

As in ''[[The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology|The Ticklish Subject]]'', though, Žižek raises several points of contention. Expanding on his previous criticism of Badiou’s disavowed [[Kantianism]], Žižek criticizes his continued [[insistence ]] on the opposition between the [[Real ]] and the subject, between existent Being and emergent Truth, and his consequent [[refusal ]] of any Lacanian ontologization of the subject. On the one hand, Žižek agrees that the excess of the Unnameable – which he translates as the “''stupidity'' of the Real” (''PV'': 325) – should not be essentialized. On the other hand, he finds the maintenance of this unbridgeable gap problematic, since it jars with Badiou’s politics of prescription: since the Truth cannot be reinserted into the ontological domain of Being, Žižek argues, it remains to-come, it refuses actualization, it is a constantly deferred possibility in the future rather than a present actuality (''ibid''.). In other words, the notion of the Event is too idealistic, because the infinite immaterial order of the Truth-Event is privileged above the [[material]], finite order of Being (PV: 166). His second problem with Badiou’s politics of prescription is that it is grounded in the [[concept ]] of equality. According to Žižek, Badiou’s egalitarian political extremism (or what he terms “enforced ‘terrorist’ equality”) is “a phenomenon of ideologico-political ''[[displacement]]'': an [[index ]] of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal actually to ‘go to the end’” (''PV'': 326). We thus [[return ]] to his aforementioned [[suggestion ]] that Badiou’s philosophy is not radical enough. Th is [[time]], though, Žižek insists that Badiou’s lack of radicalism is due to his abandonment not of Lacan, but of [[Marx]]. Against Marx’s crucial insertion of political emancipation into the sphere of [[economics]], Badiou refuses to [[regard ]] the [[economy ]] as a potential site for an Event. As Žižek points out, his four “generic procedures” – his four principal [[categories ]] for Truth-[[processes]], art, [[love]], mathematics and politics – exclude economics.

America and Roman [[Empire ]] 211

beyond the [[Good ]] 161[[Christianity ]] and [[psychoanalysis ]] 145-51

[[ideology ]] and the Truth-Event 141-5influence of [[Althusser ]] 128

[[Master]]/Hysteric/University 164-5

[[St Paul ]] and psychoanalysis 153-4[[subjectivity ]] 182-4