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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]] 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]] [[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|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]] 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.
