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The [[Case ]] of [[Alain ]] [[Badiou]]By Slavoj [[Zizek]]

[[Notes]]1 Alain Badiou, L'etre et l'evenement ([[Paris]], I988).

3 Another Badiou example of Truth-Event, the atonal revolution in [[music ]] accomplished by the Second Viennese [[school ]] (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern), also exemplifies three ways to betray the event of Truth: (I) the traditionalists' dismissal of atonal music as an empty formal experiment, which allowed them to continue to compose in the old ways, as if nothing had happened; (2) the pseudo-modernist fake imitation of atonality; and (3) the tendency to change atonal music into a new positive tradition.4 Perhaps therein resides the negative [[achievement ]] which brought such fame to Francois Furet: the de-event-ualization of the French Revolution, that is, adopting an external perspective toward it and thereby turning it into a succession of complex historical facts.

6 As Badiou perspicuously notes, these four domains of Truth-Event are increasingly [[displaced ]] in the [[public ]] [[discourse ]] of today by their non-evenemential fake doubles. We speak of "[[culture]]" instead of "art," of "sex" instead of "love," of "know-how" or "wisdom" instead of "science," of "management" (gestion) instead of "politics," and thereby reduce art to an expression/articulation of historically specific culture, and love to an ideologically dated form of sexuality, while science is dismissed as a falsely Westernuniversalized form of [[practical ]] knowledge equal to many forms of prescientific wisdom, and politics (with all the passion of struggle that this notion involves) as an immature ideological version or forerunner of the art of social management.7 See Badiou's unpublished 1995/96 [[seminar]], "Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme."8 An irony worth noting here is [[Foucault]]'s conception of psychoanalysis as the last link in the [[chain ]] beginning with the Christian confessional mode of sexuality, which thereby links it to Law and guilt. However, Paul, the founding figure of Christianity, does exactly the opposite (at least on Badiou's reading) by endeavoring to break the morbid chain that links Law and desire. 9 [[Jacques Lacan]], "On the Moral Law" (1959), in [[The Ethics of Psychoanalysis ]] 1959-1960, Bk. 7 of [[The Seminar ]] of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain [[Miller]], trans. Dennis Porter (New York and [[London]], 1992 [1986]), 7I-84; quotation from 83-84.

11 The status of the reference to Kant here is another matter. Insofar as Kant is conceived as the philosopher of the Law in Badiou's Pauline sense, Lacan's concept of [[Kant avec Sade ]] retains its full validity, that is, the Kantian moral Law retains its status as a superego [[formation]], so its "truth" remains the Sadean universe of morbid perversion. However, there is another way to conceptualize the Kantian moral [[injunction ]] which delivers it from the superego's constraints; for a Lacanian approach to this "other Kant," see Alenka [[Zupancic]], Die Ethik des Realen ([[Vienna]], 1995).12 For example, the very last [[sentence ]] of Lacan's Seminaire XI speaks of the "[[signification ]] of a limitless love [which] is outside the limits of the law"; Jacques Lacan, "In You More than You" (1964), in The Four Fundamental [[Concepts ]] of [[Psycho]]-Analysis, ed. [[Jacques-Alain Miller]], trans. Alan [[Sheridan ]] (New York and London, 1978 [1973] ), 263-76; quotation from 276.13 Jacques Lacan, "[[Desire, Life and Death]]" (I955), in The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the [[Technique ]] of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955, Bk. 2 of Miller, ed., Seminar of Jacques Lacan, trans. [[Sylvana Tomaselli ]] (New York and London, 199I [1978]), 221-34; quotations from 23I-32.14 The other famous quip of the embittered Oedipus is uttered in response to the claim by the Chorus that the greatest boon to mortal man is not to have been [[born ]] at all; the well-known comic rejoinder, quoted by Freud and referred to by Lacan ("Unfortunately, that happens to scarcely one in a hundred thousand"), has acquired new meaning today amidst the heated debate over abortion: Aren't aborted [[children ]] in a sense those who do succeed in not being born?

16 This difference between Lacan and Badiou also has certain implications for the appreciation of political events. The disintegration of [[East European ]] [[socialism ]] was not, for Badiou, a Truth-Event; apart from giving rise to a brief popular enthusiasm, the dissident fomentation never managed to transform itself into a [[stable ]] movement of followers consistently engaged in militant fidelity to the Event, but soon disintegrated such that what we have today is either the resurgence of vulgar liberal-parliamentarian [[capitalism ]] or the rise of racist/ethnic [[fundamentalism]]. However, if we accept the Lacanian distinction between the negative gesture of the act (saying no!) and its positive aftermath (i.e., locating the key dimension in the primordial negative gesture), then the process of socialism's disintegration can be said to have produced a true act nonetheless, in the guise of an enthusiastic mass movement of saying no! to the Communist regime for the sake of authentic solidarity-a negative gesture that counted more than its later, failed positivization did.17 The first and still unsurpassed description of this [[paradox ]] was perhaps [[Fichte]]'s notion of Anstoss, the "obstacle/impetus" which sets in motion the subject's productive effort to "posit" objective reality; no longer the Kantian Thing-[[in-itself]]-an external stimulus affecting the subject from outside-the Anstoss is a kernel of contingency which is [[extimate]]: a foreign body in the very heart of the subject. Subjectivity is thus defined not by a struggle against the inertia of the opposing substantial order but by an absolutely inherent tension.

* [[Psychoanalysis and Post-Marxism|Psychoanalysis and Post-Marxism: the Case of Alain Badiou]]. ''The South Atlantic Quaterly''. Durham. Spring 1998. Also listed on ''[[Lacan.com]]''. <http://www.lacan.com/zizek-badiou.htm>