The ontic form of ontological axioms
While the idea of minimization of the degree of intra-worldly existence makes it possible to understand how political affirmation becomes possible in the world, whose beings are positively defined by the transcendentally prescribed identity or place, there remains a question of how this diminished existence becomes a bearer of the axioms of the World. As we have argued, the subtraction from one’s place in the world makes the beings of the world appear solely in their being-in-the-World, described by the axioms of freedom, equality and community. In this process, it is the transcendental of the world itself that becomes, in a sense, momentarily inexistent, insofar as its ordering force is rendered inoperative. Thus, the axioms of the World become accessible to a worldly being precisely as a result of the weakening of its intra-worldly identity.
Yet, what does accessibility mean here? It would be highly naïve to suggest that the newly emergent subject immediately acquires the knowledge of the ontological foundations of its world. The access of the political subject to the axioms evidently does not take the form of the ontological exposition of the kind we attempt in this book. The affirmation of the axioms of the World in any given world can never be direct and immediate: if the positivity of the world is a symbolic network, the axioms of the World are precisely what cannot be symbolized in it without being converted into intra-worldly homonyms. As numerous historical examples from the French Revolution to the global War on Terror testify, the axioms of freedom, equality and community are easily converted into such particularistic homonyms that are readily available for the purposes of the stabilization of intra-worldly orders rather than its transformation. Thus, the mere invocation of these three terms in one’s discourse does not make one a faithful subject of politics and may in fact accompany reactive or obscure negation of politics. And yet, there are no other, presumably pure and uncontaminated names for the axioms of the World: there is no language of the World simply because there is no language in the World. Since we can only rely on intra-worldly names for the axioms of the World and these names are always subject to homonymic conversion into their opposites, the access of the subject to the axioms is always mediated by a representation that, following Badiou, we shall term the idea . In Badiou’s works after Logics of Worlds , the notion of the idea is deployed as a bridge between the meta-ontology of truths and the phenomenology of worlds, giving consistency to the fragility of the generic and indiscernible truth procedure of politics within the historical positivity of the world. The idea presents trans-worldly ‘truth’ as an intra-worldly ‘fact’ and thus gives a historical anchoring to everything elusive, slippery and evanescent in the becoming of a truth (Badiou, 2010: 245–247).
For our purposes, we may define the idea as the representation of the axioms of the World by the subject in the symbolic terms of a given world, or, more succinctly, as the ontic translation of ontological axioms . The subject draws on the symbolic resources of its world in order to represent to itself and others the axioms of being-in-the-World that are simultaneously transcendent and immanent, ‘transimmanent’, in relation to this world (Nancy, 1997: 55, see also Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 2). Yet, such a representation can only be negative, since, as we have argued, the very existence of a positive world is an effect of the negation of one or more axioms of the World. While it is by definition impossible to represent the ontological axioms in the ontic terms of the symbolic order constituted by their negation, it is possible to represent the fact of this negation itself as something that takes place and must be overcome within this world. Thus, while Badiou develops his notion of the idea in the direction reminiscent of Kant’s ‘regulative idea’, emphasizing the positive inscription of the truth into the symbolic order that gives it worldly consistency that enables subjective action (Badiou, 2010: 246–247; cf. Zizek, 2011b: 184–185, 473–474), we shall rather stress the role of the idea in the negative evaluation of the transcendental of the world. The axioms of the World become accessible to the subject in the form of an idea that problematizes the transcendental order constituted by the negation of at least one axiom, rendering this negation manifest and subjecting it to a negative evaluation.
Let us elaborate the character of this idea in a concrete example. Consider a being of the world who is awakened at night by the sound of what seems to be an incident of domestic violence, his neighbour beating up his spouse. Having left his apartment, he encounters other awakened and disturbed neighbours who express their indignation but ultimately decide not to intervene in what is ultimately a private family matter that should hopefully be over in a few hours. These men and women of the world also remind our protagonist that the husband in question is a respected university professor, whose status in this world ensures that he could never stand trial for something so petty. Moreover, they warn, reporting someone so important to the police is likely to get one into trouble with the powerful individuals, with whom the professor is known to be connected, maybe even (they now start whispering) the representatives of the security services, known to dominate the world in question in an arbitrary and violent manner.
Eager to preserve their places in the world, the neighbours proceed to justify their decision not to intervene with reference to what is ‘common knowledge’ in this world. Whenever such incidents occur, they say, it is usually the fault of the wife, who most likely overstepped the boundaries of what the ways of the world prescribe as ‘good behaviour’ for a woman. In the opinion of reactive subjects, the victim of the assault might have publicly argued with the husband, went out for a drink without his permission and maybe even had an affair. While it is probably not a good idea to beat her senseless and disturb the sleep of one’s neighbours, who after all have to go work the next day, we must also understand how horrendous the alternative would be: imagine women successfully resisting and breaking away from male authority first in the family, then at work and finally in society at large! Indeed, say the obscure subjects, the alternative is so horrendous that the little lesson that our esteemed neighbour has just taught his wife actually seems like a pretty good idea after all, something we should all try more often to keep our own wives in check.
Even though the protagonist of our story is also a man of the world, with a relatively decent status within it, he remains unconvinced by the discourse of reactive and obscure subjects and after a little hesitation decides to call the police and loudly knocks on his neighbour’s door, hoping to interrupt the beating. At this moment of intervention, he undergoes subjectivation by dis-identifying with his place in the world, weakening the degree of his worldly identity and, consequently, his commitment to the security and stability of his worldly existence. We do not need to know what triggered this dis-identification that made the intervention possible: the history of spousal abuse in his own family, the contempt for the hypocrisy of the assailant or the cowardice of the neighbours, or just generally a low threshold of tolerance of violence. As we have argued, this triggering experience is entirely contingent and could be anything whatsoever, from a deep psychological trauma to an encounter with a work of art. What matters is its effect of the weakening of one’s degree of existence in the world, which conditions the possibility of intervening and subsequently sustaining fidelity to this intervention. It is at this point that the idea is formed, compensating for the weakened worldly existence with the intensity of subjective affirmation. What is this idea of ? It is purely and simply the idea of there being something wrong with the world. By deciding to intervene, the emergent subject represents the situation to itself as a wrong and seeks to set this wrong right. This is how politics first appears within the world prior to and independently of any theoretical knowledge about the ontological status of its axioms. While our theoretical explication of political practice only arrives at the idea of the wrong in the second volume of the project, this idea actually marks the beginning of the ontic unfolding of the political process.
The notion of wrong has been presented by Jacques Rancière as the constitutive feature of all politics. For Rancière, politics revolves around the fundamental contestation of the limits of political community by the group of beings who are resigned to inexistence in it:
The mass of men without qualities identify with the community in the name of the wrong that is constantly being done to them by those whose position or qualities have the natural effects of propelling them into the nonexistence of those who have ‘no part in anything’. It is in the name of the wrong done to them by the other parties that the people identify with the whole of the community. Whoever has no part – the poor of the ancient times, the third estate, the modern proletariat – cannot in fact take any part other than all or nothing. It is through the existence of this part of those who have no part, of this nothing that is all, that the community exists as a political community – that is, as divided by a fundamental dispute, by a dispute to do with the counting of the community’s parts even more than of their ‘rights’. The people are not one class among others. They are a class of the wrong that harms the community and establishes it as a ‘community’ of the just and the unjust.
(Rancière, 1999: 9)
By asserting that the community is founded on the ‘wrong’ of exclusion, the part of the community that has no part in the ‘natural order of the world’ identifies itself with the community as such, similarly to Badiou’s ascent of the inexistent to maximal existence (ibid.: 14–15). For Rancière, the idea of the wrong constitutes politics as the conflict of two logics, the ordering logic of the police that assigns every being its place and function in the world and the egalitarian logic of politics that undoes this prescription, demonstrating the contingency of every constituted order and the radical equality of all ‘speaking beings’. Thus, the idea of the wrong is not necessarily related to any particular experience of victimhood but rather
[belongs] to the original structure of all politics. Wrong is simply the mode of subjectivation in which the assertion of equality takes its political shape. Wrong institutes a singular universal, a polemical universal, by tying the presentation of equality, as the part of those who have no part, to the conflict between parts of society.
(ibid.: 39)
In its account of political subjectivation Rancière’s theory of politics veers towards the spontaneist tendency, whereby it is only the inexistent (the part that has no part) that can mend the founding wrong of politics by identifying with the whole of the community (ibid.: 31–42). In contrast, we have argued that it is by no means necessary to belong to this paradoxical part in order to contest and overturn its ‘no part’ status. Nonetheless, Rancière’s notion of wrong is very helpful in demonstrating the way the conflict between the ontological structure of the World (whence derives his logic of equality) and the phenomenological structure of worlds (whence derives his logic of police) is manifested within the world in concrete claims or ‘proofs’ by the subjects that assert the wrong of the existing count of parts and proceed from that assertion to the absolutization of their existence (see Rancière, 2010: 56–57; 1999: 40). The idea of the wrong is thus the mode of the intra-worldly appearance of the ontological difference between the World and worlds, the appearance that takes a concrete historical form without losing its connection to the ontological attributes of being-in-the-World. Historical sequences of politics that invoked such figures of the wrong as child labour, the prohibition of divorce, racial discrimination, the ban on strikes, arranged marriages, arbitrary arrest, censorship or torture may all be grasped in terms of the interplay between the ontic and the ontological in the praxis of politics.
The idea of the wrong is crucial for understanding the subjective process of world politics because, unlike such notions as injustice, violation of rights, etc., it carries no logical association with the transcendental of the world. The idea of the wrong presupposes no positive intra-worldly measure or standard, in terms of which something is found to be just or unjust, legitimate or illegitimate, moral or immoral. Similarly, the idea of rights depends too strongly on the positive juridical structure of the world to be useful in the confrontation with the order of the world itself: ‘politics is not based on right but on wrong’ (Rancière, 1999: 78; cf. Rancière, 2010: 62–75). The wrong is not a defect of the transcendental that one could demand to be rectified so that intra-worldly harmony may be restored:
[The] wrong by which politics occurs is not some flaw calling for reparation. It is introduction of an incommensurable at the heart of the distribution of speaking bodies. This incommensurable ruins in advance the project of the city ordered according to the proportion of the cosmos and based on the arkhe on the community.
(Rancière, 1999: 19)
While demands for rights or justice are positive and determinate and the ontological axioms of the world are, from an intra-worldly perspective, negative and indeterminate, since they derive from the subtraction from the positive order and thus lack any positive content, the idea of the wrong is both negative and determinate. It is a local evaluation of the transcendental of the world by a subject whose degree of existence of the world is weakened and who is no longer wholly invested in the stability of the worldly order. While positive demands on the world may always be either conceded or dismissed as unreasonably excessive, the determinate negativity involved in the idea of the wrong is far more damaging for the transcendental of the world: the subject who evaluates an aspect of the world as wrong does not want anything from the world that could either be granted or denied, all it wants is for whatever is wrong in the world to cease to exist there.
The crucial question is what exactly is wrong with the world. Let us return to our example of the subject who intervenes in an incident of domestic abuse. Evidently, this subject asserts that it is wrong that his neighbour is being beaten. However, this assertion immediately opens up a chain that might well be infinite: it is wrong that the husband is likely to get away with the beating, it is wrong that the wife has no chance of legal recourse, it is wrong that all the other neighbours do not stand up for the victim, it is wrong that I am likely to get in trouble for intervening, etc. It appears that this singular incident casts its vicious shadow over the entire world that the subject inhabits: come to think of it, isn’t it wrong that the police take hours to arrive, that the neighbours cowardly refuse to back up your statement and instead feed the police their ludicrous gossip about the victim, who in turn is interrogated by sneering and probably drunk policemen and is eventually intimidated to retract her complaint? The potentially infinite extension of the wrong is easily understandable in the context of our discussion of the inexistent object. The beaten woman in our example evidently falls under the intra-worldly category of the inexistent. It is precisely the inexistence of this and other women that sustains the maximal existence of men, just as the inexistence of the poor, homosexuals, indigenous peoples, communists, etc. sustains the maximal existence of the groups defined by the negation of these predicates. Thus, the negative evaluation of a particular case of inexistence, the beating of this woman here, leads to the problematization of the very order that regulates existence in the world in question, including the maximal existences it authorizes and supports.
What is it then that is wrong with the world? In a certain sense, it is everything , i.e. the entire transcendental order that makes the world appear the way it does. We should pay particular attention to the impersonal sentence that introduces the subject’s negative evaluation: ‘it is wrong that …’. While the object of the wrong is only introduced in the subordinate clause that follows this dictum (‘the woman is being beaten’, ‘the neighbours refuse to testify’, etc.), the formula of political subjectivation is actually contained in the introductory clause itself. For the political subject it is the transcendental of the world as such that is wrong as opposed to the fate of an individual being within it. The representation of a particular event as a case of the wrong breaks away from the immediate context of the incident, universalizing the plight of the particular victim as a problem of the entire world or, more precisely, the problem with the entire world. In this manner, the ontic fact that the subject initially declares to be wrong (a single incident of spousal abuse) ultimately touches upon the ontological dimension of the world’s very worldhood: if the wrong refers to the inexistent object and if such an object is necessary for there to be a world in the first place, then the world is wrong, not in some particular aspect that its powers may easily or grudgingly correct but in its very being.
This is how politics differs from charity , which is always eager to help particular victims on the condition that their condition remains particular and does not cast a shadow on the basic goodness of the world as such. It is always possible to sympathize with the poor lot of some beings of the world, resigned to a more unfortunate lot than ourselves, and even try to improve their lot to a reasonable extent, doing so precisely on the basis of one’s higher standing in the world. Charitable interventions do not transform the transcendental order but sustain it by permitting one to continue to abide in it with a somewhat clearer conscience.
What makes the idea of the wrong political is its attribution of the wrong not to any particular being, event or situation, which would then translate into a positive demand for assistance, redress or compensation, but to the transcendental of the world as such. The reason why this woman and other women in this world may be beaten with impunity is their status in the transcendental order, which is that of inexistence. As we have argued above, inexistence is an effect of the intra-worldly negation of the axioms of the World. As inexistent objects in the hypothetical world of our parable, women are not free to dissolve the abusive marriage or even seek legal defence against this abuse, since they are not equal to men in the legal or economic order of the world and, for this reason, do not share a community with them. If this inexistence is perceived by the subject as a wrong that must be overturned through the transformation of the world, the subject becomes the bearer of these axioms without necessarily grasping their ontological status explicitly.
Freedom, equality and community are not affirmed as the aspects of the appearance of the inconsistent multiplicity of beings subtracted from the ordering power of the transcendental, but simply as the anticipated effects of mending its wrongs . To affirm the axioms of the World the subject need not explicitly invoke their names that may well be indiscernible from the official slogans of the world, well-worn by official abuse or simply too lofty for the context in question. The axioms rather become accessible to the subject in the form of the negative evaluation of the transcendental of the world and the commitment to its transformation. In other words, the idea of the wrong establishes the relation between the (subtractive) subject and the (inexistent) object: the being that traverses the ontological mood in its momentary subtraction from the world returns to and re-engages with the world by problematizing and overturning the order that makes some beings inexist in it. In this manner, a connection is established between the one that dwells in proximity to the Nothing (the World) and the one that dwells in its world as nothing (the inexistent), the subject that is, from an intra-worldly perspective, always a bit ‘out of this world’, and the object that is ‘not of this world’. When the two are linked in the declaration of the wrong, politics begins.
Thus, while the subject may lack the explicit concept of the axioms of world politics, it nonetheless succeeds in representing freedom, equality and community to itself in the negatively determinate form of the wrong of the world: without knowing the axioms, it ‘gets the idea’ of the world’s wrongs by virtue of its weakened existence in it and its link with the inexistent object. It is important to accentuate this point: the idea of the wrong is related to the axioms of the World only by virtue of the subject defined by its non-identity with its place in the world, traversing inexistence in it and venturing to restore all inexistent objects to maximal existence. A claim that all sorts of things are wrong with the world may also come from a fully self-identical ‘(wo)man of the world’: have not we all heard them grumbling about the buses being dirty and not running on time, the neighbours being too dark-skinned and playing unpleasant music, the youth dressing strangely and talking too loudly, in short the world no longer being what it used to be? Yet, coming from a self-identical worldly being, all these complaints merely express particular preferences and have no relation to universality, even if and especially when they try to turn these particular preferences regarding matters of appearance, manner or taste into universal rules valid for all the world’s beings. This is why all such resentful grumbling about the sorry state of the world ultimately stands in the service of the existing transcendental order, however much it criticizes it. It is impossible to attain even a modest change in the world from the position of a petty particularism that is too afraid to lose its place in the world to risk stepping out of it in the act of political subjectivation, too scared to affirm its own demands and thus resigned to grumbling them to a like-minded audience. In contrast, the evaluation of the world as wrong by the political subject derives its force precisely from the subject’s non-identity with its place and its proximity to the inexistent. Whenever the political subject asserts that something is wrong with the world, it does not express its own preference or taste but rather presents in concrete intra-worldly terms the difference between the particularity of this world and the universality of being-in-the-World, disqualifying everything in this world that denies intra-worldly existence to any of its beings.
It is instructive to compare the political subject’s mode of access to the axioms to their explicit derivation by the philosopher. While both these conceptual personae emerge through the act of subtraction from the positivity of the world and the traversal of the ontological mood, their directions ultimately diverge. The political subject returns to the ontic terrain of the world, armed with a tentative, implicit or tacit grasp of the axioms in the form of the idea of the wrong. The subject thus moves from the World to the world , acting in the world on the basis of the axioms of being-in-the-World. On the contrary, the philosopher moves from the world to the World , contemplating each and every world as a contingent ordering of the void. The philosopher, who dwells in the ontological mood habitually if not permanently, is certainly capable of explicitly deriving the axioms from the disclosure of the World, but may well be indifferent to acting on these axioms, if only because it has no sufficient subjective investment in any particular world to care about transforming it. The philosopher knows the axioms but does not necessarily act on them, while the political subject acts on the tentative idea without having full knowledge of the axioms it represents.
Thus, in the absence of the epistemic grasp of the ontology of the World, the subject is capable of acting politically by virtue of the idea of the wrong, which problematizes every instance of inexistence and calls for the transformation of the transcendental of the world in order to overturn it. Since inexistence results from the negation of the axioms, its overturning negates this negation, which is equivalent to the affirmation of the axioms within the world: through the intra-worldly idea of the wrong, the subject ‘gets right’ the ontological axioms. The negation of the wrong of the world is thus equivalent to the affirmation of the World in this world.
Positivity and negativity in world politics
We have now completed the formal exposition of the subjective process of world politics. As we have seen, this process involves the simultaneously maximal affirmation of all three axioms of the World in relation to the inexistent objects of any given world. In order to raise the inexistent to maximal existence within the world, the subject of world politics must first subtract itself from its place in the world, occupying the ontological mood that exposes it to being-in-the-World and its axioms. We have argued that this exposure does not take the form of the explicit knowledge of the axioms, let alone their derivation from the ontology of the World. Instead, in its subtraction from intra-worldly determinations, the subject develops the idea of the wrong of the world, which serves as an ontic translation of the ontological axioms in the form of the negative evaluation of the transcendental and connects the subject with the inexistent object of the world. It is then by negating this wrong that the axioms of the World are affirmed in the world.
It is easy to see that this subjective process is based on an exceedingly complex relationship between affirmation and negation. Our definition of politics as a practice of affirmation of the axioms of the World within the world emphasizes the affirmative character of politics in contrast to the definitions of politics in terms of resistance or critique (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 2). Yet, how does this square with the double negativity that seems to define political praxis? On the one hand, the axioms of the World lack all positive content, being derived from the appearance of beings solely in their being, which is obtained by the negative act of subtraction from the positive world, in which we always already find ourselves. Even the basic formulae of the axioms take the form of a double negation: there is no being that is not free and equal and no community to which a being does not belong (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 3). On the other hand, within the positivity of the world the ontic idea that guides the political subjects is also defined in terms of the negative evaluation of the world as wrong. It is then the negation of this negativity of the wrong that is equivalent to the affirmation of the negatively derived axioms. Rather than being epiphenomenal, negativity seems to be the essential characteristic of politics.
Nonetheless, we must recall that it is the positive order of the world that is founded on the inaugural gesture of the negation of at least one political axiom that constitutes and delimits it as a world to begin with. A world as a particular and limited totality only exists by virtue of the negation of universality of the void of the World. Thus, the transcendental order of the world is, in its very positivity, a product of the negation of the axioms that, on the contrary, negate nothing and apply to any being whatsoever. The double-negative logical form of the axioms refers solely to the process of their origin in the subtraction from the transcendental. If negativity is at work in the very constitution of the positive world, then it is easy to understand why any political affirmation must take the form of its negation, both in the ontological sense of the subtraction from the transcendental order that grants access to being-in-the-World or in the ontic sense of the evaluation of the order of the world as wrong. Both the subtraction from the world that initiates politics and the overcoming of its wrongs that it proceeds by are nothing but the negation of the world’s constitutive negativity.
Yet, the negation of negativity does not always result in a positive affirmation. As we have argued at length in Ontology and World Politics (Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 4), any politics short of world politics, i.e. a politics that does not affirm all axioms maximally, remains subsumed under the transcendental order of the world and hence particularistic. Its negation of particular aspects of the transcendental does not eliminate the constituent negativity of the world but rather persists in it, merely modifying the existing order or transforming one particular order into another. It is only world politics that achieves a genuine subtraction from the transcendental and thereby goes beyond partial and particular negations that leave the world’s overall negative structure in place. Paradoxically at first glance, it is the radicalization of negation in world-political practices, which finds the transcendental of the world wrong as such and not in any of its particular aspects, that ultimately converts these practices into maximal affirmations of freedom, equality and community that deactivate the existing exclusions, hierarchies and subjections without producing new ones. The subtractive negation of the transcendental of the world, taking its ontic form in the overcoming of intra-worldly wrongs, renders the immanent negativity of the world inoperative and hence negates it without itself getting stuck in negativity.
This logic permits us to reconsider the pejorative assessment of ‘negative’ politics, be it protest voting or general strikes, acts of sabotage or election boycott. While a ‘constructive politics’ that expresses itself in the form of positive demands and alternatives, framed in the symbolic terms of the existing order, easily becomes co-opted into the transcendental as a half-hearted and inconsequential reformism that ensures that everything remains the same in an endless proliferation of particular modifications, a politics that is apparently purely negative actually attains a much stronger degree of affirmation precisely insofar as it locates the wrong in the transcendental as such. What is the affirmative content of a politics that makes no particular demands on the authorities, that does not formulate and propose alternatives, that is not interested in working through the existing institutions, but simply says ‘Down with X!’ (X being any metaphoric or metonymic signifier of the wrong of the world)? As we have argued, all politics seeks to raise the inexistent object of the world (Y) to maximal existence. Yet, as long as the idea of the wrong is part of a political sequence, whatever it affirms must be affirmed universally for the world in question. Thus, the negative formula ‘Down with X!’ affirms the maximal existence of the inexistent object Y along with all the other beings in the world, i.e. the existence of all beings as free, equal and in common. Since it is inexistence as such that is wrong and since every world necessarily has an inexistent object, there is nothing to be demanded from or proposed to the transcendental of the world, other than its deactivation. World politics asks nothing from the world, since no world could possibly fulfill its request, constituted as it is by the negation of at least one axiom of the World.
Thus, there is no contradiction between the negativity of intra-worldly political practice guided by the idea of the wrong and its ontologically affirmative character. On the contrary, politics is never more affirmative than when it proclaims ‘Down with the world as it is!’ It is only by evaluating the order of the world as wrong in its entirety and not in the specific aspects of its management that one truly affirms the ontological axioms of being-in-the-World as opposed to particular ontic features of some worldly beings. As long as the wrong of the world is restricted to particular aspects of the transcendental, we are stuck in the perpetual process of immanent modification, whereby the order of the world ceaselessly changes only in order to stay the same. In terms of the intensity of political affirmation, this modification consists in the permanent modulation and readjustment of the non-maximal degrees of affirmation of freedom, equality and community, which thereby figure in the world as ontic principles of management and no longer as ontological axioms. For the axioms to be affirmed maximally, the idea of the wrong must be dissociated from any particular aspect of the transcendental order, just as the problematization of inexistence must go beyond lamenting the inexistence of some particular beings and not others. Only when the wrong of the world is coextensive with its order are the axioms of the World affirmed to the maximal degree. Thus, the apparently negative and particularistic formula ‘Down with X!’ is in fact the intra-worldly mode of the universal affirmation of the axioms of the World.
It is precisely this apparent negativity that grants world politics its immense power. If the possibility of world-political affirmation does not depend on the particular features of the world in question, e.g. its economic development or cultural tradition, its dominant religion or social stratification, but rather depends on the maximal subtraction from these positive features that enables a purely negative demand for the overturning of the wrong, this means that world politics can be practised in any world whatsoever . Such familiar claims that e.g. equality is impossible in an Islamic society or that Russian culture is hostile to freedom would be utterly irrelevant even if they were true, since world politics is not determined by any particular culture or tradition but is rather made possible by a subtraction from it. Of course, any politics necessarily relies on all kinds of intra-worldly resources, be they material or spiritual, economic or cultural, yet the point is that the possibility of world politics in a given world is never determined by any of these, since its key resource, i.e. the idea of the wrong, is strictly its own. Simply put, it is always possible to revolt against the order of the world according to the formula ‘Down with the wrong!’ Any historico-cultural restriction of freedom, equality or community to any particular world, Western or otherwise, is thus definitively refuted. From the ontological mood, all worlds are strictly the same in their very worldhood, which makes it possible for world politics to erupt in any world irrespectively of the positive features of its transcendental. In the remainder of this book we shall pose the question of what, if anything, limits this power of bringing the void of the World into any world whatsoever.