Evil as the negation of politics
In Chapter 1 we defined world politics as a triply infinite process: an infinite affirmation of the axioms of the World in the infinite number of infinite worlds. As an affirmation of universal axioms universally for every world in which it unfolds, world politics is an infinite and hence presumably limitless praxis. 1 Yet, isn’t this limitless universalism of world politics precisely the problem rather than the solution? It might appear that our affirmation of universalism against the nihilistic pluralism of particular worlds has thrown the baby out with the bathwater, losing sight of what has been crucial to the entire Western tradition of political thought, i.e. the problem of limits to politics , which prevent it from fully actualizing its power. Whether the need for such limits is justified by anthropological arguments about the evil inherent in human nature, moral arguments sanctifying some things as not subject to political power or epistemic arguments about the opacity of some aspects of existence to political intervention, it is evident that political thought is constitutively intertwined with the thought of the non-political that serves as a limit to politics, be this limit legal, moral, epistemic, etc.
Our theory of the world-political subject must therefore address this question of the limit with respect to the singular process of world politics. Having accounted for the ontological conditions of emergence of the subject through dis-identification from its place in the world and the ontic translation of ontological axioms through the idea of the wrong, we shall now seek to chart the path of the subject in the world in terms of its confrontation with a series of intra-worldly limits to its activity. We shall begin with the consideration of the ‘problem of evil’ as an inherent obstacle to the unfolding of political affirmation, arguing that evil must be understood as the negation of politics, which either takes the form of the negation of the World in the world through the betrayal of the political axioms or the negation of the world in the name of the World through the nihilistic drive to attain the infinite end of politics in a finite act. While the first form of evil exemplifies the abandonment of politics and is hence extraneous to it, the second arises from the internal perversion of the political affirmation whereby it succumbs to the temptation of its own completion. In Chapter 4 we shall consider the possibilities of establishing an ethical limit to politics to ward off this latter form of evil. Focusing in particular on Alain Badiou’s figure of the unnameable, we shall address the question of whether politics can be limited by any external ethical prescription, be it the avoidance of destruction or renunciation of violence. In Chapter 5 we shall proceed to epistemic limits to politics, posing the question of whether political praxis can be grounded in philosophical or scientific knowledge that would prescribe the correct path for the political subject. Finally, in Chapter 6 we shall address what we shall call a functional limit to politics that pertains to the positive features of certain worlds that would preclude their politicization.
Let us begin with the most self-evident objection against the idea of world politics as the maximal affirmation of the ontological axioms of freedom, equality and community within particular worlds. Does not this concept of politics rest on the naïve or outright erroneous assumption about human nature that ignores its problematic features that obstruct from the outset any universalist affirmation? By assuming that human beings will abandon their particular places in the world, their intra-worldly identities and interests for the destabilizing project of the affirmation of freedom, equality and community of all and everyone we seem to be treating human beings like angels, 2 ignoring their potentiality for evil that should rather be a starting point for any discourse on politics. The human capacity for evil has not merely been the focus of ‘pessimistic’ political anthropologies from Hobbes to Schmitt, but has also been invoked by more ‘optimistic’ strands of political thought from Kant (1991: 41–53) to Negri (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 189–201) and Virno (2008: 9–65), all of whom sought to develop institutional arrangements that limit, counter or neutralize this evil through various procedures of immunization (Esposito, 2011). Isn’t the idea of world politics then hopelessly utopian in its belief that the maximal affirmation of freedom, equality and community for the entire world is, in the absence of any exclusion, domination or restriction, at all possible?
Insofar as we understand world politics not as an ideal of the pacific unification of all beings in a perfect world, but rather as a militant practice of the infinite affirmation of political axioms in the infinity of infinite worlds, this objection clearly loses much of its force. What is at stake in the idea of world politics is not a vapid and depoliticized image of world unity, but rather the local (intra-worldly) process of political affirmation that necessarily presupposes an antagonistic relationship to the order of the world. World politics is not about the disappearance of antagonism on the basis of the recovery of the inherently ‘good’ nature of humanity, but rather its intensification and universalization on the basis of the subtraction from anything like a ‘nature’ of humanity or any other worldly being in favour of the axioms that tell us nothing about the good or evil character of these beings but simply maintain that whatever these beings are, human or animal, good or evil, they are in common as free and equal.
On the other hand, there is certainly no reason to expect all these beings to affirm the three axioms universally for their world. To return to our example of the subject constituted in an intervention into the incident of domestic violence, do not we always find ourselves among those who choose non-intervention, finding a thousand good reasons why the wrong of the world is either a ‘necessary’ or a ‘lesser’ evil, or, come to think of it, actually something quite good. Moreover, even the subjects who do intervene in the world may eventually fail in their fidelity to the axioms and end up producing an uglier version of the world they fled from (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 4). Yet, all these examples only prove that every being of every world is capable of reactive and obscure modes of subjectivity as well as the faithful one. Recalling Agamben’s (1999a: 177–184) reconstruction of Aristotle’s notion of potentiality, we shall assert that any recognition of the potentiality for evil must presuppose that this potentiality is also the potentiality not to succumb to evil, i.e. to persist in one’s fidelity to the good. Thus, while the potentiality for evil is there in every positive world, this potentiality must be rigorously distinguished from any argument about human or other beings as necessarily evil, which is just as ‘idealistic’ as the claim that these beings are by nature good. The negative idealization of humanity or any other class of beings fares no better than their positive idealization. Thus, any argument for the impossibility of world politics on the basis of the ineradicable potentiality for evil immediately refutes itself, since the possibility of negating the axioms necessarily implies the possibility of their faithful affirmation. In other words, all beings are as much capable of the negation of the axioms as they are of the fidelity to them. The understanding of evil in terms of negation returns us to St Augustine’s privative understanding of evil on the basis of the good (Augustine, 1974: 159–161), in relation to which it is then secondary and epiphenomenal. Evil only arises as the negation, perversion or corruption of the good and there is no such thing as ‘primordial evil’. As Hardt and Negri concisely put it, ‘evil is love gone bad’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 193).
In a more systematic fashion, in his Ethics Badiou defined evil as the negation of the truth procedure through three processes of terror, betrayal and disaster . Terror refers to the fidelity to the simulacrum of the event that elevates a particular transcendental to the universal status and the consequent denigration of other worlds into inexistence. Betrayal pertains to the disavowal of the event, followed by the retreat into the security of one’s assigned intra-worldly position. Finally, disaster consists in the destruction of the truth procedure through the excessive ‘forcing’ of the truth in the world, which presents the infinite process as already completed (Badiou, 2001a: 72–87). These three forms of evil are logically dependent on the prior existence of the truths, which, in Badiou’s philosophy, are strict synonyms of the good. Prior to the events that give rise to these truths, human existence is neither evil nor good but rather remains beneath (as opposed to Nietzsche’s ‘beyond’) both good and evil (ibid.: 59–61) as a purely biological reality, concerned with survival and subordinated to instincts.
In contrast to Badiou’s characteristically dismissive invocation of biological ‘bare life’, our approach locates ‘existence beneath good and evil’ in the intra-worldly realm, governed by transcendental ordering principles, which disavow and foreclose the event of the World in the world. Existence beneath good and evil is purely apolitical existence, which need not be reducible to biology but might very well be regulated by elaborate and sophisticated ordering principles, be they traditional, mythical, religious or legal. However, as long as these principles have no relation to the three axioms of the World, they remain purely contingent and arbitrary from the ontological perspective, since, as we have argued, the transcendental order of every world lacks a foundation in being. Thus, any adjudication between good and evil is conditioned by the prior existence of the good in the form of world-political affirmation.
Yet, in what sense is world-political affirmation itself ‘good’? Evidently, the universal axioms of world politics should be rigorously distinguished from normative principles, since their very accessibility depends on the rupture of any possible normativity, which only exists as an intra-worldly phenomenon. Insofar as world politics is conditioned by the subtraction from all intra-worldly determinations, including the world’s normative criteria of good and evil, its ‘goodness’ cannot be derived from the transcendental of the world. On the other hand, since the World as void is by definition indifferent to the good or evil nature of the beings to whom its axioms apply, it is impossible to take the easy way out and claim that world politics is good ‘from the perspective of the World’: the World as void offers no such perspective and no normative principle could be located there. If neither the void of the World nor the positivity of the world permit us to ground the ‘goodness’ of world politics, might not this goodness consist in the very relation it establishes between the two? World politics could then be proclaimed good because it brings the World from its being the universal part of every world to its appearance in this world here and seeks to positively transform this world in accordance with the axioms that always already define the being of all its beings. Thus, world politics transforms the world on the basis of its own ontological foundation, which its immanent transcendental order disavows and forecloses. The good of world politics would thus consist in its accord with the ontology of the World .
But what, and, even more importantly, who, is this accord good for ? From a philosophical perspective that we have termed meta-political (Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 2), which, in diverse ways, characterizes the work of Lacan, Heidegger, Derrida and their contemporary followers (Bosteels, 2011b: 253–258), the good is identical to the true and world politics is good insofar as it restores to the world its truth, the truth of its being as structurally lacking, decentred, incomplete, contingent or inconsistent. While philosophically correct, this argument nonetheless remains at the stage of the elucidation of the ontological conditions of possibility of worldhood as such and stops short of any positive transformation on the basis of these conditions. Yet, why should the beings of any positive world care about its ontological foundations, especially if the transcendental order of the world successfully conceals the latter? Why should the good consist in the destabilization of the world in accordance with its originary ontological inconsistency and not in the insulation of its positive order from the threat of any ontic eruption of this inconsistency?
We ought to be wary of understanding world politics in terms of the restoration of some kind of originary harmony by bringing the World, which ontologically always already is in every world, to appearance through the production of the intra-worldly effects of its axioms. The ‘good’ of world politics has nothing to do with the restoration of the World as the arkhe of the world or the coming of the World to appearance as the telos of the existence of every world. It is not a matter of mending the originary injustice of the closure of worlds from the World, simply because the void of the World knows no (in)justice: all that it discloses are the freedom, equality and community of all beings, which are neither good nor bad, but simply are in the sense of the brute facticity of being-in-the-World. The World is utterly indifferent to its own appearance or non-appearance within any of the infinite number of worlds that it makes possible. The world that negates all the axioms of the World is no less actual or no less possible than the world in which these axioms are affirmed. Since the World and worlds, being and appearance, remain disjointed, the accord between ontology and politics cannot be good either in itself (‘for the World’) or for us (‘for the world’). It would be ridiculous to try to justify to the (wo)man of the world the destabilization or loss of his or her place in the world by claiming that it accords with the world’s own ontological status as inconsistent multiplicity: a fat lot of good that accord will do for those who stand to lose their intra-worldly security, status or possessions! Yet, there are also worldly beings for whom this accord actually matters , for whom the good is indeed the true, the beings that take it upon themselves to produce the effects of the World in its world, i.e. faithful subjects of politics.
While the (wo)man of the world finds little consolation in the fact that the collapse of his or her world is in accordance with this world’s very being, the subject that has already dis-identified with the world and evaluated it as wrong, would certainly derive from this accord the proof of its being ‘in the right’ and an impetus to maintain fidelity to its intervention in the world. The problem is that, as we argued in the previous chapter, the subject’s access to the axioms of the world does not take the form of explicit ontological knowledge. What the subject may come to know of the accord of its practice with the axioms of the World is usually not expressed in terms of a philosophical doctrine but rather in the rather more hazy and indeterminate terms of various ontological moods that constitute the subject in the first place. 3 Thus, while the subject gets the idea of the universality of the axioms in its subtraction from the transcendental and its standing out in the nothingness of the World, its access to these axioms remains mediated by the intra-worldly idea of the wrong. Unlike the philosopher, the subject has no direct and explicit grasp of the accord between its practices and the ontology of the World and is thus never securely ‘on the side of good’ or having being itself ‘on its side’.
Thus, while from a philosophical perspective the subject does indeed transform the world in accordance with its ontological foundation and not simply on the basis of its whims, desires or external compulsion, this ‘founded’ character of politics does not grant it any ontological guarantees, epistemic certitude or ethical privilege on its perilous path of affirmation. On the contrary, since politics breaks with intra-worldly foundations and finds its sole ontological foundation in the void, it is forever devoid of any such guarantees or privileges and is driven only by the subject’s conviction that the wrong of the world must be set right, the conviction that lacks any explicit reference to the accord of these practices with the ontology of the World. Thus, in its intra-worldly practice of world politics the subject perceives its ‘goodness’ as a simple inversion of the ontic wrong, the inversion that ‘feels right’ in the ontological mood that the subject occupies. While the ontological accord between world politics and the void of the World is evidently ‘good’ for the subject , it is not the good that the subject can know , let alone derive from this knowledge any security, guarantee and privilege.
Nonetheless, since the subject does traverse the ontological mood, it is not completely barred from the access to the ontological dimension and actually derives from it a certain fortification of its conviction. As we recall, the subject is constitutively characterized by the weakened degree of existence in the world, resulting from its dis-identification from its place in it. Indeed, on its path of political affirmation the subject often comes to experience its own inexistence in the world, be it in the form of ostracism or extra-judicial detention, censorship or slander, alienation or betrayal. The risk that every subject takes is of existing in the world as not existing in it and of being treated accordingly by those who do exist there. In these ordeals of inexistence the subject’s exposure to being-in-the-World in the ontological mood at least provides the subject with the assurance of its own being that enables it to persist in the world that denies it existence. ‘Its sole property is that of consisting as pure multiple, or being. Subtracted from language, it makes do with its being’ (Badiou, 2005a: 371).
Appearing to be nothing in the world that it evaluates as wrong, the subject mobilizes its very being against the world, which in the ontological mood is not , its transcendental lacking any foundation in being. Thus, the subject and the world stand in an asymmetric relation. While the world exists , and indeed appears to exist maximally precisely when it denies existence to some of its beings, the subject, whose existence in the world is minimal, nonetheless is , unlike the transcendental of the world. It is this access to its own being and to the non-being of the transcendental that ultimately fortifies the subject’s conviction about its being right about the wrongs of the world, about its practice being good in the absence of any explicit criteria for its goodness. Nonetheless, this conviction evidently remains tentative and unstable, insofar as it cannot take the form of a universally accessible normative principle, which the subject can refer to in justifying its practice to itself and the others. The good of world-political affirmation is not an innate idea, a rationally deducible maxim, an effect of consensus, but rather an always precarious effect of the subject’s contingent persistence on its path of affirmation, which is always at risk of weakening, betrayal, diversion, dissolution or destruction. This is precisely where the problem of evil comes in.
If world politics in the sense of the maximal affirmation of the axioms of the World is subjectively maintained as the good, then evil is nothing other than the negation of these axioms within the world. It is only when an axiom has been affirmed, that it can be denied in a reactive manner (corresponding to Badiou’s betrayal) and the effects of this affirmation destroyed in an obscure fashion (Badiou’s terror). It is only from this perspective that it is possible to speak of absolute evil as a correlate of the absolute good of the axioms and, moreover, to assert that all evil is absolute despite not being ‘radical’ in the sense of originary or primordial. Insofar as the three axioms describe being-in-the-World that is obtained by the subtraction from every particular world, evil, which negates these axioms, is similarly not relative to the features of particular worlds, but is an absolute value (or rather a non-value) across the infinity of worlds. In other words, although evil usually manifests itself phenomenally in particularistic terms of private interests, personal rivalries or vendettas, group loyalties, etc., it is not itself a purely intra-worldly phenomenon. On the contrary, it is possible to construct an ontological concept of evil as a strict antithesis of our ontological concept of politics. Like the axioms that it negates, evil arises from the World, yet, in contrast to politics that brings these axioms into a positive world, evil exists as the potentiality of the negation of the existence of the World in the world . While politics seeks to bring the World to appearance in the world by producing its positive effects therein, evil seeks to foreclose this appearance and destroy its already existing effects.
Does this technical definition of evil make any sense from more conventional moral perspectives? Evidently, most acts that our moral sense would unhesitantly qualify as evil may be approached as negations of the axioms of freedom, equality and community: genocide, torture, rape, ethnic discrimination are all immediately graspable as negations of one or more of the axioms of the World. The advantage of our definition is that it allows us to delimit evil from acts that are judged to be immoral or criminal. Since the very categories of crime and immorality pertain to positive legal or moral norms, inscribed in the transcendental of the world, they have no necessary relation to the axioms of the World. Actions that offend the public or violate the legal code of the world need not be evil, just as evil need not necessarily take the form of a crime or an affront to morality, particularly if the legal and moral norms of the world are themselves constituted by the negation of the axioms of the World.
Evil has nothing to do with the violation of any intra-worldly norm but is wholly contained in the negation of the axioms of the World. It is this negation that opens the possibility for domination, subjugation and ultimately extermination of others, who can simply be expunged from one’s world as not belonging to it or unworthy of sharing a world with (cf. Arendt, 2006: 278). This is not to say that evil necessarily takes the form of an explicit negation of the terms ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘community’ in a valorization of domination, inequality and exclusion. A more dangerous and insidious way in which this negation takes place consists in the conversion of the universal axiom into the positive principle of a particular world, which Badiou terms the simulacrum and we have analysed in terms of pure or polysemous homonymy (Prozorov, 2014 Chapter 4). In this conversion the axioms of freedom, equality and community that characterize the being of the beings subtracted from all intra-worldly determinations are reduced to positive norms by which the existence of these beings is governed. As we have seen, the very institution of the transcendental of the world involves the negation of at least one axiom and thus the non-maximal degree of the affirmation of the others. Thus, anthropological pessimists are entirely correct to claim that evil pervades the world, except that it does so not as a necessary attribute of the world’s beings but as a necessary consequence of the existence of the world itself in its positivity.
From this understanding of evil follows a startling thesis that we shall return to repeatedly in the remainder of this book: world politics never takes the form of the construction of another world . While it may be counterintuitive to pronounce the constructive activity of world-making evil (isn’t politics precisely about ‘making a new, better world’?), this makes perfect sense from our definition of evil as the negation of the existence of the World in the world. Insofar as any construction of a positive world involves the establishment of a particular transcendental order, it involves the negation of at least one axiom and in this manner introduces evil into the world. The subject of world politics may thus never be a world-maker (cf. Arendt, 1998: 7–9, 50–57, 167–178). In order to understand this point, let us consider the implications of our thesis about the contingency of positive worlds (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 2). The void of the World as the condition of possibility of positive worlds grants these worlds being without prescribing the positive mode of their appearance, which lacks any ontological correlate and is thus entirely contingent. The order of the world has no foundation in being and is thus strictly anarchic . While the label ‘anarchism’ is usually applied to a variety of ‘negative’ and ‘disruptive’ forms of politics, the accusation may be legitimately returned to sender, insofar as the governance of any world whatsoever has no ontological support or arkhe .
This anarchic character of government, particularly in its economic sense, has been addressed by Giorgio Agamben in his theological genealogy of government in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011). Tracing the caesura between being and action in the Trinitarian doctrine, Agamben reconstitutes the Christian notion of the economy as the practical activity of administration of both the divine and the earthly world that was entrusted by God the Father to Christ. Yet, insofar as in the Trinitarian dogma Christ the Son was not generated from (or ‘founded by’) the Father but rather reigned absolutely and simultaneously with him, his government lacked any foundation in being and was rather a purely contingent activity of administering the world through the production of collateral effects (see ibid.: 53–65; see also Agamben, 2009c: 9–10). On the basis of this genealogy of government Agamben concludes that rather than function as a political movement heterogeneous to the very principle of government, anarchism has been precisely its very principle since early Christianity.
[Anarchy] is what government must presuppose and assume as the origin from which it derives and, at the same time, as the destination towards which it is travelling. The remark of one of the Fascist dignitaries in Pasolini’s film Salo , according to which ‘the only real anarchy is that of power’ is perfectly serious. [Ontotheology] always already thinks the divine praxis as lacking a foundation in being, and intends to find an articulation between that which it has always already divided. The oikonomia is always already anarchic, without foundation.
(Agamben, 2011: 64–65)
Striking as this thesis might appear, it also follows logically from our concept of worlds. Since positive worlds are conditioned by the World only in their being, but not in their appearance, the transcendental orders that regulate the modes of appearance in these worlds can only be radically contingent and unfounded. All intra-worldly government is purely ad hoc practical activity that reinvents its principles each time anew. To regulate and administer a world is not to realize its latent orderly design or restore its natural order – on the contrary, it is to act without any foundation, freely, sovereignly and hence violently. From this perspective, the greatest anarchists in the world are its police. On the contrary, world politics always retains its ontological foundation in being-in-the-World by maximally affirming all of its axioms in the world. The disruptive character of world politics has nothing to do with its lack of arkhe but is rather a direct effect of its attempt to bring into the world this arkhe , which is entirely contained in the ‘whatever being’ of all the beings of this world.
Yet, this is where things get complicated. It is the very arkhe of world politics that precludes the arrangement of its effects in the form of a transcendentally ordered positive world. A world constituted by the negation of freedom, equality or community is ontologically unfounded, insofar as it contravenes the axioms of the World, yet it nonetheless exists in its positivity, precisely by virtue of this negation. On the contrary, any attempt to construct a positive world founded on the three axioms contradicts the very definition of the world as a transcendentally ordered positivity, which presupposes the constitutive scission of the void that makes a particular world possible. What does it then mean to speak of world politics in terms of the positive transformation of worlds in accordance with the axioms? If world politics cannot produce its own world of maximal freedom, equality and community, its claim to positively transform existing worlds begins to ring hollow, confirming time-honoured scepticism about radical or utopian politics as necessarily bound to fail.
Yet, everything depends on how we understand the term ‘transformation’. If by transformation we mean the ‘formation’ of a new, presumably perfect world in which all three axioms of being-in-the-World find their ontic fulfilment, this task is indeed impossible. Whatever positive world is constructed, its sheer positivity, produced in the delimitation from its outside, is bound to contravene the universality of the axioms by delimiting the membership of the community and the restriction of freedom and equality to these members. On the other hand, if a world were to be created without any delimitation from its outside, it would have to be the world of all worlds, the figure of the Whole, whose logical inconsistency was our point of departure. Of all modes of politics world politics alone does not have a correlate world, whose construction would be its task.
Nonetheless, this is not a defect of world politics but rather the proof of its genuine universality: irreducible to any particular world, world politics is practicable in any world whatsoever precisely insofar as it deploys ontological axioms not to construct a new world but rather to change the existing ones. We may thus also understand ‘transformation’ as the production within worlds of trans-worldly effects that cannot be subsumed under their positive orders and do not take a transcendental form of their own, but are nonetheless real not only in ontological but also in phenomenological terms, observable to all the beings of the world and not only the subjects of the political process. These effects consist in the maximal existence of the inexistents of the world in question and the correlate decline into inexistence of the aspects of the transcendental order evaluated as wrong. Insofar as the process of world politics is infinite, it never attains the positive form of a world completely deprived of inexistents, which would by definition have to be a world deprived of a transcendental and thus a world that would contradict its own concept. Nonetheless, world politics produces finite effects of maximal existence of freedom, equality and community amid the infinity of the world, the effects that, without themselves coalescing into a transcendental, disrupt and destabilize the operation of the existing order. While this destabilization cannot produce maximally liberated, egalitarian and communitarian worlds (or regions of worlds), it makes possible maximal experiences of freedom, equality and community by suspending, however momentarily, the worldly logic that negates or subsumes these axioms.
Using the concept from Simone Weil’s political thought (Weil, 1952: 78–83), Agamben refers to this type of transformation as the ‘decreation’ of the world (see De La Durantaye, 2009: 23). In the process of decreation that is central to Agamben’s reconstruction of messianic politics, there takes place a reversal of modal categories, whereby what is necessary (the objective order of the world) becomes contingent and may even be relegated to inexistence, while what was impossible (the intra-worldly appearance of an inexistent object) becomes possible and may even be actualized in the mode of maximal existence: ‘[W]hat could not have been but was becomes indistinguishable from what could have been but was not’ (Agamben, 1999a: 270; see also Agamben, 1999b: 137). To recall the Pauline logic of existential absolutization, in a decreated world what was comes to nought while what did not exist comes to existence. This is not a new world, which would inevitably have to be defined by a new transcendental with its own inexistent objects. Instead, it is the same world, ‘this world here’ that has undergone a messianic ‘tiny displacement’ that makes all the difference by suspending the hold of the transcendental on the world’s beings (Agamben, 1999a: 164).
Thus, the process of world politics is constitutively barred from ever attaining the form of the world, which does not thereby resign it to impotent formlessness but rather enables it to transform positive worlds by producing finite effects of the ontological axioms that, precisely insofar as they do have a foundation in being, transcend any anarchic order of appearance. This is where our approach to world politics differs most from the orientations that we have termed meta-political: while a variety of Heideggerian, Lacanian or Derridean orientations demonstrate that a ‘perfect world’ corresponding to the World is impossible and proceed to argue that its pursuit through a radical or utopian politics is dangerous or at least useless, we agree that a ‘world-political world’ defined by the attainment of absolute freedom, equality and community and thus transcending the very concept of worldhood is impossible and yet we nonetheless maintain that the maximal affirmation of these axioms is not useless (though still dangerous), insofar as it makes possible the maximal degree of real change in positive worlds in the form of the finite effects of the axioms that decreate the order of the world.
This argument permits us to reassess the well-known slogan ‘Another world is possible!’ Evidently, since the positive order of a world has no foundation in being and is entirely contingent, another world is always possible, both a better and a worse world. The list of possible worlds is literally infinite, yet it is not unlimited: what is not possible is a ‘perfect world’, a world ordered in accordance with the ontology of the World and hence restored to its own good , a world in which the ontological and the ontic happily coincide to the infinite joy of its beings. What remains excluded from the infinity of possible worlds is what every political subject desires most, the world set right , in which nothing would be evaluated as wrong. Yet, this is not because of the imperfection of any of the world’s beings, including human beings – there is something hubristic in the attempt to explain the imperfection of the world as such by the imperfection of a particular class of beings inhabiting it. If anything is ‘imperfect’ here, it is the principle of worldhood as such, the logic of appearance that is severed from a foundation in being and consigned to the contingency of immanent ordering. The political process is capable of overcoming this ‘imperfection’ in its decreation of the transcendental and the absolutization of the worldly inexistent, yet, given the infinity both of the world and of its own procedure, it can never overcome it completely in the construction of a perfect world. What it can do is subject any world whatsoever to a negative evaluation and transform aspects of its transcendental in the manner that absolutizes the existence of what was resigned to inexistence to it. That ‘another world is possible’ ultimately means that this world here, whatever it is, can be made other through its decreation.
In contrast, evil is nothing other than the negation of this possibility of decreation, either in the reactive mode of subsuming its effects under the particular transcendental as homonymic instruments of order or in the obscure mode of destroying them in the restoration of the transcendental power of conferring inexistence. Either way, evil is never an exception to the normal order of the world but, on the contrary, consists in the reassertion of the norm of the world, which is purely contingent and ultimately anarchic, against the irruption of political affirmation, which exposes the world to its ontological foundation in the void.
Evil as the excess of politics
The potentiality for reactive and obscure negation of the axioms does not exhaust the idea of evil. The second form of evil that is more difficult to recognize and even more difficult to confront arises out of the internal perversion of the logic of political affirmation itself. While we have addressed the first form of evil in terms of the negation of the World in favour of the particular world, we shall now discuss the opposite process of the negation of the world in favour of the void of the World.
We have defined politics as bringing the World into the world and emphasized repeatedly that what is at stake in it is the production of positive effects of the axioms of the World within positive worlds as opposed to the transformation of the world into the World, which is, after all, literally nothing. While this production is evidently disruptive and even destructive in relation to the transcendental order, it does not destroy the world itself along with its beings. Bringing the World into the world requires that the world in question should remain , although of course not intact. Political affirmation aims at the transformation of worlds in accordance with the axioms of the World rather than at producing the void of the World where the world once was.
It is precisely the latter desire that defines the active-nihilist disposition (see Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 2). The object of the active-nihilist affirmation is not any of the axioms of the World as void but the void as such , nothingness pure and simple. The active nihilist does not, strictly speaking, negate the axioms of the World in the reactive or obscure manner, but rather seeks to produce the void of the World within its world, which presupposes the destruction of the very site, in which the axioms can be affirmed in the first place. There is no sense in affirming the axioms of the World in the World itself, since in being-in-the-World freedom, equality and community are already given maximally as the attributes of the inconsistent multiplicity of ‘whatever being’. Yet, the World is not a possible dwelling place for beings and being-in-the-World remains an intra-worldly mode of appearance, momentarily accessed through a subtractive assumption of the ontological mood. This is why political praxis is oriented towards the production of the effects of the World, which is itself indifferent to beings, in the worlds that are inhabited and transformed by beings. In contrast, the nihilistic affirmation of the void is profoundly anti-political, insofar as it bypasses this specific requirement of the affirmation of the World in the world, opting for the destruction of the world in the name of the World . Moreover, this destruction is utterly meaningless, since it is impossible to replace the world with the World: as we have argued, the World as void always already is inside every world as its ‘universal part’ and the condition of possibility of all the beings that appear there. All that active nihilism achieves is the destruction of the world in the name of something that was in this world all along.
It is important to emphasize the difference of active nihilism from the forms of evil addressed in the previous section, whose nihilism is either passive (in the reactive mode of subjectivity) or imperfect (in the obscure mode). While the explicit abandonment of the axioms and their conversion into particularistic instruments of worldly governance seek to negate the appearance of the World in the world, to render powerless the process of political affirmation, active nihilism is rather a result of an illusory belief in the total power of world politics that leads it to a self-destructive paroxysm. It is therefore important to trace the way this destructive disposition arises from within the process of political affirmation as its perverse excess rather than as privation or lack.
We have argued that world politics is an infinite process of producing the positive effects of the axioms of the World in the infinite number of infinite worlds. If this process were finite, at the point of its completion the transcendental of the world, which is always constituted by the negation of at least one axiom, would be rendered entirely inoperative, its hierarchies flattened, its lines of exclusion erased, its modes of domination deactivated. Since world politics is not a world-making activity, its hypothetical completion would entail the disappearance of the world as a transcendentally ordered totality. Yet, since this process is infinite, we always find ourselves in a world of some sort as a transcendental condition of the appearance of beings: for a being to be is to appear in a world (Badiou, 2009b: 114). Thus, any finite political sequence necessarily fails in its confrontation with the world, insofar as the world will always prevail. More specifically, what prevails is the principle of worldhood as such, not any particular world, which may indeed be unrecognizably transformed by the axioms of the World, even though this transformation never attains completion. While the maximal affirmation of the axioms never assumes the positive form of the world, it is capable of the maximal possible subversion, decreation and transformation of the world. It is thus precisely by ‘demanding the impossible’, i.e. the dissolution of the very logic of worldhood in the total triumph of the universality of the axioms of the World, that it attains the greatest degree of real change in positive worlds.
Yet, the triple infinity of world politics is as awesome as it is disappointing for its subject. This is because the subject, a worldly being that dis-identifies with its place in the world and affirms the axioms of the World by confronting the wrongs of its world, is always a finite being or a group of finite beings. While the subjective process of fidelity to the event of the World is indeed infinite, the subjectivized body , whether individual or collective, is always its finite fragment. This means that it is from the outset ‘inadequate’ to the task of infinite affirmation, since it will never be able to completely politicize and transform even one world, let alone all of them. The power of political affirmation is indeed immense, yet no finite subject may ever effectively use that power to completely change the world(s) it acts in. However faithful it is in its affirmation, the political subject will never enjoy the world completely transformed in accordance with the axioms of the World but will, at best, find refuge in ‘temporary autonomous zones’, the sites of decreation, within it. What hurts the most, however, is that the realization of this permanent inadequacy of the subject comes not at the moment of defeat, which merely demands that we press on and try to succeed next time, but at the moment of victory, when we understand that no victory will ever be enough .
It is the negative evaluation of the world as wrong that makes it difficult to come to terms with the necessarily incomplete character of the subject’s practice. Thus, there arises the temptation of an ontological shortcut : of attaining maximal freedom, equality and community by simply cleaning the slate, doing away with the positivity of the world, wrong as it is. Since the world is a contingent mode of appearance that lacks an ontological correlate, it is, strictly speaking, worthless not merely in the ontic terms of the subject’s evaluation but also in ontological terms. And yet, the infinity of this worthless world makes it impervious to the militant actions of the finite subject, which will never suffice to complete the political process in this world. This generates a sense of resentment, which targets not the transcendental order to be transformed but the world itself, the world that forever exceeds the subject despite its ontic and ontological worthlessness. Thus, the subject no longer seeks to transform the world in its positivity but rather ventures to attain the complete actualization of the axioms of the World by simply destroying this contingent, anarchic and superficial world, so that the community of free and equal beings may arise in its ontological splendour once the frayed veil of appearance is torn away. Dissatisfied with finite acts of decreation that cannot embrace the infinity of a world, the subject opts for the destruction of the world that, unlike decreation, does not restore the contingency of the world’s existence but rather makes its non-existence necessary (cf. Weil, 1952: 78). While the production of the effects of the axioms of the World in an infinity of infinite worlds is an infinite task that no finite subject may complete, it is possible to do away with the world in a finite act of destruction. It is this temptation of ‘beating infinity’ that leads to the disastrous conversion of politics into a ceaseless drive for the violent purification of appearance in the name of being.
Struggle exposes us to the simple form of failure (the assault did not succeed) while victory exposes us to its most redoubtable form: we notice that we have won in vain, and that our victory paves the way for repetition and restoration. Hence the sacrificial temptation of nothingness. For a politics of emancipation, the enemy that is to be feared most is not repression at the hands of the established order. It is the interiority of nihilism and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness.
(Badiou, 2010: 32)
This disposition, which Badiou (2007: 48–57) termed the ‘passion of the real’ and deemed particularly characteristic of twentieth-century politics, art and philosophy, takes the axioms of the World as the indices of the real condition, concealed by the transcendental order of the world. Thus, one can only attain this reality by purifying the world of everything transient and epiphenomenal, which ultimately means purging it of everything positive that makes it a world to begin with. This logic of destructive purification is contrasted by Badiou with that of subtraction, which is also animated by the passion of the real, but understands the real not in terms of substantive presence but rather as a generic subset of the truth, produced in practices of fidelity to the event. In our terms, the subtractive subject produces the reality of freedom, equality and community as the positive effect of the axioms of the void, while the destructive subject obtains the real as the void by the destruction of everything positive.
[There] exists a passion for the real that is obsessed with identity: to grasp real identity, to unmask its copies, to discredit fakes. It is a passion for the authentic. This passion can only be fulfilled as destruction. Herein lies its strength – after all, many things deserve to be destroyed. But this is also its limit, because purification is a process doomed to incompletion, a figure of the bad infinite.
(Badiou, 2007: 56)
It is easy to see that the drive for the purification of the ‘real’ ends in the infinite process of destruction of reality itself, insofar as any worldly being whatsoever can be suspected of being mere semblance and appearance (ibid.: 52). Moreover, the subject of the purification is itself in no way exempted from this suspicion, as the Stalinist purges of 1936–8 and Hitler’s 1945 Demolition Order demonstrate in different ways. Thus, this disposition resigns us to the infinite replay of the destruction of the world in the vain hope that whatever remains after the work of destruction is done would correspond to the real of being-in-the-World, i.e. a community of free and equal beings, a veritable ‘world community’. While the practice of world politics also seeks to attain such a community and does in fact attain it as a finite fragment of an infinite process, active nihilism seeks to attain it as the complete actualization of the axioms of world politics.
As Roberto Esposito (2010: 86–97) has argued in his ontological reinterpretation of community, community is only ever given in its withdrawal and cannot be brought to presence in any historical–empirical actualization. Yet, this withdrawal is not equivalent to the Kantian logic of the regulative idea, thinkable by a transcendental subjectivity but not cognizable in actual experience. The point is not that world politics strives at the realization of the ideal of a global community of free and equal beings, which nonetheless remains unattainable in practice due to the various imperfections of the human condition. What is at stake is not the opposition of the perfection and plenitude of the ideal and the imperfection and lack in the real. The World as the source of political axioms is not merely lacking, but lacks lack itself, it is nothing . There is no fullness there that could or could not be transferred to the empirical world. Thus, the process of world politics cannot be conceived in terms of a painstaking process of the empirical approximation of the transcendent ideal but as the process of drawing together the consequences of the affirmation within the positively ordered worlds of the void that conditions their emergence. In this logic, a fully actualized and complete community of free and equal beings is unthinkable even as an idea and, moreover, any attempt to think it undermines the very condition of universality, under which it is to be thought.
Let us suppose that the telos of world politics were fully attained and a community of free and equal beings actually existed as a positive entity. This community would thus by definition form a world. According to our definition of world politics, this world must be characterized by the maximal affirmation of all three axioms. Since the maximal degree of affirmation of the axioms is in excess of any transcendental order, which is constituted by the negation of at least one axiom, the ‘world-political world’ cannot be a world like any other. Indeed, insofar as this world is characterized by the complete actualization of the ontological axioms, it must function as the positive correlate of the World itself. Such an ontic correlate of the World could never be a particular world, a ‘something’, but would have to be either ‘everything’, the world of all worlds, which is logically impossible, or ‘nothing’, the ontic void produced as a correlate of the ontological void of the World. Thus, the very ambition to attain an ontologically founded ‘universal world’, in which the infinite task of world politics is completed, ultimately leads to the production of the void within the world through the destruction of the world itself and its beings.
Jean-Luc Nancy has addressed this disastrous outcome in terms of the ‘substantialization of the void’, whereby its nothingness becomes a thing:
[T]his nihil in annihilation, this nothing, is a substantial nothing: it is less a common thing (res publica communis ) than the ‘common as thing, as thingified’ […] If it is this that we want, we have to know what such wanting means: not that ‘God is dead’ but that death is becoming our God.
(Nancy, 2010: 31)
When the void stops being the source of universal axioms and becomes the object of affirmation in its own right, every positive world is from the outset sacrificed to the void as the God of Death, tried, convicted and executed in the name of nothing but its own being, its own being which is nothing. What began as an attempt to attain the infinite task of politics directly and immediately, forcing the community of free and equal beings as an actual self-present entity, ends up in the destruction of the very beings, whose community, equality and freedom were initially to be affirmed.
Thus, the idea of the complete actualization of the axioms in the form of a world-political community necessarily leads us to the logically inconsistent concept of the ‘universal world’ modelled on the World itself, which in turn transforms politics into the nihilistic drive for purification through the destruction of worlds and the production of the void in their place. The active-nihilist disposition arises from within the logic of world politics as a result of the illusion of the appropriability by the finite subject of its infinite power. It is therefore a form of evil that is strictly opposed to the negation of politics through the betrayal of its axioms or their perversion into homonymous intra-worldly simulacra. In an oft-cited remark from 1992, Badiou unequivocally opts for the former form of evil against the latter: ‘[B]etter a disaster than lack of being’ (mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre ) (Badiou, 2008a: 159. Cf. Badiou, 2010: 31–40). ‘However terrorist, sacralized and ecstatic’ the disaster of politics is, it is still preferable ‘to a politics that is evacuated of all thought, and whose excessive management calls only for the petty exacerbation of interests’ (ibid.).
And yet, it is not really clear why the disaster is better, other than in the sense of the dubious honor of ‘at least having tried’. After all, the effect of the active-nihilist purification of the world is the same destruction of the political process in the world as in the case of the passive-nihilist negation of the existence of the World in the world, but at the additional cost of the destruction of the world itself in the name of the World, i.e. in the name of nothing. Faced with the choice between disaster and lack of being, it would be more correct to claim, in the words of Joseph Stalin, himself no stranger to betrayals and the production of disasters, that ‘both are worse’ and that the task of world politics is precisely to navigate between the Scylla of passive or imperfect nihilism and the Charybdis of active nihilism. On the one hand, the critique of the nihilistic destruction of worlds in the name of the World must not be equated with the contemporary ‘anti-totalitarian’ pathos of moderation, whereby every radical political project is suspect as long as it does not abdicate from the task of the actualization of its vision and explicitly preach the ultimate unattainability of its goal. On the other hand, the abandonment of passive nihilism need not entail a quasi-Nietzschean ‘yes, yes’ to disaster, but rather an attempt to maintain the political process against its destruction by either of these two forms of evil.
Navigating between passive and active nihilism is certainly easier said than done. While avoiding the passive-nihilist forms of evil requires the courage of fidelity to the axioms of the World, steering clear of active nihilism appears to call for the immanent limitation of this fidelity. Yet, what could possibly limit the unfolding of the infinite process of the affirmation of liberty, equality and community and prevent the catastrophic expiry of world politics? In this section we shall engage with Badiou’s attempt at designing such a limitation in his theory of the unnameable.
In his Ethics (2001a: 58–88) Badiou outlined the middle course between active and passive nihilism that consists in the self-limitation of the truth procedure (see also Badiou, 2008a: 129–144, 118). Since Badiou’s truth as a generic subset of the situation is infinite, it can never be completed. However, this does not resign us to the ineffability of truth as a forever inaccessible ideal. Following P.J. Cohen’s work on the continuum hypothesis in set theory, Badiou affirms the possibility of the authorization by the truth of positive veridical statements in a procedure termed ‘forcing’. To force a statement of truth is to establish its veridical status in the situation in the hypothetical condition of the complete unfolding of the truth procedure. It is by virtue of forcing that the infinity of truth can produce positive effects in the ‘encyclopedia’ of the situation, evaluating its elements in terms of their connection with the truth. In our terms, forcing makes it possible to produce finite positive effects of the axioms of the World in a given world despite the impossibility of the completion of the world-political process and the full actualization of the community of freedom and equality. However, the power of forcing is not total, since the language of truth cannot name every single element of the situation. For Badiou, there is always one element in the situation that cannot be forced without destroying the truth procedure as such, resulting in the active nihilist destruction of worlds in the name of the World (Badiou, 2001a: 86; 2008a: 126–127). 4
What is the unnameable? It is important to emphasize that this element of the situation is never unnameable ‘in itself’ (Badiou, 2008a: 141) but rather inaccessible specifically to the language of truth, since there is no formula in that language that can name this unique element. As Badiou emphasizes, we can certainly talk about the unnameable and discuss various opinions on it (Badiou, 2001a: 86); what we cannot do is incorporate it into the generic subset of the truth. Badiou then proceeds to identify the following figures of the unnameable for his four truth procedures: non-contradiction for science, sexual pleasure for love, community for politics. While Badiou does not mention the unnameable of art in Ethics , in his work on Mallarme he identifies a number of possible candidates: the subject of art, death and, ultimately and most plausibly, the very material of art, e.g. language in poetry (Badiou, 2008a: 49–67).
Why does forcing the unnameable constitute evil? For Badiou, such a naming
[is] tantamount to the denial of singularity as such; it is the moment in which, in the name of the infinite genericity of a truth, the resistance of what there is that is absolutely singular in a singularity appears as an obstacle to the deployment of a truth seeking to ensure its dominion over the situation. Evil is not the non-respect of the name of the Other; it is much more the will to name at any price.
(ibid.: 127)
This desire to name ‘unleashes a capacity of destruction that is latent in every truth’ (ibid.). The problem with forcing the unnameable is that in its desire to achieve the total power of the truth it actualizes this latent potential for destruction, since whatever escapes its language is consigned to nothingness.
[The] danger is that a truth, errant and incomplete as it may be, takes itself, in the words of the poet, as an ‘age of authority’. It thus desires for everything to be triumphantly named, in the Summer of revelation. But the core of what is does not and must not have a name.
(ibid.: 128)
The forcing of the unnameable yields to the temptation of completing the infinite unfolding of political affirmation within the world, of making the infinite finite by finalizing it, i.e. leaving no element of the world untouched by the power of affirmation.
If truth can be pronounced with respect to every element, then the power of a truth would manifest itself not by the mere distortion of pragmatic and communicative meanings, but by the absolute authority of truthful nomination. A truth would then force the pure and simple replacement of the language of the situation by a subject-language. That is to say: the Immortal would come into being as the wholesale negation of the human animal that bears him.
(Badiou, 2001a: 83–84)
This description resonates with our discussion of the phantasmatic figure of the community of free and equal beings that is expected to ascend from being to appearance as a result of the reduction of the world to the void of the World. The active-nihilist subject wants to complete, in the here and now, the infinite process of the production of the effects of the World (or finite fragments of the truth in Badiou’s terms) within positive worlds, populated by human (and other) animals, and thus wants the World itself to appear in the world’s stead. But the World itself is nothing and its appearance can only come at the cost of the destruction of those very beings, whose freedom, equality and community are affirmed in world politics. World politics is not a politics in the name of the World, which needs neither worlds nor politics, but rather in the name of the beings existing in positive worlds. Similarly, for Badiou the ‘immortal’ effects of the truth procedure only exist on the basis of the mortal beings that sustain their production by incorporating themselves in the body of truth:
Every truth presumes, in the composition of the subjects it induces, the preservation of some-one, the always two-sided activity of the human animal caught up in truth. Every attempt to impose the total power of a truth ruins that truth’s very foundation. The Immortal exists only in and by the mortal animal.
(ibid.: 84)
The theory of the unnameable is thus an indispensable component of Badiou’s ‘ethics of truth’, which prescribes moderation with regard to the exercise of the power of the truth and establishes the limit to its unfolding in the figure of the ‘mortal animal’, which remains the material substrate of the ‘immortal’ truth and can never be negated or annihilated without the attendant destruction of the truth itself. Somewhat paradoxically for a thinker so dismissive of the merely ‘animal’ existence ‘beneath good and evil’, what is properly unnameable and even unthinkable in Badiou’s ethics is the death of the mortal in the name of the immortal.
Why, then, did Badiou eventually disown this theory in Logics of Worlds and subsequent publications, opting instead for the affirmation of the limitless character of truth procedures, including politics?
[I] have publicly renounced the theory of the unnamable, as presented in Ethics . I may very well renounce the use of the term ‘ethics’, since it has so many countermeanings. I believe that what exist are the rules of incorporation to a subjectivizable body, and that they depend entirely on the points to be dealt with. Forcing the right decision regarding a point is the only form of duty we can recognize. The imperative of truths is greater than any other. And I’m inclined to believe that we cannot oppose any formal limits to it .
(Badiou, 2009a: 794)
As Zizek argues in the Parallax View (2006: 64–65, 325), the theory of the unnameable has always seemed uncharacteristically ‘moderate’ in comparison with Badiou’s otherwise militant if not extremist orientation. ‘The ethics of truth is the ethics of respect for the unnameable Real that can’t be forced’ (ibid.: 324). Zizek claims that, despite Badiou’s best efforts, it is difficult to ‘[avoid] the Kantian reading of this limitation. Significantly, Badiou, the great critic of the notion of totalitarianism, resorts here to this notion in a way very similar to Kantian liberal critics of the “Hegelian totalitarianism”’ (ibid.). Considering that Kant is certainly Badiou’s least favorite philosopher, 5 this criticism appears seriously damaging, yet things get even worse, as Zizek also finds a strong similarity between Badiou’s notion and the author, whose work is the target of a passionate polemic in Ethics , Emmanuel Levinas:
[Does] not Badiou, the anti-Levinas, come dangerously close precisely to the Levinasian topic of the respect for otherness that is, against all appearances, totally inoperative at the political level? Badiou himself, in order to avoid the catastrophe of forcing, has to evoke the Unnameable as that which forever prevents the full actualization of the evental truth: the (paradigmatically ‘postmodern’) withdrawal from full forcing, the insistence that the Truth (or Democracy or Justice or …) should remain ‘to come’, a possibility higher than any actualization, a spectral, not ontological entity.
(ibid.: 325)
Indeed, while Badiou criticizes Levinas and the later Derrida for their ethical discourse of piety, does not he himself exercise piety before the unnameable? After all, we do not know what or where the unnameable is in the concrete world, otherwise we could safely steer clear of it. 6 Thus, we have to exercise reserve and moderation all the way in the political process, from its very beginning. Indeed, the very beginning of the process, the subjective intervention that declares the event would be suspended by the wariness about forcing the unnameable: what is the guarantee that the very name of the event, the decision on which initiates the truth procedure, is not the unnameable of this situation? Thus, Bruno Bosteels is entirely correct in claiming that ‘the mandatory limit of the unnameable, far from restraining the ongoing process of truth from within, actually blocks such a process in advance and thus keeps the truth from ever taking hold to begin with’ (Bosteels, 2011b: 108, see also ibid.: 193–196).
Thus, the key concept of Badiou’s ethics ends up subsumed under the ‘democratic materialist’ doxa and the philosophies of Kant, Levinas and Derrida that Badiou sought to overcome. The problem with the doctrine of the unnameable is that it serves to undermine precisely that which it was meant to protect, the infinite procedure of evaluating and gathering together the positive consequences of the event within the situation. ‘[The] unnameable, then, would be the guarantee of the impotence of truth as well as the safeguard against its transformation into disaster, terror or simulation’ (ibid.: 195). For this reason, in Logics of Worlds and other texts and interviews of the 2000s Badiou drops the concept of the unnameable altogether, reconstructing his ethics of truths in terms of the process of the subjectivation through the incorporation of the finite beings of the world into the infinite body of truth.
[By] recognizing the quasi-ontological category of the unnameable I made concessions to the pervasive moralism of the 1980s and the 1990s. I no longer feel obliged to make such concessions. But neither do I wish to give up on the general idea of an ethic of truths.
(Badiou, 2011a: 350)
The incorporation into the body of truth is now the only ‘form of duty’ recognized by Badiou’s ethics and no ‘formal limit’ may be assigned to it (Badiou, 2009a: 794). In fact, this is not a new position but in many ways a return to the earlier, Maoist Badiou of the Theory of the Subject . In this book, having traced in detail the figures of the unnameable in Mallarme (subject, death and language), Badiou ultimately rejects this very notion with explicit reference to Mao: ‘Is it true? I mean that there is some unconceptualizable? Mao did not think so. He said: “We will come to know everything we did not know before!”’ (Badiou, 2009c: 106). This phrase is cited once again in the Preface to Logics of Worlds as an illustration of the key task of Badiou’s materialist dialectic: ‘[T]o have done, if possible, with the watered-down Kant of limits, rights and unknowables’ (Badiou, 2009b: 9, see also Bosteels, 2009: xxxv, Bosteels 2011b: 209–211).
In contrast to the earlier imperative of moderation and restraint with regard to the power of truth, in Logics of Worlds Badiou proposes a much more militant ethical principle: ‘A truth affirms the infinite right of its consequences, with no regard for what opposes them’ (Badiou, 2009b: 7). While in Ethics Badiou insisted on the finitude of the mortal being as simultaneously the support for and limit to the infinity of the truth procedure, he now calls for the abandonment of the principles of finitude and ‘modesty’ regarding the truth procedure:
One is never modest enough when it comes either to exposing oneself to the transcendence of the destiny of Being, or to gaining awareness that our language games give us no access to the mystical beyond where the meaning of life is decided.
(ibid.: 7) 7
Instead of this modest renunciation of access to truth, Badiou asserts that ‘every world is capable of producing its own truth within itself’ (ibid.: 9). In his passionate polemic against democratic materialism in the conclusion to Logics , entitled ‘What is it to Live?’, Badiou similarly throws all caution about the power of truth to the winds, affirming life ‘in truth’ against reactive conservation and obscure mortification:
[Life] is a subjective category. A body is the materiality that life requires, but the becoming of the present depends on the disposition of this body in a subjective formalism. To live is thus an incorporation into the present under the faithful form of a subject. If the incorporation is dominated by the reactive form, one will not speak of life but of mere conservation . It is a question of protecting oneself from the consequences of a birth, of not relaunching existence beyond itself. If incorporation is dominated by the obscure formalism, one will instead speak of mortification .
(ibid.: 509, emphasis added)
Thus, any life worthy of the name is a life in truth and fidelity to the event, while the negation of the event reduces life to the mere conservation of the organism and its occultation mortifies the organism itself in the manner of an autoimmune disease. It is notable that the two non-faithful subjective formalisms in Logics of Worlds correspond exactly to two of the forms of evil earlier presented in Ethics . The reactive subject that negates the event corresponds to the figure of betrayal due to a lack of courage, while the obscure subject of violent occultation corresponds to the figure of terror arising out of the simulacrum of the event, the production of the fictitious ‘full body’ that destroys the present that is the trace of the event (see ibid.: 54–62). Yet, the third form of evil, i.e. the disaster arising from the forcing of the unnameable, is now conspicuous by its absence. Instead, the truth procedure, conceived in terms of the ‘physics’ of the body and the ‘topology’ of points as sites for the subjective decision, appears to be strictly limitless.
To the extent that there remain any limits to its unfolding, these are the objective characteristics of the world in question. Thus, in the final pages of Logics of Worlds , Badiou briefly introduces a number of conditions for the truth procedure to unfold: there must exist points in the transcendental of the world that could be treated by the body (the world is not atonic ), the event must have taken place in the world (the world is not stable ), there must exist elements of the evental site that are incorporated into the body besides the trace of the event itself (the world is not inconsequential ), for any given point there must exist an efficacious part of the body that would treat it (the world is not inactive ) and, finally, this efficacious part must be synthesized by an ‘organ’ of the body (the world is not inorganic ) (ibid.: 491).
The course of the truth procedure is thus only limited by the objective characteristics of the world, its transcendental order and the beings in it that may compose the body that sustains the subjective formalism. Thus, we may ultimately imagine the entire world as in a sense ‘unnameable’ for the subject of the truth procedure, if this world happens to be atonic, i.e. lacking any points that could be treated in a subjective decision, a world of ‘unreserved consumption and easy-listening euthanasia’ (ibid.: 422), in which there are indeed only bodies and languages and nothing can happen to them except death. Yet, this unnamebility is not the internal limit of the truth but a contingent characteristic of one particular world. There may be worlds, in which the process of affirmation yields nothing at all, but this is only a result of an objective obstacle not an immanent limit.
Moreover, even with regard to these objective obstacles, Badiou is quick to point out that they might be nothing other than ideological simulacra that only conceal the impossibility of transformation (ibid.: 422). Indeed, the claim that ‘there is no alternative’, that the given transcendental is the ‘only game in town’ is a time-honoured mechanism of hegemonic depoliticization (see Badiou, 2008b: 7–20), which seeks to foreclose the very possibility of political affirmation by insisting on the infinite complexity of the world, in relation to which political axioms are nothing but brutal simplifications (Badiou, 2009b: 420). In contrast, Badiou’s truth procedure rejects this valorization of complexity and seeks to find, ‘in the nooks and crannies of the world’ (ibid.: 422), some points that would permit the reduction of the complex stratification of the transcendental to a binary logic of decision. The objective limits to the unfolding of the truth procedure are only there to be confronted, tested and possibly transgressed. Where the unnameable was, its true name shall be.
This renunciation of the unnameable aligns Badiou’s later work with Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical project that targets the figure of the unspeakable as the negative foundation of Western metaphysics (Agamben, 2007a: 4). In Language and Death (1991), Agamben demonstrates that the pure experience of language as intention to signify remains unspeakable in concrete acts of speech, functioning as a negative presupposition that he terms Voice, capitalizing it to distinguish it from the animal voice as non-signifying sound (phone ) and signifying discourse (logos ). The human experience of having language is thus characterized by negativity and a consequent scission between being and entity, nature and culture, essence and existence. In a strict parallel to Agamben’s more famous concept of bare life, the Voice as pure intention to signify is included in language only in the manner of its exclusion or ‘ban’: ‘[Everything] that is presupposed for there to be language is nothing other than a presupposition of language that is maintained as such in relation to language precisely insofar as it is excluded from language’ (Agamben, 1998: 50).
For Agamben, previous critiques of metaphysics have failed to overcome this logic of negative foundation. Most recently, Derrida’s deconstruction dismantled all positive foundations, presupposed by the metaphysics of presence, only to affirm at the end negativity itself as the unsurpassable foundation.
[Derrida] believed he had opened a way to surpassing metaphysics, while in truth he merely brought the fundamental problem of metaphysics to light. Metaphysics is always already grammatology and thus is fundamentology in the sense that the gramma functions as the negative ontological foundation.
(Agamben, 1991: 39; see also Thurschwell, 2005; Kishik, 2012: 75–77; De la Durantaye, 2009: 184–191; Mills, 2008: 44–46)
Agamben’s philosophy attempts to overcome this logic of negative foundation in an affirmative experience of language: ‘[Only] if language no longer refers to any Voice is it possible for man to experience a language that is not marked by negativity and death’ (Agamben, 1991: 95). The ineffable foundation of language is to be brought to speech as such in what Agamben terms experimentum linguae , the experience of the existence of language as such, the exposition of the sheer fact of speaking [factum loquend i] that founds every particular language while itself remaining foreclosed from speech:
[The] age in which we are living is the age, in which, for the first time, it becomes possible for human beings to experience their own linguistic essence – to experience, that is, not some language content or some true proposition, but the fact itself of speaking. The experience in question here does not have any objective content and cannot be formulated as a proposition referring to a state of things or to a historical situation. It does not concern a state , but an event of language; it does not pertain to this or that grammar but to the factum loquendi as such.
(Agamben, 2000: 116)
This logic of bringing the facticity of language to speech as such has a direct correlate in Agamben’s messianic politics of ‘happy life’. Just as in Language and Death Agamben attempts to ‘speak the unspeakable’ by bringing the existence of language itself to language, so in Homo Sacer he articulates the possibility of a life that ‘brings bare life itself to life’ in a ‘form-of-life’ that is nothing but its own existence. The opposition between zoe and bios , the state of nature and the state of the political is thus dismantled in exactly the same manner as the distinction between phone and logos by the reappropriation of the negative foundation that articulates the members of the opposition (Voice, bare life). This reappropriation recasts this negative foundation in an affirmative manner as a condition for integrating the members of the opposition in a new figure (experimentum linguae , form-of-life), in which the positive or essential term is taken up in the existential aspect formerly confined to the negated term: logos as phone, bios as zoe . We may thus identify Agamben’s ‘happy life’ as a precise political correlate of the experimentum linguae , i.e. as the experience of living one’s existence . What was included in language and politics solely in the mode of its exclusion as a negative foundation becomes a positive feature of new linguistic and political experiences that do not construct new languages and political orders but rather expose existing ones to the universality of factical speech and existence devoid of any positive predicates that conditions their very possibility.
Both of these examples resonate with our understanding of world politics. The universal axioms of being-in-the-World describe the being of beings, subtracted from every positive intra-worldly determinations and are therefore analogous to factum loquendi and bare life. While the transcendental order of any particular world is constituted by the negation of at least one of these axioms, thus endowing the world with a negative foundation, world politics maximally affirms all three axioms, bringing their universality into the particular world through the production of their positive effects in the form of the maximal existence of what the transcendental of the world relegated into inexistence. Similarly to Agamben’s figures of experimentum linguae and form-of-life, our notion of world politics emphasizes bringing into positive and particular worlds the universality of freedom, equality and community that their transcendental order negated and rendered ineffable. The unspeakable, the unnameable or the unthinkable of any positive world is merely the effect of its transcendental order and rather than function as the limit to the political process serves as its prime target.
It is this insistence on the accessibility of life, language or politics devoid of a negative foundation that aligns Agamben with Badiou despite numerous differences (see Agamben, 1998: 24–25; 2005b: 52; Badiou, 2009b: 558–59) and separates him from other thinkers in the contemporary ‘messianic turn’, particularly Derrida. In the Derridean messianic logic of the ‘patient perhaps’ (Derrida, 2005b: 91), criticized by Agamben as ‘a thwarted messianism, a suspension of the messianic’ (Agamben, 2005b: 103), the advent of parousia is forever deferred, leaving us with nothing but the traces of the ineffable messianic event. Similarly to Gershom Sholem’s conception of the messianic, which Agamben describes as a ‘life lived in deferral and delay, in which nothing can be brought to fulfillment and nothing accomplished once and for all’ (Agamben, 1999a: 166), Derrida’s logic exemplifies the condition of dwelling within extreme potentiality that has been barred from actualization. Derrida’s thought may thus be grasped as the multifarious expression of the radical inaccessibility of the eschaton . In this type of messianism, in which ‘every gesture has become unrealizable’ (Agamben, 1999a: 169), the social order is revealed in its ‘zero degree’ condition of being in force without significance, but its ultimately meaningless and purely formal existence is nonetheless deemed impossible to transcend (for a more detailed critique of Derridean ethics see also Moran, 2002; Sharpe, 2002).
It is easy to recognize in these claims the orientation that we have termed metapolitical, which reveals the contingency and inconsistency of every positive world and warns politics against the temptation to overcome these constitutive features of worldhood. Similarly, the assertion of the existence of something unnameable or unpresentable as the ‘vanishing cause’ of every world ‘always leads back to the transcendent presentation of a measure beyond measure, or of a ground without any bottom’ (Bosteels, 2011b: 195). Rather than sustain fidelity to the event of the World within the world in the form of political affirmation, metapolitics remains faithful to the World itself , ceaselessly marveling at its paradoxical function as an abyssal ground or inessential essence, yet foreclosing the possibility of a positive transformation of worlds on the basis of the axioms derived from the disclosure of the World. The only intra-worldly consequence of such a form of fidelity would then consist in ‘assuming the finitude of the human being, his or her tragic or comical nothingness’ (ibid.): faced with the transcendence of the unnameable Real that renders every world contingent and inconsistent, the subject, if this term is at all appropriate here, finds itself utterly powerless, caught between the ontic contingency of its positive world and the ontological necessity of this very contingency. This powerlessness may then be affirmed either tragically as the inescapable feature of the human condition that one heroically comes to terms with or comically as the long overdue liberation from the injunction to change one’s world. Either way, metapolitical messianism maintains the contingent and inconsistent world as its irreparable ethos and affirms suspension, deferral and delay as authentic modes of dwelling in this world.
In contrast, just as Agamben’s experimentum linguae ventures to move beyond Derrida’s negative metaphysics to advance a purely affirmative experience of language devoid of the ineffable negativity, his vision of messianism, addressed in Chapter 1 , abandons the very idea of constitutive deferral in emphasizing the possibilities of happy life in the here and now (see Prozorov, 2009c, 2010, 2011). There is neither the unnameable nor the unpracticeable for Agamben and (later) Badiou, which is precisely what renders their thought not merely political but specifically world-political , i.e. devoid of limitations on universal affirmation. As long as one insists on the unnameable, the World remains separated from the world, in which politics is practised, by at least one figure (or name), which supposedly is in the World but cannot be politically produced in any of the worlds, in the manner of the Lacanian Real that resists all symbolization. The effect of this separation is the reconfiguration of the difference between the World and worlds along the lines of the Kantian distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal. Yet, the World is not a noumenal reality that remains inaccessible to worldly beings, but is rather the void as the condition of possibility of worlds that is inside them as a ‘universal part’ and which is brought to existence in them through the production of intra-worldly effects of its axioms. There is no unnameable in the World , since the world is void – there is therefore nothing that could not be named in the course of the political procedure, including the name of the World itself. On the other hand, what is unnameable in the positive world is so only contingently, since the positivity of the world is itself contingent, and could not possibly limit the political process that seeks to overturn the order of this world as such. Since the unnameable by definition cannot have its locus in the World and its intra-worldly location is entirely contingent, politics cannot be limited by any figure of the unnameable. On the contrary, the liquidation of all things unnameable is the most urgent task of world politics, insofar as it seeks to attain the maximal existence of all beings of the world as free, equal and in common.
1 While we frequently use the two terms interchangeably, from a strict logical perspective the infinite and the unlimited are not identical. For instance, the set of possible values for x in the function 1/x is infinite but is most certainly limited, since this function is not satisfied for x = 0. Conversely, it is easy to imagine a finite set [a, b, c … z], in which a certain predicate would apply to all members without any limit but its extension would still be finite. See Heller-Roazen (2009: 233, Note 6).
2 The all too familiar dismissal of ‘utopian’ political theories as illegitimately treating human beings as angels might be more problematic than it appears. As Agamben’s magisterial reading of ‘angelology’ in his theological genealogy of the economy demonstrates (2011, Chapter 6), the secular analogue of the angel is not the political subject but rather the bureaucrat, responsible for the maintenance of the order of the world. Agamben traces the parallels in the historical constitution of the celestial and worldly bureaucracy, demonstrating the indistinction of angels and bureaucrats in the process of the entwinement of worldly and spiritual powers: ‘Long before the terminology of civil administration and government was developed and fixed, it was already firmly constituted as angelology’ (ibid.: 158). To the charge that our theory approaches (human) beings as angels, we may therefore only reply that we do no such thing: world politics is possible precisely because its subjects are definitely not angels: unlike the latter, they have no investment in the maintenance of their world as stable and governable.
3 Of course, it is possible to conceive of a political subject who is also a philosopher and thus has explicit grasp of the axioms of the World and hence of the accord between the axioms and its own practice. While there are numerous historical examples of philosopher-politicians, from Plato to Badiou, the two conceptual personae remain distinct and their modes of operation intransitive. For this reason, the philosopher’s knowledge of the axioms may well be unusable to the political subject even when the two are united in the same person. We shall address the relation between politics and philosophy in more detail in Chapter 5 .
4 The number of unnameable elements remains ambiguous in Badiou’s work. On the one hand, he insists that for a single truth ‘there cannot be two or more unnameables’ (Badiou, 2008a: 142), while on the other he argues that the unnameable is ‘at least one real element’ of the situation (Badiou, 2001a: 85). We shall subscribe to the former thesis, since, insofar as something is unnameable, it can hardly be differentiated into two or more distinct elements, since these would then have to be named precisely in order to remain distinct. The unnameable is thus whatever cannot be named within a situation and for this very reason its ‘quantity’ cannot be identified. Similarly to the concept of the inexistent, the unnameable functions as a non-decomposable object.
5 See Badiou, 2009b: 535 for Badiou’s discussion of his relationship to Kant: ‘[Kant] is the one author for whom I cannot feel any kinship. Everything in him exasperates me, above all his legalism, combined, as in today’s United States, with a religiosity that is all the more dismal in that it is both omnipresent and vague. The critical machinery he set up has enduringly poisoned philosophy. Kant is the inventor of the disastrous theme of our “finitude”’.
6 While Badiou provides examples of the unnameable for his four truth procedures, they are only meant as very general indications of the most problematic areas for the truth procedure. This is only obvious, since if it were possible to know what exactly the unnameable of the situation was, we would have already named it. By the same token, if it were possible to name everything except the known unnameable, it would be named precisely by means of this exception. Thus, the ethics of the unnameable is not about resisting the impulse to taste the forbidden fruit in front of us but rather about navigating the minefield, in which any point whatsoever could spell the destruction of the truth procedure and its carrier. The imperative of moderation is not advanced against a hypothetical depravity or wantonness, but as an injunction to take care of the truth process and oneself as its carrier.
7 For the detailed critique of the latter approach see Badiou’s critique of Wittgenstein (2011d), in which the notion of the unnameable is addressed from a different perspective, no longer as the limit to the truth procedure but as the compensation for the nonexistence of truths and the reduction of philosophical claims to logical tautologies or nonsensical statements. Wittgenstein’s famous figure of ‘that of which we cannot speak’ and which we must therefore ‘pass over in silence’, is precisely the unnameable element that points to the mystical sense of the world that philosophy can no longer access.