‘Many things deserve to be destroyed’
The removal of the figure of the unnameable throws us back to the problem of how to avoid the active-nihilist destruction of worlds in the name of the void of the World. If nothing in the world is unnameable, if there is no ontological limit beyond which politics cannot venture, what could possibly protect the political sequence from nihilistic self-destruction? Might it be possible to impose an ethical limit on the subject of world politics in the form on the prohibition of or at least a limitation on destruction and violence? The demand for such a limit appears particularly pertinent in the context of world politics, whose process of the existential absolutization of the inexistent must logically be accompanied by the descent into inexistence of some part of the existing world. What is this object that must be driven into inexistence and how is it different from the one whose existence world politics seeks to maximize? What is the difference between the ordinary transcendental organization of the world and the world-political process, if both operate by making something inexist? Does not the unavoidability of inexistence confirm the metapolitical scepticism about politics, whose drive for transformation so often entails that things stay the same or get even worse?
Let us begin addressing these questions by an excursus into Badiou’s treatment of the theme of destruction in his three major works. In such early works as Theory of the Subject Badiou insists on the necessary link between destruction and the very possibility of novelty and transformation: ‘We must reserve the name subject for that which cannot be inscribed on the splaced ground of repetition except destructively as the excess over that which keeps it in its place’ (Badiou, 2009c: 141 and more generally ibid.: 131–147). 1 In Being and Event , Badiou turns against this assumption of the intrinsic link between the novelty of the truth procedure and the destruction of the old order.
[E]mpirically, novelty is accompanied by destruction. But it must be clear that this accompaniment is not linked to intrinsic novelty. Destruction is the ancient effect of the new supplementation amidst the ancient. A destruction is not true, it is knowledgeable. Killing somebody is always a matter of the (ancient) state of things; it cannot be a prerequisite for novelty.
(Badiou, 2005a: 408)
Finally, in contrast to this understanding of destruction as secondary, derivative and inessential, in Logics of Worlds Badiou returns to his earlier insistence on the link between novelty and destruction and elaborates it in terms of the concept of the inexistent, which we have discussed in Chapter 1 as the object of world politics (Badiou, 2009b: 378–379). 2
As we have seen, the effect of world-political affirmation is the maximal existence of the inexistent element of the world: what was ‘nothing’ in the world must now become ‘everything’. Yet, since, according to Badiou, every object of the world possesses an inexistent element, the coming of the inexistent to maximal existence entails that another element of the world must cease to exist: ‘[T]here where existence now stands, the inexistent must return’ (ibid.: 378). Hence, if it is not to be inconsequential, any event is necessarily accompanied by destruction. ‘If what was nothing comes, in the guise of an evental consequence, to be worth everything, then an established given of appearing is destroyed. What seemed to support the cohesion of the world is abruptly turned to nothing’ (ibid.: 380). While the inexistent object marks the contingency of the world by demonstrating the possibility for what is not to appear in it, the ascent of the inexistent to maximal existence provides another demonstration of this contingency by rendering inexistent the very order that authorized the inexistence of some beings in the first place: nothing in the world, including its very order, is necessary, hence everything can be destroyed.
Since Badiou’s introduction of the inexistent object in Logics follows his abandonment of the idea of the unnameable, 3 it would be instructive to compare the two notions. Just as there was only one unnameable element in the situation for a given truth, so there is only one inexistent element proper to an object of the world (ibid.: 321–323). Just as the unnameable marks a point of the real which is in the situation but cannot be grasped by the subject-language of the truth procedure, the inexistent is suspended between ‘(ontological) being and a certain form of (phenomenological) non-being’ (ibid.: 324). Yet, contrary to the imperative of the guarding of the unnameable in Ethics , the inexistent is to be maximally forced into existence and it is precisely this forcing that becomes the defining characteristic of the event, separating it from ‘weaker’ forms of change (modification, fact, weak singularity) (ibid.: 374–379). ‘It is through the existence of the inexistent that the subversion of appearing by being, which underlies it, unfolds within appearing itself’ (ibid.: 378). Thus, what was earlier conceived as a mark of evil (the will to name at any price), becomes a necessary part of the political process, since insofar as the inexistent is not brought to maximal existence, the event vanishes without a trace and the world persists under the grip of its transcendental.
This radical revaluation of forcing is arguably due to the shift from the meta-ontological plane of Being and Event to the phenomenological plane of Logics of Worlds . The theorization of the unnameable in Conditions and Ethics , both written in the interval between the two great works, still unfolded in the austere realm of being-qua-being, ruptured by the event, in which the truth process unfolds and produces effects in being itself . In this logic, destruction, which is inherent in the forcing of the unnameable, is always at the risk of destroying the being of beings as such. Hence, to avoid the catastrophic conversion of the truth process into the annihilation of what is, Badiou had to delimit destruction and impose a strict requirement on the truth procedure that ‘the being of each term in the situation is safe’ (2005a: 408). Simply put, this requirement means that the truth procedure can only bring to appearance new beings without destroying old ones:
Since the situation-to-come is obtained via supplementation, all the multiples of the fundamental situation are also presented in the new situation. They cannot disappear on the basis on the new situation being new . […] If indiscernibility and power of death are confused, then there has been a failure to realize the process of truth.
(ibid.: 407–408, emphasis in original)
Thus, the truth procedure, which takes the form of the ‘generic extension’ that supplements the original situation with the indiscernible subset of truth (ibid.: 372–389), is proscribed from destroying any elements of the original situation. However, since Badiou admits the empirical fact of novelty being accompanied by destruction (ibid.: 407), he must account for the existence of destruction in the manner that would not make it an effect of the truth procedure. Yet, what does it mean to say that destruction is the ‘ancient effect of the new amidst the ancient’ (ibid.)? At this stage of the argument Badiou introduces a distinction between destruction proper and disqualification that will become even more crucial in the phenomenological context of Logics of Worlds . While the former annihilates an element in its being in the sense of its pure belonging to the situation, the latter pertains to the state of the situation, which establishes quantitative evaluations and hierarchies within it. Now, it is this regime that it ‘vulnerable to modification’ (ibid.: 408), insofar as the generic subset of truth, which lacks any particular identitarian predicates, is by definition ‘ordained to equality’ (ibid.: 409) and disrupts any artificial hierarchical distinctions that have no correlate in the pure being of the elements of the situation.
In order to safeguard the purely affirmative nature of the truth procedure Badiou repeatedly stresses that this disruption does not really destroy anything that was, as it were, legitimately there in the situation to begin with: ‘What becomes apparent is that in truth these placements and differentiations did not have a legitimate grounding in the being of the situation’ (ibid.: 408). Thus, while the subject of the truth process is prohibited to destroy, it is nonetheless endowed with the authority to disqualify, not the elements of the situation themselves but rather the order of subsets or parts, into which they are grouped in the state of the situation. Moreover, the subject is authorized to do this precisely on the basis of the ontological status of these very elements that do not provide the order of parts with a ‘legitimate grounding’ – similarly to the ontologically contingent transcendental of a world in Logics , the state of the situation in Being and Event remains disjoined from pure belonging. At this point, Badiou introduces the idea of the inexistent object that will play a different and much more important role in later works:
[If] a presentation’s qualification in the new situation is linked to an inexistence, then this presentation was already qualified thus in the ancient situation. A truth does not suppress anything. The subject can bring to bear a disqualification but never a de-singularization. What is singular in truth was such in the situation.
(ibid.: 409, emphasis in original)
While this line of reasoning anticipates the later argument in Logics of Worlds , it is also marked by a number of problems that, in our reading, could not be adequately resolved in the meta-ontological framework of Being and Event . First, insofar as we posit as the only admissible type of negation the disqualification of the hierarchies of the state of the situation, the course of the political process appears to be benignly and naively inclusive, simply incorporating new, indiscernible elements into the situation without negating any of its original elements but only restructuring the order of its parts as a logical consequence of this inclusion. Second, even this restructuring, to the extent that it leads to the disqualification of some aspects of the state of the situation, is deemed to be nothing but the retroactive revelation of its own originary illegitimacy. Moreover, Badiou is ambivalent about the ground of this illegitimacy: on the one hand, these ‘placements and differentiations’ are illegitimate ‘in truth’, i.e. from the perspective of the generic extension of the situation (ibid.: 408), yet on the other hand, they lack a ground in the being of the original situation, prior to its generic extension.
Thus, in Being and Event Badiou ventures both to proscribe destruction in the truth procedure and, to the extent that it remains unavoidable, to render it the ‘ancient’ effect of the original situation and not of the truth procedure itself. Yet, it is doubtful whether these limitations are sufficient: after all, history teaches us that it is always possible to declare that the destruction accompanying any political process is the ‘fault’ of the old regime, if only because it ensues from the latter’s resistance to change. It is also always possible to invoke the argument on the lack of the legitimate grounding of any order in the ontological status of the elements of the situation, because the state of the situation does not have this grounding at all, being constitutively in excess of those elements (ibid.: 81–89, 106–109). Thus, according to this line of reasoning, the entire state of the situation may always be disqualified as lacking legitimate grounding. The only limit that is actually effective in this scheme is the imperative of keeping the ‘being of each term safe’.
Transcendental disqualification
It is precisely this imperative that Badiou reconstructs and elaborates in the phenomenological framework of the Logics of Worlds , in which he abandons the very concept of the state of the situation, opting instead for the distinction between the ontological aspect of the situation (its sheer multiple-being) and its logical order of appearance, investigated by the objective phenomenology of worlds. While there are evident similarities between the concepts of the transcendental of the world and the state of the situation, since both refer to ordering structures, the two should nonetheless be held rigorously distinct. The state of the situation remains an ontological concept, pertaining to being-qua-being as multiplicity, not its positive appearance. This is why the imperative of keeping the being of elements safe despite their disqualification on the level of the state of the situation is so problematic – the situation and its state have the same ontological status (ibid.: 82), so it is not clear how the disqualification of the represented part could leave the element ‘safe in its being’, unless the element that is to be disqualified did not have any being in the original situation but was rather an ‘excrescence’, constituted by the very operation of representation (ibid.: 99–100). The phenomenology of worlds solves this problem because it makes it possible to conceive of the disjunction between being and appearance that takes the form of either the inexistent object of the world (which is ontologically there but does not appear) or a simulacrum (the phenomenon that appears in the world but lacks being). 4 Indeed, the very idea of inexistence in Being and Event was barely intelligible since Badiou had not yet developed a rigorous concept of existence as the self-identity of one’s appearance in the world: in purely ontological terms the inexistent would have to be read in terms of simple non-being, in which case the problem of destruction is brought back in. Only in the phenomenal domain of the world is it possible to simultaneously inexist and keep one’s being ‘safe’. Thus, the phenomenology of worlds reorients the earlier discussion of the prohibition on forcing the unnameable towards the consideration of the phenomenal ‘destruction’ that is the necessary ‘price’ for the existential absolutization of the inexistent of the world:
[The] category of the unnameable may prove irrelevant. The theory of appearance provides all by itself the guarantee that every object of a world is marked by an inexistent term. Since an event produces the intensification of an inexistence, there is no need to limit the effects of this intensification. Once a price has been paid in the domain of the inexistent, one cannot act as if this price had not indeed been paid. In sum, I’m coming back to the maxim of the Chinese communists in the Cultural Revolution: ‘No construction without destruction.’ Of everything that comes into existence or comes to be constructed, we must ask: does it possess a universal value that might justify the particular destruction that its coming into existence demands?
(Badiou, 2011a: 349)
How does the relocation of the theme of inexistence to the phenomenal domain of appearance resolve the problems identified in the previous section? Since the truth procedure now unfolds strictly within worlds and not within being as such, Badiou’s first requirement is evidently fulfilled: destruction indeed ‘keeps the being of elements safe’ since it is now strictly concerned with the appearance of an element as a phenomenon of the world. The destruction that compensates for the rise of the inexistent to maximal existence does not affect the ontological status of any of the elements involved, but solely their degree of existence in a given world, which is reduced from maximal to minimal. However, the second requirement that links all destruction to the ‘ancient situation’ is simply abandoned, since it is now a matter of the production of genuine novelty through destruction. The very occurrence of the event is only discernible through its trace, which consists in the rise of the inexistent to maximal existence and the correlate reduction to the minimal degree of appearance of a maximally existing object of the world.
Yet, the truth procedure is clearly not reducible to merely replacing the inexistence of one object with the inexistence of another, which would be politically impotent and philosophically trivial. As Badiou notes, ‘when the world is violently enchanted by the absolute consequences of a paradox of being, all of appearing, threatened by the local destruction of a customary evaluation, must reconstitute a different distribution of what exists and what does not’ (Badiou, 2009b: 380, emphasis in original). Why is this so? According to Badiou’s theorem of existence (ibid.: 246–247), the degree of identity between any two elements in the world is lesser than or equal to the degree of existence (i.e. self-identity) of either of the elements. Thus, what is inexistent in the world is not identical to anything in this world and, conversely, whatever is identical to the inexistent element must itself join this element and become subsumed under inexistence. As Badiou demonstrates in his example of the ‘Indians’ as the inexistent element in the population of Quebec, deprived of electoral rights between 1918 and 1950, in the hypothetical case that the electoral rights of all the beings of this world were to be abrogated, every single being would become transcendentally identical to the ‘Indian’ and thus be resigned to inexistence (cf. ibid.: 322–324). Thus, as a result of the descent of one privileged term into inexistence in a political practice, the entire transcendental must be reordered, since everything that existed to the same maximal degree as this term must now follow it into inexistence. ‘Thus, through an inevitable death under the injunction of the event, is inaugurated the destruction of what linked the multiple to the transcendental of the world. The opening of a space of creation requires destruction’ (ibid.: 396).
Thus, destruction makes a full-fledged comeback in Badiou’s philosophy, yet it no longer unfolds at the ontological level, but is rather limited to the domain of appearance in worlds. What is destroyed is not the being of the elements of the world, but their existence , as governed by the transcendental of the world, and ultimately this transcendental itself. This specification of destruction in terms of transcendental disqualification makes it possible to drop the doctrine of the unnameable as an immanent limitation of the subject and let the truth procedure unfold with maximal intensity without any ethical value assigned to moderation and restraint in its pursuit.
This is not to say that this mode of destruction does not affect beings of the world, but only that it does not negate their being. For instance, the negation of the object ‘the ruling class’ into inexistence as a matter of the affirmation of the egalitarian axiom evidently affects the empirical representatives of this ruling class in numerous ways: their privileges may be abolished, their assets confiscated and they themselves tried for the crimes committed during their period of rule. Yet, all this destruction does not target the being of these beings themselves. What is destroyed in this process is the identity-function ‘ruling class’, not its empirical representatives. In order to understand this intricate point, we need to recall Badiou’s construction of the relation between being and appearing in terms of ‘transcendental indexing’ (ibid.: 199–220, 243–252). Any object that appears in the world is constituted by the indexing of its being as a set on the transcendental of the world. Transcendental indexing is a function that makes a transcendental degree of appearance correspond to any pair of elements of the original set, thus measuring the identity of the two terms in the world where they appear. The object of the world is thus the joint product of the original set and its transcendental indexing (A, Id ). When the object is transcendentally disqualified, it is only its indexing Id that it destroyed while the set A remains ‘safe’.
There nonetheless remains some ambiguity in Badiou’s description of this process in terms of the ‘death of an element’ – insofar as the element, unlike the object, is an ontological concept, does not death affect precisely its being (ibid.: 395–396)? Idiosyncratically and somewhat counterintuitively, Badiou defines death as a phenomenological, not an ontological, category, so that it refers to the passage from a positive value of existence to inexistence in the world (ibid.: 267–270). In a strict sense, death cannot apply to an element in its ontological aspect but solely in its transcendental indexing. One can only die in a world and to the world – there is no such thing as death ‘in itself’, since the only element that is ontologically ‘nothing’ is the void, but the void has nothing to do with death, but is rather the proper name of being itself (ibid.: 270). Thus, the death of any object of the world only entails that a certain element no longer appears in this world, not that its being has been negated. This concept of death permits us to apply the logic of the inexistent to any worldly object whatsoever, making no distinction between the death of a material object and a human being, since what ‘dies’ in both cases is the same thing, i.e. the identity-function or the transcendental indexing of an element.
While all this might sound too abstruse, a simple example should suffice to clarify this logic. Let us imagine a world in which a part of the population is discriminated against according to some positive criterion (ethnic, religious, sexual or whatever other identitarian predicate), deprived of rights and excluded from the common lifeworld. For instance, the members of this group are prohibited from using the same buses, benches or drinking fountains as the rest of the population of the world. The political affirmation of the three axioms of the World must bring this inexistent of the world to maximal existence as free, equal to and in common with all the other beings, which must come at the price of the destruction of some maximally existing object of the world. It is evident that insofar as this inexistent group ascends to maximal existence in the world, the privileged objects, whose use was proscribed to them, must cease to exist. Yet, the overturning of discrimination clearly does not necessitate the physical destruction of material objects that embody it, e.g. blowing up buses, sawing up benches or breaking drinking fountains.
While such physical destruction might be one of the consequences of the unfolding of politics, e.g. in the form of a riot, these measures are in themselves impotent and meaningless, since the physical being of these objects is evidently not at issue here. The object to be destroyed is not the drinking fountain in its material being but rather the fountain marked ‘for X only’, X designating the privileged group within the world. This object (F , for the fountain in its being, Id , for its transcendental indexing) is destroyed and, in Badiou’s terms, ‘dies’ not when its physical being F is altered, but when its use is freed from the transcendental prescription of its function Id in political practices guided by the idea of the wrong of discrimination. For instance, when the representatives of the inexistent group decide to break the prohibition and drink from the restricted fountain despite demands to desist and threats of prosecution, they literally destroy its identity as a privileged object. In this manner, the object ‘fountain for X only’ literally ceases to exist in the world with its materiality remaining intact and available for use to all the beings of the world.
Yet, something else happens in this process. The individuals who violate the prohibition to drink from the fountain are no longer the same beings they were before, i.e. the excluded, the marginalized, the subaltern. By venturing into places marked ‘no Ys allowed’ and drinking from the fountains reserved for the members of the privileged group X, these individuals have rendered their very Y identity inoperative, making it inexist in their world. In Badiou’s terms, they clearly died as Y and, even more scandalously, they actually killed themselves as carriers of the Y-identity function without really ceasing to live and in fact beginning to live at least more intensely and perhaps even more happily. Yet, if the subjugated group Y no longer exists, it is impossible to isolate the privileged group X, insofar as its intra-worldly privilege consisted precisely in the subjugation of Y. Thus, at the very moment when the prohibition is violated and the water from the drinking fountain touches one’s lips, three objects of the world die (the restricted fountain [F, Id], the subjugated identity [Y, Id] and the privileged identity [X, Id]). Yet, this death does not affect the being of the respective elements, F attaining a higher degree of existence in the world as a symbol of political struggle, Y ascending to maximal existence as a result of political subjectivation that made their intervention possible in the first place and X missing the good old days and mourning its lost privileges. Dying in and to the world in the instance of political affirmation, the three groups of beings remain safe in their being.
The idea of transcendental disqualification also permits us to differentiate political destruction within the world from the nihilistic destruction of the world as such, addressed in the previous chapter. The destruction of the transcendental indexing of the beings of the world is undertaken by these beings (or, as we have seen, any other subject) in the name of the universalization of maximal existence in the world: what dies in this process are transcendentally imposed identities and degrees of existence, not beings themselves. In contrast, the destruction of the beings of the world, when it is not simply an intra-worldly mechanism of repression, can only be undertaken in the name of the void itself, in which there are no beings and hence nothing can exist, maximally or otherwise. In other words, political destruction must keep the being of the world’s beings safe since it is to these beings that the political axioms of the World apply. The destruction of beings in their very being is politically meaningless, since it is only capable of producing the void where the positive effects of the axioms should be. Thus, while the axioms of politics apply to the subtractive condition we have termed being-in-the-World, the subjective process of politics always pertains to beings whose existence in positive worlds must be transformed in accordance with these axioms. There is no ‘politics of being’ but only politics of, for and by beings, and any attempt at something like a purely ontological politics will at best come down to an impotent marvelling at the void of being and at worst lead to the production of this void within worlds in a paroxysm of nihilistic violence.
Yet, is it not too idealistic or utopian to imagine a politics, in which there is no lethal violence against beings, a politics in which no one is killed in the more conventional sense? Obviously, we cannot deny that the process of political affirmation within a world may take the form of a violent antagonism, in which the beings of the world may die as beings and not merely as objects . It would therefore be insufficient to remove the prohibition on destruction as an ethical limit to politics by reconstructing the very idea of destruction in the ‘non-lethal’ terms of transcendental disqualification. While it is easy to reduce violence to a simple metaphor – after all, all politics is violent insofar as it disrupts the transcendental order – the very recasting of destruction in logical and transcendental terms suggests the need for an ethical limit to world politics in the form of the prohibition on violence in its literal and most extreme sense of the physical annihilation of beings. In the following section we shall address this figure of limit and the problems associated with it.
Violence, resistance and agonism
If, as we have seen, the question of physical annihilation is peripheral to the process of world-political affirmation, which rather operates according to the logic of transcendental disqualification, how does the problem of violence first arise in the context of world politics? While the negation of the wrong as the intra-worldly form of the affirmation of the axioms is limited to the transcendentally indexed identities of worldly beings, the power of the annihilation of beings finds its locus in the world’s structures of sovereign power. As we have argued in Ontology and World Politics (Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 4), every positive world is constituted by the negation of at least one axiom of the World that introduces in its domain the negativity, which it must negate once again through the institution of sovereignty, which sustains the positivity of the worldly order while not itself being subsumed under it. In this negative logic that Roberto Esposito has analysed extensively in terms of immunization (2011; 2008: 45–76), the positivity of the world, made possible by the negation of the nothingness of the World, is protected by the power of negation that founds and exceeds this positivity. This power of negation must be understood quite literally as the potentiality for violence, including lethal violence, which indeed constitutes sovereign power as, in Foucault’s famous terms (1990: 136), the power of ‘making die’ or ‘letting live’. While this potentiality need not necessarily be actualized and, moreover, its actualization might only indicate its weakness, the threat of physical annihilation remains one, though not the only one, condition for the maintenance of the order of the world.
Faced with the possibility of the disruption of this order in the course of political affirmation, sovereign power, which need not be embodied in any concrete personal figure of the sovereign but may well be dispersed among a variety of intra-worldly apparatuses of security , 5 defends this order by threatening to deploy within the world the very negativity it protected the world from by absorbing it within itself. In this paradoxical manner, sovereign power protects the world by withdrawing its own protection from the inherent negativity of world-making, unleashing this negativity in the world against the destabilizing effects of political affirmation. We must emphasize that this insistence on the necessary inscription of the potentiality for violence in the transcendental of the world is not a normative argument against any particular world order or even all world orders as such: a positive world that is not delimited from its outside and whose positivity is not protected by some form of power of negation is not merely a political but a logical impossibility. Wherever there is a transcendental order, there is potentiality for violence.
Thus, the question of violence and physical destruction only arises when the world ventures to defend itself from the rupture of political affirmation, which, as we have seen, takes the form of the existential absolutization of the inexistent and the correlate disqualification of whatever authorized this inexistence. Insofar as the world exists as a transcendentally regulated situation, any political affirmation will necessarily have to confront the transcendental order and its apparatuses of security. It is important to emphasize the difference between the stakes involved in this confrontation for the apparatuses of sovereign power and the political subject. While politics seeks to bring the inexistent object of the world to maximal existence at the cost of the destruction of the privileged objects of the transcendental, sovereign power must prevent any increase in the degree of the appearance of the inexistent and preferably return it back to inexistence.
What is the most effective way to ensure that the inexistent remains in or returns to inexistence? Evidently, the response of the world’s apparatuses of security to the eruption of politics cannot be limited to the existential disqualification of the object since it is already inexistent and cannot be disqualified any further. The transcendental of the world would be completely impotent if all it could do to counter the rise of the inexistent was to demand its return to inexistence by threatening the political subjects with nothing but this return itself. It is impossible to restore order by threatening those who rebel against it with the promise of this very restoration. The most effective way to extinguish the revolt of the inexistent is rather the elimination of the support set of the inexistent object in its very being, so that what inexists in the world would also not be in it. In order to prevent the inexistent object from ascending to maximal existence in the world, sovereign power threatens to annihilate it in its being as an element. Thus, while the trajectory of politics moves from the affirmation of inexistence to its ascent to maximal existence through the destruction of transcendental indexing, the trajectory of the world’s sovereign response moves from the dangerous irruption of inexistence to its effacement through the threat of the destruction of the inexistent element in its being.
Evidently, this is only the most extreme way the transcendental order of the world may react to the disruptive intervention of the political subject. It may just as well respond by corruption or seduction, blackmail or incarceration, humiliation or conceit. What is at stake here is simply the inscription of the potentiality for annihilation in the sovereign logic of security, since the only way to return the beings that have already ascended from inexistence and reclaimed the world as their own back to inexistence is to threaten their very being. Let us take the example of a slave revolt in a world where slavery is a legitimate principle inscribed in the transcendental. In this world the slaves rise up against the wrong of their condition and thus ascend from their status of the inexistent of the world through the disqualification of their transcendental indexing as slaves and of their masters’ indexing as slave-owners. It is not necessary for the slaves to physically kill their masters in order to liberate themselves, since what matters is the destruction of the relation that binds them, not particular beings who happen to dominate them. However, in order to restore the ruptured transcendental, it would be necessary to return the rebellious slaves to the status of the inexistent, to erase the traces of their revolt. Yet, in the very act of their revolt the slaves have already ‘died’ to the world as slaves, hence the only way to ensure their return to inexistence is to threaten their very being or even actualize this threat in an exemplary manner, demonstrating to all the beings of the world that the price for temporarily maximizing one’s existence in the world is the permanent loss of one’s being. This is not to say that the world’s apparatuses of security must kill every single rebel, but rather that any possible restoration of the order of the world is conditioned by the power , i.e. potentiality, of annihilation. No transcendental order can restore itself without manifesting, if not actualizing, its power of making die or letting live. Faced with this power, political affirmation may either persist in its fidelity to the axioms or expire in a reactive or obscure manner.
In the reactive mode of negation the renunciation of politics proceeds by the claim that whatever benefits the slave revolt might have brought were perfectly achievable on the basis of cooperation and compromise with the slave owners, that the cost of revolt in terms of scores of dead bodies is prohibitive while the rewards for obedience are substantial: it would have been better not to revolt at all . In short, the abandonment of the political process produces what Badiou calls the ‘extinguished present’ that is ‘a little less worse’ than the past, which is retroactively reinscribed as a ‘time of troubles’ (Badiou, 2009b: 55). In the obscure mode of negation this renunciation attempts to suppress the very existence of the political community of the rebels, replacing it with an intra-worldly phantasm of the particularistic and hierarchically ordered community, whose fictitious fullness would preclude the very possibility of the entry of the World within it. The renegades of the rebellion are offered the possibility of integration into this fetish of the ‘social body’ (of the chosen people, race, colour) on the condition of recognizing their very slavery as legitimate (ibid.: 59–60).
The obscure subject offers the chance of a new destiny, under the incomprehensible but salvific sign of an absolute body, whose only demand is that one serves it by nurturing everywhere and at all times the hatred of every living thought, every transparent language and every uncertain becoming.
(ibid.: 61)
In this manner, the world restores the security of its order by the manifestation of the power of physical annihilation that gives rise to reactive and obscure negations of politics that push the subjectivized former slaves back into objective inexistence in the world. Whereas politics seeks to dis-qualify the order of the world by affirming axioms that are universal for all its beings, the world’s logic of security operates by the re-qualification of inexistence on the basis of the threat of the physical annihilation of beings.
This fundamental asymmetry between the logics of politics and security permits us to challenge both the Schmittian understanding of politics in terms of a symmetric intersubjective ‘duel’ (Schmitt, 2003: 141–143) and the more fashionable poststructuralist reading of politics in terms of agonism , which retains and elaborates the Schmittian prescription of symmetry and equality between political adversaries. Insofar as Schmitt’s concept of the political lacks any positive substance and rather refers to the degree of intensity of the existential association or dissociation, it is impossible to grant ontological or ethical primacy either to the Self or the Other, which emerge simultaneously in the act of their distinction. Moreover, in Schmitt’s theory the primacy of either of these figures, which are, after all, mirror images of each other, inevitably leads to the eruption within the world of the very negativity that the concept of the political was intended to contain. Both the ‘egoistic’ primacy of the Self and the ‘ethical’ primacy of the Other only lead to the catastrophic absolutization of enmity and the actualization of the ‘most extreme possibility’ of violent death (see Schmitt, 1976: 27–29, 58–66).
Contemporary critical thought borrows this affirmation of symmetry from Schmitt and seeks to develop it beyond the confines of Schmitt’s theory in order to reinvigorate contemporary Western politics (Mouffe, 2000, 2005; Laclau, 2005; Honig, 1993; Connolly, 1995). The current popularity of the agonistic understanding of politics is due to its claim to avoid the two extremes to which the political has apparently been resigned during the twentieth century: the radical antagonism of the Schmittian friend–enemy distinction and the depoliticized liberalism in its economic and moral varieties (see Mouffe, 1999a, 2005: 8–35; cf. Zizek, 1999a). The agonistic discourse uses Schmitt’s critique of liberal depoliticization to undermine the liberal hegemonic consensus, yet restrains the antagonistic tendency in Schmitt that permanently threatens to convert the political into brute violence. It is therefore advanced as a solution both to the problem of contemporary depoliticization and to the problem of the violence inherent in politics.
Yet, this attempt to limit the excesses of both politics and depoliticization unwittingly replicates both of the problems it sets out to address. To focus on the most prominent version of the agonistic approach to politics, Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism (1999a, 2000, 2005) seeks to set limits on Schmitt’s friend–enemy antagonism by introducing a common symbolic framework, which permits the expression of dissent and manifestations of conflict but does not let them be translated into the violent quest for the elimination of the enemy. This ‘radical democratic’ rethinking of Schmitt asserts the constitutive dimension of antagonism against both the liberal reduction of politics to economic competition and the Habermasian subjection of politics to the telos of rational consensus (Habermas, 1997), attained in communicative action guided by the rules of discourse ethics. Yet, on the other hand, against Schmitt’s alleged valorization of ‘frontal struggle between enemies’, Mouffe asserts the possibility of a ‘differential treatment of [the] conflictuality’ inherent in the human condition, whereby a head-on confrontation between enemies gives way to a struggle between adversaries that share a common symbolic ground (Mouffe, 1999b: 4). This move is in itself certainly laudable, yet the mitigation that Mouffe proposes as a corrective to Schmitt’s conception is suspiciously similar to what Schmitt himself analysed at length in his studies of the ‘bracketing’ of war in the Westphalian system of the Jus Publicum Europeaum (2003). There is thus little in Mouffe’s account of the agonistic mitigation of conflict that is not already present in Schmitt, but the difference between them concerns the precise status of this mode of mitigation. While Schmitt locates it as a contingent feature of a particular ontic nomos , Mouffe proposes nothing less than the elevation of this contingent empirical fact to the ontological condition of politics as such. In other words, what is in Schmitt’s work a historically specific world, whose passing Schmitt laments without due attention to the utterly restrictive character of this ‘agonistic’ space, is in Mouffe’s argument a component of the very concept of the political apparently valid for any world whatsoever. While Mouffe accuses Schmitt of ‘essentializing’ the political by framing antagonism within ‘already existing borders’ (Mouffe, 1999b: 50), the charge of essentialization applies with equal force to her version of agonism.
The problem with this essentialization is that it presupposes as the condition of politics what is in fact its rare and fragile outcome, i.e. the commitment to the limitation of antagonism by all the subjects in the political terrain. Similarly to the proverbial tango, which takes two, agonism may never be merely one’s own political stance among a plurality of others but must apply universally for its symbolic framework to be truly common. Indeed, it would be difficult to treat as a legitimate adversary someone who is treating you as an enemy or, even worse, refuses to recognize your humanity as such. All historical struggles against despotic regimes or foreign occupation have faced this problem of the recognition of one’s legitimate status as an adversary as opposed to a ‘terrorist’, ‘troublemaker’, ‘beast’ or mere ‘lice’. In fact, this recognition is frequently the most important demand of the struggle itself. For example, what the dissident movements in Central and Eastern Europe during the Cold War demanded prior to any articulation of a positive political programme was precisely the recognition of civil society as a legitimate political force. By the same token, ‘Dissenters’ Marches’ in Putin’s Russia, routinely banned by the authorities and broken up by police, were similarly about the demand for the right to protest as such, inscribed in the constitution yet proscribed by the authorities, whose ‘cruel and unusual’ persecution of the protesters demonstrates their non-recognition as legitimate adversaries and their reduction to, in Putin’s colourful phrase, ‘jackals scavenging around foreign embassies’. As long as the recognition of one’s legitimate alterity cannot be presupposed, it is also impossible to exclude the inverse move of denying recognition to the regime on the part of the dissenters and the collapse of politics into terrorist warfare: if your enemies can only be skulking jackals, it should not be too surprising if they would eventually creep up on you with less than agonistic intentions.
Thus, the ideal of agonistic pluralism requires the universalization of a common symbolic framework, in which all the political subjects recognize each other as legitimate adversaries. Yet, once we presuppose that these conditions of possibility are given, we end up in a system that is strangely similar to contemporary Western liberal democracies, whose depoliticization the agonistic approach lamented in the first place. Indeed, does not the institutionalized process of alternation in government of centre-left and centre-left coalitions that share a common liberal-democratic ideology, and increasingly agree on almost everything, correspond precisely to the agonistic ideal of the mitigation of antagonism through institutionalization and mutual recognition? It appears that the only way to safeguard the political from collapsing into violence is to depoliticize it. Agonism may then be viewed as an adequate description of contemporary liberal–democratic systems rather than a normative ideal of their transformation . Rather than resolve the problems of depoliticization and violence, agonism merely posits the first problem as the solution for the second, misrecognizing the way this solution is already operative in the systems it criticizes.
In contrast, our approach demonstrates that it is impossible to presuppose the symmetry between the parties in a political relation, simply because politics is, in a strict sense, not a relation . Politics is not a conflict between like entities , be they antagonistically or agonistically inclined towards each other, but rather a process whereby a transcendentally ordered positive world encounters its ontological condition of possibility (the World as void) in the ontic form of the subjective process of the overturning of the world’s wrongs, which threatens to undo its particular order insofar as it affirms universal axioms of freedom, equality and community. What politics, and particularly world politics, ipso facto lacks is the very thing agonism must presuppose to be intelligible, namely the agreement of all the parties on the legitimacy of their conflict. As long as political affirmation cannot be subsumed under the world’s transcendental, it simply cannot be symbolized as legitimate intra-worldly conflict but appears in it as pure negativity and disruption. Conversely, to the political subject, the stability of the world appears as the perpetuation of the wrong, authorized by a transcendental order that has no foundation in being and is therefore purely contingent. There is no symbolic framework that the ‘(wo)man of the world’ and the political subject could possibly share in order to agree even on what political practice is in a given world: whatever one affirms (axioms of the World, the stability of the world) appears to the other as pure negativity (the destruction of order, the persistence of the wrong). In the famous words of Leonard Cohen (1974), ‘there is a war between the ones who say there is a war and the ones who say there isn’t’.
It is this ‘war’ about the very meaning of political affirmation that makes world politics non-relational. There is no relation between the particular order of the world with its apparatuses of security and the political subjects emerging as a result of the weakening of their intra-worldly identity. Nor is there a relation between the inexistent object of the world and the privileged object of the transcendental that descends into inexistence as a result of political affirmation. The only relation that we may speak in the context of world politics is the relation between the world in question and the void of the World, which is brought to appearance in the world through the positive effects of the axioms. Yet, this relation is obviously asymmetric, since there can be no symmetry between something and nothing, appearance and non-appearance, the particular and the universal.
Symmetric relationality is only possible within the world as a function of the transcendental order (cf. Badiou, 2009b: 303–317), which regulates interaction between like entities, be those individuals or parties, corporations or cultures. We may even envision a degree of symmetry between non-maximal and hence particularistic modes of politics, e.g. communitarianism, libertarianism and egalitarianism. Insofar as these modes do not attain universality due to their negation of at least one axiom, they are inevitably subsumed under the transcendental of the world as particularistic modes of government, which may then interact, compete and even confront each other on the basis of this symmetry. Yet, insofar as this confrontation pertains to the more effective way of governing the world and no longer to bringing the World into this world, it ceases to be political in our sense of the universal affirmation of universal axioms. Agonistic pluralism is thus always already constrained by the transcendental order of the world, in which alone its presuppositions may be valid. In contrast, world politics withdraws from any symmetric relation with the world in which it unfolds, precisely because it does not seek to construct a different world on the basis of some alternative principle, but rather to open this world here to its conditions of possibility and transform it on their basis. Insofar as it is not a world-making activity, world politics is wholly incommensurable with any intra-worldly principle and thus by definition subtracts itself from any ‘symbolic framework’ of any positive world, however pluralistic and tolerant it might be. Yet, if world politics renders agonism, which sought to limit and mitigate violence, impossible, does this mean that it is resigned to a violent confrontation that knows no limits and threatens at every point to destroy the world as such?
In the previous section we have argued that the process of political affirmation only involves the destruction of the transcendental indexing of the objects of the world, not its beings as elements. While destruction is necessary to politics and cannot possibly be a prohibitive limit to it, it is only necessary as transcendental disqualification, not as physical annihilation. Yet, we can easily envision situations in which this disqualification would be radically insufficient. Since, as we have argued, the world’s apparatuses of security respond to the eruption of politics by mobilizing their potentiality for physical annihilation, the subject of politics must be able to resist this power simply in order to persist in its tasks of existential absolutization of the inexistent and the transcendental disqualification of the maximally existent. If the subject is a priori proscribed to go beyond transcendental disqualification, it finds itself disarmed and impotent against the powers of the world, resigned to playing on the level of appearance against the threat to its very being. It is only in this context of resistance that the resort of the political subject to physical violence becomes meaningful as a supplement to political praxis that enables this praxis to persist in the face of repression and possible annihilation. Going beyond transcendental disqualification and deploying the power of annihilation against the beings of the world is thus only conceivable as defensive action.
While this limitation of violence to self-defence has been frequently advanced in critical political thought (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 342–347; Zizek, 2009: 166–183; 2011a; 2011b: 450–451), it appears to create as many problems as it solves. After all, does not this limitation bring in interminable debates on the insurmountable problem of adjudicating on what constitutes (self-)defence, its permitted forms, its limits, etc.? What is the object of defence, the political subject in its being or the political process in the sense of its positive effects? Is it legitimate to annihilate beings in order to defend the effects of community, liberty and equality gained in the political affirmation or can one only defend physical being, be it one’s own or that of the other? Does legitimate defence include preemptive attacks against the adversaries or the violation of intra-worldly conventions? It is easy to see that the list of such questions is inexhaustible and the answers inevitably contestable. It will never be possible to establish incontestable criteria of purely defensive violence, hence this limitation appears highly problematic as the normative principle regulating the subjective process of politics.
And yet, these problems largely disappear, if we do not posit defensive violence as an external normative prescription, but rather approach it as a logical consequence of the unfolding of the subjective process itself. It would be pointless to normatively prescribe that politics should never be accompanied by acts of violence, simply because it is easy to imagine or recall instances in which such a prescription would sound either absurd or obscene (cf. Benjamin, 1978: 293): does anyone really want to recommend strictly non-violent resistance against the Nazi Einsatzgruppen in Second World War Poland or rape squads in Gaddafi’s Libya? On the other hand, it would be just as pointless to normatively prescribe a measure of violence that would be somehow ‘acceptable’ for politics, because any criterion of ‘acceptability’ is bound to be contestable. Indeed, to set any such conditions on the exercise of politics is to misunderstand its very logic, for which the use of violence and, more generally, the very form that its process should take, is entirely contingent on the concrete order of the world. The subjective process certainly takes different forms, depending on whether the affirmation of its axioms in the world is countered by silencing in the media or internment in concentration camps, house arrests or carpet bombings of the rebellious areas, roundtable fora or public executions.
Whether the affirmation of freedom, equality or community ends up violent does not depend on the content of these axioms, which, as we have seen, contain nothing negative, but on the concrete circumstances of the unfolding of the subjective process in the world, primarily the degree of repression it encounters from the world’s apparatuses of security. And yet, while this repression certainly explains the possible recourse of the world-political subject to violence, it cannot ever justify it: insofar as any destruction of beings by definition negates universal freedom, equality and community, it cannot possibly contribute to political affirmation by producing positive effects of the axioms and thus remains extraneous to the political process, having no political content of its own. Despite his undeserved reputation as a warmonger, Schmitt arguably said it best:
War, the readiness of combatants to die, the physical killing of human beings who belong on the side of the enemy – all this has no normative meaning, but an existential meaning only, particularly in a real combat situation with a real enemy. There exists no rational purpose, no norm, no matter how true, no program no matter how exemplary, no social ideal no matter how beautiful, no legitimacy nor legality which could justify men in killing each other. If such physical destruction of human life is not motivated by an existential threat to one’s own way of life, then it cannot be justified. Just as little can war be justified by ethical and juristic norms.
(Schmitt, 1976: 48–49)
Thus, violence cannot be justified by any normative (ethical or juristic) criterion, which does not mean that it is simply to be prohibited. For Schmitt, the ‘meaning’ of violence is not normative but existential, arising from a ‘threat to one’s own way of life’ in a ‘real combat situation with a real enemy’. Violence can only be ‘motivated’ by an existential threat, yet since sheer existence, devoid of all normativity of ‘good life’ and appearing solely in the facticity of ‘bare life’, is itself beyond any criterion of justice, literally ‘beyond good and evil’, even this threat does not provide violence with a justification but only with a ‘meaning’. Even if we were to cast violence as necessary to maintain the existence of a worldly being, this very existence is not itself necessary from an ontological perspective: insofar as existence pertains to intra-worldly appearance, it is always contingent. While violence may accompany politics, it does not derive any justification from it and indeed remains exterior to the subjective process. Thus, rather than proscribe all recourse to violence or prescribe its appropriate measure, we must depart from this radical exteriority in establishing what kind of violence may accompany politics without destroying its very process.
Insofar as it consists in the existential absolutization of the inexistent, the political process gains literally nothing from the destruction of the beings of the world, whatever these beings are. The positive effects of politics consist in increasing the number of beings, positively affected by the affirmation of the axioms, not in the reduction of the number of beings in the world. Killing, irrespectively of whether it takes place in military confrontation, escape from concentration camps, terror against collaborators, the execution of traitors, does not yield any additional effects of politics, but merely might enable this process to go on in the face of the reprisals of the world’s apparatuses of security. The physical killing of the rulers or the privileged of the world does not achieve anything more than the transcendental disqualification of these groups would achieve. Thus, violence is never an end of politics, yet neither is it a means to an end : insofar as the end of politics is the production of positive effects of the universal axioms, violence cannot possibly lead to that end. The attribute ‘defensive’ should therefore not be read in instrumental terms, since violence is entirely separated from the goals of politics, and only pertains to the sheer perseverance of the process of affirmation in adverse conditions.
In terms of Walter Benjamin’s seminal distinction in ‘Critique of Violence’ (1978: 280–288), the violence that may accompany world politics without negating its very substance cannot be either law preserving (since it ruptures the order of the world) or law establishing (since, as we have argued, world politics is not a world-making activity). To the extent that world politics resorts to violence, this violence can then only take the form of what Benjamin enigmatically termed ‘divine violence’ (ibid.: 297–300), which withdraws from any relation to the law or, in our terms, the transcendental order. While this concept has given rise to numerous interpretations (see Derrida, 1992; Zizek, 2009: 157–173; 2011a; Weber, 2008: 176–194; Martell, 2011; Critchley, 2012: 207–245), we shall follow Giorgio Agamben in understanding this violence as a ‘pure means’ (2000: 116–118, 57–60; 2005a: 60–64) that has lost every relationship to any end and merely manifests its own pure mediality. Similarly to Agamben’s concept of whatever being and such related concepts as being-thus (1993: 93–106), special being (2007b: 55–60) or gesture (2007a: 147–156), a pure means is wholly exposed in the facticity of its being. Devoid of any telos, violence as a pure means consists simply in persevering, in maintaining one’s sheer presence in the world that threatens one with non-being, in insisting on one’s existence despite being qualified as inexistent in the world’s transcendental. In other words, this is a form of violence that can only be exercised against violence , against the violence of the powers of the world that threaten the subject in its very being (cf. Critchley, 2012: 217).
What is divine about this perseverance in being? Evidently, divine violence is not the violence authorized by a divinity or purified of all earthly considerations, but quite simply the praxis that deactivates its tie to the law or any intra-worldly order, rendering itself inoperative and thus available for a new, non-instrumental use: ‘[O]ne day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused toys, not in order to restore them to the canonical use but to free them from it for good’ (Agamben, 2005a: 64). While we are conventionally inclined to only accept or forgive violence in the situations where it is ‘absolutely necessary’, divine violence is on the contrary devoid of any necessity and divorced from every end. What is divine about it is precisely its utter indifference to any end, its non-strategic gratuitousness that contrasts with the calculative deployment of violence by the world’s apparatuses of security. Yet, it would evidently be absurd to understand this gratuitous character of violence as the world-political subject’s unconditional ‘licence to kill’. While the reference to divinity in Benjamin’s formulation is sometimes interpreted in terms of omnipotence, we may rather suggest that it should be understood in the diametrically opposite sense, resonating with the notion of ‘weak messianic power’ that Benjamin’s own ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ invoke (Benjamin, 1968: 254; cf. Agamben, 2005b: 125–137; Santner, 2006: 87–95; Dickinson, 2011: 84–98; Prozorov, 2007a: 143–146). Messianic power is ‘weak’ not only because it is comparatively weaker than sovereign power but because it operates by weakening the latter without producing its own form of sovereignty, its power being wholly exhausted in its ‘decreation’ of established orders. Similarly, divine violence refers to the engagement with the world’s apparatuses of security, which does not seek to defeat these apparatuses at their own game of the establishment and maintenance of order (which is wholly alien to the tasks of worldly political affirmation) but only attempts to make possible the continuation of the political process, whose own destructive orientation does not target the beings of the world but only their transcendentally prescribed identities. In other words, the political subject only engages in violence when the world engages it in it, leaving it with a choice of abandoning political affirmation or persisting in it. To the extent that the subject retains its fidelity to the political axioms, it will opt for persistence, yet whatever violent acts it commits in this attempt to persist cannot be incorporated into the political process as either ends or means without radically perverting this process itself, whereby it becomes either world-establishing or world-preserving.
Understood as a pure means, violence is in a strict sense inessential to world politics, meaningful only in the context of the confrontation with the order of the world, which the subject is powerless to avoid without abandoning the political process as such. It is only as inessential that violence can accompany the political process without destroying the consistency of political affirmation itself. 6 As soon as it exceeds this inessential, non-strategic status and becomes an integral part of the political process itself, politics is diverted from its task of universal affirmation and loses its connection to the axioms of the World. The exercise of violence for the purpose of establishing a new world or preserving a newly established world logically entails the weakening of the degree of the affirmation of the axioms, since, as we have argued, it is impossible to construct a ‘world-political world’ and any attempt at such a construction would only yield a particular world, in which at least one axiom is negated and hence no axiom is affirmed maximally. Thus, for world politics to retain its consistency, its recourse to violence must remain non-strategic, lacking any gain and merely supporting the continuation of the political process, whose own destructive effects consist solely in transcendental disqualification.
It is important to emphasize that the recourse to violence as a means to an end does not (merely) render politics illegitimate in terms of any external normative criterion but rather brings it to its ruin as politics. The turn towards non-defensive physical annihilation purely and simply indicates the expiry of politics and its degradation into something else, be it the project of establishing and securing one’s new world or the nihilistic drive for the destruction of this world here. As the history of revolutions teaches us, the drive for the physical annihilation of the representatives of the old regime frequently obscures the failure of the political process to achieve its primary task of transcendental disqualification. The paroxysms of revolutionary terror, from Robespierre to Mao, are symptoms of the failure to actualize the revolution as a positive form of life, i.e. attain maximal liberty, equality and community in the world, whereby the transcendental order of the world remains intact despite all revolutionary aspirations (Zizek, 2002: 128–132; 2008: 157–210). For example, the violent struggle against the representatives of the imperial repressive apparatus during the Russian Civil War was accompanied by the transcendental reconstitution of this very apparatus in the post-revolutionary regime. In a tragic reversal of the political principle, the post-revolutionary Bolshevik politics targeted the beings of the ‘old world’, from the former aristocracy to their competitors in the socialist movement, while foregoing the task of the transcendental disqualification of the old world itself. In this manner, its politics turned into a militarized policy of securing the new world, which gradually began to appear as a degraded version of the old.
It does not matter whether such a conversion is motivated by the desire for revenge and retribution, the fear of reaction or subversion, base material interests or pseudo-heroic pathos. What is crucial is that none of these motives have anything to do with the axioms of the World but rather pertain to the particular desires or interests of the subjects of the political process. Yet, the political subject, constituted by the subtraction from its particular intra-worldly identity that exposes it to being-in-the-World, can never be guided by these desires or interests but can only be contaminated and eventually ruined by them, (mis)led back to its place in the world. The defensive and non-strategic character of violence is not a condition of legitimacy of politics, posited from the outside as its limit, but is rather a logical requirement for the political subject to retain its own consistency as the bearer of universal axioms. The historical sequences of world politics, from the French Revolution to the Colour Revolutions, teach us that this consistency is extremely fragile and easily lost. Any political affirmation always runs the risk of self-destruction, be it the degradation into the active-nihilist destruction of the world or the passive-nihilist retreat into intra-worldly security. Yet, isn’t it possible to insure against this risk by grounding political praxis in philosophical or scientific knowledge that would establish what counts for defensive violence, its proper forms and limits and more generally prescribe every move along the path of the subject? If, as we have seen, it is impossible to provide an ethical limit to political praxis in the form of the wariness of evil, the guarding of the unnameable, the prohibition on destruction and the renunciation of violence, could not politics be limited epistemically , i.e. endowed with secure foundations and a meaningful direction that contain the excesses and perversions that lead the subjective process to its expiry in active and passive forms of nihilism? This is the question that we address in the following chapter.
Notes
1 In the Theory of the Subject ‘splacement’ refers to the space of placement, the symbolic order of the world in which the positive identity of a being is constituted. In our terms, this notion corresponds to one’s place in the world, from which the intra-worldly being dis-identifies in becoming a political subject. See Badiou, 2009c: 3–50.
2 There are so many other similarities between Theory of the Subject and Logics of Worlds , e.g. regarding the types of subjectivity, the affects of subjectivation, the importance of Hegel, that Logics might be read not as a sequel to Being and Event but as its prequel , the book immediately following Theory of the Subject and developing its central themes. See Bosteels (2009: xii, xxvi); Bosteels (2011b: 202–225); Clemens (2006).
3 While the notion of inexistence appears in all Badiou’s major works, its meaning and significance vary. In Theory of the Subject (Badiou, 2009c: 259–264) the inexistent refers to the ‘unoccupiable’ place in the world that the subject forcefully assumes in its confrontation with the order of the world. In Being and Event (Badiou, 2005a: 409) the ‘principle of inexistents’ means that whatever inexists in the situation supplemented by its truth (the ‘generic extension’ of the original situation) must have also inexisted in the original situation, since truth does not destroy anything. Finally, the argument in Logics of Worlds reverses this principle: it is precisely because the world must have one and only one inexistent that the truth procedure must destroy something that originally existed in order to itself be capable of raising the inexistent of the world to maximal existence. For a more detailed discussion see Bosteels, 2011b: 244–249.
4 In his postulate of materialism (Badiou, 2009b: 217–220, 250–251) that proclaims that every atom of appearance is real, i.e. has a correlate in being, Badiou appears to disqualify the existence of simulacra or ‘virtual’ entities. This ‘speculative decision’ is perhaps too hasty, since, in Badiou’s own account (2011c: 75), the transcendental of the world ‘does not exist’ in the same way as the multiples that it orders. Insofar as being does not prescribe the mode of appearance, there must be at least some aspects of the transcendental that lack being and it is this lack that accounts for the contingency of the order of every world: ontologically, no world is necessary, even if all that appears in it is real.
5 While both the presumed adherents (Schmitt) and critics (Foucault) of the logic of sovereignty tend to emphasize its personalist aspect, this aspect is historically contingent and epiphenomenal to the logic of sovereignty in any of its classical formulations, Hobbesian, Lockean, Rousseuan, etc. As Agamben (1998: 15–29) demonstrates conclusively, what defines the logic of sovereignty is not its contingent holder but its function of the constitutive exception for the order in question that enables it to positively constitute order while itself escaping from its rules. The weakness of many contemporary analyses of the ‘end’ or ‘crisis’ of sovereign power is arguably owing to the inattention to the concrete empirical ways, in which this function may be transferred from its ‘traditional’ holders (monarchs, presidents, commanders-in-chief) to other instances of authority in the transcendental of the world, be they private corporations, international organizations, organized crime, etc. While often replicating Foucault’s relegation of sovereignty into irrelevance on the theoretical level, various post-Foucauldian studies of governmentality (Dean, 1999; Rose, 2001; Cruikshank, 1999; Barry et al ., 1996; Larner and Walters, 2004; de Larrinaga and Doucet, 2010) actually excel at tracing precisely this transfer in empirical analyses of governmental rationalities. The advantage of our understanding of government in terms of transcendental ordering is that it permits to grasp the diversity of governmental practices within a single framework, within which such oppositions as state/economy, public/private, national/supranational, etc., become relativized or even irrelevant. For the compelling argument against opposing sovereignty to government that treats the two phenomena as polarities of a single ‘providential machine’ see Agamben, 2011, particularly Chapters 4 and 5.
6 This argument resonates with Benjamin’s reading of the divine commandment ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill!’ in the ‘Critique of Violence’. For Benjamin this commandment ought not to be understood as an external normative principle that simply prohibits killing and threatens sanctions for the violation of this prohibition. ‘The injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment. And so neither the divine judgment, nor the grounds for this judgment, can be known in advance. Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it’ (Benjamin, 1978: 298). In our reading, the reason why political subjects ‘wrestle in solitude’ with the problem of violence is not their fear of violating a normative prohibition, which can only come from within the very world that they have already confronted, but rather the understanding that, unless it is restricted to the non-strategic and non-essential maintenance of one’s presence as a political subject, violence may bring the very political process to ruin. Violence is not simply proscribed as a matter of divine injunction but its very proscription leaves it available to the subject in the form of transgression that one must wrestle with and assume responsibility for, precisely because it is not simply ‘wrong’ in itself but rather dangerous for the very politics that it is meant to sustain. Against the ‘false and ignoble proposition’ that ‘mere life’ stands higher that ‘the happiness and justice of existence’ (ibid.: 298–299) and that all violence is therefore unacceptable, Benjamin affirms not a happy negligence of the commandment but rather a permanent ‘wrestling’ with it in a concrete situation of struggle, in which its violation may either help the political subject to persist in its confrontation with the powers of the world or lead the subjective process to self-destruction. For another reading of Benjamin’s approach to the commandment see Critchley (2012: 218–221).