Alain Badiou, Ethics
Nov. 11th, 2011 04:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_divided
Or, books I have been reading for class, Part 1. Ethics: I think I should probably have read this after Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson, because it is a stab at a solution to a problem I hadn't known existed. XD Namely, the problem of the paralysis felt by philosophers in a world in which philosophy can only be used to critique, all attempts to claim universal relevance by philosophers are savagely torn apart, and no one can think of a way to put philosophy to use for the purpose of imagining and then creating a better world for us all.
Lurking behind this is the idea that the best time to be alive was during the modernist era, particularly the 60s, when there was a sense of wide-open-possibility, that the world could be a better place, that collectively we could accomplish something. To not have this sense of possibility is "nihilist".
Badiou's solution to these problems, at least in Ethics, is to invent a philosophy that is actionable for individuals, that is "universal" because it will lead to the creation of new truths with universal relevance, but that avoids (he hopes) the pitfalls of 20th century totalizing philosophies that had huge human costs, like Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism.
I returned the book to the library -- also it was tricky reading for me because it referenced a lot of philosophers I wasn't familiar with and used mathematical terms I didn't know (as a physics major!) -- so I might be misrepresenting some of the author's arguments. But I think the basic idea was:
--Truth is found in lack (see: Lacan), meaning at times when you recognize that your existing philosophy is inadequate.
--These times are "truth-events".
--ethics (small "e") consists of devotion to a truth-event. And by devotion, Badiou means lifelong devotion.
--Through devotion to a truth-event, you instigate a "truth-process" whose goal is the creation of new "truths".
--A bunch of qualifications to keep this philosophy from having unforeseen bad consequences.
--Something about 'subtraction', which is a concept I found very hazy. I think it means that instead of trying to demolish the current order so that you can build a new one in the flaming wreckage, you find the smallest change that can be made which will still completely change the whole.
Generally I found this book to be really invigorating reading, which I am sure is the entire point of the philosophy in the first place! My specific reservations with it were:
1. Badiou stresses that truth-events are individual affairs. My truth-event is not your truth-event, nor should it be. This is good for individuals who seek meaning for their own lives, but it can't be used as an organizing principle for society. Well, probably Badiou would regard that as a good thing, since he thinks that current Ethics (big "E") is too tangled up in national politics.
2. In order to prove the need for his new philosophy, he somewhat misrepresents and shortchanges the current philosophy. Briefly, according to Badiou: Current ethics is defensive. It identifies evils and then attempts to legislate against them. It focuses on "human rights," which are rights to non-evils. There is no attempt to make an "immortal" humanity, only to protect the advances that have already been made.
2b. (Badiou's thoughts on current Ethics continued:) "Ethics is nihilist because it has as its underlying conviction the certainty that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death... the essence of Ethics is 'when and how, in the name of our idea of happiness, may we kill someone?'" (He is talking about medical ethics related to health care costs, among other things, here. One thing I learned in another class - Research Management - is that social research in Europe often has to be approved by ethics boards, and those boards use guidelines first developed in medicine.)
2c. (Badiou's thoughts on current Ethics continued:) Otherness dialog is poisonous. The same actors (former colonial powers and former colonies) are always cast in the same roles. This dialog reinforces the status quo. The way around difference is to find truths that are universal and will benefit everyone. Also, the same people who cast themselves as defenders of tolerance are themselves intolerant of other points of view.
2d. While I think that many of Badiou's points in 2a-2c are likely correct - though not being a European intellectual or politician, I lack first-hand experience of them - it's hard for me not to think, based on what I know about this dialog around Otherness and rights as it appears on LJ, that Badiou is using too much of a strawman argument. The "intolerant guardians of tolerance" do exist, but are they leading philosophers? If not leading philosophers, do they have an absolute hegemony over the discourse? Are their views maybe more nuanced than what he presents them as? What's the point of going after easy targets that you have constructed yourself? Also, not to go all feminist on him, but it is more of a male thing to assume that "universality" should be the goal, or even that one's views COULD have universal relevance.
3. As a personal philosophy, I think it could be really rewarding to dedicate yourself to a single life-changing event. I think good things could result from this, and that those good things might even benefit others - maybe even the whole world. What I wonder, though, since Badiou has not much to say about types of events that will make good truth-events (other than that they fall into 4 categories: art, science, politics, and love), is whether this philosophy will be of any use to people who haven't yet had a life-changing event. Will they obsess about finding one, and hastily follow an unfruitful or destructive path?
3a. I know what my truth-event would be, though. I mean, if I wanted to go down that route.
4. Badiou defines "Evil" as the corruption of a truth-process. This follows from his earlier stated goal to make ethics proactive, rather than reactive. Furthermore, if you define good as "not evil", you then have to define evil, and if it is not defined it becomes "a consensual judgment of opinion, and consensus is worthless as a mode of thought." The only consensus evil is Radical evil (e.g. Nazism), which "is inimitable, yet it is constantly imitated...The enemy of intellectual pursuit is being told that something is 'unthinkable'." The idea is that you need to be able to think about Evil in order to prevent it. Having defined Evil as the corruption of a truth-process, he can now discuss the possible ways a truth-process can be corrupted:
4a. Simulacrum and terror: Nazism mimicked a truth process but was tied to particularities (race), not universals. "A simulacrum of a truth is terror directed at everyone." (p. 77)
4b. Betrayal.
4c. The unnameable: When there's an attempt to force the truth into situations where it does not belong, and to forbid all other truths, totalitarianism style, the result is a disaster. "The Good is only Good to the extent it does not attempt to render the world Good." (p. 85)
4d. My problem with 4a-4c, simply stated, is that you can use them to retroactively declare any truth process to be corrupted! For instance, Badiou uses this tactic for Stalinism (4c) and Nazism (4a), but he is unaccountably soft on Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, which he defends as a struggle with real stakes for a real cause. However, if you think it was a pointless struggle or not worth the human cost, you can declare in in violation of 4c, the sin of "the unnameable", by saying it was a totalizing philosophy. And you can do this for any historical example - plus there are an endless number of historical examples to choose from - so the examples he uses to support his point, don't have any weight! And the point remains unproven and unproveable.
So yeah, that's my assessment of Ethics. This was probably the hardest book for me, btw, both because of the specific vocabulary Badiou invents or thieves (from Math) to communicate his ideas, and because it was the first book we read for class this term. If I've misrepresented anything, I apologize.
I'm glad I read this before reading Zizek, though, because he's a huge fan of Badiou and his work makes a lot more sense with Badiou's ideas as the context!
The section of this book I enjoyed the most, and thought was the most illuminating, was Badiou's discussion of the difference between opinion and truth. Briefly:
There is something called disinterested-interest -- the pursuit of truth for its own sake -- and something called brute interest -- the harnessing of invention toward concrete aims. All disinterested-interest eventually turns toward brute interest, at which point, new "knowledges" will come into being on the backs of a few truths. "At the end of which the human animal has become the absolute master of his environment – which is, after all, nothing but a fairly mediocre planet", sez Badiou.
Knowledge, therefore, is a byproduct of the pursuit of truth. Opinion, on the other hand, "is the necessary language of the everyday. Truths should not attempt to do away with the space for opinion" lest evil 4c, the unnameable, result -- the example here is the May 1968 riots in central Europe, which were riots not against Communism, but for a public space free of the meddlesome interference of the Party. "Truths have the power to change the language of opinion, and this is the power that, when abused, results in an evil."
Well, anyway, that's a short and probably very inscrutable summary, but if anyone is interested I will try to excerpt the whole thing in a comment later. Good stuff. The basic point is that we shouldn't always try to make every conversation about Big Ideas, chit chat is very important as well, but Big Ideas are still important because they define the scope of what the chit chat can be about. The more stuff like this I read, the more I kind of want to meet Alain Badiou, he seems like a passionate guy. One more thing I will point out about Ethics is that it was written in two weeks - two weeks! - over the summer. You learn stuff like this and you wonder.
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Still to come: Badiou's The Century (which I enjoyed more than this), Zizek (briefly, because he's still very difficult for me to read), Jameson's Postmodernism (the source of many opinions I have seen floating around the net! :D), Foucault, and Zygmunt Bauman.
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Date: 2011-11-15 06:16 pm (UTC)Sensible on topic comment to follow! XD
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Date: 2011-11-15 08:07 pm (UTC)I'm kind of apathetic towards Libs stuff at the moment, but I'll check the fares and ask my friend. If he's interested and you're coming - or just the latter - maybe I could make the trip down just for social reasons. XD.
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Date: 2011-11-15 08:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-15 09:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2011-11-21 11:32 pm (UTC)