Grande est la série de ceux qui les suivent

Three really remarkable ideas struck me in reading over Etienne de la Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (the link is to a modernized French version). The first, perhaps the most remarkable, is simply stated at the beginning, and said over again in different ways in the whole first quarter of the essay. Governments function because people allow them to do so. A king does not rule on a daily basis through violence. He is the ruler because when he gives an order, people obey him. If one day he was not obeyed, he would cease to be king. Therefore, the servitude of his subjects is voluntary. Here’s a paragraph:

Or ce tyran seul, il n’est pas besoin de le combattre, ni de l’abattre. Il est défait de lui-même, pourvu que le pays ne consente point à sa servitude. Il ne s’agit pas de lui ôter quelque chose, mais de ne rien lui donner. Pas besoin que le pays se mette en peine de faire rien pour soi, pourvu qu’il ne fasse rien contre soi. Ce sont donc les peuples eux-mêmes qui se laissent, ou plutôt qui se font malmener, puisqu’ils en seraient quittes en cessant de servir. C’est le peuple qui s’asservit et qui se coupe la gorge ; qui, pouvant choisir d’être soumis ou d’être libre, repousse la liberté et prend le joug ; qui consent à son mal, ou plutôt qui le recherche... S’il lui coûtait quelque chose pour recouvrer sa liberté, je ne l’en presserais pas ; même si ce qu’il doit avoir le plus à cœur est de rentrer dans ses droits naturels et, pour ainsi dire, de bête redevenir homme. Mais je n’attends même pas de lui une si grande hardiesse ; j’admets qu’il aime mieux je ne sais quelle assurance de vivre misérablement qu’un espoir douteux de vivre comme il l’entend. Mais quoi ! Si pour avoir la liberté il suffit de la désirer, s’il n’est besoin que d’un simple vouloir, se trouvera-t-il une nation au monde qui croie la payer trop cher en l’acquérant par un simple souhait ? Et qui regretterait sa volonté de recouvrer un bien qu’on devrait racheter au prix du sang, et dont la perte rend à tout homme d’honneur la vie amère et la mort bienfaisante ? Certes, comme le feu d’une petite étincelle grandit et se renforce toujours, et plus il trouve de bois à brûler, plus il en dévore, mais se consume et finit par s’éteindre de lui-même quand on cesse de l’alimenter, de même, plus les tyrans pillent, plus ils exigent ; plus ils ruinent et détruisent, plus on leur fournit, plus on les sert. Ils se fortifient d’autant, deviennent de plus en plus frais et dispos pour tout anéantir et tout détruire. Mais si on ne leur fournit rien, si on ne leur obéit pas, sans les combattre, sans les frapper, ils restent nus et défaits et ne sont plus rien, de même que la branche, n’ayant plus de suc ni d’aliment à sa racine, devient sèche et morte.

What if they had a war, and nobody went ? It’s the same idea.

Secondly, and this is axiomatically stated, we humans all are equal. It is of course true that we aren’t all the same in body or in mind, but first of all much of that difference should be attributed to environment, rather than nature. Secondly, the basic differences of strength and capability that do exist innately were obviously not given to us by God so that some might dominate others. Rather, our obvious underlying sameness is a sign that we are to practice brotherly love and support one another. Here is another chunk of the text:

Ce qu’il y a de clair et d’évident, que personne ne peut ignorer, c’est que la nature, ministre de Dieu, gouvernante des hommes, nous a tous créés et coulés en quelque sorte dans le même moule, pour nous montrer que nous sommes tous égaux, ou plutôt frères. Et si, dans le partage qu’elle a fait de ses dons, elle a prodigué quelques avantages de corps ou d’esprit aux uns plus qu’aux autres, elle n’a cependant pas voulu nous mettre en ce monde comme sur un champ de bataille, et n’a pas envoyé ici bas les plus forts ou les plus adroits comme des brigands armés dans une forêt pour y malmener les plus faibles. Croyons plutôt qu’en faisant ainsi des parts plus grandes aux uns, plus petites aux autres, elle a voulu faire naître en eux l’affection fraternelle et les mettre à même de la pratiquer, puisque les uns ont la puissance de porter secours tandis que les autres ont besoin d’en recevoir. Donc, puisque cette bonne mère nous a donné à tous toute la terre pour demeure, puisqu’elle nous a tous logés dans la même maison, nous a tous formés sur le même modèle afin que chacun pût se regarder et quasiment se reconnaître dans l’autre comme dans un miroir, puisqu’elle nous a fait à tous ce beau présent de la voix et de la parole pour mieux nous rencontrer et fraterniser et pour produire, par la communication et l’échange de nos pensées, la communion de nos volontés ; puisqu’elle a cherché par tous les moyens à faire et à resserrer le nœud de notre alliance, de notre société, puisqu’elle a montré en toutes choses qu’elle ne nous voulait pas seulement unis, mais tel un seul être, comment douter alors que nous ne soyons tous naturellement libres, puisque nous sommes tous égaux ? Il ne peut entrer dans l’esprit de personne que la nature ait mis quiconque en servitude, puisqu’elle nous a tous mis en compagnie.

The final and most remarkable point made in this short Discourse is something like a sociological theory of autocratic governance.

The king rules because there is a social structure of domination that supports his rule. In short, it is a chain of direct interpersonal fear and greed that ties the whole people to the government of the tyrant. A final substantial quote:

Ce ne sont pas les bandes de gens à cheval, les compagnies de fantassins, ce ne sont pas les armes qui défendent un tyran, mais toujours (on aura peine à le croire d’abord, quoique ce soit l’exacte vérité) quatre ou cinq hommes qui le soutiennent et qui lui soumettent tout le pays. Il en a toujours été ainsi : cinq ou six ont eu l’oreille du tyran et s’en sont approchés d’eux-mêmes, ou bien ils ont été appelés par lui pour être les complices de ses cruautés, les compagnons de ses plaisirs, les maquereaux de ses voluptés et les bénéficiaires de ses rapines. Ces six dressent si bien leur chef qu’il en devient méchant envers la société, non seulement de sa propre méchanceté mais encore des leurs. Ces six en ont sous eux six cents, qu’ils corrompent autant qu’ils ont corrompu le tyran. Ces six cents en tiennent sous leur dépendance six mille, qu’ils élèvent en dignité. Ils leur font donner le gouvernement des provinces ou le maniement des deniers afin de les tenir par leur avidité ou par leur cruauté, afin qu’ils les exercent à point nommé et fassent d’ailleurs tant de mal qu’ils ne puissent se maintenir que sous leur ombre, qu’ils ne puissent s’exempter des lois et des peines que grâce à leur protection. Grande est la série de ceux qui les suivent. Et qui voudra en dévider le fil verra que, non pas six mille, mais cent mille et des millions tiennent au tyran par cette chaîne ininterrompue qui les soude et les attache à lui, comme Homère le fait dire à Jupiter qui se targue, en tirant une telle chaîne, d’amener à lui tous les dieux.

I was prompted to read this because I’ve been reading about les années ’68 in France—it seems that Etienne de la Boétie was quite popular among the student revolutionaries. It makes sense. We are all basically equal; tyranny functions through greed and fear, which is to say the dominance of one person over another; tyranny would cease to exist if we simply refused to obey the tyrant. I’m not sure that the revolutionaries really heard the force of the argument about equality as mutual obligation; maybe they never even got past the first pages and the parts about how all we’ve got to do is stop obeying.

Geuss' realism

Raymond Geuss’ Philosophy and Real Politics [2008] is a highly polemical book. Its position is basically anti-Rawlsian, against bringing the ‘is/ought’ distinction into political philosophy, and articulates itself as beginning with “assumptions that are opposite of the ‘ethics-first’ view.” The position is identified with a Hobbesian tradition. Geuss’ vision of political philosophy is sketched out in the first half of the book, and clarified in fierce opposition of Rawls in particular, but also Nozik, in the second half. Here, I’m going to give the first, programmatic, part of the book in summary form.

Geuss’s four “interrelated theses that…ought to structure a more fruitful approach to politics” (9) are, as slogans, realism, the study of contextualized action, emphasis on the historical location of politics, and finally, the “assumption that…politics is more like the exercise of a craft or art,” than the application of a theory to reality (15). It seems to me that it is the first and last of these four that are potentially problematic. There is nothing remarkable in history and context—the rub always comes in arguing about what constitutes correct or sufficient history and context. Even the emphasis on action, it seems to me, is not unreasonable or immediately problematic.

For Geuss, it seems that realism really means a non-normative opposition to the analysis of ideal reconstructions or models. This is not simply a materialism of interests, although this is important to Geuss, but also, “tautologically,” that “ideals and aspirations influence…behavior and hence are politically relevant, only to the extent to which they do actually influence behavior in some way” (9). Further on, Geuss says that his Hobbesian, realist approach “is centered on the study of historically instantiated forms of collective human action with special attention to the variety of ways in which people can structure and organise their action so as to limit and control forms of disorder that they might find excessive or intolerable for other reasons” (22). I am suspicious of the rhetoric of ‘hard’ realism as opposed to flabby idealism. Yet I am tempted to read all this, especially given the last half of the book, as a polemical move that can safely be treated as more or less internal to political theory as an academic discipline. This is against Rawls; or put differently, it is Skinner against the rarified history of ideas. Now, the notion of politics, or political action, as basically a skill or craft, seems to me to be close to mystification. Geuss says,

a skill is an ability to act in a flexible way that is responsive to features of the given environment with the result that action or interaction is enhanced…One of the signs that I have acquired a skill, rather than that I have been simply mechanically repeating things I have seen others do…is that I can attain interesting and positively valued results in a variety of different and unexpected circumstances. (15-16)

To say that such and such a political actor is successful because they are politically skilled seems to me to have advanced matters no further than the famous old saw about how it is the dormative quality of opium that makes you sleepy. Maybe Geuss wants us to understand that establishing criteria for success, even local ones, is simply not the task of political philosophy? Whose task is it? Is it a pointless, hopeless task? If so, it seems no more pointless than asking why one person is good at playing the piano and another is not, which is after all a question with answers.

Geuss does give us a clear picture of what he thinks the tasks of political philosophy ought to be, but before that, he presents us with a somewhat oddly mixed together set of questions under three basic headings, with which he thinks political philosophical investigation should start and that “map out the realm of politics” (30). He groups these questions under three proper names: Lenin, Nietzsche, and Max Weber (23). Lenin is made to stand for the contextually complex ‘who [does what to] whom [to whose benefit]?’ Further, and tangentially related to this, is the question of the partisanship of political philosophy itself. Essentially Geuss’ position here seems to be that all theory is somehow political, but that this does not require every ‘theorization’ to commence with a political declaration of faith, or even that isometry must exist between a given clutch of interdependent theoretical positions and the political positions to which they correspond (29). The second set of questions, grouped quite loosely under ‘Nietzsche,’ are basically those thrown up around “priorities, preference, timing,” by the assertion (observation?) that “politics as we know it is a matter of differential choice: opting for A rather than B. Thus politics is not about doing what is good or rational or beneficial simpliciter…but about the pursuit of what is good in a particular concrete case by agents with limited powers and resources, where choice of one thing to pursue means failure to choose and pursue another” (30-31). Finally, ‘Weber’ indicates all that is implied by a notion of ‘legitimacy.’ It seems that Geuss wants to step back from Weber’s interest in the ‘legitimate monopoly on violence’ and take legitimacy more generally. Without a sense of how, in a given society at a given moment, legitimation takes place, one cannot “attain a moderately realistic understanding of why a society behaves politically in a certain way” (36).

There are, says Geuss, five basic tasks of political philosophy. The first three are discussed together, and the last two are given a more extended treatment. Political philosophy is to strive for understanding, evaluation, and orientation. It may also play a role in conceptual innovation, and in grappling with ideology. Although Geuss has various interesting things to say about the first three, their interrelation is summed up nicely in a description of the modern condition, “Humans in modern societies are driven by a perhaps desperate hope that they might find some way of mobilising their theoretical and empirical knowledge and their evaluative systems so as both to locate themselves and their projects in some larger imaginative structure that makes sense to them, and to guide their actions to bring about what they would find to be satisfactory…outcomes or to improve in some other way the life they live” (42). Political philosophy may also have a real effect in the world by changing how we think about it. Geuss’ example is the rise of the modern concept of the state, which, he says, had the power it did because it smuggled in alongside its conceptual clarity and explanatory power, certain normative assumptions. We can see historically how, in the aftermath of Hobbes’ invention of the concept of the state, “the ‘tool’ develops a life of its own, and can become an inextricable part of the fabric of life itself” (49). In a nice Hegelian ending, “often you can’t see the original problem clearly until you have the conceptual instrument, but having the instrument can then change the ‘real’ situation with which one is confronted so that other, unforeseen problems emerge” (50). There is, finally, the question of ideology. This is controversial, but Geuss proceeds with clarity, giving us the following definition of ideology, “An ideology…is a set of beliefs, attitudes, preferences, that are distorted as a result of the operation of specific relations of power; the distortion will characteristically take the form of presenting these beliefs, desires, etc., as inherently connected with some universal interest, when in fact they are subservient to particular interests” (52). For Geuss, political philosophy can have different orientations toward a given ideology. Ideology might well enlist in various ways the support of political philosophy—but the latter may also take up the “reputable” task of “analyzing and criticizing” it (55).

Although Geuss makes several interesting moves in the next part of the text, I do not want to enter into it. He essentially sweeps to the side the entire project of a normative, ‘kantian,’ political theory. I will only pull out the following, itself a rather ‘normative’ statement.

Historical arguments…are not in the first instance intended to support or refute a thesis; rather, they aim to change the structure of argument by directing attention to a new set of relevant questions that need to be asked. They are contributions not to finding out whether this or that argument is invalid or poorly supported, but to trying to change the questions people ask about concepts and arguments (68).

Jean-Paul Sartre, antisemite

The argument of Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive is straightforward. Antisemitism is a specific and recognizable psychological posture in the world. It is a reaction against the fundamental human condition of freedom and contingency, and it takes the shape of a synthesizing manichean antirationalism. Antisemitism is, it goes without saying, an inauthentic way of being. Not, for all that, powerless. The most famous phase of Sartre’s argument is that it is ultimately the antisemite who makes the Jew (first clearly state p 83, but see also 112, 123-4, 167, 170, 176). The word and the condition are fixed onto certain human beings, who are thus forced to confront Jewishness as their situation. Many respond inauthentically to their condition, and Sartre, in what is probably the part of the book to which people most object, describes in great detail the various well-known traits of ‘the Jew’ (relation to money, social climbing, and so on) as attempts to disavow and escape their situation. For instance, money is important to (inauthentic) Jews because it is related to abstraction (pp 156-60) and thus to an escape from the particularity thrust upon them. Although there is some typically daring and penetrating psychological analysis here (particularly, I think, around the notion of flesh), this is all very close to the edge of having simply accepted that ‘Jews are that way,’ that is, to have given up a great deal too much already. Although Sartre claims to pass no moral judgment on those unable to live authentically, of course the goal, and the only real way to escape psychological distortion, is to authentically assume both one’s freedom and one’s situation. This is the task of Jews themselves—but, and here Sartre quotes Richard Wright—there isn’t a Jewish problem, there’s an antisemitic problem. Ultimately Sartre feels that only the revolution will genuinely put an end to this—and here is yet another of the series of comparisons between the worker-bourgeois and the jew-antisemite dyads. This was also although I’m not sure Sartre would have known this, Marx’s answer. Until the revolution comes, though, there are many ways to act against antisemitism, but essentially through collective propaganda. Form leagues against antisemitism, make it illegal to say antisemitic things, use the school systems. Make everyone understand that, in a word, antisemitism hurts us all.

In the end, this is a remarkably French-republican response. Of course Sartre is clear that he is speaking specifically about France, the situation of French Jews and French antisemites. Although it would be useful to place this book in Sartre’s broader development, I think it would also be interesting to be precise about the tensions in it between republican-coded universalism (the famous last lines: “Pas de Français ne sera libre tant que les Juifs ne jouiront pas de la plénitude de leurs droits. Pas un Français ne sera en sécurité tant qu’un Juif, en France et dans le monde entier, pourra craindre pour sa vie” p 189) and the drive to the concrete implicit in Sartre’s whole philosophy (here represented by his peculiar notion of “libéralisme concret” p 181). I wonder if this book, written in the immediate aftermath of the war, isn’t really best regarded as a document of Popular Front era non-communist left republicanism.

Since it would be so easy to show in a facile way how Sartre reproduces the antisemitism he sets out to criticize (it would be less easy, but still possible, to do so seriously), I want finally to give a chunk of text from the end of Sartre’s psychological sketch of the inauthentic Jew.

Tel est donc cet homme traqué, condamné à se choisir sur la base de faux problèmes et dans une situation fausse, privé du sens métaphysique par l’hostilité menaçante de la société qui l’entour, acculé à un rationalisme de désespoir. Sa vie n’est qu’une longue fute decant les autres et devant lui-même. On lui a aliéné jusqu’à son propre corps, on a coupé en deux sa vie affective, on l’a réduit à poursuivre dans un monde qui le rejette, le rêve impossible d’une fraternité universelle. A qui la faute ? Ce sont nos yeux qui lui renvoient l’image inacceptable qu’il veut se dissimuler. Ce sont nos paroles et nos gestes – toutes nos paroles et nos gestes, notre antisémitisme mais aussi bien notre libéralisme condescendant – qui l’ont empoisonné jusqu’aux moelles ; c’est nous qui le contraignons à se choisir juif, soit qu’il se fuie, soit qu’il se revendique, c’est nous qui l’avons acculé au dilemme de l’inauthenticité ou de l’authenticité juive. Nous avons créé cette espèce d’hommes qui n’a de sens que comme produit artificiel d’une société capitaliste (ou féodale), qui n’a pour raison d’être que de servir de bouc émissaire à une collectivité encore prélogique. Cette espèce d’hommes qui témoigne de l’homme plus que toutes les autres parce qu’elle est née de réactions secondaires à l’intérieur de l’humanité, cette quintessence d’homme, disgrâciée, déracinée, originellement vouée à l’inauthenticité ou au martyre. Il n’est pas un de nous qui ne soit, en cette circonstance, totalement coupable et même criminel ; le sang juif que les nazis ont versé retombe sur toutes nos têtes. (pp 167-8)

Strong words. This is a species of radical responsibility that, I think, today is entirely without moral force. Certainly the left has been unable to use it to their advantage. ‘Collective responsibility’ has, in general, been kept out of political discourse. It would be good to think about why and how this took place.

Perhaps it is simply so radical and so obviously true that it becomes meaningless. The sharpest formulation: we are all responsible for the system of global exploitation and misery for which the word ‘capitalism’ usually stands. This easily comes to seem like a morally impossible situation. It sounds a great deal like the anarchist justifications for random violence of the 1890s. This would be the beginning of a long discussion of the various life-style leftisms that exist today, and how the very massiveness of the situation makes an essentially aesthetic (not even ethical) response the most apparently sensible one. Although, if I am interested in the difficulty of fusing an ethic of personal freedom and responsibility with a Marxist historical and economic perspective, then I am in danger of sitting down to read The Critique of Dialectical Reason.

unspoken

Scraps of reviews, the blurb on the disk, these suggest that Michael Haneke’s Caché is ‘about’ France and Algeria, or the general guilt of the ‘bobos,’ or both. This must literally be the case, although these themes take on full meaning only when connected with what I suppose must be the other most explicit theme of the film: childhood, understood as a condition in which the capacity to hurt others and accumulate guilt far outstrips self-awareness. The movie also struck me, in a refreshing sense, as a plea for the power of literature, although perhaps it is best simply to say art. By this I mean that, in a sense, the ‘argument’ of the film is that the simple—and within the narrative, never explained—act of recording and presenting, is more than sufficient to generate change. Presentation enforces responsibility, which is then amplified by denial. This is demonstrated most of all through the mysterious tapes and messages, but also repeatedly in other ways, for instance by revelations at a dinner party, or when Majid’s son confronts Georges at work. It is no doubt not simply incidental that both Georges and Anne work literally in the culture industry—she in publishing, he in television—profiting from the success and labor of others, but not themselves involved in production. My impulse is to read the two characters as caught basically in the same trap, although clearly Georges is more disconnected. Certainly one of the more emotionally grueling movies I have recently seen.

Badiou's Ethics

Perhaps reading Being and Event before any of Alain Badiou’s other books means that I read his smaller essays more sympathetically. Certainly, I would have taken a different attitude to the (quite lucid) sketches and condensations of his larger philosophy that Badiou gives here and there in Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, if I did not know in what detail he worked them out earlier.

Verso has bundled together with the essay on ethics a long interview with translator and Badiou scholar/interpreter Peter Hallward. The interview is in some ways quite a different thing, and at first appears tacked-on; however, it answered, or tried to answer, questions about politics that the main essay left me asking. There is also an introduction from Hallward, which on principle I did not read. Judging by the questions that he asks of Badiou in the interview, it’s probably a good introduction. However, since this book already seems to be a kind of introduction to Badiou, I would strongly recommend that new readers go directly to the beginning of the main text.

Badiou writes against the ideology of human rights, in particular the discourse that takes as its organizing point Nazism and the Holocaust. According to this facile way of thinking, he says, evil is self-evident, and the great ethical task is to intervene in the world to stop these evident evils (which tend to be genocides). This whole ‘ethical turn,’ he argues in the first chapter, is a regression from the anti-humanist and specific engagement of the 1960s.

The second chapter is devoted to a critique not so much of Levinas, but of the distortions, simplifications, and misunderstandings of his work that circulate. Interestingly, Badiou takes as fairly obvious that Levinas’ ethics as first philosophy rests on an essentially theological foundation—this is a matter of some debate, and arrived at only painfully in other circles. Badiou argues that it is in fact impossible to attach any permanent rights to humans-as-animals. That is, against Levinas (or a version of him), there are no rights or obligations for others tattooed on our human faces.

For Badiou ethics as a struggle to avoid radical evil, which is how it is usually posed, is a “figure” of nihilism. He makes a series of arguments here, especially having to do with the repeated invocation of the Holocaust as both that which is absolutely singular and also something constantly to be struggled against. In the end, though, his real problem is with ethics as negative. It is not an ethical position, in his view, to simply try to mitigate cases of the most massive human suffering (never mind the enormous potential for self-serving, hypocrisy, and voyeurism inherent in the current way of thinking about this—I wonder what he thinks about Myanmar, about this specific case of ‘human rights interventionism’?). For Badiou, it is only meaningful to understand ethics as somehow a positive imperative, and it is only from this perspective that it is possible to understand Evil.

Now, I myself have run across the argument, which Badiou must always brush aside, that Evil occurs when people try to change the world in radical or utopian ways. This is Arendt; this is any number of less worthy lights from the postwar period. It is either a liberal or a conservative, and in any case a deeply anti-Marxian position. Although I’m not exactly convinced by most of Badiou’s brief comments on historical specifics—for instance: the Terror was really the result of the pressure of external war on the Revolutionary situation—I appreciate the search for a positive ethics, and his courageous acceptance of the principle that with positive ethical imperatives comes positive evil. How does this work?

Only subjects are able to reach (up to) Good, and so also Evil. A subject is not the same as an individual human organism, though they sometimes overlap. A subject is formed always and only through fidelity to an event via a truth-procedure. The fourth chapter of Ethics sets this out in terms of an ethics of this truth-bearing subject—which is infinite in its variety, but may take one of Badiou’s four famous forms of truth: political, scientific, amorous, artistic. Of course all this, and its relation to the event, is central to Badiou’s thinking. The chapter seems to me like a good way in, though I won’t pretend to have grasped things so well as to be able to make such a judgment. At any rate, people who want to know more are referred to Being and Event and other books.

If the Good is thought of in terms of successful fidelity to an event through the bearing of a truth-procedure, ethics will always be specific to the situation of the fidelity. So, again, there is no universal principle, except perhaps that of specificity. For me, there are some problems hooking this into any meaningful analysis of global capitalism—I suspect that for Badiou these analyses would be scientific, and no doubt very important, but would not have the kind of radical meaning that Marxists of an older stripe would give them. This is discussed in the interview, and is something for which (the incorrigible) Zizek has criticized him. Badiou does not privilege economics. The emancipatory struggle must be political. Capital, despite the empirical power that it wields today, should not be granted any metaphysical status. I haven’t decided quite what I think about this yet.

Evil, then, which is related to the Good of the truth-process, is to be understood in terms of a typology of failures of fidelity to the event. This is all set out in the long fifth chapter, and I won’t try to recap it here. Suffice to say that this is where Badiou’s own philosophy does the most work. We end up with three names, or kinds, of Evil. The first is “to believe that an event convokes not the void of the earlier situation, but its plenitude” (71). Badiou here discusses the Nazis, who are after all the inescapable point of reference. It is crucially important for Badiou that Nazism was not fidelity to a real event, but rather was real fidelity to the simulacrum of an event. Rather than practice fidelity to the name of the void of the event (which seems to be 1917—shades of Ernst Nolte?), which is always emancipatory because empty, Nazis were faithful to a plenitude (Aryan-ness) and were therefore obliged to exteriorize the void, especially around the name ‘Jew.’ If one does not embrace and practice fidelity to the void as possibility, then it becomes necessary to eject this void and enforce it around one’s self. In this way, the Evil Nazi subject contained in its essence the genocidal impulse, enforcing the void.

I’m playing a bit fast and loose with Badiou’s vocabulary here, which is dangerous, but this is an excellent example of something that Hallward presses him on in the interview: the void is a concept taken from set theory, and is crucial for Badiou’s ontology. Here it slides very quickly from the ontological to the ontic and goes from being a name for the constitutively nameless to a sort of neologism for killing human animals. Badiou’s answer to Hallward was not, for me, entirely satisfactory.

The next form of Evil—or, rather, name of Evil—is betrayal. This is less well developed than the other names of Evil, and seems to me in fact the most salient one. It can occur when one convinces one’s self that the truth one is practicing is in fact a terror. That is, you betray the fidelity you have been practicing, and, crucially, deny the very possibility of subject-hood associated with it. This is understood as a failure of courage, but it seems to me just as easy to read as an empirically-based decision. This is a major problem, I think, for Badiou—there is no way to know, or test, a truth, since it exists only as it is born by a subject. So how is a well-meaning person to be certain that they are not a Nazi, practicing what appears to be fidelity to the universalizable void of a situation (as, he says, Heidegger briefly and foolishly thought), while in fact they are externalizing the void in order to give place to the particular plenitude? In short, how do we know what is a universalizable and an immortal truth-procedure, and what is a scam? Badiou’s answer seems to be a kind of secular faith, or courage. At a certain point, one must decide.

There’s more to say here, but I want to pause and point out my problem with two sorts of words that Badiou uses that bother me. The first is his mobilization of the universal/particular. This, I think, is justified by, or at least connected to, math. Many systems and modes are universalizable, he suggests. Politics, further, is always about the universal. I’m not certain what the import of these claims are, and especially how one thinks about this universalist impulse within the situation, which is always where his ethics stays. The answer, I suppose, is a kind of ontological proceduralism? It’s the fidelity that is universal, and the subject that is immortal, rather than their content? What does he mean by Immortal? Plato, I think, is the reference point here, but I’m not familiar enough with all that to know what he might be making of it. It seems to me that Immortal is what we in fact are, as subjects, according to Badiou. Humans are different from other animals because they can be subjects of truth, and therefore immortal. Fine, but again I’d like to hear more about—though it sounds ridiculous—the content of this immortality.

The last name of Evil is the disaster—or, the temptation of totality. Again, it seems that this has to do with the void and the nature of the situation. It is an ontological rule that descriptions of situations are not co-extensive with the situation. A disaster is when fidelity to the truth-procedure attempts to name every element of the situation, which in principle cannot be totally named by any language. I believe it is here that Badiou mentions Gödel’s theorem. It is Evil, then, to take one’s fidelity to a truth-procedure, and march it into every corner of the situation. This is to say, no truth is total, and so no one fidelity may be used to organize the entire world. The distinction here is between what Badiou calls ‘opinion,’ which is what we normally use to operate in the world, and the truth-procedure. The first is incoherent and messy, the later is totally consistent. Evil happens with this consistency is enforced.

Especially here at the end, I’m simplifying considerably and stripping away most of Badiou’s language. I’ve signaled most of the places where there seem things left out to me, where gaps or failures seem especially clear. Some of this no doubt comes from my unfamiliarity with the larger body of his work, some no doubt from failure to read well enough. As to whether I think this is a good way of understanding the world...well, this is another question.