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Friday, November 30, 2007
Badiou’s Truth
Bear with me here, if you’d be so good; and forgive me my Godwin’s law trespass.
Simon Critchley, in Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance (Verso 2007), discusses what ‘truth’ means to Badiou, starting with what I take to be the Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian way of approaching truth not as ‘the property of a proposition that can be tested or scientifically verified’, but rather as a process of being-in-the-world.
…true is being used here in a manner close to its root meaning of ‘being true to’, or ‘troth’, namely an act of fidelity that is kept alive in the German true, loyal, faithful. For Badiou truth is ‘the real process of fidelity to an event’. [p.43]
The event is a core piece of Badiouan terminology, of course; and Critchley glosses it:
For Badiou we are simply the kinds of animals claimed by circumstances to become a subject … [but] these circumstances cannot be what there is (ce qu’il y a). What there is, what Badiou calls ‘being’ (être) is the sheer multiplicity of the world, a plurality of stuff (facts, states of affairs etc) that cannot be reduced to any single organizing principle, like Spirit in Hegel, Substance in Spinoza, or the multitude in Hardt and Negri. As such the multiplicity of that which is does not place a claim or demand on the subject. A subject … demands something more, it demands that something happens that supplements its place in that which is, or being. [p.45]
This something, or excess, is Badiou’s event; parsed via four conditions (mathematics, politics, art and love) and necessarily infinite. Finite truth he calls ‘veracity’ or ‘veridicity’ (both terms seem to be used interchangeably in the Oliver Feltham translation of Being and Event: I may be missing some subtle distinction between them). Something is ‘veridical’ if it correlates to the ascertainable knowledge; so the statement ‘it is raining outside my window’ is veridical if it is indeed raining outside my window. But this is a finite fact, and the accumulation of all such facts is still, for Badiou, finite; he calls it ‘encyclopedic’. Truth, which is a function of the event, is for him more than finite.
We will term veridical the following statement, which can be controlled by a knowledge: ‘Such a part of the situation is answerable to such an encyclopaedic determinant’. We will term true the statement controlled by the process of fidelity, thus attached to the event and the intervention: ‘Such a part of the situation groups together multiples connected (or unconnected) to the supernumerary name of the event.’ What is at stake in the present argument is entirely bound up in the choice of the adjective ‘true’. [Being and Event p.332]
Seems to me there’s obvious objection to this position from an ethical point of view; since it is also, in a sense, an objection to Heidegger I feel released from the usual interdiction no ethical argument may revert to the Nazis.
The problem with an ethics of fidelity (fidelity-as-truth) is that fidelity itself becomes the point of it; which is to say, that ‘remaining true to’ something becomes more important than acting in one particular way or another. (’If I am ordered to kill these people, I will do it; and if I am ordered to spare them I shall do that; what is more important than whether I kill or do not kill is whether I remain true to my oath as a soldier‘) To put it another way: the problem becomes that loyalty trumps judgement. It seems to me empirically hard to deny that many of the evils of humanity’s past were enabled, in a strong sense, by loyalty. It is probably true that amongst those German soldiers manning the concentration camps were some sadists and psychopaths who took active pleasure from torturing and killing; but not all, indeed not most, of the guards were like that. The majority of such soldiers undertook the distasteful work of murdering Jews precisely in order to ‘be true’ to their word, to be loyal to their commanders and their people; to be faithful to an event—the Hitlerian rebirth of Germany, or more universally Germany’s destiny.
According to this mode of living, the woman who stays with an abusive husband, black-eyed and broken-boned though she be, does so because she is in a meaningful sense being true to him, or to marriage, or to love. The woman who submits to genital mutilation in sub-Saharan Africa is ‘being true to’ her culture. A man who cheats on his wife is ‘being true to’ his physical desire. The British who slaughtered tens of thousands of rebellious Indians in 1857 were being true to the Empire. This idiom of ‘fidelity’ gives us no point of purchase to challenge the very obvious wrongness in all these cases.
Now as I understand it (and I’d be very grateful if readers better acquainted with Being and Event can correct me), Badiou’s thesis would not admit any of the above examples of ‘true’ because according to him truth, and the event, is universal, not local. A man who cheats on his wife may be being veridical to his own urges, but he ought to consider a larger, less selfish fidelity—to marriage. Indeed, Badiou would presumably see not marriage but love as the relevant truth here. I’m not sure what he’d say if the man argued ‘I love my children but I no longer love my wife; so I stay in my marriage for my children’s sake but I cheat on my wife for the sake of love’? Perhaps he’d argue that such an individual, instead of trying to discern the count through the veridicities of his local, subjective situation, should be looking for the universal event. Which is to say, he shouldn’t be trying to parcel out portions of himself in this way; he should be trying to realise truth with his entire being. Or something.
Because the subject is a local configuration of the procedure, it is clear that the truth is equally indiscernible ‘for him’—the truth is global. [Being and Event p.396]
Moreover, the subject being internal to the situation, can only know, or rather encounter, terms or multiples presented (counted as one) in that situation. Yet truth is an un-presented part of that situation. Truth is global. Or as Baddi puts it a little later, ‘Every truth is transcendent to the subject, precisely because the latter’s entire being resides in supporting the realization of truth.’ The way individuals apprehend (and presumably act according to) this faithful sense of truth Badiou calls ‘confidence’.
What does confidence signify? By means of finite enquiries, the operator of fidelity locally discerns the connections and disconnections between multiples of the situation and the name of the event. This discernment is an approximate truth, because the positively investigated terms are to come in a truth. This ‘to come’ is the distinctive feature of the subject who judges. … Belief is solely the following: that the operator of faithful connection does not gather together the chance of the encounters in vain. [p.396]
In other words, the individual tries her best, faithfully, to discern the contours of the event that supports a global, infinite truth; and she works in the confidence that such truth transcends the local (let’s say, selfish or petty) conditions of her being-in-the-world. We could certainly give the adulterous man a severe talking to on that basis.
But tying truth to ‘the event’ in this way seems to me not to address a large class of circumstances that have resulted in prodigious human misery, and that have been rooted precisely in a mass urge to be trothful to a perceived ‘event’. Badiou might say that the Nazi concentration guard’s version of truth is not universal; that it is limited to the German Volk. But it seems to me that this notional guard could reply, confidently and genuinely, in Badiouan terms:
Killing these people is a distressing and unpleasant chore for me; I derive no personal satisfaction. But I do it in order to the faithful to my trust as a soldier, a German and a human being. I have Badiouean confidence that the advent of Hitler’s rule is an event not merely in German history but in global history. Such an event forces a new ethical ground; Hitler like Badiou’s Saint Paul, requires us to act in ways that transcend the subject, with a belief in what-is-to-come. Hitler acts as the ground for an arising or forcing of the subject (surgir du sujet, a ‘subjective certitude that approves of the demand placed upon it’. This surgir du sujet is the leap of faith all Nazi’s must make.
Perhaps it would be better to come up with a non-Nazi example. Let’s say, an American officer in Vietnam who genuinely believes that saving the world from Communism is a universal ethical duty, and the advent of America ‘one nation under God’ constitutes an event, in Badiou’s terms, and who strives genuinely to be faithful to that universal vision, even if it involves the upsetting business of killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese. Or let’s say, one of Stalin’s henchmen, drawing up a list of thousands of innocent people for a purge, who believes deep in himself that what he does is for the longterm good of all mankind. My point is not that any of these people is right—they none of them are. My point is: what means does a Badiouian ethics of Truth and Event gift us to enable us to persuade any of them of their wrongness.
To be clear: I do not (of course) regard the advent of Hitler as an ‘event’, any more than Badiou does. That is not the question. The question is whether our ordinary 1940s German soldier would have been able truthfully—without infidelity—to consider it as an event, and to consider subsequently all the acts he was ordered to perform in the light of remaining trothful to it. By what means we would persuade him otherwise? We might answer ‘hindsight’, but an ethics that can only be judged in hindsight is no use at all. People cannot act solely by the lights of hindsight; they must act in the here and now. Nazism presented itself precisely as a ‘truth transcendent to the subject’; in that, and its ethos of loyalty, sacrifice and fidelity, lay (surely) the strength of its appeal.
Comments
That german sense of truth as faithfulness actually featured in the motto of the Waffen SS, which was “My honor is called faithfulness” (Meine Ehre Heisst Treue).
The trick, in all these theories of the Event, is of course to come up with some method that would exclude Nazism as a possible event. Badiou’s standards can be found in his Ethics, including such things as universality. The fact that a Jew definitionally cannot participate in the Nazi revolution would, for Badiou, exclude Nazism as an event. To the soldier who claimed that it is nevertheless an event, Badiou would simply say, “No, you’re wrong.” Whether this is convincing or not, of course, is up to the reader.
The deeper question here appears to be whether an ethics of fidelity to the Event may be “proto-Fascist” and thus too dangerous to subscribe to. Coincidentally, Zizek’s recent article about Heidegger addresses precisely such questions, and therefore, you may wish to read it (pdf) and write a post about how dangerously wrong Zizek is. (I promise not to start a fight if you do—I’m genuinely trying to provide a service here.)
I appreciate the service, and likewise am not trying to pick a fight. Thanks for the link. I’d say you’re clearly right that Badiou’s objection to my examples would be that they’re not universal. But I don’t really understand, having read Badiou, why ‘universal’ has this privileged place in his ethics, or how we can ever be in a position to assess universality or otherwise, or how this universalism avoids eliding with a neo-colonial globalising impulse. But as you say, different readers will read it differently.
My post here is, fairly obviously, me thinking aloud in response to recently having read Being and Event. Which is to say, problems with the idea of an ethics of fidelity a la Badiou had been bothering me, but only the strength of second-hand accounts of Badiou, so I figured I should at least have a proper read of him. Which I did. Hence the rather obviously feeling-my-way manner here.
Saying “the deeper question here appears to be whether an ethics of fidelity to the Event may be “proto-Fascist” and thus too dangerous to subscribe to“ no doubt responds to the heavy emphasis in my post on Nazism as an example. But that’s not the point I was trying to make. Which is to say I’m afraid that Fascism (because it’s one of my buttons) has skewed what I was saying. The soldier who says ‘what’s important is not whether I kill civilians or not but whether I remain true to my oath as a soldier‘ could just as well be in the Red Army as the Wehrmacht, or in any army. The danger of an ethics of fidelity (namely, to repeat myself, that loyalty trumps judgment) seem to me as much a problem for the left as the right. Rather than write a post on the wrongness of Zizek (blimey: where to start?) maybe I should write a post on how one might validly—genuinely, humanely—live according to an ethics of infidelity. Which is, when I really come to think of it, what I do. Not just in the sense that I am an infidel, although that’s part of it.
I’ve read Ethics but not Being and Event. Badiou discusses Nazism in the former, pages 72-77 (Verso: 2001). It’s pretty clear (if not satisfying to all).
In any example re: Badiou, it’s presumably important to know whether one is primarily in the realm of love, politics, science,or art. Does talking of a soldier’s oath--or of killing civilians--confuse a political question in individual terms (i.e., love).I don’t see fidelity aligning so simply with oaths and contracts, etc.
I can’t imagine anyone who would sign on with Badiou’s ethics in any programmatic, personal way, and then move to negotiate every quandary in relation to eventalism (though of course he writes in a register which seems to demand something like this.) And, you know, the French post-structuralists and their Maoism. They all went through it--maybe not Balibar and Ranciere?
There’s something very reactive in Badiou, in his desire to supercede discourses of Rights and the Other. I find a a lot of value in Badiou; and I do find his thought courageous and affirming (if also swaggering and overblown).
This is one of the finest things I’ve heard a philosopher say about love (I shared it with my partner the moment I came across it in an interview with Badiou):
“As for love, there is nothing mystical or irrational about it. It is the existential construction of a thought of the TWO; it is an intimate and creative experience of difference.”
It ain’t Proust, but I dig it.
Does your wife know about this “ethics of infidelity”?
Ah, but in that sense my infidelity is not to my wife, but to a culture in which sexual promiscuity is normalised and self-realisation is supposed to happen via sexual openness.
From that Zizek piece Adam K. links: “Lacan’s theory, of course, can be used to throw a new light on numerous politico-ideological phenomena, bringing to the light the hidden libidinal economy that sustains them.”
If only I was sure he was joking, the ‘of course’ would transport us into the realms of brilliant wit. As it stands, it sounds a bit complacent.
"Ah, but in that sense my infidelity is not to my wife, but to a culture in which sexual promiscuity is normalised and self-realisation is supposed to happen via sexual openness.”
This kind of thing is a brilliant move, by the way. One can construct an entirely ordinary existence (as a strand of ancient Greek thought suggests, the best kind) out of a series of rebellions against what you are being implicitly urged to do. For instance, “God”, as shown by both the behavior of his locally predominant Christian adherents and their holy writings, evidently wants people to hate others and engage in acts of social authoritarianism; therefore my infidelity to religion can be expressed as an ordinary tolerance of others and willingness to help them. You end up with all the steady virtues, and at the same time can imagine oneself to be a rebel.
I read somewhere, Badiou sees the Chinese Cultural Revolution as “l’evenement”. If that’s true, what is its difference between the Red Guards crushing “capitalist-roaders,” or, fir that mater, people born with in the “wrong” class and the Nazi fanatics attacking Jews?