Badiou. Ethics

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Badiou’s Ethics is the book that inspired this course– it is the reason I think this topic deserves a course and constitutes a distinct mode of inquiry. This is not because I agree unquestioningly with Badiou’s theory of the event– in fact, there is much to question or consider here, and I remain uncertain about the potential for this theory’s application to life. But I think Badiou’s ideas are very important for our course of reading and for our thinking about the possibilities and limits of “the event” as a theoretical concept. Link for the text: https://unmtheorygroup.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/badiou-ethics-an-essay-on-the-understanding-of-evil.pdf Questions for Discussion: Choose 1 Badiou proposes that our contemporary notion of ethics centers on the notions of difference, multiplicity, and the other. Do you agree with this assessment– particularly just from your perspective on popular culture, politics, economics, and social relations in our time? Building on question 1, Badiou’s idea about our contemporary ethics is that an ethics of difference actually produces a kind of conservation of the status quo. His idea seems to be in part that the ethics of human rights is only concerned to apply rights in a way that fails to transform the situation. These applications of rights fail to offer universal projects of truth and only react negatively to what is perceived as evil in the world (i.e. particular violences, abuses of rights, etc.) rather than promoting a positive idea of the good. Do you find these claims about human rights politics convincing? How does Badiou’s idea of a truth-event apply to works like Hamlet or Beloved? Badiou certainly doesn’t seem interested in trauma– what he calls an event here produces the possibility of a decision to remain faithful to a truth that’s revealed. What might we say to either link these texts to his idea of truth-event or to consider what has happened to the idea of trauma within his theory? Badiou’s idea of “the immortal” is one that requires that we live in relation to a positive project of good (rather than just reacting against evil). As such, this vision of ethics seems like an activist one, a philosophy that requires us to become activists. What are the limits or dangers of life lived entirely in relation to activist aims? What happens when we become the “immortals” Badiou describes here?  Is he right that only in such idealist aims we can become something other than animals who are devoted only to living in relation to death (i.e. the body and its duration)? Badiou’s four modes (politics, love, science, art) seem almost like arbitrary distinctions, unnecessary ways of limiting the potential of an event. Can you imagine or think of an alternative mode to these– some framework in which an event might emerge that radically redefines the situation (or status quo) or reveals what the situation has been hiding or excluding (i.e. its void)? Do the modes Badiou has offered us make sense– does it seem possible to imagine how an event might emerge in each of these frameworks or registers? One privileged example of a truth-event would be Paul’s biblical conversion on the road to Damascus. In this moment, everything changes for Paul (including his name), and he suddenly becomes devoted to serving Jesus and the Christian movement. Can you think of another significant example of a transformative moment in which an entirely new subjective orientation (and activism) becomes possible? What would count as an event, for Badiou?