Summary of Alain Badiou (2001) Ethics (pp. 4–29) Sofian Audry ∗ March 27 th , 2011 In the first two chapters of his Ethics , Alain Badiou points to a return to a Kantian conception of ethics which he finds problematic. The recourse to an ethics of difference, which origins in Levinas, isn’t an appropriate answer. In response to these two systems of ethics, Badiou proposes a to think about ethics and truth in a processual manner. 1 Does Man Exist? According to Badiou, following the failure of revolutionary Marxism, the West has returned to a conception of ethics based on the promotion and enforcement of in- dividual rights. These rights of Man are held to be both self-evident and universal. Many intellectuals have thus been “won over to the logic of a capitalist economy and a parliamentary democracy”. (p. 4) This position was criticized, starting in the 1960s, by people such as Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. They contested the “idea of a natural or spiritual identity of Man” proposed by this system of ethics which they believe is only a cover for a self-satisfied, Western-centric conception of Good and Evil. They opposed to it a “death of man” that opens up the possibility of revolution. (p. 5) ∗ Ph. D. candidate, Humanities, Concordia University (#6912680) 1
For Badiou, the ethics of human rights is actually a return to Kant. It presupposes that (p. 9): 1. there is a universal, general human subject 2. ethics precedes politics 3. Evil is derived from the Good (and not the other way around) 4. “ ‘Human rights’ are rights to non-Evil” In this conception, Man is defined first and foremost as a victim or more precisely: “man is the being who is capable of recognizing himself as a victim .” This definition, for Badiou, is deemed unacceptable for three reasons: 1. It reduces man to an animal. (p. 11–13) 2. It presents any “effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good” as the “source of evil itself” because Evil is derived from Good. (p. 13–14) 3. It doesn’t acknowledge the singularity of each situation. (p. 15–16) The author opposes three corresponding theses to these principles (p. 16): 1. Identify Man by what distinguishes him from the animal: his “affirmative thought”, the “singular truths of which he is capable” and his “Immortality”. 2. Identify Evil “from our positive capability for Good” – that is, our ability to make changes, to seize opportunities and refuse conservatism – and not vice- versa. 3. “There is no ethics in general”, all humanity is based on the recognition of “singular situations”. But this conception is still rooted in the “identity of the Subject”. This is why Badiou, in the next chapter, turns his eye on the “ethics of the other”. 2
2 Does the Other Exist? This “ethics of the other” or “ethics of difference” has its origins in the work of Emmanuel L´ evinas. Badiou summarizes L´ evinas’s view (p. 18): Levinas maintains that metaphysics, imprisoned by its Greek origins, has subordinated thought to the logic of the Same, to the primacy of substance and identity. But, according to Levinas, it is impossible to arrive at an authentic thought of the Other (and thus an ethics of the relation to the Other) from the despotism of the Same, which is incapable of recognizing this Other. We must thus turn to a “non-Greek origin” to find another way of thinking. L´ evinas finds it in the Jewish Law which “does not tell me what is, but what is imposed by the existence of others. This Law (of the Other) might be opposed to the laws (of the real).” In other words: “The ‘thou’ [ tu ] prevails over the ‘I’.” (p. 19) For L´ evinas, ethics is “thought which has thrown off its ‘logical’ chains (the principle of identity) in favour of its prophetic submission to the Law of founding alterity.” (p. 20) Proponents of ethics have used this “ethics of difference” as part of a “common- sensical discourse” that opposes tolerance to fanaticism, ethics of difference to racism and recognition of the other to identitarian fixity. This view is “strikingly distant from Levinas’s actual conception of things”. (p. 20) This commonsensical view is thus wrong. But if we turn to the “pure analysis of phenomenal appearing” such as face, caress, love, we still cannot “ground the anti- ontological” thesis of L´ evinas. The phenomenological experience of the other cannot guarantee the ethical experience. (p. 21–22) To bridge the gap, L´ evinas introduces the principle of the “Altogether-Other” [“ Tout-Autre ”] which states that “in order to be intelligible, ethics requires that the Other be in some sense carried by a principle of alterity which transcends mere finite [phenomenological] experience.” (p. 22) 3
Thus, abandoning the greek origin of ethics forces us to think about ethics as a transcendent and therefore religious category (p. 23), the “Altogether-Other” being nothing else than the “ethical name for God” (p. 22) So what happens to this category, asks Badiou, if we try to remove its religious character? We are left, in place of the class truggle, with the preachers of “cultural sociology”. Among them, the “self-declared apostles of ethics and of the ‘right to difference’ [who] are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference ”. The main problem is that the “respect for differences” and the ethics of human rights imply a certain (Western) identity in the first place. (p. 23) It might well be that ethical ideology, detached from the religious teachings which at least conferred upon it the fullness of a ‘revealed’ identity, is simply the final imperative of a conquering civilization: ‘Be- come like me and I will respect your difference.’ ” (p. 24–25) To get out of this problematic conception of the ethics, Badiou proposes to replace the recognition of the Other by the recognition of the Same. “There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple ‘without-one’ [...] is the law of being.” (p. 25) Any experience is an experience of multiple, infinite difference. We are all different from one another and even from oneself. “I am another”, said Rimbaud. 1 (p. 25–26) Contemporary ethics focuses on cultural differences and refuses exclusion. But these difference have no interest for thought because they are only the obvious multi- plicity of human, “as obvious in the difference between me and my cousin from Lyon as it is between the Shi’ite ‘community’ of Iraq and the fat cowboys of Texas.” (p. 26) Culturalism is thus nothing more than an almost tourist’s fascination for the di- versity of habits and religions. Ethical “objectivity” is based on a “vulgar sociology” inherited from colonialism. (p. 26) 1 Note: The translation here seems inappropriate to me. The original phrase from Rimbaud is “Je est un autre” which I would rather translate as “I is another”. [Badiou, 1993] – S. A. 4
Against this view, Badiou proposes a conception of truth that is based on the infinite multiplicity of human being. Since truth is always the “coming-to-be” of something that is not there yet and since differences are what is already there – ie. the rule rather that the exception – thus differences are “precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant”. A truth is “ indifferent to differences ”. Or to put it another way: there are differences, “and such is the way of the world”. (p. 27) The Other doesn’t matter: the difficulty thus lies on the side of the Same, which is “not what is [...] but what comes to be ”. What is common, what is shared, is the truth: “a truth is the same for all .” For Badiou, we are the same in our “immortal being” and in our “capacity for science, love, politics or art”. (p. 28) The ethics of cultural relativism is a mistake because it implies that a “merely contingent state of things can found a Law.” For Badiou, the only ethics possible is the ethics of truth processes, the work through which some truth come into being. Following Lacan, he concludes by stating that ethics “does not exist” just by itself. Ethics is alway the ethics of something because there is not a single Subject but “as many subjects as there are truths” and “as many subjective types as there are pro- cedures of truths”. Badiou identifies four fundamental subjective types: “political, scientific, artistic and amorous [ amoureux ]”. These types coexist but can never be united in a single ethics. (p. 28) References [Badiou, 1993] Badiou, A. (1993). L’´ ethique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal . Op- tiques. Hatier, Poitiers. [Badiou, 2001] Badiou, A. (2001). Ethics: An Essay in the Understanding of Evil . Verso. 5
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