Unstable Universalities: Poststructuralism and Radical Politics by Saul Newman

Author:Saul Newman [Newman, Saul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Political Ideologies, Political Science, Political, General
ISBN: 9780719071294
Google: NO3IyAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 13169550
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2007-08-21T00:00:00+00:00

The event of ethics

Badiou’s gripe against ethical ideology is to do with its abstraction – an abstraction which leads to ideological conservatism, nihilism and the obstruction of radical politics. As an alternative to this, he proposes a radical revision of ethics: ethics must be understood in terms of a universal truth-event. As we saw in the preceding chapter, the truth-event, for Badiou, is what de-subjectifies the subject: it is a radical encounter with a universal truth which seizes hold of the subject, taking him ‘out’ of himself and disrupting his normal identity and social existence. Badiou sees ethics as a kind of fidelity to this truth-event – a willingness to think a situation according to the event which conditions it; to follow its path and affirm its consequences. In other words, ethics implies a perseverance of the subject in this truth event: ‘Do all that you can in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you.’20 The typical sites of this ethic of truths, for Badiou, are science, art, love and politics. Ethics in such situations would be a willingness to think through the implications of a scientific breakthrough or recognise the novelty of an artistic innovation; to live one’s life according to an amorous encounter or to proceed along a path invented by a revolution or insurrection, affirming the radical consequences of this event. What is important here is that this ethics of universal truth emerges from singular concrete situations rather than from abstract concerns about human rights and the categorical imperative. These situations are structured around a kind of void, and the event is what emerges from this void, while at the same time tracing its edges. We see that the event here forms the ontological ground for Badiou’s notion of ethics: ethics does not depend on abstract deontological ethical imperatives, but rather on an encounter with a universal truth, and a fidelity to this event whose irruption disturbs the conditions of a normal situation, exposing the contingency of its foundations, the void upon which it rests.

What are we to make of this understanding of ethics, one that seems so different from the Aristotelian desire for the Good or the Kantian categorical imperative? Despite its idiosyncrasy, we can take from it a number of important consequences. First, ethics is a de-subjectifying experience: ethics is not based, in other words, on pre-given, essentialist tendencies in the subject or on some pre-ordained notion of the Good which the subject is supposed to follow. Rather, ethics is what radically disrupts the identity of the subject and takes him out of himself. Secondly, then, ethics takes the form of an event that irrupts in the stable normative order, throwing established forms of knowledge and ideas of the good into disarray; in this sense, it creates a space for ethical and, particularly, political experimentation. Thirdly, ethics is both universal and singular: while the truth-process which forms the ground for ethical experience is universal, the situations in which it emerges are singular and concrete.

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