Badiou KBadiou K..........................................................................................................................................1

Notes..............................................................................................................................................3

Shell................................................................................................................................................4

Ethics of the Other Shell.........................................................................................................5

Links................................................................................................................................................9

Ethics....................................................................................................................................10

Embrace Difference..............................................................................................................12

Hegemony.............................................................................................................................14

Human Rights.......................................................................................................................15

Identity Politics.....................................................................................................................18

Include the Other..................................................................................................................23

Language Fluidity..................................................................................................................25

Law.......................................................................................................................................26

AT: Moral Obligation.............................................................................................................27

State......................................................................................................................................28

Terrorism..............................................................................................................................30

Impacts.........................................................................................................................................32

Inequality / capitalism..........................................................................................................33

Nihilism.................................................................................................................................34

War.......................................................................................................................................36

Alternative....................................................................................................................................37

Fidelity to the Event..............................................................................................................38

Solves Oppression.................................................................................................................40

Radical Questioning Key.......................................................................................................42

Situational Ethics Good.........................................................................................................43

2NC Blocks....................................................................................................................................45

AT: Link Turn / Prereq...........................................................................................................46

AT: Perm...............................................................................................................................47

AT: Cede the Political............................................................................................................50

AT: Events are Evil.................................................................................................................52

AT: Realism...........................................................................................................................53

AT: Badiou is Totalizing.........................................................................................................54

AT: Generic Lacan Bad Cards................................................................................................55

AT: Desanti............................................................................................................................57

AT: Laclau..............................................................................................................................58

AT: Nancy..............................................................................................................................59

Affirmative Answers.....................................................................................................................60

Cede the Political..................................................................................................................61

Alt Fails – Capitalism too big.................................................................................................63

Alt fails – impossible.............................................................................................................65

Badiou over universalizes.....................................................................................................66

Badiou – Radical Violence.....................................................................................................67

Permutation..........................................................................................................................69

Badiou = Esoteric / unworldly...............................................................................................70

Nazism DA.............................................................................................................................71

Ethics of Other First..............................................................................................................73

Human Rights Good..............................................................................................................75

NotesWhat does this argument link to? Any affirmative predicated on changing one of our human rights abuses links to this critique. For instance the human rights credibility advantage for the indefinite detention affirmative. Badiou believes that when good liberal politicians act to give us a better HR record, they are only disguising the systematic violence being committed now.

The armed hostilities affirmative would also link to this critique. The affirmative attempts to open western ways of knowing the world to the perspective of Afghani women. Badiou thinks this form of identity politics is incredibly violent. A) It still participates in creating ethical insiders verse ethical outsides (anyone not engaging in the aff’s methodology is the new ethical outsider). B) Ethics don’t account for changing circumstances – Suggesting that the entirety of the occupation of afghanstan should be read as an imperialist occupation ignores the authoritarian rule there previously. c) Victims are portrayed as being helpless beings – drained of their humanity. They are dying, emaciated bodies.

Non-camp related Any affirmative with an ethical obligation impact – Badiou believes that ethics should be made in the situation. Attempts to predetermine our action ignore situational factors that are important for ethical decisions.

Best K links always come from the affirmative evidence. Reading their cards to find examples that fit the argument in the tag will make the link debate much easier.

Shell

Ethics of the Other Shell

‘Respecting difference’ only operates insofar as the other is willing to be integrated into Western modes of thought – all others are characterized as dangerous and expendable.Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 23-25)

What then becomes of this category if we claim to suppress, or mask, its religious character, all the while preserving the abstract arrangement of its apparent constitution (‘recognition of the other’, etc.)? The answer is obvious: a dog’s dinner [de la bouillie pour les chats]. We are left with a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle. Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics and of the 'right to difference' are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference. For them, Mrican customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter of fact, this celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a good other - which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? Respect for differences, of course! But on condition that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment. ... That is to say: I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects , just as I do, the said differences. Just as there can be 'no freedom for the enemies of freedom', so there can be no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences. To prove the point, just consider the obsessive resentment expressed by the partisans of ethics regarding anything that resembles an Islamic 'fundamentalist'. The problem is that the 'respect for differences' and the ethics of human rights do seem to define an identity! And that as a result, the respect for differences applies only to those differences that are reasonably consistent with this identity (which, after all, is nothing other than the identity of a wealthy -albeit visibly declining - 'West' ). Even immigrants in this country [France], as seen by the partisans of ethics, are acceptably different only when they are 'integrated', only if they seek integration (which seems to mean, if you think about it: only if they want to suppress their difference). 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: 'Become like me and I will respect your difference.'

Their ethical stance is just camouflage for cultural domination. Only others who are already compatible with the dominant ideology will be embraced by their ethics. McCarraher, 01 (Eugene teaches humanities at Villanova University Review of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil By Alain Badiou, http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/18/mccarraher2518.html).

While purporting to "respect difference," the acolytes of otherness are "clearly horrified," Badiou observes, "by any vigorously sustained difference." Arguing that genuine difference entails conflict, Badiou contends that "difference" is really a recipe for homogeneity and

consensus. By this token, left-wing militants, along with Christian and Islamic fundamentalists and African practitioners of clitorectomy, are stigmatized as "bad others" and disinvited from those "celebrations of diversity" sponsored in campus halls and advertising agencies. "Good others," on the other hand, exhibit differences that are remarkably consonant with "the identity of a wealthy West." Indeed, with its mantra of "inclusion" and its vagueness about "the exact political meaning of the identity being promoted," identity politics supplies exotic grist for the corporate mills of Western democracies. Thus, in Badiou's view, "difference," cast in the image and likeness of consumerism, joins "rights" as rhetorical camouflage for Western economic and military domination.

Their politically compromised framework allows the West to wage perpetual war on those it considers ethical outsiders.Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223–238 ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477-2876 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals)

From the moment we begin to live indistinctly in the war of democracies against Islamic terrorism, which is

to say, quite simply, the war of Good (democratic) against Evil (dictatorial), operations of war –

expeditions, bombings – don’t need to be any more solemnly announced than do police raids on petty criminals. By the same token, assassinating heads of state, their wives, children, and grandchildren, or putting a

price on their heads like in a western, no longer surprises anyone. Thus, little by little the continuity of war comes to be established, the declaration of which, in times past, showed that, on the contrary, war was the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity renders war and peace indistinguishable. This means that the question of the protagonists of the state of war is more and more obscure. “Terrorists,” “rogue states,” “dictatorships,” “Islamists”: just what are these ideological entities? Who identifies them, who proclaims them? Traditionally, there were two kinds of war: on the one hand, symmetrical war, between comparable imperial powers, like the two world wars of the twentieth century, or like the cold war between the USA and the USSR; on the other hand, non-symmetrical or dissymmetrical wars between an imperial power and popular forces theoretically much weaker in terms of military power – either wars of colonial conquest (the conquest of Algeria, the Rif war, or the extermination of the Indians in North America), or wars of national liberation (Vietnam, Algeria, and so forth). Today, we can talk about dissymmetrical wars, but without the political identity of the

dissymmetry being really conceivable. The proof for this lies in the fact that invasion and occupation operations (Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, and so on) are explicitly presented as liberations – and this despite the fact that the local populations don’t see things in that way at all. In fact, now the concept of war only designates the use of violence, disposed in variable dissymmetries. The only invariable trait is dissymmetry: only the weak are targeted, and as soon as the shadow of power can be seen (North Korea’s atomic bomb, the Russia of brutal extortions in Chechnya, the heavy hand of the Chinese in Tibet), war – war which might risk actually becoming war, and not the

peace of the police, or peace/war (la pe´guerre apre‘s l’apre‘s-guerre?)–is not on the agenda. In fact, if the American wars don’t constitute any kind of present, it’s because, being politically unconnected to any dialectic, whether interimperialist, whether according to the war/revolution schema, they are not really distinguishable from the continuity of “peace.” And by “peace” is meant American, or “western,” peace, democratic peace/war, whose entire content is the comfort of the above-mentioned “democrats” against the barbarian aggressiveness of the poor.

Ethical principles remove us from the urgency of particular needs. We focus on identifying situations that match the rules, rather than imagining a positive vision of the future. This reduces us all to a subhuman mass.

The alternative is to break with such rules and give ourselves over to the particular event—what Badiou calls fidelity to the event. Badiou, 1998 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 14-16)

Every collective will to the Good creates Evil This is sophistry at its most devastating. For if our only agenda is an ethical engagement against an Evil we recognize a priori, how are we to envisage any transformation of the way things are? From what source will man draw the strength to be the immortal that he is? What shall be the destiny of thought, since we know very well that it must be affirmative invention or nothing at all? In reality, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism. The ethical conception of man, besides the fact that its foundation is either biological (images of victims) or 'Western' (the selfsatisfaction of the armed benefactor), prohibits every broad, positive vision of possibilities. What is vaunted here, what ethics legitimates, is in fact the conservation by the so-called 'West' of what it possesses. It is squarely astride these possessions (material possessions, but also possession of its own being) that ethics determines Evil to be, in a certain sense, simply that which it does not own and enjoy [ce qui n 'est pas ce dont elle jouit]. But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and the un-possessed. He is sustained by non-being [non-etant]. To forbid him to imagine the Good, to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him humanity as such. 3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determination of Evil, ethics prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which is the obligatory starting point of all properly human action. Thus, for instance, the doctor won over to 'ethical' ideology will ponder, in meetings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding 'the sick', conceived of in exactly the same way as the partisan of human rights conceives of the indistinct crowd of victims -the 'human' totality of subhuman entities [reels]. But the same doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this particular person is not treated at the hospital, and accorded all necessary measures, because he or she is without legal residency papers, or not a contributor to Social Security. Once again, 'collective' responsibility demands it! What is erased in the process is the fact that there is only one medical situation, the clinical situation,' and there is no need for an 'ethics' (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to understand that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if he deals with the situation according to the rule of maximum possibility -to treat this person who demands treatment of him (no intervention here!) as thoroughly as he can, using everything he knows and with all the means at his disposal, without taking anything else into consideration. And if he is to be prevented from giving treatment because of the State budget, because of death rates or laws governing immigration, then let them send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic duty would oblige him to resist them, with force if necessary. 'Ethical commissions' and other ruminations on 'healthcare expenses' or 'managerial responsibility', since they are radically exterior to the one situation that is genuinely medical, can in reality only prevent us from being faithful to it. For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation. As a

matter of fact, bureaucratic medicine that complies with ethical ideology depends on 'the sick' conceived as vague victims or statistics, but is quickly overwhelmed by any urgent, singular situation of need. Hence the reduction of 'managed', 'responsible' and 'ethical' health-care to the abject task of deciding which sick people the 'French medical system' can treat and which others -because the Budget and public opinion demand it -it must send away to die in the shantytowns of Kinshasa.

Links

Ethics

Ethical rules maintain are an attempt to freeze the current order and are therefore nihilist and deeply conservative. Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 30-34)

The very idea of a consensual 'ethics', stemming from the general feeling provoked by the sight of atrocities, which replaces the 'old ideological divisions', is a powerful contributor to subjective resignation and acceptance of the status quo. For what every emancipatory project does, what every emergence of hitherto unknown possibilities does, is to put an end to consensus. How, indeed, could the incalculable novelty of a truth, and the hole that it bores in established knowledges, be inscribed in a situation without encountering resolute opposition? Precisely because a truth, in its invention, is the only thing that is for all, so it can actually be achieved only against dominant opinions, since these always work for the benefit of some rather than all. These privileged few certainly benefit from their position, their capital, their control of the media, and so on. But in particular, they wield the inert power of reality and time [de la realite et du temps] against that which is only, like every truth, the hazardous, precarious advent of a possibility of the Intemporal. As Mao Tse-tung used to say, with his customary simplicity: 'If you have an idea, one will have to split into two.' Yet ethics explicitly presents itself as the spiritual supplement of the consensus. The 'splitting into two' horrifies it (it smacks of ideology, it's passe . ..). Ethics is thus part of what prohibits any idea, any coherent project of thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle (which, as we have said, does not itself contain any positive idea of humanity). And in the same way, the 'concern for the other' signifies that it is not a matter -that it is never a matter -of prescribing hitherto unexplored possibilities for our situation, and ultimately for ourselves. The Law (human rights, etc.) is always already there. It regulates judgements and opinions concerning the evil that happens in some variable elsewhere. But there is no question of reconsidering the foundation of this 'Law', of going right back to the conservative identity that sustains it. As everyone knows, France -which, under Vichy, approved a law regulating the status of the Jews, and which at this very moment is voting to approve laws for the racial identification of an alleged internal enemy that goes by the name of 'illegal immigrant' [immigre clandestin]; France which is subjectively dominated by fear and impotence -is an 'island of law and liberty'. Ethics is the ideology of this insularity, and this is why it valorizes -throughout the world, and with the complacency of 'intervention' -the gunboats of Law. But by doing this, by everywhere promoting a domestic haughtiness and cowardly self-satisfaction, it sterilizes every collective gathering around a vigorous conception [pensee] of what can (and thus must) be done here and now. And in this, once again, it is nothing more than a variant of the conservative consensus. But what must be understood is that this resignation in the face of (economic) necessities is neither the only nor the worst component of the public spirit held together by ethics. For Nietzsche's maxim forces us to consider that every non-willing (every impotence) is shaped by a will to nothingness, whose other name is: death drive.

The affirmative’s call for universal ethics relies upon assumptions about the ‘victim’ that are fundamentally dehumanizing and necessitates Western domination – only a situational understanding of ethics allows us to escape. Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 11-14)

In the first place, because the status of victim, of suffering beast, of emaciated, dying body, equates man with his animal substructure, it reduces him to the level of a living organism pure and simple (life being, as Bichat says, nothing other than 'the set of functions that resist death').5 To be sure, humanity is an animal species. It is mortal and predatory. But neither of these attributes can distinguish humanity within the world of the living. In his role as executioner, man is an animal abjection, but we must have the courage to add that in his role as victim, he is generally worth little more. The stories told by survivors of torture4 forcefully underline the point: if the torturers and bureaucrats of the dungeons and the camps are able to treat their victims like animals destined for the slaughterhouse, with whom they themselves, the well-nourished criminals, have nothing in common, it is because the victims have indeed become such animals. What had to be done for this to happen has indeed been done. That some nevertheless remain human beings, and testify to that effect, is a confirmed fact. But this is always achieved precisely through enormous effort, an effort acknowledged by witnesses (in whom it excites a radiant recognition) as an almost incomprehensible resistance on the part of that which, in them, does not coincide with the identity of victim. This is where we are to find Man, if we are determined to think him [le penser]: in what ensures, as Varlam Shalamov puts in his Stories of Life in the Camps,s that we are dealing with an animal whose resistance, unlike that of a horse, lies not in his fragile body but in his stubborn determination to remain what he is -that is to say, precisely something other than a victim, other than a being-for-death, and thus: something other than a mortal being. An immortal: this is what the worst situations that can be inflicted upon Man

show him to be, in so far as he distinguishes himself within the varied and rapacious flux of life. In order to think any aspect of Man, we must begin from this principle. So if 'rights of man' exist, they are surely not rights of life against death, or rights of survival against misery. They are the rights of the Immortal, affirmed in their own right, or the rights of the Infinite, exercised over the contingency of suffering and death. The fact that in the end we all die, that only dust remains, in no way alters Man's identity as immortal at the instant in which he affirms himself as someone who runs counter to the temptation of wanting-to-be-an-animal to which circumstances may expose him. And we know that every human being is capable of being this immortal -unpredictably, be it in circumstances great or small, for truths important or secondary. In each case, subjectivation is immortal, and makes Man. Beyond this there is only a biological species, a 'biped without feathers', whose charms are not obvious. If we do not set out from this point (which can be summarized, very simply, as the assertion that Man thinks, that Man is a tissue of truths), if we equate Man with the simple

reality of his living being, we are inevitably pushed to a conclusion quite opposite to the one that the principle of life seems to imply. For this 'living being' is in reality contemptible, and he will indeed be held in contempt. ·Who can fail to see that in our humanitarian expeditions, interventions, embarkations of charitable legionnaires, the Subject presumed to be universal is split? On the side of the victims, the haggard animal exposed on television screens. On the side of the benefactors, conscience and the imperative to intervene. And why does this splitting always assign the same roles to the same sides? Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man? Since the barbarity of the situation is considered only in terms of 'human rights' -whereas in fact we are always dealing with a political situation, one that calls for a political thought practice, one that is peopled by its own authentic actors -it is perceived, from the heights of our apparent civil peace, as the uncivilized that demands of the civilized a civilizing intervention. Every intervention in the name of a civilization requires an initial contempt for the situation as a whole, including its victims. And this is why the reign of 'ethics' coincides, after decades of courageous critiques of colonialism and imperialism, with today's sordid self-satisfaction in the 'West', with the insistent argument according to which the misery of the Third World is the result of its own incompetence, its own inanity -in short, of its subhumanity.2. In the second place, because if the ethical 'consensus' is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone to identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itse1f; such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatized as 'utopian' turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad.

Embrace Difference

*Included in the Ethics of the other Shell

*‘Respecting difference’ only operates insofar as the other is willing to be integrated into Western modes of thought – all others are characterized as dangerous and expendable.Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 23-25)

What then becomes of this category if we claim to suppress, or mask, its religious character, all the while preserving the abstract arrangement of its apparent constitution (‘recognition of the other’, etc.)? The answer is obvious: a dog’s dinner [de la bouillie pour les chats]. We are left with a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle. Our suspicions are first aroused when we see that the self-declared apostles of ethics and of the 'right to difference' are clearly horrified by any vigorously sustained difference. For them, Mrican customs are barbaric, Muslims are dreadful, the Chinese are totalitarian, and so on. As a matter of fact, this celebrated 'other' is acceptable only if he is a good other - which is to say what, exactly, if not the same as us? Respect for differences, of course! But on condition that the different be parliamentary-democratic, pro free-market economics, in favour of freedom of opinion, feminism, the environment. ... That is to say: I respect differences, but only, of course, in so far as that which differs also respects , just as I do, the said differences. Just as there can be 'no freedom for the enemies of freedom', so there can be no respect for those whose difference consists precisely in not respecting differences. To prove the point, just consider the obsessive resentment expressed by the partisans of ethics regarding anything that resembles an Islamic 'fundamentalist'. The problem is that the 'respect for differences' and the ethics of human rights do seem to define an identity! And that as a result, the respect for differences applies only to those differences that are reasonably consistent with this identity (which, after all, is nothing other than the identity of a wealthy -albeit visibly declining - 'West' ). Even immigrants in this country [France], as seen by the partisans of ethics, are acceptably different only when they are 'integrated', only if they seek integration (which seems to mean, if you think about it: only if they want to suppress their difference). 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: 'Become like me and I will respect your difference.'

Emphasizing difference is useless—we are all different in an infinite number of ways, making the category of the “other” hopeless. Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 26-27)

Contemporary ethics kicks up a big fuss about 'cultural' differences. Its conception of the 'other' is informed mainly by this kind of differences. Its great ideal is the peaceful coexistence of cultural, religious, and national 'communities', the refusal of 'exclusion'. But what we must

recognize is that these differences hold no interest for thought, that they amount to nothing more than the infinite and self-evident multiplicity of humankind, 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. The objective (or historical) foundation of contemporary ethics is culturalism, in truth a tourist's fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs. And in particular, for the irreducible medley of imaginary formations (religions, sexual representations, incarnations of authority ...). Yes, the essential 'objective' basis of ethics rests on a vulgar sociology, directly inherited from the astonishment of the colonial encounter with savages. And we must not forget that there are also savages among us (the drug addicts of the banlieues, religious sects -the whole journalistic paraphernalia of menacing internal alterity), confronted by an ethics that offers, without changing its means of investigation, its 'recognition' and its social workers. Against these trifling descriptions (of a reality that is both obvious and inconsistent in itself), genuine thought should affirm the following principle: since differences are what there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant. No light is shed on any concrete situation by the notion of the 'recognition of the other'. Every modern collective configuration involves people from everywhere, who have their different ways of eating and speaking, who wear different sorts of headgear, follow different religions, have complex and varied relations to sexuality, prefer authority or disorder, and such is the way of the world.

Hegemony

Hegemony saves lives only very selectively—millions are allowed to die from AIDS while mass interventions are justified if US interests are threatened in even a small way. The result is violence without limit. Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223–238 ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477-2876.)

In fact, the United States is an imperialist power without an empire, a hegemony without territoriality. I propose the term “zoning” [zonage] to convey its relation to the world: every place in the world can be considered by the American government as a zone of vital interest, or as a zone of total disinterest, according to fluctuations in the consideration of its “democratic” comfort. You could die by the thousands without America raising an eyebrow (thus, for years, AIDS in Africa), or, on the other hand, have to endure the build-up of a colossal army in the middle of the desert (Iraq today). Zonage means that American military intervention resembles a raid much more than a colonial-type intervention. It’s about vast incursions, particularly brutal in nature, that are as brief as possible. Kill people in large numbers, beat them into a stupor, smash them until their last gasp, then return home to enjoy the comfort you’ve so skillfully defended in a provisionally “strategic” zone: this is how the USA thinks about its power, and about how to use it. The time will certainly come for us to conceptualize this assertion: the metaphysics of American power is a metaphysics of limitlessness. The great imperial theories of the nineteenth century were always theories of dividing, dividing up the world, creating boundaries. For the USA, there are no limits. Nixon’s advisers, as Noam Chomsky points out, were already proclaiming this under the name of “the politics of the madman.” The USA must impose upon the rest of the world the belief that it – the United States – is capable of anything, and especially of what is neither rational nor foreseeable. The excessive quality of the interventions aims at getting the adversary to realize that the American retaliation can be totally unrelated to what was initially at stake. The adversary will deem it preferable to concede management of the disputed zone, for a time, to the “mad” power. The invasion of Iraq, currently under preparation, is a figure of that madness. It shows that, for American governments, there are neither countries, nor States, nor peoples. There are only zones, where one is justified in destroying everything if there is, in those zones, the slightest question of the idea – an empty one, besides – of American comfort.

Human Rights

Human rights stands in cooperation with conservative power—all those who oppose rights are labeled as terrorists to be exterminated.Meister 02 [Robert, Professor of Philosophy @ UC Santa Cruz, “Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 16, Iss. 2, pg. 91, proquest]

This theme in much of present-day Human Rights Discourse is most directly understandable as an effort to depoliticize the unresolved victim-beneficiary issues of the revolutionary/counterrevolutionary politics that drove the Cold War. It seeks to represent these issues as superseded by a moral consensus on the means used to resolve them: violent or nonviolent, constitutional or "terrorist.''12 The political effect of recent Human Rights Discourse is to marginalize as "terrorists" those on both sides of the old conflict who are still willing to fight on. Terrorism-the remnant of twentieth-century "inhumanity"-is now the phenomenon against which all civilized nations in the twenty-first century can agree to make "war." The main point, today, of calling a movement or regime "terrorist" is to drain it of its twentieth-century political content and context. Indeed, struggles for political and/or cultural autonomy that might recently have claimed the mantle of human rights are now described (looking forward) as morally equivalent to crimes against humanity insofar as they engage in acts of "terror" or are hesitant in condemning terrorism elsewhere. In its new proximity to power, the mainstream human rights establishment speaks with increasing hostility toward movements that it might once have sought to comprehend. As we begin this new century, Human Rights Discourse is in danger of devolving from an aspirational ideal to an implicit compromise that allows the victims of past injustice a moral victory on the understanding that the ongoing beneficiaries get to keep their gains without fear of terrorism. The movement aims, of course, to persuade the passive supporters of the old order to abjure illegitimate means of counterrevolutionary politics-the repressive and fraudulent techniques of power that they once condoned or ignored. Insofar as the aim is also to reconcile these passive supporters (including many beneficiaries) with the victims of past injustice, it nevertheless advances the counterrevolutionary project by other means. The new culture of respect for human rights would, thus, reassure the beneficiary that the (former) victim no longer poses this threat, and maybe never did. For the victim who was morally undamaged and/or subsequently "healed," the past would be truly over once its horrors were acknowledged by national consensus. This sought-after consensus on the moral meaning of the past comes at the expense, however, of cutting off future claims that would normally seem to follow from it. To put the point crudely, the cost of achieving a moral consensus that the past was evil is to reach a political consensus that the evil is past. In practice, this political consensus operates to constrain debate in societies that regard themselves as "recovering" from horrible histories. It means that unreconciled victims who continue to demand redistribution at the expense of beneficiaries will be accused of undermining the consensus that the evil is past; it also means that continuing beneficiaries who act on their fears that victims are still unreconciled will be accused of undermining the consensus that the past was evil by "blaming the victim.' Indeed, the substantive meaning of evil itself has changed in the human rights culture that is widely believed to have superseded the Cold War. "Evil" is no longer widely understood to be a system of social injustice that can have ongoing structural effects, even after the structure is dismantled. Rather, evil is described as a time that is past-or can be put in the past. The present

way that born-again adherents to human rights address surviving victims of past evil is to project a distinction between the "good" (undamaged) and "bad" (unreconciled or recalcitrant) members of the victimized groups. To the extent that the emergent human rights project aims to enlist the support of the good victims in repressing the bad victims as terrorists (and/or criminals, depending on the type of judicial process they will receive), it is, prima facie, a continuation, by other means, of the twentieth-century project of counterrevolution.

The politics of human rights justifies massive violence—the powerful can wage wars against the inhuman masses lying outside the circle of rights holders. Meister 02 [Robert, Professor of Philosophy @ UC Santa Cruz, “Human Rights and the Politics of Victimhood,” Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 16, Iss. 2, pg. 91, proquest]

The anti-messianic message of the Human Rights Discourse is not entirely the program of peace and reconciliation that it might seem to be on the surface. It is, also, a declaration of war against a new enemy. Carl Schmitt first pointed this out in his criticism of the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, outlawing war. "The solemn declaration of outlawing war," he asserted, "does not abolish the friend-enemy distinction, but, on the contrary, opens new possibilities by giving an international hostis declaration new content and new vigor."30 This criticism applied equally, in Schmitt's view, to the human rights consensus expressed by the Treaty of Versailles, in 1919, which established the League of Nations: When a state fights its political enemy in the name of humanity it...seeks to usurp a universal concept against its military opponent ... in the same way that one can misuse peace, justice, progress, and civilization in order to claim these as one's own and to deny the same to the enemy.31 Although Schmitt's own political agenda, which led to a defense of Nazism, is ultimately despicable, he nevertheless provides a helpful guide to the ideological significance of Human Rights Discourse at a moment of U.S. military and economic hegemony at the end of the Cold War. This move is, as he well understood, a way to create new political alliances by shifting enemies. The underlying intent of such an international consensus to protect human rights is not to assert a selfconfident universality, but rather to represent what Schmitt called "a potential or actual alliance, that is, a coalition."32 In the present conjuncture, he is worth quoting at length on this point: It is...erroneous to believe that a political position founded on economic superiority is "essentially unwarlike"... [It] will naturally attempt to sustain a worldwide condition which enables it to apply and manage, unmolested, its economic means, e.g., terminating credit, embargoing raw materials, destroying the currencies of others, and so on. Every attempt of a people to withdraw itself from the effects of such "peaceful methods" is considered by this imperialism as extraeconomic power.... Modern means of annihilation have been produced by enormous investments of capital and intelligence, surely to be used if necessary.33 Schmitt anticipated the rhetorical demands that Human Rights Discourse would place on liberal politicians still fighting, as Woodrow Wilson did, "to make the world safe for democracy"-but now in the name of a "world community" defending "humanity" as such. As he explains: For the application of such means, a new and essentially pacifist vocabulary has been created. War is condemned but executions, sanctions, punitive expeditions, pacifications, protection of treaties, international police, and measures to assure peace remain. The adversary is thus no longer called an enemy but a disturber of peace and is thereby designated to be an outlaw of humanity.... But this allegedly non-political... system cannot escape the logic of the political.34 Schmitt's analysis, above, might be read today as a forecast: Although we are now able to fight wars only on the condition that they are not

described as such, these wars do not thereby "escape the logic of the political." Schmitt's powerful critique of the depoliticizing project of what was, in his time, the precursor to Human Rights Discourse went some way toward repoliticizing it, at least in Weimar Germany. Perhaps because of his own dalliance in the politics of victimhood in its most pernicious form, Schmitt did not fully understand a deeper implication of his own argument: that adopting a Human Rights Discourse gives survivors of past barbarity the consciousness of victims. It is they, the newly vulnerable, who must now be protected from being violated by the "inhuman." "Whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat; ' Schmitt says. "To... invoke and monopolize such a term probably has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity."35

Rights are designed for passive victims in need of state protection. True ethics emerge in particular situations and cannot be derived from a pre-determined principle.Barker 02 ( Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 138)

Clearly, then, these subtractions from ethics exclude all the usual founding assumptions about the human being as the possessor of certain inalienable rights. Any such rights merely amount to the right not to be (offended, mistreated, threatened. tortured, etc.). With Badiou, this standard conception of right is clearly nothing of the kind, and depends rather on the lack of an infinite set of particular rights. Ethics must therefore begin, not with abstractions which would seek to distinguish between primary and secondary rights, but from the concrete demands of any given situation. Following the Hegelian and Maoist models, then: from the particular to the universal. There is also a debt to Spinoza in Badiou's approach to ethics, since if the 'human animal' is 'convened by circumstances to become subiect', 'to enter into the composition of a subject’ (E, 37), then it also enters the realm of freedom (libera) and necessity where a thing acts according to the force of its very own reason. However, for Badiou the circumstances of becoming are not ultimately the circumstances of the ordinary, everyday world (what Spinoza calls 'nature'). The subject - which ordinarily is not - in order to surpass itself (its indifferent nature) in becoming what it is, must harness the historical supplement of the truth-event (E, 38). Henceforth, for the duration of its existence (in this new realm of being), the subject is compelled to think or act (it's the same thing now) in a way which is unique to the (new) situation where it finds itself. As we have already seen, this procedure where, in a set of historical circumstances, the subject manages to rally selflessly to the enterprise of truth is called ‘fidelity’. Singularity, therefore, is where ethics must begin, since ethics always involves the new emergence of a subject (E, 38-40). Finally, the consensus surrounding what is or is not, does or does not involve ethics, can have no part of and gain no access to truth. Ethics is a constriction, must be constructed, in the here and now. It is not concerned with founding a universal law of human conduct, and so takes no account of the possible negative consequences that a given set of principles may inadvertently unleash.

Identity Politics

Identity politics are the ultimate basis of banal homogeneity-endless numbers of groups will demand recognition and will only be marked as ready for capitalist targeting, such as distinctive fashion or a specialty magazine.Badiou '03 (Alain. Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, p.9-11)

Our world is in no way as "complex’ as those who wish to ensure Its perpetuation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple -J On the one hand, there is an extension of the automatisms of capital, fulfilling one of Marx's inspired predictions: the world finally configured!, but as a market, as a world-market. This configuration imposes the rule of an abstract homogenization. Everything that circulates falls under the unity of a count, while inversely, only what lets itself be counted in this way can circulate Moreover, this is the norm that illuminates a paradox few have pointed out: in the hour of generalized circulation and the phantasm of instantaneous cultural communication, laws and regulations forbidding the circulation of persons are being multiplied everywhere. So. it is that in France, never have fewer foreigners settled than in the recent period! Free circulation of what lets itself be counted, yes, and above all of capital, which is the count of the count. Free circulation of that uncountable infinity constituted by a singular human life, never! For capitalist monetary abstraction is certainly a singularity, but a singularity that has no consideration fir any singularity whatsoever: singularity as indifferent to the persistent infinity of existence as is to the eventual becoming of truths. On the other side, there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation. Both processes are perfectly intertwined. For each identification (the creation or cobbling together of identity) creates a figure that provides a material for its investment by the market. There is nothing more captive, so far as commercial investment is concerned, nothing more amenable to the invention of new figures of monetary homogeneity, than a community and its territory or territories. The semblance of nonequivalence is required so that equivalence itself can constitute a process. What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge- taking the form to communities demanding recognition and so called cultural singularities – of women, homosexuals, and disabled Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims married priests, ecologist yuppies, the sub save unemployed, prematurely aged youth! Each time, a social image authorizes new products, specialized magazines, improved shopping malls, "free" radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady "public debates" at peak viewing times. Deleuze put it perfectly: capitalist deterritorialization requires a constant reterritorialization. Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action: identities . Moreover, that never demand anything but the right to be exposed in the same way as others to the uniform prerogatives of the market. The capitalist logic of the general equivalent and the identitarian and cultural logic of communities or minorities form an articulated whole. This articulation plays a constraining role relative to every truth procedure. It is organic ally without truth .

Identity politics is a contradiction in terms. Identity can never be the foundation for liberation because true politics must search for the universal. Revaluation of the whole system is the pre-requisite to their project. Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis / London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy).

The very notion of identity politics is thus an explicit contradiction in terms. The OP regularly condemns the articulation of a “'French' identity that authorizes discrimination or persecution” of any kind; the only legitimate national unit is one that counts all of its elements as one, regardless of ethnocultural particularity. 26 The left-liberal insistence on the vacuous “right to remain 'the same as ourselves' has no chance against the abstract universality” of contemporary capital, and does nothing more than “organize an inclusion in what it pretends to oppose.” 27 Of course, it has often been argued that if we are oppressed as Arab, as woman, as black, as homosexual, and so on, this oppression will not end until these particular categories have been revalued. 28 Badiou's response to this line of attack is worth quoting at length: When I hear people say, “We are oppressed as blacks, as women, ” I have only one problem: what exactly is meant by “black” or “women”? … Can this identity, in itself, function in a progressive fashion, that is, other than as a property invented by the oppressors themselves? … I understand very well what “black” means for those who use that predicate in a logic of differentiation, oppression, and separation, just as I understand very well what “French” means when Le Pen uses the word, when he champions national preference, France for the French, exclusion of Arabs, etc…. Negritude, for example, as incarnated by Césaire and Senghor, consisted essentially of reworking exactly those traditional predicates once used to designate black people: as intuitive, as natural, as primitive, as living by rhythm rather than by concepts, etc…. I understand why this kind of movement took place, why it was necessary. It was a very strong, very beautiful, and very necessary movement. But having said that, it is not something that can be inscribed as such in politics . I think it is a matter of poetics, of culture, of turning the subjective situation upside down. It doesn't provide a possible framework for political initiative. The progressive formulation of a cause that engages cultural or communal predicates, linked to incontestable situations of oppression and humiliation, presumes that we propose these predicates, these particularities, these singularities, these communal qualities, in such a way that they become situated in another space and become heterogeneous to their ordinary oppressive operation. I never know in advance what quality, what particularity, is capable of becoming political or not; I have no preconceptions on that score. What I do know is that there must be a progressive meaning to these particularities, a meaning that is intelligible to all. Otherwise, we have something that has its raison d'être, but that is necessarily of the order of a demand for integration, that is, of a demand that one's particularity be valued in the existing state of things….

All forms of identity politics are enemies of truth. The test of true ethics is very simple: it is either based on a universal that applies to all or it is not.Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis / London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy).

Every invocation “of custom, of community, works directly against truths” (E, 67; cf. PP, 19). Badiou rejects categorically the idea that true understanding is a function of belonging to a given community. This idea results in “catastrophic statements, on the model: only a homosexual can 'understand' what a homosexual is, only an Arab an Arab, etc.” (SP, 13). No community, be it real or virtual, corresponds to philosophy, and all genuine philosophy is characterized by the “indifference of its address, ” its lack of explicit destination, partner, or disciple. Mindful of Heidegger's notorious political engagement, Badiou is especially wary of any effort to “inscribe philosophy in history” or identify its appeal with a particular cultural tradition or group (C, 85, 75–76). Philosophy and communal specificity are mutually exclusive: “Every particularity is a conformation, a conformism, ” whereas every truth is a nonconforming. Hence the search for a rigorously generic form of community, roughly in line with Blanchot's communauté inavouable, Nancy's communauté désoeuvrée, and Agamben's coming community, so many variations of a pure presentation without presence. 89 The only community consistent with truth would be a “communism of singularities, ” a community of “extreme particularity.” 90 Nothing is more opposed to the truth of community than knowledge of a communitarian substance, be it French, Jewish, Arab, or Western. As Deleuze might put it, philosophy must affirm the necessary deterritorialization of truth. “I see nothing but national if not religious reaction, ” Badiou writes, “in the use of expressions like 'the Arab community,' 'the Jewish community,' 'the Protestant community.' The cultural idea, the heavy sociological idea of the self-contained and respectable multiplicity of cultures …, is foreign to thought. The thing itself, in politics, is acultural, as is every thought and every truth.” 91 What may distinguish Badiou's critique of the communal is the rigor with which he carries it through to its admittedly unfashionable conclusion: “The whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other must be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question—and it is an extraordinarily difficult one—is much more that of recognizing the Same.” 92 An ontology of infinite multiplicity posits alterity—infinite alterity—as the very substance of what is. So, “differences being what there is, and every truth being the coming to be of that which is not yet, differences are then precisely what every truth deposes, or makes appear insignificant.” Difference is what there is; the Same is what comes to be, as truth, as “indifferent to differences” (E, 27). True justice is either for all or not at all.

The affirmative claim to save a particular identity group is what Badiou calls a simulacrum of the truth. Simulacrums are dangerous because they create an “us” of ethical insiders vs a “them” of outsiders. This is the root of war, racism, and genocide. Only a search for universals that we refuse to impose on others can be emancipatory. Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 73-77)

What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of a truth -which is the only thing that can be for all, and can be eternally -is precisely the fact that it relates to the particularity of a situation only from the bias of its void. The void, the multiple-of-nothing, neither excludes nor constrains anyone. It is the absolute neutrality of being, such that the fidelity that originates in an event, although it is an immanent break within a singular situation, is none the less universally addressed. By contrast, the striking break provoked by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, although formally indistinguishable from an event -it is precisely this that led Heidegger astray5 -since it conceives itself as a 'German' revolution, and is faithful only to the alleged national

substance of a people, is actually addressed only to those that it itself deems 'German'. It is thus right from the moment the event is named, and despite the fact that this nomination ('revolution') functions only under the condition of true universal events (for example the Revolutions of 1792 or 19I7) -radically incapable of any truth whatsoever. When a radical break in a situation, under names borrowed from real truth-processes, convokes not the void but the 'full' particularity or presumed substance of that situation, we are dealing with a simulacrum of truth. 'Simulacrum' must be understood here in its strong sense: all the formal traits of a truth are at work in the simulacrum. Not only a universal nomination of the event, inducing the power of a radical break, but also the 'obligation' of a fidelity, and the promotion of a simulacrum of the subject, erected -without the advent of any Immortal above the human animality of the others, of those who are arbitrarily declared not to belong to the communitarian substance whose promotion and domination the simulacrumevent is designed to assure. Fidelity to a simulacrum, unlike fidelity to an event, regulates its break with the situation not by the universality of the void, but by the closed particularity of an abstract set [ensemble] (the 'Germans' or the 'Aryans'). Its invariable operation is the unending construction of this set, and it has no other means of doing this than that of 'voiding' what surrounds it. The void, 'avoided' [chassel by the simulacrous promotion of an 'event-substance', here returns, with its universality, as what must be accomplished in order that this substance can be. This is to say that what is addressed 'to everyone' (and 'everyone', here, is necessarily that which does not belong to the German communitarian substance for this substance is not an 'everyone' but, rather, some 'few' who dominate 'everyone') is death, or that deferred form of death which is slavery in the service of the German substance. ¶ Hence fidelity to the simulacrum (and it demands of the 'few' belonging to the German substance prolonged sacrifices and commitments, since it really does have the form of a fidelity) has as its content war and massacre. These are not here means to an end: they make up the very real [tout le Tliel] 6 of such a fidelity. In the case of Nazism, the void made its return under one privileged name in particular, the name ‘Jew'. There were certainly others as well: the Gypsies, the mentally ill, homosexuals, communists.... But the name ‘Jew' was the name of names, serving to designate those people whose disappearance created, around that presumed German substance promoted by the 'National Socialist revolution' simulacrum, a void that would suffice to identify the substance. The choice of this name relates, without any doubt, to its obvious link with universalism, in particular with revolutionary universalism -to what was in effect already void [vide] about this name -that is, what was connected to the universality and eternity of truths. Nevertheless, inasmuch as it served to organize the extermination, the name ‘Jew' was a political creation of the Nazis, without any pre-existing referent. It is a name whose meaning no one can share with the Nazis, a meaning that presumes the simulacrum and fidelity to the simulacrum -and hence the absolute singularity of Nazism as a political sequence. But even in this respect, we have to recognize that this process mimics an actual truth-process. Every fidelity to an authentic event names the adversaries of its perseverance. Contrary to consensual ethics, which tries to avoid divisions, the ethic of truths is always more or less militant, combative. For the concrete manifestation of its heterogeneity to opinions and established knowledges is the struggle against all sorts of efforts at interruption, at corruption, at the return to the immediate interests of the human animal, at the humiliation and repression of the Immortal who arises as subject. The ethic of truths presumes recognition of these efforts, and thus the singular operation of naming enemies. The 'National Socialist revolution' simulacrum encouraged nominations of this kind, in particular the nomination of Jew'. But the simulacrum's subversion of the true event continues with these namings. For the enemy of a true subjective fidelity is precisely the closed set [ensemble], the substance of the situation, the

community. The values of truth, of its hazardous course and its universal address, are to be erected against these forms of inertia. Every invocation of blood and soil, of race, of custom, of community, works directly against truths; and it is this very collection [ensemble] that is named as the enemy in the ethic of truths. Whereas fidelity to the simulacrum, which promotes the community, blood, race, and so on, names as its enemy -for example, under the name of 'jew' -precisely the abstract universality and eternity of truths, the address to all. Moreover, the two processes treat what is thus named in diametrically opposite ways. For however hostile to a truth he might be, in the ethic of truths every 'some-one' is always represented as capable of becoming the Immortal that he is. So we may fight against the judgements and opinions he exchanges with others for the purpose of corrupting every fidelity, but not against his person -which, under the circumstances, is insignificant, and to which, in any case, every truth is ultimately addressed. By contrast, the void with which those who are faithful to a simulacrum strive to surround its alleged substance must be a real void, obtained by cutting into the flesh itself. And since it is not the subjective advent of an Immortal, so fidelity to the simulacrum -that appalling imitation of truths -presumes nothing more about those they designate as the enemy than their strictly particular existence as human animals. It is thus this existence that will have to bear the return of the void. This is why the exercise of fidelity to the simulacrum is necessarily the exercise of terror. Understand by terror, here, not the political concept of Terror, linked (in a universalizable couple) to the concept of Virtue by the Immortals of the Jacobin Committee of Public Safety, but the pure and simple reduction of all to their being-for death. Terror thus conceived really postulates that in order to let [the] substance be, nothing must be [pour que La substance soit, rien ne doit etre]. I have pursued the example of Nazism because it enters to a significant extent into that 'ethical' configuration (of 'radical Evil') opposed by the ethic of truths. What is at issue here is the simulacrum of an event that gives rise to a political fidelity. Such a simulacrum is possible only thanks to the success of political revolutions that were genuinely evental (and thus universally addressed). But simulacra linked to all the other possible kinds of truth-processes also exist. The reader may find it useful to identity them. For example, we can see how certain sexual passions are simulacra of the amorous event. There can be no doubt that on this account they bring with them terror and violence. Likewise, brutal obscurantist preachings present themselves as the simulacra of science, with obviously damaging results. And so on. But in each case, these violent damages are unintelligible if we do not understand them in relation to the truth-processes whose simulacra they manipulate. In sum, our first definition of Evil is this: Evil is the process of a simulacrum of truth. And in its essence, under a name of its invention, it is terror directed at everyone.

Include the Other

*Included in the Ethics of the other Shell

*Their ethical stance is just camouflage for cultural domination. Only others who are already compatible with the dominant ideology will be embraced by their ethics. McCarraher, 01 (Eugene teaches humanities at Villanova University Review of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil By Alain Badiou, http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/18/mccarraher2518.html).

While purporting to "respect difference," the acolytes of otherness are "clearly horrified," Badiou observes, "by any vigorously sustained difference." Arguing that genuine difference entails conflict, Badiou contends that "difference" is really a recipe for homogeneity and consensus. By this token, left-wing militants, along with Christian and Islamic fundamentalists and African practitioners of clitorectomy, are stigmatized as "bad others" and disinvited from those "celebrations of diversity" sponsored in campus halls and advertising agencies. "Good others," on the other hand, exhibit differences that are remarkably consonant with "the identity of a wealthy West." Indeed, with its mantra of "inclusion" and its vagueness about "the exact political meaning of the identity being promoted," identity politics supplies exotic grist for the corporate mills of Western democracies. Thus, in Badiou's view, "difference," cast in the image and likeness of consumerism, joins "rights" as rhetorical camouflage for Western economic and military domination.

The ethics of difference are irrelevant – Dwelling on difference must be abandoned to search for universals. Johnston, 02 (Theory and Event, Confronting the New Sophists, 6:2 | © 2002 Adrian Johnston, Book Review of Jason Barker, Alian Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2002), Adrian Johnston recently received his Ph.D. in philosophy at SUNY Stony Brook. He is presently an interdisciplinary research fellow in psychoanalysis at Emory University). In the continental philosophical tradition ever since Levinas, an ethics of the "difference of the Other" has predominated to the point of effectively crowding out any serious alternative. Proponents of this stance adamantly insist that the root of all evils is a lack of sufficient and proper respect for the differences of others. This bit of academic dogma reflects a broader popular ideology of (multi)culturalism: once people become comfortable with each other's lifestyles and tastes, things will be just fine. In his Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Badiou launches a scathing attack on the ethics of difference . A passage from this text offers the finest summary of his position: The objective (or historical) foundation of contemporary ethics is culturalism, in truth a tourist's fascination for the diversity of morals, customs and beliefs. And in particular, for the irreducible medley of imaginary formations (religions, sexual representations, incarnations of authority....). Yes, the essential 'objective' bias of ethics rests on a vulgar sociology, directly inherited from the astonishment of the colonial encounter with savages (Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil [trans. Peter Hallward], London: Verso, 2001, pg. 26.) Badiou continues:Against these trifling descriptions (of a reality that is both obvious and inconsistent in itself), genuine thought should affirm the following

principle: since differences are what there is, and since every truth is the coming-to-be of that which is not yet, so differences are then precisely what truths depose, or render insignificant. No light is shed on any concrete situation by the notion of the 'recognition of the other.' Every modern collective configuration involves people from everywhere, who have their different ways of eating and speaking, who wear different sorts of headgear, follow different religions, have complex and varied relations to sexuality, prefer authority or disorder, and such is the way of the world (pg. 27). “Difference" as such isn't worthy of the labor of thinking, being what is most obvious and immediately given in today's globalized living spaces. Instead, the challenge to "think the same," to grasp what is true for all and thus what should be dignified as universal, is increasingly more relevant and pressing in contemporary socio-political contexts.

The notion of ‘obligation to the other’ must be abandoned – we are all different in an infinite number of ways, making their category useless Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 25-26)

The truth is that, in the context of a system of thought that is both a-religious and genuinely contemporary with the truths of our time, the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned. For the real question -and it is an extraordinarily difficult one - is much more that of recognizing the Same. Let us posit our axioms. There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple 'without-one' -every multiple being in its sum nothing other than a multiple of multiples - is the law of being. The only stopping point is the void. The infinite, as Pascal had already realized, is the banal reality of every situation, not the predicate of a transcendence. For the infinite, as Cantor demonstrated with the creation of set theory, is actually only the most general form of multiple-being [etre-multiple]. In fact, every situation, inasmuch as it is, is a multiple composed of an infinity of elements, each one of which is itself a multiple. Considered in their simple belonging to a situation (to an infinite multiple), the animals of the species Homo sapiens are ordinary multiplicities. What, then, are we to make of the other, of differences, and of their ethical recognition? Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences. Even the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations, and Rimbaud was certainly not wrong when he said: 'I am another.' There are as many differences, say, between a Chinese peasant and a young Norwegian professional as between myself and anybody at all, including myself. As many, but also, then, neither more nor less.

Language Fluidity

The notion that language orders truth is merely modern sophistry that seeks to undermine reason and the universality of truthsBadiou 1992 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Manifesto for Philosophy, p. 116-117)

Let me add that in my view this definition is itself an historic invariant. It is not a definition in terms of a result, or the production of a loss of sense. It is an intrinsic definition enabling one to distinguish philosophy from what is not philosophy, and this, since Plato. It can also be distinguished from what is not philosophy but what resembles it, resembles it a great deal, and which, since Plate, we call sophistry. This question of sophistry is very important. The sophist is from the outset the enemy-brother, philosophy’s implacable twin. Philosophy today, caught in its historicist malaise, is very weak in the face of modern sophists. Most often, it even considers the great sophists – for there are great sophists – as great philosophers. Exactly as if we were to consider that the great philosophers of Antiquity were not Plato and Aristotle, but Gorgias and Protagoras. An argument which is moreover increasingly defended, and often brilliantly, by modern historiographers of Antiquity. Who are the modern sophists? The modern sophists are those that, in the footsteps of the great Wittgenstein, maintain that thought is held to the following alternative: either effects of discourse, language games, or the silent indication, the pure ‘showing’ of something subtracted from the clutches of language. Those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between truth and error or wandering, but between speech and silence, between what can be said and what is impossible to say. Or between statements endowed with meaning and other devoid of it. In many regards, what is presented as the most contemporary philosophy is a potent sophistry. It ratifes the final statement of the Tractatus – “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” – whereas philosophy exists only to defend that the whereof one cannot speak is precisely what it sets out to say. The objection will be raised that, in its essential movement, contemporary discourse itself also claims to break with historicism, at least in its Marxist or Humanist form; that is goes against the ideas of progress and the avant-garde; that it declares, along with Lyotard, that the epoch of the Grand Narratives if over. To be sure. But this discourse only draws from its ‘postmodernist’ rebuttal a kind of general equivalence of discourses, a rule of virtuosity and obliquity. It attempts to compromise the very idea of truth in the fall of historic narratives. Its critique of Hegel is actually a critique of philosophy itself, to the benefit of art, or Right, or an immemorial or unutterable Law. This is why it must be said that this discourse, which adjusts the multiplicity of the registers of meaning to some silent correlate, is nothing but modern sophistry. That such a completely productive and virtuosic discourse should be taken for a philosophy demonstrates the philosophers inability today to practice a firm, founding delimitation between him- or herself and the sophist.

Law

The law cannot be the site of the event. The law fixes identity and politics ahead of time—the event can only emerge from unfixed struggle.

Pluth, 99 (The Pauline Event? 3:3, Ed, Review of Alain Badiou, St. Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme, doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy

at Duquesne University, Johns Hopkins University Press, p)

Yet Badiou finds that there is something in Paul's work that resists this tendency. What exactly made the universality of Paul's project distinct from the constitution of a new identity? We

have already seen one aspect of it that makes for this difference: the maintaining of a disjunctive "no...but." According to Badiou, the constitution of an identity articulates a pseudo-universality on the basis of a law that is always only partial (85). Universality, he claims, should be "organically connected to the contingence of what happens to us" (85). 6 The false universality of law is one that gives place to everything in advance -- it distributes and fixes regions of identity. Thus it excludes the event , Badiou's name for "the contingence of what happens to us." The law, if it poses as a universality, is always a partial universality, a universality of placement and designation: in other words, of identification. The universality of a truth-process, however, is not particularzing. The deciding question is: where is the force of universality coming from? Does it come from the contingency and perpetual resistance of the event within the situation, or does it ground itself on the placings that stem from the law of the situation? If it is the former, then the One is proceeding from the event, and is adressed to everyone. If the latter, it comes from the law, and only promotes the dominance of one group over others. Hence Badiou's first of eight theorems derived from the work of St. Paul: "There is only a One for everyone, and it proceeds not from the law, but from the event" (85).

AT: Moral Obligation

A priori ethical rules are nonsense—true ethics can only take place at a distance from the state and in particular contexts. We need to search for the egalitarian lessons of each situation—what Badiou calls “fidelity to the event.”Ling, 06 (Alex, University of Melbourne, www.cosmosandhistory.org 359 Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006, BOOK REVIEW).

In point of fact the whole of contemporary ethics—derisively designated by the author as ‘the ethical ideology’—appears in Badiou’s eyes to be little more than a vast synonym for negativity: today’s ‘ethical ideology’ is a fundamentally statist edifice whose principle role is to ‘[prohibit] any idea, any coherent project of thought, settling instead for overlaying unthought and anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle’ (E 32-33). The task is then, reductively speaking, to invent a new ethics which would radically circumvent the state’s authority. And, by happy coincidence, it is precisely this sort of circumvention that Badiou’s philosophy has been offering all along. Setting himself then firmly at odds with the dominant ‘ethics of otherness’ Badiou contrarily asserts his own ethics as fundamentally of the subject and accordingly (it means the same thing) as not of the other but of the same. Of course we need remember here that for Badiou the subject is neither transcendental nor substantial, but is rather a ‘finite local configuration’—albeit one touched by immortality—convoked through an (aleatory, unknowable) event. This means precisely (once again, in Badiouian terms) that his subjective ethics is equivalent to an ethic of truth(s)—which is what the event gives rise to—or of the same—which, emanating from the situational void (and thus from what is in-different to all situations and hence properly universal) is what truth is. To this effect Badiou’s is a philosophy that strictly opposes any a priori concept of ethicality: ‘there is no ethics in general’ he tells us, ‘there are only—eventually—ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation’ (E 16). Further, as Badiou’s subject only comes into being by virtue of a singular event—an event which is strictly immanent to a particular situation—and subsists only by maintaining a militant fidelity to the truth of the event, his subjective ethics is then ultimately a situated ethics, that is, an ethics of the situation. In sum—and in stark contrast to the contemporary understanding of ethics as natural, objective, a priori, a-situational and fundamentally of the other—Badiou’s ethics are of the event, of the subject, of truth, of the situation, and of the same.

State

Egalitarian politics of resistance to capitalism are possible when the state is held at a distance.Badiou, 2005 (http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm, Appears in Metapolitics, New York: Verso, 2005, Alain Badiou, • Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy, translated Barbara Fulks).

At the moment that the political procedure exists, up to the point of the prescription on the State, then, and then only, can the logic of the same be deployed, that is to say the egalitarian maxim, proper for every politics of emancipation. The egalitarian maxim is effectively incompatible with the errancy of state excess. The matrix of inequality is precisely that the excess power of the State cannot be measured. Today, for example, all egalitarian politics are rendered impossible and declared absurd in the name of a necessity of the liberal economy without measure or concept. But what characterizes this blind power of unchained Capital is precisely that at no point is this power measurable or fixed. What one knows is only that it weighs absolutely on the subjective destiny of collectives, such as they are. Consequently, in order that a politics can practice an egalitarian maxim in the sequence opened by an event, it is absolutely necessary that the state of the situation be put at a distance by a rigid calculation of its power. The inegalitarian conscience is a deaf conscience, captive of an errancy, captive of a power of which it has no measure. It is what explains the arrogant and peremptory character of inegalitarian statements, even if they are evidently inconsistent and abject. It is that these statements of the contemporary reaction are entirely supported by the errancy of state excess, that is to say by the violence deployed entirely by the capitalist anarchy. It is why liberal statements represent a mix of certitude in regard to the power and total indecision about what is important for the life of people and the universal affirmation of collectives. The egalitarian logic cannot be broached except when the State is configured, put at a distance, measured. It is the errancy of excess which obstructs egalitarian logic and not the excess itself. It is not at all the simple power of the state of the situation which interdicts egalitarian politics. It is the obscurity and the without-measure in which this power is enveloped. If the political event authorizes a clarification, a calculation, a demonstration of this power, then, at least locally, the egalitarian maxim is practicable.

Our alternative can only succeed by maintaining its distance from the state. Politics must be conceived of as the search for a universal that is uncompromised by political calculations. Badiou, 05 (http://www.lacan.com/badtruth.htm, Appears in Metapolitics, New York: Verso, 2005, Alain Badiou, • Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy, translated Barbara Fulks).

The representation of the State through power , in the case of public power, indicates on the one hand its excess, and on the other the indeterminacy, or errancy, of this excess. We all know that the political, when it exists, instigates manifestations of the power of the State. It is evident in that the political is collective, and thus universally concerns parts of the situation, which is the field of existence of the state of the situation. The political - and it is the only procedure of truth to do it directly- convokes the power of the State . The ordinary figure of this

convocation is that the political always coincides with repression. But repression, which is the empirical form of the errant excess of the State, is not the essential point. The true characteristic of the political event and of the procedure of truth which it activates is that a political event fixes the errancy, assigns a measure to the excess power of the State, fixes the power of the State. As a consequence, the political event interrupts the subjective errancy of the power of the State. It constructs the state of the situation. It gives it shape; it gives shape to its power, it measures its power. Empirically this means that when there is a truly political event, the State shows itself. It shows its excess of power, the repressive dimension . But it shows also a measure of this excess which in ordinary times does not let itself be seen because it is essential to the normal functioning of the State that its power remain without measure, errant, unassignable. The political event puts an end to all that by assigning a visible measure to the excessive power of the State. The political puts the State at a distance, in the distance of its measure. The apathy of non-political time is maintained by the State's not being at a distance, because the measure of its power is errant. We are captives of its unassignable errancy. The political is the interruption of this errancy, it is the demonstration of a measure of State power. It is in this sense that the political is "liberty." The State is in effect a bondage without measure of the parts of the situation, a bondage of which the secret is precisely the errancy of the excess power, its absence of measure. Liberty is here to set a distance from the State, through the collective fixation of a measure of excess. And if the excess is measured, it is because the collective can measure it. At the moment that the political procedure exists, up to the

point of the prescription on the State, then, and then only, can the logic of the same be deployed, that is to say the egalitarian maxim, proper for every politics of emancipation. The egalitarian maxim is effectively incompatible with the errancy of state excess. The matrix of inequality is precisely that the excess power of the State cannot be measured. Today, for example, all egalitarian politics are rendered impossible and declared absurd in the name of a necessity of the liberal economy without measure or concept. But what characterizes this blind power of unchained Capital is precisely that at no point is this power

measurable or fixed. What one knows is only that it weighs absolutely on the subjective destiny of collectives, such as they are. Consequently, in order that a politics can practice an egalitarian maxim in the sequence opened by an event, it is absolutely necessary that the state of the situation be put at a distance by a rigid calculation of its power. The inegalitarian conscience is a deaf conscience, captive of an errancy, captive of a power of which it has no measure . It is what explains the arrogant and peremptory character of inegalitarian statements, even if they are evidently inconsistent and abject. It is that these statements of the contemporary reaction are entirely supported by the errancy of state excess, that is to say by the violence deployed entirely by the capitalist anarchy. It is why liberal statements represent a mix of certitude in regard to the power and total indecision about what is important for the life of people and the universal affirmation of collectives. The egalitarian logic cannot be broached except when the State is configured, put at a distance, measured. It is the errancy of excess which obstructs egalitarian logic and not the excess itself . It is not at all the simple power of the state of the situation which interdicts egalitarian politics. It is the obscurity and the without-measure in which this power is enveloped. If the political event authorizes a clarification, a calculation, a demonstration of this power, then, at least locally, the egalitarian maxim is practicable .

Terrorism

The war on terrorism creates a simplistic division into rigid categories of Good and Evil that resist investigation of the causes of violence. Such thoughtlessness generates perpetual warfare. Badiou, 02 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Theory and Event, 6:2, “Philosophical Considerations of Some Recent Facts”).

It must be said that today, at the end of its semantic evolution, the word "terrorist" is an intrinsically propagandistic term. It has no neutral readability. It dispenses with all reasoned examination of political situations, their causes and their consequences. In fact, it is a term that has become essentially formal. No longer does "terrorist" designate either a political orientation or the possibilities of such and such a situation, but rather, and exclusively, the form of the act. And it does so according to three criteria. It is first and foremost -- for public opinion and those concerned with shaping it -- a spectacular, non-State action, which emerges from clandestine networks, really or mythologically. Secondly, it is a violent action aiming to kill and/or destroy. Lastly, it is an action which makes no distinction between civilians and non-civilians. This formalism goes hand-in-hand with Kant's moral formalism. That is the reason why a "moral philosophy" specialist like Monique Canto believed she could declare that the absolute condemnation of "terrorist" actions and the symmetrical approval of reprisals, including those of Sharon in Palestine, could and should precede all critical examination of the situation and be abstracted from general political consideration. As it is a matter of "terrorism", explained this iron lady of a new breed, to explain is

already to justify. It is convenient to punish without delay and without further examination. Henceforth, "terrorism" qualifies an action as being the formal figure of Evil. That is exactly, moreover, the way Bush conceived of the expenditure of vengeance right from the start: Good (factually speaking, State terrorism of villages and ancient cities of Central Asia) against Evil (non-State terrorism of "Western" buildings). At this crucial point, as all rationality risks folding beneath the immensity of such propagandistic evidence, one must be careful to be sure of the details and, in particular, to examine the effects of the nominal chain induced by the passage from the adjective "terrorist" -- as the formal qualification of an action -- to the substantive "terrorism". Indeed, such is the moment when, insidiously, form becomes substance. Three kinds of effect are thereby rendered possible: a subject-effect (facing "terrorism" is a "we" avenging itself); an alterity-effect (this "terrorism" is the other of Civilisation, the barbarous Islam); and finally, a periodisation-effect (now commences the long "war against terrorism").... My thesis is that, in the formal representation it makes of itself, the American imperial power privileges the form of war as an attestation -- the only one -- of its existence. Moreover, one observes today that the powerful subjective unity that carries (away) the Americans in their desire for vengeance and war is constructed immediately around the flag and the army. The United States has become a hegemonic power in and through war: from the civil war, called the war of Secession (the first modern war by its industrial means and the number of deaths); then the two World Wars; and finally the uninterrupted continuation of local wars and military interventions of all kinds since the Korean War up until the present ransacking of Afghanistan, passing via Lebanon, the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Libya, Panama, Barbados, the Gulf War, and Serbia, not to mention their persistent support for Israel in its war without end against the Palestinians. Of course, one will hasten to add that the USA won the day in the Cold War against the USSR on the terrain of military rivalry (Reagan's Star Wars project pushed the Russians to throw in the towel) and are understood to be doing the same thing against China, by the imposition of an exhausting armament race (that is the only sense of the pharaoh-like anti-missile shield project) by means of which one hopes to discourage any project of great magnitude. This should remind us, in these times of economic obsession, that in the last instance power continues to be military. Even the USSR, albeit it ruined, insofar as it was considered as an important military power (and above all by the Americans), continued to co-direct the world. Today the USA has the monopoly on the aggressive financial backing of enormous forces of destruction, and does not hesitate to serve itself with them. And the consequences of that can be seen, including (notably) in the idea that the American people has of itself and of what must be done. Let's hope that the Europeans -- and the Chinese -- draw the imperative lesson from the situation: servitude is promised to those who do not

watch carefully over their armed forces. Being forged in this way out of the continual barbarity of war -- leaving aside the genocide of the Indians and the importation of tens of millions of black slaves -- the USA quite naturally considers that the only riposte worthy of them is a spectacular staging of power. Truly speaking, the adversary matters little and may be entirely removed from the initial crime. The pure capacity to destroy this or that will do the job, even if at the end

what is left is a few thousand miserable devils or a phantomatic "government". Provided, in sum, that the appearance of victory is overwhelming, any war is convenient. What we have here (and will also have if the USA continues in Somalia and in Iraq etc.,) is war as pure form, as the theatrical capture of an adversary ("Terrorism") in its essence vague and elusive. The war against nothing: itself removed from the very idea of war.

Impacts

Inequality / capitalism

Promoting human rights and democracy as the only viable politics allows millions to die from brutal inequalities. And, their demand that we have a more specific alternative dooms us to maintaining status quo power relations.Badiou, 02 (Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland Translated/Interviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php, On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).

Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parlimentarianism, as the only natural and acceptable solutions. Every revolutionary idea is considered utopian and ultimately criminal. We are made to believe that the global spread of capitalism and what gets called "democracy" is the dream of all humanity. And also that the whole world wants the authority of the American Empire, and its military police, NATO. In truth, our leaders and propagandists know very well that liberal capitalism is an inegalitarian regime, unjust, and unacceptable for the vast majority of humanity. And they know too that our "democracy" is an illusion: Where is the power of the people? Where is the political power for third world peasants, the European working class, the poor everywhere? We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian–where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone–is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we're lucky that we don't live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it's better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it's not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don't make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don't cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc. That's why the idea of Evil has become essential. No intellectual will actually defend the brutal power of money and the accompanying political disdain for the disenfranchised, or for manual laborers, but many agree to say that real Evil is elsewhere. Who indeed today would defend the Stalinist terror, the African genocides, the Latin American torturers? Nobody. It's there that the consensus concerning Evil is decisive. Under the pretext of not accepting Evil, we end up making believe that we have, if not the Good, at least the best possible state of affairs—even if this best is not so great. The refrain of "human rights" is nothing other than the ideology of modern liberal capitalism: We won't massacre you, we won't torture you in caves, so keep quiet and worship the golden calf. As for those who don't want to worship it, or who don't believe in our superiority, there's always the American army and its European minions to make them be quiet.

Nihilism

The affirmative’s ethical demands are nihilistic – their pathos relies on disaster fetishism and a silent pleasure in witnessing Evil.Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 34-35)

We should be more struck than we usually are by a remark that often recurs in articles and commentaries devoted to the war in the former Yugoslavia: it is pointed out -with a kind of subjective excitement, an ornamental pathos -that these atrocities are taking place 'only two hours by plane from Paris' . The authors of these texts invoke, naturally, all the 'rights of man', ethics, humanitarian intervention, the fact that Evil (thought to have been exorcized by the collapse of 'totalitarianisms') is making a terrible comeback. But then the observation seems ludicrous: if it is a matter of ethical principles, of the victimary essence of Man, of the fact that 'rights are universal and imprescriptible', why should we care about the length of the flight? Is the 'recognition of the other' all the more intense if this other is in some sense almost within my reach? In this pathos of proximity, we can almost sense the trembling equivocation, halfway between fear and enjoyment, of finally perceiving so close to us horror and destruction, war and cynicism. Here ethical ideology has at its disposal, almost knocking on the protected gates of civilized shelter, the revolting yet delicious combination of a complex Other (Croats, Serbs, and those enigmatic 'Muslims' of Bosnia) and an avowed Evil. History has delivered the ethical dish to our very door. Ethics feeds too much on Evil and the Other not to take silent pleasure in seeing them close up (in a silence that is the abject underside of its prattle)(For at the core of the mastery internal to ethics is always the power to decide who dies and who does not) Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death . And it is certainly true that in so far as we deny truths, we thereby challenge the immortal disjunction that they effect in any given situation. Between Man as the possible basis for the uncertainty [alia] of truths, or Man as being-for death (or being-for-happiness, it is the same thing), you have to choose. It is the same choice that divides philosophy from 'ethics', or the courage of truths from nihilism.

Only the alternative can escape the smug nihilism of the affirmative’s ethics that demand brutal domination and desire for catastrophe.Badiou, 98 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 37-39)

The root of the problem is that, in a certain way, every definition of Man based on happiness is nihilist. It is clear that the external barricades erected to protect our sickly prosperity have as their internal counterpart, against the nihilist drive, the derisory and complicit barrier of ethical commissions. When a prime minister, the political eulogist of a civic ethics, declares that France 'cannot welcome [accueillir] all the misery of the world', he is careful not to tell us about the criteria and the methods that will allow us to distinguish the part of the said misery that we welcome from that part which we will request -no doubt from within detention centres -to return to its place of death, so that we might continue to enjoy those unshared riches which, as we know, condition both our happiness and our 'ethics'. And in the same way, it is certainly

impossible to settle on stable, 'responsible', and of course 'collective' criteria in the name of which commissions on bio-ethics will distinguish between eugenics and euthanasia, between the scientific improvement of the white man and his happiness, and the elimination 'with dignity' of monsters, of those who suffer or become unpleasant to behold. Chance, the circumstances of life, the tangle of beliefs, combined with the rigorous and impartial treatment without exception of the clinical situation, is worth a thousand times more than the pompous, made-for-media conscription of bio-ethical authorities [instances] -a conscription whose place of work, whose very name, have a nasty smell about them. IV Ethical nihilism between conservatism and the death drive Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition for the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our 'Western' position -the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy [economie objective sauvage] with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life -or again, that dooms what is to the 'Western' mastery of death. This is why ethics would be better named -since it speaks Greek -a 'eu-oudenose', a smug nihilism. Against this we can set only that which is not yet in being, but which our thought declares itself able to conceive. Every age -and in the end, none is worth more than any other - has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names ('ethics', for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe. It is only by declaring that we want what conservatism decrees to be impossible, and by affirming truths against the desire for nothingness, that we tear ourselves away from nihilism. The possibility of the impossible, which is exposed by every loving encounter, every scientific re-foundation, every artistic invention and every sequence of emancipatory politics, is the sole principle -against the ethics of living well whose real content is the deciding of death - of an ethic of truths.

War

*Included in the Ethics of the Other Shell

*Their politically compromised framework allows the West to wage perpetual war on those it considers ethical outsiders.Badiou 04 (Alain, FRAGMENTS OF A PUBLIC DIARY ON THE AMERICAN WAR AGAINST IRAQ Vol. 8, No. 3 Summer 2004, pp. 223–238 ISSN 1740-9292 print/ISSN 1477-2876 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals)

From the moment we begin to live indistinctly in the war of democracies against Islamic terrorism, which is

to say, quite simply, the war of Good (democratic) against Evil (dictatorial), operations of war –

expeditions, bombings – don’t need to be any more solemnly announced than do police raids on petty criminals. By the same token, assassinating heads of state, their wives, children, and grandchildren, or putting a

price on their heads like in a western, no longer surprises anyone. Thus, little by little the continuity of war comes to be established, the declaration of which, in times past, showed that, on the contrary, war was the present of a discontinuity. Already, this continuity renders war and peace indistinguishable. This means that the question of the protagonists of the state of war is more and more obscure. “Terrorists,” “rogue states,” “dictatorships,” “Islamists”: just what are these ideological entities? Who identifies them, who proclaims them? Traditionally, there were two kinds of war: on the one hand, symmetrical war, between comparable imperial powers, like the two world wars of the twentieth century, or like the cold war between the USA and the USSR; on the other hand, non-symmetrical or dissymmetrical wars between an imperial power and popular forces theoretically much weaker in terms of military power – either wars of colonial conquest (the conquest of Algeria, the Rif war, or the extermination of the Indians in North America), or wars of national liberation (Vietnam, Algeria, and so forth). Today, we can talk about dissymmetrical wars, but without the political identity of the

dissymmetry being really conceivable. The proof for this lies in the fact that invasion and occupation operations (Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, and so on) are explicitly presented as liberations – and this despite the fact that the local populations don’t see things in that way at all. In fact, now the concept of war only designates the use of violence, disposed in variable dissymmetries. The only invariable trait is dissymmetry: only the weak are targeted, and as soon as the shadow of power can be seen (North Korea’s atomic bomb, the Russia of brutal extortions in Chechnya, the heavy hand of the Chinese in Tibet), war – war which might risk actually becoming war, and not the

peace of the police, or peace/war (la pe´guerre apre‘s l’apre‘s-guerre?)–is not on the agenda. In fact, if the American wars don’t constitute any kind of present, it’s because, being politically unconnected to any dialectic, whether interimperialist, whether according to the war/revolution schema, they are not really distinguishable from the continuity of “peace.” And by “peace” is meant American, or “western,” peace, democratic peace/war, whose entire content is the comfort of the above-mentioned “democrats” against the barbarian aggressiveness of the poor.

Alternative

Fidelity to the Event

Ethical principles remove us from the urgency of particular needs. We focus on identifying situations that match the rules, rather than imagining a positive vision of the future. This reduces us all to a subhuman mass.

The alternative is to break with such rules and give ourselves over to the particular event—what Badiou calls fidelity to the event. Badiou, 1998 (Alain, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, 14-16)

Every collective will to the Good creates Evil This is sophistry at its most devastating. For if our only agenda is an ethical engagement against an Evil we recognize a priori, how are we to envisage any transformation of the way things are? From what source will man draw the strength to be the immortal that he is? What shall be the destiny of thought, since we know very well that it must be affirmative invention or nothing at all? In reality, the price paid by ethics is a stodgy conservatism. The ethical conception of man, besides the fact that its foundation is either biological (images of victims) or 'Western' (the selfsatisfaction of the armed benefactor), prohibits every broad, positive vision of possibilities. What is vaunted here, what ethics legitimates, is in fact the conservation by the so-called 'West' of what it possesses. It is squarely astride these possessions (material possessions, but also possession of its own being) that ethics determines Evil to be, in a certain sense, simply that which it does not own and enjoy [ce qui n 'est pas ce dont elle jouit]. But Man, as immortal, is sustained by the incalculable and the un-possessed. He is sustained by non-being [non-etant]. To forbid him to imagine the Good, to devote his collective powers to it, to work towards the realization of unknown possibilities, to think what might be in terms that break radically with what is, is quite simply to forbid him humanity as such. 3. Finally, thanks to its negative and a priori determination of Evil, ethics prevents itself from thinking the singularity of situations as such, which is the obligatory starting point of all properly human action. Thus, for instance, the doctor won over to 'ethical' ideology will ponder, in meetings and commissions, all sorts of considerations regarding 'the sick', conceived of in exactly the same way as the partisan of human rights conceives of the indistinct crowd of victims -the 'human' totality of subhuman entities [reels]. But the same doctor will have no difficulty in accepting the fact that this particular person is not treated at the hospital, and accorded all necessary measures, because he or she is without legal residency papers, or not a contributor to Social Security. Once again, 'collective' responsibility demands it! What is erased in the process is the fact that there is only one medical situation, the clinical situation,' and there is no need for an 'ethics' (but only for a clear vision of this situation) to understand that in these circumstances a doctor is a doctor only if he deals with the situation according to the rule of maximum possibility -to treat this person who demands treatment of him (no intervention here!) as thoroughly as he can, using everything he knows and with all the means at his disposal, without taking anything else into consideration. And if he is to be prevented from giving treatment because of the State budget, because of death rates or laws governing immigration, then let them send for the police! Even so, his strict Hippocratic duty would oblige him to resist them, with force if necessary. 'Ethical commissions' and other ruminations on 'healthcare expenses' or 'managerial responsibility', since they are radically exterior to the one situation that is genuinely medical, can in reality only prevent us from

being faithful to it. For to be faithful to this situation means: to treat it right to the limit of the possible. Or, if you prefer: to draw from this situation, to the greatest possible extent, the affirmative humanity that it contains. Or again: to try to be the immortal of this situation. As a matter of fact, bureaucratic medicine that complies with ethical ideology depends on 'the sick' conceived as vague victims or statistics, but is quickly overwhelmed by any urgent, singular situation of need. Hence the reduction of 'managed', 'responsible' and 'ethical' health-care to the abject task of deciding which sick people the 'French medical system' can treat and which others -because the Budget and public opinion demand it -it must send away to die in the shantytowns of Kinshasa.

Solves Oppression

Badiou's open system of ethics as searching for truth is the best means of discovering social bonds that can create genuine egalitarianism-allowing us to seize power from oppressive state systems. Barker 02 (Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 147- 148)

How does Balibar's theory of the State constitution stand alongside Badiou's, and can we find any key areas of mutual agreement between these two ex-'Althusserians'? The most general area of difference involves Balibar's 'aporetic' approach to the question of the masses. Balibar refuses to see any principle underlying the masses' conduct, since the latter are synonymous with the power of the State. Badiou, on the other hand, regards the masses (ideally) as the bearers of the category of justice, to which the State remains indifferent (AM, 114). Two divergent theories of the State, then, each of which is placed in the service of a distinctive ethics. With Balibar we have an ethics - or 'ethic' in the sense of praxis - of communication which encourages a dynamic and expanding equilibrium of desires where every opinion has an equal chance of counting in the democratic sphere. With Badiou we have an ethics of truths which hunts down those exceptional political statements in order to subtract from them their egalitarian core, thereby striking ii blow for justice against the passive democracy of the State. Overall we might say that the general area of agreement lies in the fact that, in each case, 'democracy' remains a rational possibility. In particular, for both Balibar and Badiou, it is love as an amorous feeling towards or encounter with one's fellow man - a recognition that the fraternal part that is held in common between human beings is somehow 'greater' than the whole of their differences - which forges the social bond. However, on the precise nature of the ratio of this bond their respective paths diverge somewhat. In Balibar's case we are dealing with an objective illusion wherein one imagines that the love one feels for an object (an abstract egalitarian ideal, say) is shared by others. Crucially, love in this sense is wholly ambivalent, wildly vacillating between itself and its inherent opposite, hate. On this evidence we might say that a 'communist' peace would be really indistinct from a 'fascist' one. Therefore, the challenge for Balibar is to construct a prescriptive political framework capable of operating without repression in a utilitarian public sphere where the free exchange of opinions is more likely than not to result in the self-limitation of extreme views. In Badiou's case what we are dealing with, on the other hand - and what we have been dealing with more or less consistently throughout this book - is a subjective reality. The social contract is forever being conditioned, worked on practically from within by the political militants, in readiness for the occurrence of the truth-event. This is the unforeseen moment of an ‘amorous encounter’ between two natural adversaries (a group of student mounting a boycott of university fees, for instance) which retrieves the latent communist axiom of equality from within the social process. Here we have a particular call for social justice ('free education for all!') which strikes a chord with the whole people (students and non-students alike). Crucially, love in this sense is infinite, de-finite, in seizing back at least part of) the State power directly into the hands of the people. Moreover, in this encounter between students and the university authorities there is an invariant connection (of communist hope) which is shared by all, and where any difference of opinion is purely incidental. Momentarily, at least. For Badiou, the challenge is to develop and deepen an ethical practice, not in any utilitarian or communitarian sense – since the latter would

merely risk ‘forcing’ a political manifesto prematurely, perhaps giving rise to various brands of State-sponsored populism – but in the sense of a politics capable of combating repression; a politics which, in its extreme singularity, holds itself open to seizure by Truth.

Radical Questioning Key

Radical questioning produces new forms of politics—any past failures are reasons to re-dedicate ourselves and resist the savage and destructive nihilism of status quo politics. Badiou, 02 (Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland Translated/Interviewed by Christoph Cox & Molly Whalen, Issue #5, Winter 01/02, http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/5/alainbadiou.php, On Evil: An Interview with Alain Badiou).

It is necessary to examine, in a detailed way, the contemporary theory of Evil, the ideology of human rights, the concept of democracy. It is necessary to show that nothing there leads in the direction of the real emancipation of humanity. It is necessary to reconstruct rights, in everyday life as in politics, of Truth and of the Good. Our ability to once again have real ideas and real projects depends on it. You say that, for liberal capitalism, evil is always elsewhere, the dreaded other, something that liberal capitalism believes it has thankfully banished and kept at bay. ... My position is obviously that this "reasoning" is purely illusory ideology. First, liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. Second, the Communist revolutions of the 20th century have represented grandiose efforts to create a completely different historical and political universe. Politics is not the management of the power of the State. Politics is first the invention and the exercise of an absolutely new and concrete reality. Politics is the creation of thought. The Lenin who wrote What is to be Done?, the Trotsky who wrote History of the Russian Revolution, and the Mao Zedong who wrote On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People are intellectual geniuses, comparable to Freud or Einstein. Certainly, the politics of emancipation, or egalitarian politics, have not, thus far, been able to resolve the problem of the power of the State. They have exercised a terror that is finally useless. But that should encourage us to pick up the question where they left it off, rather than to rally to the capitalist, imperialist enemy.

Situational Ethics Good

The notion that it is possible to adopt a critical perspective towards the world still pre-supposes global ethics as an object of study. Our point is that such universals are a fiction—ethics should only be created in context. Franke, 2000 (Mark Franke, Instructor of International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia, 2000. “Refusing an Ethical Approach to World Politics in Favour of Political Ethics,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 6(3): 307-333.

The world is a notion through which sense of subjects, their shared and respective conditions, and their standings to one another could be made. Hence, views of the world may be seen to function precisely in the service of quashing the sort of agonistic competition of global perspectives that Campbell desires. As a total or universal perspective, a worldview competes for the description of a globe. To say, then, that we must keep the worldviews, that emerge through the flux of experience, in debate with respect to one another does little more than keep at bay the decision regarding which sense or which amalgam of sense shall dominate. For, supporting a competition of worldviews as a way to maintain a critical perspective on world politics retains the world as a legitimate domain where none in fact exists, where it is itself always already a creation (Nancy, 1997: 41). To do so already insinuates a sense of human life in which humans are supposed to inform and constitute one another in the face of alterity and difference. And, as a result, it serves to continue to suppress the political activity that gives rise to world images. A world is presupposed as the given limits with respect to which theoretical and political engagements are to be globalized. If critical inquiries into international politics offer any positive position, it is that 'the world' or 'the international' and any representations of these things are first and foremost the consequences of politics. Thus, while one ought to accept the fact that any approach to International Relations is already ethically situated, one need not accept ethics or the ethical as the conditions from which politics in the world ought to be understood or through which they arise. For example, Hugh C. Dyer is quite right to claim that 'whatever facts are apprehended [in terms of International Relations] are apprehended as a consequence of normative influences' (1997: 201). But it does not then follow that 'political substance resides in values' (Dyer, 1997: 202). Neither International Relations nor the world are themselves the grounds of politics. Rather, they are ways of framing politics of human life in terms of ethics, in terms that may allegedly make sense for humans so understood. My contention is that it is the conflict of ideas and actions in inter-human encounters that produces the possibility of world politics. Experiencing the way in which one's views and actions are inhibited or even negated through contact and engagement with others produces the grounds under which a competition of views may seem necessary. And the most successful medium through which one's own views may survive is one that can claim global validity. Even where persons may decide that competition is undesirable, it is only through a general subscription to some sort of universal concept that the experience of conflict may be avoided. In this case, all, willingly or through coercion, may agree to a fundamental sense of how things are in order to enjoy respective differences, as in the social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes or Jean - Jacques Rousseau. Hence, all politics may be viewed as essentially a world politics, as politics involves constant efforts to world in one sense or another. But, paradoxically, critical inquiry

must also take the position that there is no world in world politics, understood in whatever manner.

Ethics cannot be formulated from an armchair- they must be grappled with by a subject in the singular involvement with an event. Barker 02 (Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy, at Cardiff University. Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, p. 140)

Here, then, we have the Evil variants of Good, understood as the dialectical momentum of the process of truth itself, in three stages: 1) the event which denies the void and tends towards 'terror' or 'simulacrum'; 2) the fidelity which passively yields to its desire in an act of 'betrayal'; and 3) the totalitarian accession of truth to the point of 'disaster' (E, 63). For the militant practitioner of ethics (and for Badiou there can be no other kind), given the fact that Evil remains immanent to Good - a simulacrum as it were - Good must not be regarded as the mere avoidance of Evil. The only means of truly avoiding evil, so to speak - particularly given the fact that every truth, as well as being undecidable, is also indiscernible and unnameable - is to (attempt to) appreciate the perils of not standing up to it. The act of the informed decision (or perception) is naturally perilous here and risks regression (although of course there are always risks ...). For given the ethical practitioner's uncertain attachment to the event, we might say that the subject is forced to find out for itself, this side of (rather than beyond) Good and Evil, what ethics is (E, 75). In this sense, finally, 'The Good is Good only inasmuch as it doesn't pretend to render the world good.' The notebooks on ethics are not a bible, nor must they be read as one. In highlighting the constitutive political dimension to ethics, Badiou's Ethics avoids lapsing into the kind of abstract moral reasoning which tends - in the 'analytic' tradition - to distort the field of enquiry. No longer is it a question of what the individual would do in some ideal world with adequate time tor reflection. Instead, for Badiou ethics becomes a question of being catapulted into the here and now, and or following through the consequences of its actions. Ethics, from this militant standpoint, cannot take an effective back seat when it comes to determining what is right (unlike the journalist who claims to enable the facts to 'speak for themselves'). Of course, the question which we have been dealing with here all along involves the ambivalence which returns to afflict the ethical practitioner in the service of truth, in any one of its four realms, although politics is the one which will continue to interest us for the remainder of this book.

2NC Blocks

AT: Link Turn / Prereq

Liberation that tries to begin with a particular group is destined to fail. Only demands for universal justice, can result in true political change. Hallward, 04 (Badiou’s Politics: Equality and Justice, Peter, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm).

All genuine politics seeks to change the situation as a whole, in the interest of the universal interest. But this change is always sparked by a particular event, one located in a particular site and carried by a particular interest (the sans culottes, the soviets, the workers, the sans-papiers...). 1792 in France, 1917 in Russia, 1959 in Cuba, 1988 in Burma: each time, the event opposes those with a vested interest in the established state of the situation to those who support a revolutionary movement or perspective from which the situation is seen as for all. Other, more narrow principles and demands, however worthy their beneficiaries might be, are merely a matter of ‘syndicalism’ or trade union style negotiation, i.e. negotiation for an improved, more integrated place within the established situation. Clearly, what goes under the label of ‘politics’ in the ordinary day to day sense amounts only to ‘revindication and resentment ..., electoral nihilism and the blind confrontation of communities’ (AM: 110). The very notion of identity-politics is thus an explicit contradiction in terms. The OP regularly condemns the articulation of a ‘"French" identity which authorises discrimination or persecution’ of any kind; the only legitimate national unit is one which counts all of its elements as one, regardless of ethno-cultural particularity (‘Le pays comme principe’, 1992: 135). The left-liberal insistence on the vacuous ‘right to remain "the same as ourselves" has no chance against the abstract universality’ of contemporary capital, and does nothing more than ‘organise an inclusion in what it pretends to oppose’ (Badiou, letter to the author, 11.06.96).

AT: Perm

The permutation is also an additional link. Any calls for political compromise are what Badiou calls a “betrayal of the event.” It is to fall back into the world and become an enemy of the truth. This is a root cause of oppression.Santitli 03 (Siena College, Radical Evil, Subjection, and Alain Badiou’s Ethic of the Truth Event World Congress of The International Society for Universal Dialogue, Pyrgos, Greece, May 18-22, 2003 http://www.isud.org/papers/pdfs/Santilli.pdf#search=%22santilli%20badiou%22).

From this idea of truth as a subject-making, break-through event, Badiou derives his ethics. An ethic is “the principle that enables the continuation of a truth-process” (p. 44), and consists fundamentally in a single imperative: “Do all that you can to persevere in that which exceeds your perseverance. Persevere in the interruption. Seize in your being that which has seized and broken you” (p. 47). He calls this the principle of consistency or fidelity to fidelity. It’s maxim is “Keep Going,” especially when it is tempting to forget about the Truth that has happened to you and to settle back into the ordinary way of doing and thinking about things. The ethical subject, then, is one who experiences a split in his or her being between the mundane, self-interested situations of life and the extraordinary disinterested spirit of truth and who is able to sustain this split in all its tension, without giving up on one side on the other. It is in relation to this ethic of the truth event that one is to understand evil. What then is evil for Badiou? Evil essentially consists in the subject’s violation of the consistency principle. This can happen in three general ways. First, as with the Nazis, one can give one’s allegiance to a false imitation of the event of truth, a simulacrum or pseudo-event. Nazism structurally resembles an authentic truth event (convulsion of the ordinary, revolutionary practice etc.), but, because it doe not champion a true universal for all humanity, only the dominance of a specific tribe, it is a mere simulacrum. Its “fakeness” is demonstrated by its terrorist drive to annihilate the Jews rather than address an eternal truth to all (p. 76). Secondly, as with Stalinism, one can create a disaster by attempting to totalize one’s truth and remake the whole of Being according to its principles. Authentic truth events in politics and science, while universal and transcendent, are only appropriate for specific traditions and circumstances. It would falsify a biological discovery, for example, to apply it everywhere outside of a limited context (as was done with Darwinism for example). So truth is disastrous when it absolutizes its power: “Rigid and dogmatic (or ‘blinded’), the subject-language would claim the power, based on its own axioms to name the whole of the real and thus to change the world” (p. 83). Religious fundamentalisms, to the extent that they are based on truth events and are not “fakes” in the first place, would seem to be particularly susceptible to this kind of evil. Finally, the subject can be guilty of the simple disavowal of Truth. From fatigue, cowardice, doubt, the unbearable tension of living that split in being, or simple self-interest, one can give up on the truth that has happened to one and “fall” back into the world: “I must betray the becoming-subject in myself, I must become the enemy of that truth.” (p. 79, Emphasis added). Let us then locate the precise difference between Badiou’s ethics and its account of evil and that of the “ethical ideology” of human rights and radical evil. For Badiou ethics originates in transformative ideals that envision new possibilities for all human beings (a requirement of universality). One’s primary obligation is to remain faithful to the transformative event and to the particular finite situations to which it applies, without terrorizing those who do not subscribe to it. For Badiou the Platonic vision of the “Good” is primary, with evil appearing only as a deviation or swerve from one’s obligatory allegiance to

this Good. ... Precisely in the way that Kant describes radical evil, Badiou too speaks of the human being falling from grace by betraying the formal imperative of consistency, by putting self-interest and self-love ahead of the immortal truth. Evil emerges for Badiou, not because of the effects of human action on others, but because of a disorder in the way the subject responds to a revelation of truth. Evil is measured in other words, not by what is done to others, that is, by the horrible suffering even well-intentioned men cause (that would smack too much of the ideology of rights for Badiou), but by failures in what Kant would call the subjective will. Badiou does not speak of freedom the way Kant does, but one would have to surmise that for him, this fall or swerve from the truth is freely undertaken: one willfully relaxes back in to the status quo, one gives up on one’s principles, and one chooses totalizing power and contingencies, rather than the concrete universality of truth. Evil represents a contamination of the purity of one’s insight, whether it is political, artistic, religious, or amatory.

Tying the truth of an event to traditional politics risks disaster. For instance, Nazism and Stalinism were both politics of absolute truth. This means that the ethical subject searches for the universal but does not enforce that universal on others. Barker 02 (Jason, Lecturer in Communications, and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Philosophy at Cardiff University “Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction,” p. 134- 135)

But there is a paradox at work here, perhaps an aporia, and a potentially dangerous one at that, since what seizes by chance and without warning can all too easily be taken up by the State and enacted as the rule of law. In such circumstances where philosophy is elevated to the heights of ethical responsibility (‘the philosopher-king named by Plato’) disaster looms. ‘Disaster in philosophical thought is the order of the day when philosophy presents itself as being, not a seizure of truths, but a ‘situation of truth’ (C. 70). There we encounter the jump from logic to ontology. As we will recall from our earlier chapters, the situation is the set of circumstances, infinitely multiple, which is interrupted and named 'after the event'. In light of what we have also said above, the situation is seized from the outside before being 'sutured' to politics, art, science or love as one of the four conditions of its truth. The 'suture' is a concept derived from Lacan, and Badiou employs it to define the tendency of philosophy to ‘delegate its functions to such or such of its conditions’ at times when its intellectual circuit becomes 'blocked' (MP, 41). In the nineteenth century for example, 'between Hegel and Nietzsche', we mainly encounter the positivist suture, which pretends to be able to manage time scientifically, thereby playing into the hands of the 'diffuse religiosity' of capitalist industry. There is also, in the same epoch, the suture of philosophy to politics, where we discover Marx's commitment to philosophy as the practical means to change the world. And of course, what has overtaken both science and Marxism in the twentieth century - largely as a result of Heidegger's influence, although continued in the philosophy of Blanchot, Derrida and Deleuze - is the suture of philosophy to art: the 'age of the poets' (MP, 42-58). The suture always brings about a reduction of thought - synonymous with a 'heightening of the void' - which turns out to have a "triple effect': truth is made I) ecstatic, 2) sacred and 3) terroristic (C, 71-2). Taken together, these three aspects add up to the concept of disaster. Although the latter pertains primarily to thought, disaster finds expression in empirical effects, while 'Reciprocally, every real disaster, in particular historical, contains a philosopheme which joins together ecstasy, the sacred and terror.’ The destiny of the German people to establish a new world order, for example, and

Stalinist Marxism in its claims over the future course of history both combine a terroristic element (the persecution of ‘traitors’), an ecstatic element (a romantic sense of ‘place’ or community, e.g. German Heimat) and a sacred name (‘Fuhrer’) (C, 73). Can we assume, therefore, that every philosophy must navigate this perilous path on the brink, or at least within the vicinity of disaster? For Badiou, the answer to this question is yes, since disaster is always internal to the conflict between philosophy and sophistry. ‘Philosophy must never abandon itself to anti-sophistic extremism. It loses its way when it feeds the dark desire to finish with the sophist once and for all’ (C, 73). The sophist, it would seem, serves the ends of Good in stting the philosopher a worthy target, a good enemy as Nietzsche says. Evil is not the practice of the sophist, but is made possible whenever the philosopher arrogantly denies that sophistry does not exist. The sophist is the measure of Evil, the means of holding Evil within our sights. ‘The ethics of philosophy,’ Badiou says, ‘is at heart to maintain the sophist as an adversary, to preserve the polemos, the dialectical conflict’ (C, 74-5).

AT: Cede the Political

The state dooms the creation of new forms of ethics. We must have seperaiton from traditional power structures to find new alternatives Franke, 2000 (Mark Franke, Instructor of International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia, 2000. “Refusing an Ethical Approach to World Politics in Favour of Political Ethics,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 6(3): 307-333. )

Rather than being a repository and force of political power in the world, the modern state, where sovereignty is said to rest first in the people, is a ground for ethics. And it gains its right as such via the political efforts that found and sustain it. Whether it is popularly constructed through the fabled general will and social contract or founded through the forces of conquest, terror, theology or revolution, the state provides a socially constructed human universe in which one vision and map holds sway for all. It is a space in which all individuals are required to submit to one fundamental set of principles and ideas of inter - human relations, expressed through a constitu tion and laws . As such, the liberal state provides a matrix in which members may and must conform to a particular set of codes of conduct, notions of responsibility and rules of judgement. The state is at base a moral order created through political conflict and cooperation to overcome the anarchy that naturally makes ethics always uncertain and open to question. Furthermore, the state functions primarily to enforce a specific and identical ethical subject position in each of its members . As beings who are understood to fit equally within the same sovereign order, citizens of a modern liberal state are required to appreciate themselves and one another as essentially the same kind of being. They must not only understand that each one of them enjoys the same world but could also partake of the same perspective of that world. The citizen of the state, in other words, must cast away particular perspective in favour of the notion that she or he may see her - or himself reflected in the attitude of the state as it exists. Moreover, she or he must accept the fact that the vision and character attributed to this human sub-universe may be changed only as permitted by the amendments acknowledged through the constitution under which each enjoys her or his identity as an ethical being. The state not only normalizes the limits and structure of political associations. It also provides mechanisms through which the normalization of humans may occur, where the title of citizenship and normalcy are coextensive and where the notion of criminality allows for the correction of citizens.6

This argument is the essence of what keeps us docile--submission to the state results precisely when power is indeterminate and it becomes impossible to imagine alternatives. Hallward, 04 (Badiou’s Politics: Equality and Justice, Peter, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/hallward.htm).

Politics thus proceeds through the invention of new subtractive mechanisms of formalisation that can confront and transform this formless resistance to change (LS: 89). A true political sequence can only begin when business as usual breaks down for one reason or another. This is because what ensures submission to the status quo is ‘submission to the indetermination of

power, and not to power itself’ (TA, 8.04.98). Under normal circumstances, we know only that the excess of the static re-presentation over elementary presentation is wildly immeasurable (corresponding, in the terms of Badiou’s ontology, to the infinite excess of 2N over N). Today’s prevailing economic regime indeed dominates its inhabitants absolutely, precisely because we can hardly imagine how we might limit or measure this regime. The first achievement of a true political intervention is thus the effective, ‘distanced’ measurement of this excess. Intervention forces the state to show its hand, to use its full powers of coercion so as to try to restore things to their proper place.

AT: Events are Evil

Events are emancipatory because they demand fidelity to something universal without trying to impose those truths on others—these simple standards make the identification of false events easy. Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).

If one's own support of a truth is fundamentally a matter of decision, what is to distinguish untruth from truth? Didn't, for example, at least some Germans (Heidegger is the obvious example) believe that, far from representing a monstrous falsehood, their participation in a fascist movement was fidelity to an event, the Nazi seizure of power in 1933? "[W]hen all is said and done, it is obvious that reaction, even the forces of death, can be stamped with the creative force of an event" (Ethics, lvii). Since mere predation is beneath good and evil, evil must take its sense from some perversion of a truth-procedure; and since a truth-procedure has essentially three parts (the event, fidelity to the event, and the truth this fidelity constructs), there are three ways a truth-procedure can be perverted into evil. The first is the substitution of a simulacrum for the event, the second is betrayal of a real event, and the third is to ascribe to the truth-process total power. It seems to me that these three modes of evil are meant to correspond primarily to three political evils, although only the first is spelled out. The "revolution" of National Socialism was a simulacrum of [End Page 299] the previous revolutions of 1792 and 1917: because it convokes the plenitude of an ethnic "Germany" instead of the (universalizable) exclusion on which this plenitude was founded, it blocks any possible truth-procedure. In a strange echo of Heidegger's scandalous paragraph on the gas chambers, the (ontic) extermination of the Jews appears here as the effect of an (ontological) blockage of truth: inasmuch as "Jew" names the address to all that Nazism cannot make, its referent must be eliminated. The second evil, that of betrayal, could be taken to refer to the abandonment of the revolutionary movements in the Third World—the corruption of the political class in Angola after the MPLA took power, or the strange quiescence of some Brazilian radicals in the face of the military dictatorship in the late 1960s. The third evil ascribes total power to the truth-process—as though a truth, rather than reconfiguring the situation from which it emerges, could actively become the situation, subjecting everything to a single rule. The referent here would seem to be Left absolutism.

AT: Realism

Realism only proves Badiou’s thesis – that the world is constantly unstable makes the notion of universal ethics absurdFranke, 2000 (Mark Franke, Instructor of International Studies at the University of Northern British Columbia, 2000. “Refusing an Ethical Approach to World Politics in Favour of Political Ethics,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol 6(3): 307-333. )

The grounds that propel International Relations and, consequently, the general concern of international ethics themselves, though, are surely not of an ethical character per se. International Relations and the considerations of ethics made possible within that vision respond primarily to the notion that there is no natural structure or code upon which actions and judgements in human relations may be legitimately justified in any final sense. No person or group of persons has view to any thing like what one might call the universal conditions of humanity. Each is limited to particular perspectives and cultural mappings of how a human universe may appear if local understandings could be extended globally. It is for this reason that persons are said to be naturally in a state of war with each other.' In trying to orient themselves to one another and the things that come of interest to them via experience and reports of the experiences of others, humans run inevitably into a cartographic crisis with one another, a crisis regarding how each ought to orient her- or himself to others. Even prior to any kind of base power struggle that Realists may attribute to them, people come into a conflict of ideas and representations of what the world of experience might be. The multiple images that different humans may project or adopt in trying to understand the potential range of their respective interests and movements share no natural grounds in common. There is no one place, life or vision in which all humans commonly partake. The world of humans is therefore anarchical. But it is not so because of a selfish nature identically reproduced in each individual, as the metaphysicists of Realism/Idealism proclaim. Rather this 'world' is anarchical due to the fact that there is never actually a single world to which all ideas of human life may agree. And there are no natural grounds upon which a singular world may be justifiably created from this variety of views. Instead, humans, by the fact of being particular and finite beings unable to see all things and enjoy all possible lives at once, give rise to unlimited numbers and kinds of principles upon which unending worlds may be founded and demanded. Only one universally applicable social fact must then be said to confront each and every possible person, that an ethics is not available by nature. There are at least no grounds upon which such an ethics may be assumed possible. The codes of conduct and grounds upon which judgements are to be made must, rather, be constructed and legitimized politically. The basis for shared human norms can be accomplished only through processes of tyranny, negotiation, competition and/or force. And thus it is that the liberal state emerges as it does .

AT: Badiou is Totalizing

Badiou’s striving for a universal is not totalizing because it does not seek to impose itself on others—his conception of truth is inherently plural. Rothberg 01 (Criticism 43.4 (2001) 478-484, Book Review, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

A truth is, for Badiou, "indifferent to differences"; it is "the same for all" (27; AB's italics). How can we situate such a claim in the contemporary theoretical landscape? Is Badiou's ethics simply a return to the totalizing and universalizing thought that a combination of historical and intellectual events (the Holocaust, Stalinism, colonialism, postmodernism, etc.) had seemed to render hopelessly passé? While Badiou's understanding of truth, and thus also ethics, is uncompromisingly universalizing, it is also definitively not totalizing. The interest of his thought today lies precisely in the way he finesses this apparent paradox. When Badiou writes that truth is "the same for all" he does not mean that there is only one truth. To the contrary, truths are irreducibly plural. They are the product of "the real process of fidelity to an event" (42), and there are an infinite number of possible events. Events—to continue using Badiou's vocabulary—are immanent breaks with a given situation. And a situation is a singular configuration, an "infinite multiple" which can be "politico-historical," "strictly physical or material," aesthetic, or even defined by the relationship of two people (129).

AT: Generic Lacan Bad Cards

Badiou’s alternative is simply not the same as Lacan’s—where Lacan is accused of being politically dangerous because he denies all access to the Real, Badiou allows for real world political transformation. Rothberg 01 (Criticism 43.4 (2001) 478-484, Book Review, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil Michael Rothberg, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign).

Because knowledge serves power (and this is not precisely Badiou's own language), there will always be "voids" in a given situation that cannot be known or thought according to the recognized forms of knowledge. Badiou links this notion of the unthought in a given reality to Lacan's notion of the Real. (One also thinks of the Sartre of Search for a Method.) But there is also a significant difference between Badiou's void and Lacan's Real: while the Real is never susceptible to transformation (it is the place to which one always returns), the void can be revealed and thus potentially displaced through the advent of an event (although it is never clear from where the event emerges—Badiou likens its advent to a non-theological "grace" [122-3]). An event—whether it involves the production of art, political action, scientific discovery, or an amorous encounter—reveals what was missing in the given state of the situation. Once the event has taken place, producing truth entails remaining "faithful" to the event that has revealed the gaps in the situation. The production of truth also constitutes a subject (which, for Badiou, is more an assemblage than an individual), and helps to re-make the opinions and instituted knowledges of the situation—it is thus fundamentally a form of permanent, if local, revolution.

Badiou’s concept of the subject is a major break from Lacan—he sees the subject as fully capable of positive action through his alternative of fidelity to the event. Ling, 06 (Alex, University of Melbourne, www.cosmosandhistory.org 359 Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006, BOOK REVIEW).

Clearly then the core of Badiou’s ethics is nothing other than the evental prescription of the subject, that is, the absolute necessity to remain faithful to a fidelity—to continue being a militant of truth—which he rather nicely summarizes in a single imperative: continuez! (in which one should of course hear Lacan’s ethical maxim ‘ne pas céder sur son désir’: don’t give way on your desire). Simply—and one cannot stress this point too strongly— outside of the fact of the event, there is no subject, nor truth, nor ethics—there is solely difference (which is simply what is) and an otherwise inconsequential biological species counted as human, ‘a “biped without feathers,” whose charms are not obvious’. (E 12) So then in light of his theory of subjectivation Badiou accordingly reinterprets Lacan’s ethical imperative as the necessity to ‘seize in your being that which has seized and broken you’ (E 47), to remain

faithful to an event, to hold on at all costs to a truth and continue being a subject. Of course, the reader of Lacan would likely wonder precisely what is to be found here that is new? Certainly the literally exceptional status of Badiou’s ethics resonates with Lacan’s own distinction between the moral and the ethical—between Creon’s Law and Antigone’s desire, between the good and the beautiful—insofar as morality, for Lacan, fundamentally serves to reinforce/reinscribe the statist order (qua ‘service of goods’) while ethicality is by contrast necessarily anti-statist (owing to the fact that, as an ethical subject, we must first give ourself over to ‘the cause that animates us’, a cause—desire; drive—which is in itself radically antithetical to order as such). Clearly then we are once more presented with those familiar divisions between ethical radicality and moral stasis, between revolutionary praxis and conservative polity, between truth and the

knowledge through which it punches a hole. And yet it also at this precise point that we discern a clear break with Lacan—who we should remember is not only for Badiou an antiphilosopher par excellence (witness the role played here by desire and drive) but also the term’s true father (le nom du père)—insofar as Badiou, by virtue of his decidedly non-Lacanian (non-Cartesian) conception of the subject, necessarily presents something of a recession of orders, seeing the ethical as coextensive with (indeed, equivalent to) the good, thereby leaving morality (which is in

Badiou’s thinking implicitly tied up with that truthless realm of ‘opinions’) lying necessarily beneath both good and evil. Thus the beautiful descends to the good and the good—to invoke Badiou’s reading of that other archetypal antiphilosopher Saint Paul—falls from grace. If this however seems something of a negative gesture, we should remember that one of the great virtues of Badiou’s philosophy is on the contrary its fundamental positivity, which is something we can (unexpectedly perhaps) clearly discern in his conception of evil as an ‘effect of the power of truth’ (E 61). Indeed, this simple progression—from good to evil—stands in marked opposition to the ethical ideology he so despises, in which good might be solely derived as an after-effect of evil (such good depriving itself of positive content in its reduction to the sole function of preventing evil) and which accordingly thinks ‘the only thing that can really happen to someone is death’ (35) (such negative movement accounting for the intrinsic nihilism of, for example, the discourse of human rights). Simply, if the good is ultimately truth, then evil is at base that which has a negative effect on truth; it is the corruption, in one way or another, of truth. This of

course means that, as with the good, evil is knotted to the evental subject, or, to paraphrase Voltaire, Badiou’s ethics of truth means in the end that ‘every subject is guilty of all the good he did not do’. Thus the human animal, along with its concomitant predilections—be they munificent, disinterested, or just plain nasty—exists, outside of the embrace of the event, fundamentally beneath good and evil.

AT: Desanti

Desanti’s critique fundamentally misses the point. Badiou under-theorizes ontology on purpose because he believes that the Event, not pre-determined ontology, shapes the subject. Van Rompaey, 06 (Deakin University, Chris, www.cosmosandhistory.org 350 Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006 BOOK REVIEW: A QUESTION OF FIDELITY).

Other critics object to the minimalism of Badiou’s ontology, to its radical exclusion of the phenomenological concerns that they refuse to relinquish from philosophy’s grip. Here, it is Jean-Toussaint Desanti who comes most immediately to mind with his discussion of what he calls Badiou’s ‘intrinsic’ ontology. Badiou’s ‘choice’ of a minimal ontology, he argues, does not in any way eliminate the need for ontology to account for being in a more expansive sense. This emphasis on ‘choice’ as if it were simply a matter of personal predilection entirely overlooks Badiou’s rigorously axiomatic development and exposition of his thesis. It is only his foundational decisions that (i) mathematics is ontology and (ii) the ‘one’ does not exist that could be construed as acts of choice. Even these decisions, though, are, as Badiou has pointed out, not arbitrary but based empirically on the logical impasse generated by alternative points of departure. Another line of demarcation could be drawn between those who criticize, often from a position of fidelity to the Badiouian event, aspects of Badiou’s procedural methodology, and those who, like Desanti, attack Badiou for failing to encompass what at no stage he sets out to encompass. Implicit in most such critiques is the assumption that ontology must, by definition, account for every conceivable aspect of being , that it must contain within it the promise of boundless plenitude. But it is precisely this kind of totalizing gesture that Badiou is at pains to avoid. In a brief response to his critics, he stresses the limits of his enquiry into the nature of being: It is very important to grant a statement from the very beginning of Being and Event its full scope: ontology is a situation. Or, if you prefer: ontology is a world. This means that the mathematical theory of pure multiplicity in no way claims to inform the way we might think everything that is presented in the infinity of real situations, but only the thinking of presentation as such . This is what I call, adopting the vocabulary of the philosophical tradition, being qua being (233). Clearly, there is nothing in Badiou’s ontology that challenges the validity of Desanti’s concerns per se. When, for example, Desanti asks (60) how we are to gain access to what he calls ‘modes of presence’ (seemingly just another version of his need to know who performs the count-as-one and in what ‘realm’), he raises questions that, however pertinent they might be to the world of ‘real situations’, have nothing to do with the ‘thinking of presentation as such’. If Badiou’s ontology were to embrace these concerns by extending itself into its ‘margins’ (to use another of Desanti’s terms), it would immediately lose the rigour that sets it so decisively and productively against the grain of poststructuralist indeterminacy.

AT: Laclau

Laclau gave Badiou only a cursory reading and distorts his concepts in order to advance a different point about his own work. His argument is therefore irrelevant to really understanding Badiou. Van Rompaey, 06 (Deakin University, Chris, www.cosmosandhistory.org 350 Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006 BOOK REVIEW: A QUESTION OF FIDELITY).

Ernesto Laclau’s critique of Badiou’s ontology or, more precisely, of the extra-ontological status of the Badiouian event is at a formal level the inverse of Desanti’s. Where Desanti has nothing but praise for Badiou’s procedural thoroughness—the reader, he insists, will find ‘admirably set out, all the mathematical instructions required in order to follow [the book’s] argument’ (63)—Laclau enthusiastically embraces Badiou’s interventionist notion of ethical engagement but rejects entirely the theoretical apparatus that underpins his concept of fidelity. What for Laclau is particularly problematic is the relation between the evental site, the subject and the constitution of a truth procedure. Once again, though, it is a critique that founders on its distortion of Badiou’s fundamental categories. Rather than pursue in a rigorous way Badiou’s suturing of ethical commitment to the constitution of the subject, he persists with a focus on the curious notion of ‘filling’ the void, arguing that, even though this process is incompatible with Badiou’s ontology, it nevertheless requires ‘theoretical description’ (125). At the heart of Laclau’s protestations is a refusal of the mathematical basis of ontology, but it is a refusal that is justified by only the most cursory reference to Badiou’s use of set theory. Before canvassing the possibility of situations in which the ‘logic of representation might lose its structuring abilities’ (125), Laclau might have made a more systematic examination Badiou’s exposition of such crucial concepts as the event, the evental site, the state’s ‘prohibition’ of the event and the act of subjective intervention. It soon becomes clear, though, that what is at stake for Laclau is the inability of set theory to account for what is not included in a situation in terms other than the void. Of course, what in a given situation escapes the count is not nothing in any absolute sense and, contrary to the impression given by Laclau, set theory at no point makes any such claim; it simply has no existence for the situation. It is precisely because Laclau’s own project—the articulation of his theory of ‘hegemonic universality’ (131-2)—is rooted in what he mistakenly takes to be voided unconditionally by set theory that he finds it necessary to dismiss Badiou’s ontology.

AT: Nancy

Nancy misrepresents Badiou in order to make a point about his own philosophical project—it is irrelevant in terms of actually understanding Badiou’s argument. Van Rompaey, 06 (Deakin University, Chris, www.cosmosandhistory.org 350 Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 1-2, 2006 BOOK REVIEW: A QUESTION OF FIDELITY).

Jean-Luc Nancy is another contributor who, like Laclau, frames his critique through his own hardly inconsiderable philosophical enterprise and accordingly misrepresents important elements of Badiou’s project. In spite of being ‘close’ on certain points, Nancy insists that he and Badiou ‘inhabit utterly different sites of thought’ (39), an observation which appears to license him to ‘force’ Badiou into an entirely alien theoretical context. A prime example is where Nancy takes Badiou to task for his account of the origins of philosophy, ex nihilo, as a consequence of Plato’s foundational gesture. In disputing this account Nancy blurs what for Badiou is a crucial distinction between generic form, or discursive mode, and articulated content. At issue is not the emergence, several centuries before Plato, of ‘philosophy’ as a discursive focus on what Nancy calls the ‘deconstruction of the structures of a crumbling … mythico-religious world’ (45), but the wresting of that discourse from the clutches of the poem so as to constitute an independent, ‘properly’ philosophical mode of enquiry. Like Desanti’s critique, Nancy’s [critique] is based on the assumption that Badiou’s claims are other than they actually are.

Affirmative Answers

Cede the Political

Badiou is not politically useful because his alternative is too vague—he says that the event side-steps the state but any alternative politics must be able to reform the state to succeed. Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).

Badiou's ontology cannot usefully displace the dialectic. Because the Event must descend like a grace, Badiou's ontology can only describe situations and never History. Since the event emerges from outside of the state of the situation, it is rigorously untheorizable : as we saw above, it is theorized as untheorizable. Despite every protestation to the contrary, Badiou's system cannot address the question "What is to be done?" because the only thing to do is to wait for the Event. What happens when the precipitation of the Event is precisely what needs to be done? Yes, we can be faithful to a previous event , as Badiou says Lenin was to the Paris Commune. But surely this solution mitigates the power of the Event as the irruption of the void into this situation. The dialectic, on the other hand, conceives the void as immanent contradiction. While both contradiction and void are immanent to the situation, contradiction has the tremendous advantage of having movement built in, as it were: the Event does not appear out of an immanent nowhere, but is already fully present in itself in the situation, which it explodes in the movement to for-itself. Meanwhile, the question of the dialectic leads us back to the twofold meaning of "state": both the law and order that govern knowledge, and law and order in the everyday sense. This identification authorizes Badiou's antistatism, forcefully reflected in his own political commitment, the Organisation Politique (whose members do not vote), which has made limited [End Page 306] but effective interventions into the status of immigrant workers. In Badiou's system, nothing can happen within the state of a situation; innovation can only emerge from an evental site, constitutively excluded from the state. But can a principled indifference to the state ground a politics? The state surely has the function of suppressing the anarchic possibilities inherent in the (national) situation. But it can also suppress the possibilities exploited by an anarchic capitalism. It is well known that the current rightist "small-government" movement is an assault on the class compromise represented by the Keynesian state. To be sure, one should be suspicious of that compromise and what it excluded. But it also

protected workers against some of capitalism's more baleful effects. As with Ethics, Badiou is certainly describing something: the utopian moment of a total break with the state may be a part of any genuine political transformation. But, unless we are talking about the sad old interplay of transgression and limit—which posited the state as basically permanent, with transgression as its permanent suspension—this anarchic moment says nothing about the new state of affairs that will ultimately be imposed on the generic set it constructs. Surely the configuration of that state will be paramount—in which case state power has to be fought for, not merely evaded.

Complete abandonment of the state and abstract alternatives fail – focusing on concrete solutions is necessary to form a genuine political process

Alain Badiou, 2001, Chair of Philosophy: École Normale Supérieure University [Ph.D: Rene Descartes Chair at EGS, “An Interview with Alain Badiou” by Peter Hallward, PhD, Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University , Ethics: An Understanding of Evil, Pages 96- 143 Appendix]

Hammond: One last question about immigration . You describe it as a 'problem of internal polities', and distance yourselves from those who 'brandish pseudfrprescriptions, like the suppression of frontiers'.1' But doesn't a politics of unconditional naturalization remain pretty abstract, as long as current borders remain intact ? Badiou: I would say of the abolition of frontiers what I said a moment ago about the withering away of the state. I'm for it, I'm absolutely for it! But to be for something yields no active political principle in the situation. In reality, politics must always find its point of departure in the concrete situation. The question of knowing what happens to people who are in France is already a huge question. To refer this question back to a debate about the opening or the closing of borders, to the question of

whether labour belongs to a global market or not, and so on, seems to forbid thinking about the situation itself and intervening in it so as to transform it. The guiding principle concerning these questions should be as follows. We still belong to a historical era dominated by states and borders. There is nothing to suggest that this situation is going to change completely in the near future. The real question is whether the regulations [reglementation] at issue are more or less consistent with egalitarian aspirations. We should first tackle the question of how, concretely, we treat the people who are here; then, how we deal with those who would like to be here ; and finally, what it is about the situation of their original countries that makes them want to leave. All three questions must be addressed, but in that order. To proclaim the slogan 'An end to frontiers' defines no real policy, because no one knows exactly what it means. Whereas by addressing the questions of how we treat the people who are here, who want to be here, or who find themselves obliged to leave their homes, we can initiate a genuine political process.

Alt Fails – Capitalism too big

Badiou’s system fails—he has no way to overcome the enormous power he attributes to capitalism. Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).

But what is strange is the vehemence with which Badiou maintains his distance from the economic—from what classical Marxism called the "base," the elements of a situation that pertain to its own reproduction. It is perfectly orthodox to say that there can be no purely economic intervention in the economy: even with the best intentions, the World Bank could not solve the problem of Third World poverty. However, in Badiou's system the economy is not merely reduced to one aspect among many, but actively dismissed from consideration. Material reproduction is reduced to the sneering Lacanian contempt for "le service des biens," the servicing of goods which pertains to the human animal beneath good and evil. Why should Badiou fully endorse Marx's analysis of the world economy ("there is no need for a revision of Marxism itself," [Ethics, 97]) while keeping Marx's entire problematic at arm's length? In fact, capitalism is the point of impasse in Badiou's own system, the problem which cannot be actively thought without grave danger to the system as a whole. Capital's great power, the tremendous ease with which it colonizes (geographic, cultural, psychic) territory, is precisely that it seizes situations at their evental site. In their paraphrase of a brilliant but much-maligned passage in Marx's Grundrisse, Deleuze and Guattari insist that "capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes."2 Is this flow that eludes every society's codes not identical with generic multiplicity, the void which, eluding every representation, nonetheless haunts every situation? Does not capitalism make its entry at a society's point of impasse—social relations already haunted by variously dissimulated exploitation—and revolutionize them into the capital-labor relation? A safely non-Orientalist version of this would be the eruption from modernist art's evental site—the art market, which belonged to the situation of modernism while being excluded from its represented state—of what we might call the "Warhol-event," which inaugurates the transition from the formal to the real subsumption of (artistic) labor under Capital. It makes perfect sense to say that this transition is the truth of the [End Page 308] Warhol-event. As we saw earlier, the real subsumption of labor under Capital, the conversion of every relation into a monetary relation, is the origin of formal equality: that is, the foundation of

universalism. And far from pertaining to mere animal life beneath the level of the truth-procedure, capitalism itself fits perfectly the form of the revolutionary Event. It would then appear that capitalism is, like religion, eliminated from the art-politics-science-love series only by fiat. And why is this? Because the economic, the "servicing of goods," cannot enter Badiou's system without immediately assuming the status of a cause. Excluded from direct consideration, capitalism as a condition of set theory is perfectly innocuous; its preconditional status belongs to a different order than what it conditions. It opens up a mode of presentation, but what is presented existed all along: look at Paul, for example. But included as the product of a truth-procedure, capitalism immediately appears as the basis for all the others: it is, in fact, the revolutionary irruption of Capital (in whatever society) that conditions any modern process of science, art, love, or politics. If Badiou's system were to consider capitalism directly, some elements, those pertaining to the "base," would appear to have more weight than others—the "superstructure." The effects of such an inclusion of capitalism in Badiou's system—an inclusion which nothing prevents—would be catastrophic. Radical universality (as opposed to the historically conditioned universality imposed by the emergence of capitalism) would become unthinkable. The "eternity" of truth would yield to historicism.

Badiou’s great enemy of capitalism fits perfectly within what he considers a truth event—the alternative merely re-creates the status quo. Brown, 04 (Nicholas, University of Illinois at Chicago, Or, Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, Waiting for Something to Happen, CR: The New Centennial Review 4.3 (2004) 289-319).

Badiou cannot think Capital precisely because Capital has already thought Badiou. And let's face it: despite Badiou's inspiring presentation, nothing is more native to capitalism than his basic narrative matrix. The violent seizure of the subject by an idea, fidelity to it in the absence of any guarantee, and ultimate transformation of the state of the situation: these are the elements of the narrative of entrepreneurial risk, "revolutionary innovation," the "transformation of the industry," and so on. In pushing away material reproduction, Badiou merely adapts this narrative to the needs of intellectuals, who, in Badiou's conception, have a monopoly over much of the field of truth.

Alt fails – impossible

The radical break of the truth event is impossible—slow reforms are a more effective politics. Ingram 05 (James, PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research, “Can Universalism Still Be Radical? Alain Badiou’s Politics of Truth,” Constellations Vol. 12 No. 4, 2005, p. 571)

It could be replied that this is the realm of practical judgment, about which theory can tell us little. But the problem seems to stem from Badiou’s approach, in particular his attempt to combine radical subjectivism with abstract formalism. For Badiou, the contribution of philosophy (which is universal and formal) to politics and ethics (which are singular and situational) is to discover the generic logic by which events happen. The problem with his empyrean perch is not only that it suspends the actor between two irreconcilable attitudes; it is that no historical event could correspond to his theory. No less than otherness, no event is completely foreign to the situation it interrupts. Even if we allow that new things do happen, they do not emerge all at once, out of the blue, in stark relief to everything that exists, immediately changing everything. In this respect, the purism of Badiou’s event, like his activist, seems too wedded to a romantic notion of total transformation. Suppose Bertolucci’s teenagers tidied up, went to the supermarket, and eventually took jobs to support their love nest; one suspects their tryst would cease to be an event and become an alternative lifestyle. Yet some such adaptation is surely involved in the realization of a new possibility. The pacte civile, which we can imagine our lovers availing themselves of as their thoughts turn to insurance and retirement, is a long way from the liberation of desire.16 But the question should be what it changes and what further changes it makes possible. Analogously, universal

citizenship and global equality will not come about in a single stroke. Seattle does not lead straight to global revolution, but to Porto Alegre and Cancún – the difficult forging of new solidarities and the contestation, with imperfect means, of the system’s more glaring injustices.

Badiou over universalizes

Badiou wrongly universalizes, destroy any chance for a successful alternativeRothberg 01[Michael, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. “Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil” Criticism 43.4 (2001) 478-484]

Another sort of problem emerges when we consider Badiou's attempt to [End Page 482] surpass the discourse of victimization that he and many others see as defining the contemporary moment. While this critique of victim-centered ethics is crucial, and works well with respect to many situations, it risks overgeneralization . In his laudable insistence that humanity "does not coincide with the identity of the victim" (11; emphasis in original), Badiou leaves out of his system the possibility that a human being could be reduced precisely to the status of victim . Such a case has been investigated by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz under the heading of the "Muselmann." Muselmann, or "Muslim," was the name given in certain Nazi camps to prisoners who had been so overcome by hunger, beatings, etc. that they became zombie-like, incapable of human communication or response, trapped in an indeterminate zone between life and death. While surely the product of an extremity not conducive to generalization, the Muselmann nevertheless constitutes the unthought of Badiou's own project: the potential of a victimization so radical that it really does exceed the possibility of any human project or truth-process. Whether this case is at all conducive to ethical or political elaboration must remain open here, but what the counter-example of the

Muselmann suggests is the limit of Badiou's will to universality. The problem with universality surely also returns in the insistence on ignoring questions of cultural difference. Badiou's absolute commitment to the ethical value of the Same—the fact that truths are addressed equally to all—demonstrates a provocative and radically democratic spirit. In presenting truths as simultaneously multiple and universal, Badiou poses an imaginative answer to what may be the most intractable antinomy of contemporary left social theory: the difficulty of adjudicating claims for universality and particularlity. (For other attempts to think through this problem, see the contributions to the recent collective volume by Judith Butler,

Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Z;akiz;akek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality [London and New York: Verso, 2000]. And yet, is his notion that the universality of truths is premised on the simultaneous local nature of truth—its immanence to a particular situation with which it breaks— sufficient to ward off fears of homogenization, if not cultural imperialism? How can we differentiate between the Sameness of truth and the homogenization produced by capitalist commodification? Is there an alternative formulation that would respect the universal address of truths while still allowing for a valorization of or commitment to difference? The unease that Badiou's dismissal of cultural difference provokes, despite the freshness of his formulation, suggests that the antinomy of the universal and the particular is as much a symptom of the post-Cold War historical moment as a problem solvable in theory.

Badiou – Radical Violence

Badiou’s critique of victimization is an overgeneralization – the muselmann demonstrates that violence can be so radical that it exceeds the possibility of universality. Michael Rothberg 2002 (University of Illinois, Ubana-Champaign Book Review “Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil” Muse)

Another sort of problem emerges when we consider Badiou's attempt to surpass the discourse of victimization that he and many others see as defining the contemporary moment. While this critique of victim-centered ethics is crucial, and works well with respect to many situations, it risks overgeneralization . In his laudable insistence that humanity "does not coincide with the identity of the victim" (11; emphasis

in original), Badiou leaves out of his system the possibility that a human being could be reduced precisely to the status of victim. Such a case has been investigated by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz under the heading of the "Muselmann." Muselmann, or "Muslim," was the name given in certain Nazi camps to prisoners who had been so overcome by hunger, beatings, etc. that they became zombie-like, incapable of human communication or response, trapped in an indeterminate zone between life and death. While surely the product of an extremity not conducive to generalization, the Muselmann nevertheless constitutes the unthought of Badiou's own project: the potential of a victimization so radical that it really does exceed the possibility of any human project or truth-process . Whether this case is

at all conducive to ethical or political elaboration must remain open here, but what the counter-example of the Muselmann suggests is the limit of Badiou's will to universality.

Badious’s alternative results in violence-takes out solvency. Hallward 2003 (lecturer at King’s College, Peter, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, p. 268-69,)

My second question concerns Badiou’s essentially instrumental understanding of violence. His strict separation of true subjects from merely objective “individuals” allows him to consider violence as essentially external to any truth process, and there is certainly a compelling strategic case to be made for this position. But how exactly then are we to acknowledge the potential of any individual to become a subject? What precise circumstances justify the suppression of this potential? For it might well be argued that the last century, driven by that “passion for the real” which by Badiou’s own admission excludes the luxuries of critical distance or reserve, demonstrated more than once the inadequacy of an ethics based on an appreciation of these very

luxuries. It might be more consistent, and arguably more courageous, to insist that the true break with our established order will come, not through recourse to alternative forms of violence, but with the organized, uncompromising imposition of a radical nonviolence. Only a precisely axiomatic commitment to nonviolence offers any hope of a lasting break in the futile recycling of violences. Only such a principled commitment can both respond to the violent re-presentation of the state and, once this re-presentation has been suspended, block the creation or reassertion of new forms of violence. In the absence of such a commitment, the appeal to philosophical “restraint” is ultimately unconvincing. We know that “the ethics of a truth is absolutely opposed to opinion” and communication, but at the same time we must communicate, we must have our opinions” (E, 48, 75). It is only by preserving the very opinions it penetrates that a truth avoids its disastrous totalization. But what is the precise mechanism of this preservation? This gives rise to my third question. If the only relation between truth and knowledge is one of subtraction, how can the one preserve the other? How are we to coordinate the imperative to maintain this relation—to maintain the sophist, maintain opinions, maintain the dialogue—with that more insistent imperative, prescribed by every generic procedure, to act in

the singular absence of relation, to pursue a radical deliaison? If “philosophy ultimately has no relation other than to itself,”51 if philosophy is conditioned by nothing other than truth, it is difficult to see how it

might regulate its relations with its non-philosophical counterpart, be it sophist, citizen, or opinion. In the end, the question of ethics turns on the preservation of a viable relationship between knowledge and truth, opinion and subject—but it is precisely this relationship that Badiou’s philosophy has yet to express in other than mainly subtractive terms.

Permutation

Perm: do both.

The state and the revolutionary political subject can cooperate in Badiou’s conception of the alternative.

Hallward, 03 (Badiou: a subject to truth, Peter Hallward, University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis / London 2003, Professor of Modern European Philosophy, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex Univeristy).

We know that Badiou's early and unequivocally hostile attitude to the state has considerably evolved. Just how far it has evolved remains a little unclear. His conception of politics remains resolutely anticonsensual, anti–“re-presentative, ” and thus antidemocratic ( in the ordinary sense of the word). Democracy has become the central ideological category of the neo-liberal status quo, and any genuine “philosophy today is above all something that enables people to have done with the 'democratic' submission to the world as it is.” 66 But he seems more willing, now, to engage with this submission on its own terms. La Distance politique again offers the most precise points de repère. On the one hand, the OP remains suspicious of any political campaign—for instance, an electoral contest or petition movement—that operates as a “prisoner of the parliamentary space.” 67 It remains “an absolute necessity [of politics] not to have the state as norm. The separation of politics and state is foundational of politics.” On the other hand, however, it is now equally clear that “their separation need not lead to the banishment of the state from the field of political thought . ” 68 The OP now conceives itself in a tense, nondialectical “vis-à-vis” with the state, a stance that rejects an intimate cooperation (in the interests of capital) as much as it refuses “any antagonistic conception of their operation—a conception that smacks of classism.” There is no more choice to be made between the state and revolution; the “vis-à-vis demands the presence of the two terms and not the annihilation of one of the two.” 69

Badiou = Esoteric / unworldly

Badiou is the pinnacle of esoteric philosophy – his alternative has no way of connecting to politics because he cannot find examples to support his theories MacKenzie 8(Iain MacKenzie, a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent. He is the author of The Idea of Pure Critique, “What is a Political Event?” Theory & Event¶ Volume 11, Issue 3, 2008, Muse, KB)

This can be seen in three different but related ways. Firstly, and in agreement with Egyed, Badiou’s examples of political events are ‘too obvious’.34 Caught between the need for examples to support his analysis and a strict demarcation of what might count as a political event, Badiou faces a dilemma; ‘he either has a theory of the event that relies on commonly received opinions, or one that is highly esoteric’.35 The result in either case is that his approach imposes an uncompromising burden on our understanding of political events. Either they are revolutionary embodiments of the universal ideal of equality or, what we often take to be political events are, in fact, merely inconsequential ‘happenings’ that actually change nothing fundamental within ‘the political’. In other words, only the exceptional, epochal and revolutionary egalitarian occurrences actually count as political events, while others are relegated to the category of ‘the situation’. Second, while Badiou is correct to emphasise the ways in which individuals become political subjects through the embodiment of significance, by then claiming that a political subject is only truly created if that subjectivity rests upon a universalizable ‘fidelity’ to the event Badiou robs political subjectivity of all but the most

revolutionary content. As shown above, there are only militant political subjects for Badiou and the vast array of other possible political ‘subjects’ – we could think of the groups that make up ‘identity politics’ (civil rights groups, women’s groups, disability groups etc) – are simply elements within a political situation rather than agents of change, or of a truly

political event. This evacuates what we ordinarily think of as politics from contemporary political life because on Badiou’s criteria there are only militant political subjects, bound together by a shared fidelity to universal equality, and as such there can be no way of conceiving of contestation, dissensus and consensus among these political subjects. As such, and thirdly, Badiou’s understanding of the political event implies a conception of ‘the political’ that is verging perilously close to being an empty formalism. Bensaïd captures this well when he says that Badiou’s theory of the ‘pure diamond of truth, the event’ creates ‘a politics

without politics [that] is akin to a negative theology. The preoccupation with purity reduces politics to a grand refusal’.36 While Badiou is one of the few philosophers of his generation to integrate political events into his systematic philosophy, his account of political events is in such stark contrast to everyday understandings of political life that it has to be noted, at least, that it lacks plausibility.

Nazism DA

Badiou’s theory of political events justifies Nazism MacKenzie 8(Iain MacKenzie, a Lecturer in Political Theory in the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Kent. He is the author of The Idea of Pure Critique, “What is a Political Event?” Theory & Event¶ Volume 11, Issue 3, 2008, Muse, KB)

As noted already, Badiou can be said to resolve, initially at least, the problem of how to introduce the idea of significance into the internal constitution of political events (while maintaining an apparatus to identify what counts as a political event) by way of the criteria of universalisability understood as a form of address that equally applies to all and to which all individuals can be faithful to in equal measure. Clarifying this, Badiou says that equality ‘means that the political actor is represented under the sole sign of the uniquely human capacity’ and that ‘thought is the one and only uniquely human capacity’.39 This would appear to mean that a true political event engenders an ‘equality of thought’ whereas a political non-event always privileges a particular perspective on thought (perhaps, the thinking, rational man over and against the unthinking, irrational woman) in the service of maintaining the status quo of the political situation. Yet, a few lines later, Badiou says that equality ‘signifies nothing objective...political equality is not what we desire or plan; it is that which we declare to be, here and now, in the heat of the moment, and not something that should be’.40 At this point it would seem that Badiou is eschewing any conception of equality that can be understood as ‘equality of x’ - ‘it is not a question of the equality of social status, income, function and still less of the supposedly egalitarian dynamics of contracts or reforms’41 – thereby seeming to embrace what we could call a purely formal conception of equality. This formal conception, one devoid of particular referents, can be unpacked as the claim that ‘like cases should be treated alike’. ¶ It seems clear that these two claims regarding equality are in conflict with

each other : the former being a version of a human capacity argument for equality (because we are all equally capable of thought we should only aspire to political ideals that recognise this fact); whereas the latter would seem to deny any validity to arguments in support of any particular version of equality at all. The vacillation on this point has its source in the fact that a purely formal conception of equality – treat like cases alike – can sanction deep and profound inequality if one simply assumes that the cases are not alike. Unless it is filled out by a conception of why it is that all humans are intrinsically equal then a purely formal conception

of equality will be no more than an empty tautology . On a purely formal understanding, it would mean that the Nazis could indeed be said to have embraced equality while simply adding that some individuals (Jews, gays, gypsies and so on) were not really human at all and therefore not to be treated like people. As such, Badiou’s attempt to dismiss Nazism as a ‘simulacrum’ of a true political event begins to look like a value-laden judgement, a matter of political opinion rather than an axiomatic principle of the political itself. ¶ The general problem Badiou faces is that his ideas push in two different directions at once. If he understands equality in a purely formal way then he cannot distinguish a true political event from a false

one . If he understands equality more substantively as ‘equality of thought’ then this introduces a normative dimension into his analysis that erodes his claim to be establishing an

axiomatic of true political events. The problem in this latter case resides in the value-laden and thereby contestable claims he is making about equality. In particular: a) it is not clear that the capacity for thought is ‘uniquely human’; b) it is not beyond dispute that this capacity, even if it is uniquely human, is shared equally by all humans, and; c) if it is the case that all humans have this capacity in equal measure then this is only pertinent to political life if it is given value, at which point the question of how this value is to be treated would emerge. Without deciding these issues, it is clear that by relying upon a rather traditional ‘human nature’ argument, Badiou unwittingly finds himself in the realm of opinions, values and debate; that is, in the realm of the political as it is more traditionally conceived. In sum, Badiou’s addition of the criteria of universalizability to the idea of significance, for all its provocative qualities, does little to either sustain a rigorous distinction between political events and mere occurrences in the political situation or to clarify or change our grasp of the political itself.

Ethics of Other First

Responsibility to the Other must come firstGrob 1999, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, [Leonard, Ethics after the Holocaust, p. 47]

Finally, if it is not just another abstraction in a history of philo-sophical abstractions, how does the face-to-face encounter help us to realize our goal of a post-Holocaust ethics? How can it help us to prevent future genocides? Is Levinas's depiction of the ethical rela-tion descriptive or prescriptive in nature? It must be recalled that Levinas is writing against the backdrop of centuries—no, millennia—within which moral, legal, and reli-gious systems have failed to protect us from the threat and, all-too-often, the reality of

genocidal acts. Levinas does not offer us just another set of moral directives akin to those ultimately derived from a base of egoist ontology. Rather, he endeavors to ground all modes of thinking and acting in a ground of all grounds: the call to responsibility sounded by the Other. This call undergirds, and thus stands outside any traditional descriptive/prescriptive distinction. Levinas's thought provides a context of all contexts for what it means to be moral, prompting us to rethink, from the bottom up, where we stand in relation to

others. Where do we stand? We stand, in every aspect of our lived expe-rience, as called to account for ourselves. Levinas brings to our at-tention that which, at bottom, is requisite for action which would refuse our potential for genocide. Whether it be those aspects of my being traditionally analyzed, let us say, by behavioral, social, or any other ( alleged ) science of humankind, each and every part of my being must now be looked at as founded in a fundamental call to responsibility. The human sciences must indeed be called upon in the endeavor to combat genocide, but they must no longer

ground themselves in an egoist base. After Levinas, it is not as if I am no longer subject to emotional or social constraints; rather, I must see this -being subject to- as rooted in something more basic than the alleged need to act, in all instances, from mere self-interest. The ethical relation to the Other permeates all that has heretofore been considered rooted in a fundamentally egoist ambition.

Ethics of the other comes firstGrob 1999, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, [Leonard, Ethics after the Holocaust, p. 13]

Philosophy in the post-Holocaust world need not speak explicitly of the face of the Other, because, implicitly, it is a work addressed to that very face. Guided by this "face" as the absolute, the end of all ends, the teacher of philosophy—or, by extension any teacher or parent—can adopt only that content mid pedagogy which ultimately honor the value of the personhood of the Other. In the shadows cast by the Holocaust, all the ways we teach and learn must radically be called into question. As that discipline which, perhaps more than others, has modeled the enterprise of an egoist appropriation of the world, philosophy has a special obligation to take upon itself the task of rethinking its fundamental aims.

In its movement from warlike to peaceful means and ends, philosophy after the Holocaust must model a mode of thinking which will help prevent new genocidal acts. Post-Holocaust philosophy must recall that it is neither (as has traditionally been said) theory nor practice. In its primordial sense, philosophy is an offering. With Levinas, we must recall that ethics is first philosophy.

Ethics comes firstGrob 1999, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, [Leonard, Ethics after the Holocaust, p. 9]

Ethics, for Levinas, is thus not to be identified with any ethical or even meta-ethical position. Levinas speaks neither as deontologist nor consequentialist. He does not attempt to articulate any list of rights or obligations, or even the principles on which the latter

would be based. All ethical theories, he implies, are secondary to, or derivative from, a primordial or founding moment: the encounter with the face of the Other. It is this moment-of-all-moments which institutes the very possibility of the "ethical" systems so hotly debated within the history of Western thought. Before there can be any ethical positioning—before there can be

discussions of virtue, happiness, duties—there is the meeting with the Other. Ethics is no set of directives; rather, in Levinas's words, “Already of itself ethics is an 'optics,'" a way of seeing which precedes—and founds—all that has heretofore been identified as ethical philosophy.

Human Rights Good

We must continually engage human rights to produce an increasingly better society by embracing the alterity and uniqueness of all individuals. Burggraveve 04 (Roger, The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as the Surpassing of Political Rationality, http://www.springerlink.com/content/2hnac1r8cdr4ewx8/fulltext.pdf Human Rights Review, 2004, Volume 6, Number 2, 92-94) WC

T he one who thinks and acts from the basis of human rights – e.g., standing up for and committing oneself to the rights of certain minorities or forgotten peoples – then does more in terms of humanization than what the sociopolitical structures can achieve. This is so because these structures can never take to heart completely the singular realization of the rights of the unique other. In our ever more international and structurally constructed societal bonds, they precisely make it possible to orientate separately every responsible person towards the necessary surplus of the good for each and every other. In one of his three articles, which Levinas dedicated entirely to human rights; he expressed the bond between the uniqueness of the other and human rights in a radical and challenging manner (HS 176-78). Human rights, which in no way whatsoever must be attributed from without because they are experienced as a prior and therefore as irrevocable and inalienable, express the alterity or absoluteness of every human being (AT 151). Every reference is annulled by human rights since it is acknowledged that every individual person possesses those rights: they are inherent to their being-human as persons. In this regard, human rights wrench every human person away from the determining order of nature and the social body, to which everyone indeed obviously belong. Herein lies, according to Levinas, a remarkable paradox. Thanks to the belongingness of every person to human kind – humanity – every person possesses an incomparable alterity and uniqueness, whereby everyone likewise transcends the generalness of the human kind. The belongingness of every person to the human kind does not mean a reduction to a neutral unity, but a presentation as a unique person, who by means of that fact itself actually destroys humanity as an abstract idea. Every person is unique in his or her genre. Every person is a person like every other person and yet utterly unique and irreducible: a radically spate other. Humanity exists only by grace or irreducible beings, who are for each other utterly unique and non-exchangeable others. Levinas also calls it the absolute identity of the person (HS 176). It is about a uniqueness that surpasses every individuality of the many individuals in their kind. The uniqueness or dignity of every individual person does not depend on one or the other specific and distinctive difference. It is about an “unconditional” uniqueness, in the sense that the dignity of the person – over every individual person – is not determined by their sex, color of skin, place of birth, moment of their existence, not by the possession of certain qualities and capacities. Every person possess dignity that is to be utterly respected, independent of whichever property of characteristic. It is about uniqueness that precedes every difference, namely understanding a radical alterity as an irreducible and inalienable alterity, whereby a person can precisely say “I.” This leads Levinas to state that human rights reveal the uniqueness or the absoluteness of the human person, in spite of their belongingness to the human kind or rather thanks to this belongingness. This is absolute, literally detached and unconditional alterity and thus uniqueness of every person simply signifies the paradox, the mystery and the newness of the human in being!

Human rights produce a spillover effect in which people will demand ever greater social justice. Burggraveve 04 (Roger, The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as the Surpassing of Political Rationality, http://www.springerlink.com/content/2hnac1r8cdr4ewx8/fulltext.pdf Human Rights Review, 2004, Volume 6, Number 2, 92-94) WC

But there is more. Human rights also fulfill a function within socially and politically organized justice itself, namely insofar as they also offer a specific contribution to an even better justice . Or rather, they precisely flow froth from the awareness that justice is never just enough (EFP 98). From within their surpassing position, people will begin to demand that the current, not yet stipulated or realized human rights be acknowledged in society and also acquire a structural, social, economic, juridical and political rendition. In this regard they belong to the essence of a non-totalitarian order of society itself, which namely is an order where the political (to be understood as a synthesizing term for the entirety of social, economic, financial, juridical and state structures, institutions and forms) is not the definitive and total regime. Even though they are not indentified with the presence of a government, and thus they have no direct political or state function, it is still within the political structure that they are acknowledged as their own parallel institution alongside the written laws. It is precisely this acknowledgement that makes the state a non-totalitarian state. For human rights to make a specific institutional place means indeed accepting that the political order does not proclaim itself as the final word. A politics that accepts human rights agrees at the same time to be critiqued on the basis of these human rights to make a specific institutional place means indeed accepting that the political order does not proclaim itself as the final word. A politics that accepts human rights agrees at the same time to be critiqued on the basis of these human rights so that a better justice becomes effectively possible. With human rights, which is not equated with the regime, one can lay one’s finger on the sore spot. By means of pressing charges when human rights are violated, one can question radically a political system that has become rigid or break its open towards greater justice. Human rights remind us that there still no perfect social and political justice – and there will never be as well (EFP 119).

Human rights must be addressed in a utopian manner. Though never actualizable, we must attempt the impossible to refine ethics. Burggraveve 04 (Roger, The Good and Its Shadow: The View of Levinas on Human Rights as the Surpassing of Political Rationality, http://www.springerlink.com/content/2hnac1r8cdr4ewx8/fulltext.pdf Human Rights Review, 2004, Volume 6, Number 2, 92-94) WC

Thus human rights have both a critical as well as a prophetic character . They go against all conservatism that is self-resigned and plays it safe, provoking or calling us forth literally to strive for full justice, without lapsing into the faults of a totalitarian regime, however. By so doing, human rights keep the future of the ideal society open. We can call this a utopia insofar as it is about something that shall not and cannot be realized. But at the same time it is an effective utopia because, ultimately, it leads all our ethical actions of responsibility and justice. Even though the utopia is unattainable, it does not hinder the condemnation of certain, factual conditions and structures. It makes it concretely possible to have eye for relative

progress that can achieved utopian thinking does not condemn all the rest, but on the contrary works like leaven in all the rest, so that the future is held open dynamically time and again. No ethical life is possible without the utopia of human rights (PM 178).