Lindsay Farinella
Philosophical Report 1: Badiou’s Ethics

Alain Badiou opens his Ethics by observing the common contemporary designation of the concept of ethics. He observes the concept’s widely-employed foundation as the capitalist notion of a universal human subject: innate rights to certain privileges are therefore held as not only self-evident, but as the true basis of morality as well. This perspective of ethics, he argues, is not a realization of the basis of the human, but remains another example of an ideology in itself—and consequently holding no validity in anything deeper. Because this ethical ideology focuses on the rights to what Badiou deems as the non-evil—or the freedom from certain oppression or cruelties—it naturally firstly looks to identify evil. Badiou observes the contemporary, or humanistic identification of evil is held in an a priori, consensus-based fashion. To identify human rights, or ethics in terms of the potential evil inflicted on a human, consequently leads to the identification of man himself in terms of his impending victimhood.
To conceive of a human subject and his ethics in these terms is to bring him down to a level Badiou feels is wholly erroneous as well as counterproductive. It seeks to conserve what is currently accepted and reject what it does not already have power over. A known Maoist, Badiou strongly criticizes what he sees as the western liberalism that encourages this definition of ethics. Instead, he maintains, a conception of ethics should look towards a “broad, positive vision of possibilities” (14). It should initially approach man—and his impending unknown possibilities—with a “collective will” towards the good, and not an a priori consensus of evil, or what already is (13). A process affirming the latter of these, for Badiou, is true inhumanity as compared to its usual humanistic idea. It therefore does not allow the conception of what he views as the true source of human action: the situation.
Badiou begins his argument for the concept of the situation by pointing out how it functions under the current notion of ethics. He maintains that any ethical approach functioning away, or apart from any specific individuality is generally observed to be rendered ineffectual by a specific situation. Any kind of external a priori conception of ethics always has the possibility of missing some point that remains interior to a situation. It often focuses on what Badiou maintains as an “abstract, statistical generality” while going on to argue that “all humanity has its root in the identification in thought of singular situations” (16). His ethics is therefore only located in the singular conception of an occurring situation and its process. In forming his own idea of ethics, he subsequently also feels the need to dispute Levinas’ ethical proposal of the Other.
Badiou comments that Levinas, “after a brush with phenomenology,” puts forth phenomenological arguments which serve (unknowingly, in many cases) as the foundation for much of ethical thought, such as the eventual approach to differences and tolerance (18). This only results in one having the capability to recognize differences between other human beings, or nothing more than the difference between “the Shi’ite community of Iraq and the fat cowboys of Texas” (26). The ethics that the Other has helped build for contemporary thought, he maintains, doesn’t provide any real truth concerning the importance of the situation. For Badiou, basing ethics on what essentially amounts to the viewing of relative difference is dangerous because there is no such thing as a single subject.

Contemporary ethics is therefore also essentially nihilistic. Badiou references Nietzsche in maintaining the current use of ethics amounts to the concept of the will to nothingness—it is incapable of reaching any kind of higher good and, almost by design, amounts to nothing. Badiou holds that because it essentially resigns itself to the consensus of evil and the conservation of the accepted standard, it cannot reach a higher standard. This higher standard is what he deems immortal. This term is used for its opposition of the nihilistic manner in which Badiou maintains contemporary ethics defines man by the base-level of an animal, or a potential victim—when a way should be found to bring him up as an immortal of sorts. The idea of the Other also contributes to this nihilism, he argues, because it already lays a firm frame of reference for the world in the sense that one is unable to break out of it and form completely unexplored or undefined conceptions. The Other is incapable of reaching any other kind of observation. Badiou sums up his nihilism argument, “Ethics is nihilist because its underlying conviction is that the only thing that can really happen to someone is death” (35).
Badiou therefore presents his own situational vision of ethics: truth defined through the event. An event in itself is characterized as a supplement to everyday living—the man enters into the composition of the subject, where subject is defined as something that goes beyond the base-level animal concept. This process allows one to discover a new way of being, and a truth that is found only within a specific situation. Subjects are only formed in the wake of the event. Truth, in this construction, is found through the event in which one holds faithfully to its process and ultimately reaches what is deemed an “immanent break”: “A truth process is heterogeneous to the instituted knowledges of the situation…it punches a hole in these knowledges” (43). His desire for an immortal therefore also comes into play within this framework: as one becomes part of the whole of the subject, he is exceeding the conception of the base-level animal.
Badiou’s examples of these events include Galileo’s contribution to physics, the French Revolution, as well as the meeting of Heloise and Abelard. All of the events fit into his four subjective types: political, scientific, artistic, and love. The French Revolution would obviously be political, while Galileo’s event would be scientific. Badiou is careful to note these categories are not the groupings of ethics or its truths—there are as many ethics are there are situations, or processes of truth. Badiou contrasts this process strongly with that of current ethics: “‘Love what you will never believe twice.’ In this the ethic of truth is absolutely opposed to opinion, and to ethics in general, which is itself nothing but a schema of opinion. For the maxim of opinion is: ‘Love only that which you have always believed’” (52). This is a notable contrast to Husserl’s own position on Galileo in his Crisis, where he presents a much stronger discrimination to what is deemed the mathematization of nature. Badiou, however, maintains Galileo’s contribution does indeed have bearing on much larger, more universal philosophical position. He analyzes the idea of an event and its ontology as mathematical. An event should therefore be seen as almost purely through itself, and its situation. Badiou gives a prominent example of the Holocaust to illustrate this: he claims it should not be grouped with any other kind of (seemingly) related situation, such as the massacres in Serbia. It is more productive to view the Holocaust as a political situation with its own historically-positioned nature. He therefore criticizes those that attribute the word evil to the Holocaust; they are lumping together situations that are also being improperly viewed in the first place.
Before giving his main conception of evil, Badiou notes that humans as a whole live not beyond good and evil, as Nietzsche maintains, but beneath them. This is proved as the human being reaches good through the truth process, propelling himself to more of an immortal from below. Evil, therefore, for Badiou, is the perversion of this truth process. He identifies three ways in which this can occur: through terror, betrayal, and disaster. To terrorize the truth process is for a subject to continue the knowledge of a situation and mistake whatever result for a truth. Therefore a true break, or hole would not be punched in the situation that Badiou asserts is necessary—and the resulting truth would actually be the opposite of one. A betrayal of the truth process is truly the word in its essential sense; one betrays ethics by remaining unfaithful to the truth process. This consists of a subject theoretically reaching the immortal and denying it as a truth. Disaster is therefore attempting to use a truth as becoming an Earth-based entity—it should remain as still essentially in its own world, as it were. It is referred to as a disaster because it involves literally misusing—and many times attempting to name truth—therefore making a complete catastrophe of a truth.
Badiou concludes Ethics by affirming the reality of the good and evil as contrasting strongly with that of general contemporary thought. Evil is only possible when one searches for the good—and never the other way around. He gives a systematic account of the event while making sure to include its importance with a potential drastic political persuasion. With this philosophy of the ethic of truths, its processes and its possible perversion, Badiou lays out a forcefully structured analysis of the world.