ZIZEK / BADIOU: THE NEO-MARXIST SUBLIME

Alain Badiou's book Saint Paul: Le fondation de l'universalisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997) first arrived / landed in France, as if from outer space, a topologically rich appropriation of the Pauline insurrection, followed by Slavoj Zizek's The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). It then was translated into English, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), at the same time as Badiou's more aggressively configured Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2003) appeared. As a complex, these books underscore a moment in time perhaps best described as the rediscovery of the present-present, a form of radicalized time that is purely inherent in the very nature of being (of being alive). It is for this reason that Badiou expropriates Paul, given Paul's exquisite rhetorical circling of the question of being alive or dead (awake or asleep).

This arsenal of explosive, critical matériel is part and parcel of the principal cultural turn currently underway, in interdisciplinary venues, towards a reclaiming of universal concepts in the face of advanced nihilism, the outpouring (onslaught) of regressive tactical operations associated with Late Capitalism, a sinister non-thing foreseen by Adorno and Horkheimer as a withering, almost apocalyptic instrumentalization of everything and, notably, the attendant death of the subject (subject as consumer / endlessly manipulated thing). Thus the Baudrillardian specter of the Desert of the Real.

Zizek and Badiou (present-day 'Fox' and 'Hedgehog' ???) build upon (while confronting) similar works by both Jean-Luc Marion and Giorgio Agamben, while also demolishing the last vestiges of the implicit wager, present since Pascal (renewed by George Steiner), on a transcendent Some-thing Else as compensatory illusion. In its place, what emerges is the subject-as-rupture, a purely radicalized self-insufficiency noted as the pure potential of all universals, and all supposed singularities ("There is singularity only insofar as there is universality"). An excess, then, in-and-of-itself, and an anti-dialectical figure nailed to the ontological cross where immanence and transcendence converge in the present-present revealing the audacious (revolutionary) nature of the here and now.

This implied immanence of self is structured according to Lacanian gestures not towards the usual ineffable otherworldliness of intense inwardness, but instead dependence on the subject as site for pure contingency and becoming. To accomplish this 'splitting' of the subject into two (echoing Nietzsche's High Noon), Zizek resorts to excavating an extra-ethical subject-as-dimension within being that actually seeks its own demolition through revolutionary praxis. Transferred to the arts (and politics) this praxis supersedes all attempts to construct a new Master-Signifier (a new conceptual sign of a totality), while also bracketing the extreme, inward or self-ironic (hyper-subjective) jouissance of the subject-as-victim (that sensibility that moves within so much of present-day art). In fact, both Badiou and Zizek confer on the subject (the late-modern self) the role of self-destroying angel, a figure that actually rescues the subject from its dependence on mutually 'filiated' forms of subjection (slavery) and repression structurally imposed by the abstract principles operating within dematerialized and de-territorialized capital. And, as exemplified by Zizek's masterful deconstruction of popular culture, all authorized forms of 'filiation' (consciously or unconsciously applied, as propaganda and / or entertainment) merely permit a minimal space in which the imperiled subject is 'free' to effectively twist in the wind (enjoy his / her symptoms). As such, this polemical assault on the perverted nature of the late-modern subject represents a neo-Marxist sublime (a problematizing of subjectivity itself).

What this 'splitting in two' seems to indicate for Badiou (and it is Zizek's purview to in some ways echo what is 'happening' else-where) is that the self-recognition of the subject involves also a type of self-analysis (a being both analyst and analysand) leading to self-revelation, such that the subject notes that it only exists by virtue of its dual residence under the sign of death (the letter, the law, particularization) and the sign of life (the spirit, the resurrection, universality). What this seems to mean for Badiou, the 'post-cultural' neo-Marxist, is that the subject -- once it realizes its inherent slavery (impotence) -- re-discovers its truly inherent singularity in universality. For Badiou, who always slips away at the crucial moment, this singularity within universality (and vice versa) signals a new life (re-subjectivization) for the subject. In short, Badiou is offering -- by way of Saint Paul -- the recovery of the ground of being through re-mapping the soul. This proposed new subjectivity is, in fact, the oldest subjectivity (the pre-Adamic Self) present but also absent in the folds and warps of Modernity. Thus, and for very sound reasons (for Badiou is after all a materialist-rationalist), the late-modern subject must be re-configured. His expropriation of Saint Paul represents the most radical (insurrectional) form of this renewal. The 'use-value' of Saint Paul is legendary. It is perhaps Kazantzakis' The Last Temptation of Christ that is the ultimate unreferenced reference here. In that scorching novel Jesus survives the cross only to be confronted by Paul and effectively denounced.

As such, re-territorializations are prefigured as revolutionary acts (declaratory acts) reclaiming the emptied (and empty) gestures of modern subjectivity (intentional and permissible 'cultural' forms of alienation and anomie; i.e., the perverse 'allowable cut' of capitalist dis-ingenuity). By way of countering both the re-imposition of figures of law and dominance (the Platonic Big Lie), and by forcing the subject to reconstruct the possibility in oneself of a new, better world, the post-phenomenological turn towards radical contingency (and radical subjectivity) points vigorously, and with considerable élan, to the ground always-already overwritten in all instrumentalized systems; that is to say, towards the forever disfigured, hijacked, and desecrated ground of the 'given', or the very ground beneath our feet (this world endlessly gone awry). This proposition opens infinite, elective gestures within both the private universe of the modern subject and the multiple representational worlds of art, architecture, and literature (to name but the most obvious 'names'). For Badiou, of course, it opens directly onto politics. But, these 'multiple' worlds of disconnected forms of inhabitation (and critique) -- such as architecture parlante ('talking architecture') -- are in many senses (in the most advanced senses) more powerfully connected to the world as it exists (and as it might exist) than the endlessly twisted, topologically disfigured world of political agitation.

Badiou goes straight to the heart of the matter when, in Saint Paul, he re-situates spirit in the here and now (in the present-present) as the always-existing opportunity that is concealed by the impositions of a present-past (the short shadow of History-in-the-making, or Law). By making the present-present a form of rupture (and anti-sign for the self), Badiou avoids the metaphysical conundrum of 'here' versus 'over there' (and its rhetorical sub-species). 'Here' (as in 'here and now') becomes the site of / for Some-thing Else. This Some-thing else forever slips away in Badiou's writing, as well it should, because he is not of the mind to tell us what it is. As with Zizek, this whatever it is is for the subject, mired or un-mired in the latency of dual distresses, to figure (configure) for itself. This is not to say, as good Lacanians, that Badiou and Zizek are mere 'analysts'. In a bizarre sense -- a sense that might be perversely related back to the market and its very own analysts -- Badiou and Zizek are Old Testament prophets. They have signaled the coming of a new subject. This subject is pre-figured in their exhaustive critique of the warped universe of Late Capitalism. Late Capitalism -- and all of its various, twisted symptoms (intentional and otherwise) of a type of insanity -- in its non-self is the functional equivalent of the Law that Paul inveighed against (in his own vigorous, inimical, and evasive manner).

It is abject subjectivity (cipher for humanity as indivisible remainder ???), as an excess (surplus), that leads out of this horrific, contemporary impasse towards this implicit / explicit Some-thing Else always on offer. This Some-thing Else is the rediscovery of what has always existed beneath everything else anyway, anytime -- that is, a Some-thing Else formulated quite simply as the State of Emergency Known as Love. It is this State of Emergency that Zizek offers, brilliantly, as the all-purpose answer to all other so-called states of emergency (the latter which, as he indicates, are always announced to forestall the former).

Gavin Keeney (November 2003)

A review of Badiou’s St Paul by Daniel Boyarin appeared in Bookforum (April/May 2006), pp. 12-13, entitled “Neither Greek Nor Jew” …