I’ve been reading Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil over the past few days (it’s a light, very short read), and for a work intended as an introduction to Badiou’s thought, it comes across as unnecessarily confused. He wants to critique the contemporary liberal evacuation of politics into ethical dilemmas that require no change to the status quo, but struggles to name the problem as such. Instead, he spends most of his time (poorly) criticizing Levinasian ethics for problems Badiou himself admits have very little to do with it, and the solutions he proposes strike me as just as susceptible to those same problems. In place of a theological devotion to the Other, a theological devotion to the event or the situation; in place of liberal co-optation and self-representation as the Other’s benefactor, the potential liberal co-optation of who names, structures, represents these events (EG the establishment response to Black Lives Matter).
3 Likes