What is ethical experience for Alain Badiou? What can be said of the subject who has this experience? Let me begin by trying to pick out the formal structure of ethical experience, or what with Dieter Henrich we can call ʻthe grammar of the concept of moral insightʼ, [1] and explaining how such experience implies […]
Ethics without others
In his otherwise sympathetic survey of Badiouʼs ethics in RP 100,1 Simon Critchley advances three significant arguments against Badiouʼs rather unusual position. They are likely to be fairly typical of the sort of objections we should expect from those committed, after Levinas and Derrida, to an ethics oriented around the category of the other. All […]
Uncategorical imperatives
Uncategorical imperatives Adorno, Badiou and the ethical turn Peter dews ethics have now generated a crossover among these various disciplines that sees and does ethics ʻotherwiseʼ. The decentering of the subject has brought about a recentering of the ethical. But the disparate contents of the volume, from John Guillory on the ethics of reading, via […]
‘The history of truth’
The twenty-first meditation in Alain Badiouʼs LʼEtre et lʼévénement, which is devoted to Pascal, opens with the following quotation from the Pensées: ʻThe history of the Church should properly be called the history of truth.ʼ [1] The pensée in question is numbered 858 by Brunschwicg, and 776 by Lafuma. Although it is not my intention […]