The Problem of Evil

In my last post I talked about Alain Badiou's ethic of truths as outlined in Ethics: An Inquiry into the Understanding of Evil. Now I'd like to look at his concept of evil, which is as unorthodox as his concept of the good. Devoting oneself to the unfolding of a truth is a good. Evil arises directly from the good, Badiou stresses. Conventional ethics begins with a notion of evil and from there tries to deduce a concept of the good. Evil is easier to imagine than the good, which is why the Christian tradition has focused so much on evil: it's more effective to inspire fidelity in people by frightening them with prohibitions and threats than it is to work out what one should actually do in a given situation.

Badiou identifies three forms of evil, all of which are deviations from the good. The first is simulacrum of the truth, i.e., an event that assumes the form of truth while lacking the "immortal" quality of truth. His example for this type of evil is Nazism. Nazi ideology seemed to be a radical break from received wisdom, and certainly it seized a lot of people, as the truth should do. However, the nationalist ideology of the Nazis was founded on a phony substance. The Nazis demanded fidelity to a closed, abstract set that was organized around a void called "the Jew," which, as a term for political (not to mention genocidal) action, "was a political creation of the Nazis." In effect, the Nazis had to invent a whole category of people in order to give substance to the false truth of the Aryan.

The second form of evil is the betrayal of a truth. Badiou's ethical maxim is "keep going!" Giving up on the truth, on one's desire, is therefore an evil. Badiou talks about a "fictional self" that one must use to maintain a balance between the call of the true (inventing a new form of music like Haydn or Schoenberg) and one's ordinary, everyday concerns, like grocery shopping and paying the electric bill. After the vividness of the event starts to wane, as it inevitably will, and the business of life presses its demands, "I am confronted with a pure choice between 'Keep going!' proposed by the ethic of this truth," Badious writes, "and the logic of the 'perseverance in being' of the mere mortal that I am." Fidelity to a truth, which is always never fully knowable, may leave you vulnerable to charges that you've lost your mind (Badiou admits "my fidelity may be terror exerted against myself"). But giving up means abandoning yourself to a series of unrelated wishes and unfathomable demands. Giving up means returning to the "service of goods," as Lacan put it.

Badiou calls the third form of evil "the unnameable." The good is a singular truth, not an absolute, which is why it's more precise to refer to "a truth" rather than "the truth." There's no overarching truth that encompasses everything, contrary to what religious fundamentalists like to claim. According to Badiou, there must always be something that lies outside a truth as we know it--and that elusive element is the Real. Again, Badiou is referring to Lacan's concept of the Real, which is something that both frustrates desire and changes it. The Real isn't necessarily an object; it's that slap in the face that forces you to change how you look at the world. Think of the scene about midway through Sleepless in Seattle in which Meg Ryan is about to approach Tom Hanks and his son as they play on a beach. She takes her first step toward them and she's nearly run over by a truck. The truck is the Lacanian Real. She retreats back to New York and nurses her desire before trying to meet him again. Her first attempt to meet him is premature, a false totalization. There are unresolved issues to work through before the truth of their initial contact can be revealed, but she can't know what the issues are until she learns more about what she really wants--the truth of her own desire.

Badiou cites the act of falling in love as a truth event.  In fact, it's the only commonplace experience he specifically designates as a source of a truth. Ethics is a short book that arose out of a specific event (a lecture series for French high school and college students), so Badiou has cut some corners, including specifying how we're supposed to recognize a truth. He acknowledges we can be deceived (see form of evil number one), but there's an unresolved tension between his claim that a truth announces itself in an event and the long process of unfolding the truth. Furthermore, his definitions of evil can be awkward. Do we really want to call a CPA evil when he neglects to upend all the rules of accounting? There are other questions as well: Can we maintain fidelity to multiple truths, say, one governing our love life and one our work life? Is the desire for a Corvette always stupid? What if it's part of some obscure truth? Badiou says the French Revolution was a truth event, but are there more mundane truths with which we can occupy ourselves while waiting for the next revolution to announce itself? Is there a truth in Java coding? In learning to ski? I guess these are all questions we need to answer according to an ethic of truth.