Keeping the Faith: On Being Good and How Not to Be Evil (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil) (Book Review‪)‬

Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward, New York, Verso, 2001. ISBN: 1-85984-435-9 'Every truth, Badiou tells us in his Ethics, 'deposes constituted knowledges, and thus opposes opinions. For what we call opinions are representations without truth, the anarchic debris of circulating knowledge' (E 50). Being then fully aware that the book review--as little more than an at best vaguely nuanced species of opinion--is fundamentally 'beneath the true and the false' (E 51), it goes without saying that what follows is, veracity aside, not in the least bit true. That said, Ethics occupies a decidedly singular position within Alain Badiou's oeuvre. For starters, it's the only of his thus far translated major theoretical works which might be read, for the most part, without immediate recourse to Being and Event (although it does serve as something of a necessary addendum to his magnum opus). This rather welcome fact is due in part to Peter Hallward's introduction (which provides a concise overview of Badiou's ethical and philosophical project) and, more generally, to Badiou's concerted effort to eschew all overtly technical writing (Ethics was ostensibly written for a high school audience). Further, it is arguably (again, amongst his translated works) his most Lacanian book (or rather the book which thinks most closely alongside Jacques Lacan's antiphilosophy). Lastly, it is very probably, in a career distinguished by polemy and invective, his most immediately provocative work. Indeed, it is difficult not to be at least momentarily taken aback by a book which begins by launching into a virulent attack against the contemporary discourse of human rights and whose axial assertion is that 'the whole ethical predication based upon recognition of the other should be purely and simply abandoned' (E 25). In point of fact the whole of contemporary ethics--derisively designated by the author as 'the ethical ideology'--appears in Badiou's eyes to be little more than a vast synonym for negativity: today's 'ethical ideology' is a fundamentally statist edifice whose principle role is to '[prohibit] any idea, any coherent project of thought, settling instead for overlaying un-thought and anonymous situations with mere humanitarian prattle' (E 32-33). The task is then, reductively speaking, to invent a new ethics which would radically circumvent the state's authority. And, by happy coincidence, it is precisely this sort of circumvention that Badiou's philosophy has been offering all along.