Citing Alain Badiou, the Happy Tutor asks "in the name of what does one speak against the golden calf?" A fine answer—a gesture toward an answer, anyway—can be found in Badiou's own writings (Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Verso, 2001). He prescribes Good as The Goal and defines Evil only secondarily, as any abstention from the Good. This is a contrast to Badiou's characterization of the reigning paradigm, which defines Evil first and leaves Good more or less undefined.

While his characterization of the Good is complex and difficult to read, I understand it as follows. He calls it a "truth process" and gives some fine examples:

Nothing in the world could arouse the intensity of existence more than this actor who lets me encounter Hamlet, this perception in thought of what it means to be two, this problem in algebraic geometry whose innumerable ramifications I suddenly discover, or this open-air meeting, by the doors of a factory, which confirms that my political statement does indeed bring people together and transform them.

Interesting examples, no?

What qualifies as truth under this "truth process" is even harder to get a handle on, but the sense is that a truth is something "outside the box" or in Badiou's words, it "punches a hole in these [instituted] knowledges"—it is something unprecedented, in other words. The word "truth" is always couched with "process" because he acknowledges that no statements will be usably true for all time, but rather that certain events are truthful relative to their situation. The event, he says, cannot be precipitated by a determined individual; instead, our ethical responsibility is to be faithful to such an event when it occurs.

Another interesting facet of this theory is Badiou's assertion that a truth-process "names the void of a situation" (Ethics, p. 69), a phrase that I'd like to risk paraphrasing as "naming the 2000-pound lack of an elephant in the room": to specify, and therefore to help everyone realize, the presence of something which up until then was outside the sphere of (say) language, or beyond the limen of everyone's awareness.

It needs to be asked whether this idea of "naming the void" should really define the truth-process, or how we can verify it when it appears, or seems to have appeared. "A truth is indifferent to differences" says Badiou (p. 27)—meaning it is true regardless of any differences between Ourselves and the Other. But this denies the problem of relativism without answering to it. Hopefully we will have time to examine this issue in the weeks to come; in the meantime, I hope this gives some sense of in-the-name-of-what we fight for.

"I was like those in the gulags who fashioned a cross from twigs / And prayed to it at night in the barracks." (Czeslaw Milosz, "Prayer")