Over on the pages of Bellona Times:

Ezra doesn't mention Badiou's "four fundamental Evils," so I assume he wasn't as appalled as I was. Deceptions, torture, mass murder: Badiou calls them legitimate means to the Good, as all means are -- except for "obscurantism, commercial academicism, the politics of profit and inequality, and sexual barbarism." It doesn't matter what other benefits might be gained from those means: they're off limits. Only the vilest of humanity would take a paying academic job or partake of sexual pleasure.

Touche! This is, in fact, appalling, and I took it softly because the interview seems more off-handed than my other readings in Badiou. It's odd that he talks about "fundamental forms of evil" when he has been railing against the tendency to define Evil first and Good as its negative. The interview casts Badiou in a more absolutist light than I would like to have him, and I'm getting more and more interested in mounting a critique of his absolutism as I read more of it. But for the moment I have to clarify something in his writing that is to me like an epiphany.

In Ethics he presents a truth-process as something subjective, and that's why I think that to paraphrase, or infer: "the truth is fixed and not to be tampered with" is too quick. Rather, the truth is something that appears to you in a given moment, and can only be seen from the point of view of the moment, or afterwards. From the interview: "A Truth is a concrete process that starts by an upheaval (an encounter, a general revolt, a surprising new invention), and develops as fidelity to the novelty thus experimented. A Truth is the subjective development of that which is at once both new and universal."

Instituted knowledge is, then, very much to be tampered with. and the subject to which it occurs is "riven, or punctured, by this truth that 'passes' through [him]" (Ethics, p. 46). So we are not talking about a fidelity to established knowledges, but to brand-new ideas which contradict established knowledges (those knowledges are always imperfect, of course).

Why "universal," then? From Ethics: "After Einstein's texts of 1905, if I am faithful to their radical novelty, I cannot continue to practise physics within its classical framework." In fact, you can continue to practice physics in the classical mode, but you can't deny that there is such a thing as relativity. You can't go on, as Michelson and Morley tried to do, in saying that there is no way to explain the propagation of waves without positing an ether on which they travel, when in fact there is a way to explain it without the ether.

So a "truth" is, in a way, something that uproots a seemingly "fixed" idea. I find this notion both attractive and precarious. Precarious because I don't think a truth is simply anything which goes against conventional wisdom; it must be something which is somehow rigorous and powerful as well; it is not enough to say, "Our President is an idiot": that is not a Truth in the present sense. A Truth would be something closer to "The political system has become entangled with commercial interests" but a statement like that does not go nearly far enough to producing the kind of break that I, and Badiou, seek.

"[A truth] is thus an immanent break. 'Immanent' because a truth proceeds in the situation, and nowhere else—there is no heaven of truths. 'Break' because what enables the truth-process—the event—meant nothing according to the prevailing language and established knowledge of the [preceeding] situation" (Ethics, p. 42–43).

So it is not the Ends that justify the Means—though I see how the interview gives that impression—quite the contrary, it is only an unprecented event or epiphany (like Einstein's concept of relativity) that justifies the perseverence of that recognizably-new idea. What Einstein did that was Good was to keep working out the theory, and thus he made good on that epiphany, rather than let it slip out of his head into uselessness. It matters not what the results of the theory might be.

And so we are left in the end with the question of what amongst things that are Good are really good. Presumably Hitler was persevering on an immanent break, when he realized he might be able to conquer the world by marketing xenophobia. Then again, maybe that was an established knowledge. Badiou deals with the question of Nazism expressly in the latter parts of Ethics, but quite frankly I don't find his arguments convincing. He seems to have invented too strong an ethics and is finding ways to bail himself out for particular circumstances.

My own belief after absorbing Badiou's Ethics (here's where Philosophy becomes one's own philosophy, Tutor) is that the maxim of "Continuer!" is splendid and indeed vital in the areas of science and art, and perhaps in love, too. In Badiou's fourth "fundamental" domain of ethics, that is politics, we still need a way to recognize which epiphanies are good ones, and what kinds of truths in the social domain are True. Truth is, in a sense, easy to come by in the domains of mathematics, science, even in painting, where the subjects concerned are made-up, idealized entites; but when the subjects are hungry, bitter, angry, clipped people, the truths that might be useful are somewhat harder to come by.