#badiou

[soracities]

Philip Larkin, from "Be my Valentine this Monday", The Complete Poems [ID in ALT]

[grandpasessions]

The ideological coordinates of such liberal multiculturalism are determined by two features of our "postmodern" zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism -

(all values and rights are historically specific, hence any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent)

and the universalized "hermeneutics of suspicion" -

(all "high" ethical motives are generated and sustained by "low" motives of resentment, envy, etc.— the call to sacrifice our life for a higher cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or a pathological expression of masochism— and this either/or is an inclusive vel, i.e., both terms can be true at the same time).

Another way to formulate Badiou's insight that we live in a world-less universe would be to say that the functioning of ideology today no longer relies on mechanisms for the interpellation [the mechanism through which pre-existing social structures "constitute" (or construct) individual human organisms as subjects with consciousness and agency] of individuals into subjects: what liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, a mechanism "whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point in interpellating individuals into subjects."

The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it— all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to "re-create" himself or herself.

Living In the End Times / Slavoj Zizek

[nihmue]

identity is only ever a cessation of movement, or the absence of movement

Alain Badiou, Mathematics of the Transcendental

[anocana]

at this point i'm worried i'm going to find out there was a reason badiou was using the female symbol for the generic element

[dog-uncrushed]

First of all, what is being-there? It is being as determined by its coupling with what it is not.

Badiou, Logics of Worlds 98

[chrisengel]

[kenotype]

Alain Badiou, The Immanence of Truths.

[fajrydust]

In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure, through the birth of a world.

Alain Badiou, In Praise of Love