Considered as a figure of nihilism, reinforced by the fact that our societies are without a future that can be presented as universal, ethics oscillates between two complementary desires: a conservative desire, seeking global recognition of the legitimacy of the order peculiar to our ‘Western’ position – the interweaving of an unbridled and impassive economy with a discourse of law; and a murderous desire that promotes and shrouds, in one and the same gesture, an integral mastery of life – or again, that dooms what is to the ‘Western’ mastery of death. This is why ethics would be better named – since it speaks Greek – a ‘eu-oudenose, a smug nihilism. Against this we can set only that which is not yet in being, but which our thought declares itself able to conceive. Every age – and in the end, none is worth more than any other – has its own figure of nihilism. The names change, but always under these names (‘ethics’, for example) we find the articulation of conservative propaganda with an obscure desire for catastrophe.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, pg. 38