Badiouian Event

All occurrences

Where it appears in the corpus (33)

1. #01

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.88

   The voice and the drive > His Master's Voice, His Master's Ear

   Theoretical move: Dolar uses the HMV logo as a theoretical parable: the voice-as-object (acousmatic voice) operates as a Lacanian drive-montage that simultaneously structures authority/obedience, deceives via a trompe-l'oreille analogous to trompe-l'œil, and exposes the speaking subject to the power of the Other's ear — thereby showing the voice's irreducible asymmetry with vision and its constitutive role in psychosis and subjective interiority.

   One could say it is by its nature on the side of the event, not of being, in Badiou's parlance.

2. #02

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.69

   chapter 2 > Shofar

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that the object voice — paradigmatically embodied in the shofar — is not simply opposed to logos but is its hidden support: the paternal voice that founds the Law is structurally identical to the "other" voice it ostensibly persecutes, and both are organized around an ineradicable lack (S(A/)) that links voice, jouissance, femininity, and the impossible foundation of the Other. The voice is further theorized as the missing link between bodies and languages, connecting Lacanian object-theory to Badiou's ontology.

   the emergence of event and truth through the break presented by the object voice... we can reach what Badiou is after by another path

3. #03

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.205

   Notes > Chapter 3 The "Physics" of the Voice

   Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus advances several interlocking theoretical arguments: the drive's aim/goal distinction (via Lacan) explains why the oral drive circles an eternally lacking object rather than reaching satisfaction; the acousmatic voice is shown to be structurally tied to phantomology when seen/heard fail to coincide; and the trompe-l'œil/lure distinction illuminates how deception operates at the level of the sign rather than verisimilitude.

   'entre le vide et l'événement pur.' The quote is from the circulated manuscript version of Logiques des mondes.

4. #04

   A Voice and Nothing More · Mladen Dolar · p.127

   The voice and the drive > The antipolitics of the voice

   Theoretical move: The passage theorizes two opposed political uses of the voice against the letter: (1) a ritual/complementary division-of-labor in which the voice enacts and seals the letter's authority, and (2) an authoritarian-totalitarian use in which the voice supplants the letter — with fascism and Stalinism representing structurally inverse forms of this second mode, the former centred on the charismatic, law-suspending voice and the latter on the self-effacing subordination of voice to the letter-as-Big-Other.

   if the main objective of the fascist ruler was to produce an Event here and now, if fascism put all its resources into the mechanisms of fascination and spectacle, if the voice was the ideal medium of producing such Events

5. #05

   The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.239

   8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Notes* > *4. The Possibility of the Impossible*

   Theoretical move: This passage (endnotes) works through the parallels and tensions between Lacanian singularity and Badiou's truth-event, arguing that both posit a subject of truth as a fissure in the symbolic order defined by its radical break with social situatedness, while also examining the paradoxical relationship between the subject's agency and the contingency of the event via Žižek, Zupančič, and Santner.

   truth-events 'are irreducible singularities, the beyond-the-law of situations. Each faithful truth-process is an entirely invented immanent break with the situation.'

6. #06

   The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.210

   8. *The Sublimity of Love* > *Making the Sublime "Appear"* > *Towards Universalist Ethics*

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that a genuine universalist ethics must bypass particular identity categories by grounding itself in singularity rather than collective substance: only the singular subject who refuses identitarian particularity can participate in the universal, while fidelity to particularist "simulacra" (e.g., National Socialism) produces totalizing violence rather than liberating truth.

   The truth-event, as well as the process of elaboration that represents fidelity to this event, thus renders 'difference' insignificant by introducing a truth that is universally applicable to everyone concerned.

7. #07

   The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.111

   4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Lures of Power*

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's two "lures of power"—reifying the void and absolutizing truth—are countered by the structural incompleteness of naming, and that this incompleteness aligns Badiou with Lacan's insistence on an unbridgeable gap between the Real and its symbolization, while also positioning sublimation ethics as a superior framework for both personal and social transformation.

   one of the surest ways to tell the difference between a genuine event and a simulacrum is that while the event is 'universally addressed' (applicable to everyone), the simulacrum attempts to translate the name into an identitarian 'substance' of some sort.

8. #08

   The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.165

   7. *The Ethics of Sublimation* > *Beyond the Reality Principle*

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that sublimation constitutes an ethics grounded in fidelity to das Ding rather than the reality principle: by admitting traces of the real into the symbolic, sublimation punctures the seamlessness of social reality and opens a space for the reinvention of values beyond the hegemonic 'common good', a move Badiou's truth-event is shown to parallel.

   Inasmuch as the event activates the 'immortal' within the mortal, turning an ordinary 'some-one' into an extraordinary 'subject,' it inevitably brings the subject's 'immoderate' passion for the Thing into its conventionally moderate 'situation.'

9. #09

   The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.97

   4. *The Possibility of the Impossible* > *The Subject of Truth*

   Theoretical move: The passage argues that Badiou's truth-event — arising from the void (the Lacanian real) of a situation — transforms an ordinary "some-one" into a singular, universal subject of truth (an "immortal"), and maps this structure onto Lacanian concepts of the act, the real, jouissance, and singularity to theorize how the impossible encounter with the real generates unprecedented subjective and ethical possibilities.

   Badiou's truth-event represents a break in routine that manages to provoke something utterly surprising or unforeseeable.

10. #10

    The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within · Mari Ruti · p.96

    4. *The Possibility of the Impossible*

    Theoretical move: The passage maps Badiou's theory of truth-events onto Lacanian psychoanalysis, arguing that Badiou reconceptualises the Lacanian act and ethics of psychoanalysis by making the social/collective transformation that is only a byproduct in Lacan constitutively necessary to the event itself, thereby shifting the subject's fidelity to rupture from a 'private' experience to a premise of collective change.

    the truth-event opens the possibility for new possibilities or, to use Badiou's own wording, the 'possibility of the impossible'

11. #11

    Sex and the Failed Absolute · Slavoj Žižek · p.320

    **Sex and the Failed Absolute** > The World With(out) a <span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-138"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2118"></span><span id="scholium_34_the_world_without_a_snout.xhtml_IDX-2519"></span>Snout

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues against Badiou's "positivism of Truth-Event" by insisting that the Death Drive—understood as radical (self-relating) negativity rather than any ontic positivity—is the primordial opening that makes an Event possible, and that sexuality (as the site of this void) cannot be reduced to the order of Being but is already a "brush with the Absolute" that love merely supplements, not elevates.

    for him, the exception to the order of Being can only be a positive (affirmative) Truth, while for us, the space for such an exception is opened up by the void of radical negativity.

12. #12

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.308

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > The Historicity of the Four Discourses

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that power is constitutively obscene—its "truth" is that it always already functions as an illegal excess—and uses this diagnosis to press the question of whether a structurally new Master Signifier (Lacan's *vers un signifiant nouveau*) is possible, or whether every revolution merely returns to the same obscene supplement, a structural problem shared by Badiou's and Miller's frameworks.

    is this also not Badiou's predicament, after he is forced to take into account the 'de-territorializing' dynamics of today's capitalism? After defining the task of emancipatory politics as undermining the state of representation from the standpoint of its constitutive excess

13. #13

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.319

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that global capitalism is uniquely "worldless" — it dissolves every stable representational frame rather than founding one — and this creates a fundamental aporia for Badiouian emancipatory politics (which traditionally intervenes from within a world's symptomal excess), forcing a parallax reading of the economy/politics non-relation as the key structural problem for any leftist project today.

    The same problem arises apropos of truth: if, for Badiou, the Truth-Event is always local, the truth of a determinate historical world, how are we to formulate the truth of a worldless universe?

14. #14

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.32

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Hegelian "concrete universality" is not a neutral container of particulars but the irreducible tension and non-coincidence between levels—demonstrated through the logic of the frame (appearance appearing as such), the supernumerary exception that *is* the universal, and the "temporal parallax" by which the same principle cannot actualize simultaneously across domains, requiring retroactive reading (après-coup) to become legible.

    This is what Badiou et al. deployed as the logic of the 'supernumerary' element: the exception (the element with no place in the structure) which immediately stands for the universal dimension.

15. #15

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.170

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that a truly radical materialism must be non-reductionist—not "everything is matter" but "there is nothing which is not matter"—which, via Lacan's formulas of sexuation (the not-All), opens space for immaterial phenomena to have a specific positive nonbeing; and that the Badiouian Event must be understood not as a Beyond of Being but as the very curvature/non-self-coincidence of Being itself, which Žižek aligns with the parallax gap and the logic of the non-All.

    an Event does not curve the space of Being through its inscription in it—on the contrary, an Event is nothing but this curvature of the space of Being.

16. #16

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.112

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Comedy of Incarnation

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that the standard critique of fetishism (which reduces the fetish to a contingent object filling an empty structural place) misses the "Hegelian performative" dimension whereby the big Other's empty place is constitutively correlated with an excessive partial object — castration names not merely the gap between element and empty place, but the very emergence of that place through a cut; this logic extends to a critique of the philosophy of finitude (including a Lacanian variant), which is countered by the obscene immortality of objet petit a / death drive as the true materialist infinite.

    when Badiou, in his disparaging dismissal of the philosophy of finitude, talks about 'positive infinity,' and, in a Platonic way, celebrates the infinity of the generic productivity opened up by fidelity to an Event

17. #17

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.40

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Master-Signifier and Its Vicissitudes

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Master-Signifier operates as a reflexive "quilting point" that transforms disorder into order without adding positive content, and that objet petit a functions as the "transcendental scheme" of fantasy mediating between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects in reality — thereby explaining how ideology schematizes desire and hegemonizes the void left by the primordially repressed binary signifier.

    Badiou proposes the concept of 'point' as a simple decision in a situation reduced to a choice of Yes or No, he implicitly refers to Lacan's point de capiton

18. #18

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.412

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 4The Loop of Freedom

    Theoretical move: This endnote apparatus performs multiple theoretical moves simultaneously: it glosses the Lacanian big Other's radical ambiguity (symbolic substance vs. pure appearance), identifies the Master-Signifier as the answer to infinite regress in argumentation, reads anxiety (and, contra Lacan, Badiouian enthusiasm) as the affect that grants access to the Real, and deploys the Hegelian 'positing of presuppositions' to illuminate the mutual entanglement of sexual and socio-symbolic failure in marriage.

    for Badiou, enthusiasm (of the fidelity to the Event) is also a signal of our access to the Real

19. #19

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.265

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Lacanian analysis has surrendered its sociopolitical critical edge by seeking institutional recognition, while Hardt and Negri's biopolitical theory of the multitude commits a parallel theoretical error: by neglecting the dialectical role of capitalist *form*, they reproduce the ultimate capitalist fantasy of frictionless self-revolutionizing production, leaving the notional structure of revolutionary rupture in darkness.

    multiple forms of resistance to the Empire, Multitude ends with a Messianic note adumbrating the great Rupture, the moment of Decision when the movement of multitudes will be transubstantiated in the sudden birth of a new world

20. #20

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.386

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Notes > Introduction: Dialectical Materialism at the Gates

    Theoretical move: The passage deploys the parallax concept as both a structural and political category—defining revolutionary utopia as the abolition of the parallax gap, and mobilizing Hegelian dialectics (U-P-I contradiction, singularity, Absolute as Subject-Object) alongside Badiouian materialist dialectics to articulate the logic of truth, drive, and universality against liberal "democratic materialism."

    I share with Alain Badiou the conviction that the time has come openly to assume this problematic term (in his forthcoming La logique des mondes, Badiou designates as today's principal politico-philosophical opposition that of 'democratic materialism' and 'materialist dialectics').

21. #21

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.379

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Of Eggs, Omelets, and Bartleby's Smile

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Bartleby-gesture of pure withdrawal ("I would prefer not to") constitutes not a preparatory stage but the permanent ontological foundation of revolutionary politics—a parallax shift from the gap between two somethings to the gap between something and nothing, which simultaneously empties the superego supplement from the Law and reduces metaphysical difference to the immanent void within reality itself.

    In his (unpublished manuscript) La logique des mondes, Alain Badiou elaborates the eternal Idea of the politics of revolutionary justice at work, from the ancient Chinese 'legalists' through the Jacobins to Lenin and Mao, which consists of four moments: voluntarism... terror... egalitarian justice... and, last but not least, trust in the people

22. #22

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.181

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Resistances to Disenchantment

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that neither the transcendental-philosophical defense of subjectivity nor the accommodationist strategy of finding neuronal correlates for psychoanalytic concepts constitutes an adequate response to the challenge of brain sciences; instead, psychoanalysis must locate itself within the brain sciences' own inherent silences and impossibilities, identifying the "absent Cause" of cognitivist accounts as the Freudian death drive / German Idealist self-relating negativity. Along the way, he maps four positions on consciousness through a Greimasian square and proposes a Badiouian framing of consciousness-emergence as Event.

    Perhaps the problem of consciousness should be formulated in Badiou's terms: what if the emergence of thought is the ultimate Event?

23. #23

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.333

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that 'free choice' is always already a meta-choice whose conditions are ideologically pre-structured, and uses the Amish rumspringa as a model for how academic 'radical' distance from the state functions as a reproductive mechanism of hegemony rather than genuine resistance; against Critchley's ethics-first localism, Žižek proposes a parallax shift that reveals 'resistance' as feeding the power-machine, and authentic revolution as a 'Must' rather than an 'ought.'

    even if the emancipatory progress cannot be directly grounded in an 'objective' social necessity... it presupposes a certain specific historical site: what Alain Badiou called 'the evental site.'

24. #24

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.286

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Gelassenheit? No, Thanks!

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that Nazism was a pseudo-event (désêtre) while Stalinist Communism, despite its horrors, remained inherently related to an authentic Truth-Event (the October Revolution), making Stalinist "irrationality" a displaced return of genuine revolutionary negativity rather than mere nihilism—and uses this distinction to reframe Heidegger's complicity with Nazism and his failure to attribute "inner greatness" to Soviet Communism.

    Stalinist Communism was inherently related to a Truth-Event (of the October Revolution), while Fascism was a pseudo-event, a lie in the guise of authenticity.

25. #25

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.67

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy > ". . . ce seul objet dont le Néant s'honore"

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that drive must be rigorously distinguished from desire: drive is not an infinite longing for the lost Thing that gets stuck on a partial object, but is itself the very fixation, the self-propelling loop of repetition that finds satisfaction in failure and endless circulation around the void. This distinction is then leveraged to reframe the debate between Lacan and Badiou on negativity and the Act, and to identify the curved structure of drive with Hegelian self-consciousness understood as a non-psychological, impersonal agency of registration — the big Other.

    while, for Badiou, the unnameable Real is the *unfathomable external background* to a process of Truth (the resisting X which can never be fully "forced" by Truth), for Lacan, the Unnameable is *absolutely inherent*

26. #26

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.329

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: Žižek argues that egalitarian political "terror" (from the Jacobins to Maoism) is a symptom of the *foreclosure* of the economic sphere rather than its over-extension, and that Badiou's anti-Statist politics reaches a deadlock precisely because it refuses to grant the "economic" domain the dignity of Truth/evental potential—the only exit being to restore the economic as a site of Event.

    the only way out of this deadlock is to restore to the 'economic' domain the dignity of Truth, the potential for Events.

27. #27

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.270

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > interlude 2

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the inherent obstacle/antagonism of capitalism is simultaneously its condition of impossibility AND possibility (via Derrida/Lacan), meaning abolishing capital's contradiction would dissolve rather than release productive potential; it then identifies slum-dwellers as today's privileged "evental site" and proletarian subject, defined not by exploitation but by exclusion from citizenship, making them the true symptomatic product of global capitalism rather than its accident.

    we should nonetheless, in Badiou's terms, perceive slums as one of the few authentic 'evental sites' in today's society

28. #28

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.405

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 1: Kate's Choice, or, The Materialism ofHenry James > 3The Unbearable Heaviness of Being Divine Shit

    Theoretical move: This endnote cluster advances several interlocking theoretical moves: it articulates drive as an ethical/metaphysical category distinguishable from instinct; critically probes Badiou's four truth-procedures (science, art, politics, love) by exposing their hidden asymmetry (three plus one); and raises the question of whether every order of Being is the disavowal of a founding Event, linking Badiou's event-theory to Lacanian notions of the Real and inscription.

    is there a Being without an Event, simply external to it, or is every order of Being the disavowal-obliteration of a founding Event

29. #29

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.168

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others

    Theoretical move: Žižek reframes the modern "humiliation" narrative (Copernicus-Darwin-Freud) by arguing that twentieth-century thought does not simply continue desublimating reduction but paradoxically rehabilitates appearance/Event as irreducible to positive Being—and that the true materialist wager is not reductionism but the capacity to explain mind, consciousness, and sexuality precisely where idealism fails, with Badiou's Event-logic shown to be structurally homologous to the Hegelian non-All.

    in Badiou, it is the Event reference to which grounds a Truth-process... a Truth-Event is totally heterogeneous with regard to the order of Being (positive reality)

30. #30

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.324

    Copernicus, Darwin, Freud . . . and Many Others > Do We Still Live in a World?

    Theoretical move: Žižek critically examines Hallward/Badiou's "politics of prescription" — the axiomatic, direct-universalist logic of emancipatory politics — exposing an internal deadlock: the concept of "forcing" (forçage) structurally requires an "Unnameable" remainder that cannot be fully actualized, which pushes Badiou's framework back toward a Kantian regulative ideal and, paradoxically, toward the liberal "to-come" logic that prescription was meant to overcome.

    an Event always occurs at the site of this surplus/remainder which eludes the grasp of the State.

31. #31

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.58

    The Birth of (Hegelian) Concrete Universality out of the Spirit of (Kantian) Antinomies > The Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy

    Theoretical move: The passage argues that the Marxian "parallax" consists in the irreducible, non-synthesisable gap between the logic of economy (commodity-form as socio-transcendental a priori) and the logic of politics (antagonism), such that the bracketing which produces each domain is not merely epistemological but inscribed in "real abstraction" — and that post-Marxist "pure politics" (Badiou, Rancière, etc.) mistakes by reducing economy to an ontic sphere while Karatani's Kantianism fails to go beyond a transcendental X that leaves the fetishism of Power intact.

    In Badiou, the root of this notion of pure 'politics,' radically autonomous with regard to history, society, economy, State, even Party, is his opposition between Being and Event—it is here that Badiou remains 'idealist.'

32. #32

    The Parallax View · Slavoj Žižek · p.420

    The Academic Rumspringa, or, the Parallax of Power and Resistance > Interlude 2: objet petit a in Social Links, or, The Impasses of Anti-Anti-Semitism > 5From Surplus-Value to Surplus-Power

    Theoretical move: This passage is a footnote/endnotes section providing bibliographic references and brief theoretical asides, including a key note on Lacan's self-critical shift in conceiving the analyst's position from a stand-in for the big Other to an embodiment of objet petit a, and scattered remarks on perversion, sexuation, the four discourses, and Badiouian politics.

    What if the greatest courage is not that of fidelity to the Event, but that of assuming the thankless role of undoing the catastrophe/disaster of the Event gone awry

33. #33

    Žižek Responds! · Todd McGowan & Dominik Finkelde (eds.)

    Žižek Responds! > [Slavoj Žižek Is Not Violent Enough](#contents.xhtml_ch5) > Notes

    Theoretical move: This endnotes passage contextualizes Žižek's theory of the Act by grounding it in critiques of gradualism, the big Other, and cowardice — arguing that true political courage requires accepting the inexistence of the big Other, while situating Žižek's positions on Stalinism, Badiou's event, and Benjamin's critique of violence against his academic critics.

    Žižek shares with Alain Badiou, who sees what he calls the event as constitutive of a life worth living. Life outside the bearing of the event is insignificant being, a being in which one is never a subject but just the plaything of the prevailing situation.