Forcing of the Unnameable

The "Forcing of the Unnameable" is a critical-diagnostic concept introduced by Žižek in his reading of Badiou. Within Badiou's ontology, "forcing" (forçage) names the procedure by which a truth-process—unleashed by an Event—retroactively compels the existing situation to verify propositions that were previously undecidable. A truth-procedure thus "forces" the language of the situation to name what it could not previously name. Yet Badiou's own framework stipulates a structural limit: every generic truth-procedure must respect a remainder that is constitutively resistant to nomination—the "Unnameable." The Unnameable is not merely a practical limit (something we have not yet gotten around to naming) but a logical necessity: the structural condition of possibility for any truth-process at all. Without this ineliminable remnant, the truth-procedure would claim total, closed completion.

Žižek's critical intervention consists in identifying the "total forcing of the Unnameable"—the dream of achieving complete Nomination, of abolishing any remnant—as Badiou's own definition of Evil. This move is theoretically loaded because it reveals an internal deadlock in Badiou's "politics of prescription": if forcing must always leave an Unnameable in place, then the emancipatory truth-process is structurally incomplete, structurally "to-come," and thus formally indistinguishable from the Kantian regulative ideal that Badiou's axiomatic-prescription logic was designed to supersede. The concept thus functions as an immanent critique, exposing how Badiou's framework, in its very gesture of radical political prescription, secretly reinstates a liberal "always-not-yet" horizon.

This concept appears in the-parallax-view-slavoj-zizek (p. 325) as part of Žižek's sustained critical engagement with Badiou's political ontology. Its primary anchor is the Badiouian Event: just as the Event irrupts from the "situated void" and initiates a truth-procedure, forcing is the mechanism by which that procedure extends itself into the situation. But where the canonical account of the Badiouian Event emphasizes the dangers of monumentalizing or absolutizing the truth (its "simulacrum"), Žižek here identifies a deeper structural danger inscribed within the forcing logic itself—not in a voluntarist excess but in the very formal requirement that the Unnameable must remain un-forced. The Forcing of the Unnameable thus functions as an internal specification and critique of the Badiouian Event's conditions of possibility.

The concept also resonates with several other cross-referenced canonicals. The Fichtean Anstoss is structurally homologous: just as the I's self-positing requires an irreducible obstacle-impetus that it cannot absorb without destroying itself, Badiou's truth-procedure requires an Unnameable remainder it cannot absorb. Both designate a "positivization of a lack" as a necessary structural support. The Master Signifier enters because total Nomination—the dream that Žižek identifies as Evil—would be the fantasy of an S1 that finally, completely quilts the entire field of signification with no remainder, no sliding, no constitutive gap; this would collapse the symbolic into the Real. The Real itself is implicated as the register that the Unnameable occupies: not a merely empirical leftover but the Real as structural impossibility. Finally, the deadlock Žižek diagnoses — that prescription structurally reinstates a regulative horizon — is framed against Politics of Prescription and Ideology, since the "liberal to-come" logic Badiou sought to exit is itself an ideological formation, meaning Badiou's framework risks ideological capture at the very moment it claims to escape it.

The Parallax ViewSlavoj Žižek · 2006 (p.325)

Badiou has proposed, as (one of) the definition(s) of Evil, the total forcing of the Unnameable, the accomplished naming of it, the dream of total Nomination.

The quote is theoretically loaded because it equates three phrases — "total forcing," "accomplished naming," and "the dream of total Nomination" — thereby revealing that Evil, in Badiou's own framework, is structurally identical to the fantasy of a completed Master Signifier: a closure of the symbolic that leaves no Real remainder. The word "dream" is especially significant: it marks total Nomination not as an achievable political goal but as a fantasmatic, ideologically driven wish — the very thing that, when actualized, produces terror rather than emancipation.