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| Marcus Steinweg | |||||||||||||||
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| WHY BADIOU? 41TH LECTURE AT THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL, JUNE 17, 2009 By Marcus Steinweg (Abstract) |
 Alain Badiou |
| "Kant's greatness," says Alain Badiou, "resides in the fact of combining the idea of a limit to reason with the contrary idea of a human nature which surpasses itself as it is laid out above all in the infinitude of practical reason". The subject of self-surpassing, of self-transgression, of self-tearing-away and touching of the limit is the finite subject of infinitude. It is the subject of truth insofar as truth is the name of "primordial inner turmoil or emptiness" (M. Blanchot). It is a subject opened to nothingness, to the real, to the dimension of a pre-originary 'originariness', ontological subject whose truth belongs neither to the ontological order of being nor to the ontic order of beings. The truth of the subject of truth is an opening toward the zone of conflict between being and beings, to the strife (eris) or war (polemos) between openness and closedness, to the... ontological difference. As a subject of truth, the subject of the touching of truth is the subject of an experience of difference between lethe and aletheia, earth and world, darkness and light. In relation to this difference (to a conflict that is mirrored neither on the scale of what is knowable nor on the scale of the unknowable, for it describes the monstrous compossibility of knowledge and non-knowledge), the subject must maintain a form which would be equally a form of truth and a form of life, a form that is appropriate to formlessness itself. |
