Ethics
Alain Badiou is thrilling in the first chapters of Ethics, where he demolishes what ethics has become. Though initially sympathetic to Levinas, he argues that the philosophy of the Other, in suppressing or masking its religiosity, is co-opted as "a pious discourse without piety, a spiritual supplement for incompetent governments, and a cultural sociology preached, in line with the new-style sermons, in lieu of the late class struggle."

See what I mean? Ow. Scorching. He's the same on the ethics of difference: scandalously contemptuous.

All this destruction is in the service of a project: an ethics of militancy. The problem with ethics, for Badiou, is that it has become negative: do not infringe human rights, which scarcely have any positivity; they amount to the right not to have your rights taken away. Badiou decries the reign of nihilism, and the sophistry that sees in every effort to think or enact the good a latent evil. "Such is the accusation... every revolutionary project stigmatized as 'utopian' turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare."

I'm with him all the way, and on into the critique of nihilism. What I am uncertain about is how he will maintain his Lacanianism and also not be a nihilist. The subject is "riven" by the event, writes Badiou. The subject is "not yet." The subject is true to his "non-knowledge." That's an awful lot of "not's" piling up at the feet of the militant subject of Badiou's ethics. That's what I'm saying.

More later.