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mrbear's review against another edition
3.0
This is a book that I almost certainly should have spent a longer time reading, despite it being very short. It is also the kind of book that is almost pointless to give a rating to, so by 3 stars I mean only that I to some extent disagree with Badiou's conclusions. To think of Evil as being constructed from Good (or even visa versa) strikes me as a hopeless quest. It is a question that comes up often in philosophy, and while Badiou does well explaining his take on this issue, I personally cannot bring myself to believe it. To me there are certain things that are Good and other things that are Evil not because we name them or characterize them situationally, but because they evoke a visceral feeling of happiness or horror. These events are definite extremes, and the vast majority of human history is concerned with the shades of gray between them. In this sense, I agree with Badiou that a religious conception of Good is antiquated, but disagree that it is possible to perceive Good situationally. If something is obviously Good or Evil, there will be no debate. If something is not Good or Evil explicitly, as I would argue almost all things are, It is not possible to fully and convincingly explain the ethics of the situation.
It is entirely possible I am misunderstanding Badiou's argument or conclusion, and I'm sure I will return to this book in the future. But for now, I respectfully disagree.
It is entirely possible I am misunderstanding Badiou's argument or conclusion, and I'm sure I will return to this book in the future. But for now, I respectfully disagree.
blackoxford's review against another edition
5.0
Against Human Rights
Human rights is an idea dangerous to the human beings whom it is nominally meant to protect. These rights presume that what constitutes a human being is ‘self-evident’ as it says in the Constitution of the United States. This is, however, according to Badiou, a philosophical conceit made popular by Immanuel Kant at the time that document was prepared. The contradictions and inadequacies of the document and of its inherent philosophy have became apparent only subsequently.
The first problem is obvious once stated but not before. Rights are actually the recognition of evil, that is, they are the inverse statement of that which is deemed unacceptable. Rights presume that human beings are victims who must be protected from their victimhood. So, Badiou asks, “Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man?” The idealist white knight fulfilling his fantasy of saving the honour of the virginal princess. This is not ethics but self-indulgence.
But there is an objective issue as well as this subjective fantasy in the defining of rights in terms of evil: “because if the ethical ‘consensus’ is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone to identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself.” This is a subtle but crucial point. The ethics derived from evil are at best a sort of “stodgy conservatism” much like the ethics of Christianity which has always found it preferable to enforce the ‘don’ts’ than the ‘do’s’.
Such an ethics derived from evil is a uniquely ‘Western’ phenomenon. It is an ethics of the armed benefactor, of the owner of possessions who does not want to lose them, of the cipher who is a person in the ancient Roman legal sense of a set of fixed entitlements, of human beings as bureaucratic statistics.
What Badiou proposes is an ethics grounded on the Good, on, perhaps, the Sermon on the Mount rather than the Ten Commandments. Clearly such a radical proposal is difficult to conceive in all its practical details, much less to implement in social institutions. But Badiou does provide an interesting series of ‘deconstructions’ aimed at rooting out many of the hidden presumptions that prevent us from formulating the collective Good.
These hidden presumptions are both religious (e.g. Levinas’s Other) and economic (the logic of Capital triumphant over the politics of government). The legacy of religion is primarily one of evil projected and hence to mutual terrorism. The effect of global capitalism is to reduce all human endeavour to the pursuit of GDP rather than the articulation and execution of new social possibilities. Together they trap ethics as an “ideology of insularity,” ensuring an inherent retrograde conservatism, a smug nihilism, in both public and private life.
Ethics, it should be clear, is very philosophical and very French. It follows a trajectory which is likely to seem alien to the Anglo-Saxon penchant for pragmatic solutions to current problems. But this is the real source of its value. Badiou‘s intention is to provoke the reader to thought, not to action. In prosaic terms, his suggestion is that the really important lesson to be learned about digging bottomless holes is to stop digging and consider alternative occupations.
Human rights is an idea dangerous to the human beings whom it is nominally meant to protect. These rights presume that what constitutes a human being is ‘self-evident’ as it says in the Constitution of the United States. This is, however, according to Badiou, a philosophical conceit made popular by Immanuel Kant at the time that document was prepared. The contradictions and inadequacies of the document and of its inherent philosophy have became apparent only subsequently.
The first problem is obvious once stated but not before. Rights are actually the recognition of evil, that is, they are the inverse statement of that which is deemed unacceptable. Rights presume that human beings are victims who must be protected from their victimhood. So, Badiou asks, “Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man?” The idealist white knight fulfilling his fantasy of saving the honour of the virginal princess. This is not ethics but self-indulgence.
But there is an objective issue as well as this subjective fantasy in the defining of rights in terms of evil: “because if the ethical ‘consensus’ is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone to identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself.” This is a subtle but crucial point. The ethics derived from evil are at best a sort of “stodgy conservatism” much like the ethics of Christianity which has always found it preferable to enforce the ‘don’ts’ than the ‘do’s’.
Such an ethics derived from evil is a uniquely ‘Western’ phenomenon. It is an ethics of the armed benefactor, of the owner of possessions who does not want to lose them, of the cipher who is a person in the ancient Roman legal sense of a set of fixed entitlements, of human beings as bureaucratic statistics.
What Badiou proposes is an ethics grounded on the Good, on, perhaps, the Sermon on the Mount rather than the Ten Commandments. Clearly such a radical proposal is difficult to conceive in all its practical details, much less to implement in social institutions. But Badiou does provide an interesting series of ‘deconstructions’ aimed at rooting out many of the hidden presumptions that prevent us from formulating the collective Good.
These hidden presumptions are both religious (e.g. Levinas’s Other) and economic (the logic of Capital triumphant over the politics of government). The legacy of religion is primarily one of evil projected and hence to mutual terrorism. The effect of global capitalism is to reduce all human endeavour to the pursuit of GDP rather than the articulation and execution of new social possibilities. Together they trap ethics as an “ideology of insularity,” ensuring an inherent retrograde conservatism, a smug nihilism, in both public and private life.
Ethics, it should be clear, is very philosophical and very French. It follows a trajectory which is likely to seem alien to the Anglo-Saxon penchant for pragmatic solutions to current problems. But this is the real source of its value. Badiou‘s intention is to provoke the reader to thought, not to action. In prosaic terms, his suggestion is that the really important lesson to be learned about digging bottomless holes is to stop digging and consider alternative occupations.
franchenstein's review against another edition
I was deeply moved by the idea of ethics being a movement of creating the Same out of Difference. That being said, a lot of this book gave me mixed feelings.
The criticism of the human rights ethics and the ethics of the other was interesting and forced a shift in perspective, but it's far from steel manning what it critiques. It might not be the point, anyway.
For the rest of Badiou's ideas, I really feel I'd have to read his other works to be able to properly criticize. I get the general gist of the Event, and yet it still seems as something almost transcendent, no matter how materialist and immanentist the philosopher tries to portray it. Especially as it makes the multiple-being of a human into an Immortal. It is a fascinating concept, but it still strikes me as laicizied religion.
What disturbs me more is how his categories of Event, fidelity and Truth create his idea of Good from which then Evil is derived (instead of the other way around). Nonetheless, Good and Evil seem very hard to distinguish in practice when looking through Badiou's lenses and yet the Event requires an almost fanatical fidelity to something that might as well be Evil.
Ultimately, Badiou's ethics give me the sense that they have as much potential for evil as for good.
The criticism of the human rights ethics and the ethics of the other was interesting and forced a shift in perspective, but it's far from steel manning what it critiques. It might not be the point, anyway.
For the rest of Badiou's ideas, I really feel I'd have to read his other works to be able to properly criticize. I get the general gist of the Event, and yet it still seems as something almost transcendent, no matter how materialist and immanentist the philosopher tries to portray it. Especially as it makes the multiple-being of a human into an Immortal. It is a fascinating concept, but it still strikes me as laicizied religion.
What disturbs me more is how his categories of Event, fidelity and Truth create his idea of Good from which then Evil is derived (instead of the other way around). Nonetheless, Good and Evil seem very hard to distinguish in practice when looking through Badiou's lenses and yet the Event requires an almost fanatical fidelity to something that might as well be Evil.
Ultimately, Badiou's ethics give me the sense that they have as much potential for evil as for good.
asher__s's review
adventurous
fast-paced
4.0
The reader lacking care of thought may find his position on bio-ethical perspectives on euthanasia extreme, but considering the eugenic program in Canada of “euthanizing” disabled and mad people (MAiD), Badiou was ahead of his time and clearly ahead of the capacity of some reviewers.
paulataua's review against another edition
5.0
Certainly not an easy read. Badiou takes apart modern ethics based on concepts of human rights, argues against the ethics of alterity found in Levinas. and then goes on to argue for an ethics based on the subject, the event, and fidelity. I started by thinking it was all loose and inadequately argued, but after a second read and a lot of deliberation, I began to see a solid and interesting argument. I still have questions about his ‘universalization’ and where it comes from, and what being 'human' is, but this short book gave me an immense amount of food for thought that will keep me going for quite some time. Asking for no more.
pvbelkom's review against another edition
4.0
Serves as a compact introduction to a complex and widely misread philosopher. I read 'The Uses of the Word Jew' first, rather by coincidence, but I can now say that this work provided me the introduction for 'Ethics'. The way Badiou is describing revolutionary processes of Truth is an eye-opener and lets us reconsider the way in which we tend to use ethical categories like the 'radical Evil'. Highly relevant, innovative but sometimes a bit (unnecessarily?) obscure. Loved to read it!