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A review by franchenstein
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil by Alain Badiou
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.