Badiou beyond formalization? On the ethics of the subject

Abstract

This paper assesses the tension between Badiou’s claim that his theory of the subject must be considered most importantly a ‘formal’ theory, and a certain genealogical history of his subject notion. In the latter case, it seems that a certain political experience plays a crucial role in the development of this particular conception. Whereas it is repeatedly affirmed all along his work that the subject poses in the first place a formal problem, the motivation behind this formalization escapes the formal language that fixes the subject. Hence, this paper proposes four theses or formulations appearing in his three main works (Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Logics of Worlds) that seem to express something that exceeds the purely formalizing theorization of the subject: a theory of affects, the maxim ‘to decide the undecidable’, the notion of ‘confidence’ and the particular answer to the question ‘what is it to live?’. It is the conviction of this paper that in all four cases a certain ethical direction is implied behind or beyond this acclaimed formal character. Hence, they all contribute to what I will call an ‘ethics of the subject’