Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of EvilEthical questions dominate current political and academic agendas. While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bio-ethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of broad consensus. Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, explodes the facile assumptions behind this recent ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo, and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil. In contrast, Badiou summons up an "ethic of truths" which is designed both to sustain and inspire a disciplined, subjective adherence to a militant cause (be it political or scientific, artistic or romantic), and to discern a finely demarcated zone of application for the concept of evil. He defends an effectively super-human integrity over the respect for merely human rights, asserts a partisan universality over the negotiation of merely particular interests, and appeals to an "immortal" value beyond the protection of mortal privileges. |
Contents
GRAD | xlv |
Preface to the English Edition | liii |
Does Man Exist? | 1 |
Copyright | |
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absolute affirmation Alain Badiou Altogether-Other anti-philosophical bio-ethics conception concerns consensus consistency counted Critique cultural Derrida differences Donner la mort Ecole Normale Supérieure element Emmanuel Lévinas engagement essential ethic of truths ethical ideology event example existence extermination fact fidelity figure French Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak genuine Hannah Arendt human animal human rights idea identify identity Immanuel Kant immigrants Immortal infinite interest Irigaray Jacques Jacques Derrida Jacques Lacan Jacques-Alain Miller Kant knowledge L'Ethique L'Etre et l'événement Lacan Lévinas logic Luce Irigaray mathematical matter means militant moral multiple-being Nazism not-known ontology opinions Paris particular perseverance philosophy Plato political sequence possible precisely prescription principle psychoanalysis pure multiplicity question radical Evil reality relation Revolution Saint Paul Séminaire sense Seuil simply simulacrum singular situation Slavoj Žižek some-one Spivak subject of truth subject-language theory things thought tion trans transcendent Translated truth-procedures truth-process universal unnameable void