Artemy Magun // Commentary on Badiou’s 15 Theses

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We cannot, on this newspaper’s pages, offer you a complete, coherent introduction into the work of Alain Badiou, who is one of the most significant and original thinkers of our time. We can only clarify a few things that the “proletarian aristocrat” Badiou did not find necessary to explain.

In his first thesis, Badiou is obviously referring to the psychoanalytical interpretation of art. He agrees with Lacan that art’s main gesture is subtraction, abjection, and ellipsis. But he also opposes Lacan’s Kantian ontologism of the Infinite and Unreachable “Real” and its constructive pathos: subtraction affords the possibility for the appearance of the subject, the subject of event, truth and political action.

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Alexei Penzin // Registers of Resistance

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“Of course, there is a huge difference between authentic social struggle in the name of the exploited minorities…and…sowing the kind of safe, harmless, inoffensive resistance that flourishes among “radical” university professors”. (S. Zizek, “Repeating Lenin”)

Even the media-adept Zizek sees “resistance” as something that provides a hidden legitimation of the status quo, poignantly uncovering its motivation (the Lacanian model of hysterical behaviour): the intellectual-resistance-fighter constantly provokes the “System” (the Other, the Master) with his texts and public appearances, but the name of the game is that nothing should ever change, that everything should be understood in the framework of “psychology” (as the confirmation of non-conformist identity).

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