ABSTRACT
How are these ambivalent relations played out in Žižek’s texts? In Th e Ticklish Subject, Žižek upholds Badiou’s politics of Truth and his “pathbreaking reading of St Paul” (TS: 3), while re-inscribing them into a Lacanian psychoanalytical framework. As Žižek points out, the core of Badiou’s philosophy is the opposition between Being and Event, which he theorizes in mathematical terms, using Cantorian set theory. Being, or Being-as-Being, is for Badiou an “irreducible multiplicity” (Badiou 1999: 104), a pure, inconsistent, unstructured multitude of elements. ese existent elements form a “situation”, a positive ontological order accessible to Knowledge, a “consistent presented multiplicity” (ibid. 2005: 522), or what Žižek, following Lacan, calls the symbolic order. When these elements are collected together under a shared term (like Victorian society, modern art or capitalism), they are, in Badiou’s terms, “counted as One” (ibid.: 24). From this count-as-One arises a representation of the presented multiplicity, a metastructure that Badiou terms the “state of the situation”, referring at once to the political state and the general status quo. Since “it is formally impossible … for everything which is included (every subset) to belong to the situation” (ibid.: 97), there is an excess of representation over presentation, of the state over the situation.
