How (Not) to Construct an Event

Part I: The Evental Supplement

What the doctrine of the event teaches us is rather that the entire effort lies in
following the event’s consequences, not in glorifying its occurrence. There is no
more an angelic herald of the event than there is a hero. Being does not
commence.
- Alain Badiou, Being and Eventi

Can one construct an event? This is the question we set ourselves in lieu of Alain

Badiou’s theory of the event. It is, strictly speaking, a non-question for him. In fact,

starting with Being and Event and continuing in all his subsequent work, Badiou’s project

has been precisely to expel the very possibility of knowledge from the order of the event.

Knowledge, in Badiou’s Lacanian reading, is limited to the veridical encyclopedia of the

facts of being; it is the collection, the aggregation of such facts. Truth, on the hand,

irrupts within knowledge but not from it. Every truth is a novelty brought to light by the

conjunction of an aleatory event and a faithful subject. An event—that gap in the law of

presentation, that roaming of the void in a situation—bores a hole in knowledge,

unpresents itself, leaving only a trace, “a lightning flash” which, if one has the courage to

declare its universality, can create a new subject in its wake. This subject is nothing but

the faithful, finite trajectory of an infinite truth coming into being. For this reason, every

event is an absolutely singular occurrence, occurring locally yet addressed universally.

Marked only by the singular intersection of a universal truth and a finite subject,

an event is a priori precluded from the realm of constructability. How so? To be

constructible, one must have knowledge of that-which-is-to-be-constructed. One must

have the pieces, parts, or elements at hand; one must know a set of rules or heuristics, and
take into account specific conditions, factors, and variables that arise. To meaningfully

construct something, one needs names and terms, grammar and syntax; in short, there

must be at least a language (or set of meaningfully symbols within which the construction

takes place) and a law (or axiomatic rule by which the construction takes place). If even

one of those conditions falters, then “nothing will have taken place but place,” as Badiou

so often cites from Mallarmé.

Yet all of these things are clearly denied by the nature of the event as such, for it

is precisely that which is not-being-qua-being, that which is subtracted from the language

of the situation and only recognized illegally. This recognition is actually a subjective

intervention, suspended from the rule of the count-as-one due to the event’s inaugural

twoness, i.e., its self-belonging. The reason why the event is so radically other than that

which is usually presented is because it unbinds the void from its ontological enclosure

by the state, allowing it to roam and wander in all its inconsistency, to circulate in the

situation which, having founded it, is nevertheless barred from. The void is outlawed

from presentation for an obvious reason: an utter incoherence of experience would

follow.

At all costs then, the void—this proper name of being—cannot be encountered.

The state—the metastructure that counts the count itself, the operation that re-presents the

multiples so that all their parts will be included in the end—exists only to the extent that

the void is not. Since an event releases the excess in a situation by “touching” its void (its

unpresent, uncounted, inconsistent parts), it too must be outlawed. From the standpoint

of the situation, it is necessarily undecidable whether an event occurred or not; from the

standpoint of the state, if it does occur, it is an erratic, irrational multiple, accomplished

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by a stranger and in no way “internal” to the situation. But these possibilities already

grant too much to the power of the void and its evental medium. Ontologically, the state

should not allow it to even get this far. For the event should not only be unlikely,

undecidable, incoherent, erratic, and alien, it should be, strictly speaking, impossible. To

solidify this prohibition into more than just an injunction and into something like an

axiom, one must accept the hypothesis that ‘every multiple is constructible’ and if it is

not constructible, it simply does not exist. But before we investigate this path, let us first

clarify more exactly the nature of this abnormal multiple, the event.

Event

What are the requirements for an event to occur? First, there must be an evental

site. That is, a multiple which belongs to a situation yet none of whose elements are

presented in the situation. In Badiou’s terms, this multiple is singular (since it has

elements which are not subsets of the situation), historical (since only singular multiples

have historicity), on-the-edge-of-the-void (since nothing is beneath this multiple, none of

its elements are counted-as-one), and foundational (since this multiple is indecomposable,

halting the infinite regression of multiple combinations, primary).ii

Second, an event is always localized within an evental site, and never part of a

global situation. An event is tied to its site precisely in the sense that it presents the

elements of its site along with itself. This is nothing but the matheme of the event: “I term

event of the site X a multiple such that it is composed of, on the one hand, elements of

the site, and on the other hand, itself . . . e x = {x  X, ex} . . . That is, the event is a one-

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multiple made up of, on the one hand, all the multiples which belong to its site, and on

the other hand, the event itself.”iii

Third, from the standpoint of the situation, the event’s belonging or not to the

situation is strictly undecidable. This is due to its obvious circularity, its supernumerary

(non)being as that which belongs to itself. This self-belonging is what crucially

distinguishes an event from an evental site. To the situation, the evental site is void of

elements, those subsets which belong without being included due to that multiple’s

singularity (i.e., it being presented without being represented). If an event was nothing

but the radical appearance of those veiled elements (which were previously void to the

situation), then they could easily be normalized into a set in which they are included. As

Badiou writes, “one of the profound characteristics of singularities is that they can always

be normalized.”iv This normalizing, or counting of what was previously uncounted,

empties the site of its singularity, voiding its foundational status. Therefore, if one wants

to block the normalization of this singularity, then one must decide whether or not

something more occurred. This point-of-excess is nothing but the (name of the) event

itself. Badiou: “To declare that an event belongs to the situation comes down to saying

that it is conceptually distinguished from its site by the interposition of itself between the

void and itself.”v How can this be determined? Only by an interpretative intervention,

one which announces “the arrival in being of non-being, the arrival amidst the visible of

the invisible.” vi This intervention acts as a “torsion” within the situation’s order, forcing

“the situation itself to confess its own void, and to thereby let forth, from inconsistent

being and the interrupted count, the incandescent non-being of an existence.”vii That

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something can exist without it being, that the void itself can be presented, this is the

paradox of the event.

Fourth, the event must bring forth the new, interrupting the automatism of what is.

Let me explain this with help from some of Badiou’s other texts. In his book on Saint

Paul, Badiou expounds on Paul’s understanding of law as that which gives life to death.

This paradoxical phrasing captures the vacancy of the “repetition compulsion” that

structures being in relation to everyday situations and knowledge. For in situations and

their veridical compendiums, the “automatism of repetition”—what Freud calls the death

drive—is present as the unconscious motor of desire. What the law does is fix the object

of desire (as sin), releasing it from the subject yet at the cost of placing it in the hands of

death (or transgression). “The law is what, by designating its object, delivers desire to its

repetitive autonomy.”viii How does it do this? The law gives life to death, fixing the

repetition compulsion of desire, by allowing desire to work through me but not as me. “It

is never I who sin, it is sin that sins in me.” ix Law allows desire to roam free in relation to

its letter, which is blind. The law’s power lies in its dismemberment of the subject, for the

subject is now emptied of all agency (life), which has been transferred to the autonomy of

desire (sin, death). What exists after such an evacuation of power? Repetition. “When the

subject is under the letter, or literal, he presents himself as a disconnected correlation

between an automatism of doing and a powerlessness of thought.”x

This is the normal state in which we find ourselves, Badiou suggests. But if law is

the structure of death repeated in the automatism of situations, then grace is the chance of

an event irrupting towards a novel truth. We can extrapolate that law here falls squarely

within the ontological realm of the constructible, veridical, and normal while grace

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appears in the evental world of the generic, truthful, and singular. An event is

structurally illegal, contingent, unpredictable and unrepeatable. It is, simply put, the new.

In his essay Philosophy and Truth,xi Badiou makes this clear:

For the process of a truth to begin, something must happen. What there already is
—the situation of knowledge as such—generates nothing other than repetition.
For a truth to affirm its newness, there must be a supplement. This supplement is
committed to chance. It is unpredictable, incalculable. It is beyond what is. I call
it an event. A truth thus appears, in its newness, because an evental supplement
interrupts repetition.xii

In On Subtraction Badiou reemphasizes the aspect of novelty when he writes, “I call the

advent, the pure supplement, the unforeseeable and disconcerting addition: ‘event.’ It is,

to quote the poet [Mallarmé] once more, that which is ‘sprung from the croup and the

flight.’ A truth arises in its novelty—and every truth is a novelty—because a hazardous

supplement interrupts repetition. Indistinct, a truth begins by surging forth.” xiii This

radical novelty of truth which the event brings forth is directly related to the prior

condition of an event’s undecidability vis-à-vis its’ belonging to a situation or not. If an

intervention cuts through a situation, declaring that yes an event did take place therein,

such a declaration must be necessarily undecidable. For “were such a statement to be

decidable, then clearly the event would already be subject to the norms of repetition, and

consequently would not be evental.”xiv Subtraction from the automatism of repetition is

both the effect of the event’s ‘newness’ or ‘surging forth’ and also the cause of its

‘intrinsic undecidability.’

As a supplement, an event is beyond what is and what we know of what is.

However, it is not simply the flux of becoming, spontaneously discharging its flows in an

instant, which then disseminates across the universe. It is rather more like a blockage, a

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dam that interrupts such incessant becoming, a halting point between flows, a solid rock,

a hard truth.

To repeat, the four requirements of an event are: an evental site, a localization

within such site, an undecidability of the event’s belonging to a situation due to its own

self-belonging, and a radical interruption of the automatism of repetition.

Now, again, can one create this?

Constructability

It is here that we return to our initial problem of the constructability of an event.

The ‘constructability hypothesis’—the belief that every multiple is constructible—is

actually a type of nominalism in Badiou’s eyes, one which grants existence only to things

constructed from identifiable names, irrespective of referents to such names. This is,

admittedly by Badiou, an irrefutable thesis on its own terms, for one cannot ever touch

the purely nonlinguistic or nonexistent without at the same time granting it some minimal

name or existence with which one discards or negates it. Every time one tries to touch the

absolute, so it seems, one ends up only confirming their nominal, constructivist

presuppositions. Hence, Wittgenstein’s maxim: “that whereof one cannot speak, it shall

be passed over in silence.” Similar or perhaps the same as what Quentin Meillasoux calls

“correlationism,” Badiou sees this hypothesis at work not only in mathematics (e.g.,

Brouwer, Gödel) but also philosophy (e.g. Leibniz, Wittgenstein) and its ‘linguistic turn’

in the 20th century.

One would think that such radical constructivism, which is now the de facto

position of critical thought, would grant us an affirmative answer in response to the

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question of the event’s constructability. What Badiou shows us, and this is the challenge

we have before us, is that the hypothesis of constructability is the most conservative of

positions, the “latent philosophy of all human sedimentation; the cumulative strata into

which the forgetting of being is poured to the profit of language and the consensus of

recognition it supports.”xv This framework polices the borders of knowledge, sense,

enunciation, and meaning, banning the in-constructible and the in-nominal from its

universe. Every counter-example of transcendent excess is actually an example of

nominalist immanence, for to cite it is to construct it, and to construct it is to already

delimit it within the re-presentations of the state. Here, “the state legislates on

existence,”xvi an existence marked by its essential finitude.

What Badiou show’s in Meditations Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine of Being

and Event is that precisely, “if every multiple is constructible, no multiple is evental.” xvii

For a multiple to be evental, one would have to construct a multiple which belongs to

itself, since the matheme of the event is characterized by all the multiples that belong to

its site, and the event itself. The French Revolution is Badiou’s classic example here,

condensed into Saint-Just’s claim within the event itself that “the Revolution is frozen.”

An event is always in excess of itself, supernumerary, presenting itself along with its site.

In section four of Meditation Twenty-Nine, Badiou mathematically demonstrates

within his set-theoretic ontology “the Absolute Non-Being of the Event.” Without the

technical details, one can say that to construct a multiple (or set) that is also an element of

itself would mean that one would need access to such a multiple before it “appears” in its

“level” of the “constructible hierarchy.” That is, it would have already existed before we

constructed it, since to construct this multiple, one already needs it as an element from

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which to make it. But “this antecedence to self is constructively impossible.”xviii Why?

Because the constructible universe is hierarchically organized by ordinal-numbered levels

which are generated by ‘extracting’ the constructible parts of a previous level and

forming a new set out of them, beginning with the void, of course.xix But only the parts

which can be articulated in a formal language are extracted by this means of construction.

The “undifferentiated, the unnameable, and the indeterminate” xx are not merely left

behind, but eradicated. What this achieves is a global normalization of multiples, a

measuring of their “distance from the void,” xxi one which counts every set and grants

every multiple its proper place. A multiple which self-belongs, blurring its distance from

the void, and leaping outside the count has no hope in this universe; this multiple—the

evental one—is effectively doomed therein. In Badiou’s terms, “the hypothesis of

constructability provides for the deducible elimination of any ‘abnormal’ multiple, of any

ultra-one. . . Within the constructible universe, it is necessary (and not decided) that the

event does not exist.”xxii Or better, “within the constructivist vision of being, and this is

the crucial point, there is no place for an event to take place.”xxiii Ultimately then,

“unconstructible, the event is not.”xxiv

Badiou’s conclusion is not that the event is not, but rather that the constructivist

universe is one of “astonishing poverty”: narrow, ascetic, minimal and yet relentless in its

precision. Admirable in that it truly delimits what can be said of being qua being under

the condition of language, it nevertheless falters on two principles which Badiou cannot

and will not grant: that of the decidable and the discernible. When knowledge is sutured

to the laws of the decidable and the discernible, it excludes from its grasp the possibility

of truth which sits on the precarious bedrocks of undecidability, indiscernability,

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genericity, and unnameability. Badiou’s maneuver outside the constructivist totality

follows directly in the footsteps of Lacan (as well as Plato, Kant, Heidegger and others)

by decoupling truth and knowledge, situating the former as precisely that which is

produced by the collapse of the latter.

If the event is outside of the order of knowledge, it is nonetheless within the realm

of truth; if it is not decidable, it is however declared in an interpretative intervention; if its

consequences are indiscernible, they are yet aleatorically gathered by a faithful subject in

its freedom; if it’s truth is not constructible, it is whatsoever existent as generic,

anticipatorily forced into being; if the power of such truth is infinite, its effects are

nevertheless blocked by the unnameable which is its real.

Time

By dislocating the significance of the event from its antecedent possibility to its

subsequent effectivity, Badiou strategically relocates the temporal position of what he

calls the subject, philosophy and politics, for instance, into post-evental activities. If

subjects, philosophy and politics are to remain faithful to what they are, then their true

activity must be retroactivity. Fidelity, the process by which a subject binds itself to

consistently follow through on the consequences of an event, is the present-gathering of a

backwards-looking subject. What is the temporal structure at work here? Marked only by

events and the interventions between them, time has no being in the automatism of

repetition. Only in relation to events is there time. The evental temporality is as such: the

future (event) comes out of nowhere, “like a thief in the night,” as Badiou quotes from

Paul, preceded by no sign; the past is nothing but the historicity of events and their

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surrounding consequences, subjects, and truths; and the present is the conjunction, on the

one hand, of multiple subjects declaring the universality of truths whose events are still

undecidable and, on the other, the constant reevaluation of the current situation based on

the forcing of new truths. Everything else is repetition.

Granted this structure, Badiou wavers between where the real locus of action lies.

On the one hand, it is the future, the new, the radical novelty that one can only hope to

witness in their lifetime. Always forward-looking, Badiou sees no benefits to nostalgic,

pastoral philosophies or politics which lament the ‘loss of presence’ or the destruction of

‘feudal socialism.’ For instance capital, the modern force by which all bonds are broken,

all substances melted and all unity dissolved, should not be simply shunned or avoided

but directly confronted on its own universal terms. There is no turning back, there is only

the possibility for an evental irruption, an illegal contingency to break loose and

reconfigure the situation at hand. This possibility is not, however, left to the gods or

Revolution, but rather, it is the material possibility held within every historical site that

borders on the edge of the void. Events do occur, what is lacking are the names.

But if the names are lacking then the real onus lies not in the future but in the

present, for only now, in the present, can we grant names to events, deciding through

interventions and discerning through fidelity what qualifies as an event and what it means

for us in the world today if such events occurred. The present is where the real work of

fidelity takes place, fidelity being the subjective knotting of events with situations, tying

together the future and the past. The points at which time is ‘tied’ together can be mapped

out as local configurations of generic truth-procedures, or what Badiou calls subjects.

Subjects occur in the present but only by allowing the past (event) to touch the future

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(truth); this is so because events are only recognized retroactively, yet the generic truth of

such events can only be forced anticipatorily. Between the retroactive and the

anticipatory lies the (dis)appearance of the subject.

Yet this present, we can say, is wholly derivative. There is nothing autonomous

about it, except the chance situations which occur and must be counted, that is, except the

automatism of repetition. Yet strictly speaking, that is not temporal. What is temporal are

events and their consequences, subjectively decided and generically discerned. But this

present temporality is then nothing but the leg work of the past eventality, its effects so to

speak. The weight can be shifted again, this time at its halting point, to the past, where

the real meaning of subjects, philosophy and politics occurs. Badiou’s relentless, almost

dogmatic progressivism is nonetheless sutured to a retrospectivism which he cannot

discard without destroying the key concepts of his thought. But this is no problem for

Badiou, for all this means is that subjects, philosophy and politics, among others, are

conditioned. These conditions seal the evental domination of the past over the present.

We can ignore the future, we can exist automatically in the present, but we can never

escape the injunctions of the past. To do so constitutes betrayal.

Politics

Why would Badiou place the agency of his main concepts within retrospective,

post-evental temporalities? First of all, if events are the determining factor in these cases,

then their inherent unconstructibility makes the present or futural modes pointless for

their meaning. To unfold, carry out, follow through or gather together the meaning of an

event—the only activities worthy of subjects, philosophy and politics, for instance—one

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must face backwards. If events were constructible, then the future would be our

privileged site, for it is the model of a future event that our present construction would be

oriented to; if events were decidable, then the present would be our privileged site, for it

would be now, immediately as something occurs, that we could simultaneously recognize

it as an event or not. These two options barred, the past, in a resolutely un-nostalgic way,

is our only home.

Let’s take the example of politics from now on, honing in on it especially in

relation to our initial question of the event’s constructability. What happens when the

constructivist hypothesis is translated into political terms? Or, to put it differently, why

does Badiou politically preclude events from being constructible? In Meditation Twenty-

Eight again, we find Badiou’s political critique of constructivism laid bare. From his

strictly rationalist yet militantly un-reformist perspective, Badiou sees the danger of the

constructivist hypothesis lying in its programmatic nature. For if it is accepted that

politics is only what we construct it to be, than our resources for such constructions are

limited to the ‘constructible universe’ of linguistic, social, economic, and political parts.

Ontologically, when local, situational multiples are constructed, they must fit within the

re-presentational bounds of the state’s global metastructure. Politically as well, when

local, situational programs are constructed, they must too be capable of being represented

within the State’s discursive structure. Either way, the state again “legislates on [political]

existence.” Badiou’s argument is that no matter the content of a particular constructivist

program (revolutionary or reformist, liberal or conservative), its very form concedes its

potential power to the state which is its ultimate guarantor. He writes:

One posits that a political proposition necessarily takes the form of a programme
whose agent of realization is the state—the latter is obviously none other than the
state of the politico-historic situation. A programme is precisely a procedure for

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 the construction of parts: political parties endeavour to show how such a
procedure is compatible with the admitted rules of the language they share (the
language of parliament for example). . . What is at stake in this quarrel over the
possible? The State. This is in perfect conformity with the orientation of
constructivist thought, which renders its discourse statist in order to better grasp
the commensurability between state and situation. The programme—a
concentrate of the political proposition—is clearly a formula of the language
which proposes a new configuration defined by strict links to the situation’s
parameters (budgetary, statistical, etc.) and which declares the latter
constructively realizable—that is, recognizable—within the metastructural field
of the State.xxv

What is the extent of politics in this view? Nothing but “procedure[s] for the construction

of parts” along with claims for their ‘compatibility’ and ‘realizability’ in terms of the

state at hand, that is, the political-historical State. What this brutally formal analysis of

politics allows one to do is to think together the ‘compossibility’ of seemingly antithetical

political forces, such as vanguard socialism and conservative nationalism, multicultural

liberalism and universalist capitalism. Extending political critique beyond the standard

realms of equality and justice, of capitalism and the working-class, Badiou can help us

see all such political formations as tied to “the orientation of constructivist thought”

which “subsumes the relation to being within the dimension of knowledge.”xxvi For these

political forms are structured around programs and platforms which are based on some

type of precise knowledge of the situation at hand, whether it be: economic facts, opinion

polls, census data, population statistics, stock analysis, poverty figures, market indicators,

land speculation, geographic locations, budget proposals, production values and so on.

All of this works not to liberate individuals from their political alienation, but rather “the

programmatic vision shelters the citizen from politics.”xxvii How can he say this? Because

politics for Badiou really only exists in relation to events and their consequent truths,

subjects, and fidelities. No events, no politics. States, programs and parties are no proxies

for the events which they prohibit.

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 We can see now why Badiou’s temporal structure of the event privileges the past

for political reasons as well as for the aforementioned meta-ontological ones. A

constructivist politics draws its meaning from a realizable future, for it is geared toward

the program one wishes to construct. Yet, this politics is activated by a technical-

managerial relationship to the present, for its realization is merely a current technical

problem for which we have bureaucratic machines and/or state apparatuses to solve. An

evental politics structured by the past, on the other hand, is neither historicist,

technocratic, nostalgic, or messianic. It is simply “politics as truth-procedure.”xxviii

What a constructivist orientation in politics does is structurally eliminate the

possibility of evental irruptions and interpretive interventions, that is, it bars the very

possibility of truths and subjects. And isn’t this exactly what constructivism in

philosophy does as well, eliminate truths and subjects? In relation to both philosophy and

politics, Badiou’s intention is the same: one must reopen the question of truth and the

subject, and one must see them both in relation to events. That these truths are infinite

and generic, that these subjects are divided and indiscernible, that these events are

contingent and undecidable—this is what Badiou brings to these perennial problems of

thought and action.

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 How (Not) to Construct an Event
Part II: Patient Watchman
Rather than a warrior beneath the walls of the State, a political activist is a
patient watchman of the void instructed by the event, for it is only when
grappling with the event that the State blinds itself to its own mastery. There the
activist constructs the means to sound, if only for an instant, the site of the
unpresentable, and the means to be thenceforth faithful to the proper name that,
afterwards, he or she will have been able to give to—or hear, one can not decide
—this non-place of place, the void.
-Alain Badiou, Being and Eventxxix

We now know why both philosophically and politically an event is not

constructible for Badiou. Concerning the former, it is due to the supplementary nature of

events which belong to themselves, hence forbidding them from the order of knowledge

so that they may exist in the universe of truths. In regards to the latter, it is due to the

non-political nature of constructivist programs which are founded on knowledge of the

situation and sealed by the state’s representing function, “sheltering the citizen from

politics,” as he says.

With this in mind, we can now pose the following question: is it possible to

articulate a position that maintains the constructability of an event yet without submitting

to the constructivist hypothesis? In other words, can we agree with Badiou that the

constructivist orientation is insufficient yet maintain that events are somehow still

possible to construct, even if there be no parts to make them or rules to connect them?

How can we accept the illegal, contingent and supernumerary aspects of the event yet

still argue consistently for evental constructability? We should have known that the

answer, always buried within the correct formulation of a question, lies in exactly those

problematic aspects. For if an event is to be created, if must be made illegally,

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contingently, without names. But before we go down this path, let us first understand

what Badiou sees as the actual locus of political action in the wake of evental multiples.

A Political Event Occurs . . .

What exactly is a political event for Badiou, as opposed to scientific, aesthetic or

amorous ones? In his book Metapolitics, especially the essay “Politics as Truth-

Procedure,” Badiou lays out the necessary conditions that an event would have to fulfill

for it to be marked as political. Very briefly, political events are materially collective;

they are created directly out of collective multiplicities. Second, they are immediately

infinite, summoning the infinite character of situations through a subjective universality.

And third, they work by measuring the excessive errancy of the state. This “measuring”

of the immeasurable is possible because an event presents that which the state cannot

grasp without ensuring its own collapse. This is because the event unleashes an

inconsistent multiple around which certain consistent multiples hold, and so for the state

to include that multiple is to include an inconsistency, and hence to include its own

refutation. Therefore, as a limit to the state’s field of knowledge or vision, a political

event puts the state at a discrete distance from which one can evaluate its power. In other

words, political events pull the state into focus, threatening its hegemonic normality,

totality, and security of the situation at hand.

In Badiou’s words, a political event “fixes the errancy and assigns a measure to

the superpower of the State. It fixes the power of the State.” xxx More literally, political

events reveal the state’s (implicit) physical power, that is, its monopoly on legitimate

force, its control of identity-representation, and its rules of collective association. In

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responding to such events, the State “reveals its excess of power, its repressive

dimension.” xxxi This is why a State exists only insofar as there is the institution of the

police. By fixing this errant power, the collectivity that emerged in the event frees itself

from the determination-in-the-last-instance that the State as meta-structure normally

envelops. If true politics is synonymous with freedom, it is only because it “consists in

putting the State at a distance through the collective establishment of a measure for its

excess.”xxxii Badiou calls this establishment of a measure of the State, “political

prescription.” Although born out of a local singularity, this prescription is addressed to

all; its form works as a universal invitation, while its content is filled by material

organization. Hence in sum, a “political event prescribes a measure to the

measurelessness of the State through the suddenly emergent materiality of a

universalisable collective.”xxxiii

. . . which an Intervention decides . . .

Let’s assume that such a political event occurs. Since the space of conscious

political action is precluded from any pre-evental practice, the first moment in which a

political subject really emerges is when one decides, on no evidential ground whatsoever,

that an event did in fact occur. This declaration is what Badiou calls the interpretative

intervention, the deciding of the event from the standpoint of the undecidable. Since the

event breaks with all laws of the count, subtracting itself from the rule of presentation,

the naming of event that occurs in this moment is “essentially illegal.” xxxiv Intervention

takes a resolute courage for two reasons: first, because it is a purely subjective endeavor,

18
a wager of one’s life that no proof can assuage, no knowledge can verify, and no profit

can justify; second, because this intervention, as a naming of the event, must look into the

void of the situation that the event unleashes. For “the name of the event is drawn from

the void,”xxxv the inconsistent multiplicity of a situation that the state cannot account for;

to look anywhere else for it, such as to a “fullness” of the situation, is to construct a

simulacrum which can only unleash terror instead of truth. Along with betrayal (of

fidelity) and disaster (of forcing), terror is but another name for evil.

What an intervention does is retrospectively “touch the void” of a situation by

connecting the “anonymity” of the site with the name of the event. Presenting the site and

the name of the event inseparably together (which the matheme of the event illustrates)

inaugurates the aforementioned twoness of this abnormal multiple, a twoness which

allows the intervention to be “subtracted from the law of the count-as-one which rules the

situation.”xxxvi Hence, the intervention is both inside and outside the strictures of being.

Inside since it only occurs in a situation, yet outside since it breaks the law of such a

situation. But this breakage is not absolute. It is tempting to think that the intervention, as

the proper birth of political action, comes from visionary supermen who emerge from

nowhere and descend back into nothing once the event passes by. But this fascination

with the “leader” or “hero” comes from a deeper obsession with the event itself, one that

consecrates the event as something self-justifying, self-creating, and self-determining.

This is the temptation of what Badiou labels “speculative leftism,” xxxvii the belief that

primal events, radical beginnings and apocalyptic moments usher in their own authority.

Opposed to this nostalgia of the origin and messianism of the end, Badiou locates

political intervention always in-the-middle, more specifically in-between two events. “It

19
is evental recurrence which founds intervention,” and so “an intervention is what presents

an event for the occurrence of another. It is an evental between-two.” xxxviii Hence,

although the intervention in some sense creates politics through its wager on the event,

nonetheless this creative act is only possible from the standpoint of a previously decided

event. For only within the consequences of an already-intervened-upon-event can there be

a place for an intervention to occur. Just as “an event is an interval rather than a term,” xxxix

an intervention is “a line drawn from one paradoxical multiple, which is already

circulating, to the circulation of another, a line which scratches out. It is a diagonal of the

situation.”xl Both the event and the intervention are squeezed between themselves and

something else, whether it is the event’s existence between the void and its name or the

intervention’s location between two events. Strictly speaking, we should stop saying

“location” concerning interventions, for between two events is not some space but a

distinct organization of time. This is why Badiou writes that “time is intervention itself,

thought as the gap between two events.”xli

What all this means is that political action neither begins out of nowhere nor

creates out of nothing, but rather it is a retrospective endeavor that patiently watches for,

courageously declares, and meticulously follows events. Together, this constitutes the

core of conscious political activity, or in Badiou’s terms, militant discipline. Militant

because it does not waver in its subjective declaration, and disciplined because “it does

not deliver any originality.”xlii This unoriginal, unspectacular work of politics, begun by

the intervention in media res, can outlast the lighting flash of the event long enough to

generate its singular truth-procedure only if a second phase of (retro)activity follows as

well. This phase concerns the “organized control of time” in which one conserves the

20
consequences of the abnormal, evental supplement in the realm of being. This is the

second work of political action, the work of fidelity.

…and a Fidelity preserves.

Intervention, as a subjective puncture in a situation shaken by an event, is rare.

For intervention is only possible in a one-to-one relation to events, which are themselves

atypical, infrequent, and undecidable. No events, no interventions. However, the

opportunity for true political action is not limited to such moments, but is rather open to

all in any time and any place. The political prescription against the state which the

intervention announces for all can be tested by anyone who decides to follow the

consequences of the event through their aleatory experience of new situations and new

multiples. What ties together the event and their new experience is this decision to remain

consistent, faithful, and true to its prescriptions. As Badiou writes in his Ethics, this is the

“decision to relate henceforth to the situation from the perspective of its evental

supplement. Let us call this a fidelity.”xliii

Fidelity is a situated consistency which gives material form to the generic truth of

an event. But let’s be clear: if one is to be faithful to an event, then things cannot remain

as they were before for that same someone. The event is a break, the intervention is a

division, and these ruptures of/in being cannot be ignored, alleviated, or sublimated. They

can only be followed through. To do this means that one’s own being shifts along with

the event, and this is in done in three directions at once: backwards to the event, sideways

towards the situation at hand, and forward towards the anticipatory truth. The one who

carries through this self-torsion, this real process of fidelity, is no longer merely an

individual; this one is now in composition as a subject.

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 One is only a subject after events, existing only as long as one preserves that

event’s truth in their own relation to the situations that come. In the political truth-

procedure, subjects carry the specificity of the political event’s conditions: its material

collectivity, its immediate infinity, and its measuring of the state. Putting this together,

we can say that a political subject remains faithful to an event through collective work,

done in an infinite variety of situations, matched against the constant power of the state.

A political subject, poised on the crack in being that the event opened up, operates on the

level of the state, but not within it. Rather, “a fidelity is definitively distinct from the

state if, in some manner, it is unassaignable to a defined function of the state; if, from the

standpoint of the state, its result is a particularly nonsensical part.” xliv This is then the goal

of the political subject, to build (locally) within the situation “a kind of other situation”

which is only sensible and consistent in relation to the “counter-state” that a fidelity

(globally) organizes. xlv

What must a political subject be like in order to build this other situation, to craft

this counter-state? In the end of Meditation Nine in Being and Event, after criticizing the

romantic archetype of the political subject as a warrior or guerrilla, Badiou condenses his

formula of proper political subjectivity and action into the syntagm of the epigraph

above: a political activist is a “patient watchman of the void instructed by the event.” xlvi

In Saint Paul, after laying out the theorems of the militant and the lessons of Paul’s

universalism, Badiou once again states that fidelity is accomplished only by a patient

worker. In Metapolitics, in lieu of Mallarmé, Badiou praises the role of the militant as

one of restrained action. Patient, restrained, militant, workers, watchman—these are the

signposts of Badiou’s political universe. What are we to make of them?

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 How (Not) to Construct an Event
Part III: Organize, Create, Revolt

“But if everything depends on an event, must we wait? Certainly not. Many events, even
very distant ones, still require us to be faithful to them. Thought does not wait, and it has
never exhausted its reserve of power, unless it be for him who succumbs to the profound
desire to conform, which is the path of death. Besides, waiting is pointless, for it is of the
essence of the event not to be preceded by any sign, and to catch us unaware with its
grace, regardless of our vigilance.”
– Alain Badiou, Saint Paulxlvii

Badiou’s critique of evental constructability and his arguments for post-evental

political action are woven around his theory of the subject. A subject is the name for any

militant of truth, structured around the triad of event/intervention/fidelity. Event is the

Zero term, ante-political in its conditioning of politics as such; intervention is the First

term of politics in that without it, nothing will have taken place; and fidelity is the Second

term, the lasting work in which subjects are born and die. What I will seek to do, albeit

cursorily, is to sketch a different diagram of political action that hopes to be consistent

with Badiou’s framework yet structures a different triad with different possibilities.

The faithful subject in this case will appear first (yet this is not the subject of the

political event at hand); the illegal event will occur second (yet this is not an event per se,

but rather only its conditions and provocations); and the undecidable intervention will

occur last (yet this is neither post-evental nor prescriptive). What this template does is

start from the end of Badiou’s gamma diagram of a truth-procedurexlviii and work its way

backwards in the hopes of seeing how events can, in some sense, be constructed. If we

accept this, then political action is no longer strictly analogous to being a watchman of

the void, but rather opens itself up to the unknown waters of experimental action.

23
A Subject organizes….

There are some subjects. We will accept this thesis from Badiou’s framework

without difficulty. For our position begins by compounding Badiou’s trajectory of the

truth-procedure as a whole and making it one element in a new equation. This is simply

an algerbraization of Badiou’s geometry, for now the diagram is itself a variable in our

new formula. To refresh, a truth procedure begins from the undecidable ultra-one of an

event, crosses through a nomination which a finite subject indiscernibly grapples with,

passes through their fidelity in an infinite procedure that gathers together the generic

multiples of a truth, forces itself upon the situation in an anticipatory way, and halts upon

the unnamable real subtracted from this truth’s power. Granted, there are some subjects

who survive this process. But a subject is only a local configuration of a generic truth-

procedure tied to a singular event. Is it possible for there to be local subjects of multiple

events? Global subjects of a singular event? And what about global subjects of multiple

events?

It is theoretically possible for an individual body to be multiple subjects just as it

possible for an individual subject to be multiple bodies. For instance, one can be faithful

to multiple revolutions, one can have traces of both artistic and amorous events stitched

in them, one can be faithful to different scientific paradigms without inconsistency, and

this presents no problem for Badiou. Post-evental fidelity is rarely so isolated, for

individuals are as multiple and intersectional as any other element of being. So let us take

for example one of these individuals who has experienced multiple subjecthood of

differing events and truths. Let us name this individual a multiple-subject. The trace of

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singular truths are there, but what is also there now is the abstract understanding of

events as such. For even if one experiences the most radically heterogeneous truth-

procedures as different subjects, one has still gained the material experience capable of

grounding a theorization of events as such. To become a theoretician of events as

opposed to a philosopher of the event is to move along the inverse path of Badiou. For

Badiou, the philosopher looks at events and into their truths together from the standpoint

of their abstract compossibility, a position which the philosopher materializes in her

being. The philosopher, therefore, cannot speak truths, but only give meaning to the

present topography within which truths circulate. The philosopher looks-in, and then

comes-out. The multiple-subject, on the other hand, looks out of events and from truths

into the abstraction of compossibility itself. This allows for theoretical knowledge beyond

the already achieved subjective truth. Theoretical knowledge, as the knowledge of the

theory of events, can then be carried back to the proper abode of the multiple-subject.

The multiple-subject looks-out, and then comes-back-in.

This again is not inconsistent with Badiou, for he clearly understands the

separation between militants and philosophers, or better, between militancy and

philosophy. One can, and does, both; but never are they the same. Yet, the multiple-

subject does both from the reverse position, and hence is able to take the theoretical

insights of philosophy without taking the restrictions placed upon the philosopher as well.

What is the theoretical insight that is gained? That there is a theory of events. The

material experience of carrying multiple-truths, multiple-fidelities, and multiple-counter-

states then translates into something more than just an aleatory conjunction of evental

supplements. Badiou calls “fidelity to fidelity” the process of remaining consistent with

25
an ethic of truths in one’s life. But this is misleading, for fidelity to fidelity as such is a

theoretical maneuver which presupposes the meaning of fidelity in a global sense, beyond

any particular event. This fidelity to fidelity, this ultra-fidelity, would not be to remain

faithful to an ethic of truths, but rather to remain committed to a strategy of events.

Compounded fidelity cuts across events and truths for an organized irruption of events as

such. This is not speculative leftism, for it does not see events as the ultimate beginning

or final ending, but rather as the result of previous events and present organization along

with a future legacy. The task of the multiple-subject is not simply to gather the multiples

connected to the past event, but now to organize multiples that could become relevant in

an evental site.

. . . the conditions of an event . .

Having bathed in the waters of theory, this re-formed militant of truth will now

have a new task. This new mission is not necessarily antithetical to Badiou’s formulas of

the patient watchman and restrained militancy, but also not limited to those types as well.

The multiple-subject is still a faithful subject, but no longer to a particular event. As the

philosopher is faithful to truth as such, this subject is faithful to events as such. Yet we

know that it is only by looking back at past events that one organizes multiples in the

present. So how does one organize multiples for a future-to-come?

Events are unconstructible, but their conditions are not. Badiou hints that militants

should inhabit evental sites,xlix waiting for the void to irrupt within. We say that militants

should not only inhabit those sites, but actively seek to organize those sites with others, to

connect evental possibilities, and even to actively create those sites. This is impossible if

26
a) one does not know what an event of truth-procedure is and/or hasn’t experienced it,

and b) one has only experienced one event or one truth-procedure. Both these conditions

were crucial for understanding why an event is a radical rupture in the situation which

only a new being, the subject, can endure. Events are unpredictable, incalculable,

contingent, singular, and hence the role of political action is a retrospective fidelity in

relation to them. But, in our scenario, neither of these presuppositions hold. For although

events are unpredictable and incalculable, their conditions are not and the relations to

them need not be retrospective. Our multiple-subject, if they are to remain ultra-faithful,

has the task of constructing the conditions which allow for contingency, illegality,

subtraction, and unrepresentability to emerge within the situation.

Since all events are directly related to those evental sites which the state cannot

comprehend in a situation, the multiple-subject faithful to events luckily has a local guide

to work off of. That is, the holes, paradoxes, and unincluded of the state itself. For it is

there that evental sites are born and there that the void can irrupt. This thinking through

evental sites from the standpoint of a blinded state is both a theoretical endeavor and a

material experiment. For one cannot really know what is and is not a hole in the state

until one tests the state to its presence. This tactical exploration can be called

provocation, experimentation, or direct action.

This rhythm of activity has a few invariant notes to harmonize itself with: it must

allow for spatial and temporal contingency, it must be illegal, it must not fall within any

discourse of representation, it must focus on the elements of a situation which are hidden

or invisibilized, it must be capable of being addressed to all, it must be subtracted from

any norm of the situation, and it most definitely needs to be subjectively transformative.

27
. . . for another Subject-to-be.

“Aha,” the critic says, “here is your mistake. For how can an event be

subjectively transformative and radically contingent if one is actively building, planning,

and creating it the entire time. This directly contradicts the main force of the event,

which is its radical novelty to all. This is anything but novel. In fact, this is exactly the

type of programmatic politics that Badiou’s anti-constructivist argument destroyed.

Furthermore, this politics combines the worst of dogmatic Marxism and liberal

parlimentarianism, which both seek top down solutions and strategies based on

knowledge and their encyclopediactic application and not on anything like events and

their subtracted truth-procedures.

Herein lies the entire problem of my algerbraic use of Badiou, for who exactly is

the event novel for? If the assumption is everyone, then clearly my analysis fails and

succumbs to the worst forms of programmatism that Badiou discarded earlier. But, and

this is what I wager upon, the evental decision is not simply laid out in two categories of

either it didn’t occur and it is repetition or else it did occur and it is novel. Rather, for the

multiple-subjects who crafted the counter-state space for such an event to occur, it is not

novel but neither did it not occur. It is novel and hence transformative, on the other hand,

for new subjects who experience it, intervene, declare it, remain faithful to it, etc. The

logic is as such: one can only create the possibility of an event for another subject and

never for oneself. The critic stated correctly that organizing even remotely towards it is

too much knowledge already, for the event is a rupture of all norms of knowledge. Yet,

all this means is that multiple-subjects do not experience the event as an event, only

28
others can. Of course, it is never guaranteed that an event will in fact occur if one sets up

the sites, and it is never guaranteed that even if it did occur there would be subjects to

preserve it. But this is irrelevant to the main point. All that needs to be grasped is the

centrality of the (non)relation to the event that the multiple-subjects helped push through.

What exactly is this type of experience, if not evental? Perhaps, and here we stray too far,

it is what Gilles Deleuze calls virtual.

Conclusions

What emerged in this speculation? Using other terms than I have so far, let me

make some initial conclusions. First, the fact that self-organization ends up as an other-

organization, for in being faithful to fidelity in ones strategy of event, what ends up being

produced is nothing for that multiple-subject and everything for that subject-to-be.

Second, that the horizontality of evental experience can be consistently understood as

pre-verticalized. Horizontal political experience occurs in processes of radical self-

organization based on procedures that are open to all at hand to use. However, as the

experience of an event crushes all hierarchies of predicates for the ones involved, it

nonetheless can be brought to pass by series of provocations and actions which occur

without such equality of opportunity. For only multiple-subjects are allowed into this

camp, and not all. Third, new subjects might or might not emerge, for a new event might

or might not occur. All the experimental militant can do is connect and provoke the

necessary conditions, she can’t force the efficient cause. Fourth, the collective experience

of organization/provocation for the multiple-subjects is almost like another event, but it is

29
not. It is neither evental nor ontological nor simply being-faithful, but something in-

between which we still don’t have the language for. And finally, this is not a construction

of an event per se but rather something like a (complex, self) organization toward a

(simple, other) provocation. As Badiou cites from Plato’s Laches in his short book on

Sarkozy, politics takes the courage to see your enemy in the face, and run towards him.

The only question left for us is, how fast?

30
i Badiou, Alain Being and Event (2006) Meditation Twenty, “The Intervention,” p211
ii Ibid., Meditation Sixteen, “Evental Sites and Historical Situations,” p175
iii Ibid., Meditation Seventeen, “The Matheme of the Event,” p179
iv Ibid., Meditation Sixteen, “Evental Sites and Historical Situations,” p176
v Ibid., Meditation Seventeen, “The Matheme of the Event,” p182
vi Ibid., Meditation Seventeen, “The Matheme of the Event,” p181
vii Ibid., Meditation Seventeen, “The Matheme of the Event,” p183
viii Badiou, Alain Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (2003) p79
ix Ibid., p83
x Ibid., p84
xi See Ch.2 of Badiou, Alain Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy (2003). This essay was originally a paper he gave in Sydney in 1999 called “The Ethic of
Truths: Construction and Potency.”
xii Ibid., p62
xiii Badiou, Alain Theoretical Writings (2004) Ch.9 “On Subtraction” p112
xiv Ibid., p112
xv Being and Event, Meditation Twenty-Eight, “Constructivist Thought and the Knowledge of Being,” p294
xvi Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Eight, “Constructivist Thought and the Knowledge of Being,” p288
xvii Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Nine, “The Folding of Being and the Sovereignty of Language,” p304
xviii Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Nine, “The Folding of Being and the Sovereignty of Language,” p304
xix Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Nine, “The Folding of Being and the Sovereignty of Language,” p 298
xx Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Nine, “The Folding of Being and the Sovereignty of Language,” p299
xxi Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Nine, “The Folding of Being and the Sovereignty of Language,” p299
xxii Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Nine, “The Folding of Being and the Sovereignty of Language,” p305
xxiii Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Eight, “Constructivist Thought and the Knowledge of Being,” p289
xxiv Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Eight, “Constructivist Thought and the Knowledge of Being,” p290
xxv Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Eight, “Constructivist Thought and the Knowledge of Being,” p293
xxvi Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Eight, “Constructivist Thought and the Knowledge of Being,” p293, italics original
xxvii Ibid., Meditation Twenty-Eight, “Constructivist Thought and the Knowledge of Being,” p293
xxviii See Ch. 10 of Badiou’s Metapolitics (2005), titled “Politics as Truth-Procedure.”
xxix Being and Event, Meditation Nine, “The State of the Historical-Social Situation,” p111
xxx Badiou, Metapolitics p145
xxxi ibid.,
xxxii ibid.,
xxxiii Badiou, Metapolitics p146
xxxiv Being and Event, meditation twenty, “The Intervention” p 205
xxxv ibid., p204
xxxvi ibid., p205
xxxvii ibid., p210
xxxviii ibid., p209
xxxix ibid., p206. “An event is an interval rather than a term: it establishes itself, in the interventional retroaction, between the empty anonymity bordered on by the site, and the
addition of a name.”
xl ibid., p210
xli ibid., p210
xlii ibid., p207
xliii Badiou, Ethics (2002) p41
xliv Being and Event, meditation twenty-three, “Fidelity, Connection” p237
xlv “. . . one can again think fidelity as a counter-state: what it does is organize, within the situation, another legitimacy of inclusions. It builds, according to the infinite becoming
of the finite and provisional results, a kind of other situation, obtained by the division in two of the primitive situation.” ibid., p238
xlvi Being and Event, meditation nine, “The State of the Historico-Social Situation” p111, italics mine,
xlvii Saint Paul, p111
xlviii The diagram is in “On Subtraction”, included in his Theoretical Writings (2005).
xlix “Even for those who wander on the borders of evental sites, staking their lives upon the occurrence and the swiftness of intervention, it is, after all, appropriate to be
knowledgeable.” Being and Event, meditation twenty-eight, “Constructivist Thought” p294