Books like Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

Against Human RightsHuman rights is an idea dangerous to the human beings whom it is nominally meant to protect. These rights presume that what constitutes a human being is ‘self-evident’ as it says in the Constitution of the United States. This is, however, according to Badiou, a philosophical conceit made popular at the time that document was prepared by Immanuel Kant. The contradictions and inadequacies of the document and of its inherent philosophy have became apparent only subsequently.The first problem is obvious once stated but not before. Rights are actually the recognition of evil, that is, they are the inverse statement of that which is deemed unacceptable. Rights presume that human beings are victims who must be protected from their victimhood. So, Badiou asks, “Who cannot see that this ethics which rests on the misery of the world hides, behind its victim-Man, the good-Man, the white-Man?” The idealist white knight fulfilling his fantasy of saving the honour of the virginal princess. This is not ethics but self-indulgence.But there is an objective issue as well as this subjective fantasy in the defining of rights in terms of evil: “because if the ethical ‘consensus’ is founded on the recognition of Evil, it follows that every effort to unite people around a positive idea of the Good, let alone to identify Man with projects of this kind, becomes in fact the real source of evil itself.” This is a subtle but crucial point. The ethics derived from evil are at best a sort of “stodgy conservatism” much like the ethics of Christianity which has always found it preferable to enforce the ‘don’ts’ than the ‘do’s’.Such an ethics derived from evil is a uniquely ‘Western’ phenomenon. It is an ethics of the armed benefactor, of the owner of possessions who does not want to lose them, of the cipher who is a person in the ancient Roman legal sense of a set of fixed entitlements, of human beings as bureaucratic statistics. What Badiou proposes is an ethics grounded on the Good, on, perhaps, the Sermon on the Mount rather than the Ten Commandments. Clearly such a radical proposal is difficult to conceive in all its practical details, much less to implement in social institutions. But Badiou does provide an interesting series of ‘deconstructions’ aimed at rooting out many of the hidden presumptions that prevent us from formulating the collective Good.These hidden presumptions are both religious (e.g. Levinas’s Other) and economic (the logic of Capital triumphant over the politics of government). The legacy of religion is primarily one of evil projected and hence to mutual terrorism. The effect of global capitalism is to reduce all human endeavour to the pursuit of GDP rather than the articulation and execution of new social possibilities. Together they trap ethics as an “ideology of insularity,” ensuring an inherent retrograde conservatism, a smug nihilism, in both public and private life.Ethics, it should be clear, is very philosophical and very French. It follows a trajectory which is likely to seem alien to the Anglo-Saxon penchant for pragmatic solutions to current problems. But this is the real source of its value. Badiou‘s intention is to provoke the reader to thought, not to action. In prosaic terms, his suggestion is that the really important lesson to be learned about digging bottomless holes is to stop digging and consider alternative occupations.