The Truth can't Handle Itself

Badiou, Political Disorientation, and the Ontology of Truth

The word ‘disorientation’ is an undeniably fruitful category in today’s atavistic discourse ceaselessly pleading for a return to rationalistic common sense, pleading for ‘reason’ as the abject of a ‘confused’ technocratic society. The avatars of a new form of right-wing populism lay claim to reason when they firmly despair at a gender discourse that no longer understands biological sexual difference, a political thought which desperately clings to the spectres of socialism and social justice, a concern with collective freedom over individual liberty, or even an insistence that impending ecological and economic disasters should be taken seriously. Common sense is framed according to its unending battle with an irrational disorientation. 

The Ontology of Political Truth

The French philosopher Alain Badiou’s short 2022 pamphlet, Remarques sur la Désorientation du Monde (Remarks on the Disorientation of the World) builds on the paradox sustaining this opposition constitutive of right-populist logic. Badiou recognises the unique aspect of ‘disorientation’ itself lodged in this political discourse which opposes itself to the very same disorientation by falling back upon a trite and manufactured sanctification of common-sense reasoning.

In other words, Badiou intends to point out the forms of libertarian, right-wing, and crypto-authoritarian ‘liberal’ discourse that is installed as a reaction to a perceived disorientation, a perceived political corruption - a reaction nevertheless as disoriented as the disorientation it opposes. ‘Authoritarian liberalism’ is the term that is employed by Badiou for this paradoxical position of reactionary narratives - a liberal fundamentalism which loosely employs the category of freedom as a smokescreen for a series of nationalistic, republican suspicions tending towards an inevitable authoritarian restriction of popular freedom.

Four variations of this authoritarian liberalism are presented, in themselves irreconcilable with each other, yet grounded in a similar disorientation: 1) the true democrats (les vrais démocrates), so concerned with the freedom of ‘the individual’ (in fact their individuality) that this isolated freedom takes precedence over any other (poorer, more alienated) individual. 2) the authentic nationalists (les nationalistes authentiques) nostalgic for a bygone colonialism. 3) the classical liberals (les libéraux classiques) proclaimers of an unquestionable fidelity to an aggressive free-market capitalism. 4) a type of neo-leftism (une sorte de néogauchisme) devoted to a politics of absolute, forceful criticism without proposing any useful future alternatives. The obverse of this type of self-contradictory liberalism, to which Badiou ascribes the same inconsistent method of critique, or the same tendency towards inevitably authoritarian (’capitalised’) disorientation, is modern feminism and ecologism.

Feminism (and Badiou sharply distinguishes even between the feminism for example of Simone de Beauvoir and and modern variations on an attempt at new forms of feminine representation), like ecological diplomacy, deploys its discourse within the economic order that ultimately conditions its antagonism. Solutions to the ecological crisis must ‘dare to talk about globalised capitalism’, unless it is to be doomed to produce ineffective policy-solutions catering to, and reproductive of, the political economy (globalised industrial manufacture) which is directly responsible for climate catastrophes.

What should be stressed is Badiou’s conception of the conditions under which political disorientation emerges. A formal politico-ontological frame explains this authoritarian disorientation: such disorientation occurs at the margins of a (distorted and misrecognised) political truth. Where the ontologically true form of political structures reveal themselves, the threat of its simultaneous obfuscation is a frequent consequence. Disorientation is thus conceptualised according to the same coordinates (yet as its negative) of truth itself. 

An important question emerges here: what does Badiou mean by a ‘truth’ in its political sense. To answer this, we must turn to Badiou’s rigorous ontological treatises, his ‘armes nucléaires’ as he calls them (since they are rarely employed but frequently referred to): Being and Event (L’Être et l’Événement) and Logics of Worlds (Logiques des Mondes).

The principal thesis of Being and Event is that ‘mathematics is the domain of ontology (Being)’ - specifically, mathematical set theory. Badiou adopts a reasoning about Being which slowly emerged through the course of philosophy, beginning with Plato’s Parmenides: Being is inarticulable. More precisely, Being is a form of unstructured ‘multiplicity’, a qualitative infinity which refuses to be posited in the form of the ‘One’, as a countable, representable structure. We never directly speak of Being as such, but of an existing thing, formulated according to a set of structured modes (or coordinates) of articulating this existence. In order to speak of Being, we must speak of it indirectly, in the form of axioms that recognise its negative, disjunctive relation to our methods of concrete understanding. The inconsistent ontology of Being can only be formulated indirectly, through a ‘non-language’ which deals with infinite, qualitatively non-concrete formations. Badiou argues that set theory (the mathematical theory of ‘sets’, dictated by laws of belonging and exclusion) is capable of precisely such a non-language. Set theory constructs laws and axioms for dealing with infinite sets that cannot in themselves be concretely ‘represented’, yet of which a purely formal, mediated knowledge nevertheless becomes possible. Ultimately, the truth of Being is something that is never immediately expressible for the knowledge which attempts to grasp it. An ‘Event’ is for Badiou the rupture and radical ‘newness’ caused by the introduction of an ontological truth in a situation which cannot make direct sense of it. In other words, an Event is a definite break which emerges in a situation lacking the language to properly articulate this ‘new form’.

Logics of Worlds would more directly operationalise this conceptual conjunction of Being and truth, in the form of an Event, by its application to four key domains of existence: art, science, politics, and love. In each of these domains (or ‘Worlds’), an Event operates by breaking with , and retroactively restructuring, an established set of logical relations. The ontological truth expressed in an Event is irreducible to a pre-established comprehension, and it is this radical aspect which conditions a desperate engagement with the Event, with truth, in order to ‘makes something out of it’, in order to understand its meaning for a presupposed set of logical relations. 

In politics, an Event reveals an underlying formation or tension which is not wholly conceptualised in our everyday political relations. It is when faced with the dizzying de-centralisation, the inarticulable truth, of an Event that the type of disorientation Badiou describes becomes possible. The disorientation of liberal authoritarianism does indeed occupy a relation to truth, yet this relation is located on the inverse side of truth, as its obfuscation and incomplete/inconsistent articulation. The implication, therefore, is that the ‘disorientation of the world’ must be recognised as a disorientation at the threshold of a sincere orientation, a faithful apprehension of the existence of a truth expressing itself in our political relations.

Problem: Truth is Self-Corrupting

For Badiou, it seems that the key to political freedom is to recognise the existence of a truth without falling into the disorientation which such a truth would condition. Whilst Badiou’s ‘mathematical-ontology’ (the doctrine underlying Being and Event and Logics of Worlds) is an undeniably feat in philosophical and political thought, a necessary limitation becomes present in the above conclusion. This argument hinges on an over-reliance on a dyadic conception of our subjective relation to truth. If disorientation is the failed articulation of truth, then sincere political projects must simply not obfuscate the truth, and instead maintain a fidelity to it. Badiou’s logic seems on this point optimistically misplaced.

We must ask the question not of why the truth might be hidden or misrecognised, but of why even when faced with the truth, it can be disowned recognised as other-than-itself, as an unclear anomaly. It is not enough to simply insist upon the truth - we must recognise in truth the presupposition of its own rejection. More specifically, we must see truth for the disorientation which is in fact constitutive of it. It is not a question of a well-appreciated vs misrecognised truth, but of a truth that is always in itself incomplete - a truth that presupposes its disoriented, partial, and fragmented reception.

Whatever truth there may be, even accepting the tenets of Badiou’s Being and Event (written 34 years before Remarks on the Disorientation of the World), its paradox is that it is a self-obfuscating truth. Truth is, as Lacan said, Mi-Dit: a play on words referencing the Nietzschean ‘greatness of an overwhelming future truth’ - the noontide (in French, midi) - and the incompleteness-in-itself of any formulation of truth (mi-dit literally means ‘half-said’). Truth never expresses itself for what it actually is, but posits its own distortion as constitutive of its existence. 

Truth cannot conveniently be distinguished from its disoriented obverse. Disorientation should rather be recognised as internal to the truth which is misrecognised. Lacan would foresee this difficulty when he insisted that the Real relies on the existence of a virtual, Symbolic structure. The Real is inscribed in everyday life only insofar as it is produced by the pre-existence of the Symbolic which mis-represents the Real. Removing the Symbolic (imperfect and incomplete structures of expression) would remove the possibility of the Real, the possibility of truth itself. The uncomfortable fact with which Lacan presents us is that there is no truth ‘by itself’ - truth is possible only insofar as it is constitutively entangled with the virtual principle which obfuscates it. A neat separation between Symbolic and Real, between truth and disorientation, is impossible.

Therefore, whilst Badiou correctly identifies disorientation as located in the margins of truth, it would be an optimistic conclusion that we can remove disorientation whilst retaining the existence of an independent truth. Where truth is constitutively obscured by its own existence, impossible to distinguish from the virtual disorientation which appears to negate it, maintaining a fidelity to political justice and freedom whilst avoiding the avenues of ‘authoritarian liberalism’ necessitates an organised, collectively structured engagement with a self-negating truth.

The freedom of the commune (the hypothesis of communism) begins with a precise articulation of the structural hinderance to a complete and isolated political truth. The task of the ‘philosopher of the people’ is to reproduce the conditions in which truth emerges as a consequence of, and indissociable from, the disorientation which corrupts this truth. Disorientation is not only the negative reaction to truth, it is the negative moment of corruption lodged at the heart of truth itself.