Abstract

When Alain Badiou writes that “we make up a politburo of two which decides who will be the first to shoot the other,” he shares with us more than just some playful hyperbole concerning his relationship with Žižek; instead, the joke’s Stalinist framework reveals the brutal mutual-exclusivity of the metapolitical consequences of these authors’ divided conceptualizations of the real. Badiou’s and Žižek’s debate concerning the real acquires critical urgency, since what is ultimately at stake is a theorization of the egalitarian emancipatory subject. My paper addresses the two main components of this debate. There is, primarily, the question of structure, which is to say the question of bodies. Here, I demonstrate that what separates Badiou and Žižek amounts to a kind of ‘minimal difference’ concerning the paradoxical status of Lacan’s objet a in the making of bodies. While Badiou and Žižek both follow Lacan in asserting the body’s extimacy with regard to the evental becoming-Other which marks the beginning of a subject’s grip on an event’s trace, their differing conceptualizations of the modality of this extimacy - as sequential and contingent becoming for Badiou; as structure for Žižek - installs a parallax gap at the heart of what Badiou calls ‘the regime of the cut’, the evental upsurge whose trace affects a body in such a way as to be the basis for a new subject. Thus the second component of my analysis addresses this parallax gap by examining its consequences for an anti-humanist ethics of the real – an initiative shared by Žižek’s and Badiou’s communisms