Abstract

The primary objective of this essay is to illuminate why the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has become so important to the work of Slavoj Žižek. The primary audiences include new or relatively new readers of Žižek , the merely curious, and those, like myself, whose various disciplinary specific pursuits engage with the work of Žižek and Badiou, but only indirectly and very often in a haphazard fashion. I am particularly interested in addressing those that “borrow” from or “use” Žižek and Badiou to inform their own work in various fields but who do not, as a general rule, consider themselves philosophers or theorists or, at least, do not write as philosophers or theorists but as “theoretically informed” or “philosophically minded” literary critics, political scientists, anthropologists, etc. In particular, I contend that Badiou is so important to Žižek because in the course of the 1990s and the early twenty-first century Badiou’s work helped Žižek, both philosophically and rhetorically/strategically, confront and avoid the “religious” or “ethical” temptation ever present in philosophy. In so doing I trace Žižek’s struggle with “the usual gang of democracy-to-come-deconstructionist-postsecular-Levinasian-respect-for-Otherness suspects.”