Lorenzo Chiesa

In Logics of Worlds (2006/2009), Alain Badiou discusses “four forms of change”: modification, fact, weak singularity, and strong singularity or event. Modification as “the simple becoming a world” is conceived as a change “without real change” (Badiou 2009a: 357; 372; 374). This possibly explains why, in the more recent Second manifeste pour la philosophie (2009), Badiou opts for a tripartite division of change and only speaks of “three types of mutation” – fact, weak singularity, and event – omitting any reference to modification (Badiou 2009b: 93). In this paper I would like to dwell on some of the implications of the notion of modification as a change that changes nothing, but nevertheless underlies all other kinds of change, by focusing on the treatment it receives, from a different perspective, in the conclusion of Logics of Worlds dedicated to the question “What is it to Live?” Here Badiou states that the animal that man is “shift[s] almost constantly from one world to another” (Badiou 2009a: 513; my emphasis). I closely associate this effortless “shift” with “modification”, since no subjective dimension of creation seems to be involved at this level. We are dealing with nothing more than a natural “kind of objectal ubiquity” that is proper to the species homo sapiens (Badiou 2009a: 513). In spite of some terminological ambiguity, this should clearly be differentiated from any real change of world as incorporation into the new body of a truth. Moving from these premises, my first claim will be that an open thematisation of such a purely biological “shift” allows us to identify a series of tensions in Badiou’s notion of the ‘human animal’. I will then argue that Lacan’s own pronouncements on the human animal provide us with a valuable tool to think more thoroughly this basic form of change – which is not a change – in accordance with the theory of the body of truth advanced in Logics of Worlds; this will also entail a problematisation of Badiou’s own reading of the way Lacan articulates the connection between bodies, languages, and truths. Finally, I will show that a full appreciation of the “almost constant” shift of worlds that distinguishes homo sapiens from other animals can only reinforce the battle against the reduction of man to animality promoted by the reigning ideology Badiou defines as ‘democratic materialism’. To this end, I will sketch the contours of a fourth figure of the subject to be added to the three figures of the faithful, the reactive, and the obscure subject analysed in Logics of Worlds: returning to an intense page from Théorie du sujet (1982) that Badiou consecrates to Mallarmé’s and Lacan’s ‘structural dialectic’, I will tentatively name this fourth type of subjectivisation of body allied with the faithful subject, the ‘partisan’.

In this article I aim at analysing Žižek's recent critique of Badiou's notion of repetition with regard to the political subject. Furthermore, it is my intention to show that Žižek's own arguments should in their turn be supplemented with a detailed consideration of the function of repetition in Lacan's notion of the fundamental fantasy. This will finally allow me to indicate how, leaving aside the specific question of political subjectivization, it is only by means of a psychoanalytic approach to repetition that, more generally, we can identify the limits of Badiou's metaontological notion of the "phantom of inconsistency"

Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) has often been described as a ‘gothic’, if not straightforwardly ‘horror’ movie. While this claim could easily be challenged with regard to strict genre definitions, it is doubtless the case that the film deals very explicitly with fear, first and foremost the female protagonist’s fear of herself, which is placed at the top of the so-called ‘pyramid of fear’ drawn by her therapist/wanna-be-Saviour partner. My opinion is that Antichrist perfectly displays the horrific effects of the direct embodiment, following a true love encounter, of the symbolic positions which Lacan associated with male and female sexuation. If human sexuality relies on the logic for which there is only one mythical man who is truly whole while every real woman is not wholly whole, what happens when He and She (the nameless protagonists of the movie) fully identify with such irreducible asymmetry between the sexes, its fundamental derailment from nature? They short-circuit the material singularity of a specific human animal with the abstract universality of gender. With the same move, they cannot overcome (or sublimate) the realisation that, in the female protagonist’s own words, woman is ‘evil’ – as long as she feels guilty of what man accuses her – and man is a ‘bastard’ – haunted by the phantasm of unifying purity which woman disrupts. Gynocide as male totalizing extermination of universal difference and genital self-mutilation as female reflexive hatred for the supposedly exceptional man mark the sadomasochistic extremes of the scene of the not-two, the frightening ob-scenity ( o-skené ), or off-representation, of human sexuality.

This collection provides English readers with a critical update on current debates on biopolitics in and around Italian thought. More than a decade after the publication of seminal books such as Agamben’s _Homo Sacer_ and Hardt and Negri’s _Empire_, the names of, among others, Roberto Esposito, Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, and Andrea Fumagalli have recently been brought to the attention of Anglophone scholars and political activists. Several authors have rightly emphasised the evanescent character of biopolitics, and the difficulty in providing a definition of it that could embrace all the conflicting theories of its most celebrated critics and supporters. The present collection is structured around the basic contention that bio-economy, human nature, and Christianity are the three visible contemporary manifestations of the theoretical object/problem of biopolitics in, respectively, Italian post-workerist economics, post-Marxist philosophical anthropology, and post-structuralist ontology. This book was originally published as a special issue of _Angelaki_.