Badiou's ethics of truth

The problem with an ethics of fidelity (Badiou's truth) is that fidelity itself becomes the point of it--that 'remaining true' becomes more important than acting in this way or that way. In other words, loyalty tends to trump judgment. The British soldiers who undertook the distasteful work of slaughtering Indians in 1857, or the Germans who slaughtered Jews in the 1940s, were being true to their duty; a woman who stays with an abusive husband is 'being true to him' or 'to love'; a woman who submits to genital mutilation is 'being true' to her culture and identity. This sort of loyalty is obviously wrongheaded; but it's hard to see, in Badiou's scheme, how to challenge it. Badiou's ethics posits Bill Sikes's dog as the model for 'how to act'.

Publicity

'He went public' -- as if publicity were a place ...

Love your neighbour

Love your neighbour as yourself is a carte blanche for the self-hateful and parasuicidal to maim and kill those around them ... the very people, of course, who (under various degrees of self-repression and self-awareness) make up most of the world's secret police forces, private armies, unofficial and official mafias.

Six six-word stories

Your eyes are lovely. With wasabi.

‘The sky’s falling!’ ‘Don’t be stu—’

One of these words is poisoned.

A headless man? How last-century!

The one law of robotics. Kill!

The French for six is cease.

On hypocrisy

“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.” Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963), ch. 2 .

But, as Freud points out in Civilisation and its Discontents, hypocrisy is correlative with civilisation; all of us who live in the polis are hypocrites in this sense. It’s as if Arendt has lighted upon her own formulation of the idea of original sin …

'It's not enough ...'

To say 'it's not enough to be in love' is to call into question concepts of sufficiency (and satiety), not concepts of love ...

Flood

Medieval mementi mori represented death and physical corruption as a process of dessication: a turning into dust, ‘ashes to ashes’, ‘from dust you art and to dust you shall return’ and so on. But modern life sees bodily matter (witness ten thousand horror flicks, and the expert special-effect representation of the abjection of decay) as a wet thing. The flesh, dry and clean, has become our flesh, sodden and rotten and revolting.

I wonder if this isn't a symptom of a broader cultural evolution, a shift from discourses of dryness to ones of wetness. Smoking goes out of fashion and drinking comes in; we go from dystopic future-visions of desert landscapes and dried-out ruined city husks to dystopic future-visions of devastating flood.

What gives? Don't we feel dry anymore? Have our whistles been too thoroughly wetted?