Back to index

12:19

(In »Truth as an act – the road to the fourth singularity«)

A central theological idea for Badiou is that the singular in the universal has no name. Badiou therefore calls this truth substance the unnamable. It is thus the unnamable at the innermost core of truth that makes it axiomatic. The unnamable for Badiou is of course merely another name for the fundamental syntheological concept of Atheos. Badiou argues that there can be no love or loyalty towards anything unless this love and loyalty first goes via Atheos as its productive engine. Only by devoting oneself to the void as precisely a void can truth be produced and set in motion. Even if Badiou calls Atheos the unnamable, it is not about a destructive but rather a highly productive void. This contrasts with how Slavoj Zizek, another prominent Lacanian, describes Atheos as the excremental remainder that is the subject’s and thereby the truth’s foundation. Zizek may by all means ascribe whatever attributes he wishes to Atheos; at any rate this attribution says more about the philosopher’s emotional fetishes than about the actual nature of Atheos. But the fact remains: the effect of Atheos – and it is the effect and not the character that is interesting – is an enormous productivity, both in the external world of physics and in Man’s internal world.