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Secondly, this is only the third of Badiou's books to be translated into English (though several others will appear over the next two years). Significantly, the presentation of his theoretical edifice rests in the extensive ontological analyses [It's all Dutch to me - Ed.]of L'être et l'évènement (1988). 

Ethics is itself only 90 pages in length (the English language edition is supplemented by a translator's introduction, an additional interview conducted in 1997, and an extensive bibliography). At several points it refers back to the arguments of the earlier work, hence a full appreciation of the theoretical claims and arguments would depend upon the developments found in the former. Neither Manifesto for Philosophy nor Badiou's book on Deleuze, both translated in English, serve to sufficiently illuminate the analysis of being and the event that Badiou conducts through set theory and its developments under Cantor, Cohen and Grothendieck.

The third problem is apparent from the preface to this English language edition, where Badiou appears to retract some of the critical formulations relating to the presentation of the problem of evil in general, and to whether Nazi atrocities of World War II constitute an 'event', in particular. His modifications are promised for inclusion in a forthcoming book Logiques du Monde, yet to appear. The monolinguist is thus tasked with treating Ethics as a stand-alone text, whilst at the same time displacing any assessment in view of its possible place in the framework of Badiou's developing theoretical enterprise.

Ethics has two aims: it seeks to intervene against the current discourse of ethics and the Other in French philosophy, which has increasingly migrated across the Atlantic and the Channel, but which Badiou marks as characterised by a nihilistic resignation; it aims to develop a positive account of the Good [sic] as part of a reinvigoration of progressive politics. With regard to the first aim, Badiou shares his genealogical analysis of the dominance of human rights discourse with Dominic Lecourt's Mediocracy: both see its roots in the figure of the dissident drawn from the Cold War era of the 1970s and the writings of the Maoist apostates, the nouveaux philosophes, André Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and so on. 

On his reading, this discourse operates as an ideological support for the current political situation by presenting as potentially evil any organised political collectivity that seeks to challenge the domain marked out by parliamentary democracy and neoliberal economics. To this end, this discourse presents a set of absolutely evil events as a spectacle demanding consent: there is no alternative, we are agreed that these are evil and that this is what happens when one attempts to go beyond the current model. Whatever one may think of this political analysis, Badiou makes the point that this consensus has no positive account of the good beyond the abstract notions of security and order. For Badiou, this is the mark of a fundamental nihilism, or more specifically, a lapse into animality.

Unlike Alain de Botton and Comte-Sponville, Badiou insists that ethics cannot be reduced to practices of social lubrication: it is only by seeking the impossible that humans escape a pragmatic self-preservation. The individual experiences the convocation of an impossible truth revealed in the event. Marked by the legacy of both structuralism and phenomenology, this distinction between being and event is current in recent French philosophy: the event is not simply a novelty, but marks a rupture in the skein of knowledge and opinion which characterises being. Truth appears in an event which reveals the shortcomings of instantiated knowledge or practices the event falsifies. However, the event itself is weak, it cannot transform knowledge without the practice of subjects. Badiou describes four fields in which truth appears: the amorous encounter; scientific re-foundation; artistic invention; and, more relevant to the aims of Ethics, the sequence of emancipatory politics.

The event marks an immanent break. Badiou provides the following examples of events in each field: the love of Héloïse and Abelard; the discoveries of Galileo; Hadyn's revolution of Baroque music; the French Revolution of 1792. Though these now structure our current knowledge, at their occurrence these events were not comprehensible in terms of what existed and preceded. They attest to the event as a truth that breaks with the order of knowledge or being. But sited in a transitory, uncertain event, which being can elide, evade or ignore, truth requires this fidelity of the subject, who fights to alter knowledge to incorporate truth. 

The example of Galileo illustrates the struggles that this might entail. The work of Kuhn on paradigm-shifts in scientific knowledge might provide a comparison. Alternatively, we can conceive Badiou's fidelity as the counterpoint to Hume's invocation of Bayes' theorem in his rejection of belief in miracles. For Hume, a reported miracle will always be erased by the greater likelihood that the witness was mistaken, lying or deceived. In contrast, Badiou presents the subject as only formed in the resistance to this dismissal of rupture in the given. Badiou's St Paul et la fondation de luniversalisme (1997, forthcoming in translation) marks the most consistent treatment of this fidelity, though Badiou is keen to insist on his secular treatment of this structure. Indeed, his first ethical principle is: There is no God. 

The ethics of this fidelity is the ethics of consistency; to continue attesting to the truth, to resist giving up and returning to ordinary situations. In contrast to human rights, Badiou refers to the rights of the infinite. Unless we try to think truth, the design undreamed by Fate, we are only bipeds without feathers, acculturated ants. Ethics aims to construct an affirmative account of the Good on the basis of this disjunction: it is the internal norm of a prolonged disorganisation of life. 

Whereas modern discourse presents the Holocaust as an absolutely evil event, which produces the categorical imperative, never again! and hence closes down any politics of truth over the status quo, Badiou's main concern is to insist that the Nazism was only the simulacrum of an event, a reaction to the Russian revolution of 1917. Badiou's attempts to differentiate a political event from that which adopts the guise of an event is far from convincing. And it is this argumentative effort which appears to be retracted in the introduction: 

'For I was previously unable to explain the appearance of reactionary innovations. My whole theory of the new confined it to truth-procedures. But when all is said and done, it is obvious that reaction, and even the powers of death, can be stamped with the creative force of an event.
I was then obliged to admit that the event opens a subjective space in which not only the progressive and truthful subjective figure of fidelity but also other figures every bit as innovative, albeit negative, take their place.'

 If one is able to articulate a relationship between politics and truth, then it requires an ontology of time and history, which is precisely what is not available to Badiou's mathematical system of extensively defined sets which determines the past as void [vide]. Hence Badiou is forced into following the Platonic gesture of equating 'the Good' with 'truth'. But if truth is characterised negatively, as that which ruptures current knowledge and being, it cannot be positively characterised as eternal, or indeed as Good. For unless the event is interpreted as the appearance of the infinite in the finite, there is no event whose effects cannot be radically altered by later faithful responses to both events and simulacra.

The formal structure of the event means that unless it is supplemented by a metaphysical gesture, it is not a marker of truth but only of the finite structure of instantiated rationality there are more possible events than can be anticipated by knowledge. Badiou's attempt to suture his extensive political commitments to his theoretical structure serve to reveal this hiatus. I quote the following paragraph in order to connect Badiou to a much less radical thematic:

 'The stories told by survivors of torture forcefully underlie this point: if the torturers and bureaucrats of the dungeons and the camps are able to treat their victims like animals destined for the slaughterhouse it is because the victims have indeed become such animals.
 That some nevertheless remain human beings, and testify to that effect, is a confirmed fact. But this is precisely achieved through enormous effort, an effort acknowledged by witnesses as an almost incomprehensible resistance on the part of that which, in them, does not coincide with the identity of the victim. This is where we are to find Man, if we are determined to think him: in what ensures that we are dealing with an animal whose resistance, unlike that of a horse, lies not in his fragile body but in his stubborn determination to remain what he is: something other than a mortal being.' 

     (Ethics, 11-12) 

Through this discipline, Frankl learnt that the last of the human freedoms that could not be taken away: He could decide himself within himself how all of this was going to affect him. By finding meaning in life Frankl was able to transcend his situation, 'but if we live like animals, out of our own instincts and conditioning and conditions, out of our collective memory, we too will be limited.' This description comes from Stephen R. Coveys popular management bible, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. 

The search for meaning, as defined by Frankl's 'logotherapy', produces a proactive, reframing of sense and shares many structural similarities with Badiou's fidelity. Admittedly, there is perhaps an acute hermeneutical analysis which would distinguish the rupture of truth in Badiou from the call to individual responsibility in Frankl. Yet both insist on the root of the ethical in thoughts imposition on being. It must be uncomfortable for Badiou that this is the ethics of strategy whether military, business or political.

Perhaps one should also question whether the truth of the human condition is revealed in such extreme circumstances. Can one generalise from the experience of the death camps? That which enables one to survive this horror, may not be what is required today. Especially if it involves expunging all that is animal, non-rational or emotional. I do not know if Badiou has an account of the faculties or subjectivity, beyond his account of fidelity, but his separation of thinking from mortal animality appears open to criticisms made by Adorno, whose Minima Moralia insists that thought does not profit from the decay of the emotions and that indeed this expresses a process of stupefaction well-adjusted to the modern, capitalist relations of production. 'Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology'. 

 Is not tautology the model of absolute consistency, an ethics of solipsism? That this might also be the structure of a strain of madness is revealed in the poem of Pessoa (much admired by Badiou) Dom Sebastian, King of Portugal: 

My madness let the others take from me
And with it all the rest;
For without madness what can mankind be
More than a healthy beast
A corpse that breeds before its juices waste.

Reviewed by Andrew McGettigan