In his recent article in the New Left Review, Alain Badiou says a number of encouraging but slightly perplexing things:

Experimentally, we might conceive of finding a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: ‘There is only one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of ‘alter-globalization’. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The ‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things–objects for sale–and monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelming majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. They are locked out, often literally so.

Here is the first point: the world of the global market is not a “single world of human subjects”, but what Jean-Luc Nancy calls “l’immonde”: a world of destitution and squalor, an un-world. Strictly speaking, the global market does not constitute a world; but the worldly face of its thing-universe is one of proliferating immiseration - the “planet of slums” named by Mike Davies. The effective power of capital’s “worldless” logic appears in the literal unmaking of any part of the world in which it holds sway. But this unmaking is partial, incomplete: the riches of the world are not simply squandered, but rather concentrated in the hands of a few. A rule of separation is imposed on the planet’s population, which Badiou (following a similar line to that taken by John Berger) calls a wall:

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in favelas, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human existence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval patrols, barbed wire and expulsions.

The axiom that “there is only one world” is addressed to those divided by this wall, “the world’s wall”, wherever the rule of the global market causes it to materialise. Just as there is only one world, there is in the same sense only one wall, however diverse the sites of its construction. The various walls of the world are one wall, the wall “between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of the poor”, a boundary which proliferates alongside the unification of economic sectors.

In a sense, then, this “one world” is the unification of a divided world - but, specifically, of a world structured by a single division, “the artificial and murderous division of the world into two”. Because there is just one wall, one division, multiply materialised, it is possible to call for a world in which just this division, the only one, is cancelled. The “unity in terms of living, acting beings, here and now” for which Badiou calls is to be constructed specifically in opposition to the rule of separation universally imposed by capital.

What it cannot be, however, is the restoration of a primordial unity that once existed naturally, only to be artificially sundered by some inexplicable lapse into duality. I endorse Badiou’s call for the construction of a new universal, a unity “in terms of” multiplicity, but I’m a little baffled by his language here. Clearly, it is the false universality of global capital, its construction across the world of “the world’s wall”, that creates the conditions under which this call for unification (which also requires a multiple construction) becomes necessary and just. The task is to answer a false universal, a simulacrum of universality, with a true one. But Badiou’s evocation of a global existential situation seems profoundly at odds with his concept of a truth as something that supplements a situation.

A truth procedure does not seek to repair a broken situation, to fill in a lack in order that some lost plenitude can be regained, but to derive the consequences of an event without precedent. What’s more, it must not seek to arrogate to itself the power of naming everything within the situation - to reconstruct a total world in its image. To do so would be to enter into a dispute with the real, of which a savage and merciless destructiveness is - so Badiou’s Ethics assures us - the inevitable outcome. The existential situation of the militant is in truth never one: Badiou’s “subject” is the name of the subjectivation by an animal of a thought, a process that entails the radical disorientation of the animal by the in-animality of a new form. Such a subject is never wholly of the world, and a world that contains it can never be wholly itself. There are, assuredly, not two worlds. But is there really only - or even - one?