The most Lacanian thing of Badiou’s I’ve read, in both style and substance. Also the most unnervingly ferocious, funny and poetically concentrated.

The discussion of active nihilism as discordance is particularly illuminating for me, as you might imagine. Badiou is fond at this stage of drawing graphs of positions, such that they compose a field in which the assumption of any one point depends on the nomination of the others. So one doesn’t, for example, take up an “active nihilist” position in a vacuum, but rather with specific respect to passive nihilism (fatalist resignation), belief and courage and the “diagonals” running between them. (It’s all a little bit Myers-Briggs if you ask me, but then I’ve always had a weakness for schemas of that kind). The issues discussed in Cold World map pretty well onto this graph: the cold world’s systematic devaluation traces the line from belief to nihilism, dysphoria takes you from passive resignation to active discord (BM, or B-M), and the real problem - which I posed but didn’t resolve - is how to get from there to “Promethean” courage.

It’s arguable that “posing but not resolving” this problem, or indicating courage without attaining to it, is precisely what active nihilism does, not least in the Situationist mode which Badiou analyses so acutely: it maintains the problem of courage as a problem. I take it that part of what Ben Noys is doing in The Persistance of the Negative is holding open the line of communication between active nihilism and affirmationist confidence, which we might describe in other terms as a “vale of soul-making” or vector of subjective activation (oh, poor Keats…). The question of “agency”, as Ben repeatedly poses it, could perhaps be rephrased as: where do little subjects come from? Affirmationism assures us that they’re always already here, that subjective agency is already part of what there is (be it in larval, virtual or otherwise infra-objective form): as a discourse of ethical praise (éloge), it scans and evaluates beings on the basis of the powers of affirmation (élan) that inform and traverse them. Active nihilism suspends this evaluation (nothing is praiseworthy!), exempts itself from the rites of power-worship, and poses anew the question of subjective formation: in what shall the subject confide?