The One

Despite his antagonism to the notion of unitary being, there is one thing that links Badiou to Parmenides: a suspicion of common opinion, of truth in the guise of the already known – the status-quo. The only fidelity that matters is oriented towards a disruptive, execrable truth. Anything else is just mute obedience or the promulgation of false unity. In this manner, just going through the motions of being provides no basis for authentic subjective experience and action. It is only when the hidden multiplicity of a situation is made evident – only when new radical possibilities emerge and are recognised – that anything significant happens. What this ignores is the texture of existent being as such – the constitutive field of repetition and tacit operation that enables anything whatsoever to take shape. Too hard a line is drawn between identity and novelty, ignoring that novelty is as inflected by repetition as identity is by change. Not everything is determined in the apparently revolutionary moment, there is also the rub of the water against the rocks – the light pressure (and epiphany) of minor, imperceptible experience.