taCity

Today of all days feels like a good time to revisit how we theorise ‘evil’. Too often we will hear people say “he’s evil” or “they’re pure evil” or “that country is evil”, but this just is invoking very blinkered, binary and too moralistic forms of what evil is, often based on religious doctrines that have bled into cultural narrations.

He has his faults for sure, but Alain Badiou’s philosophy offers a radical rethinking of the core philosophical question of evil. In his 1998 book Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Badiou confronts the notion of evil in a way that is deeply intertwined with his broader metaphysical and political commitments; and at it’s heart is an ethical understanding of evil. As we navigate the 21st century – a world of political extremism, rampant neoliberalism, imperialism and ongoing genocides – Badiou’s conception of evil warrants a refresher.

At it’s very basic, his understanding of evil is that it is a failure of the ‘good’. But a closer reading shows that being evil is a deviation from a ‘truth’. Not ‘the’ truth, but a truth (small t). In so doing, Badiou rejects the classical metaphysical and theological understandings of evil, which typically define it as the opposite of good or as inherent human depravity. Instead, Badiou’s ontology of evil and truth is profoundly tied to his theory of the “event.” For him, a truth is not something that exists in abstract; it is created in historical ruptures or “events” that break the continuity of established order.

So what is an event? Put simply, an event is a moment that offers the potential for radical change in the status quo. It is a deep rupture in the ‘normal’ order of things and crucially, it is unpredictable and unleashes a truth onto the world. Badiou likes to bracket of different ‘realms’ or ‘worlds’ in which events happen – art, science, politics and love. The French Revolution is a political event for example, Issac Newton having an apple fall on his head is one in science. But I prefer not to carve up the world like this, and events should be thought of more holistically. Arguably the most important event in all of history is the crucifixion of Christ Whatever your religious leanings (or not) or whether you believe it actually happened or not, Jesus’ death is the point in history from which the modern world has been created. All Western culture – and the rapacious dominance and violence on the world it was overseen – is a result of Christianity’s lust for conquest which began with Christ’s crucifixion. As ugly as it is, the truth of this was ‘unleashed’ onto the world upon Jesus’ death (and his resurrection).

An event therefore is a massive rupture but it can’t be so purely by itself. It is made so by individuals, cultures and planetary societies maintaining the truth of the event: Badiou calls this fidelity. And so evil is when this fidelity to a truth is lost, subverted, wains or simply disappears. Badiou goes onto suggest that around this, evil arises in three distinct forms: betrayal, terror, and simulacra, or what we can call a pretend truth.

The first, betrayal, occurs when an individual (or a group led by an individual) abandons their fidelity to the truth of an event. For example, a political leader who initially promotes revolutionary change but later compromises with the existing power structures is seen as betraying the event. Selling out is one version of this of course, but it can also be a form of (re)capture by the status quo. The second evil, terror, emerges when fidelity to the event is enforced through violence, exceeding the bounds of rational engagement and leading to authoritarianism. The third, is simulacra, or pretending. It often involves the outright denial or suppression of a truth-event but masks it as revolutionary thought.

Of course Badiou focuses on Nazism as embodying all three of these, but particularly terror and simulacra. For example, yoking the idea of a break from the status quo to an ethno-nationalism is patently absurd, but then too was naming it the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party when they solely represented the interested of the elite ruling class.

The potency of Badiou’s analysis is that it reframes evil not as an inherent property of individuals but as an active distortion or deviation from an ethical relation to a truth. This shifts the discussion away from binary (and overtly myopic) moralistic and top-down religious judgments and opens the door for a more dynamic and political understanding of good and evil that is in constant ‘negotiation’ of the naming of a truth that is revealed by an event.  

Badiou’s ideas here though are not without pause for thought and potential rebuttal. Contemporary political conditions are often far more ambiguous and incremental, making Badiou’s fairly rigid schema harder to apply. The truth-events he often valorizes such as the radical uprisings of May 1968 in France, the Bolshevik Revolution or the Arab Spring of 2011 are increasingly rare and unsullied by attempts at political narrativizing. Today’s social movements, whether climate activism or the struggle for racial justice, tend to operate in a more fluid space, where compromises and slow reforms are often the only pragmatic avenues for change. In this context, the binary of fidelity versus betrayal oversimplifies the nuances of political action. Does Badiou’s overview leave room for the messy realities of contemporary politics, where compromise may not be a betrayal but a necessity condition for survival?

But where it does fit very well is in the contemporary rise of right-wing populism and the ugly reemergence of an institutionalist neo-fascism (for it was always latent in the fabric of human society). These movements often claim to represent a truth (and therefore a radical break from the status quo) in the form of national sovereignty, racial purity, or a return to traditional values. In Badiou’s terms, these could be categorized as forms of simulacra, pretending to be modern forms of equality and justice but ultimately it’s just a return to unspecific, vague notion of historical greatness: “Make America Great Again!” (but without specifying when exactly it was great) or perhaps more applicable to today, “we have a right to defend ourselves!” (without acknowledging the racist histories of why people are attacking you in the first place).

In addition, Badiou’s notion of betrayal could be extended to help us understand the intricate emotional workings of neoliberal capitalism. In the constant demand for innovation, flexibility, and adaptability, individuals are repeatedly forced to betray any stable ethical commitment or truth to something beyond that. Jobs, communities, and even relationships are subjected to the logic of endless competition and self-interest, and social media only enshrines this in our everyday environments. This systematic erosion of fidelity to anything other than market logic, to me, is a very real form of structural Badiouian evil, even if it is rarely narrated as such.

Ultimately, the question of what it means to have fidelity – or to remain ‘faithful’ (and I use that word deliberately as a panacea to religiosity) – to a truth-event in our contemporary world requires not just the courage of conviction, but the recognition that sometimes, ethical action means going against the grain, whatever the costs.