Florian Pittiş, Moment poetic by Florian Pittiş

If crisis is, indeed, a biopolitical technique of management that invests the material precarity shared by all human individuals in their everyday lives, living philology is a “technique of trouble” that allows to recover the qualitative dimension of life from the crisis-driven cultural logic of financial liberalism.

In Greek, kairos indicated the due-time of the affective and experiential dimension of life, opposed to chronos, the passing time of biological and physical cycles. In the augmented reality of modern liberal societies, cultural concepts like crisis attained an unsettling ‘operative force’ that profoundly affects both the material and the qualitative experience of life. In Frames of War, Judith Butler suggested that modern society imposed a tragic condition of “precarity” onto life: established by the biopolitical state of exception that has become the rule, precarity is the constitutive dimension of the life in crisis, from which there is no protection because one must appeal to the very state from which protection is required. In this paper, I will elaborate on Edward Said’s philological methodology for proposing a “living philology” of crisis as an attempt to recover the kairotic dimension of life from the constitutive precarity of modernity. The extent and limits of this comparison clarify Badiou’s critique of Levinas, which is less general than commonly supposed, and help to intervene in potential misreadings of Badiou’s own work, which resists the pathos and horror typically attached to ethical considerations of trauma and the real. By describing Badiou’s ethical subject in terms of trauma, the essay places Badiou’s ethics in relation to Levinas’s. By describing Badiou’s subject of art in terms of trauma, Badiou’s theory of art is placed in relation with that of the Romantics, who also conceived of art as addressed to an essential hole in being. Because the existing situation cannot articulate a truth radically novel and alterior to itself, the subject must “poeticize” in order to name any truth, as this essay shows, whether artistic, amorous, political, or scientific. The subject remains ethically faithful to a truth by introducing it into the language of the situation in which that truth appears. This connection is seen in Badiou’s description of truth as a radical alterity befalling the subject and constituting a real hole in the existing order of language.

The essay then establishes connections between Badiou's work on the void of the situation, the hole of truth, and the rivenness of the subject, and Lacan’s work on trauma and the real.

The essay opens with a general consideration of art and ethics in Badiou’s philosophy in order to describe his subject as faithful to an event that pierces a given situation with its hitherto indiscernible truth.

Florian Pittiş, Moment poetic by Florian Pittiş