"Evil is the interruption of a truth by the pressure of particular or individual interests"
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Evil, for Badiou, is less a demonic force than a managerial one: the moment an event of truth gets rerouted into someone’s agenda. The line is deliberately anti-psychological. It refuses the comforting story that evil is about monstrous desires or flawed character, and instead pins it on a more banal mechanism: distortion under pressure. Truth, in Badiou’s world, isn’t a private opinion you “have”; it’s something that happens - in politics, art, science, love - and demands fidelity. Evil enters when that fidelity breaks, when the universal claim of a truth-process is interrupted by the gravitational pull of the particular.
The subtext is a warning about capture. Revolutions get annexed by parties, emancipation gets rebranded as lifestyle, love collapses into possession, science gets bent by funding, art gets reduced to market signal. “Particular or individual interests” reads like a diagnosis of how institutions and egos metabolize what initially exceeded them. The phrasing also carries a polemical edge against liberal moral frameworks that treat ethics as harm-minimization among competing preferences. For Badiou, the ethical question isn’t “Who gets hurt?” but “What truth is being betrayed?”
Context matters: Badiou writes in the long aftermath of 20th-century political catastrophes and disillusionments, when universal projects looked suspect. His provocation is to salvage universality without naivete: the enemy isn’t the universal as such, but the ways it’s hijacked, fragmented, or domesticated into something useful to the already powerful - or simply useful to the self.
The subtext is a warning about capture. Revolutions get annexed by parties, emancipation gets rebranded as lifestyle, love collapses into possession, science gets bent by funding, art gets reduced to market signal. “Particular or individual interests” reads like a diagnosis of how institutions and egos metabolize what initially exceeded them. The phrasing also carries a polemical edge against liberal moral frameworks that treat ethics as harm-minimization among competing preferences. For Badiou, the ethical question isn’t “Who gets hurt?” but “What truth is being betrayed?”
Context matters: Badiou writes in the long aftermath of 20th-century political catastrophes and disillusionments, when universal projects looked suspect. His provocation is to salvage universality without naivete: the enemy isn’t the universal as such, but the ways it’s hijacked, fragmented, or domesticated into something useful to the already powerful - or simply useful to the self.
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| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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