The Cause-Effect: The Practical Centrality of the Subject in Alain Badiou

Abstract

Although Badiou’s thought can only be understood through the systematic connection and implication of the concepts of event, subject, and truth, our reading points to the centrality of the concept of subject. This reading is explained insofar as it is up to the subject, as incorporation and generator of provisional stability in contingency, to judge, name, and therefore make the multiplicity of the event endure. In other words, the primacy of practical reason ultimately organizes thought. The subject is the conceptual operator that problematizes contingency: the distance between lived contingency and thought contingency, or the logical void that substitutes the thing for the idea, through a rupture. Thus understood, in opposition to its characterization by instrumental reason, the subject allows the continuity of processes, since it constitutes the explanation of their marks from a practical point of view.