Life event

Solo la vida puede conocer la vida.

Francisco Varela

1. Life is the event.

2. It is not about Being, is about Living Being.

3. The order of being is cut by life, establishing the gap between the void inside, the borderlessness outside, and the subject in the surface. Reality, after life, must always already had this structure.

Let me try to go further. An event is an event just for those engaged on it, so it is life. It is in this sense that Varela and Badiou are talking the same. (Personally, I think that an ontology grounded on mathematics is simply retarded: I think is has to do with the fact that I was born in Chile. I mean, Parra's dedication of his Complete Works to "God, exists or not," is the way we deal with reason.)

Zizek almost get it, just misses one word: "When Badiou emphasizes the undecidability of the Real of an Event, his position here is radically different from the standard deconstructionist notion of undecidability. For Badiou, undecidability means that there are no neutral “objective” criteria for an Event: an Event appears as such only to those who recognize themselves in its call, or, as Badiou puts it, an Event is self-relating, it includes itself—its own nomination— among its components. While this does mean that we have to decide about an Event, such an ultimately groundless decision is not “undecidable” in the standard sense; it is, rather, uncannily similar to the Hegelian dialectical process in which, as Hegel made clear in the Introduction to his Phenomenology, a “figure of consciousness” is measured not by any external standard of truth but in an absolutely immanent way, through the gap between itself and its own exemplification/staging. An Event is thus “non-All” in the precise Lacanian sense of the term: it is never fully verified precisely because it is infinite/illimited—because there is no external limit to it. And the conclusion to be drawn here is that, for the very same reason, the Hegelian “totality” is also “non-All.” In other (Badiou’s) terms, an Event is nothing but its own inscription into the order of Being, a cut/rupture in the order of Being on account of which Being can never form a consistent All. Of course, Badiou—as a materialist—is aware of the idealist danger that lurks here:

We must point out that in what concerns its material the event is not a miracle.What I mean is that what composes an event is always extracted from a situation, always related back to a singular multiplicity, to its state, to the language that is connected to it, etc. In fact, so as not to succumb to an obscurantist theory of creation ex nihilo, we must accept that an event is nothing but a part of a given situation, nothing but a fragment of being.

Here, however, we should go a step further than Badiou is ready to go: there is no Beyond of Being which inscribes itself into the order of Being—there is nothing but the order of [Living] Being."

Photo by Etherhill