Ray Brassier (American University of Beirut)
Lack and Destruction, Anxiety and Courage
In Theory of the Subject, Badiou declares: “Our entire dispute with Lacan lies in the division, which he restricts, of the process of lack from that of destruction”. (TS 149/131) This talk will consider how the conceptual division of lack and destruction aligns with the political division of anxiety and courage. The process of lack is encapsulated in the operation of the vanishing cause. This is the principle of structural inscription which splits every inscribable term from within. It persists as a trace within and across structured terms but is not directly inscribable. Yet it becomes so by being subjected to annulment: the annulment of vanishing elevates the lack indexed by the trace to the level of the concept within structure itself. Annulment is the structural inscription of lack’s excess vis-à-vis structure; the inscription of its un-inscribability, which indexes the formlessness of the real. The subjective corollary of the annulment of vanishing, or lack of lack, is anxiety. Anxiety is the subjective registering of this excess of lack, or formlessness of the real, within the bounds of objective structure. Where annulment is the objective inscription of lack’s excess, endured in anxiety, destruction is its subjective assumption, undertaken through courage. Destruction is the torsion lending subjective consistency to the disordering of form. Courage transforms the dereliction of form into a form of dereliction capable of recomposing structure. The political stakes of this division between anxiety and courage could not be higher. Today, it marks the dividing line between those in Europe and America who believe they can only palliate the murderousness of the global capitalist order, and those in Palestine and elsewhere whose survival depends on destroying it.