Alain Badiou argues spectacularly in Being and Event that there is no truth, there are only truths, and that truths only come to rupture and re-organize our knowledge through the intervention of an event. But where can we find these rare, edifice-tumbling, knowledge-piercing events? Events, for Badiou, always occur on the boundary of the situation and the Void (think set theory.) Truths are both the result of a subjective truth-procedure, and truth is what supports and is supported by a faithful subject of this truth. Even though truths are subjective, they have universal address: that is, if something is true, it’s true for everyone.
Truths are subtracted from the infinite undecidability of an event, and are made real by the subject’s faithfulness to the event. (If this is sounding incredibly abstract, one of Badiou’s favorite examples of fidelity–even though Badiou is an atheist–is St. Paul; the relevant event would be, of course, the Resurrection.) Events are beyond the ontological division of being and not-being; events in-consist, they exist on the edge of the void, and it is up to the subject to wager on this event. For Badiou, it would seem as though we only exist as subjects to the degree we are faithful to the events which constitute our subjectivity, to the truths which we have struggled faithfully to learn and master.
Once again:
(1) There is no truth, only truths
(2) Truths are universal: if something is true, then it’s true for everyone
(3) A truth is the result of a faithfully-undertaken subjective truth-procedure
Some truths are always true, some are only true some of the time. For example, ‘I am body entirely, and nothing else besides’ is always true, but ‘I am lazy’ isn’t.
Absolutely. Badiou would be quick to question the faithfulness of someone who is asserting that there are no “events” but only “interpretations” (which, strangely enough, some people actually end up asserting in one guise or another. One of the important places Badiou wants to oppose this kind of “sophistry” is around this question of truth.
Badiou says that if you’re trying to prove (or even communicate your belief) that truths don’t exist, you’re already in such an obvious contradiction that handling your belief directly wouldn’t be productive. After all, the root (as Badiou identifies it) of this kind of strategy is the belief that ultimately, there aren’t really events, only interpretations. This is, more or less, bad faith: we’re betraying the event of our own subjectivity, in a way, we’re abandoning ourselves. So Badiou can be seen as making an effort to oppose what he sees as the loose informalism and language-mania which he believes has infected the Western academy, especially cultural studies, opposing to it a mathematical model of rigor, clarity and understanding.