Subtracting Insurrectionary Anarchism: From Alain Badiou to the Black Bloc.

The fundamental idea of the beginning century must be that the very essence of negation is subtraction. -- Alain Badiou

In late June of 2010, the G20 met in Toronto to push forward a series of so-called austerity measures that will be made at the expense of marginalized and working people all of the world. As is often the case with such economic summits, a number of public protests were planned to coincide with the arrival of the delegates and in response, an amalgamation of local, provincial, and national police forces known as the Integrated Security Unit mobilized thousands of riot police, cordoned off a large portion of the downtown core, and subjected community activists to surveillance, harassment, and preemptive arrest. 1 However, despite these preventative measures, on the afternoon of June 26 a relatively small group of masked protesters broke away from the peaceful union march and proceeded to attack the police and vandalize a large number of corporate storefronts before disbanding a short time later in Queens Park. That evening, as the mainstream press broadcast dramatic footage of police cars burning in the financial district, the police began violently clearing the streets of anyone who could have conceivably been associated with the demonstrations, and by the end of the weekend over a thousand people were detained. Though many on the mainstream left criticized the police for using excessive, and in some cases illegal, punitive measures in their response to the rioting, they did so without affirming the validity of militant protest and even went so far as to claim that it was only due to negligence that the police let the demonstrations get out of control. 2 In light of such reformist political commentary, this essay will attempt to justify the actions of the militants by comparing the materialist dialectic of contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou with the writings of Italian insurrectionalist anarchist Alfredo Bonanno. After an initial exposition of Badiou's thought, it will be seen that if insurrectionary anarchism is evaluated according to his concept of a generic truth-procedure the radical negation acted out in the streets of Toronto during the G20 riots should be understood, contrary to popular opinion, as part of an emancipatory creative practice founded, not on destruction, but on subtraction.

Like many other French intellectuals now occupying a central position in contemporary continental philosophy, Badiou's work was formed in response to the failure of traditional Marxist politics to account for the tumult of May '68.3 Though he would by no means refer to himself as an anarchist, beginning with his early readings of Hegel, Lacan, Althusser, Mallarme, and Mao and including his later, controversial use of Plato and post-Cantorian set theory, Badiou has consistently sought to define the general conditions that make any emancipatory struggle possible. In his first book, Theory of The Subject, Badiou departs from the Mallarmean theme that unless one makes a genuine rupture with the world as it is Nothing will have taken place except the place, and he attempts to draw out a complex dialectical schema of periodization which accounts for the process in which a revolutionary movement both exceeds and reconfigures the established order. 4 In doing so, Badiou repositions the traditional Marxist category of the revolutionary proletariat in the void left between the destruction of the old and the creation of the new and claims that, like the flash of deviation found in the Greek atomist notion of the clinamen, the subject takes place only in order to disappear, and as such cannot be inscribed on the [structured] ground of repetition except destructively as the excess over that which keeps its place.5 This directly anticipates his later concept of the subtractive, in as much as it attempts to situate the subject outside of, or in excess of, thought and claims that given this condition of forced exception the subject should be considered strictly as something inexistent. 6 Though he would later claim that his early work was too concerned with destruction, this privilege given by Badiou to the inexistent connects his early forays into ontology with his later, more comprehensive, foundationalist philosophy found in Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. In Being and Event Badiou claims that against what he names the ontologies of presence he will oppose the rigour of the subtractive, in which being is said solely as that which cannot be supposed on the basis of any presence or experience.7 Badiou, engaging himself with a problem that has puzzled Western thought since the pre-Socratics, states in direct reference to Parmenides that the One, understood here as the unified totality of any situation, is not.8 In doing so, Badiou distinguishes between that which can be known to exist as presentation, and the necessarily vague and undefined set that such forms of presentation supposedly present. According to Badiou's logic, this pure multiple, since it is unpresentable in and of itself and can only be presented if counted-as-one, must be

considered to be nothing and it is only there, in the void that surrounds the presentable, that Badiou situates being qua being.9 Though in Being and Event Badiou's explanation and supposed proof of this thesis employs a number of challenging concepts that cut across both the history of philosophy and mathematics, the idea that there is no actual correlation between the count-as-one of a linguistic signifier (i.e. tree) and the pure multiplicity of the real that it supposedly refers to (i.e. what is given the name tree) is not necessarily a new one, and is by now, at least for anyone remotely familiar with post-structuralism, common sense. As seen below in Badiou's diagram of a generic truth-procedure, each of his four primary concepts (the event, the subject, the truth, and the Good / Evil) are accompanied by a qualifier that indicates their subtraction from presentation, or what can, in any given situation, be known by thought. Thus, for Badiou: the event is undecidable in as much as its radical novelty subtracts it from any given norm of evaluation ; the subject is indiscernible in as much as it is subtracted from any and all definition according to the differential markings of a finite linguistic set; the truth is generic in as much as the pure multiplicity of a situation is necessarily in excess of any and all linguistic predication; and the final consequence of the process, whether or not it results in Good or Evil, rests on the obstruction of the unnameable. As the names suggests, this generic truth-procedure is meant to be applicable to any number of situations in which a subject is engaged in the production of a truth and Badiou, in identifying love, art, science, and politics, as the four primary categories of such a process, has repeatedly attempted to anchor the abstraction of his supposedly universal model in examples drawn from psychoanalysis, poetry, mathematics, and political struggle. 10 In following with such a deliberately diagrammatic concept of philosophy, after a brief exposition of the terms introduced above, Badiou's outline of subjectivization as subjectivization-in-subtraction will be seen to correspond to the more concrete example of the anarchist militants who participated in the G20 riots.

If, according to Badiou, a truth exists only as an exception to what there is, a truth procedure, then, is the process by which this exception is maintained and given consequence. 11 Such a process begins with a moment of rupture in which an entirely novel statement is produced, one that, given such a condition of pure supplementarity, surges forth and interrupts the repetition of established knowledge.12 This moment of rupture is what Badiou calls an event, and as he indicates in the above diagram it is in excess of the totality of the One (Un+) and is as such, undecidable. It is, as he explains in On Subtraction, a properly valueless statement, one in which the norm of evaluation that governs the situation [. . .] cannot be applied to the statement 'the even belongs to the situation.' Were such a statement decidable, the event would clearly comply in advance with the norms of repetition, and would not be evental. 13 However, such a critical moment, like the clinamen he refers to in Theory of the Subject, occurs in a flash and disappears as soon as it appears, and can only be carried forward by the fidelity a subject has in upholding the statement: An event has taken place. 14 This leap of truth, in which ones decision upon the undecidable is a pure wager on what has being only in disappearing, proceeds, therefore, through an affirmative process of nomination.15 In Logics of Worlds, Badiou cites the Paris Commune as an example of such a phenomenon since, in as much as it was only after its apparent failure that one could speak about the possibility of a revolutionary proletarian politics, every emancipatory struggle made in the name of worker's communism must ultimately refer back to it. 16

For Badiou, again asserting himself against the ontologies of presence, the subject is neither a substance or the organization of a sense experience and it does not pre-exist its induction into a truth-process. 17 It is, instead, a finite local configuration of a generic procedure, or a 'point' of truth,' and is a rare and singular phenomenon.18 And just like the truth and the event, if the subject according to Badiou's definition is to indeed be considered worthy of such a name, it must be equally subtracted from the encyclopaedia of knowledge that comprises the present. Badiou names this aspect of subtraction, in which no linguistic mark can adequately serve to differentiate the subject, the indiscernible and places it underneath the U- because it is an essentially negative definition.19 Again, though it is perhaps being framed in unfamiliar vocabulary, anyone who has encountered the singularity of a lover as a form of difference irreducible to any linguistic term (ie. man or woman) has encountered the indiscernible. Fidelity then, in love as much as in politics, is the manner in which the subject attempts to affirm the real of the relationship without recourse to established linguistic definitions and is forced, again and again, to invent a new set of customs and linguistic codes strictly from the exceptional perspective of the event itself.20 This fidelity to the trace of the event, as that which maintains the subject in its subtraction from the given language of a situation, opens onto the infinite of the generic. The generic is a pure multiple of the universe and is, as such, the simple affirmative inverse of the indiscernible. Whereas the indiscernible is, in as much as it denies any substantial definition, in-different, the generic is subtracted from predication by excess and contains, so to say, a bit of everything, such that no predicate can ever group all the terms. 21 If the distinction here between the indiscernible and generic becomes a bit fuzzy, it is because the two aspects of subtraction mutually presuppose each other in as much as no subject exists except as a subject-of-truth, and Badiou has a tendency to use the two interchangeably. 22 What is essential to retain however, is that for Badiou, truth is not a category of enunciation but is instead a general truth of a situation, the truth of its being and that, as such an open-ended pure multiplicity, it concerns everyone and cannot be restricted to the interests of any particular community. 23 If it is precisely since a truth lies outside of any established linguistic form that Badiou can claim that it is little-said, through the act of forcing it is recomposed in the field of knowledge.24 This forcing of a truth

back into the very structure of presentation that it had previously exceeded creates the fiction of a wholly said from the vantage point of an infinite and generic truth and implies at a distance from itself, powerful reshapings of the forms and referents of communication. 25 Therefore, if a truth is to persevere in its subtraction without being inevitably recuperated by the existing language of the situation it must therefore contain at least one component that is so singular that it cannot even tolerate having a proper name. 26 This obstacle to a truth being wholly-said is what Badiou calls the unnameable, and he places it underneath the symbol Un- because it demonstrates the very inadequacy of the principle of the One found in the intimate depths of presentation. 27 As indicated by the diagram, it is upon this irreducibility of the singular that the very question of Good and Evil rests, since to force a nomination upon the unnameable, and in so doing to deny the very singularity of singularity itself, is, according to Badiou's compelling thesis developed more formally in Ethics, equivalent to Evil. Instead of the commonly held belief that Evil is the negation of what is present and affirmed, that it is murder and death [and] that it is opposed to life Badiou claims that Evil should be understood strictly as the denial of a subtraction.28 Before returning to discuss how the diagram above might be related to the project of insurrectionary anarchist communism, it is important to iterate this novel understanding of Evil since it is according to such a definition that the the success of a future militant political configuration must be evaluated. In Ethics Badiou identifies three kinds of Evil, each of which interrupts an active truth-procedure: simulacrum or terror, betrayal, and disaster.29 Simulacrum is when, as in conservative identity politics, a subject takes the void of its being to constitute a pre-existent, substantial plenitude and claims, not the universality of that which is sustained, precisely, by no particular characteristic (no particular multiple), but the absolute particularity of a community, itself rooted in the characteristics of its soil, its blood, its race. 30 Badiou cites Nazism as proof that fidelity to such a simulacrum of truth, if given absolute power, will necessarily result in terror since the need to regulate the break with the situation according the closed particularity of an abstract set (the 'Germans' or the 'Aryans') leaves it no option but to 'void' everything else that surrounds it. 31 Betrayal is when a subject gives up on his or her fidelity to a truth-procedure and returns to the continuity of the present situation, thus breaking with the very break that such a process initially required and reentering, as Badiou says in reference to Lacan, the 'service of goods.' 32 Finally, disaster is when one identifies truth with a total power

that through a rigid and dogmatic subject language would claim the power, based on its own axioms, to name the whole of the real. . . .33 Evil is, in this case, to want, at all costs and under conditions of a truth, to force the naming of the unnameable.34 Thus, it is necessary that a militant subject-of-truth persevere in maintaining itself in subtraction if it is to avoid the fall into Evil. This method, through which one finds point by point an order of affects which authorizes the continuation of the process, is what Badiou calls an ethics of truths. 35 To say that such an ethic is maintained point by point is to say, according to Badiou's definition of a point in Logics of Worlds, that it is maintained in decision.36 For Badiou, a point is like a fork in the road of a subject's fidelity to a truth, it is a moment when all the degrees of existence are concentrated into only two possibilities. Of these two possibilities, only one is the 'good one' for a truth procedure that must pass through this point. Only one authorizes the continuation, and therefore the reinforcement of the actions of the subjectbody in the world.37 As such, a point spaces out the world and in this sense constitutes a kind of fibre of the present, in as much as it divides the continuity of creation into a series of decisive sequences. 38 Though not, according to the hierarchy of singularities presented by Badiou in Logics of Worlds, strictly an event, a point is a decision made upon the undecidable and, as such, is the site in which the subject has the opportunity to incorporate, or reincorporate, itself into a truth. 39 For Badiou, in a world dominated by a neo-liberal democratic materialism whose maxim is simply, live without an Idea, any genuinely anti-capitalist project must begin by searching in the nooks and crannies of the world, for some isolate on the basis of which it is possible to maintain that a 'yes' authorizes us to become the anonymous heroes of at least one point. 40 During the G20 protest of June 26, the moment when the black bloc broke away from the official labour march constitutes a point. Though for many the question as to whether or not to join the militants heading east down Queen St towards the financial district was a matter considered in terms of long-term strategy, for the militants and those who were caught up in such activity, the option presented itself as a binary alternative between the preservation of the situation as it is and its event-like rupture. To have proceeded east down Queen St would be to have immediately affirmed oneself in subtraction from the laws and customs that generally rule the city and act, as a subject-of-truth, in fidelity to the event of revolutionary communist politics. Even if one agreed to stay with the union march in order to carry on with an alternate (and perhaps equally subtractive) form

of political struggle, to deny the option to join the militants would have been to concede, if only for the moment, that nothing will have taken place but the place. 41 For a militant already engaged in such a truth-process, to deny the point of the protests would constitute betrayal, since to turn away from such violent alterity would be to break with the break that had, up until that point, given life its consistency. Though it is true that the presentation of such an option in the (aptly named) Get of the Fence protest of June 26 is directed at those who, possessing a certain degree of privilege, could conceivably be on the fence at all, it is reasonable to conceive that Badiou's conception of the point could be applied to even the most marginalized social groups since, no matter how dispossessed or excluded one may be, there is always the option to turn away from the struggle for dignity and justice and to accept, against the saturation of points that would make up such a world, the restrictive terms and conditions afforded by capital and the State. If affirms that, in agreement with Badiou's theory of points, any anti-capitalist public protest aims to polarize the social field according to decisions that are undecideable according to the given norms of evaluation, one can assume that the subject revealed through such demonstrations must be indiscernible in terms of the knowledge of the State. According to Badiou's attempt to redefine the term, a subject, to the extent that it is the subject of a truth [. . .] subtracts itself from every community and destroys every individuation, and any attempt to reduce its singularity to a proper name and to make of it a pre-existent substance is constitutive of Evil. 42 Such a reduction is, precisely, what the State requires in order to marginalize and criminally charge the specific individuals involved in the rioting and yet any arrestee will readily attest that the real subject of such protests are not so easily defined. Thus, in SOAR's Statement in Defence of Our Comrades, made in the wake of a number of protest-related conspiracy charges, the anonymous authors state unequivocally that though the police targeted twenty of them as the so-called ring-leaders of the protest, Even this act shows how little they understand us. We have no leaders. These twenty are our teachers, friends, and mentors. And although they are invaluable to our lives, they are not SOAR. Nor are we. 43 The black bloc then, in as much as it is simply a temporary phenomenon composed of in-different, anonymous actors brought together for common cause, or Idea, that exceeds the laws of the State, fits Badiou's definition of a subject as an indiscernible finite, local configuration of a truth procedure.44

This model of organization adopted by the militants of the G20 has been written about extensively by Italian insurrectionalist anarchist Alfredo Bonanno during his attempt, made over the last 30 years, to separate anarchist thought and practice from the authoritarian weight of traditional Marxist party politics. As an anarchist, Bonanno denies that a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is a necessary intermediary between insurrection and communism and seeks to draw out a method of struggle that will neither reinstate the very forms of authority anarchists intend to oppose, nor cling to historical methods that may now be obsolete. 45 He names this informal organization, and claims that since it rejects the prioritization of quantitative growth inherent in a party structure and operates without having reached any sort of constitutional or programmatic consensus it is defined only in the the common experience of insurrectional struggles and the methods that distinguish them: selforganisation, permanent conflictuality and attack. 46 Not only does this rejection of the party protect against the fall towards static representational, and therefore authoritarian, models of organization but its formlessness prevents the movement from being recuperated by the power structure. 47 A further correspondence between Badiou and Bonanno's conception of the subject can be found in Bonanno's definition of class. In From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an Anarchist Perspective Against PostIndustrial Capitalism, Bonanno proposes that given the more or less unanimous agreement that workers have been displaced from their central position the traditionally economic opposition between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie be replaced by a primarily linguistic opposition between the included and the excluded. 48 In opposition to continuing appeal of workerist party politics in Italy during the 80s, Bonanno writes that modern lines of polarization will be drawn according to access to information and that the inaccessibility of the dominant language will become a far more effective means of segregation than the traditional confines of the ghetto.49 Such a linguistic mode exclusion will gradually put the excluded in a position of being absolutely 'other,' with the end result that the project of reformism, predicated as it is on communication, will be an impossibility.50 Here, Bonanno's attempt to situate the revolutionary subject of politics solely in the negative, like Badiou's early definition in Theory of the Subject that the masses are neither thought nor thinkable, mirrors Badiou's more contemporary definition of the indiscernible. 51 Given the violent separation of the public from the actual meetings of the G20 delegates and the refusal of the security forces to enter into any sort of reasonable

dialogue with the public during the almost random repression and harassment that followed the riots, such an interpretation should be considered appropriate. For emancipatory struggles, both Badiou and Bonanno assert that the truth of politics must be conceived as a form of radical equality that is subtracted from demands posed by a particular community and, as in Badiou's definition of the generic, must be addressed to all. Bonanno, echoing the position taken by Badiou in Ethics, writes in Propulsive Utopia that if the revolutionary struggle is not based on the equality of all, No matter how well it goes, the particular struggle will be recuperated and transformed into further conditioning because it is still a struggle for equal 'rights.' 52 Though his conception of truth has little in comparison with the rigorous proofs offered by Badiou's use of set theory, in the same essay Bonanno states that the propulsive value of a concept cannot be understood in social terms if one limits oneself to examining existing conditions, and that there is in fact there is no causal relationship between social conditions and a utopian concept. 53 For Bonanno, the revolutionary Idea, like the generic truth of Badiou, is subtracted from the language of power and is in deep contrast to the structural limits that condition but do not cause it. 54 However, while Bonanno still refers to the truth of equality in terms of a prescriptive statement, in attempting to prevent what he believes is the disastrous result when a philosophical concept is sutured to politics, Badiou insists that the subtraction of the generic is taken a step further and not reduced to a desire for equality but that equality be considered strictly as the philosophical name for what makes emancipatory politics itself possible. 55 Equality is then, in a sense, the very site of politics, in as much as it is our ability to decide whether or not to incorporate ourselves into a truthprocedure that presumably makes us all equal. 56 Finally, nearing the end of the trajectory traced out in the diagram above, we must affirm that if the subject of insurrectionary anarchism is to avoid the fall into Evil it must remain unnameable if it is to avoid reproducing the very modes of power that it claims to negate. Both Bonanno and Badiou agree that such an ethic requires a combination of courage and restraint so that one can carry this through without compromise of halfmeasures, without pity or illusion without becoming too taken up with the desire for destruction. 57 If Bonanno, in Revolution, Violence, and Anti-Authoritarianism states that we are convinced that only a violent revolution will be able to solve the social problem at the stage in which countries in various parts of the world today have

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been determined [. . .] by the acute phase of bourgeois or State capitalism, and Badiou in Logics of Worlds admits that without any particular joy, the material dialectic will work under the assumption that no political subject has yet attained the eternity of the truth which it unfolds without moments of terror, 58 both insist that militancy should be oriented strictly towards the affirmative aspects of such negation. In a pamphlet written against the rigid militarization of the Italian Red Brigades in the late 70s called Armed Joy, Bonanno's insistence that arms must be considered as merely tools, and as such should continually be submitted to critical evaluation, is echoed by a recent article written in defence of the attack made on the Hudson's Bat Company during the Anti-Olympics protests in Vancouver named No Action is Sufficient in Itself, Black Bloc or Otherwise in which Oshipeya writes that no act is revolutionary if taken out of context and presented as an abstraction.59 And Badiou, in a lecture named Destruction, Negation, Subtraction, has recently sought to negotiate the problem of violence by asserting that violence is not, as has been said during the last century, the creative and revolutionary part of negation. The way of freedom to is a subtractive one; but to protect the subtraction itself, to defend the new kingdom of emancipatory politics, we cannot radically exclude all forms of violence.60 If anything can be learned from the failed revolutions of the last century, it is that any theory of radical change that aims to justify militant revolt and seek the affirmative aspects of negation must include a disciplined commitment to avoid fascism. Though such a comparison is beyond the scope of this essay, in A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari frequently warn against the dangers of interpreting their work in terms of a simple valorization of destruction, and in their Nomadology they insist that although war and the battle may be its result, the war machine does not necessarily have war as its object. The fact that such a danger is implicit in Badiou's work has been noted by Alexander Galloway in a recent review of Mehdi Belhaj Kacem's as yet untranslated book L'espit du Nihilisme: Une Ontologique de l'Histoire in which Galloway claims the Kacem attempts to merge Badiou with Agamben in order to specifically address this problem of the dark event as foundation of Evil.61 Hopefully, this essay has suggested that Badiou's understanding of a truth-procedure, when approached strictly as an ethics-of-subtraction, may provide an appropriate answer to this problem. If, amidst the terrorism of Italy in 1977, Bonanno found it necessary to invoke the term joy, and Badiou, in opposition to the

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supposed nihilism of post-modern art, has recently argued for an affirmationism, it is because each has sought to outline a theory of revolutionary practice that manages to affirm the negative aspects of life without falling into a cult of destruction.62 Therefore, if in tracing out the concepts contained in Badiou's diagram of the subtractive we affirm that the appearance of insurrectionary anarchist struggle on the streets of Toronto has the potential to constitute a valid form of emancipatory politics, it is imperative that such a justification not hinge on a superficial appreciation of violence as in itself. Furthermore, insurrectionary anarchism should not, by any means, be elevated to such a position that it would be conceived as the only appropriate form of struggle, since as Badiou asserts in his conclusion to Logics of Worlds, it is the very fact that there is an infinity of possible worlds that the grace of living for an Idea, that is of living as such must be accorded to everyone and for several types of procedure.63

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Bibliography: Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2005. ---, Conditions. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008. ---, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso 2001. ---, Logics of Worlds. Trans. Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum, 2006. ---, Theory of The Subject. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. London: Continuum, 2009. ---, Manifesto of Affirmationism, Trans. Barbara P. Fulks. Lacanian Ink 24 (2005). Web. Nov. 20, 2010. http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIV5.htm ---, Destruction, Negation, Subtraction On Pier Paolo Pasolini Lacan.com 2007. Web. Nov. 20, 2010. http://www.lacan.com/badpas.htm Bonanno, Alfredo, Armed Joy. Trans. Jean Weir. London: Elephant Editions, 1998. Elephant Editions Digital Archive. Web. Nov. 20, 2010. http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/armed-joy.html ---, From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an anarchist perspective against post-industrial capitalism. Trans. Jean Weir. London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive. http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/from-riot-to-insurrection.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. ---, Insurrectionalist Anarchism: Part One. Trans. Jean Weir. London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive. http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/insurrectionalist-anarchism-part-one.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. ---, Propulsive Utopia. Trans. Jean Weir. London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive. http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/propulsive-utopia.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. ---, Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism. Trans. Jean Weir. London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive. http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/revolution-violence-anti.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. Crimethinc. Ex-Workers Collective. Toronto G20 Eyewitness Report. Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective. Web. Nov. 20, 2010. http://www.crimethinc.com/texts/recentfeatures/toronto2.php Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Tran. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Galloway, Alexander. The Spirit of Nihilism. CTheory (2009). Web. Nov 20, 2010. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=616 Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. SOAR, Statement in Defence of Our Comrades. Toronto Media Co-op. Web. Nov. 20, 2010. http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/blog/dan-kellar/4021

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1 Dawn Paley, G20 Nations: Race to the Bottom Will Continue, Vancouver Media Co-op, posted June 27, 2010, http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/story/g-20-nations-race-bottom-will-continue/3899 [accessed Nov 29 2010]. 2 Adrian Morrow, Ann Hui & Jill Mahoney, Protests turn violent: storefronts smashed, police cars set ablaze, Globe and Mail, June 26, 2010, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/g8-g20/toronto/police-demonstrators-gather-for-hugeg20-protest/article1619460/ [accessed Nov 29, 2010]; Judy Rebick, Toronto is burning, or is it? Transforming Power blog, entry posted June 27 2010, http://transformingpower.ca/en/blog/toronto-burning-or-it [accessed Nov 29, 2010]; Andrew Moran, Naomi Klein to Toronto police force: 'Do your goddamn jobs,' Digital Journal Reports, entry June 28 2010, http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/293973 [accessed Nov 29, 2010]. 3 Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth. [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 29 -31. 4 Ibid., 33. 5 Alain Badiou, Theory of The Subject. Trans. Bruno Bosteels. [London: Continuum, 2009], 62; Ibid., 141. 6 Ibid., 88. 7 Alain Badiou, Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. [London: Continuum, 2005], 27. 8 Ibid., 31. 9 Ibid., 52-3. 10 Ibid., 16; Alain Badiou, Conditions. Trans. Steven Corcoran. [London: Continuum, 2008], 121. 11 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Trans. Alberto Toscano. [London: Continuum, 2006], 4. 12 Badiou, Conditions, 122. 13 Ibid., 123. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 376. 17 Badiou, Being and Event, 391; Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil Trans. Peter Hallward. [London: Verso 2001], 43. 18 Badiou, Being and Event, 523; Badiou, Ethics, 44. 19 Badiou, Conditions, 124. 20 Badiou, Ethics, 41. 21 Badiou, Conditions, 117. 22 A truth is indiscernible: it does not fall under any determinant of the encyclopaedia.Alain Badiou, Being and Event, 525. 23 Badiou, Being and Event, 327; Ibid., xiii. 24 Badiou, Conditions, 126. 25 Ibid., 126; Badiou, Ethics, 70. 26 Badiou, Conditions, 119. 27 Ibid., 126; Ibid., 122. 28 Ibid., 127. 29 Badiou, Ethics, 71. 30 Ibid., 73. 31 Ibid., 74. 32 Ibid., 80. 33 Ibid., 83. 34 Ibid., 86. 35 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 88. 36 Ibid., 82. 37 Ibid., 416. 38 Ibid. 416; Ibid., 508. 39 Ibid., 372 4. 40 Ibid., 510; Ibid., 422. 41 Badiou, Theory of The Subject., 311. 42 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 9. 43 SOAR, Statement in Defence of Our Comrades. Toronto Media Co-op. http://toronto.mediacoop.ca/blog/dankellar/4021 [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. 44 Badiou, Being and Event, 523. 45 Alfredo Bonanno, Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism. Trans. Jean Weir. [London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive], http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/revolution-violence-anti.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. 46 Alfredo Bonanno, Insurrectionalist Anarchism: Part One. Trans. Jean Weir. [London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive], http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/insurrectionalist-anarchism-part-one.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010.]

47 Ibid. 48 Alfredo Bonanno, From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an anarchist perspective against post-industrial capitalism. Trans. Jean Weir. [London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive]. http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/from-riotto-insurrection.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. 49 Ibid. 50 Ibid. 51 Badiou, Theory of The Subject, 228. 52 Alfredo Bonanno, Propulsive Utopia. Trans. Jean Weir. [London: Elephant Editions Digital Archive], http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/propulsive-utopia.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Badiou, Conditions, 172. 56 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 26. 57 Alfredo Bonanno, Revolution, Violence, Anti-authoritarianism; Badiou, Conditions, 127. 58 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 88. 59 Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy. Trans. Jean Weir. [London: Elephant Editions, 1998. Elephant Editions Digital Archive], http://digitalelephant.blogspot.com/2010/08/armed-joy.html [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]; Oshipeya, No Action is Sufficient in Itself, Black Bloc or Otherwise. Vancouver Media Co-op, entry posted March 14, 2010, http://vancouver.mediacoop.ca/blog/oshipeya/3044 [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. 60 Alain Badiou, Destruction, Negation, Subtraction On Pier Paolo Pasolini Lacan.com 2007. http://www.lacan.com/badpas.htm [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. 61 Galloway writes that MBK's central question in L'esprit du nihilisme is, 'Why is the evental site so often a state of exception, and why politically does the event so often sew the seeds of the state of exception, lending to the confusion that often arises between the 'positive' event (revolutionary let's call it) and the 'negative' event (genocide, State crime)?' In other words, why are events today more often riots than revolutions? Or as Roberto Esposito put it in his splendid book Bos, 'Why does a politics of life always risk being reversed into a work of death?' Perhaps what MBK is doing to Badiou is awakening a theory of the 'dark event,' the event that does not call for the fidelity of a subject, but instead indicates a foundational evil, an inaugurating tragedy. This is why Badiou's void is so appealing to MBK, who argues that '[w]hat is at stake in our endeavour is to tell of the 'nature' of this presence [the void].' Galloway, Alexander. The Spirit of Nihilism. CTheory [2009], http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=616 [accessed Nov 20, 2010]. 62 Armed struggle is often a symbol of death. Not because it gives death to the bosses and their servants, but because it wants to impose the structures of the dominion of death itself. Conceived differently it really would be joy in action, capable of breaking the structural conditions imposed by the commodity spectacle such as the military party, the conquest of power; the vanguard Alfredo Bonanno, Armed Joy; Alain Badiou, Manifesto of Affirmationism, Trans. Barbara P. Fulks. Lacanian Ink 24 [2005]. http://www.lacan.com/frameXXIV5.htm [accessed Nov. 20, 2010]. 63 Badiou, Logics of Worlds, 514.