Strange Wrestling with the Stranger Alain Badiou: From 9/11 to Bendigo (ROARAWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes A Badiouian

Recontextualization of a Site-Specific Performance Research Project In Situ at Bendigo, Victoria Australia apropos 9/11.) Craig Peade Monash University
I

Imagine, if you will, an ambiguous time-travelled figure, whose deeply etched lines cut across his face and somehow betray the forces animating his spirit; a deep blue utilitarian attire intimates a suspect authority and a suspicion of authority itself. His subjective disposition philosophically prescribes universal multiplicities, whilst an ecstatic event(u)al grace permeates the minute yet god-like demanding calls for an unquestioning obedience to hauntologically and hysterically return:

Hey you! Hell yeah! Yes you! Know thyself! Continue! Keep going! Do not cede on your desire! Enjoy your symptom! You can! You must! Know thyself! Thou art hysteric! Schizophrenic! He and I; we look like idiots. He, and I; we act like idiots. But let this; in no way should this deceive you we are idiots!

Those familiar with Slavoj Zizek might recognize this appropriation of a Marx Brothers joke from Duck Soup (1933) whereupon Groucho, as a lawyer defends his clients sanity. For Zizek, this joke exemplifies perfectly the classical topos of Lacanian theory only man can lie by telling a truth that he expects to be taken for a lie. Only man can deceive by feigning to deceive. (Zizek, 1991: 73; original emphasis).

With this in mind I will proceed with a post-modern air, cautioning that I am a live performance artist whose absurd ludicity or playfulness, as a pedagogy, is an epistemic pretense. I am ignorant and know nothing of what is, or is about to be imparted.

Nevertheless might this not approach the Delphic wisdom of Platonic Socratism itself? For, it is indeed a truthful fact that I neither know nor think

that I know (Plato, 1997: 21) and yet, despite this, might such nothingness be knowledge and invoke an uncommon sense.

As an excessive encounter exceeding beyond a normative determinacy, the excess of this non-knowledge aspires to transcend or transgress the limits constraining what is possible unto the impossible Truth-Event of the subject supposed to know (Lacan, 1978: 232-6). Its affirmative embrace of the unknown and unknowable approaches the prophetic; in that an intuited, anticipatory future time, pregnant with heterogenous expectations, ensures such things as truth-events, like magic, shit and psychoanalytical transference happens, irrespective of letter casing. As such, this somewhat Bataillean nonknowledge (Bataille, 1988 & 2001) aspires to radicalize inter-subjectivity and community as well as inspire Truth-Events and their affective effects.

II One must rid oneself of the delusion that it is the major events which have the most decisive influence on people. They are much more deeply and continuously influenced by the tiny catastrophes which make up daily life. And their fate is certainly linked to the sequence of these miniature occurrences (Kracauer, 1998: 62).

We are condemned and abandoned to the pure simulacrum of the microspectacles rendering our collective and individual identities identifiable. Together we court and betray desire, hope, faith, regret and some more hope, faith, desire and regret again, whilst aspiring for Truth-Events such as those of the emphatically capitalized T and E of Badiouian analyses.

Projected immanently without transcendence and irrespective of letter casing; the West suffers from a terminally-ill psycho-pathology and bathetically falls from the sublime unto a ridiculously absurd genius. Is this grace? Postmodernitys mytho-poetic crisis of negation (Van Houdt, 2011)? Or just some random trash? There has been much ado about the nothingness of Badiouian analyses as exemplified by Alan Sokal et al (Sokal & Bricmont, 1998; Scruton, 2012) whose own intellectual impostures and critique of the humanities' inexact social sciences including Badiouian analyses are symptomatic of the socalled post-modern condition. So too are the aesthetics of ROARAWAR FEARTATA; the loosely connected live performance art collective I established as a Performance Studies under-graduate at Victoria University with Benjamin Cittadini in 2003.

As such, our live performance art research project Small Catastrophes facilitated by Punctum Inc's Seedpod Initiative Sponsorship Program and Badiouian recontextualization throughout what follows, is also subject to the vicissitudes of post-modern mores. In this way, Badiouian analyses might not only be deconstructed as a metaphysical failure symptomatic of Western deicide, but also, Badious own self-deification. For, Badiouian analyses have now been subsumed or institutionalized as a de rigueur evental itself (Barbour 2010: 99). Ensuring a future anterior and perfection will endure unto the subjective militancy of its own authoritative and totalitarian catechisms, Badiouian analyses approach its own anti-thetical doxa, or rather, doxologies (Toscano, 2000: 220).

Primarily, my analysis is a performative provocation in response to perspectives glossed from secondary sources engaging with Badiou. In fact, Badiou might approach something of Immanuel Kant in that whilst he is now widely cited, I cannot but hazard that as a primary resource he still remains unread.

For me, Badiouian analyses reveal themselves paradoxically, or rather, as paradoxical or chiastic revelations. This Zizekian inversion, subject to a partial, biased or distorted anamorphic subjective perspective has the fundamental essence of Badiouian analyses approach somewhat of a psychoanalytical illogic or coincidenta oppositorum.

Paradoxical and dialectical, this coincidence, or, unity of opposites accounts for Badious secularized or laicized materialistic grace. For upon appropriating Georg Cantors transfinite set theoretic numbers and their exceeding of infinity, or infinite excess; Badious mathematical ontology might be analytically interpreted as an expression of the fundamentally contradictory essences of the deep psychical structures constituting not only reality per se, but also, those manifesting a sacred presence, deity or god. As such, despite Badious hazarding that the infinite is immanent and the God of Cantors theological set theoretic mathematics is dead (Badiou, 1999: 103 & Depoortere, 2009: 17); might not the presence of the saintly figure of Paul within Badious oeuvre (Badiou, 2003) exemplify Zizeks aforementioned classical topos of Lacanian theory whereby truth is hidden in plain sight? Moreover, might the atheism of Badiouian analyses not be construed as nothing but the unconscious driving force of a theistic desire?

Nevertheless, upon my demanding these analyses identify themselves and their apocryphal Truth-Events as such; all that becomes identified is merely a mirrored hauntological reflection of myself, or rather, our own situational selves, structurations, avoidances, displacements and desires as a multiplicity of doubles or doublings. And upon subjecting Badiouian analyses to

rumination, my own identificatory projections awaken an ideological consciousness whose concomitant unconscious desires I trust will faithfully affect these musings unto a fidelity to its own Truth-Events; beyond or irrespective of intentionality.

In this regard, upon ascribing an eventalness to the multiple banal crises and minutiae encountered within everyday experience; ROARAWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes perceives how unintended consequences accumulate a retroactive meaningfulness. Moreover, the Bendigolian micro-dramas of ROARWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes conspires with proleptic futurity and obtains to an ethical liminality, or inter-subjective in-between space, 9/11 exemplifies albeit geo-politically. For, apropos ROARWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes and 9/11, Badiouian analyses might become provocatively critiqued as the return of a hauntology, whose vicissitudes exemplify the chiasmus of philosophy and art. Furthermore, the polemical and militant conservatism of Badiouian analyses and its own miraculous decisionism to disavow 9/11 and post-9/11 subjectivity as a Truth-Event, approaches an inversion or dialectical reversal upon 9/11s aesthetic re-constitution.

Returning to the emphatically capitalized letters of Platonic Truth, the contentions of Badiouian analyses that 9/11 was not an event because it did not inspire a true subjective mobilization (Hallward, 2004: 7) approaches a chiastic logic upon 9/11s aestheticization. For, its eventness exceeds the initial spectacle and superficial war on terror unto an infinite imperceptible becoming, whereupon, the ecstatic pleasure or jouissance of 9/11s overdeterminations void or negate thought within the liminality, or in-between space of their inter-subjectivities, and intervallic co-relationships.

As such, 9/11 is an evental site of a truth and another unknowable event yet to come. Appropriating Zizek again, Badiouian analyses fetishistic disavowal of 9/11 and its non-subjectivization might be expressed as:

I know very well that 9/11 was a Truth-Event from which a post-9/11 subject emerges, but nonetheless, I continue to act as if it is not. For 9/11 is its own best mask (Zizek, 2006: 28 original emphasis). And beyond the existence of 9/11s victims, whom for Badiouian analyses such as Peter Hallwards is never itself enough to inspire a true subjective mobilization (Hallward, 2004: 7); what about that of Tania Head whom claimed to survive United Airlines Flight 175s impact with the 78 th floor of the World Trade Centre Building 2 South Tower? Not until New York Times journalists David W. Dunlap and Serge F. Kovaleski investigated her

unverifiable claims that her fianc and soon-to-be husband died in World Trade Centre Building 1s North Tower as well as being rescued by Welles Crowther whom also died after guiding people to safety was the truth mobilized (Dunlap & Kovaleski, 2007). Head even insisted a dying person presented her with a wedding ring to pass on to his widow! Such was the extent of Alicia Esteve Heads immaculate deception that she became President of the World Trade Centres Survivor Network and championed their cause onto unprecedented national recognition! And similarly again, as a concomitant corollary to 9/11s non-subjectivization; Badiouian analyses disavowal of a conservative humanisms good conscience, and an ethics of alterity or an others Otherness (Badiou, 2001), symptomatically presences a traumatic mimetic rivalry exemplifying Badiouian analyses own bad subjectivity. For, the truth processes of Badiouian analyses are susceptible to the risk and failure of rendering an axiomatic subjectivity indiscernible from a definitive objectivity (Hallward, 2003: 190).

As such, the Truth-Events of Badiouian analyses are nothing but an excessive hubris. These excesses, hubristically exceeding its proper limitations, envisions or enframes the co-relationships between the finite and infinite unto, what I believe if I may approaches a sacred and tragic aesthetic philosophy, or rather, theatre of a sacred and tragic aesthetic philosophy.

Voiding thought and subject to the performative trope of a tragic and sacred theatre, Badiouian analyses are but movement of hubris [as] a lesson of finitude a counter-example, the example of hubris, the catastrophic example of hubris a subjective vision (Badiou, 2011). Projecting a liminal consciousness, Badiouian analyses figure-ground distinctions of subject and object, Self and Other, philosophy and its antitheses have significant implications for the aestheticization of reality. Moreover, the retroactive interpretive intervention and nomination of 9/11 within these Badiouian analyses renders problematic the interstices of his philosophy and aesthetic theatre or art in that multiplicities of minimal difference affirm 9/11 as less a political Truth-Event, but rather, more of an aesthetic Truth-Event instead.

For Badiou, beyond neo-liberalist ideologies of identity politics and Human Rights lies a critical ethical project exceeding language or linguistics. But yet however, might the symptomal torsions of Badious own idealinguistery (Badiou, 2004: 177) be nothing but his own simulacrums death mask? Re-contextualized within ROARAWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes and 9/11s Badiouian disavowal and non-subjectivization; these analyses problematic ethical co-relationships court narcissism, nihilism and affectivity unto a creative hermeneutic. With concomitant self-aggrandizement, the hubristic philosophy of such analyses confronts its own anti-theses and

excessive negativity unto an aesthetic(ized) ontological immanence and Nietzshean ressentiment.

As such, the doxa or doxologies of Badiouian analyses are a catastrophe within the parlance of Walter Benjamins historical materialism, in that they become missed opportunities (Benjamin, 1999: 474) to empathize and tarry with not only an Others Otherness and alterity, but also, ones own mortal finitude and inevitable deathly demise. Moreover the symptomal torsions of Badiouian analyses might be deemed as what Eric Santner registers as: forgotten failures to act such failures can, at least in part, be understood as failures to suspend the force of the social bond call it the dominant ideology inhibiting acts of solidarity with others (Santner, 2005: 89). Furthermore Santners Benjaminian reading of Christa Wolfs novel A Model Childhood elaborates how adaptation to the social reality of everyday life [involves] forming pockets of congealed moral and social energies manifest as psychic perturbations, as a symptomatic torsion of ones being in the world [a] signifying stress (Santner, 2005: 89). As such, might not Badiouian analyses approach a Zizekian aggress ive passivity (Zizek, 2006: 342) unto its own incarnation of Evil the inauthentic simulacrum or false Truth-Event of academic rehearsals or cultural commerce knowledge in the service of capitalist profit (Cox & Whalen, 2001)? Badiouian analyses Nietzschean ressentiment of an Others Otherness, alterity or difference and the wills ill-will against time and its It was (Nietzsche, 1982: 252) radicalizes egalitarianism as envy. And it is with such thoughts that I will appropriate Barbra Formis application of Badiouian analyses to Marcel Duchamps ready-mades as a model, for my own Badiouian re-contextualization of ROARWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes.

III

Conducting critical adventures into site-specificity, ROARAWAR FEARTATA endeavors to distil and manipulate the fundamental essences of traditional theatrical conventions such as presence and audience expectation. As artists, we ROARAWAR FEARTATAians recognise, acknowledge and identify with a

status as being that which is of a transient visitor, outsider, stranger or foreigner with a certain particular parallel knowledge or understanding to those inhabiting the site-specific splaces researched this appropriation of Badious neologistic combination of space and place (Power, 2006: 199), as symbolic representations, are a systematic indexing inside the [ideological] structure [of Bendigo within spatial terms] and their forcing within a dialectical transformation.

This forcing is for Nicolo Fazioni:

the specific strength and the force of subtraction of an element from its place. The element that is inserted and, in some way, normed by its position, maintains at the same time a space of opacity that is its singularity (Fazioni, 2012: 56).

As such, the contrasts and similarities in ideology or world views between us, as the artists known as ROARAWAR FEARTATA and those inhabitants of each site our practice encounters, becomes the impetus for a self-reflexive criticality, and a series of socially engaged dialogical conversations, of which our Small Catastrophes was no exception.

Radically deconstructionist, we identify a conspiratorial dialecticism, a negative correspondence or diabolical doubling between those expectations anticipating habitual figure-ground distinctions between the realities of art and life. This agonistic and indeed antagonistic aesthetic approaches a mimetic rivalry and transgressive Duchampian infra-mince or ultra-slim figuration, whereupon, ambiguous perceptions of authenticity and artifice court an intervallic illegitimacy (Formis, 2004: 254) and truth. For upon Bendigos streets, we ROARAWAR FEARTATAians appear unexpectedly and uninvited as if Eleatic strangers (Plato, 1997: 235-358) embodying a demonic or demonological extimite or extimacy. This Lacanian neologism of an exterior intimacy or intimate exterior, ontologically hazards that ROARAWAR FEARTATA are but a parasitic foreign-body or exterior within Bendigos interiority (Miller, 1994: 74-86) and not unlike the terrorist perpetrators of 9/11 themselves.

Subject to the vicissitudes of the unconscious and its inconsistent modalities, ROARAWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes traverses a fantasy between concrete empirical reality and a tenuous imaginary or calculable phenomenology in Badiouese. As such, a normative taciturnity confronts a provocative deistic cross-examination within a dialectic of authoritative knowledge and ignorance; fascistic mastery and oppressive subordination;

and approaches the sacred and performative gift of ROARWAR FEARTATAs entropy and extropy, negentropy or syntropy. As mimeticians, ROARWAR FEARTATAs exceptional indiscernibility performs a double being between work and art or play. Subsequently, as a consequence of the excessive informational database Bendigos small catastrophes and dreams constitute, the authorities of Local Law and Police Officers alike became incited to curiosity and asked questions of ROARWAR FEARTATA within a confronting and provocative mirroring reflecting their own impotent ambivalence. Such solicitations and surveying as these provokes affectivity, but yet however, whose so-called empowering desire is this really?

Our ROARAWAR FERTATAian modalities of disappearance or effacement, as vanishing acts, become interventional nominations and interpellate the subjectivity of others unto their own double belonging (Formis, 2004: 254 -7) or being. Thereupon art-life contexts render indiscernible the co-relationships between performer and spectator unto Augusto Boals neologization combining spectator and actor or spect-actor (Boal, 2000: xx-xxi) and the rehearsal of revolution (Boal, 2000: 141).

Aspiring to evacuate or problematize mimetic representations and absolve reality itself, Small Catastrophes augmented the affective effect First World grievances incur by asking the question: With what frequency and duration do you think about the resolutions of your own small catastrophes?

The immediacy of immediate reality and that which is taken for granted on face-value socio-cultural-political realitys constructs and re-mediations are not only subjected to mis-recognition, but also, the spatio-temporal tides of a fate affirming each individuals personal (in-)existentialism. This unconscious consciousness is what we aspire to re-mediate as a cognitive breach, rupture, or hole whose fissuring renders insignificant and significant concerns indiscernible.

Hazarding an amplification of the interface between the private, individual or personal and public, collective or socio-cultural-political reality; these realities, rather than givens, distort and become oblique, subjective and biased anamorphic perspectives. Such trompe loeil as this constitutes ROARWAR FEARTATAs Badiouian philosophical aesthetic sophistry.

Contingent upon appropriating the accidental events of other Bendigolian passer-bys pasts and presents, powerful unconscious psycho-geographical forces decant between the thresholds of socio-cultural praxes-as-macrocosm and the performed self-as-microcosm without, or rather, with no purpose. That is to say, in doing so, we do not necessarily know what our purpose is in

performing such purposelessness, except, under the pretenses of scientific inquiry, remain faithful or have a fidelity to the truth of our own convictions.

Exceeding beyond the perceptions of an objective factual reality, the truth of ROARWAR FEARTATAs site-specific analyses play with receptions, expectations, representations, statistical convergences, information gluts and socio-cultural-political agency. Our absurd ludicity or playfulness and performative experimentations courts a mimetic pedagogical critique and sophistical aesthetic philosophy in order to breach the fugue state of such realities and the tenuous immediacy of their respective pre-meditated and indeed pre-remediated constructions.

As an effect or semblance of truth beyond known or knowable reality, we pursue potentially redemptive individual, singular or personal revolutions whose humble lower case r aspires to inspire its upper casing; begetting Revolutions from revolutions by means of a self-reflexive consciousness and criticality regarding each of these, and ones own, small catastrophes as subjects per se. The principle of this ludic or playful traversal of fantasies of the true approaches a literalization of that which for Friedrich von Schiller completes humanity and the whole edifice of the aesthetic art [of the beautiful] and the still more difficult art of the living (Schiller, 2001 in Ranciere, 2002: 133).

In praise or blame, these things as pataphysical performative objects or truthevents aspire to be, and desire to inspire, radicalized socio-cultural-political idealizations. Their pharmocotic truth effects contextualize our small catastrophes within their impact upon that of the wider landscape beyond the City of Greater Bendigo. As such, the imperceptible eventness of ROARAWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes and its imaginary utopian projections are always already ethically and hauntologically fraught. For, the ambivalence and ambiguity of each small catastrophe and its truth are not only in proximity to the unknowable maleficent traumata of unknown others, but also, accessed upon their transference as a dream-displacement or condensation for purposes of ROARAWAR FEARTATAs archival record within Part D Dreams and section 10 of the Small Catastrophes Incident Registration Form 1A: Describe a dream you remember.

The intentionality of this surrealistic bureaucracy and administrative dreamcatcher imbues ROARWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes with an affectivity playing between conscious and unconscious. For upon proffering these dreams, our collective or shared ignorance of each other becomes limned within an intimate yet unverifiable reality. Subject to a psychoanalytical imperative injunction of nothing forgotten, Small Catastrophes confronted an antimonic responsibility and decisionism

simply constituted within asking passers-by the question: Had a small catastrophe? Insisting something, an event or small catastrophe must have happened, no matter what, Small Catastrophes sharply relieves perspectives of so-called First World problems, and as a corollary, their concomitant traumata, irrespective of conscious affective effect.

Initiated by means of the in-situ surveying of unfrequented malls, food courts and the narrow paths of abandoned arcades, the absolute singularity of an unforeseen encounter-as-being per se (Yarrow, 2007: 15) has each individual persons situational; its inconsistent and excessive non-knowledge retroactively presence these ambiguously, ambivalently, agonistically and indeed antagonistically defined Truth-Events or small catastrophes and dreamings. For, the exact nature of what constitutes a small catastrophe or dream is never ascertained or known. Moreover, each small catastrophe is only ever known within the limited classifications of Travel, Relationships, Weather, God, Food or Culture.

This radicalized decidability amplifies the seemingly inconsequential and insignificant nothingness or equivocality of an a priori onto-veracity. For only interested or distorted self-referential perspectival engagements trace the interpretations of each interpellating intervention. Or rather, that is to say namely who cares about small catastrophes or one anothers dreams; especially yours?!?; as each subject is really only ever concerned with their own and none else.

These performative situationals operate counting the unified or not one multiple of Bendigolians identified as a coherent community, or collective set, whilst affirming the affectivity of the ontological multiplicities constituting these catastrophic confessionals and chimeras. Each subjective induction depended upon the intensity of their fidelity and militant conviction to commit oneself to the authoritative and totalitarianistic meta-narrative of ROARWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes truth effects, and the alterity or otherness constituted within those participating Bendigolians albeit under the pretenses of a live performance art research project. All other catastrophisms death, war, pestilent epidemics, poverty and famine become null and void or foreclosed to the experiences of these First World afflictions.

Symptomatic of Western psychopathologies, these sublated or sublimated catastrophisms are powerfully affective. For, their ambiguous and ambivalent inconsistency as Truth-Events are mired within the perpetual and problematic self-aggrandizing myopia afflicting the First World. And as per the phenomenal mass commentary social media networks evince, Western subjectivity affirms itself as having significance through affective expressions of narcissism and hubris.

Irrespective of medium, the affective presences of the creative, artful or productive void instantiates the verdicalities of an abstracted immortality that not only do social media networks exemplify, but also, Badiouian analyses. Moreover, traversing a trajectory point by point making ever more and more singular consequences appear in the world, which subjectively weave a truth of which one could say that it eternalizes the present of the present (Clemens, 2006: 128-9); ROARAWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes and Badiouian analyses intersect, resurrecting an embodied concrete materiality or corporeality (Johnston, 2009: 65-6) as that which sustains, but also, stymies our existential or ontological realities. Suspended between an impotent victimhood sacrificed to destinys fatalistic spatio-temporal tides, and the eternal omnipotent resurrectional salvations of each small catastrophe overcome as anamnestic Truth-Events; Small Catastrophes miraculous decisionism and the responsibility to choose, when there is seemingly no choice or alternative to be discerned for the people of Bendigo, exemplifies affectivitys absolute heterogeneity. This state of desacralized or laicized grace and the mere spatio-temporal circumstances of time and place its modalities of disappearance; become an effacement of that which Small Catastrophes inscribes within the project itself and its participants circumscribing artist-audience-spectator-viewer-witness or each Boalian spect-actor.

Such vanishing acts or auto-erasing moments subtly proposition each subjectivity as an interpellation within the desire that it generates true change precisely through quietly receding into the background (Johnston, 2009: 159). The affective effect of small catastrophes, irrespective of whether ROARAWAR FEARTATAs live performance art research project or not, expresses an affirmation, albeit not necessarily an overtly conventional or positive reinforcement but one that is ambiguous, ambivalent and specious. Between Being and Becoming, ROARAWAR FEARTATAs dialogical dialecticism courts an applied Badiouian subjectivization process and its truth procedures as psychoanalytical retroactions. Radically encountering subjectivitys Void and excess, whereby at this Mallarmean momentary instant of time nothing takes place but the place (Milner, 2010: 106), its remainder as the minimal difference (Zizek, 2006: 18) or reflexive twist (Zizek, 2006: 17) between this subjective void, its voidedness or voidity, and its stand-in or substitute, and its own excessive particularities as each personal individuals private small catastrophe or dream become an ex-nihlo intervening interpellation or Truth-Event. For, ROARAWR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes is the chance nomination of something from nothing, or rather, the intervening interpellation of subjectivities from ones small catastrophes and manifest dreams.

Subtly decentring those propositioned unto an unstructured representation of Bendigos unrepresented true Universal; these spontaneous improvised anti structures undifferentiate the City of Greater Bendigo as a limen, or liminal evental site for life-work and art-play to become rendered indiscernible. Their equally indistinct and inconsistent ontological multiplicity becomes a subtraction unto each of these small catastrophes and manifest dreamcontents.

Manipulating and exploiting the habitual expectations of anticipated figureground distinctions and their co-relationships throughout the landscapes of Bendigos socio-cultural-political reality, Small Catastrophes radically questions occlusion, exclusivity and exceptional absolutism. For each nominated small catastrophe and dream proferred is absolutely indeterminate, yet has indefinite potential, whilst its infinite excess exceeds any objectivity of perception, or rather, objective perception.

This unidentifiability constitutes the inconsequentiality and indifference of ontology. Nevertheless, each small catastrophe and dreams affectivity affirms subjectivity, albeit ambivalently, ambiguously and speciously. And moreover, the ambiguity, ambivalence, agonism and indeed antagonism of each small catastrophe and dream has the live performance art research project itself approach a pharmocotic awakening symptomatic of post-modernitys aestheticized ressentiment in that our purpose as ROARAWAR FEARTATAians is unidentifiable or indiscernible yet pitiable. For, the project has no conventional positivity or concomitant overt affirmations for the collective weal of the community except for the unreserved avowals of our sincere pity.

Rather than prescribe intentionality, our live performance art research projects affective impact upon subjectivity is retroactive. And it is this negligibility, indiscernability or negation impelling the receptions of ROARWAR FEARTATAs provocative and absurdly compelling utilitarian pataphysical aesthetics.

Nevertheless, it is this genericity and the unconscious valence of those subject to ROARWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes and Badiouian analyses alike that, irrespective of letter casing, their respective utopian imaginary projects approach the vicissitudes of an anamnestic or hauntological truth-event. For, each forcing of their univocal pasts deciphers a present future anterior whose Truth-Events are axiomatic becomings subject to a deductive fidelity. Without recourse to verification, the discerning of these respective indiscernibles problematically court purely speculative deductions, whilst awaiting the perfection of another supplementary, albeit unknown, Truth-Event yet to come.

IV

Proceeding unprescribed, aleatory, or rather, mistaken, mis-identified and misrecognized as an error either explicitly or implicitly so, Badiouian analyses of 9/11 are prematurely deceptive. For, it is not necessarily the subjective mobilization of its human victims but that of the image, its art or aesthetics that is 9/11s Truth-Event. As per ROARAWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes, the elusive TruthEvent of 9/11s own voidity or voidedness is retroactive. Its true speculative meaning is re-generated within repeated antecedent readings, projections and linguistic traces nominating, classifying and indeed interpreting 9/11 such as those of Badiouian analyses. Moreover, might 9/11s Badiouian non-subjectivization be symptomatic of a fetishistic disavowal of deistic cosmologies unto a deicide, and concomitant self-deification or deism, Friedrich Nietzsches The Gay Science identifies? For, as with gods death, the tremendous Truth-Event of 9/11 and its concomitant analyses, including what is presented here within this analytical provocation itself, are premature. Such Truth-Events come too early ... [Their] time has not come yet and is still on its way, still wandering it has not yet reached the ears of man. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars require time; deeds require time, even though after they are done, still before they can be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars and yet they have done it to themselves. (Nietzsche, 1982: 96 original emphasis)

From the catastrophic philosophical aesthetic spectrum of ROARAWAR FEARTATA to 9/11, the Hegelian unhappy consciousness afflicting the West is exemplified. And upon abolishing the small inverted commas or scarequotes of post-modernitys truths, might Badiouian analyses be symptomatic of its own absolute exceptionalism; wandering in-excess as nothing but a sublation, or rather, sublimation of an aestheticized ressentiment forged from Platonic Socratisms ostracization of art and its apotheosis culminating within 9/11s aestheticization?

Super-ceding the archaic Greek thought that regarded representational images as presentification, actualization or embodiments; conventional interpretations of Platonic Socratism has arts inferior ontological status mirror reality. And this mirrored reflection and its concomitant mimesis is not a beneficent, nor benign power, but an explicit threat to the ideals of the Good, its truth, justice, reason and Beauty.

Arthur C. Dantos contemporization of a Hegelian historicism and its concomitant end or death of art thesis (Danto, 1986: 81-117) addresses this disenfranchisement of art and hazards Plato is politically motivated beyond any of the so-called, and somewhat anachronistic, Kantian apodictic projections of so-called categorical imperatives and duty-bound morality (Danto, 1986: 1-22). However, whilst consolidating a powerful socio-political and ideological influence, Platos strategy ensures an alternative path to that of Socrates untimely fate.

For with Socrates, accused, trialed and convicted for impiety, blasphemy and corrupting Athenian youth; Socrates condemnation and subsequent state initiated administration of the poison hemlock must have been formative to Platonic Socratisms righteous ideology, and metaphysical project of transcendental idealism. Nevertheless, as a dramatic representation or art itself, might Platonic Socratisms Dialogues not be an apologia limning consciousness, truth and authenticity within each of their own respective antitheses? In this light, with the inaesthetics of Badiouian analyses symptomatic of philosophys alleged end or death, might 9/11s hysterical overdeterminations, including that which is represented here, not only be confirmation of philosophys supercession, but also its redemptive disavowal or resurrectional salvation? Crucified and resurrected within the excessive ontological void of 9/11, the impossibility of its supercession and terroristic redemptive salvation constitutes a symptomatic trajectory, traversing an others Otherness or alterity as self-misrecognition or ideological meconnaissance unto the Wests own excessive non-relation to itself. ROARWAR FEARTATAs Small Catastrophes is symptomatic of this crisis. So too is the reception of 9/11; including those of Badiouian analyses.

Rather than authentically radical, might Badiouian analyses be but a Janusfaced dogmatic and terroristic conservatism instead? In conclusion, perhaps the cathexis of Badiouian analyses might be brought into sharper perspectival relief with Slavoj Zizeks caution to be

especially careful not to confuse the ruling ideology with ideology which seems to dominate. More than ever, we should bear in mind Walter Benjamins reminder that it is not enough to ask how a certain theory (or art) declares itself with regard to social struggles we should ask how it effectively functions in these very struggles (Zizek, 2002: 169 original emphasis).

Alternatively rather than indulging the silent laughter of anti-humanist philosophies (Badiou, 2007: 171); might we carouse instead to the so-called yacht rock and roll music of Christopher Cross and beget monstrous offspring (Deleuze, 1995: 6)?

VI

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References Badiou, Alain (1999). 'Generic' in Manifesto for Philsophy: Followed by Two Essays: The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself and Definition of Philosophy, Madarasz, Norman ed & trans. Albany: State University of New York Press, 103-12. Badiou, Alain (2001). Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London; New York: Verso.

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