RADICAL POLITICS : (…) You have vehemently denounced in your work anti-philosophy and its main thesis: the “impenetrability of God’s design”, and the fundamental “inaccessibility that opens the way to an infinite hermeneutics”. On the contrary, a philosophical project needs to be anchored within the intelligible. However, you maintain in your Saint Paul that “The Resurrection … is not of the historical order, is not demonstrable; it is a pure event, an opening of an epoch, a change in the relations between the possible and the impossible.”; in Ethics you declare that what interests you in the figure of Saint Paul, “is the idea that the becoming of a truth, the becoming of a subject, depend entirely on a pure event, which is itself beyond all the predictions and calculations that our understanding is capable of”. Could we not say that the event, because it lies beyond our understanding, beyond the order of the demonstrable, is unintelligible? And that our commitment to it, because it requires a “certain kind of special passivity” and a “total abandonment”, is, dare we say, religious?

ALAIN BADIOU : It is imperative to understand that an event is always relative to a situation; it is an event for the situation, and not above or outside it. Consequently, when I say that an event is beyond calculation, beyond prediction, this is naturally beyond prediction within the situation of which the event is the supplement, or the added singularity. As such, the event is not in itself unintelligible: it is unintelligible in regard to the means of prediction, of forecast, or of continuity that are those of the situation. But the intelligibility of the event is created in the fidelity to the event. Obviously for the revolutionaries, in the end, the event of “revolution” is intelligible. It is neither a mystery nor is it impenetrable. It is impenetrable only for the conservatism of the previous situation.

What needs to be said, to be more precise on this point, is that an event creates the conditions of intelligibility of its situation, and these new conditions of intelligibility are applied, in particular, to itself. Hence, the intelligibility of the event is neither prospective nor calculative; it is rather retroactive. Therefore, even if I sometimes compare the event to a miracle, a grace, etc., these are only metaphors. Undoubtedly, I remain rationalist in my appreciation of the event, and convinced that it is intelligible. Yet, precisely because it is an event, it is only intelligible afterwards, its conditions of intelligibility can never be anticipated.

Consequently, one cannot say that an event is religious, because “religious” always means that something remains unintelligible, that something is definitely mysterious: there is something in God’s design that remains forever inaccessible. This is not the case of the event. There is an intelligibility of the event, but one that is created, and in many ways this constitutes one of the definitions of fidelity: fidelity is the creation in the future tense of the intelligibility of the event. This is the reason why thinking the intelligibility of the event takes a lot of time and is done in successive sequences. For instance, everybody knows that the true understanding of the Revolution of 1917 took much time – perhaps it is still not complete – but this does not imply that it is a mystery. In sum, when events are constituted, they were not calculable, predictable, and were not part of the previous rationality. One must understand that an event is also the creation of new instruments of rationality.