The "Deflationary" Criticism of the Event: Ambiguities of the Theory of Change in Badiou's Being and Event

This paper revisits the "deflationary" line of criticism that had been raised against the theory of event presented in Alain Badiou's Being and Event. This line of criticism questions the Badiouian claim to have provided a theorization of radical novelty and change, suggesting that events and their consequences may be more banal than is assumed by the account of change based on truths, elaborated in Badiou's great ontological treatise. Advancing a version of deflationary criticism, this paper proposes that there are important matters left unclear in the settheoretical ontology of Badiou's magnum opus that become particularly relevant when the categories such as void, event, and truth are deployed in analyses of specific and concrete extra-ontological situations. Exploiting some of those ambiguities, it will be argued that the theorization of change due to post-evental truths in Being and Event does not adequately establish the universality of the truths that, for Badiou, must commence with events. This is problematic for the Badiouian account of change because universality, or what Badiou's ontological discourse terms "genericity," is the property of truths that is supposed to ensure their transformative potential.