In his reading of Badiou, Adrian Johnston discerned the ideologico-critical potential of the Badiouian topic of evental breaks: when the balance of an ideological situation is disturbed by arising "symptomal knots," elements which, while formally part of the situation, do not fit into it, the ideological defense can adopt two main strategies, the false "eventalization" of the dynamics which is thoroughly part of the existing situation, and the disavowal of the signs which delineate true evental possibilities, their reading as minor accidents or external disturbances:
one, making mere modifications appear to promise evental newness (a tactic that comes to the fore in the ideology of late-capitalism, whose noisily marketed "perpetual revolution" is really just an instance of the cliché "the more things change, the more they stay the same"-or, as Badiou puts it, "capitalism itself is the obsession of novelty and the perpetual renovation of forms"); two, making the sites sheltering potentially explosive evental upheavals appear to be, at a minimum, unremarkable features of the banal, everyday landscape, and, at most, nothing more than temporary, correctable glitches in the functioning of the established system.
Perhaps, this line of thought needs just one qualification: Johnston writes that "the ideology of the worldly state, through a sort of bluff or masquerade, disguises its non-integrated weakest points, its Achilles' heels, as fully integrated cogs and components of its allegedly harmonious functioning-rather than as loci containing the potential to throw monkey wrenches in its gears and thereby generate evental dysfunctions of this regime, a regime that is never so deeply entrenched as it would like to appear to be in the eyes of its subjects." Would it not rather be that one of the ideological strategies is to fully admit the threatening character of a disfunction, and to treat it as an external intrusion, not as the necessary result of the system's inner dynamics? The model is here, of course, the Fascist notion of social antagonisms as the result of a foreign intruder - Jews - disturbing the organic totality of the social edifice.
Recall the difference between the standard capitalist and the Marxist notion of economic crisis: for the standard capitalist view, crises are "temporary, correctable glitches" in the functioning of the system, while from the Marxist point, they are its moment of truth, the "exception" which only allows us to grasp the functioning of the system (in the same way that, for Freud, dreams and symptoms are not secondary malfunctionings of our psychic apparatus, but moments through while one can discern the repressed basic functioning of the psychic apparatus).'
(Slavoj Žižek, "On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes")
