Anthropological (in)fidelities to Alain Badiou

Events and reproduction in anthropology

An interest in events as kernels of potential change is not new in anthropology. For example, in his historical studies of the Pacific, Sahlins developed a notion of event as ‘a relation between a happening and a structure' (1985: xiv; 1990), distinguishing moments of instantiation, dénouement and totalisation (1990: 81–82). Later, Das studied the aftermath of ‘critical events' in India that ‘instituted a new modality of historical action which was not inscribed in the inventory of [the previous] situation' (1995: 5). These approaches have come in for criticism from various angles. Caton, for instance, states that in Sahlins' dialectical model, ‘event, eventually, becomes swallowed up in system—to be sure, a new or transformed system—but a system nonetheless' (1999: 7). Others agree (e.g. Bensa and Fassin, 2002: 12; Kapferer, 2010: 13–14; Moore, 2011: 298–202), and, unlike Caton, they point to Sahlins' culturalism as a reason for his relative neglect of contradictions. In his overview of anthropological work on events, Kapferer (2010) argues that such contradictions were central to the earlier situational analysis of the Manchester School in sub-Saharan Africa. Dismissing Das's work for merely focusing on events as illustrating general patterns (2010: 5), he contends that a key quality of the Manchester approach was its alertness to the innovative potential immanent in events. This seems an ungenerous reading of Das's work and Kapferer might understate the Manchester School's lingering structural-functionalism. Yet he usefully draws attention to its empirical choices of non-typical events, to its focus on crisis, contestation and process, and to its shift away from a bounded, integrated notion of society (all of which, along with a non-culturalist approach, I believe Das shares). Kapferer approvingly states that the Manchester anthropologists approached events as

moments in which the intransigencies and irresolvable tensions ingrained in social and personal life … boiled to the surface and became, if only momentarily, part of public awareness for the participants as well as for the anthropologist. (2010: 3)

Despite these diverging assessments, Caton and Kapferer agree on the need for a more (or in the latter's case: even more) developed alertness to events and for theoretical tools that foreground their transformative potential. In this they are joined by Robbins, who deplores anthropology's preoccupation with detecting and explaining continuity, quickly incorporating novelty into totalising frameworks (2010: 635). Likewise, Bensa and Fassin argue that the social sciences more generally ‘will most often prefer to show that an event is not an event' (2002: 6, my translation).

Such diagnoses have fed into calls for empirical and theoretical reorientation. First, we are urged to be more alert to (irruptive) events. Yet if, as late as 1999, Caton still wrote that anthropologists were ‘not trained' to see events (1999: 6), many today seem to actively look for them. This is particularly prevalent amongst scholars writing affirmative accounts of left political activism (e.g. Krøijer 2010). Second, the call for a turn to events seeks to banish any determinism from anthropological theory. To do so, Caton (1999: 8–9) turns to Foucault and Dening. Bensa and Fassin (2002) find inspiration in the work of Deleuze, and Kapferer (2010: 15) in the writing of the latter with Guattari, which he considers a more rounded articulation of the tendencies opened up by the Manchester School and by Sahlins. Robbins (2010) also delves into philosophy: his key source is the writing of Alain Badiou. ²

Being and Event: events, fidelity, subjects

Badiou's focus on ‘the event' is part of his philosophy of the subject. This is a vast scholarly project grounded in mathematical set theory. Without claiming to understand all of it, ³ I will devote considerable space to present some key dimensions for the purpose of this article.

Badiou's Being and Event (2005, B&E), first published in 1988, presents a formal, ontological detection of universal, generic processes regarding truths, change and subjectivity. For Badiou the three are inextricably linked and real subjectivity is as rare as real change (2005: 392). Every ‘situation', he says, is structured by a ‘state' (perhaps best understood as ‘status quo') and, generally, states reproduce themselves by selectively ‘counting' only certain features out of the many that are presented by any situation (104–111). Events, for Badiou, are happenings that disrupt this reproduction, revealing something of the ‘inconsistent multiplicity' in which all being is truthfully grounded (25–30). This ‘void' cannot be counted per se. Yet emerging from ‘evental sites' at its ‘edge' (175), certain happenings uncover truth by suddenly bringing into view elements of the situation that were not counted by the given state (178).

Let's consider the example of the Spartacus revolt in 73–71 bc (Badiou, 2009: 51ff). ⁴ What happened? A group of gladiators refused orders. This produced an evental trace, the universalist-egalitarian maxim ‘we slaves, we want to (and can) return home' (51), flagging a void in this situation. But since ‘the event's belonging to the situation' is ‘undecidable', an ‘intervention' is required (2005: 183, 202). Based on an ‘aleatory decision', this ‘illegal naming' of the event (201–211) sets in motion the revelation of a truth. Truths, per definition universal, require the painstaking work of systematically casting the evental maxim against all dimensions of the situation (what goes for slaves, should go for everyone). For Badiou, the emancipatory action lies in this ‘truth-procedure': the logical ‘testing' of the axiom. And this is how we get to the subject: in Badiou's understanding, for an event to be an event, it needs to ‘recruit subjects' who recognise it and who act in ‘fidelity' to it (212–222, 232–239). Some entity needs to act as a conductor for the truth that it reveals to be realised. Thus, Spartacus's rebel slaves became militants in the name of the event, they enacted the new possibilities made accessible by it and tried to realise them in the ‘future anterior', that is, in anticipation of what ‘will have been presented' (400). As slaves joined Spartacus's army, they effectively stopped being slaves in a situation where that was still impossible.

For Badiou such subjectivation can occur in four domains only—politics, art, love and science—and the only genuine events are happenings that reveal a universal truth-for-all: anyone, regardless of their position in the situation, could be recruited and enact fidelity to it. And only in that way, can individuals or other entities become subjects. In sum, a subject, in Badiou's strictly formal and post-Cartesian understanding, is

an active fidelity to the event of truth … a militant of truth. … The infinite work of a truth is thus that of a ‘generic procedure'. And to be a Subject (and not a simple individual animal) is to be a local active dimension of such a procedure. (2005: xiii)

Badiou in the land of anthropology

Anthropological studies (Demetriou, 2007; Humphrey, 2008; Lynteris, 2014; Robbins, 2010) that have put B&E to productive use reveal some rather unexpected affinity beween this philosophical treatise and anthropological analysis. Despite his resolutely formal and axiomatic approach, Badiou's insistence on what he calls the ‘local' (2005: 176) resonates with our discipline's demand for analysis to be grounded in particular, discernible social configurations. Moreover, his approach is anti-teleological yet processual: Badiou seeks to detect how subjects come into being over time and how any change can happen at all. The focus on the recruitment of subjects in fidelity also acknowledges the role of perspective: an event is or is not an event to someone.

While capitalising on such affinities, anthropological mobilisations of Badiou's conceptual apparatus as a social scientific tool also necessarily dilute its philosophical purity. At the very least, they relax the normativity, universality and all-or-nothing absolutism that pervades B&E. Robbins' study of Pentecostal conversion in Papua New Guinea (2010) has the least need for such tempering: here we have quite sudden and drastic change, with a degree of universal reach, and future anterior engagement in fidelity to an event. Robbins can stay very close to Badiou's framework, perhaps because his object of analysis parallels the latter's crown witness, Saint Paul, in a story of Christian conversion. In her account of political events in early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia, Humphrey (2008) analyses subjectivation beyond Badiou's pure cases, arguing that a focus on less earth-shattering ‘decision-events' is useful for studies, such as ethnographic ones, that deal with people who at least sometimes conceive of themselves and of others as already subjects (and not necessarily as totally ‘reborn' ones after an event—Robbins' text contains a similar warning). To understand someone's ability to acclaim a happening as an event, Humphrey argues, we should thus account for their past because an event ‘does not cut off the multiplicities of the individual, but rather recomposes them' (2008: 374). Lynteris (2014), in turn, urges us to drop Badiou's normative criterion of universalist egalitarianism. Tracing the formation of a previously unthinkable biopolitical subject of ‘hygienic modernity', he deploys Badiou's apparatus to analyse an early twentieth-century epidemic in Manchuria. Whether anthropologists analyse something as an event or not, Lynteris suggests, should not depend on the substantial politics of the subject proclaiming fidelity to it (2014: 73). Finally, in what is perhaps the most sophisticated ethnographic engagement with Badiou, Demetriou (2007) foregrounds the temporal dimension of events to reconceptualise the link between sudden irruption and fidelity in subjectivation. Tracing the micro-processes that brought about the 2003 opening of the Green Line in Cyprus after three decades, including its construction as a surprise, she analyses how the event called on ‘Cypriots … to make choices that defined them as different kinds of subjects to what they previously had been' (2007: 991). In doing so, Demetriou also lays bare the transformative potential in it that was ‘foreclosed in its unfolding' (2007: 989).

These anthropologists' explorations of the relationship between subject formation and change are not bothered by whether a certain happening is or is not a Badiouian event. In line with their pragmatic, eclectic (but coherent) conceptual borrowings from B&E, I too believe there are more interesting questions for anthropology to ask. Below I formulate three such questions, but first I explain how Badiou's own later writings may foster increased anthropological engagement. For this, we turn to B&E's second volume, Logics of Worlds (2009, LoW), first published in 2006.

Logics of Worlds: differentiation of subjectivation

In LoW Badiou proposes a new typology to introduce differentiation into his conceptualisation of change, now ranging from ‘modifications', i.e. pure reproduction, all the way to ‘events', the most intense of possible forms of ‘becoming' (2009: 357–374). This revised typology, marked by degrees of intensity, is still strictly formal and still places events at the core of any real transformation. This now requires a differentiation of subject forms, too. Remaining within the bounds of B&E, we have so far only discerned one kind of subject: ‘militants of truth', like Spartacus's rebel slave army, or Saint Paul. In the strictly ontological first volume, this was the only possible subject, conveying a notion of subject formation that is too purist for most anthropological studies. LoW, however, enhances the relational and historical dimensions of the theory, as part of an analysis of the logics by which truths appear in worlds (the latter term now replaces ‘situation') (99). This involves the acknowledgement, steadfastly axiomatic, of alternative subjects that in B&E had only appeared as easily dismissed ‘external witnesses' (Badiou, 2005: 398). ⁵ Crucially, these other forms of subjectivation remain strictly derivative: they can be detected exclusively in relation to (eternal) truths, and thus to events, and thus to the present produced by subjects ‘faithful to the trace of the event' (Badiou, 2009: 53). In that way, LoW distinguishes four formal procedures (‘destinations') with regard to the truth (49–76): its production into a new present, its denial, its occultation and its resurrection.

To clarify this, let us return to the Spartacus sequence. With regard to the maxim ‘we slaves, we want to (and can) return home', we can now add to the ‘faithful subject' of the rebel slave three other subjects: the ‘reactive subject' (the ‘conservative slave'), the ‘obscure subject' (the ‘Roman patrician'), and, much later, the ‘subject of resurrection' (e.g. the 1790s ‘Black Spartacus' slave revolution in Haiti). Since the latter is a revitalisation of previously defeated faithful subjectivity sparked by a new event, we are mainly interested here in the middle two. These two non-emancipatory subjects’ attempt to undo the present produced by the faithful subject. As a reactive subject, the conservative slave denies the novelty of the present and does not want to incorporate himself in Spartacus's army (54). Such a subject abhors risks and settles for an ‘extinguished present', considered slightly less bad than the past (55). The obscure subject goes much further, denying that anything happened at all (‘occultation') and seeking to abolish the present produced by the faithful subject. As a fascist (81) of antiquity, the Roman patrician invokes the ‘atemporal fetish' of ‘a full and pure transcendent Body, an ahistorical or anti-evental body. … forbidding the real body from existing' (59–60).

Event theory and anthropological questions

We are now ready to formulate three Badiou-inspired questions that seem particularly suited to anthropological analysis in the domain of politics. To crystallise them I return to the 2014 revolt in BiH.

A first question concerns perspective: to whom were the street protests and the plena an event? All authors mentioned above, including Badiou, agree that ‘the event has no objective content' (Humphrey, 2008: 360). Bensa and Fassin (2002) provide a useful condensed operationalisation for social scientific uses: events, to them, are happenings that elicit a rupture of intelligibility. Presenting something for which existing frameworks of understanding and reasoning cannot provide readymade explanations, they provoke a heightened awareness of indeterminacy. In such a ‘constructionist approach' (Kapferer, 2010: 18) no happening can be declared an event because it fractures intelligibility tout court. Anthropologists can only say that it does so to persons who acclaim it as such and communicate this to us in words and/or deeds (see also Fibiger, 2010; Demetriou, 2007: 991). In that way, in their militancy, participants in the 2014 revolt in BiH willed the revolt to be an event: for them, its maxim of social justice was something worth ‘positively investigating' (Badiou, 2005: 397) in light of a universalist ‘truth-to-come'. Yet even for this group, I believe, this did not generally entail a major rupture of intelligibility, nor a previously unthinkable political subjectivity. Indeed, many had participated in earlier protests—and an important reference point consisted of a large antinationalist demonstration in Sarajevo in April 1992, a last-ditch attempt to prevent war.

This brings us to the second question, which concerns intensity: how much of an event is any given happening? As hinted at by Badiou's reworked typology of becoming, if the relative rupturing of intelligibility makes happenings worth investigating in terms of their transformative potential, we need to think of degrees to which they may unexpectedly reveal alternatives. In combination with the question of perspective, this means that the interpretative schemata of more or fewer people can be more or less thrown off balance and that they can enact truth procedures in more or less fidelity, etc. In these ways, then, happenings may be more or less ‘evental', and this can be traced through the processes of subjectivation it sparks. If in the 2014 revolt in BiH, participants acted mostly within (divergent) frameworks of understanding that they (we) had already employed before, still, heightened awareness of indeterminacy was provoked, mainly through encounters with others who arrived at a similar point from different trajectories. A degree of ‘recomposition' (Humphrey, 2008: 374) of subjectivities thus occurred, and to that extent we could speak of the formation of faithful subjects. Degrees of derivative reactive subjectivation also occurred, and I will focus on that below.

Before that, I note that degrees of eventality are not stable over time. This raises a third question: how long is an event an event? What are the dynamics of its construction? On which spatiotemporal scales do they play out? From an ethnographic vantage point, duration matters, even for irruptive events (Dalsheim, 2015). Incorporating the first two questions, we may ask: When does any degree of eventality start and end for particular persons? Which trajectories and modalities of fidelity can we detect? How do they fare over time? The revolt's militants sensed an opening and worked hard to foster political change. Unlike earlier particularist demonstrations by workers of specific firms, or by former soldiers, and unlike earlier post-war ‘civic' mobilisations animated largely by middle-class urban activists, the 2014 revolt initially sent shockwaves through some of BiH's institutions. Four cantonal governments resigned. After two decades in which public debate had been dominated by the register of identitarian recognition, suddenly the terms of redistributive justice emerged as a legitimate (additional) language of contention in media reporting, in domestic political competition and in foreign supervision. The revolt maintained its momentum for a few months. Then other happenings took centre stage (in particular: devastating floods in the spring of 2014) and October elections reaffirmed the political status quo. Apart from some initiatives building on the solidarities forged in the revolt, by now its evental potential had largely been neutralised.

At the height of the revolt, there was no shortage of intellectuals of the left flying in to Sarajevo to declare it a Badouian event producing an unprecedented present driven by an emancipatory truth-for-all. As a participant, I too wanted it to be that, as intensely as possible, for as many people as possible, for as long as possible. And precisely therefore I believe it is imperative to try and understand not only the procedures of fidelity by which some of us sought to make the revolt into an event, producing a new present, but also the dynamics through which much of this was blocked, unmade, integrated in the reproductive flow of the status quo (Jansen, 2018). ⁶ In what follows, instead of following most Badiou-inspired writings on political struggle in foregrounding the event-spurred prefigurative work of militants, I thus shift attention to those beyond this small group of faithful subjects.

Fear and refusal in reactive subjectivation

Some people in BiH, of course, disagreed with the diagnoses and demands formulated in the 2014 revolt. Some could be qualified as Badiou's ‘obscure subjects', evoking the atemporal fetish of the Ethnonational Body in ways that were entirely predictable in this divided post-war setting. They found a particularly potent symbol in the burning of the presidency building, which, they never tired of pointing out, ‘not even Serbian nationalist besiegers had done in the war'. Yet I will focus instead on what I believe to be a more widespread and efficacious set of responses: those of people who withheld support but in principle sympathised with much of the concerns of the revolt. I identify two interrelated key patterns in such responses: fear and refusal.

A few days after the start of the revolt, as I sat down for my regular shave in Sarajevo, I asked the barber, M, a woman in her fifties, what she thought about it. ‘Terrible', she said, ‘to see those buildings burn … It sends me back to the war straight away. If you have lived through that once … Never again!' Like many other non-participants, M recoiled in fear at the sight of destruction and chaotic violence that the media so enthusiastically served up (Jansen, 2018). Yet there was no evocation of any anti-evental Body here, no occultation. When pressed by her daughter, M linked the revolt to familiar themes in our conversations, offering scathing criticisms of the entire party-political elite and empathy with the need of the long suffering people of BiH to express their anger and demand change. M thus did somehow participate in the present produced by the revolt's faithful subjects, but at a safe distance and without fidelity. What we see at work here is a reactive subjectivation of sorts, a reluctance to incorporate oneself in the subject-body of the revolt. At its heart is fear.

Badiou has virtually nothing to say about fear as an obstacle to faithful subjectivity. Characteristically, in his Spartacus example, he first mentions fear as something felt by slave masters (2009: 56). Any fear felt by slaves appears only briefly when he states that the momentum of the uprising was weakened by the ‘denial of too many fearful slaves (reactive subject)' (63–64). Here we find an acknowledgement that some kind of critical mass is required for an event to be carried through to its truth consequences. And this brings us to what, after Feldman (2016), I will call ‘refusal'.

Sometimes in combination with fear, a second key pattern in responses of people in BiH to the revolt consisted of a refusal to accord it any evental potential. Again this resonates with Badiou's reactive subject who plays it safe, holds out for ‘ameliorations' (2009: 56) that those in charge of the status quo may concede in order to minimise the intensity and duration of the production of a new present by faithful subjects. In BiH, the main ruling Bosniak nationalist party in particular sought to ‘regulate' (373) the threat of the revolt in that manner. Acknowledging the ‘legitimate concerns of the people', its leader called yet again for more patience (using the Turkism ‘sabur') and constantly evoked the spectre of violence. In that way, he sought to pre-emptively demobilise potential faithful subjects, playing on fear as well as moderate demands for change. Amongst those receptive to this, there were people who registered the present, but who could not be bothered to join in ‘because they had more important worries'. As Badiou points out, such reactive subjectivation is derivative: it ‘conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful break (which it calls “violence” or “terrorism”) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished present' (61). Badiou gives the example of historian François Furet's claims that all the gains of the French Revolution could have been achieved without its ruptures, which had therefore been ‘pointless' (57).

In BiH, too, many considered the 2014 revolt ‘pointless', but in a different manner. While deeply dissatisfied with the status quo, and even if they did not have ‘more important worries', they declared faithful militancy useless because they saw it as doomed to fail. Fidelity, in other words, was rejected as gullibility. The desire to affirm one's distance from any such gullibility, I contend, is a key driver of responses to any transformative political action in BiH today. In 2014, in an established genre of Bosnian sociality, cafés across Sarajevo chimed with iterations of such refusal: the revolt's demands were rejected as utopian, its future anterior investments as a waste of energy, and fidelity to it as ludicrous. Only fools could believe in the chances of such (or indeed any) action. Sometimes this included claims that the revolt was orchestrated by political parties, foreign-funded non-governmental organisations, western embassies and/or secret services. Inscribed in a belief that such a ‘hand of the stranger' (Badiou, 2005: 208) can always be detected behind every happening in BiH, this externalisation of any impulse for political change approximated a denial that any event had even taken place. From this perspective, the 2014 revolt was thus partly dismissed as a non-event: just ‘more of the same', the protests and plena were already fully integrated into the status quo. ⁷ Yet, ultimately, like the fearful reactive subjectivation of barber M, so the refusal of gullibility in Sarajevo cafés can only constitute itself in response to the new present: it is the naiveté of other people that allows the display of wisdom. Refusal shows not only that one is ‘wise', as in knowledgeable, but also ‘wise to' the ways of the world, and therefore above any pointless distractions.

I contend that fear and refusal, along with widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo, were predominant in the responses of people in BiH to the winter 2014 revolt. As the protests and plena lost their momentum, the fear of reactive subjects abated and their refusals of fidelity could be seen to be vindicated: nothing had changed, yet again. Insofar as they were right, the wise witnessed the prolongation of their own dissatisfaction.

We shall return to both fear and refusal below. Here I note that my disenchanting reading of the resonance of the revolt reflects a dominant pattern in my writing on BiH since 2000, which has little to say about events, ruptures or indeed change. This is not for lack of trying. Politically, I am gasping to detect transformative potential. Theoretically, in fine Manchester tradition, I want to foreground contradictions, conflicts, tensions, crises, dynamics, etc. Yet my empirical findings from BiH are resistant to such analysis. Of course some events—people being born and dying, making or dissolving families, finding or losing jobs, emigrating or returning, etc.—may rupture intelligibility on certain spatiotemporal scales. But they do not affect the omnipresent emic diagnosis of political non-change in BiH (Jansen, 2015). I regretfully share with my interlocutors a sense that, politically, nothing has substantially changed in post-war BiH and that nothing is about to change any time soon (not for the worse and certainly not for the better). ⁸ It cannot be a coincidence that the only text on BiH I know of that deals with event theory detects reproduction, not change. Inspired primarily by Simmelian sociology, Moore (2011) analyses reactions to a football-related riot in the town of Mostar and argues it is best understood not as transformative but as part of maintenance work (see also Pyyhtinen, 2007). Likewise, when confronted with some happening or other in BiH, I usually cannot identify much change or even transformative potential either. Frankly, over the years, I have rarely been surprised by anything political in BiH. What I find striking instead is a lack of change and much of my work tries to understand the resilience of this status quo and people's experiences of it, including their exasperation with being stuck in the Dayton Meantime, their yearnings to overcome it and, more prickly, their complicity in its reproduction.

Scaling up: subjectivation in the face of another event

How did fear and refusal become such common reactions to the 2014 revolt amongst people in BiH who in principle sympathised with its diagnoses and demands? Can Badiou's conceptual repertoire be usefully deployed to study this? I believe it can. My argument will rest on a basic move: to shift scales. I have already done so to address forms of subjectivation beyond militancy, in dialogue with Badiou's differentiation in LoW. Now I add analytical scaling up in temporal terms. I adjust my zoom to address happenings on a longer time-span. In a remarkable tour de force, Colin Wright has taken this further to propose a Badouian ‘evental historiography' of the Rastafari movement (2013). Recentring the process of ‘naming', ⁹ which Badiou dropped in LoW, Wright insists, against common interpretations, that, for all its anti-historicism, Badiou's approach is not ahistorical. Like the anthropological studies that engage with Badiou's earlier work, my assumptions and emphasis will move somewhat further away from Badiou than that.

A central mechanism in people's dismissals of the evental potential of the winter 2014 happenings, we saw, consisted precisely of framing them in a longer time-span. Wise refusal in particular incorporated the protests and plena in more encompassing accounts of BiH history and thus reduced them to ‘more of the same'. Therefore, understanding Dayton BiH's relative uneventfulness, and the emic sense of uneventfulness, requires us to trace how people place any happening (and thus any potential event) in a history. If events are only that if they are acclaimed as such by some persons—and here we can include all four subjectivations of LoW—these persons assess them in relation to other happenings: those that occurred before it and others that they hope or fear might happen in the future. The potential of an event may lie in its singularity, but the way it becomes effective or not in a transformative sense does not occur in singularity. I therefore fold my approach in Bensa and Fassin's argument that, where events are concerned, ‘the specific contribution of the social sciences is the construction of pertinent series, i.e. series in which the event makes sense/gains meaning [prends sens]' (2002: 15, my translation).

Framing the issue in these terms, we can discern a key empirical pattern in Dayton BiH. Namely, people's diagnoses of uneventfulness are not without any events. Those who refused to recognise evental potential in the 2014 revolt invoked other events. One in particular looms large here: the 1992–1995 war. So shifting up the temporal scale of our analysis allows us to see that the sense that nothing ever changes in BiH can be specified as a sense that no significant political events have happened since 1995. It is from casting any happening against the war event, inaugurating the eventless Meantime, that the fear of barber M and the refusal in Sarajevo cafés draw their efficacy.

Before elaborating on this, I remind the reader that Badiou reserves the term ‘event' exclusively for happenings that provoke the formulation of a universalist-egalitarian maxim. For example, he considers the Soviet October Revolution to be an event, but not the rise of Nazism. In his polemic on ethics Badiou reads Nazism instead as one of three forms of ‘Evil', namely as terror, consisting of fidelity to a (particularistic) ‘simulacrum' rather than to a (universalist) real event (2001: 71–87). His claim that he makes this distinction on strictly formal grounds is disputed (e.g. Hallward, 2004: 15–16; Laclau, 2004; Žižek, 1999: 139). In any case, for Badiou, the 1990s war in BiH would clearly not qualify as an event. At most it could be a simulacrum. I depart from these postulates, because, with Bensa and Fassin, I believe that

the task of the social sciences is not simply to say, with, or, more often, after other commentators on current affairs, whether we are dealing with an event: … In the rupture, we must analyse what is ruptured–what is undone or what is done. And this is where the social sciences contribute what is most needed in the event: an added value of intelligibility. (2002: 14, my translation)

First, perspective. To whom did the war become an event? The answer is simple: while most people do not talk much about their personal war experiences, almost everyone in BiH acclaims it as an event. Sharply divergent interpretations do not diminish this. In fact, they contribute to maintaining the war's evental status, as media reporting, for example, relentlessly mobilises it in competing claims to political legitimacy.

Second, the question of intensity. How much of an event is the war for people in BiH? Again, the answer is straightforward: virtually all accounts acclaim it as an irruptive, intelligibility-rocking, earth-shattering, life-transforming event. Its transformative potential was not only recognised but also realised. The war, then, is The Big Event. ¹⁰ This is not to say that it was necessarily experienced as a singular happening at the outset (Das, 1995; Demetriou, 2007; Moore, 2011). In fact, retrospective narratives often recall initial confrontations with multiple small happenings that caused mini-crises of intelligibility. For example, many Sarajevans remember what they now consider the first days of the war in those terms: ‘suddenly, there was no public transport', or ‘suddenly, we didn't go to school anymore', or ‘suddenly, some Serbian colleagues didn't turn up at work', and so on. Only later was the war assembled into a single, collectively acclaimed event.

Third, the question of duration. How long is the war event an event? Again the answer is unequivocal: it has an active (after)life at least until today. How so? One way to approach this question is through Lynteris's (2014) instructive distinction between an event, entailing a paradigm shift around a new truth-for-all, requiring new (biopolitical) subjectivities, and a crisis, reinstituting a known truth and reinforcing existing subjectivities. A common elite strategy in Dayton BiH turns any potential event—such as the 2014 revolt, but also the floods later that year—into a crisis instead, calling for further entrenchment of the lines set out by the war event that produced this political configuration. Domestic ruling elites and their partners in the institutions of foreign supervision thus met the revolt with responses that now incorporated some rhetoric on social justice, but called mantra-style for further ethnonational consociation, further efforts towards European integration and, above all, further patience (Jansen, 2018). This reiterated the significance of the war as The Event to which fidelity is imperative. Yet, the relative success of this strategy should not be read as evidence of active support for the status quo. Ask any person in BiH about the political situation, let alone about politicians, and you are likely to hear a barrage of expletives. So what about all those who sympathised with the revolt's diagnoses and demands, but abstained from fidelity? An acknowledgement of their fear and/or refusal leads me to place the duration of the war event through subjectivation at the heart of my approach. This is where I believe we can discern the most valuable contribution of Badiou's philosophy to anthropological theory.

We saw that, in B&E, Badiou conceived of fidelity as a sustained act/decision by someone, who in that way becomes a subject of truth. Humphrey (2008), we noted, includes lower-grade ‘decision-events' enacted by already-existing persons and involving other forces not situated in the individual (through divination, shamanism, etc.). Taking this further—and, like Humphrey, Lynteris and Demetriou, already having dropped Badiou's universalist-egalitarian clause—I bring in his more recent differentiation of subjects to attend to the different ways in which events can be acclaimed. In LoW Badiou acknowledges reactive subjectivation: people may recognise evental potential in a happening, a (threatened) rupture of intelligibility, negatively. Barber M and the commentariat in Sarajevo cafés considered the 2014 revolt a ‘bad' event, one that did not deserve fidelity. Twenty years after the Dayton Peace Agreement, the main fidelity-spurring event in Dayton BiH ¹¹ is still very much the 1990s war. Yet that too is a ‘bad' one. So if, contra Badiou, we use ‘emic' criteria to define it as an event, and a ‘bad' one at that, we must loosen his hard distinction between (primary) faithful ‘subjects of truth' and other (secondary) subjects formed strictly in opposition to them. ¹² In BiH the war is acclaimed overwhelmingly as The Big Bad Event—it is ‘bad' both in that it is considered to have been forced upon one by others and in that it brought dramatic change for the worse. However, in doing so, it is most definitely seen to have revealed new truths and to require fidelity (Čengić, 2016), to the degree that any subjectivation without recourse to it is still very hard to imagine.

To understand the place of the war event in subjectivation in Dayton BiH we must therefore diversify Badiou's notion of fidelity. I now discern three important modalities of fidelity to the war event, distinguished on the grounds of the vectors that sustain them.

Modalities of fidelity to the war event

First, some people in contemporary BiH position themselves as militants for a cause pursued during the war, but considered incomplete. Today, the vector for this consists largely of public positionings as faithful subjects with regard to state-building projects that clashed militarily in the war and continue to shape BiH politics. Such militant fidelity appears in the key of ethnonationalist identitarianism but also in the name of a struggle for a united, ‘civic' BiH. Sometimes, these two appear in hybrid assemblages. In addition, we can detect sustained militant subjectivation in response to the war event amongst people who became activists for antimilitarist, antinationalist and other causes crystallised in the war. ¹³ In some ways, then, pace Badiou, fidelity to the war event is indeed predominantly emplotted as militancy, but even here such ‘decisions' are usually felt to have been imposed by a bad event.

Beyond this, the war as a bad event also continues to resonate affectively. As part of this second modality of fidelity, we find fear, to a large degree somatic and much less reflected upon or narrated. As illustrated by barber M's response to the 2014 revolt, war-produced affect often entails a degree of intuitive conservatism: a fear of chaos, of upheaval, indeed of any change. Above I showed that, like for Badiou's reactive subject, novelty here is perceived as holding more threat than promise, but I insisted that the same people may also display exasperation with the status quo. In BiH this feeds into an emphasis on endurance (see Čengić, 2017: 91–94; Jansen, 2015: 182). In addition to fear, crucial to this affective modality of fidelity to the war event is a form of what I will call piety (a term I picked to convey both devotion and conformist deference). Channelled through secular or religious vectors, above all, this piety concerns wartime suffering. Many people were displaced, killed, sexually abused, wounded. Many suffered losses of various kinds. Piety towards victims and their suffering is considered a constitutive part of what it means to be a subject—indeed, even a decent human being—in BiH today. Unsurprisingly, this often entails differentiation between victims. Political elites mobilise the legitimising potential of this suffering—largely in the key of sacrifice—to police loyalty and obedience. And although disputes rage within communities of piety on the degrees of sacrifice made by particular individuals or groups, questioning the value and status of wartime suffering per se is taboo. It is the sacred ground for the requirement of piety. On the level of polity but also of most everyday sociality, a lack of such piety would lead to excommunication. In this sense, in the ‘state' of Dayton BiH there can be no non-pious subject.

Both militant narrative emplotment and affective resonance occur in particular configurations, and we must therefore consider a third vector of fidelity to the war event: institutional sedimentation. The 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement cemented the results of military violence, including ethnic cleansing and genocide. Ethnonational representation was institutionalised and, until today, shapes the conditions in which social reproduction can be pursued through employment and allowances. Regardless of any militancy or affective depth, people in Dayton BiH must forge their paths through war-produced institutions. Alertness to this ‘practical' modality of fidelity to the war event, I believe, provides a useful alternative to the predominance of the register of trauma in discussions of BiH. Clearly, war experiences have produced trauma for some. Yet there is a tendency, particularly from outside the country, to portray people in BiH as stuck in wartime thinking and to exhort them to ‘move on' from what is considered their ‘obsession' with the past. I find such a psychologising register of trauma in statements about Bosnians' collective ‘inability to overcome war' unhelpful. They ignore at their peril that the institutional sedimentations of the war event provide the only effective channels through which most people can seek social reproduction in this place and time. If Das's study of lives in the wake of critical events in India finds that the world is ‘remade' not through an ascent into the transcendental but through a descent into the ordinary (2007: 7), she seems to find this reassuring. The case of BiH reminds us that this is not necessarily good news: the ordinary routines that people ‘descend' into in order to remake the world are themselves shaped by the war-produced Dayton configuration, fostering subjectivations that reinforce and further routinise the effects of war.

Such generalised, multi-vector fidelity to the war event is crucial to understand the relatively limited resonance of the 2014 revolt. In the Dayton Meantime, it is extremely hard to acclaim anything other than the inaugural war event as a potentially transformative happening. Like in post-Nakba Palestine (Feldman, 2016), after a looming bad event, and even from a position that would prefer radical change, all happenings in the Meantime appear comparatively insignificant from the start (see also Bryant, 2012, on North Cyprus). Perhaps still reeling from their by now notorious unpreparedness for the war, and regardless of the relative weight of particular vectors for their fidelity to the war event, this fidelity serves to turn other happenings into non-events. ¹⁴ An analysis of contemporary BiH must therefore be alert to different modalities of fidelity to a war that is widely acclaimed as a bad event and without which subjectivation is currently unthinkable. The war made an unprecedented new world: it ushered in a new reality, with new truths, tangible in all kinds of mundane, practical ways. In doing so it fostered new subjectivities. The legitimacy and reproduction of this reality relies on fidelity, continuously reaffirming these subjectivities. In such a configuration, I argue, moving ever further away from Badiou, we should also be alert to how people may be summoned into fidelity, or at least find it hard to imagine ways to proceed without it.

Concluding remarks

Badiou's axiomatic approach currently feeds enthusiasm amongst the radical left. Usually mobilised to forge political optimism, I have explored how it can help us understand disappointment too. Politically, there is an understandable draw to focus on the transformative potential of events. But even for activist purposes there is limited value in seeking out maximally irruptive events and celebrating their presumed purity outside of history and/or representation. Arguably having encouraged at least some of this, Badiou himself likes to remind us that he rejects any such ‘speculative leftism' (e.g. 2005: 210). Anyway, emancipatory struggles, I believe, also have much to gain from understanding how happenings are made into non-events.

But what can anthropological theory take from this philosophy? As empirical social scientists, most anthropologists are unlikely to ever attend (and recognise) any event that would qualify as such for Badiou. ¹⁵ Nor is there much chance that we will run into any faithful subject that would pass his stringent entry exam. Rather than mourning this, I have proposed that anthropological studies of political struggle and process can fruitfully mobilise Badiou's focus on subjectivation-in-relation-to-events by lowering the bar on both counts. Badiou's axiomatic mission cannot be imported directly into anthropology without epistemological translation. Nor, I believe, should it be. What Badiou brings to the approach I have proposed, then, is not Ten Commandments with which to separate pseudo-events from real events, or pseudo-subjects from real subjects, but a provocation and a call for sustained attention to the constitutive relationships between the (after)lives of happenings and subject formation. In that way, I found engagement with his work productive to crystallise my theorisation of responsive subjectivation in BiH. I therefore suggest that Badiou's thought can inspire an operational analytical toolbox for the anthropological study of change but also, counter-intuitively, of the lack of it. ¹⁶ And this can inform theoretically sophisticated understandings of the lives of the mortals who populate this planet and of how these lives are (re)organised over time.

Not a call for a Badouian turn, then, but an invitation to consider how we can make his philosophy work for social scientific purposes. Like the anthropologists who engaged with Badiou's earlier work before me, I found that our theorisation of subjectivation in response to happenings requires relaxation and further differentiation of his axiomatic apparatus. Realising the promise of a degree of fidelity to his approach requires engaging in a series of interrelated infidelities. Let me summarise them here in four points. First, I dropped the universalist-egalitarian clause. Anthropologists may usefully trace faithful and other responses to any happening that is emically acclaimed as an event. This may include events that even subjects who are faithful to them consider ‘bad'. Second, I deepened the proto-historicisation that Badiou started in LoW. Shifting scales temporally, I traced how people's (non-)acclamation of a happening as an event involves framing it in a series of other happenings in which it ‘gains meaning/makes sense'. Third, I complemented a focus on the prefigurative fidelity of militants of a truth with more encompassing and nuanced analysis of reactive subjectivation, accounting, in my example, for fear, for ‘wise' avoidance of gullibility, for ‘having more important worries', for piety, for sheer endurance and for strategies of material reproduction. Reducing all this to Badiou's scornful formula of reactive subjects could have been gratifying to me as a would-be faithful subject, but I am more interested to gain insight into the production of political passivity despite massive dissatisfaction. This, I showed, may involve tracing the closing off of certain evental possibilities in fidelity to a previous event. Fourth, therefore, I drew attention to different modalities of fidelity—here: militant, affective and institutional-practical—that make an event earn its name, and to the vectors that facilitate these.

As a coda, I return to BiH. Analysing fear, refusal and multiple-vector modalities of fidelity to the Big Bad Event of the war, I have identified the sheer difficulty of imagining fidelity to any other event in these circumstances. So, again, I end up with a depressing story (at least from my political perspective). Yet this is not a closed determinist analysis. It acknowledges contingency: what can be done over time, can be undone over time too. By another event, for example. To anyone familiar with BiH, this last half sentence is likely to elicit anxiety. I find it unsettling too: the daunting challenge in BiH is to devise ways to reduce the tyrannical hold of the war event without recourse to another war event.