I DID. Actos éticos en el reino de la finitud

Abstract

In his last seminar, Alain Badiou denounces the contemporary ideology based on the notion of finitude, a set of devices that destroy temporality and memory. It is the logic of the Western consumer who is satisfied with everything that can be bought and is compatible with the system, even though it is unjust and unjustifiable. Badiou, unlike Bosteels, does not explicitly name the most obvious roots of this philosophical reference: finitude is the name of a French critical theory-elaborated first in Heidegger's wake, later in Derrida's - that refuses any preeminence or domain of the subject and conceives man as pure receptivity exposed to language. The death of the subject is accompanied by a construction of images, “public persons” as Groys calls them, empty subjectivities, “self-designs” (Foster). 

We analyze three acts inconsistent both with finitude discourse and with self-design in three contemporary works of different genres: Birdman by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu, Spam by Rafael Spregelburd and Simone by Eduardo Lalo. We put forward the hypothesis that these acts can be seen as “pure acts”, in Kant’s words: those who are beyond equivalence and all performance criteria, which contain in themselves their own purpose. They may seem parapraxes, and are, in a sense, “symbolic suicides of the subject”, which can be born again, but will no longer be the same.