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Filozofski vestnik  |  Volume XXXVIII  |  Number 2  |  2017  |  71–92
* Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Jelica Šumič Riha*
Towards a Materialism of the Real: 
The One of the Same
Contemporary materialism can be characterised as a position that satisfies two 
requirements: first, to think means to think from a position of immanence, and 
second, to think means to take as one’s compass those instances of dysfunction 
that have a power of interruption. Far from being an exception to the rule, this 
position is rather a mainstream in contemporary thought. Indeed, the primacy 
of the multiple over the One and the primacy of the Other over the Same, these 
being the two crucial consequences of immanentism and orientation to the real, 
has characterised much of twentieth-century thought. In fact, it can be con-
sidered as the fundamental axiom of contemporary materialism worthy of the 
name, a distinctive sign of its originality and subversiveness. Today, however, 
something has radically changed insofar as contemporary materialism seems 
to be oddly incapable of effecting a cut in the dominant discourse, to fracture 
it. In the present conjuncture, dominated by what Badiou called “democratic 
materialism”, a true ideology of pas-tout, not-all, since it affirms that “there are 
only bodies and languages,”1 considering contemporary social space as a space 
of an endless proliferation of identities and alterities, we have been witness to 
a disturbing inversion: the primacy of the multiple and the Other, which has 
been a mark of an unsettling novelty, a rupturing with the dominant ideology 
of the times, appears today to be absorbed into the dominant discourse, a pro-
longation of this discourse. 
Here, Lacan and Badiou will be our guides. Badiou in particular, since for him 
only what he calls “materialist dialectic” is capable of countering “democratic 
materialism”: the Two of “democratic materialism”, which means all there is 
are bodies and languages, is supplemented by the Three of “materialist dia-
lectic”: truths as exceptions to “what there is”. This clearly follows from the 
fundamental axiom of “materialist dialectic”: “There are only bodies and lan-
1 Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds. Being and Event II, trans. Alberto Toscano, Continuum, 
London, New York 2009, p. 1.
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guages, except that there are truths.”2 Yet truths, this impossible-real exception 
to bodies and languages, must, if we are to maintain a materialist, which is to 
say an immanentist position, manifest themselves as a new body, which is not, 
for all that, natural. Put differently, a materialist conception requires that the 
appearing of the truth depends, like anything else, on the regime of identities 
and differences organised by the structuring law of a given situation, or, to use 
Badiou’s terminology in Logics of Worlds, the transcendental laws of appear-
ing. In this regard, it could be said that what democratic materialism excludes 
from the outset is the possibility of an other bodily presence or incorporation 
in a given world, incorporation made possible through the emergence of the 
impossible-real. The gap that separates democratic materialism and materialist 
dialectic thus precisely “the gap between the multiple-body of the human ani-
mal and its subjective incorporation.”3 
I will argue that if the body is the material support, the place in the world of a 
becoming truth only insofar as it incorporates to itself, and thus to the world 
for which it is a body, the trace of the disruptive real, the event, to use Badiou’s 
own term, the subversive gesture today, from the perspective of “materialist 
dialectic”, consists precisely in recovering the cutting edge, the divisive power, 
of the One and the Same precisely in a universe in which the One and the Same 
appear to have no place. 
There are two conflicting approaches regarding the question of the status to be 
accorded to the One (and the Same) in a limitless, not-all universe. I take the 
crucial stake in a properly fratricidal war that has set as opponents the former 
allies sharing a common political past (Maoism) and Lacan as the key theoret-
ical reference, to be none other than the question of the universal and whether 
it is compatible with any kind of the One and the Same. Second, in transposing 
this ontological problematic into the political sphere, my aim is to evaluate the 
contemporary possibility of an emancipatory politics, which would be equal to 
the challenges of the limitless universe. Of particular interest in the context of 
the current rehabilitation of the One and the Same is an attempt to radically the-
orise two discredited concepts from the perspective of the structurally untotalis-
able, inconsistent multiple provided by Badiou, who is considered to be one of 
2 Ibid., p. 3.
3 Ibid., p. 482.
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
the most rigorous theorists of the “multiple-without-one”. Let me start by laying 
out Badiou’s claim for the ontological priority of the multiple over the one. 
The One of the Same
The major claim made by Badiou is, as is well known, that nothing can be said 
of being qua being prior to the distinction one/multiple. Being is neither one 
(because for Badiou there is no one, only the count-as-one), nor multiple (be-
cause the multiple is only the regime of presentation). Indeed, being is only 
multiple inasmuch as it presents itself. It is in the after-effect of the count, that 
is, retroactively, that being is thinkable as multiple. If “the One […] is not,” as 
Badiou postulates, if the One only “exists as operation,”4 two consequences 
follow therefrom: first, multiple is “retroactively apprehended as non-one as 
soon as being-one is a result”5; second, the fictive being of the One itself is but 
an after-effect of the operation of counting. Starting with the 1990s, however, 
we have been witness to a curious pivoting of perspectives in Badiou, a change 
of coordinates in which one sees a new status of the One re-elaborated. While 
the key point of reference remains the primacy of the multiple over the One, in 
his more recent work Badiou sets out to grasp the One, not as an effect of the 
operation, the count-as-one, but as a product of a generic truth-procedure – and 
precisely in a domain in which one would least expect it, namely in politics, 
which is, by definition, the realm of the multiple. We can find an understanding 
of the specifically political consequences of this re-elaboration of the One in 
Badiou’s discussion of the notion of equality in his book Conditions. 
Equality, in his view, is the only philosophically pertinent concept for con-
temporary theorising on politics. This privilege of equality is sketched out by 
its contrast with liberty and fraternity. Unlike these two terms nowadays con-
taminated by liberalism or communitarianism, respectively, only the concept 
of equality provides a sufficient force of rupture due precisely, in the words of 
Badiou, to “its abstraction.” It is only by being subtracted from all communal 
predicates as well as from the juridical statuses – ultimately, by being stripped 
of all of its contents, as an “emptiness of the same”, to use Badiou’s expres-
4 Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham, Continuum, London, New York, 
2006, p. 24.
5 Ibid., p. 25.
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sion – that equality is “immediately prescriptive.”6 Badiou is explicit on this 
point. What equality seeks to promote is a radical but entirely abstract logic of 
the Same. Equality is its own proper end. Although an egalitarian prescription 
neither adds something to nor subtracts from a given situation, it nevertheless 
succeeds in producing always the same result. Equality generates equality, as 
it were. My claim is that equality, to the extent that it produces always the same 
effects in a given situation, is an instance of the real in politics. 
How are we to understand this realism of the Same that breaks both with the 
communitarian as well as with the juridical conception of sameness or, better 
still, that breaks with the imaginary similarity and the symbolic nomination? 
What then is the status of the same that is beyond all similarity and difference? 
The political challenge of the real sameness can be expressed in Badiou’s terms 
as the challenge of finding a practice which brings out some sameness that is 
“outside the dialectics of the same and the Other” since we are dealing here 
with “the same without the other.”7
The promotion of the real sameness has some radical implications for a contem-
porary theorisation of the collective in the political realm. Obviously, not just 
any form of collective is compatible with the “authority of the Same,” to borrow 
Badiou’s term. Actually, the only collective that is compatible with the same 
is one in which no singularity is placed as an exception, in which each singu-
larity is “the same as any other” and is thus compatible with the real same-
ness. This equality without identity or predicate, the sameness of pure or mere 
singularities, is what Badiou terms the “communism of singularities.”8 In this 
regard, “communism of singularities,” is, strictly speaking, not a name of any 
community. It would be more appropriate perhaps to say that it is an impossi-
ble name or a name of that which, in politics, cannot be named: community. 
For there to be an emancipatory politics community must remain unnameable. 
Communism is therefore a generic name for the very genericity in politics. Or, 
better perhaps, communism is a generic name for the impossible. That is to say, 
a name for a paradoxical multiplicity whose members are joined by what dis-
6 Alain Badioiu, Conditions, trans. Steven Corcoran, Continuum, London, New York 2008, p. 
247.
7 Ibid., p. 249.
8 Ibid., p. 248.
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
joins them. A community of pure singularities is thus a community of a radical 
non-commonality. 
However, and this is crucial, the unbinding of the social bond, in a given sit-
uation, which brings about the transformation of a consistent or closed mul-
tiplicity into an inconsistent multiplicity, an open, not-all multiplicity, is not 
something that one discovers, something that is there – only invisible. It rather 
results from an always inventive, inimitable way of abstracting from the statist 
count. Which means that there is no formula for the production of the Same 
in the field of politics. This is because for the genericity of singularities to be 
brought to light a special operation is necessary, one which brings out the 
structural, irreducible gap between the existing principle of counting: the stat-
ist count, which count only parts or subsets, and the egalitarian count which 
makes each and every singularity count as one. Situated in a specific situation, 
such an egalitarian count is necessarily a political innovation. 
This, I think, is the core of Badiou’s claim that emancipatory politics seeks to 
present a given situation without its representation, that is, without its state. 
And only from such a perspective can Badiou state that politics seeks to expose 
the infinity of a given situation, that is, to expose the situation “as virtually 
subtracted from the necessary existence of the state.”9 The politics of emanci-
pation is therefore a matter of creating, producing, an impossible zero degree, 
as it were, when the necessity of the meta-structure, the state of the situation, is 
revealed to be entirely contingent. It is precisely at this point that there emerges 
an irresolvable differend, to use Lyotard’s term, between two theoreticians of 
the “communism of singularities,” Badiou and Agamben.
Paul versus Paul
Without entering into this debate, I would simply like to note that by introduc-
ing a new third division between “being under law” and “being under grace,” 
Paul, as Badiou and Agamben read him, with one gesture, so to speak, equates 
and at the same time invalidates both fundamental partitions of his time: the 
division between Jews and non-Jews, on the one hand, and the division sepa-
9 Alain Badiou, “Politics as Truth Procedure” in: Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker, Verso, 
London, New York 2006, p.
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rating free men from slaves, on the other. The previous distinctions are namely 
displaced by a new division insofar as the latter does not address the subject as 
a member of a particular community but rather situates him or her at a distance 
with respect to any communal belonging. As a result, this division to the sec-
ond power, the division of divisions, entails a radical transformation on both 
the individual and collective levels.
For Badiou, the lesson to be drawn from Paul is that this ultimate indistinc-
tion between the Jew and non-Jew results from the emergence of an ultra-one, 
an unsituable and therefore disruptive supplement, which he calls the event, 
whose very occurrence undermines or invalidates the law of the situation. What 
is crucial for Badiou is a paradoxical feature of the evental One. For the evental 
One is, by definition, divisive. It is One that divides into two – a self-referential 
division – since it necessarily involves a decision as to the actual taking place 
of the event and the consequences that such a ratification of its taking place 
impose on the inhabitants of that situation, that is, their commitment as sub-
jects. It is a divisive One, yet it is precisely through its capacity to divide that 
it generates a “for all”, the universal. It is because the occurrence of an event 
is undecidable from the standpoint of the law of the situation that an event 
can summon no-one in particular. Or, to quote Badiou, the evental One “is that 
which inscribes no difference in the subjects to which it addresses itself.”10 This 
means that it summons anyone, which means everyone. In the words of Badi-
ou, “unless addressed to all, the One crumbles and disappears.” 
Everything, however, depends on how we understand the universal. The dispute 
between Badiou and Agamben is a dispute about the status to be accorded to 
the universal in the perspective of the not-all. For Badiou – this is my claim – 
the question of universality is the question of the One and the Same. The maxim 
of universality that is rooted in an event is that “the sign of the One is the ‘for 
all’, or the ‘without exception’.”11 Put simply, the One is one only if it is “for all”. 
The universal, according to Badiou, is based on the capacity of the One not to 
totalise, to unite, but, rather, to divide. It is the power of division of the One, of 
the evental One, which creates the universality. It is in this sense that the evental 
10 Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier, Stanford 
University Press, Stanford 2003, p. 76.
11 Ibid.
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
One creates the “for all”. It is not addressed to some pre-given particular multi-
plicity, but rather to a paradoxical multiplicity that is, as such, still indiscernible.
 It is not difficult to recognise in this indiscernible multiplicity Badiou’s peculiar 
formulation of the not-all, however with one essential specification: the not-all 
multiplicity is not discovered, rather it is produced. Indeed, it is a multiplicity 
that never ceases to generate an elusive, insituable excess. The Badiousian not-
all is characterised as “a multiplicity in excess of itself.”12 For the evental One 
to be truly universal, the “for all” to which it is addressed, the “for all” it sum-
mons, first needs to be produced. This is because this instance of the address 
does not exist as yet, or, more precisely, it only exists as caught up in the exist-
ing communal particularities or partitions, that is to say, as a multiplicity that 
is precisely not susceptible to being “for all”, a multiplicity of individuals who 
are rather open only to that which is specifically destined to them as members 
of a particular community determined by particular predicates. In other words, 
it is not enough to proclaim that a truth is for all since this “for all” must man-
ifest itself as such, that is to say, it has to be materialised, incorporated into a 
body, which Badiou will later call the “transhuman body of a truth.” 
The radical novelty of Badiou’s account of Pauline universalism can be seen 
precisely in his insistence that the “for all” is articulated to the not-all, indeed, 
the “for all” and the “not-all” are not incompatible. Hence, if, the “for all” itself 
requires the “not-all” as its presupposition, this is because the same operation 
that makes the de-totalisation possible, that is to say, that makes it possible 
for a multiplicity to exceed its own limits, also constitutes the verification of 
the universal. The evental One, insofar as it is for all, necessarily involves the 
endless production of an insituable excess, a process of ceaselessly exceeding, 
of surpassing itself of a generic multiplicity. But to the extent that it necessarily 
implies the not-all, the One that is “for all” must be situated from the perspec-
tive of the infinite. The One that is articulated with the “for all” is the One in the 
infinite. While every truth procedure consists in infinitely deploying a purely 
generic multiplicity that necessarily collapses differences, this does not entail 
a destruction or annihilation of differences precisely because these fictitious 
beings, these opinions, customs, differences, are that to which universality is 
addressed. 
12 Ibid., p. 78.
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It is precisely at this point where one would expect that Agamben would recog-
nise the affinity between his and Badiou’s position that he completely misreads 
Badiou’s point regarding the universal. In Agamben’s reading, what Paul seeks 
is to show how a new division, i.e. sarx/pneuma, not only does not found any 
universalism, but rather renders any attempt at universalism impossible. In-
deed, it is a stratagem destined to expose, in any pre-given All, the presence 
of an irreducible remainder that turns this All into a not-all. It is this new divi-
sion that brings out a residue, a remnant, the non-non-Jew, as Agamben calls 
it, thereby showing that the existing apparatus of divisions (Jew/non-Jew, free/
slave, male/female) cannot exhaust the whole of the subject. This “remnant”, 
this measureless, uncountable, elusive remainder, does not separate the Jew 
from the non-Jew. Rather, it appears as a wedge that separates the Jew from 
himself or herself and the non-Jew from himself or herself, preventing them 
from coinciding with themselves, ultimately from “being themselves.” The sub-
ject, according to Paul, as Agamben reads him, is nothing other than his or her 
inadequacy to himself or herself, the fact that he or she can be what he or she is 
only through a minimal difference towards himself or herself. 
What is decisive here, according to Agamben, is that Paul’s division, by intro-
ducing a remnant into the law’s overall division of the people, produces the ef-
fect that “Jews and non-Jews are constitutively not all.13 By producing through 
his division of divisions an ineliminable remnant, the Agambenian Paul did not 
found universalism but rather disclosed the not-all, an untotalisable multiplici-
ty of singularities. The fundamental lesson to be drawn from Paul, according to 
Agamben, is therefore that there only exists the remnant as the not-all. Paul’s 
political legacy thus consists in his discovering the concept of the remnant, 
which is “that which can never coincide with itself, as all or as part, that which 
infinitely remains or resists in each division.”14 As an instance which through 
its appearance in any totality brings about its collapse, its transformation into a 
not-all, the indivisible remainder is, for Agamben, a stand-in for a true political 
subject, which, as such, does not exist, yet it ex-sists, precisely as an inelimina-
ble residue, in every subset or multiplicity produced through the law.
13 Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, 
trans. Patricia Dailey, Stanford University Press, Stanford 2005, p. 50.
14 Ibid., p. 57.
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
As I shall show in the second part of my essay, this double, highly uncomfort-
able position – i.e. to be both the incarnation of the divided subject and, as 
such, an irreducible objectal moment, the object a, capable of dividing others, 
the socio-political Other, thus preventing the constitution of any totality, any 
All, whatsoever – is precisely the position that some Lacanian Maoists assign to 
the bearers of the name “Jew”. What then is produced through Paul’s gesture of 
“the division of divisions”? For Badiou, it is a universal formula for the division 
of the subject, a formula that “produces a Sameness and an Equality.”15 This 
can only be achieved if some inhabitants of a given situation, as a result of the 
evental rupture, commit themselves, to quote Badiou, to the “faithful construc-
tion of an infinite generic multiple.” This being precisely the way in which the 
One of the Same presents itself in a situation shattered by the event. 
With a slight, almost imperceptible shift of emphasis, Agamben comes to a dif-
ferent if not contrary conclusion. Paul, according to Agamben, “makes Jews 
and non-Jews, inside and outside the law, indistinguishable from each other 
by introducing a remnant.”16 The division of divisions brings out a bit of the 
real, an irreducible remainder, a sort of Pauline object a, which is nothing other 
than a materialisation of the impossibility of the subject coinciding with itself 
at either the individual or collective level. 
The Aleph of the Emancipatory Politics
This brings us to the central issue that divides Badiou and Agamben: the ar-
ticulation between the not-all and the universal. While both Badiou and Ag-
amben tie the politics of emancipation to the not-all as its point of departure, 
in Agamben’s case the not-all remains the unsurpassable horizon for politics. 
Which is why Agamben contents himself with bringing out (as a result of Paul’s 
“division of divisions”) a production of a remnant as that object in the subject 
that prevents him or her from coinciding with himself or herself. But this also 
explains why, according to Agamben, an inconsistent multiplicity of singular-
ities cannot actualise itself as a community. In this respect, I will argue, com-
munity, for Agamben, is, in Lacan’s vocabulary, the real, that is, impossible. 
Agamben only understands the remnant in terms of the not-all, incomplete-
15 Saint Paul, p. 109.
16 The Time That Remains, p. 113.
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ness, thus showing that there is no place for the universal or for the same. This 
is what distinguishes Badiou from Agamben. In contrast to this, Badiou seeks 
to show that the not-all is no obstacle for the universal. On condition, however, 
that we invent a way of counting the uncountable, in short, a way of counting 
the infinite. Badiou’s fundamental claim, i.e. that “for all” can and must be sit-
uated in the infinite, thus signals an unbridgeable gap between a theory of the 
production of the remnant and a theory of the production of the Same.
For Badiou, unlike Agamben, it is not enough to say that an emancipatory pol-
itics aims at bringing out an inconsistent multiplicity there where the law of 
the situation is supposed to create a consistent one. The point here is rather to 
show that the only way in which the One of the Same, the real One of the event, 
can manifest itself in a given situation is through the creation of a generic mul-
tiplicity as a not-all body of the One of the Same. In Badiou’s words, politics is 
the single truth procedure that is not only generic in its result, but also in “the 
local composition of its subject” What this means is simply that “all are vir-
tual militants”17 of the truth procedure, which is to say that it is “immediately 
universalising” on condition that the infinity of the situation is exposed. The 
famous fidelity to the event is therefore nothing other than an invention of the 
consequences of the event that prove to be as infinite as the situation itself. 
This is why the “for all” that the evental One inaugurates remains necessarily 
not-all, that is, incompletable or open. It is precisely in this context that the 
axiomatisation of equality takes on its full value. What characterises politics 
as a truth procedure is its capacity to summon this infinity of the situation “as 
subjective universality.” 
What distinguishes an emancipatory politics is precisely its ability to “treat the 
infinite as such according to the principle of the same, the egalitarian princi-
ple.”18 In other words, by assigning to the egalitarian prescription the function 
of the counting-as-one each and every singularity that composes the existing 
situation, Badiou seeks to show that, just as in mathematics, in politics, too, the 
operation of transfinitisation can be set in motion. At this point we encounter 
an unexpected twist. Indeed, what singularises the political procedure is the 
fact that it proceeds from the infinite to the 1. Every emancipatory politics pro-
17 “Politics as Truth Procedure”, p. 142.
18 Ibid., p. 143.
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
ceeds from the infinite of a given situation but its aim is to “produce the same” 
or, in Badiou’s words, “to count as one that which is not even counted is what is 
at stake in every genuinely political thought, every prescription that summons 
the collective as such. The 1 is the numericality of the same, and to produce the 
same is what an emancipatory political procedure is capable of.”19 
Thus, a politics of emancipation is capable of producing the same, or more pre-
cisely, of producing the One because it sets out to work, or rather, to count in the 
gap opened up between the statist count and its own, in order to produce for a 
given situation the point of its impossible-real. This real that is “in accordance 
with an egalitarian maxim”20 is precisely what I have termed the One of the 
Same. A politics of emancipation, I would argue, is possible only if it is able to 
produce, in a given situation, the One of the Same, namely, that operator that 
makes it possible to distort “every non-egalitarian claim,” as Badiou maintains, 
by counting each one universally as one. One of the paradoxes of politics as a 
generic procedure that concerns the infinite at all levels (the situation, the state 
of the situation, the post-evental change in a given situation) is certainly the 
paradox that the “aleph of emancipation” – that is, the number that is capable 
of counting the infinity of generic singularities – is the One. The 1, then, is the 
paradoxical transfinite number of politics. 
However, the status of what I have termed the “aleph of emancipation” is far 
from univocal. This elaboration of the One in the not-all universe enables us to 
account for, inter alia, the stakes of an ongoing theoretico-political quarrel about 
communal predicates and the status of the name in the field of politics. Indeed, 
today, contemporary left-wing thought is helplessly divided by the question of 
how to conceive of that One of the Same. Lacan’s elaboration of the status of the 
One of the Same can help us clarify the crucial stake in this quarrel. 
The Real of the Same
Lacan raised the thorny question of the One of the Same in his elaboration of 
the repetition of jouissance since, for him, repetition always aims at jouissance. 
Jouissance can only be attained through the repetition of a marking that the first 
19 Ibid., p. 150.
20 Ibid.
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emergence of jouissance had left on the body. However, the mere fact of repeti-
tion evokes a loss: “what is repeated cannot be anything other […] than a loss.” 
More precisely, “it is in the place of this loss introduced by repetition that we 
see the function of the lost object emerge, of what I am calling the a.”21 Crucial 
here is that this object, the object a or surplus-enjoyment, is a retroactive effect 
of repetition itself. Although it is not a part of the chain of signifiers that repeat 
themselves, it attains a special place that Lacan termed the place of “sameness”. 
It is precisely at this level that Lacan articulates the Same with the One. 
There are namely two figures of the One. Indeed, according to Lacan, the One of 
the Same is not to be confused with the One which repeats itself. The One that 
repeats itself is the One of the unary trait, in short, the One of identification 
that makes it possible for the subject to be counted. From this symbolic One we 
must distinguish another One: the one that is only produced once the subject 
is situated, not at the level of the signifying chain, but at the level of the real 
or jouissance. The difference between these two Ones can be explained as fol-
lows: The identification with the unary trait reduces the difference to a trait that 
allows for the subject to be classified, to receive its place in the symbolic. The 
One of the Same, by contrast, stands for a pure difference as such, or, in Lacan’s 
words, it stands for “the sameness of difference.” 22
What is new in Lacan’s initial conception of the same is that it is separated from 
the subject since it refers primarily to the body: “The difference between the 
same and the other is based on the fact that the same must be materially the 
same. The notion of the matter grounds the same.”23 In a sense, the One of the 
Same is just like a trace, it is “memorial” in essence, a letter that marks a contin-
gent encounter between the body and the signifier. The same of the difference 
is for that reason the One beyond all differences, beyond all particularities. Ulti-
mately, the One of the Same only denotes that an entirely contingent encounter 
has taken place. The One of the Same thus inscribes in language that which 
language cannot say, namely, the incarnation of a traumatic signifier. It denotes, 
more specifically, the way in which the signifiers that determine the subject are 
21 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Book XVII, 
trans. Russell Grigg, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, London 2007, pp. 46, 48.
22 Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire, Livre XIX, … ou pire, Seuil, Paris 2011, p. 165.
23 Jacques Lacan, “L’insu que sait de l’une-bévue s’aile a mourre”, unpublished seminar (14th 
of December 1978).
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
concretely incarnated for this particular subject, before any meaning is assigned 
to them. With respect to the One of the unary trait, the One of the same is in a 
radical sense the Other. The One of the Same is that which is the most “proper” 
to me, the point of my singularity, and, at the same time, that which signals the 
presence of the Other as such, the presence of the inhuman in me. 
Obviously, everything depends on whether it is possible to intervene in this 
One of the Same, to move it, to displace it from its place, and thus to make repe-
tition impossible. Far from seeking to pin the subject to this traumatic signifier, 
psychoanalysis seeks to vacillate this One of the Same, to detach him or her 
from repetition and and thus to open the subject to contingency, to encounter. 
In so doing it also makes it possible for the subject, at the end of the analysis, to 
provide a new response to the real of the Same. 
What consequences can be drawn from Lacan’s conception of the One of the 
Same for a contemporary theorisation of politics? Psychoanalysis and the poli-
tics of emancipation share the assumption that the One of the Same is constitu-
tive of the becoming of a subject. The One of the Same is not pre-given. Rather, 
it is linked to some traumatic encounter or event that always introduces some-
thing new insofar as, however minimally, it breaks with what came before. And 
they both proceed to its production, or, more precisely, its extraction by means 
of the reconstruction of the trace, of the marking left by some traumatic event, 
traumatic in the sense that by remaining an inassimilable surplus in a given 
situation it disrupts the existing order, thereby drawing a line of demarcation 
between “before” and “after”. 
If psychoanalysis and emancipatory politics share the One of the Same as a 
common point of departure, they diverge as to their respective goals. At first 
glance, nothing appears to be more foreign to psychoanalysis than a transform-
ative emancipatory politics. Psychoanalysis seeks to circumscribe the One of 
the Same in order to neutralise it. Its goal is to make it possible for the subject 
to separate himself or herself from this One and thus to prevent its repetition. 
In contrast to this procedure, emancipatory politics, by setting in motion an 
endless verification of the egalitarian prescription, seeks to prevent the One of 
the Same from not stopping being written. For emancipatory politics, there is 
the universal, the “for all”, only to the extent that the One of the Same does not 
stop writing itself. 
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The One of the Same, from this perspective, signifies the opening up of a new 
space within a given situation for the inscription of the consequences of a con-
tingently produced disruption, the working out of the possibilities opened up 
by the emergence of the impossible within the existing situation. The One of the 
Same, in this respect, indicates the possibility of new responses to the radical 
rupture brought about by the occurrence of the event in a given situation. The 
One of the Same thus opens up a space for the subjectivation of the event in the 
infinite. It is in this sense that the constitution of a new collective, which Badi-
ou termed a “communism of singularities,” or a “transhuman body of a truth,” 
constitutes, in a given situation, a materialised verification of the “eternal” im-
perative of politics, namely, equality.
While both emancipatory politics and psychoanalysis take what could be 
termed the real of the Same as their compass, psychoanalysis seeks to separate 
out the One of the Same, an operation that proceeds one by one, as there is no 
such thing as a generalised One of the Same, a One of the Same that would be 
“for all”. To repeat once more: the One of the Same is a singularised Same, the 
One of the Same that supports the singularity of a particular speaking subject. 
This is why the principles that govern the “extraction” of this Same in psychoa-
nalysis cannot provide us with any guidelines for action at the collective level. 
But this also means that, for psychoanalysis, the not-all is the unsurpassable 
horizon of our time. This entails that from the perspective of psychoanalysis 
the always singularised One of the Same is what makes the transfinitisation in 
the domain of the collective impossible. 
This insistence on the unsurpassable horizon of the not-all requires that we 
re-trace a dividing line between contemporary theorists of the One and the 
Same: partisans of the universal and militants of the exception, incarnated in 
the name “Jew”. For the latter, the One of the Same is a name that precludes the 
for-all, a name which cannot be universalised.
For contemporary “universalists”, emancipatory politics, rather than being dis-
armed when faced with the not-all, has found a way to handle the structural 
deadlocks of the not-all – by means of the axiomatisation of equality. There 
are difficulties with this idea, difficulties that concern the exact location of the 
One of the Same in politics. The One of the Same marks the real cause of the 
transformation of a given situation in signifying, in Lacan’s words, “the cause 
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
as real.” The One of the Same, just like the Freudian unconscious, is something 
of the order of the non-realised. Situated in the gap opened by the event, insofar 
as it disappears in its appearance, that is to say, between the absent cause and 
that which it affects, it would remain indeterminate unless we introduce the 
rigorous logic of the production of consequences. 
From a logical point of view, the One of the Same must certainly be situated 
at the beginning. However, insofar as an event’s entire being consists in dis-
appearance, the only trace left behind by the event is the affirmation of its ac-
tually taking place in what Badiou calls “the evental statement,” which is for 
that reason also “the inaugural materiality for any universal singularity.”24 In 
this regard, the expression the One of the Same formalises, to use a term dear 
to Badiou, the fundamental connection between universality and singularity. 
Logically situated at the beginning, the One of the Same is only constructed – 
by means of a retroactive anticipation, that is, in the future anterior – at the end 
of the anticipated completion of the infinite generic procedure. 
For contemporary theorists of the exception, by contrast, the One of the Same, 
which for them is incarnated in some irreducible particularity, the “name Jew”, 
to be precise, entails the exclusion of the for-all. In his highly controversial 
book, Les penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique,25 Milner states that 
politics is constitutively non-contemporaneous with the modern limitless uni-
verse of capitalism and science. Invented in the closed world of the Greeks, pol-
itics is a regime of the all, of the universal. As such, it is doomed to fail when it 
tries to solve the problems generated by the paradoxes of the not-all, that is, the 
constitutive inexistence of a limit or an exception that would close the not-all. 
Politics, in a word, is structurally heterogeneous to the not-all of contemporary 
society conceived as an inconsistent, unlimited all. This necessarily provokes 
violent collisions between society as the order of the limitless not-all, and pol-
itics as the order of the all, the universal. The “Jewish problem” is situated, ac-
cording to Milner, at the very point of collision between the all and the non-all. 
It is important to see to which problem the introduction of the name “Jew” is 
24 Alain Badiou, “Eight Theses on the Universal” in: Theoretical Writings, R. Brassier and 
A. Toscano (eds. and trans.), Continuum, London, New York 2004, p. 147.
25 Jean-Claude Milner, Les penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique, Editions Verdier, 
Paris 2003.
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proposed as a solution. In what follows, I will argue that such unprovoked, sud-
den emergence of the name “Jew” as a central topic of theoretical discussion in 
France today in which one finds the former Maoists engaged, whether Jews or 
not (Benny Levy, J.-C. Milner, and F. Regnault, to name but a few, yet the most 
prominent), we have to recognise a symptom of the loss of belief in transforma-
tive revolutionary politics. 
The Name of the Subject
Both parties involved in a fratricidal war between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” 
Maoists concede that the crucial stake today is none other than the status of 
the universal in politics. It should be noted, however, that the decisive issue for 
this discussion is not simply to be either for or against universalism. The deci-
sive issue in this quarrel rather concerns the status of the One. More precisely, 
this dispute revolves around the following question: is there, in the collective 
domain, “the name which is above every name,” and if there is such a name, 
can it be subjectified and be “for all” at the same time? One of the fundamental 
lessons of emancipatory politics is that there are names that are divisive and 
cannot be borne otherwise than by being subjectified, e.g. to be a Communist, a 
worker, an immigrant, a woman, a gay, etc. “Jewish” Maoists make at this point 
an additional, yet crucial distinction. Beside these names, which could be sub-
jectified or not (for instance, the term worker designates both a social category 
and a political subject), there is a name-exception, a name that cannot not be 
subjectified: the name “Jew”. Whether one calls oneself “Jew” or is called “Jew” 
by others, the “Jew”, according to Milner, is always a way of saying “I”. 
Milner’s starting point is that there is some signifier in the real, the name “Jew”. 
That is to say, the subject has no choice in the matter – it was assigned or dealt 
out to him or her. Milner proposes grasping this moment of the real in the name 
“Jew” as the condition for the subjectivation. The name “Jew” is not a name one 
can choose or not. Rather, it is a name that, in a sense, one cannot get rid of, 
even if one wants to. It is already there, in the real. The question here is only 
whether a speaking being-Jew is willing to affirm it as a subject. This is why 
the name “Jew”, which could be presented as an accident, a contingency, is 
endowed with a particular signification for the speaking-being Jew. To become 
a subject requires that a speaking being-Jew turns this accidental trait, this pe-
culiarity, which has been assigned to him or her as his or her affliction, into a 
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
reason and justification for his or her actions that can have consequences that 
go well beyond his or her individuality.
From the perspective of the real in the name “Jew”, there are two distinctions 
that must be made between the name “Jew” and all the other names: first, a 
distinction between a subjectifying and a predicative use of the name, and, 
second, and more importantly, a line of separation must be drawn within the 
subjectifying use of the name itself: between those names on which one can 
give up or not, and the one name-exception, the name “Jew”, on which, in 
some radical sense, one is not allowed to give up. This is what distinguishes 
the “name Jew” from all other names of the subject.
According to Regnault, one can be Catholic or Communist, just as one can be 
French or man or woman. That is, one can be Communist or German in terms 
of mere belonging to some community. But one can also be Catholic, Commu-
nist, or whatever, in such a way that being Catholic, Communist, or whatever 
involves the subject’s decision not to give up on the name thus chosen, regard-
less of the price to be paid for it. The imperative “Do not give up on your name 
of the subject!” indicates that the name has befallen the subject, that it has 
been assigned to the subject as his or her affliction. But precisely for that reason 
the name itself has become the decisive issue for the subject. The whole point 
is how to subjectify “the real that assigns him his condition,”26 to paraphrase 
Lacan, that is, how to turn this real, which has been assigned to a speaking 
being-Jew as his or her affliction, into the subject’s name, a name of the subject.
The name “Jew” can therefore be considered to be one of the subject’s names. 
But what makes this name incomparable to any other name of the subject, what 
makes it literally “the name which is above every name,” results, paradoxi-
cally, according to Regnault, from the intervention of emancipatory politics, 
because this politics does not believe in the real of any name since it aims at 
the universal, at the “for all”. Politics, according to Regnault, requires that its 
militants renounce their names, in particular the name “Jew”, to pass in silence 
this name in the name of some abstract, universal principles. Politics, in short, 
26 Jacques Lacan, “Remarks on Daniel Lagache’s Presentation: ‘Psychoanalysis and Per-
sonality Structure’” in: Ecrits, trans. Bruce Fink, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 
London 2006, p. 559.
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presents itself as a space in which “the choice of this name [the name “Jew”] 
was set aside. As a result, all choices of this kind or the name as such have be-
come whatever.”27 Put simply, for politics, the price to be paid for the fact that 
any name can be subjectified, that is, that it can become the name of the politi-
cal subject, the name “for all”, an empty name that anyone can say as “I”, is to 
make a sacrifice of one name: the name “Jew”, the name which incarnates the 
absolute particularity, that which is, by definition, non-universalisable, a name 
which is certainly not “for all”. One could then say that it is the sacrifice of the 
name “Jew” that opens up the space for the political subjectivation. 
This is precisely the reason why the name “Jew” and politics, not just any pol-
itics, but precisely the only politics that counts for a Lacanian Maoist, eman-
cipatory politics, are radically incompatible. According to Regnault, politics is 
based on the assumption, an illusory assumption, in his view, that it is possible 
to displace, to arbitrarily substitute, the names of the subject – which are those 
names that keep returning to the same place, names that refuse to be silent. In 
the last instance, for politics, the name is not real, there is nothing real in the 
name. The name, in other words, is a mere semblant.
Unlike psychoanalysis, which is supposed to defend the real of the name, pol-
itics confronts the speaking being-Jew with an impossible dilemma, a forced 
choice between politics, “the sole thing that is sacred in their eyes” and the 
duty “to renew the rights of [...] the name passed over in silence.”28 But a politics 
that imposes on the subject the choice of either emancipatory politics or saving 
the name necessarily discredits itself, in Regnault’s view. Hence, every politics 
that requires that the subject sacrifice, renounce his or her name of the subject, 
in particular this name, is not worthy of the name. And conversely, what is 
worthy of being saved is only a politics that enables us to “hear the name in the 
name of which we speak or remain silent.”29
It is my claim that if the question of the name is so acute in politics today, this is 
because it concerns the status of the One of the Same in politics. The issue here, 
of course, is not the question of whether politics allows for some names to be 
27 François Regnault, Notre objet a, Verdier, Paris 2003, p. 14.
28 Ibid., p. 18.
29 Ibid., p. 21.
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
“for ever”, “eternal”, but rather whether this “name for ever”, this eternal name 
is a name of some community that already exists in reality, or, on the contrary, 
a name of the political subject which is still to come. To repeat once more, the 
question here is about the modality of subjectifying this One that returns to the 
same place: Is the One that presents itself to the subject as an indelible given-
ness or the One that is to be produced, the One, in a word, that results from 
practicing an egalitarian prescription in a given situation and which therefore 
traverses all communal nominations?
For Badiou, who on this point refers explicitly to Paul’s postulation of Christ 
as “the name which is above every name,” the universality in politics, “the 
production of the Same,” implies an indifference to all worldly nominations, as 
all names, our own included, should be held to be nothing but “nicknames”, 
accidentally attached to our body. At the same time, however, he insists that 
the subject of a truth always lays claim to such “names which are above every 
name.” Or, more explicitly: 
All true names are “above every name”. They let themselves be inflected and 
declared, just as mathematical symbolism does, in every language, according 
to every custom, and through the traversal of all differences. Every name from 
which a truth proceeds is a name from before the Tower of Babel. But it has to 
circulate in the tower.30
Thus, what is at issue in the controversy between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” 
Maoists is nothing other than the question of whether the signifier “Jew” is to 
be considered as an exceptional signifier, deserving to be given “some kind of 
nominal sacralization,” as Badiou puts it. For “non-Jewish” Maoists the answer 
is clear: nobody can monopolise “the name which is above every name.” Which 
means that no name – the name “Jew” being no exception – is chosen in ad-
vance, predestined, so to speak, to play the role of “the name which is above 
every name.”
Rejecting all the inegalitarian characteristics that mark the uses of the signifier 
“Jew” in contemporary polemics, Badiou insists that the main objective of such 
a “monopoly over the word ‘Jew’” is “to eradicate for ever the very possibility 
30 Saint Paul, p. 110.
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of political universalism, of an equality of all particularist predicates, of a pol-
itics practiced by people who are here, irrespective of their origin.”31 Against 
this “complete abandon of emancipatory and revolutionary politics,”32 Badiou 
proposes to examine the possibility of assigning a universal dimension to this 
word “Jew”. Indeed, he goes so far as to identify himself, “le juif, c’est moi”, with 
“those disparate Jews, those entirely singular Jews […] who want the universal-
ity of what they create to exceed the particularity that they also lay claim to.”33 
What he valorises instead is the way in which these disparate Jews (from the 
apostle Paul to Trotsky, including Spinoza, Marx, and Freud), by reducing “all 
communitarian particularities to equality,” that is, by rupturing with Jewish 
communitarianism, succeeded in refounding universalism – in always particu-
lar, specific circumstance. The key point, in this view, is how, by breaking with 
the name “Jew”, they have provided a new name that is above other names, 
a name that is precisely “for all”, a name that invalidates all communitarian 
predicates. 
From such a perspective, the marking of a speaking being by some indelible 
One, the One of the Same, is constitutive of the becoming of a subject only to 
the extent that it passes what Badiou calls “a single limit-point,” that of the “for 
all”. In a word, the true value of the real One resides in its compatibility with 
universalism. In this respect, taken precisely in a Lacanian sense, the name of 
the subject, the subject’s proper name, incomparable to any other name, (be 
it the name “Jew” or whatever), instead of being an obstacle to contemporary 
universalism, represents, in Badiou’s words, “the only real that can be opposed 
to the dictatorship of predicates.”34
It is through their inherent power of dissolution of any communitarian predi-
cate that the real names, the names of the subject, constitute a paving stone for 
a contemporary universalism. This is why Badiou, in his characteristic provoc-
ative style, proclaims that the fundamental problem for Jews themselves today 
is not how to bear the name “Jew”, by affirming it or renouncing it, but rather 
to take up the challenge of “creating a new place,” indeed, of “creating a new 
31 Alain Badiou, “The Word ‘Jew’ and the Sycophant” in: Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran, 
Verso, London, New York 2006, p. 232.
32 Ibid., p. 239.
33 Ibid., p. 247.
34 Alain Badiou, “Uses of the Word ‘Jew’” in: Polemics, p. 166.
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towards a materialism of the real: the one of the same
Jew,” a new name Jew that would be destined to all. In that sense, for Badiou, 
“the Jew of our time is still to come.”35
To maintain that the task today is to “create a new Jew” is but another way of 
saying that the name “Jew” is not a destiny, not even for a speaking being-Jew. 
Paradoxically enough, on this point emancipatory politics meets psychoanal-
ysis. By insisting that the One of the Same of a particular subject results from 
some contingent, yet traumatic encounter with the real, psychoanalysis does 
not ratify the theoretico-political stance adopted by some Lacanian Maoists ac-
cording to which the name Jew prescribes in advance, so to speak, the subjec-
tive position to a speaking being-Jew. On the contrary, just like for an emanci-
patory politics based on its fidelity to the event, it is the encounter with the real 
that presents an opportunity for the subject to confront the choice of the name 
that was imposed on him or her, whether “Jew” or some other name. 
To situate the name in relation to the real that “assigns the subject his or her 
condition,” to paraphrase Lacan, amounts to rendering politics impossible, 
or, more exactly, to making it an exception. The discussion revolving around 
the name “Jew” is situated along this edge. Either a politics of emancipation 
is impossible, that is to say, that it merely arbitrarily substitutes one name for 
another, thereby indicating that names are a mere semblance in relation to the 
real – this is how Lacanian Maoists see politics – or politics is an exception. 
Which means that it is capable of shifting the One of the Same proper to the 
subject (be it the name “Jew” or something else). And to be a political militant 
is to consent to remaining faithful to the name of an event, that which displaces 
one’s particular One of the Same and allows for another name, another One of 
the Same, to take its place and become that in the name of which one speaks or 
keeps silent.
What contemporary theorising of politics has to explore is that the counterpart 
of the primacy of the multiple over the One is balanced by the fact that there is 
the One in the real. It is this evental One, the real One, and the defence against 
this evental real that are at stake in politics. Badiou, who in this respect follows 
Lacan, has very clearly outlined the choice that presents itself to the subject in 
the political field, if we accept, despite the fact that the horizon of the not-all is 
35 Ibid., p. 207.
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unsurpassable for us, that the One is inscribed in the real. There are two fun-
damental positions that the subject can possibly take towards “the real that as-
signs its condition”: either it is fidelity or it is infidelity. Well, it is between this 
fidelity and infidelity to the One of the Same that contemporary theorisation of 
politics is condemned to oscillate. 
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