





















































The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis


Elementa
Intersections between Philosophy, Epistemology 
and Empirical Perspectives

2 
(2022) 

1-2

Transitions

Edited by Tommaso Sgarro

First Section

Tommaso Sgarro
Editorial I – Transitions: New and Different Perspectives 9

Tommaso Sgarro
The Human “Historicity” as a Permanent Transition 13 
in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría

Luis Roca Jusmet
François Jullien: The Double Transit of Human Life 27

Jordi Riba Miralles
The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis 37

Alessia Franco
For an Epistemology of Transition: Paul B. Preciado, 51 
Psychoanalysis and the Regime of Sexual Difference

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Second Section

Tommaso Sgarro
Editorial II – Governing Transitions 67

Pierpaolo Limone - Maria Grazia Simone
Becoming Support Teachers at the University of Foggia 71 
During the Pandemic. An Exploratory Survey

Francesca Finestrone
Music: For a Sustainable Community and the Promotion 85 
of Well-being

Gennaro Balzano - Vito Balzano
Educating for Transition in Work Contexts 101

Giuseppina Maria Patrizia Surace
The Future We Want: The Transition to Adulthood 111 
of Unaccompanied Minors

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The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis
Jordi Riba Miralles
Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona – UAB (Spain)

doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.7358/elementa-2022-0102-rimi
 jordi.riba@uab.cat

Abstract

This paper proposes a link in the perspective of transition between the concept of perma-
nent crisis belonging to the work of Jean-Marie Guyau and the conception of the event 
due to Alain Badiou. The hypothesis links the two in the sense that it is not possible to 
speak of the event as a transformative form of social and political reality without first 
producing the permanent crisis.

Keywords: Alain Badiou; event; Jean-Marie Guyau; permanent crisis; process; real 
life; second life; time; transition; true life.

In this paper I will focus on the way in which Alain Badiou conceives the 
event by virtue of the proximity that his conception has to the idea of per-
manent crisis with its transitional nature. For this, as far as the permanent 
crisis is concerned, I will take the reference of Jean-Marie Guyau, a pioneer 
about the idea of a definitive crisis and who was able to lucidly expose, 
before others, the fact that philosophy and the action that derives from it 
had entered into a permanent crisis. This is concretised as a never-ending 
work and not as an end (Revault d’Allonnes, 2012, p. 73).

One of the first arguments developed by Guyau is that, despite not 
having written any specifically political text, his writings reveal ways of 
approaching the political that bring him closer to the discourse of confron-
tation of the modern as a project with the real. This awareness of moder-
nity in the process of definitive crisis gave rise to a pioneering discourse 
in our philosopher on the idea of the end of modernity as progress and of 
democracy without foundation. Intelligences liberated from dogma. He 
states that they will continue to associate in order to defend themselves 

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Jordi Riba Miralles

against human adversities, to fight against setbacks. This association has 
its beginning in the consciousness of fraternity that nestles in consciences, 
which, despite having freed themselves from disturbing dogmas (Guyau, 
1889), remains aware of the vicissitudes in which their integrity finds itself. 
To this end, he introduces a first transition between the absence of religion 
as a fundamental element of the world, with the idea of fraternity, which 
represents not only a stage in human evolution, but the very awareness of 
a condition which, free from the great dogmas, becomes aware of its state 
of essential solitude, shared with the rest of humanity. Hence the idea of an 
orphan fraternity that Guyau raises in his writings (Riba, 2021).

This orphan fraternity, conceptually expressed by Guyau, with the 
word anomie is the creator of new forms of relations, of different solidari-
ties in the face of those who continue to support the constituted norms. 
In this sense, Jean Duvignaud (1986) sees Guyau’s anomie as the fact by 
which humans produce themselves through new forms of sociability and 
escape the norms of a morality defined by respect for rules or a collective 
conscience elevated to the rank of reason. Guyau claims that anomie is just 
“the absence of a fixed law” (Guyau, 2012, p. 165). It is at the basis of our 
freedom; it is one of the foundations of morality with all its risks. Thought 
walks in front of it, with activity, composing the world and disposing of 
the future. We believe that we are the masters of infinity, because our 
power is not equivalent to a given quantity: the more we act, the more we 
expect.

Anomie also defines the singularity of the conception of theory, 
which can no longer be conceived as before. This principle therefore goes 
beyond the idea of discipline, law and rule. The only valid rule is the one 
that takes into account the facts, namely that we are beings endowed with 
meaning and thought and that this is the specificity, the reality and the 
essence of our nature. That is the starting point for understanding and 
creating politics. The human being, in any case, is driven by his desire for 
struggle and the risk of thought (Guyau, 2012).

1. The metaphor of modernity

To make this explicit, Guyau introduces a metaphor at the end of his 
book Esquissed’une morale sans obligation ni sanction which anticipates 
and clarifies this idea linking irreligion with fraternity. Metaphor is, in 
Revault’s words, the capacity to produce a new meaning, but giving entry 
to an original, essential situation, both of existence and of language. Meta-
phorical expression has two characteristics of its own: it is an innovative 

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The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis

and revealing discursive form of something that remains either hidden or 
outside the proper sense of formal discourse.

The metaphor expresses orientations in the view of the observation of 
the world of life which cannot be crystallised in pure concepts, but which 
provide a tacit dimension of intelligibility. This is certainly why Blumen-
berg recognises it as an essential figure of what he calls aconceptualisa-
tion (Blumenberg, 1995). This way of proceeding is not really new, on the 
contrary, it has a long tradition. The metaphor par excellence that shows 
the vast problematic of existence is that of the navigation on sea, which 
Blumenberg explores in his book Shipwreck with a spectator.

It is therefore interesting to turn to Guyau showing his perspective on 
the link between the crisis of modernity and the human condition and the 
political link that firmly joins them in a space that, despite its permanent 
uncertainty, bursts forth as an invitation to endless action (Tassin, 2012).

We discover then in Guyau’s thought the intuition of an agonistic 
space in which hypotheses emerge without which the subject could hardly 
develop in a society that presents so many antinomies. Guyau considers it 
is necessary to go beyond experience and formulate personal hypotheses, 
without giving rise to a system that would take the form of a metaphysical 
doctrine that could be universally imposed on human reason.

Hence, the metaphor mobilised by Guyau at the end of Esquisse is 
not only a good example of what Beck calls “reflexive modernity” (1998), 
but also reveals the crisis of the normative detected in particular by “the 
absence of points of reference”, as Claude Lefort mentioned in many of his 
works. In a world dominated by uncertainty and permanent crisis, we are 
driven to live accepting risk and trying to manage it (Beck, 1998), while 
seeking “paths” that, leadto precarious certainties for some, incomplete for 
others.

Guyau writes at the end of his book: “No hand directs us, no eye sees 
us; the rudder has been broken for a long time, or rather, there has never 
been one, it must be done: it is a great task, and it is our task” (Guyau, 
2012, pp. 343-344). Only individualities in solidarity are capable of this. 
This is the way in which the two key concepts of Guyautist thought, 
“anomie” and “solidarity”, find their realisation when articulated.

This is Guyau’s great intuition: the idea of moral fecundity. Through 
it, Guyau transforms the spectator into an actor. This is the key political 
anthropological aspect to understand the transcendence of Guyau’s 
thought. The mission of the individual will not only be technical: to steer 
the ship to avoid sinking; it will also be political: to escape the drift to 
which humanity seems condemned in the absence of guiding principles. 
The moral agent, Guyau points out, plays here the same role as the artist: 

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he must project himself out of the tendencies he feels in himself, and make 
“a metaphysical poem with his love” (Guyau, 2012, p. 161).

It is therefore thanks to vital expansion, the intuition that we acknowl-
edge to Guyau, that human beings can and must fight against drifting, a 
state in which they originally found themselves. And that life is expansion 
means that it is also sociability, essentially altruism. Guyau used a meta-
phor to represent his thinking, probably for various reasons: in order to 
question the order of the modern, to confront it as a project with the order 
of the real. With the metaphor of the Leviathan, an old ship abandoned 
to its fate, Guyau was able to express the fragility of the link between the 
thought and the real (Ricoeur, 1986, p. 275). It is when he states that no 
hand directs us, that no eye watches over us, and that we have to build it 
and this is our task.

He clearly states that if political modernity is represented by the idea 
of progress, this is politics without foundation. This is exemplified by 
Guyau in his metaphor: there is no storm that threatens navigation, but 
it is the lack of a rudder that leads the ship adrift. But also, in Guyau’s 
metaphor, with or without a rudder, there is no possibility of finding land 
or shelter. The Pascalian “we are embarked” becomes a perpetual state. And 
in doing so, Guyau also dissociates himself from Hegel when he writes:

Here we can affirm that we are at home and that we can, as a sailor would 
do after a long voyage, cry out: land! Descartes is one of those men who have 
begun again at the beginning, and it is with him that culture, the thinking of 
modern times, makes its debut. (Hegel, 1985, p. 1379)

Guyau thus provides a different vision of the metaphor of the shipwreck 
(Blumenberg, 1995). Guyau’s political-irreligious discourse reveals the 
confusion of modernity in the face of the impossibility of realising the 
great narratives, of the definitive crisis that plagues modernity as a whole. 
For this reason, and not so much to get out of it, but to adjust to this new 
reality, the crisis of reason and the end of the idea of progress are made to 
coincide with the advent of the philosophy of action. The sea is conceived 
by our philosopher, in the manner of Arendt 1, as the exterior of the Garden, 
and the little Socrates who observes it is the image of humanity confronted 
with the great problem of the absence of referents represented in Guyau’s 
metaphor of the absence of a rudder to steer the ship.

There is indeed no pre-established political discourse, nor can there 
be, just as there is no rudder to steer the ship. And in the face of this double 

 1 See Pascal’s “thought” which Hannah Arendt uses repeatedly in her writings to 
establish the distinction between two particular ways of conceiving philosophical work.

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The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis

non-existence, Guyau’s discourse is fruitful because at the same time as it 
presents the empty place from which to build the rudder, it is the affirma-
tion that it can only be built from solidarity-based individualities.

Guyau thus introduces action as an expression of vitality, which turns 
the spectator, as we have already pointed out, into an actor. His mission will 
no longer be technical to steer the ship away from shipwreck, but political: 
to avoid the drifting into which humanity is plunged in the absence of 
guiding principles. There is thus in the metaphor an obligatory invitation 
to permanent construction. Humans are conceived as energy to be spent. 
Thanks to this vital expansion, Guyau’s own intuition, humans can and 
must fight against this state of original drift. Vital fertility replaces previous 
finalist and determinist discourses.

2. The crisis of foundations

Guyau accepts what was already rejected in his time and is still denied by 
many: the profoundly nonsensical character of today’s world (Mugnier-
Pollet, 1966, p. 41). It can therefore be affirmed that in the face of the 
unique reality of drifting, only the option of tenacity remains. In the course 
of a few years, these ideas were also ratified and developed by Simmel, 
who stressed that there is no guarantee of success in this political project 
(Simmel, 2010). And later Revaultd’Allonnes did not fail to consider 
this fact in his book. He takes it up again on the basis of the writings 
of Foucault and Lefort, whom, he points out, about having realised in 
the early 1980s the change in the forms of contestation in the contem-
porary epoch (despite the differences that separated them). They noted 
their “dissemination”, their transversality, the diversity of their objects 
(the family, women, children, sexuality, justice, the situation of prisoners, 
the management of companies, the protection of nature, etc.) (Revault 
d’Allonnes, 2012, p. 142).

Indeed, a century after Guyau, as Revault points out, Lefort wrote 
with a similar aim to that proposed by Guyau, that it was necessary to 
elevate reflection to a practice that is not mute. In this way, the democratic 
experience is traversed by antagonistic experiences (Lefort, 1981). For this 
reason, in this current crisis, which is experienced as permanent, the use of 
metaphor proves to be of great help in explaining it.

Guyau, a precocious clairvoyant, fully describes the essential fact in 
which humanity finds itself after the end of the great narratives: the irrup-
tion of the politics and the conflict with the finalvision of history, hitherto. 
The critical consequence of this metaphor emerges as the absence of a 

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foundation, as in the impossible normativity capable of providing prin-
ciples of action and going beyond the strict reality in which individuals 
move, united in their common life.

3. The crisis of normativity

And so, while the older systems represented only a tension in internal 
activity, in the present we are faced with a term situated between uncer-
tainty and categorical affirmation. This is a certainty that is the basis of 
our freedom. We do not know what the future will bring us, but through 
action we operate, we work, we undertake (Revaultd’Allonnes, 2012, 
p. 134). And in this regard, Guyau points out that the true commandment 
is the one we give ourselves not in the name of some higher authority, 
but of a particular principle superior to any commandment (Agamben, 
2013).

This principle, therefore, goes beyond the idea of discipline, law and 
the State. The only valid rule is that which takes into account the facts, i.e. 
that beings are endowed with meaning and thought, and that this speci-
ficity is the reality and essence of our nature. Therefore, the question: How 
can we give meaning and form to uncertainty in order to create an open 
space of possibilities? becomes necessary.

The political model towards which Guyau sees humanity tending, in 
accordance with his idea of fraternity, is what he calls federated republican 
(Guyau, 1887, p. XVIII). He does not elaborate much on this form of 
government, but he states emphatically that it should allow for the coexist-
ence of all kinds of religious individualities and any kind of association that 
these individualities might wish to form. Religious anomie is, according to 
Guyau, the one that best represents this state, since it has crucial effects on 
modern individuality, that is, the one that occurs in the process of seculari-
sation of the democratic becoming.

Christ could have affirmed: I have not come to bring peace to thought, but 
the incessant struggle of ideas; nor repose, but the movement and progress of 
the spirit; nor the universality of dogmas, but the freedom of belief, which is 
the first condition of its final expansion. (Guyau, 1887, p. XIX)

Expressed in another way, the essential truth of a democracy would be that 
in which political things burst forth with force. Claude Lefort took it upon 
himself to highlight this empty place of the political, showing once again 
the conflict between philosophy and politics, in particular in connection 
with Guyau’s ideas. This is precisely his main problem, the impossibility 

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The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis

of simultaneously conforming to the double meaning that the concept of 
republic possesses, political things and politeia, in order to constitute a 
universal republic.

To arrive at it, nothing better than to recall the words of Feuerbach 
in his book Principles of the philosophy of the future (1843): “the essence of 
man resides only in the community, in the unity of man with man, a unity 
which, however, rests only in the reality of the difference between the I and 
the Thou”.

This irruption of the politics allows the consolidation of the republi-
canism of political things, making more visible the secular conflict between 
politics and philosophy that Arendt situates historically in the condemna-
tion of Socrates by Athens. The singularity of this antagonism has allowed 
authors such as Miguel Abensour, Jacques Rancière and others to develop 
their thinking. They have done no more than update the conflict under 
the premise of a singular epochal principle, which, configured under the 
premise of democracy, contains those elements that the progressive aban-
donment of theological referents leads it to become a thought without 
referents; and society to organise itself under this premise.

Democracy should not be seen, under this conception associated with 
the fraternal principle, as a crystallised form, as an organisation of powers, 
but as an uninterrupted movement. A political action that opposes the 
established forms that prevent its realisation. Conflict becomes in this situ-
ation the major axis which, instead of impeding, underlines the specificity 
of living together.

It is true that the limitations of philosophical writing highlight the 
very impossibility of establishing a permanent link between the factual and 
the real. Simmel called this gap between the ever-living action and its prod-
ucts a crisis of culture. Democracy can therefore be thought of as having no 
alternative but itself in its permanent realisation. And there is no historical 
time beyond the present.

In short, the interpretative contribution of the Guyautist metaphor 
gives contemporary meaning to a situation which, seen with retrospec-
tive eyes, gives permanence to the revolutionary sentence of fraternity or 
death, undoubtedly intensely current, of the moment humanity is living. 
Lefortian democratic uncertainty takes on new impulses, not in the face of 
external dangers, but because of the very circumstances in which democ-
racy is inscribed. And in the face of which, all that remains is the expres-
sion of that orphan fraternity that Guyau once brought to light and which, 
in the words of Hegel, takes the place of destiny, and therefore, it is an 
unending and persistent modernity that opens up like a breath of what 
Miguel Abensour has called the utopian impulse (Abensour, 2011).

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4. The role of event in the permanent crisis

Hence the importance of the events that Guyau experienced in 1871 for 
him. In contrast to the predictions of positivism, they escaped these predic-
tions. No law reflected them, because they did not obey causal regularity. 
At the same time, Guyau experienced the establishment of contradictory 
and irreconcilable tendencies and motives. Faced with such an opposi-
tional situation, Guyau nevertheless believed himself capable of providing 
an answer to the minds that were troubled by this uncertainty, by sketching 
the contours of a common ground, where thoughts could meet again.

Anomie, as Guyau conceived it, defines the singularity of the 
command we give ourselves and which does not limit us in the name of a 
commandment, but in the name of a particular principle superior to any 
commandment. The only valid rule is the one that takes into account the 
facts; that is, that we are beings endowed with meaning and thought and 
that this is the specificity, the reality and the essence of our nature.

Guyau’s deployment of his anomic theory is based on three postu-
lates. Firstly, the affirmation of an individual self, the sole judge of its own 
life. Guyau (1187) had imagined a society in the process of transformation 
in which the individual would be the principal agent of transformation. 
Kropotkin, who saw himself as a disciple of Guyau for this purpose, had 
thought that he found in Guyau’s idea the reason for a society without 
obligation or sanction.

Guyau, secondly, conceives the idea according to which the social 
part present in each individual binds him indissolubly to the human 
species: the solidarity which, no doubt, he had lived in his personal experi-
ence during the days of the Commune. Thirdly, Guyau felt that history 
is a series of acts that sometimes allow us to overcome adversity, but also 
force us, at other times, to accept the inevitable. This is undoubtedly what 
happened to the Commune and to Guyau himself.

In short, Guyau’s writings implicitly reject a whole way of conceiving 
political thought that Hobbesian thought of fear displays and defends. 
Against this Guyau reveals how the struggle for emancipation is on the side 
of risk and courage.

5. The event, transit towards spaces 
of “non-resignation”

Thus, Badiou’s idea of the event serves to relate post-foundationalism 
to the overcoming of the philosophical crisis and also of a certain moral 

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The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis

disengagement when it comes to do philosophy. The event is temporary 
and transformative, but only in the sphere of permanent crisis. In another 
context, conceived as free of permanent crisis, the event has no transforma-
tive capacity.

For Badiou, the philosophical way out of post-foundationality, to 
which Badiou devotes his work, has elements that bring him closer to the 
ideas that Jean-Marie Guyau put forward in his time, emerging from them 
the idea that links the permanent crisis with the event.

Let us take a risk, Badiou points out, with the following formula: the 
event is that multiple which, presenting itself, exhibits the same incon-
sistency that underlies situations, and overturns, by its irruption, the 
conceived classifications. The novelty of an event is that it interrupts the 
normal regime of description and knowledge, which is always based on the 
classification of the known, and imposes another kind of approach that 
admits that something, there, in that place, hitherto unnamed, happens 
consummately.

6. Fidelity to the event

A truth is such an infinite multiple, always to come and to make a hole in 
knowledge, the result of a fidelity related to the unlimited consequences 
of an event. Emancipated society, mathematised science, love subverting 
sexual difference by the invention of a new link between man and woman, 
artistic discipline called for the revolution of a form. These are the four 
types of truths, produced by the four procedures of politics, science, 
love and art, capable of producing, always unusually, a subject capable 
of making an exception to the ordinary regime of knowledge, opinion, 
egoism and boredom.

His philosophy seeks to expose and unfold the potential for innova-
tion, revolution, invention and radical transfiguration of every situation. 
For, unlike many philosophers today, Badiou believes that we have not 
reached the end of philosophy, but that it must take one more step forward. 
To continue on that endless road from which we cannot step off if we do 
not want to abdicate our condition of humanity. For Badiou, philosophy 
is closely related to the condition of humanity, so its absence represents a 
hopeless return to animality.

But it will not be a question of constructing new “narratives”, these, 
in the sense of representing a metaphysical project, are certainly exhausted. 
Badiou’s work is, therefore, complex. His thought discusses various forms 
of knowledge and raises many questions about philosophy itself.

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7. The confrontation between Guyau and Badiou 
on the permanent crisis

But it will not be a question of constructing new “narratives”, for these, in 
the sense of representing a metaphysical project, are certainly exhausted. 
Badiou’s work is therefore complex. His thought discusses various forms of 
knowledge and questions philosophy itself.

His extensive oeuvre can be classified in various ways depending on 
the criteria we use to do so. The most common is to point out three areas 
in which his work develops.

For Badiou, philosophy must be armed with the best discursive 
weapons to confront a discourse that is based on the seductive power of the 
established. Armed with powerful dialectical instruments, philosophy will 
have to establish a new regime of seduction. As one of the most seductive 
arguments of the established is the discourse of inequality, philosophy will 
have to uphold as the most abstract of its maxims that of absolute equality. 
To such an extent is this idea part of the essence of Badiou’s thought that 
everything that goes against it is considered by the author to be contrary 
to the truth. This has led him to transform the notion of truth in such a 
way that it obeys this egalitarian maxim, which is why he has given truth 
three attributes. The first is that it depends more on its emergence than 
on a structure. All truth is therefore new. It will be what Badiou will call 
the doctrine of the event. The second of the attributes is that every truth 
is universal, in a radical sense, an equal and anonymous for-all, this pure 
for-all constitutes it in its being. This will be its genericity.

And the third of its attributes is that truth constitutes its subject and 
not the other way round. For Badiou, it is not a question of a reconstruc-
tion of metaphysics, which has already made its end clear, with no possible 
return; rather, it is a question of the unknown that represents the redefini-
tion of philosophy as a possible place of the unconditioned. Badiou does 
not fail to point out the difficulties involved. There are a number of reasons 
inscribed in the historical development of philosophy as such. The first is 
that we know that the human sciences cannot replace philosophy. Today 
we know that they cannot replace it because the human sciences do not 
allow us to think or treat singularity as such. Instead, they deal with things 
from the angle of the general or from a profile determined by statistical or 
empirical data, but their contribution to the singular is never shown.

Therefore, there is a first form of expression of the necessity of the 
philosophical from the angle of thinking the singular as such. The second 
reason is based on the confirmation that large, hypothetical, collec-
tive subjects, such as the proletariat, the people, etc., can no longer be 

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The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis

maintained. Hence the emergence of a second necessity which is directed 
towards the reformulation of the subject formulated in its own name in 
the face of the inhuman. It is no longer possible to speak from a redemp-
tive collective subject. For the individual decision, without recourse to 
the figure of a collective subject, without religious, historical or spiritual 
support, the existence of a reference point is required, which serves as a 
fulcrum from which to raise the solitary decision.

From the moment when everyone is returned to his or her own singu-
larity in the face of the inhuman, an unconditioned principle is necessary. 
The re-establishment of a category of truth, of a fixed point of view, of a 
possible discrimination from the point of view above all of the inhuman 
as such.

There is a third reason, which Badiou sees from the perspective of 
the increase in the planetary reactions of the religious, the racial or the 
irrational, which have come to occupy the space of the periclitated collec-
tive subjects. We will not know how to deal with this rise of the reactive, 
of that which makes return its condition of permanence, if we do not have 
the perspective of a philosophical vision of these elements.

There is a fourth and final reason, which Badiou arrives to, from the 
perspective that the world we inhabit is vulnerable. It is a world that func-
tions well as long as it functions well, but which has serious problems in 
dealing with complicated situations, which easily falls apart and has great 
difficulty in grasping events positively.

8. The transition to the political, between permanent 
crisis and event

This is why, Badiou points out, we need a philosophy of the event, which, 
together with singularity, truth and reason, will produce a solid philo-
sophical proposal for a world in a permanent state of perplexity. According 
to Badiou, none of the new schools that have emerged from the crisis of 
philosophy can yet provide this. In fact, it is a question of explaining Badi-
ou’s nodal and apparently paradoxical thesis: to know that there is only the 
history of the eternal, because only the eternal proceeds from the event. In 
other words, there is no history but truths, since all truth is strictly eternal, 
impossible to reduce to any relativism.

For Badiou there is undoubtedly a philosophical moment that is 
finished, but this very end presupposes a beginning. To end is to begin 
from what is finished, Badiou points out in his book La philosophie, de 
nouvelle fois, composed of texts that originally appeared in periodicals. For 

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Jordi Riba Miralles

this new beginning, he makes use of the hypothesis, just as Guyau did in 
his time. At a time when the great certainties have been exhausted, philoso-
phising implies risk. Hypothesis is the risk in thought. In Badiou there is 
a special allusion to the conditions on the basis of which philosophising 
takes place. These are four in number: politics, science, love, and art. Each 
of these four conditions makes possible a perspective on the real and an 
opening towards the possible. In the field of each of them, philosophical 
intervention proves necessary in the face of the sudden orphanhood into 
which contemporary thought has fallen. This leads him to the formulation 
of an appalling radicality: “Without the Idea, all that remains is an animal-
ised humanity” (Badiou, 2010b, p. 45).

And he points to the direction of philosophising:
If humanity does not work on its own unfolding, on its own invention, it 
has no choice but to occupy itself with carrying out its destruction. That 
which is not under the reign of the idea will be under the reign of death. The 
human species cannot innocently be animal. Man belongs to that species 
which needs the idea in order to reasonably inhabit its own world. (Badiou, 
2010b, p. 45)

Conclusion

And why not think of the two metaphors, that of the Leviathan and that 
of the Platonic cavern, taken up by Badiou, to establish this transition 
between the permanent crisis exemplified by Guyau and the Platonic 
cavern by restoring, through the event, the idea, an example of the Guyau 
an rudder?

References

AA.VV. (2002). Dictionnaire critique de la république. Flammarion.
Abensour, M. (2011). Utopiques II. Sens et Tonka.
Agamben, G. (2013). Qu’est-ce que le commandement? Bibliothèque Rivages. 
Badiou, A. (1988). L’être et l’événement. Seuil.
Badiou, A. (2010a). La philosophie et l’événement. Germina.
Badiou, A. (2010b). La filosofía, otra vez. Errata naturae.
Besana, B., & Feltham, O. (Éds.). (2007). Écrits autour de la pensé d’Alain Badiou. 

Harmattan.
Blanchot, M. (1971). L’amitié. Gallimard.

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The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis

Blumenberg, H. (1995). Perspectivas para una teoría de la aconceptualización. En 
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Castel, R. (1995). La métamorphose de la question sociale. Fayard.
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Guyau, J.-M. (1887). L’Irréligion de l’avenir. Felix Alcan.
Guyau, J.-M. (2012). Esquisse d’une morale sans obligation ni sanction. Paris: Payot. 
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Ediciones Península.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1985). Leçons sur l’histoire de la philosophie. Vrin.
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Revue universitaire de science morale. Revue universitaire de science morale. 
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Ozouf, M., & Furet, F. (Éds.). (1988). Dictionnaire de la Révolution française. 
Flammarion.

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between Philosophy, Epistemology and Empirical Perspectives, 2(1-2), 37-49. doi: https://
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	Sommario.pdf
	First Section
	Editorial I
	Transitions:
New and Different Perspectives

	The Human “Historicity”
as a Permanent Transition
in the Philosophy of Ignacio Ellacuría
	François Jullien: The Double Transit
of Human Life
	The Event, beyond the Permanent Crisis
	For an Epistemology of Transition:
Paul B. Preciado, Psychoanalysis
and the Regime of Sexual Difference

	Second Section
	Editorial II
	Governing Transitions

	Becoming Support Teachers
at the University of Foggia
During the Pandemic *
	Music: For a Sustainable Community and the Promotion of Well-being
	Educating for Transition in Work Contexts
	The Future We Want:
The Transition to Adulthood
of Unaccompanied Minors
	An Exploratory Survey





