A decision is a powerful thing. Alain Badiou in part bases his philosophy around the power of the decision. I am lookng forward to properly reading Badiou’s master work, Being and Event, once my dissertation is completed. From a Deleuzian perspective the problem of the decision is not the power of enframing the world with an acknowledgement of a truth, but the force of reactionary desire that withers the capacity to decide before a descision can be made. The decision to not make a decision is a refusal to engage with the world. This non-decision is a profound existential disabilty.
Once a decision is made, not simply black or white underpants, but decisions of love and life, the world is reconfigured (in Badiou’s philosophy) as an Event. The Kantian conception of enthusiasm — that is, as Lyotard writes, both a passage and an impasse — forces one’s imagination to be enlarged. A post-Kantian enthusiasm retains the paradox of the ‘impassage’ (to coin a neologism) but instead of the mind attempting to continually think an idea, and therefore finding a certain enthusiastic ease with the discordance of the impassage, it is the differential repetition of the relations with the world and the capacity of engagement that is renewed. Rather than a continual return to a ‘regulative’ (and impossible) idea of the sublime, the idea is a problematic artifice of affection expressed from the unthought of thought (short hand: subconscious) and the rest of the intensive impersonal relations within which we are tangled.
How to make decison?
To make a decision requires an acknowledgement and production of a truth and a reconfiguration of the world. “This is the way it is…?”
The power of imagination is required to think this world rendered anew. “…but how can it be like this?”
The power of imagination is enlarged through enthusiasm. “I am not at ease with the world, and yet I endure and affirm it through myself.”
To have enthusiasm requires a certain strength to endure the impassage. “I can’t go on. I will go on.”
Enduring the impassage requires an openess and mobility of desire (in the D&G sense of Anti-Oedipus) and… and… and…
How to combat the reactionary forces that close off this openess of desire in the unthought so to affirm the world anew? There is no opportunity to even make decision. All that remains is an angry paralysis. This is not a comfort and yet people are comfortable with such non-decisions.