I have two questions in this chapter: What is ethical experience for Badiou? What can be said of the subject who has this experience in his work? The hopefully significant consequences of these questions for our understanding of Badiou will emerge as we proceed. But first I need to explain what I mean by ethical experience and how such experience implies a conception of the subject. What, then, is ethical experience?

The Structure of Ethical Experience and the Ethical Subject (Kant, Heidegger)

Let me begin to answer this question by trying to pick out the formal structure of ethical experience or what, with Dieter Henrich, we can call the grammar of the concept of moral insight (Einsicht). Ethical experience begins with the experience of a demand (Anspruch, adresse) to which I give my approval. Approval and demand: that is, there can be no sense of the good (however that is filled out at the level of content, and I am just understanding it formally and emptily) without an act of approval or affirmation. That is, my moral statement that ‘x is good’ or ‘x is bad’ is of a different order to the veridical, epistemological claim that ‘I am now seated in a chair’. This is because the moral statement implies an approval of the fact that x is good, whereas I can be quite indifferent to the chair I am sitting on. If I say, for example, that it would be good for parrots to receive the right to vote in elections, then my saying this implies that I approve of this development. Practical reason is in this way distinct from theoretical reason, the order of the event is distinct from the order of being.