Tovariši absoluta, ali: Kje je ≫aupres de nous?

In Immanence of Truths Badiou refers several times and affirmatively to a formulation, to what Badiou calls a “beautiful formula” of Hegel that “the Absolute is with us all along”. But one should here immediately ask the following question: Where precisely is the absolute if it is “aupres de nous”? This is a question that one might not only raise when reading Badiou’s Immanence of Truths but also when reading Hegel: Where is “bei uns”? This is a difficult question since the being “bei uns” of the absolute does not make it overly easy to locate it. To begin giving an answer negatively, what is clear is that the absolute is neither for Hegel nor for Badiou simply ahead of us, before us, “vor uns”, or “avant nous”. It is not a point or endpoint, because it is not an object; neither target that we aim for nor finishing line that we envisage and that we just would so love to reach. That the absolute is “with us” indicates a more complex spatial and conceptual setting.