Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Rethinking Emancipation
Nick Hewlett
continuum
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8264-9861-8 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10:0-8264-9861-2 (alk. paper)
1. Political science-Philosophy. 2. Democracy. 3. Equality. 4. Badiou, Alain. 5. Rancire,Jacques.
6. Balibar, Etienne, 1942- 7. France-Intellectual life-20th century. I. Title.
JA71.H47 2007
320.092'244-dc22
2007007729
Contents
Acknowledgements
Note on Translations
Abbreviations
ix
x
xi
1
10
17
22
24
28
33
37
45
47
49
59
62
69
72
75
81
84
86
95
100
108
111
viii
5
Contents
Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equaliberty and the
Dilemmas of Modernity
The political
Ambivalence, universality, ideology
Political violence
Lenin and Gandhi
Concluding remarks
116
119
127
129
136
139
142
155
Index
173
Acknowledgements
Note on Translations
Abbreviations
xii
Abbreviations
CD
CT
DW
LA
LH
LP
M
MI
NH
PP
SP
TT
1C
LC
LG
Abbreviations
MCI
PM
RNC
SP
SS
WP
xiii
Chapter 1
Contexts and Parameters
other thought which has emerged since Sartre was the dominant force
in European philosophy. They should not be seen as forming any kind
of united philosophical school, for disagreements and differences
between them are sometimes considerable, but their common and
steadfast refusal to make concessions to a variety of more mainstream
intellectual and political currents both sets them apart from numerous
other thinkers and suggests treatment within the same book.
Each of these writers has adopted as a major aim to explore notions
of equality, and the relationship between equality and emancipation.
For Badiou, the very idea of politics is intimately related to equality
and his philosophy includes an egalitarian presumption. His philosophical system is organized around the notion of the event, which is
virtually synonymous with a broad concept of revolution, and as far
as politics is concerned the event is often an actual political and social
revolution in a traditional sense. For Balibar, his term 'equaliberty' is
at the heart of his understanding of politics, meaning that there can be
no freedom without equality, and vice versa. The notions of emancipation and transformation are central to his definition of what is political. For Ranciere, a discussion of equality is so central to his thought
that in a characteristically provocative way he argues that equality
is a starting point for any definition of politics and not just a distant
goal. Politics is intimately related to uprising and insurgency on the
part of excluded groups and against the unjust status quo; a disruption
of the normal order of things via a bold intervention by those who
have no voice.
In the broadest of terms, the work of these three thinkers is influenced by Marxism, the ground from whence they all sprang in the
early years of their intellectual and political development. However
complex their intellectual discourses might be, and however unexpected some of their points of reference, they each still return frequently to a common idea that an intellectual position of any real
significance must relate to an intervention in the material world
in order to change that world in an egalitarian direction. Despite
some highly novel, unorthodox and eclectic philosophical points
of reference, each seeks to interpret the world from a position that
starts with a belief in the need to pursue the logic of defending the
interests of ordinary people. Although none are now likely to describe
these thinkers has been and will continue to be greater in Britain and
the USA than in France itself. Taking the case of Alain Badiou,
although he teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and
attracts large audiences to his seminars and lectures, there has been,
to date, only one major conference on his work in France, in 1999, in
whose proceedings many contributors are from outside France
(Ramond 2002). There have by contrast been a number of conferences on Badiou's work in Britain and the USA. Moreover, there are
two general works on Badiou's philosophy in English (Barker 2002
and Hallward 2003) and only one in French (Tarby 2005a), and two
collections of essays on Badiou in English (Hallward 2004 and Riera
2005) where they are absent in French. The same applies to special
issues of journals.
A brief look at the careers of these writers also helps explain why I
have decided to group them together for treatment in this book. Alain
Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937, was a student at the
Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and began to work within a
broadly Althusserian framework. He taught philosophy at the University of Paris VIII from 1969 to 1999 and then began teaching at
the Ecole Normale. Greatly influenced by the May 1968 uprising, he
became a leading member of the Union des communistes de France
marxistes-leninistes (UCFML). He has been politically active ever
since, in particular as one of the most prominent activists in Organisation politique, a 'post-party' grouping launched in 1985 which organizes around a small number of key issues including housing, illegal
immigrants (sans papiers] and industrial change.
Etienne Balibar was born in Avalon, France, in 1942 and also studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He worked at the University of Algiers, Algeria in the mid-1960s and then taught at the
Lycee de Savigny-sur-Orge, in France, then at the University of
Paris I fSorbonne) from 1969 to 1994. He held the Chair in Political
and Moral Philosophy from 1994 to 2002 at the University of Paris X
(Nanterre) and in 2000 took a Chair as Distinguished Professor in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He was a contributor, with Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and
Jacques Ranciere, to the original edition of Reading Capital (1965 y ,
writing chapters on the concepts underlying historical materialism.
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12
by politically committed intellectuals of the left to unite communistleaning political activism on the one hand and intellectual activity on
the other. The former Communist Francois Furet published his antiMarxist Interpreting the French Revolution (1981 [1979]) and many other
books of revisionist historiography, including Dictionnaire des oeuvres
politiques (ed. 1989,1995) and The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (1999 [1995]). Furet and his collaborators succeeded in writing a new, revisionist agenda for the study of
French - and by implication Russian and other revolutionary - history, arguing that several generations of eminent historians had themselves gone very astray and had profoundly misunderstood the nature
of historical change. According to Furet's revised historiography, the
revolution of 1789 was not an uprising that had in the fullness of time
changed the world, signalling the dawn of modernity. Neither was it a
revolution that had swept away injustices and brought progress and
the potential for further progress. On the contrary, the most important and revealing characteristic of the French Revolution was that,
like so many other revolutions, it had quickly been followed by terror
and other major injustices and cruelties (Furet 1978, 1988, 1995a,
1995b). One had to conclude, then, that all revolutions- 1789,
1848, 1917 - were bound to bring more harm than good.
In the Anglo-American world to which the new French liberals
looked with respect and for inspiration, Tony Judt and Sunil Khilnani
are among the best-known advocates of the view that Sartre etaL were
seriously wrong; they authored accounts where left intellectuals
inhabited a world described in Judt's book title as 'past imperfect'
and where, by contrast, as he argued in a later book, Leon Blum, Raymond Aron and Albert Camus held - again quoting the title - the
'burden of responsibility' for keeping the liberal candle burning
(Judt 1992, 1998; Khilnani 1993). Mark Lilla has also strived to promote French liberalism and to investigate what he describes as the
'reckless mind' of twentieth-century European intellectuals whom he
accuses of supporting tyrannical regimes and totalitarian political
ideas. These include Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and the
Hegel scholar Alexandre Kojeve (Lilla 2001).
Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut sought to consign what they choose to
describe as La Pensee 68 - primarily Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu and
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19
Althusser was insistent that there was a substantial and crucial difference between the young Marx and the mature Marx. He argues
that in Marx's early writings, which were enjoying much positive
attention in the postwar period in France, Marx had not broken philosophically with Hegel, and the thesis contained within the early writings that Man was alienated and would later achieve self realization
was pure ideology rather than rational analysis. But in Marx's work
starting from The German Ideology (with Engels, 1970 [1932]) and the
Theses on Feuerbach (1968a [ 1888]), there emerged a true science of historical materialism (both these works were written in 1845 and both
remained unpublished for some time). In fact, this 'epistemological
break', as Althusser describes it, was a scientific revolution in the
realm of history just as significant as the development of mathematics
in Greek antiquity and Galileo's pioneering work in scientific physics.
Althusser's theoretical innovations are without a doubt more
nuanced than the way in which they emerged from the heated debates
of the 1960s and 1970s and his posthumous works have on the whole
served to portray a more subtle philosophical and political analysis
than those seen during his lifetime. However, at risk of simplification
for the sake of concision, some of the other main aspects of his reading
of Marx and further elaboration of historical materialism can be summarized as follows.
Again in For Marx, Althusser declares his intention to 'draw a line of
demarcation between Marxist theory and the forms of philosophical
(and political) subjectivism which have compromised it or threatened
it' (Althusser 1969 [1965]: 12). By the time Marx wrote Capital, he
could no longer be regarded as a thinker who emphasized the role of
the subject in history and humanist interpretations of his later works
were highly misleading. In fact, history was a 'process without a subject or goal' and he argued that '[t]o be dialectical materialist, Marxist philosophy must break with the idealist category of the "Subject"
as origin, Essence and Cause, responsible in its interiority for all the determinations of the external "Object", whose internal "Subject" it is
called' (Althusser 1973: 94). The role of the individual in history,
he argued, is one where s/he embodies the process but is not a subject
of history itself. Althusser pursues this argument by suggesting that
in relation to the capitalist mode of production, individuals are its
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21
22
confirmed his dissidence within the PCF with the publication of his
essay 'What Must Change in the Party', which denounced the weakness of democracy and the entrenched bureaucracy within the Party.
(Elliott 2006).
The above remarks on some key aspects of Althusser's thought are
intended to help understand over the course of this book the ways in
which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's thought has developed, both in
terms of the influence of Althusser and reaction against him. For the
time being, suffice it to say that Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere all
share characteristics which relate them directly to Althusser. Most
obviously, they each take an approach which is informed by a background in philosophy. Next, they each have strong views on the
nature of the human subject, which become an integral part of their
systems of thought. They are also each intensely political, to the
extent that they are part of the tradition of praxis, as discussed towards
the beginning of this chapter, and, like Althusser, view thought,
including philosophy, as an activity with profoundly practical ends.
Finally, they each remain influenced by Marxism - and arguably
Althusserian Marxism - on what are sometimes important points.
Concluding remarks
I have attempted in this introductory chapter to suggest some of the
intellectual and political contexts and parameters which help understand the nature and development of the thought of Badiou, Balibar
and Ranciere. This is in keeping with both my and their view that in
order to understand thought, and in order to judge its relevance
(which is arguably part of the same process), some discussion is necessary of the material and ideological-intellectual conditions of its production. I will return to many of the themes discussed in this
introductory chapter as we proceed through the book, and will once
again address some of the questions raised in this chapter in the book's
conclusion.
The structure of this book is straightforward, but a few words of
explanation might nevertheless be useful. Badiou's thought is the
most elaborate and complex, so Chapter 2 introduces his thought to
23
readers who have little familiarity with him, together with some discussion of what I regard as overall problems, relating in particular to
Badiou's ontology and his failure properly to explain movement and
change. Chapter 3 explores Badiou's theory of politics in more depth
and covers a wider range of areas of his political thought. I then turn
in Chapter 4 to an examination of Ranciere's theory of politics, adopting this sequence mainly because of the direct comparability between
some important aspects of Badiou's and Ranciere's thought. This
sequence also allows the two thinkers with the more totalizing view
of the world and of philosophy to be examined side by side. In Chapter 5 I examine what I regard as the key aspects of Balibar's thought,
arguing that it is important to understand his political positions since
the early 1980s in order to understand his thought. Both Badiou and
Ranciere ultimately position themselves at a considerable distance
from the lived reality of politics and this weakens their ability to
forge a wholly relevant theory of politics. Balibar, on the other hand,
despite profound insights in some areas, ultimately fails to reconcile a
body of theory strongly influenced by Marxism with a more terre-aterre orientation towards the real world of liberal democratic politics
which is in some respects highly conciliatory.
Chapter 2
Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth
There is little doubt that Alain Badiou is among the most powerful
thinkers of our time and his thought is only beginning to receive the
attention it deserves. His project is profoundly innovative, radical and
contemporary, yet he is at the same time committed to some of the
central concerns of classical philosophy. He defines philosophy in
such a way that it is intimately connected with and dependent upon
issues of our time, but argues that the Platonic concerns of truth and
being are the sine qua non of philosophical enquiry. His influences are
varied and include Plato, Lacan, Sartre, Althusser, Mallarme and
Rousseau, but in the key area of the political he is clearly just as influenced by his own activism on behalf of exploited groups. Badiou is in
strong and forthright disagreement with the central figures of poststructuralist thought such as Lyotard and Derrida and more generally
with proponents of the linguistic turn and notions of the Other. But
whilst he condemns the 'sophistry' of poststructuralism he is no more
part of either the analytic or hermeneutic folds, also criticizing contemporary philosophers such as John Rawls who are persuaded by
the central importance to thought of human rights and individual liberties. His relationship with Marx is more difficult to categorize, and
despite - or perhaps because of - the extraordinarily broad scope of
his theoretical references, he has not yet undertaken a systematic
engagement with Marxism. Above all, Badiou seeks to explore
momentous change in the form of what he describes as evenements,
and the consequences of these events, which are both of universal relevance and defined in a highly subject-oriented way. Such events only
take place in the realms of science, art, emancipatory politics and
love, and human beings can only fully become subjects when acting
in a way which is faithful to an event. Badiou's thought is political to
the core, in that it explores the commitment, orfidelite, of a subject or
25
subjects to an event which might become part of a transformative process, but it stretches far beyond politics as well.
Badiou's thought is highly original to the extent that it is not
strongly influenced by one particular school of thought to the near
exclusion of others; it breaks out of previously existing moulds, pursuing a line of enquiry which often resorts to first principles and does not
conform strictly to any particular lineage. He insists that in order to
have an understanding of philosophy we need to have some grasp of
the history and current state of its own 'conditions', which are also
science, art, emancipatory politics and love. He staunchly defends
the autonomy of philosophy, arguing that many modern philosophers
have wrongly abandoned metaphysics, and that in order to comprehend virtually anything we need to develop an understanding of the
nature of truth. He defends philosophy from, for example: party political concerns, popular culture and other sorts of trivialization (or
superficial manifestations) of contemporary reality (MP). It should
also be said at the outset that, by contrast with much Western philosophy of the late twentieth century, Badiou takes ontology, or the
science of being, very seriously. For him, ontology is mathematical
and in order to understand the special nature of the event and why
it is literally extraordinary, we must have recourse to set theory, as
elaborated by Georg Cantor. Only by taking this route can we understand why the event is so central to an understanding of the world and
how it relates to subject, truth and being.
Thus, Badiou's complex Weltanschauung draws on a wide range of
philosophical and other traditions and puts together elements which
have not been matched in the same way before, with the inevitable
corollary that there is to an extent a new language. Indeed, it would
be difficult to overstate the breadth and ambition of his philosophical
project which, whatever conclusions one might wish to draw regarding its usefulness, is certainly groundbreaking. As Peter Hallward
(2003: xxiii) puts it, 'Badiou's work is today almost literally unreadable according to the prevailing codes - both political and philosophical - of the Anglo-American academy.'
Badiou's intellectual and political trajectory can be summarized as
follows. He was one of the founder members of the Parti socialiste
unifie (PSU) in 1958, whose creation was largely a response to the
26
active or tacit collusion by large parts of the French left with the government's war against Algerian nationalists in the struggle for
national liberation. He was part of the Lacano-Althusserian Cahiers
pour ranalyse group in the 1960s and was profoundly influenced by
the student and workers' revolt in May 1968, an uprising which has
had a key influence on his thought and to which he frequently refers.
In 1968 he co-founded the Maoist splinter organization, the Union
des communistes de France marxistes-leninistes (UCFML) and continued to act and write as an orthodox Maoist during the 1970s, up to
and including his Theorie du sujet, published in 1982. In 1988 Badiou
published UEtre et Vevenement, which can be seen in part as a major
rebuttal of the postmodern idea that philosophy itself no longer had
anything to say in terms of universal values, and had become a mere
reflection of developments in other spheres. This work effectively
established Badiou's philosophy as being independent from other
major modern schools (although there were clear and acknowledged
influences of a number of other thinkers) and it is here that he elaborates at length his argument that mathematics, and in particular set
theory, offers the most useful model for understanding the nature of
being. Badiou has been politically active in defence of oppressed
groups since 1968 and since 1985 has been a leading member of the
small, 'post-party' political organization, simply called Organisation
politique, which intervenes directly in a variety of campaigns around
issues such as housing, immigration and rights at work and publishes a regular bulletin, entitled La Distance politique. In addition to
his numerous philosophical works he has published novels, plays
and the libretto of an opera. In this chapter I examine what can be
described as Badiou's mature work, that is his philosophy from
UEtre et Vevenement onwards, a period which is generally thought of
as post-Maoist, although traces of Maoism are still found in the
later Badiou.
Badiou is reasonably well known in France, at least within academic and intellectual circles concerned with left philosophy or
politics; he has taught philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure
since 1999 and before that taught at the University of Paris VIII
for thirty years. Neither in France nor elsewhere, however, has
Badiou received anything like the attention enjoyed by intellectuals
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I would like to pause for a moment to comment on Badiou's overview of the definition and practice of philosophy. One may well wish
to agree with Badiou in suggesting that the three dominant schools of
philosophy reflect the current state of the material world to such
extent that they militate against the distance philosophy needs for a
proper engagement with transformative processes in the world at
large. In other words these schools are each in their own way philosophies of the status quo. One might also want to welcome Badiou's
insistence that it is the material world that conditions the development of philosophy, not the reverse. We might applaud his frontal
attack on the slippery scepticism of much postmodern philosophy
and its reluctance to take sides. But I would at this stage simply question the choice of the four generic procedures, which are also the conditions of philosophy. Badiou tells us that these are the only areas in
which we are able to become subjects, but, short of mentioning that
philosophical preoccupation with these areas goes back a long way,
he does not explain why these and only these are the only four relevant
realms, the only realms in which individuals can become subjects. The
precise reasons for this are not clear.
Moreover, given the lingering influence of Marx on Badiou's work
and given an enduring concern to relate philosophy directly to the
material world, it is odd that the economy plays no part in the core
structure of his scheme of things. There seems to be no residual influence of Marx's political economy on the philosophical infrastructure,
however much Badiou might condemn and combat the social effects
of today's all-pervasive, virtually unfettered drive for profits. He does
of course wish to avoid the pitfalls of exaggerated economic determinism, but allowing the economy no central place in the philosophical
scheme of things does seem to weaken his case, all else being equal.
Truth
I want to explore further this blend of ambition and modesty on
behalf of philosophy by looking at Badiou's conception of truth, the
aspect of his system where this blend is perhaps best expressed:
'the only question that philosophy is concerned with is that of truth,
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place" ' (PM 24). Put slightly differently: 'Something must happen,
in order for there to be something new. Even in our personal lives,
there must be an encounter, there must be something which cannot
be calculated, predicted or managed, there must be a break based
only on chance .. .'(PH 124).
Bearing in mind that truth can only occur in the domains of politics,
love, art and science, perhaps the most straightforward example we
can give is indeed in the realm of love between two individuals. Two
people meet by chance and fall in love, they commit to each other on
the basis of this encounter (the event) and remain faithful to it. These
individuals may not be able to understand fully their mutual attraction and commitment or be able to explain it to others. They might
not have been able to predict such a development given what they
knew of themselves and each other before it happened. The faithfulness to the event of their coming together might last for the rest of their
lives, or far less long. But having met each other and fallen in love, the
individuals embark upon a process of truth and self-realization as subjects in the only way possible, that is in fidelity to an event.
It is not possible to prove (in an empirical, positivist sense) that an
event has taken place, as the truth process associated with the event
only exists through the active commitment of those who declare its
existence and importance. It even eludes definition. Truth is thus primarily a matter of conviction, intervention and action, a process
which allows us in the only way possible to enjoy self-realization as
subjects. It occurs rarely and each manifestation of it is unique, but
its significance is universal. Badiou's distance from positivism and
empiricism is emphasized by frequent assertions that truth contrasts
starkly with knowledge, which is 'what transmits, what repeats'
(IT 61, EE 269, C 201). In the normal course of things, if'nothing
happens', there can be knowledge and there can be facts, but truth
cannot occur (MP 16-17). Drawing inspiration from Lacan (C 201),
he describes the relationship between knowledge and truth thus:
[A] truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge.
This means that all is played out in the thought of the duo
truth/knowledge. This amounts, in fact, to thought about the relation - which is actually a non-relation - between, on the one hand
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none of the calculations internal to the situation can account for its
interruption, and cannot, in particular, elucidate this kind of break
in scale that happens at a certain moment, such that the actors
themselves are seized by something of which they no longer know
if they are its actors or its vehicle [supports], or what carries it
away... (PHI 24)
The strong element of surprise in the emergence of the event, and
our inability to explain it in retrospect in terms of what already
existed, is - although a familiar feeling to historians of May 1968
in particular - perhaps the most difficult aspect of the event to
accept. (An event is 'purely chance, uninferable from the situation'
[EE 215].) The event moves away from the repetition of the situation and in Saint Paul Badiou stresses that 'it is the essence of the event
not to be preceded by any sign, and to surprise us by its grace, however
vigilant we may be .. ."The day of the Lord will come like a thief in
the night" [Paul]' (SP 119). Put in more abstract terms, which he
describes as 'the rock of my entire edifice', Badiou comments that
'[i]f there is an event, its belonging to the situation of its site is undecidable
from the point of view of the situation itself (EE 202, italics in original).
I will now raise some further questions regarding the nature of the
event. First, it is not clear how significant an event needs to be to qualify as an event. The examples Badiou gives tend, apart from in the
domain of love, to be generally agreed as being momentous (at least
in retrospect): the resurrection of Christ, the French Revolution of
1789, May 1968, paradigm shifts in music, art, mathematics and so
on. Badiou might reply that whether or not an occurrence becomes
an event depends upon the response of individuals who might become
faithful to it, but he also suggests, as we have seen, that an event is rare
and exceptional. This raises the question of whether someone who frequently and fleetingly falls in love, for example, in what others might
consider to be a superficial way, is responding to (or rather creating) a
genuine event and is therefore more (or more frequently) a subject
than someone who does not do this. Can one practice fidelity and
therefore become a subject in relation to a 'trivial' event? An event
must be of universal significance, but what exactly does this mean
when it is defined so subjectively? Also, do the French enjoy more
40
'subjecthood' than the English because they are faithful to more revolutions than the British, say, who have arguably arrived at a comparable socio-economic and political place without so many instances of
sudden, momentous change?
Next, it is still not clear to me why fidelity (generating subjecthood
and truth) must always be to an event, rather than to a state of affairs.
Is not love something that can emerge gradually, without an obvious
starting point, rather than as a coup defoudre? (Badiou is emphatic that
love is not just sex, incidentally.) Is not an expression of fidelity to the
1917 revolution as much shorthand for a commitment to a much
broader process, a particular view of the world and set of emancipatory aspirations, which need not be expressed in terms of fidelity to an
event at all, but can be put in terms of, say, fidelty to the aspirations
and processes of socialism or communism, however they might be
defined? Could we not in fact one day be faithful, in theory at least,
to a (far more egalitarian and socially just) status quo, rather than to
a dramatic point of change? Why must fidelity necessarily be to a perhaps disputed and/or somewhat arbitrarily defined point of departure
for what might become the status quo?
Some of Badiou's responses to these questions would no doubt
emphasize the mathematical nature of his ontology, which again he
derives in part from Lacan and which is a major focus ofL'Etre et Vevenement. He is in search of the highest possible level of purity, which is as
removed as possible from the material, and for him this level of
abstraction is achieved by multiplicity as articulated by set theory.
Philosophy has excluded maths for too long, he argues, in part
because of its profound preoccupation with language, and must now
become re-involved with maths, not as a philosophy of mathematics
but as philosophy which depends on and is conditioned by maths,
which is accountable only to itself - it is axiomatic and does not interpret or represent - and is thus sovereign in an absolute sense. In particular, Badiou's ontology is based on set theory as elaborated by
Georg Cantor, who radically redefined the relationship between the
finite and the infinite, and the relationship between the parts and
the whole. Being in these terms is pure multiplicity, and in set theory
multiplicity is multiples of multiples and nothing more. We can
describe Badiou's concept of the 'situation' as being the same as a set,
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will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life;
and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.
(Darwin 1968 [1859]: 169-70)
I evoke Darwin's theory of evolution not because it is transferrable
as a general theory of change to human societies, as I have said. But it
does provide an excellent example - perhaps the example - of how
organisms in a constant state of flux can, precisely because of this ceaseless mobility, both evolve slowly and undergo substantial change.
(What is missing in Darwin's account - a lacuna he fully acknowledges - is the process by which characteristics are inherited and by
which organisms are eventually generated which are incompatible
with other individuals with common ancestors; the answer to this
was later provided by the science of genetics.) The seed of a particular
change, whilst not predictable in any precise sense, and not inevitable
in its detail, is entirely contained in the logic of what is already in
existence (the 'situation' in Badiouian terms). Darwinism explains
change in terms which fully integrate an interpretation of the conditions of'what was' into 'what is now'.
Marx, meanwhile, uses a theory of political economy to inform an
explanation of historical movement and change, involving most centrally a contradiction between forces of production and relations of
production. The forces of production comprise all components of the
means of production and labour power, including such diverse elements as machinery, the labour process and education of the working
class. The relations of production, meanwhile, are the way in which
the productive forces are owned (from an economic point of view), a
system of ownership investigated by Marx most fully, of course, under
capitalism, where the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and
the proletariat only its ability to work, or labour power. For Marx, the
productive forces in particular are constantly changing and tend to
become decreasingly compatible with the relations of production of a
given time, which means social relations become more unstable. This
is the core of his approach to the political economy of historical
change, which he famously expresses thus:
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For both Darwin and Marx the theories of the status quo (to the
extent that there can be a status quo where there is constant movement) incorporate a theory of change within them. For both writers,
the 'event' for Darwin adaptation and for Marx social revolution - takes place as a result of aspects of the 'situation' explained in
large part by their more general theories of this ever-changing status
quo. For Badiou it is the other way round; something happens which
cannot properly be explained by reference to the already-existing
circumstances - 'the idea of massive change whose origin is a state of
totality is imaginary' (EE 197) - and becomes an event of significant
proportions because someone or some people commit themselves to
what has happened. (Thus for Badiou an event cannot possibly be
a natural event because there are no subjects in nature [EE 194].)
In the case of Marx, the subject is certainly important to the extent
that without agents of revolution there can be no revolution, but
revolution in France for Marx, for example, was absolutely explicable with reference to, in particular, the socio-economic contraditions under the ancien regime, in conjunction with an understanding
of, for example, political developments. Badiou might in both cases
respond by saying that the subject is absent from the cores of both
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these theories of change. In the case of Darwin's theory regarding biological change, this is of course the case and is not directly applicable
to social change. As far as Marx is concerned, I would interpret his
theory as allowing a substantial role for agency whilst insisting on
definite tendencies in the development of human societies. Even
more famously, Marx suggests that people make their own history,
but within given circumstances.
In Logiques des mondes Badiou responds to criticism for having no
theory of change beyond the event, no explanation of what happens
in the normal, 'non-evental' order of things. He devotes many pages
to developing a more general explanation of change and takes us
through the idea that there can be 'weak singularities' which are
important instances of change which are less significant than 'strong
singularities', also called events. What he calls 'materialist dialectics'
la dialectique materialiste] is clearly intended to respond to those who
alleged his theory was, paradoxically, rather static and to those
who accuse him of ignoring dialectics and not placing enough emphasis on the material; the proximity of the term materialist dialectics
to Marx's dialectical materialism is entirely intentional, as is the distancing transposition of the words. But there is still, apparently, no
fully explained connection between the emergence of smaller changes
and the emergence of the event, not, at least, in terms of the overall
theory of the emergence of the subject through fidelity to the event.
Concluding remarks
I will firstly summarize some important aspects of Badiou's philosophy. He sets out to challenge the fundamental assumptions of a
number of established schools of thought and individual thinkers
and, by asserting a blend of universalism, intervention of the subject
and an argument in favour of the importance of the event, offers a
radical, praxis-driven alternative to much contemporary Western
thought. In particular, Badiou takes postmodern philosophy to task,
arguing that its declaration of the end of metanarratives, its relativism, its marginalizing of the role of philosophy itself and by implication certain forms of political activism are all leading philosophy into
46
a blind alley from which it must now remove itself. But he has little
time either for any of the schools of philosophy which espouse forms
of liberalism. I have suggested that Badiou succeeds in exposing
much contemporary philosophy - postmodern and otherwise - as
essentially a series of areas of intellectual activity which are unwilling
or unable to engage with the material world in a way that offers a
manner of thinking about changing the material world in anything
more than the most modest and unthreatening ways. I have also suggested that his assertion of the importance of intervention in order to
achieve understanding which in turn leads to further intervention is a
persuasive line of argument.
I have also suggested, however, that the theory of the event, at the
very heart of Badiou's scheme of things, is problematic for a number of
reasons. Among these are, first, that Badiou is not able to explain the
genesis of the event from the status quo from which it springs. Second,
I fail to see why we cannot act in fidelity to the status quo, or a process,
or a series of aspirations, for example, rather than to an event. Third,
and perhaps most importantly, sophisticated though Badiou's mathematical ontology may be, he does not seem to show convincingly that
set theory explains the world as it actually is, and more importantly
how the world changes. I have suggested that in order to understand
radical transformations - events - we need to have a theory of the
status quo which describes an already-existing state of flux, whereas
Badiou's status quo is rather static.
I hope to have prepared the ground for a more detailed examination of Badiou's political thought in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
Despite a strong conviction about the usefulness of philosophy qua philosophy and despite scepticism with regard to much of what today
passes as political philosophy, the work of Alain Badiou is in important ways profoundly political. We have seen that, drawing on classical philosophy, he explores at great length the question of truth,
which according to him can only come about via the commitment or fidelity - of a subject or subjects to an event which has taken place in
one of the crucial realms of science, art, love or emancipatory politics.
Indeed the realm of politics occupies a special place among the four
realms where truth procedures can take place, as truth activity in this
domain is necessarily collective - therefore universal - in its practice
as well as universal in its orientation, as are all truth procedures (AM
155-6). Moreover, Badiou's core philosophy, involving the interplay
of event, subject and truth, is in certain respects reminiscent of Marx
and other revolutionary writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in that substantial change takes place where something seems at
one stage to be of little importance and then in a process of revolution
comes to matter a great deal; subjects act in ways which promote the
importance of the event and ways which run counter to the logic and
the spirit of the status quo. Using the language of historical change
through struggle, then, the role of the activist or activists is crucial to
the process of radical transformation and in particular to the creation
of a new status quo built on new bases; in more Badiouian, philosophical terms, a subject's or subjects' fidelity to an event generates truth,
which transforms the situation along egalitarian lines (whether it be
in the domain of science, art, love or politics) for ever. Thirdly,
Badiou's thought is profoundly political because it is influenced by
many years of his own political activism, discussed in Chapter 2.
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very different from most notions of agency) or because one is a thinking being. Subjecthood comes only with being part of the truth process
involved in acting in fidelity towards a new art form, a person with
whom the subject has fallen in love, scientific innovation or a momentous political happening. The subject, then, is as central as the event
itself to Badiou's philosophical system (and is indeed always found
alongside the event), and is by definition, to put it simply, committed
to a cause of some description; this is the subject as activist, although
not necessarily political activist. Subjecthood is exceptional and
extraordinary and certainly not the rule, or part of the normal way
of things. The subject is certainly not any and every individual, an
ordinary human being, any more than a truth is an empirically verifiable representation of what is, what exists. However, any individual
can become a subject in the process of committing to a particular
cause as part of a truth procedure, where subjects, truths and events
create each other.
Badiou's strong emphasis on the role of the subject thus very much
sets him apart from structuralist and much poststructuralist thought
which has been so prevalent in France since it largely eclipsed Sartre
in the early 1960s, and Badiou indeed conceives of disputes within
French philosophy in the late twentieth century primarily as conflict
over the nature and importance of the human subject (Badiou 2005b}.
In his own work he brings the subject back to the very centre of the
stage, as we have seen, and in a respectful but critical essay on Althusser, Badiou accuses his sometime mentor of failing to develop any
theory of the subject because Althusser deals only with processes,
removing the subject entirely from his philosophy of Marxism and
instead ascribing the subject with a role only in relation to the capitalist state; the Althusserian subject can only, according to Badiou, be a
bourgeois subject (MP 68). For Badiou the subject is quite the opposite; individuals and groups of individuals become subjects when they
are, in the broadest of senses, revolutionaries, when they commit to an
extraordinary event and defend it to the hilt, altering the status quo
substantially and for ever.
To put it slightly differently, by contrast with deconstructionist
philosophers (and arguably Althusser as well), Badiou is greatly preoccupied with a form of agency, but agency - in the form of radical
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action on the part of someone (or some people) who becomes a subject - is for him not part of the normal course of things. Instead, it
comes about as part of a chance encounter with an event towards
which individuals decide to act with fidelity and which radically
changes the situation in which they exist.
One problem with Badiou's conception of the subject is that, even if
one accepts subjecthood emerging amongst individuals who commit
to an event, the subject is only partially a subject in that s/he reacts to
events which Badiou tells us simply happen; the subject plays no part
in causing the event. Badiou is thus still quite a long way from Sartre's
interpretation of the subject where each individual is at liberty to
shape their own destiny and bear the consequences of this course of
action, and indeed in some senses compared with Sartre, Badiou
comes closer to Althusser's notion of history as 'process without a subject', precisely because for Badiou subjecthood is so uncompromisingly retrospective. A thorough theory of the subject lying between
Sartre's arguably excessively free individual and Badiou's after-theevent activist is, it would seem, still to be written, influenced more closely perhaps by Marx's notion of human beings creating their own
history but within particular circumstances.
As with the event in relation to the subject in the other domains
where truth procedures take place, there is in Badiou's reflections on
the political event a peculiar mix of the highly passive and highly
active on the part of the subject of the event, whose own perspective
is the only one which is of real note:
A political process is a chance fidelity, militant and only partially
shared, to a singular event, which is legitimised only by itself. The
universality of the political truth which results from this process
is itself only recognisable, like any truth, retrospectively, in the
form of knowledge ... the point from which a political process can
be thought, from where its truth can be recognised, is the actors'
and not the spectators' ... It is via Saint-Just and Robespierre
that one enters the singular truth of the French Revolution, from
where you can gain knowledge of it, and not via Kant or Francois
Furet. (AM 33)
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Thus before the event the subject-to-be does not yet exist as a subject,
to the extent that he or she, or more accurately in the case of politics
they, only create the event (and themselves as subjects) after it has
taken place. Once the event has happened the subject becomes crucial
to the event's (retrospective) existence and significance: 'It will
always remain doubtful that an event has taken place, except for the
one who intervenes' (EE 229). For a committed view of politics, and
one which is arguably highly influenced by the notion of praxis, it is
rather odd that the role of the activist is so retrospective in relation to
the event and a matter of faith, rather than being one of planning a
course of (perhaps revolutionary) action and changing the world.
For example, the Bolsheviks surely did not wait for the 1917 revolution before behaving in a revolutionary manner and becoming agents
of change, and one does not necessarily fall into a teleological trap if
one believes otherwise. Even the May 1968 uprising in France, which
is famous for not having been predicted, is surely explicable only if one
takes into account such factors as: prolonged struggles against colonialism in the 1950s and 1960s; both the strength of the PCF and its partial discrediting during this same period, thus generating many
activists to the left of the PCF; the immediate international context
of the anti-Vietnam war movement; years of resistance to de Gaulle's
authoritarian regime; and finally, decades of work on the part of
the PCF itself and sympathetic trade union organizations such as the
CGT, which (albeit somewhat belatedly) contributed to building
the general strike in May-June 1968, and helped to give the uprising
the historic, eventmental significance which Badiou identifies. This is
not to deny that when the trade unions negotiated with the employers
at the end of May and beginning of June in the Crenelle negotiations,
this had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of the workers'
protests. Moreover, the Crenelle negotiations certainly resulted in
changes which were meagre compared to the strength of the May
movement (see Capdevielle and Mouriaux 1988).
In short, history suggests that the role of activists resisting aspects of
the status quo was crucial in terms of preparing the ground for and
sustaining the momentum of May 1968, which is not to say by any
means that the uprising was inevitable. If, on the other hand, events,
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and explain change as the approach of conventional empirical political science. If true politics only begins with the rare and the extraordinary, with an event whose genesis is impossible to explain properly
or to predict even partially, it also leaves the political analyst in a
passive, rather ineffectual position. The idea of having to engage in
order to understand is perfectly acceptable. But for Badiou engagement - fidelity - apparently only allows one to understand properly
a particular event, and not the world more generally. In fact, truth
resulting from achieving subjecthood in fidelity to an event is arguably not understanding at all, but something far more subjective,
akin perhaps to quasi-inexplicable belief, or faith; consistent with this
approach, Badiou is emphatic that truth is not the same as knowledge
(EE361,MP18).
I would suggest that if, on the contrary, we conceive of politics as
the interplay of various forms of power, some more progressive and
egalitarian, others more reactionary and elitist, then it becomes possible to understand political developments in an ongoing, more organic
way. For Gramsci, for example, politics in a capitalist society must be
understood as competing entities attempting to achieve hegemony,
which the bourgeois class is on the whole most successful in doing.
By extension, progressive politics are in part about attempting to
establish a counter-hegemony. This is an ongoing process, which in
normal, non-revolutionary times is a constant 'war of position',
rather than a sudden and revolutionary 'war of manoeuvre'. When a
serious challenge to the status quo takes place in the form of an uprising, it is in part the work by activists during the period of war of position that allows the passage to war of manoeuvre. For Badiou, on the
contrary, politics is only politics when it is egalitarian and emancipatory and takes the form of a sudden rupture with the status quo;
slow, ongoing struggles to convince others in the ideological realm, or
to make small material gains apparently do not count as politics.
Certainly, this approach which puts emphasis on the big break is
positive, optimistic and provocative, a broadside attack on both
liberal and revisionist trends currently so prevalent in France, which
of course seek greatly to play down the importance of revolt and
revolution. But it also largely avoids many political issues, including the questions of what the state does when it rules, the nature
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of exploitation, the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and liberal democracy, why revolutions happen when they
do, and so on. If we do not take a more holistic view of politics
then our analysis is bound to be left wanting and be less useful in
terms of explaining how to counter the status quo as necessary and
move onwards.
Badiou as political activist takes far more notice of the different
instances of political power than his theory might suggest, as I show
later in this chapter.
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Zizek points out that this approach also confronts head-on the historian Francois Furet's revisionist approach to the French Revolution,
where Furet attempts to remove the evental-revolutionary significance of 1789 and instead presents it as a series of individual historical
facts (Zizek 1999: 131-2, 135-6). But Zizek goes on to question
Badiou's elaboration of the place of the subject in his system, arguing
that the subject plays a far more ideological role than Badiou is prepared to admit, and that Badiou's Truth-Event is in fact close to
Althusser's notion of ideological interpellation. Zizek also argues convincingly that Badiou's most compelling example of the event and the
emergence of subjects via fidelity to the event is the Christian religion
as explored in his book on Saint Paul, and that this religious event
does not fit within the four generic procedures, namely love, art,
science and politics. There is, then, an unacknowledged ideological
and religious logic at the heart of Badiou's thought (141). (See also
Daniel Bensai'd's chapter, 'Alain Badiou et le miracle de Pevenement',
in Bensaid 2001: 143-70.)
I have argued above that in the broader context of much French
philosophy of the final third of the twentieth century, Badiou is notable in particular for his assertion of the importance of the role of the
subject. We should no doubt add that Badiou is in this context also
notable for the emphasis he places on the notion of equality and on
the political more generally. In light of this it is worth anticipating
somewhat the next chapter and pausing to compare Badiou's work
with that of Jacques Ranciere, who has a substantial amount in
common with Badiou, and who might also be deemed to be exploring
philosophy beyond the postmodern. (See especially Ranciere 1992,
1995, 2001 and Robson 2005a.) Ranciere's conception of politics
relies on a notion of the gap between the established order on the one
hand and on the other hand political interventions on the part of marginalized individuals or groups who disrupt the injustice of the status
quo. By intervening in this way the excluded assert their right to be
understood in a way that the discourse of received wisdom does not
allow; the rebels' statements cannot be understood by the ruling
order (or 'police' as Ranciere describes it) and the conditions of comprehension are created in the process of rebellion and its aftermath,
through the rebels seizing the opportunity to assert themselves and,
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revolutionary class, the potential for socialist revolution and communism, and the concept of alienated labour, to mention only some
of the most obvious consequences. But such an understanding is also
important in any attempt to understand less clearly political domains,
including intellectual history, culture, personal relations and the
family. So important was the economy to Marx, of course, that he
spent much of his mature intellectual life in the pursuit of an understanding of the capitalist economy. If anything, Badiou seems to have
done the opposite to Marx in this respect and the central place of the
economy has been replaced by the event, which arguably has for
Badiou become the motor of history, but in a retrospective way,
where things change with the emergence of truth as a subtraction
from history, as opposed to being a logical outcome of, for example,
the growing contradiction between forces of production and relations
of production at the heart of the historical process, as Marx (1968b
[1859]: 181-2) argues. By the same token, the notion of class also
plays no role in Badiou's overall explanation of the scheme of things,
at least in his work since and including UEtre et Vevenement (1988); he
indulges in little or no social or socio-economic analysis in his later
theoretical work. This stands in stark contrast with, and arguably in
contradiction to, Badiou's and his activist comrades' insistence on the
importance of directly supporting proletarian struggles in the workplace, which I discuss below.
It seems in fact that Badiou is in search of a complete alternative to
the historical and dialectical method of Marx, of a theory which
breaks with the idea of any logic of history, but where engagement
with the circumstances of the time is nevertheless crucial to any process of profound change and any understanding of this process, which
for Badiou is arguably one and the same thing. Badiou comments that
he is keen to 'refute the vulgar Marxist concept of the logic of history
and the idea that radical and sudden change could have as its origin a
"state of totality" ' (EE 196-7). Rather, radical transformation originates at one point, in an eventmental site (EE 197).
One of Marx's key overall contributions is indeed to explain the
nature of historical change, which involves an exploration of the dialectical relationship between various aspects of society, and the place
of social revolutions within the context of this dialectical relationship.
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trade unions to counter the power of capital. One might for example
expect an activist left intellectual to work with a trade union like
SUD, which was formed in 1989 and attempts to rediscover the traditional radicalism of French trade unionism, declaring in its charter
that a transformation of society is necessary and that this will involve
a 'profound break with the logic of capitalism' (in Blakey 2001). SUD
is also at pains to be innovative and open to influences which are not
part of the traditional core of trade union preoccupations, such as
those of the homeless and illegal immigrants. But Badiou is insistent
that it is wrong to attempt to take on one's adversaries on their own
territory, including in the context of trade unions. By the same token,
the antiglobal movements, whose supporters have demonstrated at
international meetings of global capital in Genoa and elsewhere, 'dedicate themselves to a systematic and economist identification of the
adversary, which is already utterly misguided' (BF 120).
Badiou also emphasizes the importance of the concept of 'two
counted as one' in any attempt to understand political processes, in a
way that is also strongly influenced by Maoism (e.g. PP 106). His
notion of the two is highly complex and varied, but taking the case of
the event, when an event takes place the situation is divided into two
because the subjects of the event act in fidelity to certain aspects of the
situation which relate to the event and not to those which do not relate
to the event. Once the event has taken place, there is no relationship
between these two groups of aspects (or these two sets of elements)
(EE 229; C 290; S 89-102). Again, the theory of the two reinforces
the perception of Badiou as a discontinuous philosopher, rather than
one who can explain history in continuous or evolutionary terms.
Rather than approaching Badiou as a Marxist thinker, then, it is
more helpful to see his thought as being influenced in a general way
by the emancipatory spirit of Marx, without what might be described
as Marx's scientific method. In spite of Badiou's elaborate mathematical discussions, his thought does not share what Marx and Engels
described as a scientific approach to socialism, which dissects the
mechanisms of capitalist society and in light of this dissection explains
the transformational potential these mechanisms offer. Writing in the
early 1980s, Badiou suggests that Marxism is far less able than it once
was to help understand the nature of reality. 'We are thus brought
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back to the figure of the beginning ... We proceed from the "there is"
of a break, and ... we are putting forward, like Marx in the Manifesto,
inaugural political hypotheses. More particularly, we are (re)formulating the hypothesis of a politics determined by non-domination ...
We must re-write the Manifesto' (PP 59-60). He goes on to say that the
'previous Marxism - of the completed cycle of Marxisation - serves
as a whole body of thought as a "Hegelian-type" reference: both
necessary and not prescribing anything particular. Marxism has
become in relation to itself its own Hegelianism' (PP 61). Marx is
thus a source for 'the beginning of a different way of thinking polities'
but the destruction of Marxism-Leninism at the same time highlights
the necessity for, as well as creating the possibility of, 'an entirely new
practice of polities' (PP 63-4).
With only a little exaggeration, one might suggest that in relation
to Marx, Badiou's work represents a reinvertion of the dialectic,
putting Hegel's dialectic on its head again. Badiou certainly shares
with Hegel a belief in the generative power of abstract and absolute
universals, which for Hegel takes the form of Geist and which for
Badiou takes the form of the logic of mathematics. In both cases the
material world is a sort of local manifestation of the abstract and the
spiritual (or the mathematical) rather than the other way round.
In fact Badiou goes far in this direction and defines a subject as a more
concrete manifestation of the abstract, as 'any local configuration
of a generic procedure where a truth is sustained' (EE 429), a 'finite
instance of a truth' (EE 447).
To conclude this brief discussion of Badiou's relationship with
Marx, it is worth quoting Marx's discussion of Hegel, by way of highlighting Badiou's very different position:
My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is
its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain.
i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of'the Idea',
he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos
of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and
translated into forms of thought. (Marx 1954 [1873]: 29)
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Democracy
Badiou has a profound ambivalence towards the notion of democracy.
On the one hand, he comes close to equating democracy with communism, almost in the way Lenin did, or at least with an ongoing,
anti-establishment, anti-capitalist struggle; communism is 'the passion for equality5, 'intolerance towards oppression, the desire for the
end of the State' and the ontological concept of democracy and communism are 'one and the same' (DO 13-14). For Badiou democracy
in this sense has manifested itself in rare instances, for example in the
Soviets during and after the Russian Revolution and in the liberated
zones in Mao's China, but it is highly praised. More recently and
closer to home, he suggests that the groupings of sans papiers from
immigrant hostels and from Organisation politique are democratic
(AM 167). But Badiou's positive view of democracy is restricted to a
very small number of actual political phenomena, and beyond these
the positive approach often becomes a mainly subjective way of ordering his view of the event, rather than a way of describing an ongoing
and potentially widespread form of political organization, which is, it
would appear, impossible now that communism is a thing of the past;
it seems democracy is now barely possible in a material sense, and
exists only as an abstract notion with little relation to political activism on a day-to-day basis.
Indeed, Badiou at his most polemical and vigorous asserts that
democracy in an organizational sense is nothing other than parliamentary, liberal democracy, in France and elsewhere, and is something to be combated, condemned and boycotted. Commenting on
his lectures on thinking the present philosophically, he remarks that
one of the two main ideas by which he is guided is 'that, in order to
think the contemporary world in any fundamental way, it's necessary
to take as your point of departure not the critique of capitalism but the
critique of democracy ... no one is ready to criticize democracy. This
is a real taboo, a genuine consensual fetish. Everywhere in the world,
democracy is the true subjective principle - the rallying point - of
liberal capitalism' (BF 127). At times Badiou is apparently not
simply talking about liberal democracy as promoted by defenders of
contemporary capitalism, and he goes a long way towards a critique
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any notion of democracy, in part because he believes that any representation of political opinion is impossible. Invoking Rousseau, he
argues that politics comes about as a result of a (non-historicallybased) event, in the form of a social contract. Politics is the same as
equality, which is in turn the main point of reference of the general
will (EE 380-2). Now, as 'a procedure with fidelity to the contractevent, politics can neither be delegated not represented. It is to be
found entirely in the "collective being" of its militant-citizens' and
'Rousseau's genius was to define politics abstractly as a generic procedure' (EE 383, 389). Here Badiou is once again expressing the idea
that politics is intimately bound up with the notions of event and
truth, where it is perhaps less important to share one's ideas with
large numbers of people (let alone a majority), or try to convince
them that you are correct, than to be right in an abstract sense.
4
What supports the procedure is solely the zeal of citizen-militants,
whose fidelity engenders an infinite truth which no constitutional or
organizational form can express adequately' (EE 389).
In one sense revolutionaries through the ages have been in this position, which lies at the heart of Badiou's account of transformation;
radical change takes place via fidelity on the part of an often small
number of people to an event (although arguably they have often
been faithful to an event which has not yet happened). Most revolutionaries have in the longer term, however, sought as a priority to win
over the majority to their point of view. Badiou insists that the question of number is not important (PP 68), but it is hard to see how any
sort of deeper socialist system of organization and government could
be realized (or 'correct' positions achieved) without having won over
large numbers of people to the idea of transformation. Indeed large
numbers of people would need to be convinced of the need for active
participation by large numbers of people; the idea of democracy
(including the numerical idea of majority participation and decision making) becomes very important in the transformational process. So attitude towards and critical support for the more democratic
aspects of liberal democracy are also important; in addition to universal suffrage, freedom of expression, equality before the law, and
other established aspects of liberal democracy, a discussion which,
for example, extends the notion of rule by the people to the economy,
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Parliamentary politics
In light of the above discussion it will come as no surprise that Badiou
is often particularly critical about other people's commentary on parliamentary politics. Much of what passes as political analysis, he
argues, is simple and unhelpful quantification and, he adds, '[pjolitics
will only become thinkable once it is delivered from the tyranny of
number, number of voters as well as number of demonstrators or strikers'(PP 68).
He is reacting in part to a tremendous preoccupation with all
aspects of elections amongst political scientists and journalists, particularly in France. There is also at times almost obsessive attention
given to opinion polls regarding political parties, policy and voting
intentions, closely followed by seemingly endless poring over the
actual election results. The ubiquity of quantification can take on
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such a dynamic of its own that studies sometimes have little or nothing
to say, for example, about what election results can tell us about politics more generally, in these studies' eagerness to quantify to the nth
degree. This is not to deny the usefulness of some empirical and quantitative studies and some commentary on election results can be very
useful in that it throws light on politics in a deeper sense. To take one
example, Collette Ysmal (2004) provides a fascinating, detailed analysis of the French elections of 2002 which also has a lot to say about
French politics and society more generally. But the general effect of
widespread quantification is indeed to detract from debates regarding
how parliamentary politics might be made more democratic, for
example, or what the alternatives might be. However, Badiou does
seem to miss the point that although elections in liberal democracy
are a very poor substitute for profounder democracy, they do nevertheless have a real relationship with a deeper democracy. They are
a form of politics which is to an extent influenced by a deeper and
more valid notion of democracy than Badiou would give credit for,
which means that - without neglecting other spheres of political
activity and activism - this is an arena with which progressive thinkers ought also to engage and at times intervene in. Badiou appears to
believe that once one is tainted with participation in such a process
one is bound to capitulate to the mainstream view of everything.
This view of partial participation in more mainstream political activity such as the elections or trade union work reflects in part a view that
radical, innovative movements such as feminism and green politics
can and have been adapted, de-radicalized and adopted, ultimately,
to suit the needs of capital. In the language of activists of the decades
following May 1968, during which time this type of development was
common (and arguably has been perhaps even more so since the
beginning of the 1980s), this is recuperation.
Badiou discusses developments in parliamentary politics at some
length in an article entitled 'On the Presidential Election of AprilMay 2002' (C1 13-43), commenting that 'the election result certainly
seemed to me to be important, because politically - and I have been
saying this for many years - this country is very ill' (Cl 15). In the
presidential elections of that year, the National Front leader JeanMarie Le Pen went through to the second round in a run-off with the
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Gaullist (and eventual victor) Jacques Chirac, after winning 16.9 per
cent of the vote in the first round. Badiou argues that popular reactions to the relative success of Le Pen in the first round - huge protest
demonstrations, meetings, mass distribution of leaflets, and so on were yet another way of showing that elections serve mainly to reinforce the politics of moderate consensus which is so characteristic of
France today (Cl 18-19). Elections do not reflect free expression, he
argues, and in the same way the right would have demonstrated massively if a Trotskyist candidate had gone through to the second round,
reminiscent of right-wing backlash demonstrations on 30 May 1968
and in 1982 in defence of private schools and against moves to bring
them more in line with state schools. 'The only reasonable conclusion
one can draw is that nothing ever happens with regard to decisive
transformations in the politics of a country if one relies on elections,
because the principle of homogeneity hangs over them ... making
sure that things continue as before* (Cl 20, italics in original). Badiou
argues that instead of simply protesting against Le Pen, demonstrators should have denounced elections and he reminds us of the slogan
from May 1968: 'elections, trahison' (C1 22). Reminiscent of the anarchist slogan, 'whoever you vote for the government will get in', this
comment also echoes other instances when Badiou insists that for him
the guiding principles in this domain are 'don't stand for election, don't
vote, don't expect anything from any political party' (PH 115). For
him there is no real difference between Le Pen and recent French governments which have persecuted sanspapiers (Cl 25). He argues that
the word democracy 'crystallises consensual subjectivity' (Cl 28)
and that the huge number of abstentions recorded in the elections of
2002 show that 'democracy is becoming a minority interest' (C 33).
One might ask if a dwindling vote is not what Badiou is advocating,
given that 'voting is the only known political procedure of which
immobilism is the more or less inevitable consequence' (Cl 34).
Badiou goes further than one might expect in this direction, arguing
that 'voting is by principle a contradiction of principles, and of any
idea of protest or emancipation' (Cl 35). He again asks why number
is so dominant when scientific and artistic innovation has always
taken place against the flow of dominant opinion, and reminds us of
the minority nature of Resistance, anti-colonial activists, and so on.
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As I commented above, this point about minority views and innovation is indisputable, but the medium- to long-term goal of any aspiring democratic politics is surely to convince a majority that one's (for
the time being minority) views are correct, as indeed happened in the
cases of both the Resistance and the anti-colonial movements of
the 1950s in France, amongst many others. Discussing the 2002 elections, then, Badiou appears either as an authoritarian voice or as an
analyst who is in a rather ultra-left realm of abstraction when he
reminds us that Hitler was elected and that Petain was approved as
head of state by an elected parliament, that Rousseau is against representative democracy ('the [general] will cannot be represented'), that
Rousseau according to Badiou correctly allows a 'symbolic majority'
to be expressed in one person, and that both Rousseau and Marx (in a
reference to the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat) agree
that number is the wrong method for making really important decisions (Cl 39-41). Elsewhere, Badiou suggests that 'the essence of politics is to exclude ... Its essence is found entirely in fidelity to the event
as it materializes in the context of activist interventions' (PP 82).
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Concluding remarks
A key chapter of Badiou's Abregede Metapolitique is entitled 'Politics as
Thought' (AM 35-66). He explains: 'Politics is thought. This statement excludes any recourse to the doublet theory/practice. There is
certainly a "doing" associated with politics, but it is in an immediate
sense the pure and simple testing of thought, its localization. There is
no distinction' (AM 56). The chapter as a whole is a glowing review
and endorsement of Sylvain Lazarus's book, Anthropologie du nom, in
which Lazarus himself insists that 'my fundamental thesis on politics
is that it should be approached as a form of thought' (Lazarus 1996:
11). The fact that Alain Badiou's point of departure is in the realm of
the ideal means that, despite a keen interest in politics as lived reality,
he is unable to unite the two aspects of his theory - the metaphysical
and the material - in a coherent system. By contrast with Marx, who
strove to bring theory far closer to material reality than it had previously been and who argued that the abstract was determined by
the material, Badiou does the opposite, insisting that in order to
understand the material one must understand the nature of truth via
a highly abstract, mathematical ontology. Certainly, he argues that
philosophy is conditioned by developments in the material world,
but his theory of the event relies on essentialism in order to achieve
internal coherence.
I have argued that this fundamental problem with Badiou's system
of thought has serious consequences for his theory of politics. For
example, the role of the subjects of a political event is, paradoxically,
a highly passive one until the event has taken place, at which point the
role of the subjects becomes crucial. Also, what is the relationship, if
any, between events in the different domains? Is there any hierarchy
of causation (a term Badiou would certainly shun) between events in
the different domains, between say a social revolution and an artistic
revolution? Badiou has retained Marx's commitment to the notion of
emancipation and egalitarianism (although in a far less material and
more abstract way), but has relinquished Marx's scientific, or historical materialist, approach to change. For Badiou true politics is about
sudden and serious change in the form of an event, and not about
ongoing power struggles which sometimes erupt into emancipatory
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come out of the blue and did not seem to fit with the circumstances of
its genesis (the 'situation' in Badiouian language). From President de
Gaulle to the activists taking part, via analysts who had the benefit of
hindsight, many have struggled to explain convincingly the causes
and nature of the movement but few have succeeded and no widely
respected view has emerged. During May, activists quickly became
passionate about revolt in favour of greater justice in many and profound ways, keeping this idea going for many years after the uprising
itself had ended; Badiou would describe this as subjects acting in fidelity towards May. In a way, to examine rationally the causes of May is
to spoil the specialness, the excitement and the 'inexplicability' of
May, and it might be argued that Badiou extends this reluctance to
his approach to all events. But it is necessary to continue to attempt
to examine the reasons for the May uprising, just as it is for all uprisings and other phenomena which Badiou would describe as events.
May did spring out of the circumstances of the time and historians
must continue to examine the revolt in that way, however difficult it
might be to imagine such an uprising today.
Chapter 4
Jacques Ranciere:
Politics is Equality is Democracy
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and liberal democracy, and there are key elements of his discussions
of democracy, consensus and dissensus that are useful and insightful.
It is a powerful and substantial intervention which is in some ways
useful as a tool to understand politics in advanced capitalist countries
in the early twenty-first century. But I also argue that Ranciere's conception of politics is too narrow to be useful as a general method in
approaching the political, and that his definition of politics seems
to contain elements of self-destruction where progressive, egalitarian
politics can only fail and revert to the unjust status quo.
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put it, 'establish what working class tradition was, and to study how
Marxism interpreted and distorted it ... I posited the existence of a
specifically working-class discourse' (Ranciere 1997b). Searching for
a 'real' history unmediated by historians with a particular paradigm
or school of historiography to defend, La Parole ouvriere reflected a view
that in order to understand the true nature of working-class values
and their expression one should turn to this period and in particular
to the socialism of the French artisans.
Embarked on a quest for the authentic and essential voice of the
progressive, nineteenth-century working class, Ranciere was at this
point wide open to the allegation of populism, to the accusation that
he and his collaborators had a naive faith in the forward-looking and
egalitarian outlook of this particular section of the French working class. But a new, if no less controversial, twist was to make such
criticisms less relevant. As a result of his intense archival activity,
Ranciere came to believe that the nineteenth-century working class
behaved less autonomously and with far less pride in itself than he
had previously thought, and was 'a working class which was more
mobile, less attached to its tools and less sunk in its poverty and drunkenness than the various traditions usually represent it' (Ranciere
1988:51). He now argued that, contrary to the belief of many historians of the nineteenth-century working class, many ordinary
working people did not take pride in their work and in their way of
life. Quite the contrary; many - including the most significant and
militant artisans - were primarily preoccupied with planning or at
least dreaming about an escape from their own trades and ways of
life and were hankering after the lifestyles and cultures of the bourgeoisie. The aspirant, self-taught and articulate amongst these individuals, who imitated the more privileged, were the most important object of study for the socialist historian: 'A worker who had
never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verses to suit
the taste of his times was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing
ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs'
(Ranciere 1988: 50).
This approach of course constituted a substantial shift away from
Marxist historiography. For Marx, the future was likely to be shaped
by the collective might of the proletariat, of wage labourers and their
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allies, who would work for the cause of socialism because it was they
who suffered most from the process and consequences of the Industrial
Revolution. It was they who were most likely to organize resistance
and revolt, in part because they had the least to lose. Aspirant artisans, Marx had argued, had far more to lose than the proletariat and
in fact benefited from the status quo, compared with proletarians at
least. Whatever one might make of Ranciere's new approach, it was
indeed this particular shift, which was arguably as significant as his
earlier strong reaction against Althusser, that led to some unique positions and placed his thought in a far less identifiable place in a disciplinary sense than had previously been the case. He was now working
on the boundaries between history, aesthetics and critical theory, and
later political theory as well. Ranciere was now looking at working
class history as culture, as writing, rather than social or political history in the more conventional sense.
His work was certainly intended to be provocative and to challenge
much accepted wisdom, including orthodox historical materialism.
The Nights of Labour: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France
(1989 [1981]) follows in great detail intellectual expressions of working class life of the 1830s and 1840s such as workers' debates with the
Fourierists and St Simonians, views expressed in popular newspapers,
diaries, letters and poetry. Many of the individuals and groups who
produced this material were affected by the July 1830 uprising in a
way Ranciere and his generation were by the events of May 1968.
Via an examination of these documents Ranciere attempts to demonstrate how working-class thought in the nineteenth century, far from
identifying proudly with a culture of the working class, on the contrary strived to effect a rupture with any such culture and instead
sought to take on the mantle of writers and poets. 'At the birth of the
"workers' movement", there was thus neither the "importation" of
scientific thought into the world of the worker nor the affirmation of
a worker culture. There was instead the transgressive will to appropriate the "night" of poets and thinkers, to appropriate the language and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality were
indeed real and effectual' (Ranciere 2003 [Afterword]: 219). In other
words, these worker-intellectuals, far from writing in order to consolidate a popular culture with pride in its honest simplicity and
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exploited what they should be doing and thinking, how they should
remain in their respectives roles and places.
If The Philosopher and his Poor was one transitional work on Ranciere's way back to theory, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation (1991 [1987]) was the other. In this slightly
later book he challenges the dominant notions of the nature of
teaching and learning by exploring the emancipatory pedagogy of the
eccentric Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840). Jacotot was a multi-skilled
emigre teacher at the University of Louvain who took as a starting
point the belief that all human beings have equal intelligence and
that differences in educational attainment stem almost exclusively
from differential opportunities and experiences. This relatively uncontentious starting point, which is indeed found in many liberal and
left-leaning approaches to pedagogy, leads Jacotot to a far more radical assertion that the position of the teacher is not one of authority
where she or he imparts to students what s/he knows and what the
students do not know. Quite the contrary; the best learning takes
place along the same lines as infant language learning, where experiment, exploration and imitation are far more important and effective than the conventional pedagogic process which involves receiving
and absorbing knowledge passively from one's teacher and then
reproducing it. Perhaps more reminiscent of supervision of dissertations or theses in higher education than of conventional school
teaching or even some undergaduate teaching, Jacotot's challenge
to conventional pedagogy is so extreme that, as Ranciere puts it:
'[t]he duty of Joseph Jacotot's disciples is thus simple. They must
announce to everyone, in all places and all circumstances, the news,
the practice: one can teach what one does not know' (IS 101). This
highly unorthodox approach to pedagogy could hardly be further
removed from that of Althusser, whom Ranciere quotes in La Le$on
d'Althusser as follows: 'The object of pedagogy is to transmit a particular body of knowledge to subjects who do not possess this knowledge.
The pedagogical situation therefore relies on the absolute condition
of inequality between knowledge and absence of knowledge' (LA 17, italics
in original). Jacotot apparently did teach languages to students
from a position of having no knowledge of the languages himself
and according to Ranciere this de-mystified form of teaching which
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In the first issue of the journal, the mainly philosophy-trained editorial collective stated that they intended to write a different sort of
history from any of the established French schools of historiography,
and most importantly to 'resituate ... thought from below' (in Ross
2002: 128). Contributors would be concerned with searching archives
for examples of primary speech and text in particular, thus allowing
worker-intellectuals to speak for themselves. Highly reminiscent of
Ranciere's approach in The Nights of Labour, the journal's inaugural
statement expressed particular interest in workers who emulated
people from other cultures and classes, including those who adopted
a language more associated with the bourgeoise.
Ranciere's return to theory thus emerged against a background of
strong reaction against the scientific structuralism of Louis Althusser,
a Maoist and populist influence, much meticulous research in historical archives, and some highly unorthodox and original conclusions
regarding both the historiography of the working class and actual
conclusions drawn from an archive-based study of its history.
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appears to be making a similar point. The powerful not only consciously and obviously override the less powerful in terms of what
does and does not get done, and what people are and are not allowed
to do, but they also set the terms of debates in such a way that the
views and demands of the less powerful cannot be understood, or
sometimes even formulated.
Having said that, Ranciere's belief that normal politics is characterized by absence of understanding contributes to a very limited
view of what politics is, a position which, I believe, weakens his case.
Before moving on, it is worth saying that Ranciere himself uses language in a way that is often open to different interpretations, which at
times makes it both intriguing and difficult to understand. Of course,
punning and wordplay more generally are characteristic of poststructuralist thought and have to an extent become part of Ranciere's philosophy as well. This is of course familiar territory to students of
Derrida in particular, who goes out of his way to include in his writing
elements of ambiguity and performativity via the manipulation of the
form of the language itself; punning, hyphenation and mis-spellings
become part of the philosophy and the distinction between form and
content is blurred. Ranciere practises linguistic games in a relatively
minor way compared to Derrida and other major figures in poststruo
turalist thought, but playful linguistic devices are certainly present.
This is in part informed by Ranciere's belief that there is no strict
demarcation between aesthetics and politics in particular and
between other traditional disciplines such as literature and philosophy; elements more traditionally associated with one discipline thus
infuse others, most commonly, aspects of linguistic or discourse analysis infusing political thought. We have already seen that for Ranciere,
writing itself is a form of political intervention, a form of performance,
not a type of detached analysis.
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lead different lives from the ones they have been leading. True politics
exists when there is a popular uprising of a particular type, when the
sans-part revolt and disrupt the status quo by asserting their right to be
equal with all others. This direct challenge to the unjust status quo
itself takes the form of a declaration of radical equality on the part of
the excluded and is necessarily just:
[PJolitics exists where the count of parts of society is disturbed by
the assertion of a part of those who have no part \l3 inscription d'une
part des sans-parf\. It begins when the equality of anyone with
anyone else is declared as being liberty of the people ... those who
are nothing assert that they are collectively identical to the whole of
the community. (M 169)
Highly reminiscent of the powerful phrase in the original French version of the Internationale,, *nous sommesrien, soyons tonf (we are nothing,
let us be everything), Ranciere places emphasis on the importance of
insurrection and rare, radical disruption of the status quo which can
be altered in positive fashion only by the determined, subjective
actions of the dominated. Influenced by classical reflections on politics, real politics appeared for the first time in Ancient Greece when
parts of the demos insisted they should be listened to and their views
and demands regarded as legitimate and equal with those who were
in positions of power, and these members of the demos insisted this
should happen in the public sphere. Even more importantly, this
crucial group, whose individual members were insignificant in the
previous order of things, put themselves forward as representatives of
society as a whole. Those who had counted for nothing audaciously
presented themselves as having universal significance.
Central to Ranciere's theory of politics is his notion of police.
He splits the conventional notion of the political into police on the one
hand, which he describes as 'a certain manner of partitioning the sensible ... [everything in its place' (TT 7) and where inequality and
injustice abound. On the other hand, politics - in the true, Rancierian sense disrupts and overturns the order of the police in an intervention which explores radical equality. The essence of politics is thus
disagreement (la mesentente) between orderly inequality and disorderly
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differently about disagreement in such a way that this process confronts the supposed consensus of the status quo, without however
creating a new form of police society and politics.
Ranciere's theory of democracy is, however, problematic in the
ways described above in relation to his definition of politics. It is
for example always defined in terms of what it is against and seems
necessarily fleeting. Crucially, there is no hint at how a democratic
society would be organized, nothing approaching a model of sustained democracy. If the demos is defined as 'those who have nothing,
who do not have specific properties allowing them to exercise power'
(DW 124), how would the demos play an active role in a more democratic society if, as it seems, an upturn in the demos' political (and presumably material) fortunes automatically disqualifies them from
political influence? If democracy comes about when 'those who have
no business speaking, speak, and those who have no business taking
part, take part' (LP 19), how could democracy ever be sustained?
How could the sons-part^ whom Ranciere promotes so effectively in
his theory, ever play a full and positive role in a democratically organized society if the very existence of democracy depends on their playing a marginal role and being in an apparently constant state of
revolt? It seems the demos is defined in terms that only allow it to
play a part which is against the prevailing, unjust order of things,
and is therefore condemned for ever to a marginal role. Ranciere
says as much when he comments:
Democracy means firstly that: an anarchic 'government' founded
on nothing but the absence of any entitlement to govern (LH 48).
Concluding remarks
Jacques Ranciere has developed a radical and emancipatory
approach both to popular history and to political theory which asserts
the importance of an engaged - as opposed to managerial - form of
politics and which poses sound theoretical challenges to liberalism and liberal democracy in particular. In a body of work which
challenges many fundamental aspects of the status quo, he puts the
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ordinary person at the heart of his system and suggests that a form of
self-realization, or political subjectivity, comes about via an assertion of equality in a process by which the views and interests of the
sans-part assume universal significance. Taken as a whole, Ranciere's
approach is an innovative and uncompromising defence of the political legitimacy of the demos and the importance of self-organization
of non-experts. I would suggest that this interpretation of politics is
particularly effective when seen as a critique of the professionalization, cynicism, elitism and depoliticization which often characterize
parliamentary politics in advanced capitalist societies in the early
twenty-first century, which is often accompanied by rising levels of
abstentions at elections, profound disillusionment with professional
politicians, and the rise of extreme right political parties. Ranciere's
theory is also useful in terms of exploring the nature of power more
generally and the ways in which many people fail to assume any
measure of self-realization because of the structures and practices of
what Ranciere describes as police practice.
By contrast with what is often described as democracy in liberal
theory and more general parlance, democracy for Ranciere is both
an active and activist term, where the demos intervenes directly not to
endorse the legitimacy of the political elite, to smoothe over differences or to achieve consensus, but, on the contrary, to assert the legitimacy of a different type of politics and systematically undermine
complacent practices of the existing order. Extraparliamentary activity is thus crucial (e.g. LH 84) and all true political activity takes
place in the name of equality. Ranciere's project is thus, implicitly at
least, also a challenge to large areas of debate and research in the
social sciences, especially political science, sociology and economics,
whose starting point is often to take as read the legitimacy of the
established order and whose conclusions therefore reinforce its purported legitimacy.
I have argued that in these ways Ranciere's work is sound and
useful. I have also argued, however, that his work suffers from
various shortcomings. The nature of Ranciere's reaction against
Althusser means that there is a reluctance to identify a class or subsection of a class as a progressive force in a historic sense. This is
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Chapter 5
Like Badiou and like Ranciere, Etienne Balibar has resisted any temptation to adopt a wholesale liberal approach in his interpretation
of politics, or to succumb in a major fashion to posts true turalism.
At the heart of his definition of the political is the notion of emancipation, with the defiant actions of ordinary people taking centre-stage.
Taken as a whole, Balibar's preoccupations are often reminiscent of
those of Althusser - both are interested in Spinoza, Marxism as philosophy, ideology, and conjuncture, to mention but the most obvious although the conclusions Balibar draws diverge increasingly with
those of his former mentor as time goes by. Balibar worked closely
with Althusser and wrote important parts of Reading Capital (1970
[1965]), in which he explores the role of modes of production in the
process of historical change. He continued to write from within a
Marxist perspective and remained engaged with some of the central
questions of Marxism until the late 1970s, examining in particular the nature and role of ideology, the scientific and philosophical
claims of historical materialism, the meaning and relevance of the
notion of class struggle, and the capitalist state. By the early 1980s
he was moving away from a strictly Marxist approach, although he
continued to make a significant contribution to the study of Marx's
writings and continued to work broadly within a materialist and
historical framework.
Again like Badiou and Ranciere, much of Balibar's work since the
early 1980s relates in one way or another to the question of the human
subject. In his general theory of politics and emancipation, it is the
emergence and role of the subject in relation to politics and society
that one must understand first and foremost. In his reading of
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democracy and its pursuit of short-term electoral gains. He condemned the party's abandonment of the principle of the dictatorship
of the proletariat, and he asserted the continued importance of working to destroy the capitalist state rather than attempting to reform it
from within. Despite these and other serious differences with the
party leadership, Balibar remained within the PCF until he was
expelled for his open and forceful criticism of the party's position on
immigration in 1981, the same year the PCF finally joined the Socialists in government.
Balibar's uneasy position as both Marxist intellectual and PCF
activist during this crucial period has, it would seem, manifested
itself in his writings. His mature work is characterized by an ambivalence towards some crucial questions in modern politics and philosophy and this ambivalence appears to leave a defining mark in some
areas. These include some of the central questions of Marxism, and
indeed arguably some of the central questions regarding the nature
of political modernity. For example, what is the role of the state in
modern emancipatory politics, and to what extent can liberal democracy and the structures that accompany it be harnessed for more progressive ends? Many of Balibar's arguments are important and
insightful as individual positions, and some are brilliant, but they do
not, when put together, amount to a unified system or worldview.
As Balibar himself comments regarding a collection of essays published in English, he '[does] not claim to present a systematic doctrine
of political philosophy' (MCI vii), and this is a remark which might
be extended to his work as a whole.
In what follows I examine some of the areas where Balibar has had
significant insights regarding the analysis of politics and human societies in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I begin by examining
his overall approach to the question of politics, where he embraces
and explores the notion of emancipation and links it with a term
which he has himself coined, namely 'equaliberty'. Next, I examine
his use of the Althusserian term 'conjuncture', his conception of citizenship and the formation and role of the subject in politics. I then
return to the question of Balibar's ambivalence in some areas of his
thought, before looking at his approach to political violence, civil disobedience, Lenin and Gandhi.
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The political
In Balibar's discussions of what constitutes the political, the influence
of traditional Marxism is clear. He emphasizes the emancipatory and
revolutionary potential of modernity, with apparent glimpses of what
might lie beyond the era born of bourgeois revolutions. In a landmark
essay entitled 'Trois concepts de la politique: Emancipation, transformation, civilite', he argues that emancipation, transformation and
civility are the key notions for understanding modern politics. They
occur all together, or not at all (LC 19-53).
Emancipation is closely bound to the notion of equaliberty (which I
discuss in more detail below), meaning the inseparability of equality
and freedom. Politics thus defined, as politics of emancipation, is a
practical exploration of the self-determination of the people; all obstacles to greater equality and freedom are illegitimate and must be abolished. A precondition for collective self-government is freedom from
all reference to a supposedly natural order, in a clear allusion to the
watershed and progressive nature of Enlightenment thought. Collective politics can only exist in the form of self-government, whether this
collective politics concerns society, the nation, the state, the people
more broadly or even humanity as a whole, and in the process of collective self-determination the political sphere becomes autonomous
(LC 22). This type of government must also be free from institutionalized and systematic discrimination and constraints.
Still in the spirit of popular self-determination, Balibar emphasizes the importance of a universal right to inclusion in the political
sphere, and argues that no-one can 'be emancipated5 by an external
entity; they cannot be granted political freedom by an outside agency.
He argues that although rights won in the process of emancipation are
individual rights of equaliberty, they not only have to be struggled
for and won (they will not be simply granted to the deserving in the
fullness of time), but the process must be a collective one (LC 22).
Balibar's subject as citizen and collective subject as demos is thus
highly active and he comments on democratic politics as follows:
... the continuous process in which a minimal recognition of the
belonging of human beings to the 'common5 sphere of existence
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(and therefore also work, culture, public and private speech) already
involves - and makes possible - a totality of rights. I call this the
'insurrectional' element of democracy, which plays a determinant
role in every constitution of a democratic or republican state. Such
a state, by definition, cannot consist (or cannot only consist) of statutes and rights ascribed from above; it requires the direct participation of the demos. (WP 119)
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different directions - in order to explore the construction, or potential construction, of the political subject. The economic benefit
which immigrant workers bring to Europe combined with political
exclusion, and any resolution or partial resolution of this contradiction, is an important part of this particular process of subjectivation.
We might comment at this point that the practical political solution
proposed by Balibar is far less radical than his complex theoretical framework might suggest. This particular argument for practical
exploration of political subjectivization and emancipation seems to
lead to a somewhat less discriminatory approach (compared with the
status quo) to relations between individuals on the one hand and
the national and emerging international state on the other, but little
more. The practical conclusions of this sophisticated theory would
appear to leave many unjust structures and practices untouched,
including, incidentally, routine exploitation of non-immigrants,
which seems to be overlooked.
Civility, meanwhile, Balibar defines as
the speculative idea of a politics of politics, or a politics in the second
degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of
conditions within which politics as a collective participation in
public affairs is possible, or at least is not made absolutely impossible ... In particular, 'civility' does not necessarily involve the idea
of a suppression of'conflicts' and 'antagonisms' in society, as if they
were always the harbingers of violence and not the opposite. Much,
if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss in fact
results from a blind political preference for 'consensus' and 'peace'
. . . ( W P 115-16)
Civility thus creates the space in which politics takes place and eliminates the extremes of violence without suppressing all violence and
revolt (LC 47).
If Balibar's discussion of politics becomes less threatening to the
status quo and indeed less emancipatory the nearer it gets to reality,
his discussion of his term equaliberty (egaliberte) is often radical and
inspiring. By equaliberty he means, in the broadest of terms, that
freedom can only be fully realized if equality is also fully realized,
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and vice versa. The historical conditions where liberty and equality
arise are the same, and therefore the one cannot exist without the
other, and this is a truth that is discovered through revolutionary
struggle. Moreover, if liberty is maximized then equality is as well.
By the same token, any circumstances that limit or suppress freedom
also limit or suppress equality; increased social inequality always
accompanies limits to freedom and vice versa. Thus there are both
political and ethical obligations to eradicate exploitation and domination (MCI 48).
Balibar's starting point for this radical notion, the logic of whose
adoption is a form of politics dedicated to a struggle against all types
of exploitation and domination, is a critical attitude towards contemporary liberalism. In liberalism freedom and equality cannot possibly
occur alongside each other, apart from within the narrow confines of
the juridical, where equality before the law is strongly defended. But a
belief in the mutual exclusivity of the two concepts, he argues, is also
found among some socialists and in West European anti-racist movements, for example (MCI 39). This mistaken approach, Balibar
argues, relies on three fundamental misconceptions. The first is the
mistaken belief that equality is mainly economic and social, whereas
freedom is mainly legal and political. The second is the belief that
equality can only be realized via actions by the state, above all
through material distribution, whereas freedom implies limited state
intervention. Finally, there is a misconception that whilst equality is a
collective goal, freedom is above all an individual one. It is these precepts, Balibar argues, that lead to a gulf between contemporary discussion on the 'rights of man5 on the one hand and the 'rights of
citizen' on the other. By contrast with the 1789 Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen, modern liberalism and other ideologies
uphold a strict non-identity between man and citizen, with the view
that an equation between man and citizen means everything is political, which in turn leads to totalitarianism.
Balibar's other starting point for the discussion of equaliberty is
thus the Declaration itself, which he argues - controversially - does
not take the pre-existing ideology of human nature, or natural rights,
as the basis for law and politics, but is a bold assertion of wholly
modern democratic principles (MCI 43-4). The core and indeed the
124
major goal of the text, he contends, is precisely the identity of man and
citizen. Moreover, the upholding of the right to resist oppression
asserted in article two of the Declaration is effectively an assertion of
the right to collective freedom, whose corollary is indeed the right to
resist oppression: 'to be free is to be able to resist any compulsion that
destroys freedom' (MCI 45). Equality, meanwhile, is implicitly at
least the notion that links all others together, although this is not
spelled out in the Declaration in so many words.
Balibar continues his argument for a re-reading of the Declaration
as a statement of the principles of equaliberty by suggesting that
Marx was quite wrong to invoke (in On the Jewish Question) the text
as an expression of the separation of public and private spheres of
human existence, characteristic of bourgeois notions of modern politics. On the contrary, according to Balibar the Declaration puts forward a new idea regarding the relationship between equality and
freedom, expressed as a universal:
What is this idea? Nothing less than the identification of the two
concepts. If one is willing to read it literally, the Declaration in fact
says that equality is identical to freedom, is equal tofreedom, and vice
versa. Each is the exact measure of the other. This is ... the proposition of equaliberty: a portmanteau word that is 'impossible' in French
(and English) but that alone expresses the central proposition. For
it gives both the conditions under which man is a citizen through
and through, and the reason for this assimilation. Underneath the
equation of man and citizen, or rather within it, as the very reason of
its universality - as \\spresupposition - lies the proposition of equaliberty. (MCI 46-7, italics in original)
It would seem that the most important part of Balibar's argument is a
view that political aspects of modernity offer the immediate possibility of a more radical form of emancipation than humanity as a
whole or any part of it has experienced to date. It was in the logic
of some aspects of the revolution of 1789 to establish the preconditions for overcoming all exploitation and domination. Indeed in
Balibar's The Philosophy of Marx, he comments that for Marx communism is 'a social movement with demands that were merely a coherent
125
126
many years after his collaboration with Althusser had ended, that his
own contribution to Reading Capital in the shape of an exploration of
forms of historical individuality and also his denial of the importance
of the subject to structural Marxism was in some sense laying the
ground for subsequent studies of its importance (1C 149). When
Balibar comes to address the question of the human subject in his own
philosophy, he comes up with what is perhaps a surprising position.
In response to Jean-Luc Nancy's question, 'Who comes after the
subject?', Balibar answers:
... after the subject comes the citizen. For the 'subject', which has
haunted the whole problematic of liberty and of the individual
[personnel for fifteen centuries, is not an ontological figure, that of
an objectum or hypokeimenon, but a legal, political, theological and
moralfigure...
What - or rather who ~ comes after the subject (first around
1789-93), is the universal, national, and cosmopolitical citizen
who is indissociably both a political and philosophical figure ...
there is no doubt that with the revolutionary event the subjectus irreversibly cedes his place to the citizen. (1C 152, italics in original; also
see Cadava et al 1991)
Thus for Balibar the modern subject is necessarily political; modernity
offers for the first time the possibility of both citizenship and subjectivity, and he talks of his 'research on the revolutionary relieving and
replacing of the subject by the citizen, and on the becoming-citizen
of the subject' (1C 156). Balibar disagrees with what he sees as
Marx's belief that man is private and part of civil society and that
the citizen is the political entity with political rights and political
involvement.
Whatever one might think of this comment on Marx, Balibar is not,
it would seem, particularly ambitious for his subject, who is an individual who becomes subject via rather minimal political rights afforded
by the Declaration and the modern state, albeit with much participation by the citizen-subject. Rather than emancipation and transformation leading to the formation of a more self-realized human being
who could at last determine his or her own fate free from the fetters of
socio-economic and political exploitation and all that goes with it, as
12 7
128
129
Political violence
If Balibar's overall approach to the political has certain serious
drawbacks, he has made a significant contribution to a general theory
130
131
132
133
we might call ethnocide or genocide (HW 13). But Balibar also contends that in Capital itself Marx argues that a violent and final confontation with the bourgeoisie is not the only possible outcome for
struggles between capital and labour. According to Balibar:
... the work [i.e. Capital] had opened up other possibilities, which it
will always be possible to turn to without abandoning the 'Marxist'
reference: namely a process of reforms imposed on society by the
state under pressure from increasingly powerful and organised
workers' struggles, which would oblige capital to 'civilise' its methods of exploitation, or to innovate constantly in order to overcome
resistance from 'variable capital'; also the exporting of overexploitation to the 'periphery' of the capitalist mode of production, in
such a way that the effects of 'primitive accumulation' are prolonged ... In these scenarios the proletariat no longer appears
as the predetermined subject of history, and the Gewalt which it
either suffers or wields does not lead 'naturally' to the final goal.
The subjectivization of the working class, that is its transformation
into revolutionary proletariat, then appears as an indefinitely distant horizon, an improbable counter-tendency, or even a miraculous exception to the course of history. (HW 17)
Balibar is insistent that debates between Marxists regarding reform
and revolution have been posed in the wrong way and at any rate
that the really important question is how to 'civilize revolution', as
discussed above. But it seems that Balibar's reflections in this respect
are at least influenced by long-running (and at one time often bitterj
debates and disputes within the European left around the theme
of'reform or revolution'. These debates have evolved over time but
certainly have not disappeared completely and indeed are likely to
intensify if the left continues to gather strength again. As a dissident
within the French Communist Party, and as an intellectual deeply
immersed in Marxist theory, Balibar was intensely involved with
such questions for many years. Balibar's position certainly seems at
times to under-estimate the extent to which, for example, governments and other political or quasi-political entities are prepared to
use violence against even the most 'civilized' revolution in order to
prevent it from taking place.
134
135
avoided wherever possible, denies the essential 'insurrectionary element5 of politics and direct, popular participation (WP 119).
Drawing on the work of international relations specialist Pierre de
Senarclens, Balibar argues that since the end of the Cold War, the
boundaries on some forms of political violence imposed by the two
blocs have collapsed and the distinction between war and peace has
become blurred. Since 1989, there has been a proliferation of armed
conflict, in particular civil war, enabled in part by the transformation
of international power structures. Balibar suggests that mass and
extreme violence is replacing politics, or that the fields of politics and
violence have now merged (WP 125).
For Balibar, this global culture of political violence is part of a
global system of socio-political control, dividing the world into 'life
zones' and 'death zones'. The death zones suffer a variety of mortal
problems ranging from civil war and inter-state wars, to communal
rioting, famine and extreme poverty. Apparently natural phenomena
such as Aids are made far worse by material hardship. Although the
causes of these disasters may be numerous, the overall effect is to
create a large, international population of very insecure, and in some
cases re-proletarianized, people, who have little or no influence on
national or international politics. There is, then, a sort of planned
obsolescence of human beings on a global scale, which is, in clinically
capitalist terms, economically wasteful but has a perverse and tragic
political logic, sometimes involving self-destruction through civil
war, for example. Concluding this discussion, Balibar again suggests
that theorists and activists must develop the idea of'counter-counterrevolution', or simply revolution. But unless the future is to become, in
the words of Hobsbawm, another age of extremes, revolutionaries
must civilize the notion and practice of revolution.
In Balibar's discussion both of theoretical and more factual aspects
of violence, Gewalt, cruelty and global politics, he thus puts forward a
remarkable case for placing these matters centre-stage in any serious
analysis of contemporary
politics and any discussions of the politics of
v
emancipation. As Zizek suggests, Balibar's theory of political violence
can be positioned in a place which is distinct from the other two major
theories which seek to account for the appalling bloodshed of the
major catastrophes of the twentieth century. Habermas argues that
136
13 7
138
and Gandhi's thought might be reconciled. He suggests briefly, however, that an attempt to answer this question might be approached by
examining whether the era of revolutionary mass movements is now
over, a question which he also leaves unanswered. As far as the question of means and ends is concerned, I would suggest that there are
situations where violence in the form of resistance becomes not only a
tactic but also a matter of survival, if not in the short term then certainly in the longer term; examples of this include French resistance
against Nazi occupation, wars of national liberation (including those
in French Indochina and Algeria, for example), and the Vietnamese
struggle against the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. The possibility and
tactical efficacy of non-violence certainly depend on the circumstances of the struggle, including the degree of violence in which the
adversary is prepared to indulge.
Balibar's distant but at times approving stance towards the modern
state is demonstrated in an article published in Le Monde newspaper in
February 1997 on the question of civil disobedience, as part of a
debate regarding a bill on immigration known as the Debre bill
(projetdeloiDebre}. This proposed legislation was legally to oblige all
those sheltering non-French nationals to inform the police of both
their arrival in and departure from France. Originally published
under the title 'Democratic State of Emergency5 (and reproduced in
the book Droit de cite as 'Sur la desobeissance civique' (DC 17-22),
Balibar argues in this essay that by stark contrast with what the then
Prime Minister Alain Juppe had declared, citizens must sometimes recreate their citizenship by disobeying the state. Writing in response to
a petition launched by film makers who declared that they had and
would again give shelter to illegal immigrants, Balibar argues that a
government is only legitimate as long as it does not contradict certain
higher laws of humanity which, whilst perhaps unwritten, take precedence over written legislation. These higher laws include basic respect
for human beings alive or dead, hospitality, the inviolability of human
beings, and the sanctity of truth. When the two groups of laws higher and written - are in contradiction, citizens have a duty to
obey the higher laws and thus bring themselves into conflict with the
law of the land, and in the process defend legality in an expression of
the'general will'.
139
Concluding remarks
In his substantial and complex ceuvre, Balibar raises some crucial questions for our time and discusses them in a way that contibutes to a
greater understanding of these questions. For example, many who
take his work seriously will recognize the relevance of the notion of
human emancipation which contrasts with the preoccupation with
mild reform which is so prevalent in parliamentary and party politics
in the West. The same could be said for his discussion of universality, a
notion that is seldom taken seriously except in a religious context in a
world which is often so preoccupied with surfaces and transience.
Meanwhile, his own term equaliberty is a constructively provocative
blending of equality and liberty which insists on their mutual dependence in a way which also flies in the face of much contemporary
received wisdom. More specifically, Balibar is an insightful theorist
140
141
Chapter 6
With and Beyond Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere
143
144
145
146
analysis of, for example, the European Union, and finally an unhappily over-optimistic interpretation of the legacy of 1789, which seems
to suggest that, after all, no further dramatic emancipatory transformation is necessary. In Badiou and Ranciere, then, there are marginalist tendencies, whereas in Balibar there are weakening concessions
to more conventional, mainstream politics.
Each of these thinkers offers important insights into the nature of
the supposedly consensual and centre-oriented governmental politics
so prevalent in the past few decades in Western Europe and the USA,
politics which serve to disguise and leave un-debated many forms of
injustice and exploitation. Balibar suggests convincingly that this
sort of consensus politics goes hand in hand with the extreme violence
found in less developed countries. Ranciere's On the Shores of Politics
(2007 [1998]) is one of the most insightful and trenchant analyses to
have appeared of France's superficially consensual form of government since the early 1980s. However, such is both Badiou's and
Ranciere's position regarding the political and intellectual climate
and practice of the period, they offer little purchase in their core theories on the nature of politics outside the exceptional occurrence of
the event (for Badiou) and popular uprising by the sons-part (for
Ranciere). In other words, in their theories proper they leave us little
the wiser regarding the nature of politics beyond the extraordinary;
nothing else really counts as politics so cannot be analysed within
their core framework. Indeed Ranciere insists in the opening line of
his Ten Theses on Politics that '[pjolitics is not the exercise of power'.
In the introductory chapter of this book I also referred to Perry
Anderson's suggestion that Western Marxism moved increasingly
into the realm of philosophy and into the academy from the 1920s
onwards and that in some respects Western Marxism had suffered as
a result. Whilst agreeing with Anderson's view in general terms, I also
suggested that Western Marxism had benefited from this move in that
it had managed to maintain a certain distance from some of the pragmatic and damaging adaptations made by some Marxists in and close
to communist parties in particular and others who became persuaded
of the merits of embracing liberal democracy and the values of the
West more generally. I hope to have shown that the exploration of
the philosophical on the part of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere has,
147
despite some associated shortcomings, enabled a distance from adaptations and political pragmatism so prevalent in both party politics
and thought. In this way their relative intellectual distance from the
material world has been a strength as well as a weakness. I have suggested that some of Balibar's weaknesses are attributable to his position as a communist activist (albeit leaving the party in 1981) closely
subjected to the Eurocommunist arguments of the 1970s and 1980s.
Given the generally conservative nature of the current era, it is no
surprise that in the academy any renewal of radical thought about
politics is less likely to be found in politics, economics and sociology
departments, which tend (with some exceptions) to stick fairly close
to the mainstream political agenda, a practice which is encouraged
and reinforced by availability of selectively allocated government
funding. Radical, egalitarian thinking is more likely to be found in
philosophy departments, but also English literature, French and
German departments. If we take Hardt, Harvey, Jameson, Negri
and Zizek as some of the foremost international representatives of
contemporary radical thought, only David Harvey has had a longterm career in a social science (geography) department; Michael
Hardt and Frederic Jameson are in comparative literature, Slavoj
Zizek is in philosophy and Antonio Negri is an independent researcher, although he did at one time teach political science. If we
add the three thinkers studied in this book to this list, who are all professional philosophers, it is small wonder that the role of the economy
and the state has been rather overlooked.
The above remarks and the more detailed critique expressed in the
preceding chapters suggest the need for additional lines of intellectual
enquiry which both complement the thought of Badiou, Balibar and
Ranciere, and compensate for and move beyond their weaknesses.
I have made the point several times in the course of this book that
in particular neither Badiou nor Ranciere pay enough attention to
the economic sphere, which perhaps significantly is the reverse of the
way in which we in the West experience the world; on a daily basis,
the reign of commodities seems to make itself felt ever more intensely
and influence ever more spheres of our lives, including of course parts
of our private lives. One of Marx's most significant contributions was
148
149
Althusser) often calls it, and the ideological becomes very much a
determining influence. Part of the Althusserian legacy seems indeed
to be the process of subjectivation, which as others have pointed out
is close to Althusser's notion of interpellation, where forms of commitment mean individuals are interpellated into subjects.
It will be clear that I would wish to place greater emphasis on the
major theories of Marx as originally stated by him than do any of
these thinkers. In particular, I would reassert the importance of his
analysis of the political economy of capitalism in order to help understand the nature of the current period and the potential for change
within and beyond it. A thorough examination of the political economy of late capitalism and its integration into a more general theory
could offer a greater understanding of the current epoch, and an indication of possible futures. Marxist analysis is, however, greatly
enriched by many forms of quasi-Marxist, post-Marxist and nonMarxist approaches (the distinction between these categories is often
not in itself important), particularly when they are motivated by progressive goals. Frederic Jameson makes roughly the same point when
he says:
Marxism is not a philosophy ... it is, like psychoanalysis and unlike
any other contemporary mode of thought, what I will call unity-oftheory-and-practice. This means that it has concepts, but that those
concepts are also forms of practice, so that one cannot simply
debate them in a disinterested philosophical way without the
uncomfortable intervention of practical positions and commitments. But it also means that the various philosophical currents of
the time have always been able to seize on those concepts and to
transform them into so many distinct and seemingly autonomous
philosophies ... Each of these 'philosophies' has in my opinion
something to teach us, and illuminates a new aspect of that original
unity-of-theory-and-practice which is Marxism as such; but the
latter is always distinct from them. (Jameson 2001: ix)
I would also argue that a thorough exploration of the notion and
practice of democracy is necessary. Badiou is profoundly ambivalent
on the question of democracy, praising it only in rare and isolated
150
151
15 2
153
154
He is not, however, entirely correct. I opened this book by suggesting that we might explore the work of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere
in the context of thought as praxis, where the relationship between
theory and material aspects of the world is particularly important.
Certainly, one striking and uniting characteristic of these thinkers is
that in order to understand the world one must, in addition to reading
and debating, actively intervene in it. At risk of exaggerating the
common features of their thought, I will close by suggesting not only
that theirs is the most engaged philosophy since Sartre and Althusser,
but that we may be glimpsing a series of different, more politically
committed systems of thought that will grow in influence in the years
to come.
156
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Index
Bidet, Jacques 9
Billancourt, Renault 76
Blum, Leon 12,79
Bolsheviks 55
Boltanski, Luc 9
borders 117,151
Bourdieu, Pierre 9
bourgeoisie 43, 58, 63, 84, 87,95, 125,
133,137
Britain 5,78, 103, 109
Cahierspour I'analyse group 26
Callinicos, Alex 17
Cambodia 130
Camus, Albert 12
Cantor, Georg 25, 32,40
set theory 48
capital 73,110,133
Capital (Marx) 7, 19, 127, 133
capitalism 7, 8, 15, 20,43, 56, 64, 67,
69,76,79,91,121,131,134,149
Carnap, Rudolf 30
Celan, Paul 32
Chiapello, Eve 9
child labour 134
China 69
Cultural Revolution 32
industrialization 134
Chirac, Jacques 74
Chomsky, Noam 8
Christ, resurrection 39
Christianity 36,60
Chronique des temps consensuels
.Ranciere) 110
citizenship 6, 117, 126, 139
civil disobedience 138, 139
civil servants 15
174
Index
demos 101,110,111,112,119,120
Derrida, Jacques 9, 12, 16, 17, 24, 27,
96, 100, 127
Spectres of Marx 9
Descartes, Rene 28,31
developing countries 134, 152
dialectics 145
dictatorship 137
discourse analysis 100
dissensus 85,86
division of labour 90
domestic violence 152
Dreyfus affair 139
Dumenil, Gerard 9
Index
Eire et I'evenement, U (Badiou) 4, 26,
27, 40, 64
EU see European Union
European Union (EU) 146
expansion 121
exploitation 59, 123
famine 135
Fanon, Frantz 131
fascism 14
feminism 73
Ferry, Luc 12
feudalism 121
fidelity 40
Fondation Saint Simon (think tank) 103
Force ouvriere 78
foreign policy (France) 102
Foucault, Michel 12, 16, 34, 85, 96
France 9,10,11,19,69,74,79
foreign policy 102
Nazi occupation 10, 138, 139
parliamentary politics 71, 72-5
presidential elections 2002 9, 78
social security reform 102
freedom 122-3, 124, 144
freedom of expression 70
French (language) 12
French Revolution of 1789 1,10,12,
38, 39, 48, 51, 54, 56, 60, 65, 124,
125, 140, 146
Freud, Sigmund 85
Furet, Francois 12, 13, 54, 60, 109
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 30
Galileo Galieli 19
Gandhi, Mahatma 118,136-9, 152
Gaucheproletarienne (journal) 945
gay movement 16
genetics 43
genocide 133
Germany, West 103
Gewalt 130, 132, 133, 135
Gilles Deleuze (Badiou) 59
globalization 15, 27, 131
Glucksmann, Andre 11
Goldmann, Lucien 14
175
176
Index
Index
Marxism-Leninism 18
Marxists 133, 134
mass murder 136
Masses, Classes, Ideas (Balibar; 4
materialism 8
mathematical ontology 46
mathematicians 51
mathematics 26, 39, 41, 63, 68
May 1968 uprising (France^ 5, 6,
10, 13, 26, 27, 37, 38-9,48, 51, 55,
74, 76, 79, 82, 83, 84, 88, 94, 98,
103, 143
Mesentente, La (Ranciere 4, 94
metanarratives 30,45
metaphysics 25, 30, 34, 49
Michel, Natacha 76
Middle East
conflict 130
oil 134
Mitterand, Fran$ois 13, 76, 102-3,
104, 109
election of 1981 91
modernity 119, 126, 136
music 39
Names of History, The (Ranciere} 99
N ancy, Jean-Luc 126
National Front (France) 9, 71, 73, 76,
104
nationalism 6
nationalization 102
natural selection 423
Negri, Antonio 7,16,147
Nights of Labour, The (Ranciere) 88,
89,95,98, 104
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat
(Balibar) 117
On the Shores of Politics (Ranciere) 109,
146
ontology 25,37,40,56,81
OP see Organisationpolitique
opinion polls 72
Organisation politique (OP) 5, 26, 69,
75,76,77,78,79,80
111
178
Index
poverty 135
pragmatism 147
praxis 3,55
proletariat 63, 87, 88, 118, 125, 137
PS I see Parti Socialist Unifie
psychoanalysis 48
punning 100
race 6
Race, Nation, Class (Balibar) 129
racism 76,117,151
radical republicanism 141
radicalism 11
rationalism 144
Rawlsjohn 24,29,48
Reading Capital (Ranciere) 5, 6,84
Reagan, Ronald 102
Renaut, Alain 12
Repressive State Apparatuses
(RSAs) 20
republicanism (France) 76, 141
Resistance 74,75, 138
revisionism 13
Revoltes logiques (journal) 6
revolution 2,44
Revolution of 1789 (France) 1, 10,12,
38, 39,48, 51, 54,56,60,65, 124,
125, 140, 146
Revolution of 1830 (France) 10
Revolution of 1848 (France) 10
Revolution of 1917 (Russia) 14-15,
40,55,56,69,121,137
Revolution of 1980 (Iran) 32
Rimbaud, Arthur 94
Robespierre, Maximilien 50, 54, 62
Rosanvallon, Pierre 13
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 14,24,50,
70,71,75,82
theory of democracy 79
RSAs see Repressive State Apparatuses
Saint Paul 36, 60, 76
Saint Paul (Badiou) 36, 39, 63
Saint-Just, Louis de 50, 54, 62
sans papiers 74, 77
sans-parts 107, 111, 112, 143, 146
116,117,120,125
Theologico-Political Treatise 125,127
Stalinism 15,21,136,151
Stalinist communism 143
structuralism 13, 16, 84, 85, 95, 145
subjectivation 117, 120, 122
subjectivity 126
subtraction 65
SUD see Solidarite, Unite, Democratie
Sweden 103
teaching 93
Ten Theses on Politics (Ranciere)
146
terror 12
terrorism 130
Thatcher, Margaret 102
Theorie du sujet (Badiou) 26
Third Way 104
Tocqeville, Alexis de 11,48
totalitarianism 37, 123, 136
trade unionists 15
4, 94,
Index
trade unions 9,13,55,57,67,76,78,
82,151
transformation 119,120,126,143,145
Trotsky, Leon 78, 121, 151
truth 33-7
truth procedures 56
Twentieth Congress of the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union 21
UCFML see Union des communistes de
France marxistes-leninistes
unemployment 102
Union des communistes de France marxistesleninistes (UCFML) 5,26
universal suffrage 70
universalism 48
universality 29, 31, 1279, 140
uprising of May 1968 see May 1968
uprising
USA 5, 7, 78, 146
overseas policy 8
179
USSR 14,15,21,56
break-up 8, 130, 153
Vietnam 138
violence 151
We, the People of Europe? (Balibar)
4,121
Wittgenstein, Ludwig 30, 31, 38
women, oppression of 151
women's movement 16
wordplay 100
workers' uprising (Poland) 32
working class 43, 76, 79,80,87,88,91,
95,117,137
emancipation 89
World War II 11,14
Zizek, Slavoj 8, 16, 36, 59-60, 135,
147, 153