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COMMUNISM
AS
SEPARATION
Alberto Toscano
COMMUNISM AS SEPARATION
139
of thought (and of politics) lies in the production of Sameness and not in the
contagions of hybridity, the call of alterity or the experience of difference.
Admittedly, this path is rife with peril, the name of communism eliciting,
with almost physiological inevitability, the most ardent reactions, be they of
hostility, or rather seldom these days of enthusiasm (and, in this case, not
necessarily for the right reasons, as the often unsavoury spectacle of parliamentary communism testies). Let us at once dispel or displace these reactions
by considering, following Badiou himself, what divides the name of communism and allows for its philosophical consideration.
In a dense and iconoclastic pamphlet from 1991,4 Badiou considers the
signicance for the thinking of politics of the then recent demise of the USSR.
His verdict is stark: rather than constituting a veritable event this is but a
second death, the death of the atrophied institutionalized body of communism,
already bereft of any driving political subjectivity, of any sustained experimental invention of forms of organization, of watchwords and principles. No
state, he argues, could function as the emblem of the politics of emancipation
that once took communism as its name. This is not a matter of opinion but the
consequence of a vital distinction within political ontology, between immanent
and precarious processes of political subjectivation, on the one hand, and their
fatal representation in the structures of the state, on the other. This distinction,
which in Badious vocabulary is bound to the one between presentation and
representation, is nevertheless not my immediate concern. The veritable pie`ce de
resistance in this argument is the afrmation, in the wake of its incessantly
represented death (of its death in representation, to follow Badiou), of the
eternity of communism.
We enter here into the terrain of what Badiou, in some of his most recent
work, names metapolitics.5 Metapolitics is one of the gures taken by philosophys qualied dependence on its conditions, and denes the effects upon
thought as such, as registered and congured by philosophy on the basis of
singular sequences of non-philosophical subjectivation, the generic procedures
that Badiou has divided into science, art, politics and love. The metapolitical
as opposed to the strictly intra-subjective (militant) or the represented (statist)
name of communism is constituted by a determination, for thought as such,
extracted by philosophy from the aleatory invention and organization of the
politics of equality. The product of this extraction is an eternity. Let us listen
to Badiou himself:
The obstinate militant tenacity, elicited by an incalculable event, to
sustain the aleatory being of a singularity without predicate, of an innity
with no immanent hierarchy or determination, what I call the generic,
[. . .] is when its procedure is political the ontological concept of
democracy, or of communism, its the same thing. [. . .] [It is] the philosophical, and therefore eternal, concept of rebellious subjectivity. [. . .]
Every political event which founds a truth exposes the subject that it
induces to the eternity of the equal. Communism, in having named this
eternity, cannot be the adequate name of a death (DO, 1315).
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might appear that in this model there is no place for the notion of transitivity,
whether the logic of the latter be that of expression or that of appropriation.
This impression would nevertheless be incorrect. Badious theory of the subject
does in fact contain a notion of transitivity but it is one woven out of
antagonism. This antagonism is to be understood in two ways: (1) the structural
antagonism between place and force that constitutes determination as domination, as the indexing of every force to its proper place within the system of
representation; (2) the subjective antagonism of a force bent on destroying its
place, by crossing the limit imposed by determination and thus limiting
representation itself, what Badiou, with some irony, calls the labour of the
positive (TS 30).
Indispensable to this gure of the thinking of non-domination let us name
it the communism of destruction is the eternal antecedence of the subject to itself
(TS 163), the idea that the force that organizes itself as the destruction of
representation was, always already, the real of representation itself, its foreclosed being. It is precisely because this transitivity is only given when the
excess of the real turns on representation, and not on the basis of any autonomy
of the masses that could be either assumed or appropriated (just as one would be
said to appropriate the means of production), that its gure is a destructive one.
The political subject proves its antecedence to itself by disarticulating the space
of placement, and singularly by destroying its own place. Or: the masses are
revealed as an antagonistic class by the organized destruction which is the only
raison detre of the party (let us not forget that party and subject are, for the
Badiou of the Theorie du Sujet, quasi-synonymous terms). This communism of
destruction can be seen as the ultimate, and perhaps terminal, gure of the
politics of transitivity, a gure in which the absence of any actually existing
autonomy from the domination of representation means that the transitivity of
the subject to the structure can only be revealed by the never-ending
destruction of the latter.
With the publication of Can Politics Be Thought? (1985) Badiou signals a
break, at once philosophical and political, with the very idea of a dialectical
transitivity between the politics of non-domination and the system of representation. At the heart of this rupture is a thorough rethinking of the very place
of the Two in political subjectivity, no longer to be congured as destructive
antagonism but rather as a discontinuous and event-bound subtraction.8 What
happens to the idea of communism in this break, and in the series of works that
draw out its considerable consequences for politics and ontology?
The rst thing to note is that this break is not an intra-philosophical one, but
follows from the assumption of the end of a sequence of political militancy,
from what Badiou calls the destruction of Marxism (in this regard, the question
that guides this essay could also be formulated as: what is a communism which
separates itself from Marxism?). In other words, the supplementation of the
theory of the subject with a theory of the event is motivated by the intellectual
necessity of holding true to the eternity of the equal whilst forgoing the tenets
of transitivity. What, after all, is the function of the event, if not that of
allowing us to think the dysfunction of representation, the interruption of
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end of the separate form of the state in general, even if the state in
question is a democratic one.
Badiou juxtaposes this Leninist vision, founded on the ultimate end of politics
[as] the in-separate authority of the innite, or the coming to itself [advenue a`
soi] of the collective as such, to the idea of politics as a singular collective
practice at a distance from the state, a politics in which the collective is a
production of the formalizing power of political prescription.18 While we are
keenly aware of the reasons behind Badious deconstruction of substantial or
teleological varieties of communism, we must remark that the formal criteria
of this singular collective practice cannot downstream, as it were avoid the
encounter with the materiality of necessities. In other words, bereft as it may
be of any transitivity to the dynamics of the social or any latency of the political
subject, such a practice cannot but result in an actual production of communism, albeit a communism whose image can never be given in advance.
While Badiou is indeed proposing something like politics for politics sake
(whence its autonomy as a generic procedure), the universalizable and egalitarian determination of such a politics cannot but have effects, communist
effects in the real.
Needless to say, this new image of communism also entails a new image of
domination. The state, no longer split by antagonism (by its function as the
placement or indexing of force), is in ontological excess of presentation, and
forecloses the inconsistency or the void at the heart of reality; in specically
political terms, it forecloses unbinding as the real of social existence. As Badiou
writes, the state is not founded on a social bond that it would express, but on
unbinding, which it prohibits (EE 125). Properly political subjectivation
politics as a truth procedure begins with this real, with the innity of
unbinding, but, and this is essential, it cannot rely on the internal dynamics of
representation to assure the possibility that unbinding may itself be applied back
on to the bound structures of representation. Having abdicated the principle of
(class) antagonism, politics thus depends on a wager on the dysfunction of
representation, on holding true to the decision that something in representation
has faltered, that at the edges of order the real of unbinding has made an
irruption. It is therefore as the precarious point of a dysfunction of representation that the concept of the event allows for the construction of communism in the absence of structural antagonism.
In the dysfunction of which the event is the signal, political thought nds
the rare chance to uphold, by means of the invention of principles and practices
specic to the locus of this dysfunction, the eternity of the equal as the
boundless capacity for universality. The invariants of De lIdeologie make a
formal return here, in the sense that every political truth, for Badiou, puts to
the test the axiom that thought (i.e. the capacity to separate oneself from the
hierarchies and determinations of representation) is the thought of all, that, in
the vocabulary of Maoism, the masses think. Yet, in contradistinction to the
transitive, antagonistic forms of communism (of production and of destruction)
this position effectively removes the substantiality of the collective. The col-
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somehow inscribed in the dynamics of the social. Or, equality is only eternal
as a formal requirement of every true instance of political subjectivation to the
very extent that it is nowhere latent. Alas, it is of the essence of Badious
proposal that at this point metapolitics that philosophy abandon any pretence
of anticipating the precarious and situated fate of the production of communism. It is here that, in the words of Dun Desastre obscur, politics really
begins, and everything remains to be invented (DO 56).