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Which Equality? Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach

Nina Power

Online Publication Date: 01 August 2009

To cite this Article Power, Nina(2009)'Which Equality? Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach',Parallax,15:3,63 — 80
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 parallax, 2009, vol. 15, no. 3, 63–80

Which Equality? Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach

Nina Power

1. The Problem of Equality

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The question of equality has persistently haunted the various disciplines to which it
lends itself. Mathematics, politics, philosophy all repeatedly talk about the concept,
depend upon it even, but find themselves at a loss to locate it, to place the idea in its
proper location, or to transform it practically into something appropriate to its
simple, yet weighty, significance. Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière share a
common project in this regard, yet the core of their disagreement lies in their
respective conceptions of the term, as the following two quotes initially establish.
The first is from Rancière, talking about the French schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot,
and the second is from Badiou, taken from an essay entitled ‘Truths and Justice’:

Equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure, a

supposition to maintain in every circumstance.1

[P]olitical sequences take no account of any particular interests. They

bring about a representation of the collective capacity on the basis of
a rigorous equality between each of their agents.2

Both Badiou and Rancière posit the necessity of a pre-emptive or pre-existing notion
of equality. For both, too, this takes the form of a claim about the specificity of
human being. For Badiou ‘[t]hought is the one and only uniquely human capacity
and thought, strictly speaking, is simply that through which the human animal is
seized and traversed by the trajectory of a truth . . . people think, people are capable
of truth’.3 For Rancière, ‘Politics only occurs when these mechanisms [of the exercise
of majesty] are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally
foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the
presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone . . . ’4 As a way of staging the
‘disagreement’ between Rancière and Badiou, I will take this shared category, at
once obvious and obscure, and try to pinpoint the subtly different role it plays in the
work of each. Ultimately, I argue, this fundamentally comes down to a
disagreement over the role of continuity and strategy in relation to equality. For
Rancière, somewhat pessimistically, the way in which ‘some new politics could
break the circle of cheerful consensuality and denial of humanity is scarcely
foreseeable or decidable right now’.5 For Badiou, on the other hand, once the ‘axiom
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DOI: 10.1080/13534640902982744 63
 of equality’ has been declared, all politics worth its name can be identified. This
includes a long series of political events that Badiou names in various places: The
Paris Commune 1871, Russia 1917, May 1968. Rancière’s use of history in his
discussion of equality is much less grandiose, we might say, focussing not on the
eternal dates of revolutionary fervour, but on the forgotten men, women and events
of a history which is too unique to be handed over wholesale to either the
philosophers or the historians as we might conventionally understand them.

One of the reasons, however, for the shared, if quite different, interest in equality,
comes from a historical circumstance that should be noted, although it is perhaps
much more of an issue for Badiou than it is for Rancière. This is the role of the
political Party, and of a more general attitude to Marxism as it was theorised and
practised in the post-war period in Europe. Badiou’s eventual turn away from the
language of classical Marxism (although it is by no means total) informs his
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theoretical shift from a concern with antagonism and destruction (as present in early
texts such as Theory of the Subject) to a more rationalist and classically philosophical
interest in questions of universality, egalitarianism and the human. Rancière has
perhaps been more consistently interested in such questions insofar as the break with
Althusser, scientism and philosophy per se comes much earlier in his intellectual
career, and in so far as it leads him to ask the same kinds of questions from quite a
different angle, that is to say from history and the archives of forgotten events, rather
than from a rather grander intra-philosophical standpoint, as Badiou does.

On several levels, then, we can see great similarities between the projects of the two
thinkers, in which equality, as yet undetermined, operates as a vital presupposition
(perhaps the most vital presupposition) for their intellectual and political projects as
a whole. This paper is an attempt to come to some resolution about the nature of the
‘equality’ at stake in each case, and to trace some of the intellectual history behind
the term. To this end, I will turn, in the second section, to the period in which the
problem of equality emerged with full force on the intellectual and political scene –
the late 1830s and 1840s in Germany, where the reception of Hegel and Hegelian
philosophy raised the question of how to implement the universality and equality
that seemed everywhere apparent in the conclusions to Hegel’s thought, but so
manifestly lacking in the world that his philosophy was supposed to be in some way
the rational reconstruction of. What this earlier problematisation of equality reveals
with regard to our two later French thinkers, I will argue, is the fundamental
problem of the location of equality, whether it is axiomatically/rationally posited, as
in Badiou, or, rather more materially (or sensuously) positioned, as in Rancière’s
anarchistic notion of intelligence and his community of speaking beings. Rancière
admittedly makes this problem of location a key feature of his analysis of equality,
whereas for Badiou it is more baldly stated as a simultaneously philosophical and
political axiom. In this way, I will argue, each prolong one strand of the earlier
reflection on equality present in the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, the most
prominent of the early readers of Hegel, who moves from a rationalist conception of
human equality in his earliest work to an embodied, practical (if not yet explicitly
political, as Marx points out) conception of human equality. This shift in Feuerbach
can be located in the movement between the claim that human reason is ‘one,
universal and infinite’ in his dissertation (1828) to later ideas of the inseparability of
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 thought and physical being: ‘Truth, reality, and sensuousness are one and the same
thing. Only a sensuous being is a true and real being’ (1843).6

In this way, we could say, bending the stick a little, that Badiou most resembles the
rationalist early Feuerbach, whilst Rancière is closer to the sensuous humanist of
Feuerbach’s later works. This is not a claim without potentially serious difficulties, of
course, particularly as it must be noted that, once upon a time, Rancière was a
strong critic of Feuerbach. This criticism is most strongly present in his contribution
to the Reading Capital project, where Rancière follows the orthodox Marxist claim
that Feuerbach’s concept of alienation (Entfremdung) is an insufficient concept of
abstraction because it posits too simple a break between the ‘reality’ of man and the
‘idealities’ of God and speculative philosophy. However, Rancière, once broken
with the discourses of mastery that constitute his early encounter with Althusser (an
experience which he analyses so acutely in his 1974 text, La Leçon d’Althusser), turns
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once again to Feuerbach.

However, and disappointingly for this author in particular, this research was cut
short by the events of May ‘68. As Rancière tells us in the foreword to The Philosopher
and His Poor (1983) there was once ‘a thesis on Feuerbach interrupted by the din of
the street’. It would be too much to try and imagine what this thesis would have
been (longer than Marx’s own, we would hope), but the figure of Feuerbach looms
large (if silently) over Rancière, particularly when he turns precisely to the period of
the 1830s and 40s in the material of The Philosopher and His Poor, even if he is only
mentioned briefly once at the beginning of the book. I have argued elsewhere, too,
about the missing analysis of Feuerbach in Badiou’s work, where returning to the
questions of the 1830s and 1840s, particularly concerning the roles of the generic,
universality, humanity and, indeed, equality, could only usefully clarify Badiou’s
post-Marxist (but in some ways pre-Marxist) attempt to recast the same problems.7

Before turning to the historical debate regarding equality, it is necessary to lay out
the grounds of this particular ‘disagreement’ – where Badiou and Rancière most
fundamentally differ on this seemingly shared problematic. To my mind, there are
two main divisions here. One appears in the relation to the question of ‘truth’. For
Badiou, the equality of thought is central because it is the only thing that both
separates us from the animality that otherwise characterises our existence, and
allows truth to take hold. Here Badiou fuses a classically rationalist proposition
(Heraclitus’ ‘thought is common to all’, or Spinoza’s axiom ‘Man thinks’) with the
subjective upsurge we might usually associate with Sartre’s notion of the ‘project’
(especially in its later collective incarnation in the Critique of Dialectical Reason with
the ‘group-in-fusion’). For Rancière, however, the question of ‘truth’ is far less
central – it is for this reason that Badiou positions him, in his brief discussion of
Rancière in Metapolitics (1998) as the heir of Foucault (albeit a Nietzsche-free
Foucault). Badiou writes of Rancière: ‘In Disagreement [ . . . ] he opposes real politics
to the politics of philosophers, or to the politics of truth’.8

The second major point of disagreement comes, as I’ve already intimated with
reference to Feuerbach, over the question of the way in which equality is initially
posited. Badiou in a way encompasses the three disciplines of equality I mentioned
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 at the beginning of the article – mathematics, politics and philosophy – with his
axiomatic, rationalist claim that ‘[t]hought is the one and only uniquely human
capacity and thought, strictly speaking, is simply that through which the human
animal is seized and traversed by the trajectory of a truth’. The equality of this
thought for Badiou is the precondition for all truth procedures, but most especially
politics, as it is in (real) politics that the subjective truth of the situation (that politics
immediately engages the infinite capacity to think of all, albeit in a specific
situation). For Rancière, however, it is not so much that equality cuts across the
three disciplines so much as it disrupts them all (for Badiou, this role would be played
by the ‘event’, but not by equality as such). ‘For a thing to be political, it must give
rise to a meeting of police logic and egalitarian logic that is never set up in advance’.9
As Peter Hallward puts it:

According to Rancière, equality is not the result of a fairer

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distribution of social functions or places so much as the immediate

disruption of any such distribution; it refers not to place but to the
placeless or out-of-place, not to class but to the unclassifiable or out-
of-class. ‘The essence of equality is not so much to unify as to
declassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace it
with controversial figures of division. Equality is the power of
inconsistent, disintegrative and ever-replayed division’.10

Kristin Ross, a fine reader (and translator) of Rancière gives a similar reading of the
same dimension of his work, with particular reference to The Ignorant Schoolmaster:

Against the seamless science of the hidden, Jacotot’s story reminds us

that equality turns on another, very different, logic: in division rather
than consensus, in a multiplicity of concrete acts and actual moments
and situations – situations that erupt into the fiction of inegalitarian
society without themselves becoming institutions.11

Equality, following Jacotot, may well be the presupposition rather than the goal,
but equality is destructive and disruptive, unruly in a way that Badiou could never
countenance: the ‘subject’ of politics for Badiou is unnatural, just as it is for
Rancière, in that it breaks with the way in which things are, or are thought to be.
But this subject is rather more substantive for Badiou, a real entity that takes upon
itself the continuing task of realising the equality upon which it is axiomatically
founded, however difficult this task might be. Rancière’s equality remains firmly on
the side of disruption, which might make it purely a question of subversion for its
own sake. As Hallward notes:

Rancière’s emphasis on division and interruption makes it difficult to

account for qualities that are just as fundamental to any sustainable
political sequence: organization, simplification, mobilization,
decision, polarization, to name a few.12

It should be noted, however, that Badiou and Rancière share a fundamental

antipathy to the notion of equivalence, even as they defend their respective notions of
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 equality. What do I mean by equivalence? This would be the kind of quantitative
counting undertaken by the state, the kind of illusory democracy that Rancière
refers to as ‘the management of places’13 and Badiou calls the ‘statist
configuration’.14 Badiou indeed upbraids Rancière for refusing to link the
brutalities of society and the police to a wider notion of the state. As he puts it,
rather harshly: ‘I suspect that it is a question for Rancière of never exposing himself,
whetever the trajectory of his argument, to the mortal accusation of not being a
democrat’.15

Nevertheless, in this shared attack they are mainly on common ground: in a state or
police regime, equality (which is to say equivalence) would mean that each
individual would be counted, as thus ‘equal’ as in ‘one man (or woman), one vote’.
But this form of representational equivalence is understood only from the standpoint
of a ‘realism’ that would only count that which is visible and would also reduce any
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singularity to a single homogeneous and representable measure, for the purposes of

control and regulation. As Rancière puts it, very clearly, under democratic
consensus:

Everyone is included in advance, every individual is the nucleus and

image of a community of opinions that are equal to parties, of
problems that are reducible to shortages, and of rights that are
identical to energies.16

This atomic, representational notion of equality is, I think, better understood as a

form of pernicious equivalence, in which the fundamental mode of political
behaviour is selfish egotism (there are parallels here with Sartre’s notion of seriality).
Rancière uses this description of atomistic equivalence to explain how racism and
xenophobia emerge, once he fear is created that others are taking ‘places’ away (or,
in more psychoanalytic terms, that the other is stealing my enjoyment). The
uprising of the ‘part of those that have no part’ is the eruption of true politics onto
and into the consensual scene. But what underlies or constitutes this part of no part?

For Rancière, the real inequality that we see everywhere and at all times is in fact
predicated on equality itself (which is why we must begin from the assumption of
equality, and not from its opposite, for fear of beginning and ending with the same
problem): ‘we can deduce that the inequality of social rank works only because of
the very equality of speaking beings’.17

It is this same problem of the real incarnation, or eruption, of equality into the world
that most concerned those early readers of Hegel in the 1830s and 40s. How to make
manifest the universalising and levelling features of Spirit in a world in which
inequality is so obviously apparent? For Hegel this was a problem resolved, or rather
curtailed, in the realm of the social, in which the excluded – the rabble (Po¨bel), in
particular, play the role of the ‘part of no part’, to use Rancière’s term. But the
obvious contradiction in Hegel between a apologia of the clear injustice of civil
society and the promise of equality and universality of the philosophical work led the
Young and Left Hegelians to perform radical operations on Hegel’s oeuvre, by both
pushing his philosophy so far it became a new form of concretised non-philosophy
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 (humanism), and by breaking abruptly with a system that claimed to be able to
encompass all dimensions of human thought and practice in the form of a
‘Philosophy of the Future’ that would simultaneously somehow also be a
non-Philosophy of the Future, to paraphrase Feuerbach. That there could be
a stance that would dispense with the very idea that philosophy has a privileged take
on the question of where to begin in thought. Why then, could we not begin with the
presupposition of equality instead?

This extra-philosophical demand for a notion of equality can be seen in both Badiou
and Rancière in different ways: if Philosophy is for Badiou strictly devoid of any
concepts of its own (being merely the place where the effects of truth procedures in
the different conditions are untangled), and for Rancière, where instances of
equality intervene to remind philosophy and politics (and in particular ‘political
philosophy’) that they are constitutively incapable of ‘recognising’ equality (for to
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recognise it would be already to diagnose it, to represent it, to capture it), then the
period in intellectual history where equality made its appearance on the scene, both
intellectually and practically, is a vital place to rethink contemporary discussion of
the concept.

2. The Origins of Equality

The conceptual trajectory of this section begins with a discussion of certain forms of
universalism and equality present in Hegel’s conception of Geist, before moving to an
investigation, through Feuerbach, of the concrete implications of this universalism
for any ‘properly’ universal thinking of humanity. Uncovering the conceptual
assumptions behind debates about humanism after the mid-nineteenth century
requires returning to the post-Hegelian philosophies and non-philosophies of the
1840s as it is here, in the wake of the success of philosophemes clustered around
Hegel’s ‘absolute spirit’ in encoding a particular historical narrative into the logic of
philosophy itself, that the status of ‘man’ seemed to be either in jeopardy (as
secondary to the progress of Geist), or falsely elevated.

In the latter instance, Hegel’s theological critics would have it that ‘man’ assumed
an importance commensurate with that of the Christian God itself. This section
argues that Feuerbach and the early Marx are radically misunderstood if their
projects are taken as mere formal critical reversals of religious postulates, just as
Badiou and Rancière are much less interesting if we understand them merely as ‘left’
thinkers reacting to a protracted period of ‘right’ politics. The eminently political
impulses of the Young and Left Hegelians should be stressed as part of a way into to
thinking a trajectory of radical political humanism that concerns itself with forms of
the collective, humanity and a form of rationalism that immediately deals with
question of the species, just as later Badiou and Rancière will both at different points
talk of the people, the proletarian, capacities and generic humanity or generic
intelligence.

Hegel’s claim, from the ‘Doctrine of the Notion’ in his Encyclopaedia Logic that ‘only
in Christendom is man respected as man, in his infinitude and universality’
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 incorporates several key moments: the idea that Christianity is the most universal of
religions, encapsulating and surpassing the truth of all others; that Christendom is
the physical embodiment of this universality; and that the universal is intricately
associated with ‘the principle of personality’. Hegel does not however mean by this
that personality is immediately apparent to the ‘person’ him or herself (elsewhere in
the Encyclopaedia he criticises Jacobi for speaking of personality in terms of a form of
idealist intuition).18 The slave’s self-recognition, in particular, would not be enough
to reveal to him his own universality according to Hegel.19 Indeed, without external
recognition, the slave is not a person at all, he does not partake, as Hegel elsewhere
puts it, in ‘the principle of the Western world, the principle of individuality’.20 Hegel
does not therefore understand this ‘principle of personality’ in terms of a personal
relation to God of which any man or woman could be the subject, as a typical
‘personalist’ might – indeed, this is what his Christian theological detractors, such as
Stahl, found so problematic. In Hegel’s later and last major text, the Philosophy of
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Right from 1821, ‘persons’ occupy the realm, between the private sphere and the
state, of bourgeois (or civil) society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft]. What persons have in
common, however, is not their reason, nor feeling (as in the family) but ownership:
private property and the collective ties that expand and regulate these relations:

When we say that a human being must be somebody [etwas], we mean

that he must belong to a particular estate [ . . . ] A human being with
no estate is merely a private person and does not possess actual
universality.21

‘Universality’ is thus understood as the systematic interweaving of individual and

family ownership and institutions. The implication of Hegel’s so-called
universalism, therefore, is that one can be human in a biological sense, and yet
have no actual relation to personhood or to the ‘actual’ universal or to equality in
any practical sense. Women, in particular, according to Hegel, cannot contemplate
‘universal’ activities such as philosophy, or governance, precisely because ‘their
actions are not based on the demands of universality but on contingent inclination
and opinion’.22 If we come to Hegel expecting a certain kind of universality to arise
in the shared, if differential, capacities of the species (what we might name
humanity or Mankind, comprising both men and women), we will be disappointed,
finding the breadth of this term restricted in the Philosophy of Right to the
permutations of marriage and reproduction, ‘Life’, or ‘the actuality of the species’.23
Not the life of men and women as it is lived in society, or could be lived, but the mere
fact of the propagation of the species, which is, in turn, subsumed by civil society as
marriage, thus relying on differentiation at a lower level in order to defend a rather
circumscribed ‘universalism’ at a higher. There is a tension between Hegel the
philosopher and Hegel the thinker of the articulation of the state and civil society, a
battle in which the universality of the human is ultimately subordinated to concrete
social hierarchisation. This is one of the reasons that Rancière will replace the
discussion of ‘Right’ with the importance of ‘Wrong’ in the realm of politics: ‘politics
comes about solely through interruption, the initial twist that institutes politics as
the deployment of a wrong or of a fundamental dispute’.24 It should be noted that
this play on right and wrong is already present in the early Marx’s writings on the
proletariat against Hegel.
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 Despite Hegel’s insistence (following Spinoza’s Axiom in the Ethics that ‘Man thinks’)
that ‘Nature has given every one a faculty of thought’, this ‘generic thought’ does not
reach the level of the universal until it ‘feels its own universality’.25 So whilst self-
reflecting thought is that which constitutes the distinction between humanity and
animals, in the realm of thought, the philosopher and the bourgeois property-owner
share the distinction of being in exclusive possession of the ability to attain the
universal: ‘the philosophic mode gets to be different from the more general thought
which acts in all that is human, in all that gives humanity its distinctive character’.26
A mode of thought that, as noted, women and slaves are by definition unable to
practice, according to Hegel, because of their ‘inability’ to attain the level of the
universal either via the legal recognition of their full right to property (or limited
forms thereof), or because of their ‘natural’ restriction to the level of the contingent
and the individual. Even in marriage and childrearing, the woman can only attain
the level of the generic [Gattung] by uniting with her husband, via ‘their consent to
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constitute a single person’.27 Above them, too, stands civil society as the ‘universal family’,
in the face of the relative arbitrariness and contingency of the married couple as
parents.28 We can see here how the rationalist position of Badiou (equality is an
axiom) and the anarcho-communist position of Rancière (intelligence is given
equally to all) are both positions whose anti-naturalism is explicitly and importantly
stressed. Hegel’s expressive notion of universality and the equality of thought (not
there until it feels its own universality) lays the ground for the defence of the
hierarchical and repressive elements of the world as it is, precisely because it defines
itself as an expressive account of the manifestation of universality.

In his earlier, work on Hegel, the ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State’, Marx will
make explicit the narrowness of Hegel’s conception of the universal and attack the
idea that the ‘universal interest’ should be commensurate with the task of upholding
legality.29 The Universal is repeatedly qualified by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right:

the process of legislation should not be represented merely by that one

of its moments whereby something is declared to be valid for
everyone; more important that this is the inner and essential moment,
namely cognition of the content in its determinate universality.30

Everywhere in Hegel the universal and its equality are given, but circumscribed:
everyone thinks, in principle, but only philosophy, and/or, the law-abiding
property-owner thinks universally. This is why a critique of philosophy, such as
undertaken in Feuerbach’s attempt to inaugurate a ‘non-philosophy’, and
Rancière’s later attempt to undermine the supposed ‘scientificity’ of disciplinary
division and philosophy’s pretensions in particular, is also a critique of the
bourgeois, ‘cognising’ subject that underpins such a philosophy. For Hegel,
however, everyone has an abstract relation to Right, yet one must have cognizance
[die Kenntnis] of the content of the law in order to partake of it. As Marx puts it: ‘the
universal appears everywhere as a determinate particular, while the individual
never achieves its true universality’.31

Löwith notes that, for Hegel, ‘man is far from being conceived as a member of a
general class; rather the life of this class itself, society, is conceived as a framework
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 external to the individuals, a restriction upon their original independence. The only
bond holding them together is [ . . . ] need and private interest’.32 Those thinkers that
followed Hegel, not only Marx, but those who Marx read, respected and argued
with in the early years, most especially Feuerbach, oriented their projects towards a
series of complex tasks: how to rescue the universal from its Hegelian limitations and
thus render it truly universal; how to redeem Man (understood as men and women)
without simply redeeming the bourgeois man of property and security; how to learn
the lessons of the dialectic, and to criticise it, without retreating to a pre-Hegelian
problematic that could easily be criticised and subsumed by the subtleties of the all-
consuming Hegelian system. As Feuerbach succinctly put it in 1843:

The culmination of modern philosophy is the Hegelian philosophy. The

historical necessity and justification of the new philosophy must therefore
be derived mainly from a critique of Hegel’s.33
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There are a number of factors to bear in mind here. By the early 1840s, not only did
the original unifying force of the ‘rationalist’ Hegelian system appear to have been
dissolved in its apparent opposition to the reality of the political state (namely, the
ascension of Pietist King Frederick Wilhelm IV and the political and academic
hostility towards Hegelianism), but the Hegelian school’s own unity was shattered
by the splintering off of myriad Hegelian factions.34 Practically, this meant that
criticisms of theology were inextricably intermingled with those of politics
(theoretical or existing). It is again Feuerbach who best summarises the theoretical
landscape post-Hegel, when discussing his proposal for a future philosophy:

The new philosophy is the negation of rationalism as much as mysticism; of

pantheism as much as personalism; of atheism as much as theism; it is the
unity of all these antithetical truths as an absolutely independent and pure truth.35

Although Warren Breckman argues against ascribing too much influence to the
political circumstances of the 1840s as being responsible for radicalising the left
Hegelians, pointing to the fact that the unity of religious and socio-political concerns
in Feuerbach’s criticisms of personalism of the 1830s already exhibits character-
istically radical themes, it is clear that there was a heightened alarm at the
increasingly repressive political state of affairs in Germany in the 1840s.36

But how could the Young and left Hegelians reconcile the concept of ‘genus’ with
‘individuals’ who, far from exhibiting a shared rationality, couldn’t seem more at
war with one another? Although the attack upon and transformation of the
religious elements of Hegel (or, the question of how to be an atheistic Hegelian,
as Feuerbach would have it) is initially crucial to this matter of the ‘properly
universal’ in the attempt to redeem man,37 the issue of religion, though it formed
a major part of the conservative attack on Hegel, did not centrally pre-occupy
the left-wing Hegelians. That honour goes instead to the question of ‘political
humanism’, as I understand the thematic of Feuerbach and the early Marx,
understood as the attempt to restore to men and women certain forms of their
own power in the face of allegedly natural forms of hierarchy (sovereignty,
monarchy, lordship and the newer, and more complex, form of domination,
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 capitalism). This project of disalienation goes far beyond a simple reversal of the
tyranny of religious oppression. It is thus disingenuous to state, as Hyppolite
does, that ‘one may see in Christianity, as it is interpreted in Hegelian
philosophy, the source of everything in Marxian humanism’.38 Similarly,
Ameriks’ claim that ‘the notion of the human species itself is Feuerbach’s
epistemological, ontological, and ethical substitute for the absolute role that was
previously played by the notion of God as traditionally understood’,39 again
underestimates the political elements in Feuerbach’s work, which is not simply an
analysis of theology, but also, and at the same time, of philosophy and certain
theo-political conceptions of civil society. Feuerbach and Marx’s early humanism,
just as Rancière and Badiou’s later notions of the people and generic humanity
represent more than a simple transmutation of the veneration of the transcendent
(God, idealism) to a veneration of the immanent (man, materialism). ‘Political
humanism’ is not solely the replacement of theology with anthropology. If it
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were, we would expect it to retain the precise structure of theological arguments,

rendering it vulnerable to criticisms along the line of Proudhon’s: ‘the deification
of our species, which is at bottom among the new atheists, is, only a last echo of
religious terrors’.40 The so-called ‘deification’ of the species that Proudhon attacks
in humanist atheism does not, and cannot, be a presupposition in either
Feuerbach or Marx (or the later French thinkers), for it is precisely awareness of
how stuck humanity has gotten in the face of its oppressions that guide their
criticisms of Hegel and theology.

This question of the formal reversal of philosophical-theological writing is, in any

case, pre-empted by Feuerbach in 1843:

The contradiction of the modern philosophy, especially of pantheism,

consists of the fact that it is the negation of theology from the standpoint of
theology or the negation of theology which itself is again theology: this
contradiction especially characterizes the Hegelian philosophy.41

Neither a theological negation of theology, nor the negation of the content of theology
without a simultaneous destruction of its form. Admittedly, Feuerbach does give
some weapons to his critics when, especially in the later works, he occasionally make
claims like

My aim in reducing theology to anthropology is rather to raise

anthropology to theology in just the same way as Christianity, by
reducing God to man, elevates man into God, even if into a
transcendent, fantastic God far removed from man.42

But his more comprehensive attacks on the formal ties between theology, philosophy
and the ‘nature’ of civil society are more salient to the question of humanism per se,
and it is these we shall briefly examine.

Some caveats are in order, however. As willing as Feuerbach was to connect his
critique of religion to socialism, it is clear that Marx’s subsequent identification of
socialism with the proletariat’s struggle actually militates (in both senses) against the
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 core of Feuerbach’s own emancipatory project. Feuerbach never identified the
proletariat as the universal class whose emancipation would liberate all mankind.
Instead he remained committed to the task of the universal emancipation of
humanity as such, and this must include proletariat and capitalist alike. In this
sense, Feuerbach is attempting to make good the promise of the universal that Hegel
never carried out. However, we know too that the universal and equality plays a
large role in Marx’s 1843-44 work on Hegel. The formation of a class with ‘radical
chains’, the proletariat, is precisely a negatively universal class: its suffering is universal,
its total ‘loss of humanity’ is a universal loss. It is as if Marx, with this notion of the
proletariat, is taking his cue from Feuerbach’s claim that ‘only he who has the
courage to be absolutely negative has also the power to create something new’.43
If only one part of humanity emancipates itself, nevertheless this ‘one particular class
undertakes from its particular situation the universal emancipation of society’.44 Marx
has here taken up Feuerbach’s ‘completed Hegelianism’ and added the beginnings
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of a more material political critique, without yet dropping the language of the
universal. The relationship between the reformulation of the universal between
Feuerbach and Marx is critical: it is here, rather than on the question of humanism
per se, that they will ultimately diverge, as Marx becomes less and less convinced by
strictly ‘philosophical’ conceptions of politics and humanity. This development
plays an important role in understanding the later claims of Rancière, in particular,
for whom the language of humanitarianism and victimology has almost completely
tainted any useful conception of humanity:

Politics [ . . . ] is the art of the local and singular construction of cases

of universality. Such construction is only possible as long as the
singularity of the wrong [ . . . ] is distinguished from the
particularization of right attributed to collectivities according to
their identity. And it is also only possible as long as its universality is
separate from the naked relationship between humanity and
inhumanity.45

The biopolitical democratic model of the human as either fully countable and
governable from the standpoint of the state or a pure victim (and again, Badiou and
Rancière are very close on this point) has come to overtake the older language of
communist or Marxist humanism, where the propertylessness and ‘nothingness’ of
the vast majority of humanity is in fact its strength and resource, not something to be
pitied or regarded in an ‘animal’ way.

The question of how and in which ways this humanity individuates itself is also at
stake in the 1840s: whilst Feuerbach will remain in the realm of that which binds at
the level of the generic (thought, love), Marx, particularly in the wake of Stirner’s
attack on Feuerbach, will give much more prominence to the role of the complex
‘individual’ (not to be understood as a substantive ‘person’ in Hegel’s sense).
As Kouvelakis puts it, ‘when it is a question of determining, in positive fashion, the
ultimate human essence, Marx becomes highly elliptical, precisely where Feuerbach
[ . . . ] is prolix’.46 Thus, there is a shift in the conception of ‘political humanism’,
from Feuerbach’s 1839 claim that ‘[t]he species is indifferent to the individual’ and
that ‘[t]he reflecting individual carries the consciousness of the species within
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 himself’,47 to Marx’s 1845 claim, in The German Ideology, for communism as the
‘power of . . . united individuals’.48 Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach’s conception of
generic humanity retains Feuerbach’s concern for that shared humanity; what he
does eliminate, however, is the idea of an ahistorical opposition between the
individual and the species, such that species-being would be revealed only ideally (in
self-consciousness, for example, as Feuerbach argues in the preface to The Essence of
Christianity). Already we can see hints of Marx’s disagreement with Feuerbach on
this point in 1844:

The real, active relation of man to himself as a species-being, or the

realisation of himself as a real species-being, i.e. as a human being, is
only possible if he really employs all his species-powers – which [ . . . ] is
only possible through the cooperation of mankind and as a result of
history.49
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Man, for Marx, is identified neither with the isolated individual, nor the species as
the revelation of shared capacity, but with the practice of real individuals in their
shared, if differentiated, conditions and their historical specificity.

Marx makes the addition to his early form of humanism of a particular idea of
democracy that makes more explicit the immediately political nature of human
emancipation, thus further distinguishing himself from Feuerbach and avoiding
some of the problems inherent in the notion of species. As Kouvelakis remarks:

The reference to the species is haunted by a constitutive instability;

that it is a provisional notion subject to progressive destabilisation;
and that it operates like the spectral trace of a different social logic,
one which comes from the future and is yet lodged at the heart of
bourgeois social relations. For its part, ‘true democracy’, defined as
the self-presence of the human essence, would be more an appeal . . .
for a democratic political practice that does not yet exist or, more
precisely, has not yet been recognised – and cannot yet be ‘named’ –
rather than a stable concept awaiting its systematic presentation.50

We can of course ultimately question, as Marx did, whether Feuerbach really achieves
a truly novel conception of explicitly political humanism as he imagines he did (we can
see just how preoccupied Feuerbach was with questions of futurity and temporality,
and the immediate need for a new kind of thinking from perusing the titles of his works:
‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’, ‘The Necessity of a Reform of Philosophy’,
‘Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy’). When Feuerbach states that
‘[p]hilosophy steps into the place that religion had occupied’, which ‘means, however,
that a totally different philosophy replaces all previous philosophy’, the question is to
what extent this new philosophy (or sometimes, this ‘non-philosophy’) can serve as an
adequate account of the really existing state of affairs.51

Feuerbach construes ‘thinking’ to be the process by which we not only attain a

universal object, but become universal in ourselves. In opposition to the apparent

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 ‘personalism’ of his immediate predecessors, Feuerbach, argues in the Preface to the
‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’ that

[a]t present, the task is not to invent a theory of man, but to pull man
out of the mire in which he is bogged down [ . . . ] to establish a
critique of human philosophy through a critique of divine
philosophy.52

We can pose Feuerbach’s early, post-Hegelian problematic in the following way:

does man entertain a relationship to his species that extends beyond (mere) finite
self-relation? Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx all, in some sense or another, have an
affirmative answer to this enquiry.53 It is Schelling’s reversal of the move from
‘thought to being’ to the one from ‘immediate being to thought’, however, that
partly influences the Young Hegelians in the early stages, who find in his work one
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way of escaping the perceived negativity of Hegelian dialectics. Also involved in the
attacks on Hegel, and writing at the same time as Marx was actively creating
himself as a Feuerbachian, Max Stirner flatly denies the possibility of species (or
genera)-relation: ‘But the species is nothing, and, if the individual lifts himself above
the limits of his individuality, this is rather his very self as an individual; he exists
only in raising himself’.54 ‘Man’ is thus nothing other than a ‘solemn cliché’, not an
object of thought, not a goal to be attained, nor a category to be rescued from its
alienation in transcendence, as Feuerbach would see it. Yet, even though Marx will
distance himself from Feuerbach on this point, as Soper quite rightly puts it, ‘we
might note, however, that though there is a decisive shift away from Feuerbachian
humanism in The German Ideology, there is no break with humanist argument as
such’.55 The question is rather how the individual (the ego, or the self, for Stirner)
lives in a social realm in which economic and political elements distance men and
women from their own capacities. This in a sense is where Rancière later begins his
work, on the ground, using individual cases in The Philosopher and His Poor and The
Ignorant Schoolmaster.

Marx and Engels will savage the individualistic Stirner in The German Ideology, in
order to stake out a position that remains strictly ‘communist’ in the sense that some
form of collective identification is possible, indeed, necessary. They declare that such
a thinker ‘by proclaiming his own thought as the end of philosophy and its
triumphant entrance into corporeal life’ presents an utterly impoverished (not to
mention bourgeois) acquisitive individualism that upholds the current order, even
as it denies that this order has nothing to do with the individual’s supposedly
‘anarchic’ anti-foundationalism.56 It is clear, however, that Stirner’s anarchistic
undermining of Feuerbach shakes Marx and Engels quite severely: the German
Ideology is, after all, a text in which three hundred and eighty pages are devoted to
Stirner (compared to a mere seventy to Feuerbach, and twenty to Bruno Bauer).57
At this stage in their thought, however, it is questionable how much Marx and
Engels interested themselves in the strictly philosophical Feuerbach-Stirner debate,
that takes as its poles the terms the ‘generic’ and ‘the ego’ (Einzige).58 Nevertheless,
the lineage of this debate, and of the origins of the concept of ‘Gattung’, are crucial for
an understanding of how it was possible for Marx and Engels, in the first place, to
formulate their critiques and programmes in the wake of Hegel. We should here
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 remember Engels’ later claim that, upon the publication of The Essence of Christianity
in 1841, ‘at once we all became Feuerbachians’.59

All three thinkers under examination here (Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx), and the
later Badiou and Rancière (particularly Badiou), draw on the language of the
generic (Gattung) to elucidate the ways in which the individual relates to his ‘species’.
We can roughly sketch the movement between the three earlier thinkers as the move
from married and sexual life in civil society (Hegel), to non-alienated consciousness
(Feuerbach), to labour and praxis (Marx). Even within the work of one of the three
thinkers, for example, Feuerbach, these conceptual tensions are manifest. We could
understand Gattung as ‘species’ if we examine Feuerbach’s transcendental biologism,
but ‘genus’ if we consider his theory that the human species is the ‘species of all the
species’.60 If the term is not merely a biological, or naturalistic one for Feuerbach,
because, as Agamben points out, it serves to identify the ‘vital activity’ proper to
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man alone, we must attend to its specifically different meanings in various contexts.
In the shift from Feuerbach to Marx, we can see a movement from understanding
Gattungswesen as the theoretical differentiation of man from animal to a more active,
productive demonstration of the separation of man in Marx that nevertheless retains
some vestiges of Feuerbach’s simple-seeming, yet complex, rationalism. In turn, this
shift from Feuerbach to Marx is prefigured by the different ways in which Hegel uses
the term. This separation between nature and capacity for rationality indicates
something of the impossibility of any immediate revelation of the generic quality of
thought. This is Rancière’s problematic too, particularly in Disagreement, as he tries
to identify the link between the fundamental equality of speaking beings and their
unequal distribution in the world as it is.

3. Badiou and Rancière: On Unequal Terms

But where does the real disagreement on equality come between Badiou and
Rancière? In Badiou’s two short pieces on Rancière in Metapolitics, one of which is
entitled ‘Rancière and the Community of Equals’, he argues that Rancière is careful
never to situate himself within any one particular discipline. (Incidentally, this
might explain why Rancière reserves particular ire for Pierre Bourdieu as the creator
of a particular kind of ‘sociological science’ in which the unwitting subjects of the
operation – those without cultural capital, for example – are turned into another
kind of object for study, deprived once again of any kind of voice.) Badiou writes:
‘Rancière’s enterprise is not internal to a system [dispositif] of knowledge’.61 This
would appear to be a strength of Rancière’s approach, allowing him to range freely
over forgotten histories and neglected Figures (the anti-master Jacotot being
perhaps the best example). Indeed, this is an extraordinarily attractive approach,
dismantling in one fell swoop the pretensions and hierarchies of disciplinary
divisions and the self-descriptions in bad faith that lead people to claim to speak ‘as a
philosopher’, ‘as a historian’. For Badiou, however, this move ‘tends, in an aporetic
manner, towards a political intervention that is forever suspended’ and,
furthermore, ‘leads us to nothing in the order of real politics that could serve as a
replacement’.62 Why? Because, for Badiou, Rancière’s whole approach depends
upon the simultaneous positing of master (‘every bond presumes a master’) and the
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 claim that ‘all mastery is an imposture’. Because of this, Rancière is obliged to resort
to the admittedly appealing motif of ‘the community of equals’, which would either
dispense with mastery all together (a totality without a master – a kind of
anarchistic utopia) or ‘an equality which is held together under a pure empty mark
of mastery’ (mastery without a master). Badiou argues that either of these two
scenarios would destroy the very position from which Rancière wishes to speak, and
that we would be best placed to give up on the ‘dream of the community of equals, or
generic communism as a militant aim’. It should be noted, however, that Badiou
himself does not always do this, speaking in recent texts of both generic humanity
and communism as yet-living terms. What Badiou recognises, however, is the shared
commitment to a notion of equality that is postulated and not willed (i.e. a starting
point, not a goal). As he put it:

We must reach agreement on the claim that equality has nothing to

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do with the social, or social justice, but with the regime of statements
and prescriptions, and is therefore the latent principle, not of simple
scrawls on the parchment of proletarian history, but of every politics
of emancipation.63

The main disagreement on this point comes on the strategy to be pursued once this
initial prescription has been declared. For Badiou, one must commence ‘the rigorous
pursuit of consequences’, but for Rancière, there is perhaps little to show us how the
egalitarian moments of eruption and dissensus might establish themselves as a new
mode of ‘proper’ politics. We might be persuaded by Rancière’s slightly more
pessimistic analysis, however, if Badiou does not convince us that his alternative (a
kind of prescriptive, organised project of equality) is of more practical and
theoretical use. How does he try and do this?

In another essay entitled ‘Rancière and Apolitics’, Badiou attempts to outline the
main features of Rancière’s politics, many points of which touch on the question of
equality. Badiou claims, somewhat obscurely, that:

Rancière’s doctrine can be defined as a democratic anti-philosophy that

identifies the axiom of equality, and is founded on a negative ontology of
the collective that sublates the contingent historicity of nominations.64

Rancière, for Badiou, lacks a theory of names (vital for his own work), in which
political sequences and events would involve a certain decision about what the event
could be called, a certain wager as its appropriate nomination: the Bolshevik
Revolution, the Storming of the Bastille. Rancière instead, claims Badiou, ‘will say
that our time is nameless’. Badiou opposes his systematic attempt to analyse all the
elements of egalitarian political events (their structure, the act of naming them, the
fidelity to their principles) to what he calls Rancière’s ‘historicist phenomenology
of egalitarian occurrence’. But surely this is Rancière’s point. Placing those moments
of egalitarian uprising in a philosophical sequence, as Badiou does, runs the risk of
obliterating history altogether, along with the sensuous appearance of individual
experiences on the stage of politics. Badiou would not deny this, seeing philosophy as
the (admittedly empty) discipline conditioned by politics, rather than history as a
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 kind of archive to be unravelled. As Badiou puts it, rather didactically: ‘The correct
thesis is that all philosophy is conditioned by instances of politics, to which
philosophy gives shelter through a particular transcription destined to produce
strictly philosophical effects’.65

With the notion of equality too, Badiou pursues are rather more forceful line,
sweeping aside any melancholic worries about the ends of politics or the prevalence of
humanitarian conceptions of democratic consensus: ‘But so what? Is the capacity to
deal with the egalitarian axiom within a situation, in singular statements . . .
unworkable?’66 For Badiou the answer is clearly ‘no’. Difficult, certainly, but
impossible, no. Badiou invokes new names – the immigrant workers – and calls for
new forms of organisation, a kind of combination of the undocumented workers whose
real relation to work must be reestablished, and the ‘few, rare’ militants who have
understand how true egalitarian politics must (for the time being) take place at a
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distance from the state. It is this figure of the political militant that Badiou points out is
absolutely absent for Rancière, unsurprisingly we might say, seeing as the ‘political
militant’ comprises a form of political subjectivity that is tied rather heavily to avant-
garde forms of political action and organisation, a far cry from Rancière’s optimistic
‘community of equals’. Badiou proposes a notion of ‘politics without a party’ that
nevertheless retains the figure of the political militant; history cannot help us, he says.
Badiou’s forward-looking conception of politics and of the way in which equality,
once axiomatically assumed, must be enacted is certainly a bold prescription;
Rancière would not and could not be so bold. Are we to say, with Badiou, that he
therefore pits ‘phantom masses against an unnamed State’? I do not think so. There
are places, and places of serious political contention, such as the classroom, the
workplace, and all the other situations regarding who has the ‘right’ to speak and to
whom, in which Badiou’s militant notion of equality is of little help. Rancière’s
positing of the equality of speaking beings, and of the assumption of an intelligence
shared by all are in fact much more useful, and much more egalitarian, appropriately
enough. Perhaps then we should reserve Badiou’s notion of equality for those
moments when organised anti-systemic political subjects rise up and work with
Rancière’s conception in the everyday battles and sites of real struggle that threaten to
prevent us from thinking that there can be something different than this at all.

Notes

1 7
Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five
Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin
Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),
p.138.
2 9
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker
(London: Verso, 2005 [orig. 1998]), p.97.
3
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, pp.98–99.
4
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and
Philosophy, trans. Julia Rose, Minnesota, p.17.
5
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.140.
6
Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Principles of the Philosophy
of the Future’, The Fiery Brook, trans. Zawar Hanfi,
p.224.
See ‘Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude:
Badiou and the Political Subject’, Cosmos and
History, 2:1–2 (2006).
8
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.114.
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.32.
10
Peter Hallward, ‘Staging Equality: On Ran-
cière’s Theatrocracy, New Left Review 37 (Jan-
Feb 2006), pp.109–129, p.110. The quote is from
Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz
Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1995),
pp.32–3.
11
Kristin Ross, ‘Rancière and the Practice of
Equality’, Social Text, 29 (1991), pp.57–71, p.70.

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 12
Kristin Ross, ‘Rancière’, p.70.
13
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.99.
14
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.82.
15
Jacques Rancière, Metapolitics, p.120.
16
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.116.
17
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.49.
18
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.97.
19
It is interesting to compare Hegel on this point
to later socialist writers. Lasalle, writing in 1864,
will say: ‘Under free competition the relation of an
employer to the employed is the same as to any
other merchandise . . . This is the leading feature
of the present age. In former times the relations
were those of man to man: after all, the relations of
the slaveowner to the slave, and of the feudal lord
to the serf were human’. Ferdinand Lassalle,
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‘What is Capital?’ (1864), German Essays on
Socialism in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Frank
Mecklenburg and Manfred Stassen (New York:
Continuum, 1990), pp.51–8.
20
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic (London:
Hackett Publishing, 1991), p.214.
21
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen
W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.239.
22
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.207.
23
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.200.
24
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.13.
25
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, p.38.
26
G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, p.4.
27
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.201. A claim not
helped by the obvious play on words Gattung
(genus) with Gatte/Gattin (spouse).
28
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.264.
29
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.329.
30
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.310.
31
Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the
State’, Early Writings, trans. Livingstone and
Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), p.99.
32
Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans.
David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1964), p.242.
33
Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Principles of the Philos-
ophy of the Future’, The Fiery Book: Selected
Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi
(New York: Anchor Books, 1972), p.203.
34
Left, Right, Young, and the movement between
various positions, as in Bauer’s turn from a
relatively orthodox Hegelian to a kind of utopian
socialist, as well as non-Hegelian right-wing and
theological critiques of Hegel. The ‘Young
Hegelians’ were known as Hegelinge (Hegelists) as
opposed to Hegelitern (Hegelians).
35
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.170.
36
Cf. Warren Breckman, Marx, the Young Hegelians
and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the
Self (Cambridge: CUP, 1999).
37
Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, Early
Writings, p.243. As Marx said, ‘the criticism of
religion is the prerequisite of all critique’.
38
Jean Hyppolite, ‘Marx and Philosophy’, Studies
on Marx and Hegel, trans. John O’Neill (London:
Heinemann, 1969 [1955]), p.99.
39
‘The Legacy of Idealism in the philosophy of
Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard’, in The
Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. by
Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), p.262.
40
From ‘System of Economic Contradictions: Or,
Philosophy of Poverty’ (1846).
41
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.204.
42
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.257.
43
Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.146.
44
Karl Marx, Early Writings, p.99.
45
Jacques Rancière, Disagreement, p.139.
46
Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution: From
Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London:
Verso, 2003), p.213.
47
Cf. also: ‘The unity of being and nothingness
has its positive meaning only as the indifference of
the species or of the consciousness of the species
towards the particular individual’. Feuerbach,
Fiery, pp.92– 93.
48
Karl Marx, The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p.86.
49
Karl Marx, Early Writings, p.386.
50
Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution,
p.314.
51
Ludwig Feuerbach, Fiery, p.148.
52
Ludwig Feuerbach, Fiery, p.176.
53
But many, not just personalist thinkers, have
argued against this possibility. Schelling in his Ideas
for a Philosophy of Nature rails against the anti-
intuitionism (and Hegelian dialectical rationalism)
of contemporary philosophy: ‘The product of
intuition is necessarily a finite one . . . it is clear
why intuition is not – as many pretended
philosophers have imagined – the lowest level of
knowledge, but the primary one, the highest in the
human mind, that which truly constitutes its
mental nature’. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. by
Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988 [orig. 1797,
revised 1803], pp.177–178.
54
Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own [1845] trans.
John Carroll (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971),
p.55.
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 55
Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism
(LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986), p.38.
56
Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol 5, p.243 -
quoted in Karl Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche,
p. 105.
57
Cf. John Carroll’s introduction to Max Stirner:
The Ego and His Own, p.14.
58
Or, as Stirner put it ‘Man’ and ‘I’ (the two
divisions of The Ego and His Own).
59
Frederick Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the
end of Classical German Philosophy’ (Peking:
Foreign Languages Press, 1976 (orig. 1888)), p.14.
60
See Louis Althusser, ‘On Feuerbach’, The
Humanist Controversy, Ed. François Matheron,
trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003),
p.137.
61
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.107.
62
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, pp.108, 110.
63
Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.112.
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Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.115.
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Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.118.
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Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.119.

Nina Power is Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She is the author

of the forthcoming One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books), and of many articles on
European philosophy. She is also currently co-editing a collection of Alain Badiou’s
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political writings for Columbia University Press.

Power
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