Review of: Badiou, Alain. Polemics. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso, 2006.
- Reading Alain Badiou's Polemics, one might initially have the
sensation of having wandered into a conversation not meant for oneself.
Polemics consists of an English translation of a series of three
slender French books, Circonstances I-III, which themselves contain a
good deal of previously published material. Two heretofore unpublished lectures
(the meatiest pieces of the lot) have also been included. Except for these last two
chapters, almost all the assembled pieces either pertain to topical controversies
(the wars in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, the response to Jean-Marie Le Pen's entry into
the second round of the French presidential elections), or initiate such
controversies (a series of articles on the word "Jew" that raised quite a furor in
Paris at the end of 2005). They are thus specific to the French scene (where for
example the role of France in the first Iraq war looked quite different at the time
than it did here).
- Nevertheless, the sense that one is witnessing a conversation already
underway and not intended for present auditors appears wrong. Alain Badiou--do not
most of us know it already?--is a philosopher of situations, of circumstances, of
the event. Par excellence he seems to be the occasional philosopher, as well as the
philosopher of the occasion. In addition, he is also the proponent of a new
universalism and a novel and unexpected return to truth.[1] The daringness, the gamble of Badiou's thought indeed consists
in his resuscitation of the most standard philosophical reference points--truth,
the universal--even as he recasts these to meet concerns that might seem to
disqualify them. Truth and universals are wedded to themes to which they appear
allergic: indetermination, the void, and most of all the event. Accordingly,
Badiou's is a return to truth, a standing by, a loyalty to this reference point,
that also reckons on the pervasive questioning of truth that so many now take for
granted.
- On a "practical" or political plane, Badiou's work is equally
innovative. His political initiative, in fact, turns on a similar balance between
the old and the new. For Badiou's politics are at once militant--some of
the most stout and innovative that we have--yet they are by no means Marxian, nor,
even, dare I say, revolutionary. Working in the aftermath of twentieth-century
Marxism, Badiou aims at a new understanding of political activity that can be the
successor of this radical politics that shaped Badiou's early years and so much of
the last century. This endeavor gives these essays their singular importance.
-
Badiou's radicalism's stamp most shows through in Polemics in what
Badiou stands against: left-liberal democracy in both its national and
international forms. Though an affirmative strand of his thought exists, which he
himself would highlight, what is plainest on Polemics' surface is that
against which all these essays war.
- The most provocative essays in Polemics are the final
series, however, which gesture toward what politics (if not political order) Badiou
would affirm in the place of the existing one. They mark an especially critical
engagement, as Badiou no longer supports a recognizably revolutionary Marxian
program (though he also denies that the predicates "Marxist" or "Marxian" carry any
univocal semantic charge). In these two concluding pieces, Badiou returns to his
Marxist roots, and reviews the history of the Paris commune and its subsequent
Marxian interpretation for possible indices of a very different future radical
politics.
- The novelty of Badiou's politics as a whole lies in its rejection of
any embrace of the particular (including, for example, of every politics of an
identitarian stripe), stemming from its insistence on a role for truth in politics,
even as it denies that this truth can in any way be comprehensive, as in
traditional Marxism. Such navigation between particularity and totality leaves
Badiou closer to modern representative democracy than he often seems to realize.
This form of political organization also rejects the premise that we possess all or
no political truth, while itself continuing to show fealty to universals. Thus, the
very features that make Badiou's politics attractive cast doubt on his
dismissal of that formation that here stands most accused.
- In Badiou's article on the French law banning the
wearing of headscarves, the problematic character of his distance
from present-day democracy becomes especially plain. This edict
prohibiting the exhibition of any religious symbols in French public
schools was widely understood to be aimed at a renaissance of wearing
the scarf and the veil among female Muslim high school students.
Badiou glosses this law as essentially a racist act aimed at the immigrant
community, a form of subjugation and
ultimately exclusion. And with this judgment in its concreteness, one
might well concur. Badiou goes further, however. According to him,
wearing the scarf essentially has no political significance at
all; it is an inherently neutral practice, a matter of
mere custom. Tapping into a Pauline spirit, Badiou
announces:
Let people live as they wish, or can, eat what they are used to
eating, wear turbans, headscarves, miniskirts, or tap-dancing shoes .
. . not having the least universal significance, these kinds of
"differences" neither hinder, nor support thought . . . . at the very
most, the diversity of customs and beliefs is a surviving testimony
to the diversity of the human animal. (106)
- The question arises, however, whether Badiou's interpretation of
this practice is indeed that of those who wear the scarf? Do they
believe it makes no difference, has no political significance, that it is but
custom? Does "the human animal," as Badiou puts it here and elsewhere,
understand its own customs as custom--especially since, as is
well-documented, wearing the headscarf and the burqa are practices often not of
the most recent immigrants, but of a younger second generation that quite
self-consciously dons them?
-
Badiou's refusal to acknowledge the significance
that the headscarf does have, which gives the flavor of many of Badiou's
discussions in Polemics, thus raises questions concerning the form
his own universalism takes. Badiou's casting of this practice in terms of the
"human animal" distinguishes between a political realm (of the "immortal") and
an inherently apolitical one (of this "human animal"), an unexpectedly clear
division that shapes Badiou's political thinking and his militancy. Equally
oddly, however, we here witness Badiou, the self-professed militant, embrace
just that depoliticizing virtue, tolerance, associated with
the political matrix that stands most accused in these pages--representative
democracy--and doing so, clearly, with similarly silencing effects.[2] Badiou thus comes perilously
close to repeating everything questionable in liberalism's own universalism,
even as he himself offers a potentially less nuanced version of this same
problematic.
- After all, not only would the majority of headscarf-wearers deny that the scarf
makes no political difference, but, to take it a step further, they would deny that it
has no universal significance--about relations among the sexes, as well as the
truth of
the human, of subjects themselves. Badiou, however, asserts that the scarf has no
meaning whatsoever. Badiou, accordingly, tolerates the scarf in the fullest sense of
this word: he affirms the wearing of it only insofar as he believes he knows better
than these subjects what makes a difference and what doesn't when it comes to politics
and its truth.
- Badiou's political analysis may be less rich, less subtle, than that
liberal-democratic viewpoint which he here momentarily recalls, though doubtless
the latter is also already limiting and silencing. His own version of tolerance
proves less nuanced, less supple than representative democracy's. For not only is
it in the teachings of actual religions that one finds many deeply held,
universalist claims and a clash among these claims,[3] but the modern liberal democratic state itself (with secular,
supposedly universal veridical presuppositions of its own) was at least in part
conceived within this context. Representative democracy has its origins in
universalist religious disagreements, and it invented a new kind of universalism, a
more formal hyper-universalism in response.
- Badiou underestimates this innovation. Badiou's faltering at this
juncture perhaps ought not surprise, however, since it is by no means on tolerance
that Badiou's politics stakes its claims to our attention. The passion and the
glory of Badiou's political thought stems explicitly from the systematic ignoring
of the possibility just encountered here of principled dissensus: the
eventuality of differing, albeit still fundamentally legitimate, political views.
Badiou's posture of total tolerance within the apolitical realm ("let people live
as they wish") meets up with an absence of tolerance (perfect intolerance) within
the domain of the political.
- Badiou's stance in its totality is at once more and less tolerant than
liberal democracy: both absolutely tolerant and intolerant at once. A useful
contrast, indeed the other extreme (affirming still more mixing, greater tolerance
than current democracies admit), is furnished by a notion found in Jacques
Derrida's late writings. Under the heading of autoimmunity, Derrida sketches how
even radical democracy's existence entails that it would never be fully democratic
(never wholly open, perfectly tolerant), thus proving allergic to itself,
autoimmune. Constitutively unable to sustain self-identical existence, democracy
attacks itself, but also what allows it to survive, the non-democratic, the
still-not-open (self and other here constantly switching places), this whole
formation thus proving a spur to ever greater, albeit always imperfectly democratic
practices.
- Such an absence of a stable domain of politics with fixable political identities
Badiou would clearly reject. Badiou joins up with Carl Schmitt (to
whose work Derrida's notion is in part a response) by way of reference to Rousseau.
Badiou's coincidence with Schmitt is noteworthy in its own right, moreover,
since in so many other respects Badiou, a thinker of a renewed universalism, and
Schmitt, a thinker of revived particularity, of just the situation,
stand so deeply opposed.
- In defense of his own militancy, Badiou explicitly refers to
Rousseau's assertion in The Social Contract that state
dictatorship is permissible in the face of an existential threat to the
existing regime (95). Badiou's own non-representative militant politics, he
argues, is justified, since even liberal republics may abandon democratic
representation. Just this proviso was
embodied, of course, in
article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which Schmitt, its leading theoretician,
urged Hindenberg to invoke, in order, as it happens, to prevent Hitler from
coming to power.
- Now, Schmitt, Badiou, and Rousseau may not be wrong about the absolutist
character of politics, which a representative government may misprise or dissimulate;
representative democracy's inability to side with any substantive political doctrine
including its own may prove a liability or simply an illusion. At the same time, this
failing also confirms that a greater profundity concerning universals, if not the
totality of the political, inheres in this arrangement than Badiou allows. Badiou,
after all, unlike Schmitt, does not himself reject universal political truths
altogether. The failure of representative government to coincide with itself harbors a
final measure of uncertainty concerning such truth that Badiou lacks, an ultimate
hesitation in regard to the universals it itself espouses. As a second-order political
device marked by a contentlessness, a formlessness, a passivity that aggravates not
only Badiou, representative democracy (doubtless without ever arriving at the extremity
that Derrida affirms) already acknowledges that no final stabilization of the political
is possible: that there exists no perfect tolerance, no ultimately defusing (as in its
own case) nor identifying (as in Badiou's case) what is political and what is not. The
essence of politics, in sum, structurally eludes liberal-republican politics,
something with which both Badiou and Schmitt in their own way would agree.
- When one registers Badiou's proximity to Rousseau and Schmitt,
the ground of Badiou's own militant stance becomes clearer. Badiou's
radicalism is not wholly a function of the concrete political causes that he
upholds (the rights of the sans papiers or his rejection of
globalizing imperialism). His militancy originates from a rejection of what
liberal politics yields in terms of activity and life. Badiou prefers
political presentation over representation, activity over
passivity--ultimately the labor of a disciplined, active minority. He thus
denies legitimacy to representative democracy owing to the passivity
of this politics and of representation as such, on account of what Badiou
explicitly identifies as its non-present (non-eventful) character in
both a temporal as well as an agential sense.
- Both for Badiou and for Schmitt, representative government
dangerously (and perhaps disingenuously) etiolates the decisiveness of
political action, and they condemn it, correspondingly, on what could be called
ethical or even transcendental grounds, as making impossible the ennobling that
true politics permits. Indeed Badiou, in one memorable passage, affirming this
moral or transcendental difference, emphasizes the lengths to which one must go to
defend it and its essentially polemical nature. He declares:
Every fidelity to an authentic event names adversaries of its
perseverance. Contrary to consensual ethics . . . the ethic of truths
is always more or less militant, combative . . . . [For, it entails]
the struggle against all sorts of efforts at interruption, at
corruption, at the return to the immediate interests of the human
animal, at the humiliation and repression of the immortal who arises
as subject. (179)
- Having earlier seen Badiou's unexpected tolerance,
here we confront his militancy. Events of "truth" and the
procedures that sustain them, in Badiou's eyes, bring with them what
in other contexts would be the human difference as such: a
rupture, a break between "the human animal" and "the immortal who
arises as subject" (such an unwieldy hybrid perhaps being all that
this creature is). Badiou's commitment to a politics of "truth," his
universalism thus entails a split between these immortals
and everyone else. One's enemies are agents of finitude,
particularity, death, and the "obscene," as he puts it elsewhere.
They resist the difference in which the whole dignity of the self has
been invested (though such dignity, to be sure, always remains open
to them in principle), having fallen away from the human (or here
supra-human) essence.
- The potentially toxic brew Badiou's mixture of militancy and
universalism yields thus appears at this moment. For his politics demands that
one have nothing in common with those who do not hold to one's
positions. An absolute enmity necessarily results, even while such
politics wages war on the basis and on behalf of humanity (or of the "immortal"
in it). Badiou's position in principle thus yields total war, victory at any
price. And such a manner of conceiving politics, with just these consequences,
has indeed long been thought by some to be the true Pauline political legacy.
As Marc Shell memorably puts it: with and after Paul, the other is either my
brother or s/he is not even an other at all. Badiou, to his credit, does not
flinch from, nor dissimulate, what such absolutist politics (no matter how
eventful or relativized in other respects) entails: what is demanded by his
radical politics, which is also (perhaps always) a politics of truth. Badiou
affirms violence, potentially even on a massive scale. For Badiou's remarks
come in the midst of a refined,
and largely convincing reflection on Nazism. And Nazism, Badiou
asserts, was not simply a massive aberration, an act of
quasi-theological evil, but instead an essentially political
crime. Nazism is isomorphic to genuine politics,
according to Badiou. It is a version or simulacrum of true,
affirmative politics--one turned inward, gone bad, to be sure,
and, of course, unjustifiable and indefensible on the
basis of Badiou's own thinking.
- Yet affirming such militancy in principle, himself the willing
"chilled support of a universal address" (144), as he puts it in the aesthetic
context, Badiou is lucid about the potentially violent effects of his politics,
as well as about the alternatives to it required in the present
situation. For all his unflinching resolve, Badiou's politics are not
really revolutionary. When compared to Mao's or Lenin's, his program is but a
"militancy lite." A gesture of retraction, a movement of tempering, also marks
Badiou's conception of the future of radical politics, the subject that
occupies the final two chapters of his book. These chapters are doubtless some
of Badiou's most important. Badiou in these pieces aims to reconceptualize the very
framework of politics. Arriving at the scene of his own earlier political
convictions--the history of Marxism and Maoism--Badiou practices an exemplary
thoughtfulness in respect to his own precursors. Badiou's reflection on the
possibility of a present and future radical politics proceeds in two phases.
First, the events of the Paris commune are recounted, with an eye to its
interpretation in the subsequent history of Marxism (Marx, Lenin, Mao).
Second, Badiou reflects on the history and
historicity of the Cultural Revolution, whose dates he limits to 1965-68. Taken
together, these two events teach a single lesson, according to Badiou: true
politics, radical politics, today must break with what he calls the
"party-state."
- Thus the Commune, which indeed proved that workers were capable
of inventing their own revolutionary practice (apart from the bourgeoisie and
the "professional left"), according to Badiou, has also long been seen to have
failed at functions (finances, military action) most proper to the state. In
part as a response to this perceived failure, there emerged in Marx and in
those who followed him a double demand: to capture and commandeer the state
while maintaining the party alongside it, as embodying their authentic, active,
and truly political goals (263-64). This conception of a "party-state," Badiou
argues on the basis of his interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, is no
longer endorsable (294). It has outlived its usefulness and today can be seen
to harbor a wholly irresolvable tension.
- No matter how provocative (or correct) this analysis may be,
Badiou himself at this moment, clearly backs away from the potentially more
cataclysmic side of his own politics; he relinquishes any scenario in which
the liberal state would be violently overthrown, not to mention "wither."
Whatever militancy will look like going forward, it will not look like what
Marx, or Lenin, or Mao envisioned. To be sure, Badiou here also proves
potentially prescient. His intuition that politics at its core may be
transformed, that the reigning model of state revolutions in the West only
appertains to a finite (and completed) historical epoch (roughly the
eighteenth-twentieth century), may quite possibly be right.
- Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder about the results of
this position of diminished ardor in combination with Badiou's still resolute
militancy. This question goes beyond Badiou's own perhaps idiosyncratic
politics, as its two sides mirror some of the radical politics found in the
American academy. Such politics also insists on its own militancy, while the
practical organization and program allied to it remain distinctly attenuated,
and its own confabulation of the future party-state remains unclear. Badiou, by
contrast, is always alert to the implications of his own positions. Yet
breaking with the state as a focus of any sort for his politics (a decision
that runs throughout almost all his published writings since the 1980s), his
future radical politics is an enterprise that in some sense now
systemically fails to take into account the actual forces and
structures of powers to which it is opposed. This politics dismisses the
liberal-democratic site of dissensus, to the point of not even wishing to
dismantle it. What can be the consequences of this approach for the struggles
it actually takes up? The sheer insistence on the correctness of putatively
self-evident (political) "truth" may be persuasive. Yet the views of the
inactive majority having here been deemed meaningless (and any principled
differences, any clash of universals impossible or ignored), what political
rhetoric can Badiou and his followers mount, with what form of
persuasion may they engage? Who can they talk to, other than themselves?
- Badiou can only heed such concerns at the price of
ceasing to be militant altogether. And his extreme disregard for
the persuasiveness of his political prescriptions, in fact, takes a
rather comic (and thus benign) form at one memorable moment in
Polemics. Addressing an audience of French and German
diplomats in Argentina, Badiou argues for a merger, or alliance of
some sort, between Germany and France. To motivate his suggestion, he
proffers world-historical (not materialist) grounds.
Appealing to what he calls "a psychology of peoples" (122),
Badiou claims that France today is but a "weary grandeur," and
Germany "a hackneyed question," and to balance out their respective
psychologies and destinies these nations or entities should merge
(126). One can only imagine what his audience of professional
politicians made of this, nor of course have signs of such a merger
blossomed since Badiou's speech.
- It is at moments such as these that the reader may well wonder whether
she has wandered into the wrong room. Nevertheless, that a first run-through of
Polemics indicates that Badiou himself is unclear about just what war he
wishes to fight, as well as how finally to fight it, given how lucid a thinker Badiou
is, demonstrates the gravity of the situation in which all of us sympathetic to
genuinely progressive political change today find ourselves. Those views of history and
concepts of political change suitable to political progress no longer seem viable, even
as these goals themselves continue, as they must, to be avowed. For this predicament,
no one today has has an answer more convincing than Badiou's
Department of English
Indiana University
jkates@indiana.edu
COPYRIGHT (c) 2007 BY Joshua Kates. READERS MAY USE PORTIONS
OF THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT
LAW. IN ADDITION, SUBSCRIBERS AND MEMBERS OF SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTIONS MAY
USE THE ENTIRE WORK FOR ANY INTERNAL NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSE BUT, OTHER THAN
ONE COPY SENT BY EMAIL, PRINT OR FAX TO ONE PERSON AT ANOTHER LOCATION FOR
THAT INDIVIDUAL'S PERSONAL USE, DISTRIBUTION OF THIS ARTICLE OUTSIDE OF A
SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTION WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM EITHER THE
AUTHOR OR THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN.
THIS ARTICLE AND OTHER CONTENTS OF THIS ISSUE ARE
AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE UNTIL RELEASE OF THE NEXT ISSUE. A
TEXT-ONLY ARCHIVE OF THE JOURNAL IS ALSO AVAILABLE FREE OF CHARGE. FOR
FULL HYPERTEXT ACCESS TO BACK ISSUES, SEARCH UTILITIES, AND OTHER VALUABLE
FEATURES, YOU OR YOUR INSTITUTION MAY SUBSCRIBE TO
PROJECT MUSE, THE
ON-LINE JOURNALS PROJECT OF THE JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.
Notes
1. See "Politics as Truth
Procedure" in Theoretical Writings, ed. Brassier and
Toscano (London: Continuum, 2004), esp. 159.
2. Throughout this piece, it
should be noted, Badiou is unremittingly dismissive of all feminist
concerns related to the status of scarves (they embody only a form
of consumerism, an imperative to display the body). Yet he is clearly
ignorant of the bulk of these, including, especially, those that stem from a
dialogue or intersection among "western" and "eastern"
(including Muslim) feminists, some of which address the "silencing" that I
bring up here.
3. Badiou, though always
respectful of religion, refers in this case to a disappearance of the gods (he
is, he tells us, "convinced all gods withdrew long ago" [109, cf
139]). The obscurity and patent inadequacy of this reference to the
universalist claims of religion is
not accidental. Though this would take a long discussion to show, the
style of Badiou's event, the way it favors discrete historicities (of
politics, art, science and so on) denies him the capacity for
systematic reflection on a transformation such as modernity, at the
root of this difference, which is at once scientific, technological,
and political, as well as social and economic.
|