Human soul, let us see whether present time can be long. To you the power is granted
to be aware of intervals of time, and to measure them. What answer will you give me?
Are a hundred years in the present a long time? Consider first whether a hundred
years can be present. For if the first year of the series is current, it is present,
but ninety-nine are future, and so do not yet exist. If the second year is current,
one is already past . . . . And so between the extremes, whatever year of this
century we assume to be present, there will be some years before it which lie in the past, some in the
future to come after it. It follows that a century could never be present.
--Augustine, Confessions 11 xv (19)
- This essay addresses the legacy of the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism
that reached its apogee in France shortly after the events of May 1968. It attempts to
delineate how this synthesis, largely abandoned by the mid-1970s, at least in its
libidinal economic dimension (though certainly taken into entirely new registers by
later thinkers such as Jameson and iek), might be said to be resurrected and
reconfigured in the work of Alain Badiou. It is a reconfiguration that is in some
sense unrecognizable as such, though Badiou's 1982 Théorie du
sujet explicitly addresses the conjunction of Lacan and Mao, and his most
recent work returns more forcefully to some of the earlier thematics--especially that
of destruction--that to a large extent fell by the wayside in his 1988 opus
Being and Event. If the "libidinal economy" theory of the early 1970s
might be defined by a certain defiant, even delirious energy--defiant of
interpretation, localization, or even of a specific mapping onto Marxism or
psychoanalysis per se--then Badiou's reconfiguration of the conjuncture of
psychoanalysis and Marxism is spoken in a tone of order and restraint that might be
more characteristic of the period Badiou labels the "Restoration," namely the last two
decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps such a shift in tonality is above all
symptomatic of a shift from the conjucture of Marx and Freud to that of Mao and Lacan,
but the claim will be that what has shifted concerns the unconscious itself, that the
early 1970s moment of libidinal economy allowed the unconscious full reign, whereas
the later moment of the early 1980s and beyond demanded that the unconscious and other
wayward desires be brought to full and absolute clarity. If unconscious desires served
as a driving motor for libidinal economy theory, they are left aside in Badiou's
engagement with psychoanalysis, only to surface in different form around questions of
number, counting, and periodization.
- In the French tradition, the synthesis of Marx and Freud reached a
heightened pace between the years of 1968 and 1974, above all in the work of
Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lacan, and Pierre Klossowski, the
two most significant texts ostensibly being Deleuze and Guattari's
Anti-Oedipus (1972) and Lyotard's Libidinal Economy
(1974).[1] Of course, there are myriad
other syntheses of Marxism and psychoanalysis, including some of Marcuse's
works and above all Althusser's,[2] but
it seems that something spectacular was at issue in the years following May
1968, a frenzy of writing that is now seen as delusional, incomprehensible, or
nothing but unchecked free association--even Lyotard himself would later
express great reservations about the libidinal economy project. iek
criticizes the "flux of Life" Deleuzians for seeing in Deleuze and Guattari
only a model of pervasive and libratory revolutionary energy
(Organs 10). It is not surprising that the 1980s marks a
renunciation of this failed free form model, and Badiou's sobriety might be
seen as a hallmark of this. Badiou himself expresses criticism of libidinal
economy theory just at the moment--1975--when it starts to wane. In
Théorie de la contradiction, a short book devoted to Mao's
theories of contradiction and antagonism and very much affirming the dialectic,
Badiou refers to Marx's critique of "saint Max" (Stirner) in The German
Ideology and links it to Deleuze and Guattari and to Lyotard:
Stirner's doctrine opposes "revolt" to
the revolution in terms exactly identical to those spread all over the
pestilential gibberish of the decomposition of the petit-bourgeois
revolutionary movement that resulted from May 1968. The only difference lies in
the small lexical variation that everywhere substituted the word "desire" for
the word "egotism" used by saint Max (Stirner), and even more directly. Beyond
that, saint Gilles (Deleuze), saint Félix (Guattari), saint
Jean-François (Lyotard) occupy the same niche in the maniacal Cathedral
of chimeras. That the "movement" is a desiring urge, a flux that spins out;
that every institution is paranoid, and by principle heterogeneous to the
"movement"; that nothing can be done against the existing order, but
according to an affirmative schize that remains apart from this order;
that it is thus necessary to substitute all organization, all hideous
militancy, for the self-consumption. . . of the pure movement: all these
audacious revisions, supposedly confronting the "totalitarian" Marxist-Leninism
with the brilliant novelty of the dissident marginal masses--this is word for
word what Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology, had to
shatter--and this around 1845!--in order to clear the landscape with a finally
coherent systematization of the revolutionary practices of their time. (72)[3]
Like Lacan before him, Badiou is
critical of free movement and flux, in so far as they are linked to the idea of
revolt simply for its own sake.[4] Badiou
reads the libidinal economists as espousing an anarchist model of pure desire
and reaction in lieu of any more goal-oriented organization. Though Badiou and
others may denounce the post-1968 thought of libidinal economy as maniacal,
self-serving and incoherent, there is in fact a
startlingly lucid nexus of arguments in these writings, and any legacy of
psychoanalysis that traces its connection to Marxism must contend with it.
- This nexus of arguments can be summarized according to three broad categories.
The first is the rethinking of the hierarchy of exchange value over use value. Whereas
exchange value would be something more abstract and more imbued with the complexity of
money, use value would refer to a presumably immutable quality of the object or thing
in itself. In For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, Jean
Baudrillard writes of the "fetishism of use value" and opines that "we have to be more
logical than Marx himself--and more radical, in the true sense of the word. For use
value--indeed utility itself--is a fetishized social relation, just like the abstract
equivalence of commodities. Use value is an abstraction" (135, 131). Lyotard,
following Pierre Klossowski, seeks to overturn in chiasmic fashion the hierarchy in
which lofty exchange value towers above the debased level of needs underpinning use
value. Lyotard cites Klossowski's La Monnaie vivante [Living
Currency], which I cite in turn from Lyotard:
One should imagine for an instant an
apparently impossible regression: that is an industrial phase where the
producers have the means to demand, in the name of payment, objects of
sensation on the part of consumers. These objects are living beings. . . . What
we are saying here in fact exists. For, without literally returning to barter,
all of modern industry rests on an exchange mediated by the sign of inert
currency, neutralizing the nature of the objects exchanged; rests, that is, on
a simulacrum of exchange--a simulacrum which lies in the form of manpower
resources, thus a living currency, not affirmed as such, already extant.
(Klossowski 89; Lyotard, Libidinal 87)[5]
Following Klossowski, Lyotard proposes that both use and exchange value be seen "as signs of
intensity, as libidinal values (which are neither useful nor exchangeable), as pulsations of
desire, as moments of Eros and death" (Libidinal Economy 82). Baudrillard,
Lyotard, and Klossowski all seek to demonstrate the extent to which "use" is caught up in an
economy as abstract and affectively invested as exchange itself, and an economy which is
inseparable from bodily drives and desires. Effectively, both exchange value and use
value (and not just exchange value) are lodged from the outset in an economy of
prostitution.[6]
- The second thematic is that of a perverse, inhuman, or machinic desire
that transfuses the human being and transforms a relation of pure exploitation
or revolt into something else. The import, staged in the form of a lesson from
the examples that follow is that there is a logic of desire, often masochistic,
that infuses all submission and non-submission to conditions of
exploitation. In Towards a Critique of the Political Economy of the
Sign, Baudrillard gives the marvelous example of the supermarket
scenario where, when the store is suddenly taken over and an announcement is
made that everything in the store is free and anything may be taken at will,
the shoppers become paralyzed and do not end up looting the store.
Baudrillard's point is that any attempt to liberate pure use value fails
because use is always bound up in a logic of desire that is more rooted in the
"desire of the code" than in the specificity of the object itself (204).[7] Or, one can turn to Lacan, who tells
the students attending his 1969-70 seminar during the upheaval of that period,
"What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will have one"
(Other Side 207, translation modified).[8] Or in the most extreme case of all, Lyotard uses the example
of the English proletariat to claim that a jouissance inseparable from
the death drive underlies what appears as a brutally straightforward instance
of bodily exploitation:
Look at the English proletariat, at what capital, that is to say their labor, has
done to their body. You will tell me, however, that it was that or die. But it is always
that or die, this is the law of libidinal economy, no, not the law: this is its
provisional, very provisional, definition in the form of the cry, of intensities of desire;
"that or die," i.e. that and dying from it, death always in it, as its internal bark, its thin
nut's skin, not yet as its price, on the contrary as that which renders it unpayable.
And perhaps you believe that "that or die" is an alternative?! And that if they
choose that, if they become the slave of the machine, the machine of the machine, fucker
fucked by it, eight hours, twelve hours, a day, year after year, it is because they are forced
into it, constrained, because they cling to life? Death is not an alternative to it, it is a
part of it, it attests to the fact that there is jouissance in it, the English
unemployed did not become workers to survive, they--hang on tight and spit on
me--enjoyed [ils on joui de] the hysterical, masochistic, whatever
exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in
hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed
imposed upon them, they enjoyed the decomposition of their personal identity, the identity
that the peasant tradition had constructed for them, enjoyed the dissolution of their families
and villages, and enjoyed the new monstrous anonymity of the suburbs and the pubs in the
morning and evening. (Libidinal Economy 111)
This is the most exorbitant claim in all of Lyotard's outrageous book, and one with
which it may be hard not to find fault. However, at the heart of this and other of
Lyotard's rants is the basic insistence that capital conditions and thrives on the
very desires that would seem to be at odds with it, and that one cannot think
situations of oppression or hegemony without taking these desires into
account--something that is also a lesson of Hegel's dialectic of the master and the
slave, of Gramsci's model of hegemony, and of Fanon's analysis of colonialism. In
short, all of the above examples illustrate a central point that is repeatedly
underscored in the range of writings by the theorists of libidinal economy: to not
consider economy through the lens of desire, disjuncture, and perversion is to not
understand it.
- A corollary to attending to the desires that undergird use value (hence
capital) is that one must similarly be attuned to desires in the very form and genre of
Marxian analysis itself. As Lyotard puts it in memorable fashion in Libidinal
Economy: "What is the desire named Marx?" He proceeds to argue that
there are at least two Marxes at issues, one who is a severe critic of capital
(the Big Bearded Prosecutor Marx) yet unable to dispense with his fascination
for it, and the other who is caught in a juvenile state of enrapture with
capital (the Little Girl Marx) yet rejects its "prostitution under the name of
alienated mediation" (136). In this extreme if not obscene fashion, Lyotard
raises the important question of the desiring-relation to capital of those who
critique it. We might extrapolate to ask what is the desire of those on the left
today who invest great energy in critiquing the United States or globalization
or colonialism? Would such a critique be possible without a concomitant desire
precisely for that very thing denounced?[9] And how
does one name that desire ("the desire called Marx") without both affirming and
undermining the very real object that is also under scrutiny--capital?
- This question of naming the desire underlying the Marxian analysis is particularly
acute when brought to Badiou's work. As Fredric Jameson writes in iek's
impressive recent
collection of essays on Lenin, "Or, to put all of this in a different terminology (that of
Jean-François Lyotard), if we know what 'the desire called Marx' is all about, can we
then go on to grapple with 'the desire called Lenin'?" ("Lenin and Revisionism" 60).
Similarly, in another recent collection on Lacan, also edited by iek,
Jameson writes about Lacan's passion for spatial figures and "mathemes":
Lacan's formalizations--not merely
the graphs, but the later mathemes and topologies, including the knots and the
rings--have been thought to be motivated by a desire for a rigour, an effort to
avoid the humanism and metaphysics of so much "orthodox Freudianism," as well
as an attempt to pass on a legacy of Lacan's own immune to the revisionisms to
which Freud was subjected. That may well be true; but I think we cannot neglect
the spatial passion involved in the pursuit of these concentrated hieroglyphs
or "characters", nor can we avoid seeing in them a specific kind of desire, the
desire called formalization, which would seem to me to be something quite
distinct from scientificity and the claims made for that. ("Lacan" 374)
Not only does Badiou share Lacan's "desire called formalization" (something that sets
him apart from the libidinal economy theorists who, with the exception of Lacan, are
less inclined to formalization), but he famously links his entire philosophy to the
axiomatic system of set theory, going so far as to declare that "mathematics is . . .
'onto-logical'" (Briefings 105). The very persistence of Badiou's
orientation toward mathematics--as well as his repeated invocations of literary,
philosophical, and political master-thinkers such as Mallarmé, Plato, and
Mao--quite readily provokes the question of just what is behind the drive for these
figures. Citing the reflections of Peter Hallward on Badiou's "unusual fidelity to
Plato," A. Kiarina Kordela emphasizes in her probing critique of Badiou in
$urplus: Spinoza, Lacan the importance of "address[ing] the desire
underpinning Badiou's exhortation to return to Plato" (49). If libidinal economy
theory is under the sign of the death drive, then Badiou's desire, be it for Plato or
Mao or mathematics, is more nearly under the sign of a drive for order and
formalization. Yet the intemporal aspect of this drive to order has an odd affinity
with the outer limits of the theory of libidinal economy, and it is in this third
dimension of libidinal economy that a connection to Badiou may be retrieved.
- As outlined above, there is clearly a premium in libidinal economy theory on
unstoppable libidinal flux and energetic machines (iek's "flux of Life"
Deleuzians), yet this is also a thought that pushes towards its opposite, namely
inertia. This is nowhere more apparent than in some of the more difficult passages
from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus in which the "Body without
Organs" (BwO) might be said at least partially to inhabit the form of a "desiring
machine" that is in flux and moving toward somewhere. But this somewhere that the BwO
approaches asymptotically is none other than the "plane of consistency" (or "full
BwO") that represents the total arrestation of desire at the zero point, the point of
an immobile and undifferentiated field.[10]
Lyotard builds on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and describes an organic body
similarly facing the limit point of its mobility. For Lyotard, this point of the
limit is also none other than theory itself, theory in its full libidinal dimension:
"Medusa immobilizes, and this is jouissance. Theory is the
jouissance of immobilization . . . . Ideally, a theoretical text is an
immobilized organic body" (Libidinal Economy 242-43). Whether
it is these evocations of immobility at the end of Libidinal Economy or
Deleuze and Guattari's BwO coming up against the plane of consistency, there is an
elusive yet radical inertia that rests at the limit point of such analyses, not
unlike Freud's death drive. At issue here is that which might have the power to stop
capital in its tracks (if such a thing were to be granted). In this reader's opinion,
it is the power of this radical inertia that is the greatest insight of the strain of
thought that counts as the theory of the libidinal economic, a body of thought that
many now largely dismiss.[11] This staging of the
encounter with inertia represents a psychological libidinal counter to capital in the
place where its motor force--its infinitely expansive flexibility, its second law of
thermodynamics, its signifying chain dominated by the endless energy of
speculation--collapses into a black hole. It is a site where what Badiou signals as
the crucial space of the void, or what Lacan terms the not-all, also takes over the
function of the all. Such a space of the inert abyss, which is also Nietzsche's
concept of forgetting, was soon displaced by a Marxian focus on the materiality of
the object (without its concurrent energetic a-materiality) and the haunting of the
psyche though trauma, memory, catastrophe, etc. What the moment of the wake of 1968
shares with Badiou is a paradoxically a-material materialism that is in no way bound
up with contemporary registers such as trauma, memory, or the haunting of the past.
- Yet such a tarrying with the practico-inert, to put it in Sartrean
terminology,[12] is accessed by Badiou in a
fashion diametrically opposed to that of the libidinal economy theorists. If
for the latter there is a chiasmic reversal of the object and its abstraction
(use and exchange value), a continual insistence on the perversion of desire,
and a gesture to an inert plane of consistency that is not entirely
distinguishable from excess or surplus, Badiou insists then on the unity
of the object and its abstraction, admits no desire in excess of his acclaimed
fidelity to a truth procedure, and in the strangest twist of all, which will be
taken up in what follows, advocates a Marxian if not Maoist dialectic of
contradiction, antagonism, and twoness, but in doing so develops in spite of
himself a realm of atemporal inertia.
- The question of desire is at once a common
refrain in Badiou's work--especially Théorie du
sujet--and something that appears as a blind spot in his
oeuvre. Whereas thinkers such as Deleuze and Foucault debate about the relative
importance of desire (important for Deleuze, subordinate to power for
Foucault),[13] Badiou in Lacanian fashion
affirms its importance yet leaves no space for the kind of libidinal economy
analysis that locates a logic of desire in the very fabric of what would appear
to be the most crude materiality. In Théorie du sujet,
Badiou writes:
for Lacan, the
analytic theory holds this equivocation in the instruction of desire from which
the subject apprehends itself. For us, Marxism holds it in the political
practice of which the subjective point is the party. Lacan, involuntary
theoretician of the political party? The Marxists, unenlightened practitioners
of desire? False window. In truth there is only one theory of the subject.
Lacan has a lead on the actual state of Marxism, one which it behooves us to
employ, in order to improve our Marxist affairs. (133)[14]
What Badiou denounces as a "false window" is precisely the point of entrance that the
libidinal economy theorists would take, highlighting above all Lacan's "involuntary"
theory of the party and the Marxists' "unenlightened" theory of desire. For Badiou,
this confrontation between Marxism and psychoanalysis entails only one
theory of the subject. But the point of the libidinal economy analysis is to retain
two poles of the equation, such as use value and exchange value, and to
observe how the two exchange positions in chiasmic fashion--use takes on the
affective currency of exchange, while exchange has its utilitarian dimension. Indeed,
Badiou adheres to and repeats the Maoist dictum of the one dividing into two, but at
the level of his "theory of the subject," Badiou reverts to an upholding of the
one, the one theory of the subject.
- For Badiou, the political itself is grounded in the category of the
impossible, which is in many regards the foundational category of his 1985
Peut-on penser la politique?[15] Yet, in a particularly notable example, the thing that
serves as the driving force of the impossible, that which will transform a
pre-political state into a properly political one, is none other than the body
of the worker and the treatment of the worker as a thing, as merchandise, as
use value. Badiou writes:
Interpretation produces this event that, in a pre-political situation, was the
statement that it was impossible to treat workers as used merchandise. Under
the circumstances, this impossible is precisely the reality, hence the
possibility. The possibility of the impossible is the basis of politics. (78)
Here, the impossible takes on the status of something that is at the level of the
obvious from a basic Marxian perspective, namely, that the workers cannot be treated
as objects to be used and discarded. The impossible thus exists at the level of the
imperative, that one must not allow this to happen. What is by far more radical if
not transgressive--and Badiou will have none of this transgression--is the
integration of a desiring apparatus into a thought of the situation of the workers.
As with the example from Lyotard above, the question is not so much to deny the
situation of exploitation, but rather to recognize that there are other contradictory
processes taking place at the same time: that the body of the worker may experience a
jouissance exactly at the site where it is made into an object or into a
pure use value, and that the experience of the body as thing may not be perceived
entirely as exploitation, but also as a reveling in the superhuman capacity of the
laboring body.[16] Indeed, to see only
exploitation and not the contradiction inherent in the very notion of use value--that
use will always prove elusive, will always turn out to be bound up with questions of
desire and economy--is still to perceive from the perspective of the bourgeois. This
is the lesson of libidinal economy, and this is what Badiou resoundingly forecloses,
while nonetheless continually emphasizing the import of contradiction, antagonism,
and doubleness or twoness over singularity or the one.
- The question of the desiring structure of the worker leads to a
tangential yet important series of reflections, which will not be treated in
detail here. At issue is the concept of the human and its relation to the
categories of "masses," "people," "workers," and "inexistence." In this domain,
Badiou is maddeningly difficult to pin down. On the one hand, he evinces a sort
of Sartrean humanism of engagement and people-based action. In
Théorie du sujet he writes that "a politics 'without
people,' without the foundation of the structured masses, does not exist" (32).
This statement is clearly at odds with the more inhuman emphasis of Lyotard and
the libidinal economy theorists (emphasizing the desires, drives, and
pulsions that push the human to the limit space beyond the human) and
is in this formulation closer to but still some distance from Althusser's
emphasis on desubjectification in his analyses of masses and class. Yet Badiou
will conclude his Peut-on penser la politique? not only with a
return to the question of the impossible, but also with a call for the time of
the future anterior, and this is remarkably close to both Deleuze and Derrida
and their evocations of a future anterior and a people to come (107).
Similarly, the emphasis on the "inexistent"--proximate to the impossible in
Badiou's early work--returns in the recent Logiques des mondes and
even in Badiou's posthumous tribute to Derrida in which he links their two
otherwise disparate philosophical modes under the banner of this term.[17] In sum, Badiou's oeuvre presents a strong paradox.
While being resoundingly consistent within its own terms and
within the variation of its terms over time, it nonetheless seems to offer
very different positions on certain concepts depending on the text and context
in which these concepts appear. Thus while Badiou concludes Peut-on
penser la politique? with an appeal to the future anterior, elsewhere
his work seems to eschew the register of the temporal altogether,
something all the more striking given the affinity that is occasionally
expressed for Marxian periodizing frameworks.[18] It is via a consideration of Badiou's relation to
temporality that I will return to the desire named Mao and the place of the
psychoanalytic within Badiou's thought.
- Despite the concern with appearance and consequences in Logiques
des mondes and increasing gestures to the question of the future in
recent lectures, it is Badiou's notion of temporality that is most incongruous
with a general Marxian framework that would emphasize some form of causal
relation, cyclical pattern, or mode of historical periodization. This fraught
relation to Marxian temporality comes out around the notion of how to count a
century and appears in the form of a logic of temporal condensation rather than
periodizing expansion, in the notion of a short twentieth century
rather than a long twentieth century. This is certainly in keeping
with Badiou's longstanding insistence on subtraction, or on the political
import of what is subtracted from a count (in France one might think of the
sans papiers, those who are subtracted or not counted with respect to
the citizen but who nonetheless might have a political force).[19]
There are many works and declarations that pose the problem of the being and the
lineage and the number of the century, including Foucault's famous pronouncement that "perhaps
one day, this century will be known as Deleuzian" ("Theatrum Philosophicum" 165). Giovanni
Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century locates the origins of twentieth-century
American dominated capitalism at least as far back as 1873, and moreover as a fourth and not a
unique historical instance of capital accumulation. Arrighi isolates
four systemic cycles of accumulation . . . . a Genoese cycle, from the fifteenth to the early
seventeenth centuries; a Dutch cycle, from the late sixteenth century through most of the
eighteenth century; a British cycle, from the latter half of the eighteenth century through
the early twentieth century; and a US cycle, which began in the late nineteenth century and
has continued into the current phase of financial expansion. (7)
Each of these cycles is considerably longer than one hundred years,
"hence the notion of the 'long century,' which will be taken as the basic temporal unit in the
analysis of world-scale processes of capital accumulation" (7).
- Arrighi's fundamental and explicit thesis is to expand, if not
displace, the notion of the century: as a construct, the century is not
equivalent to its name in years. Moreover, the twentieth century, along with
its mode of capitalism, is in fact but a shortened repetition of previous long
centuries that wax and wane according to a cyclical logic. Beyond the claim
that capital, which seems to reach so distinctive an apogee in the twentieth
century, is not exclusively of the century, Arrighi also--and this less
explicitly--proposes a somewhat novel ontology and temporality of the century,
according to which the century definitionally exceeds itself and extends beyond
its temporal limitations and its number of one hundred, creating the paradox of
an entity defined by its number that is nonetheless and also by definition not
equivalent
to its number. It is ultimately in this domain of the numerical, of the number that
exceeds its number, that I would locate a certain proximity to Badiou. Still,
if Arrighi's long twentieth century exceeds the number of the century, it does
not dispense with the century's periodizing gesture. Insofar as the century
marks a period in time, Arrighi's model is entirely in keeping with this
temporal structure--just the dates or number of years may not correspond.
- In this regard, The Long Twentieth Century is of a piece with a
Marxian model that would insist on breaks and ruptures, where dates become
significant as points of crisis and rupture, such as the famous nodal points in
France of 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, and 1962. The title of Marx's Eighteenth
Brumaire perfectly illustrates this disjunctive yet essentially temporal
logic. The Eighteenth Brumaire refers to the day of the month in the French
revolutionary calendar--time having recommenced with the revolution--when Napoleon
Bonaparte became emperor (1799). The Eighteenth Brumaire of the nephew of Napoleon
Bonaparte (Charles Louis) is here the tragedy replayed as farce of the second
declaration of empire, this time a half century later.
- Unlike Arrighi, Badiou condenses rather than expands the twentieth
century such that it starts in 1917 and ends in 1980 with what he calls the
Restoration. At the same time, Badiou's notion of Restoration operates very
much at face value and without an eye to the contradictory forces of the
political unconscious of the moment of restoration. If for Badiou Balzac
counts as the "great artist of the first Restoration, the one that followed the
French Revolution of 1792-94" (The Century 26) (and thus
foreshadows the second Restoration, or the twentieth century's last two
decades), for such Marxist literary critics as Lukács and Jameson,
Balzac marks a last outpost of a multifaceted system of social relations that
is eclipsed by the more monochrome literary world that comes into being with
the advent of monopoly capitalism--in short, the break between Balzac and
Flaubert. Balzac may be politically conservative (and for Badiou the analysis
simply stops there), but it is precisely this that, for a critic like Jameson,
is the condition of possibility for capturing in literary form a heterogeneity
of life worlds that are no longer thinkable in more advanced stages of
capitalism. Thus, for Lukács and Jameson, the thought of periodization
is of a piece with a dialectical notion of temporality, whereas for Badiou to
think in the unit of the century is precisely to condense rather than expand,
thereby flying in the face of a dialectical materialist notion of
periodization.[20]
- This is not to say that Badiou is without his own mode of periodization.
Although his book The Century speaks of the short twentieth century,
Badiou's own century (never acknowledged as such) might run from the Paris Commune of
1871 to the crucial sequences of the Cultural Revolution between 1966-67, hence an
interval of one hundred years, but one not synchronized with the specific period of
the twentieth century.[21] Badiou's idea of the
alternative and unacknowledged century is entangled with his longstanding interest in
the question of number--though he will write in Peut-on penser la
politique? that "politics will not be thinkable except when freed from the
tyranny of number" (68).[22] Also relevant to
Badiou's periodization is what constitutes an "event" for Badiou in the realm of
politics--an event being something that is accessed through the four domains of
politics, art, science, and love and that furthermore marks the success of a
universalizable process of bringing to fruition what was imperceptible or inexistent
in a situation in order for it to have new affirmative and revolutionary potential.
(For Badiou, a model is the Apostle Paul's radical fidelity and proclamation of the
event of Christ's resurrection and the early Christian movement that ensued.[23]) In the passage that follows from
Théorie du sujet, Badiou discusses the trajectory from the Paris
Commune to the October Revolution and up through the Cultural Revolution, placing his
discussion under the sign of the undecidability between three and four that concludes
Hegel's Logic. Here Badiou espouses a Marxian mode of periodization,
above and beyond the "idealist" Hegel, who sees only the cyclical and the three-part
movement of position, negation, and negation of the negation.[24] What is crucial about this periodization is the retrospective
insight it affords (the owl of Minerva, as it were), though it is hard to establish
if it is the Commune that is new in and of itself or if its newness is only
perceptible retrospectively, from the vantage point of the events of October 1917. As
Badiou writes,
any periodization must embrace its dialectical double time, for example including October 17
as the second, and provisionally final, scansion of the count. Hence the historians'
conundrum: according to the relation force/place, the Commune is new (Marx). According to the
relation subjective/objective, it is October that is new, and the Commune is this boundary
of the old whose practical perception, which purifies force, contributes to engendering
its novelty. It is highly likely that the Chinese Cultural Revolution has the same profile,
and that the question of the second time of its periodizing function is thus broached . . .
. If Hegel makes a circle, it is that he always wants but a single time. In principle he is
unaware of differing retroactions, although he tolerates them to an insidious degree in the
detail. (Théorie 64-65)
It appears from this that for Badiou the heart of the struggle of periodization lies
in establishing what counts as new. If according to one sequence (presumably the one
to which Badiou would adhere) it is the Commune that is new, then the events of
October mark a second and final moment in the sequence. If, however, it is not until
October that we have the true novelty of the subjective dimension (rather than simply
the new possibility of the party), then the Commune would be more nearly a
pre-political moment.[25] If, however, we
introduce the third moment of the Cultural Revolution, then in any case it rewrites
both sequences, so there are at least four possibilities, the two sequences described
above, and the Cultural Revolution added to each of them: the Cultural Revolution as
the third and final term in the sequence inaugurated by the Commune, or the Cultural
Revolution as the second and final term in the sequence inaugurated by October 1917,
thus forming two additional permutations of the two initial sequences. But by another
count, the Cultural Revolution could be the first moment when the subjective
dimension of politics is truly articulated, allowing for a new thought of the party,
and serving as the inaugural moment of its own properly political sequence. At
different points, Badiou seems to gesture toward all these possibilities. Here
Hegel's conclusion to the Logic is significant, for it signals the
difficulty of counting between the three and the four, something that is a larger
refrain in all of Badiou's work:
In this turning point of the method,
the course of cognition at the same time returns into itself. As self-sublating
contradiction this negativity is the restoration of the first
immediacy, of simple universality; for the other of the other, the
negative of the negative, is immediately the positive, the
identical, the universal. If one insists on
counting, this second immediate is, in the course of the
method as a whole, the third term to the first immediate and the
mediated. It is also, however, the third term to the first or formal negative
and to absolute negativity or the second negative; now as the first negative is
already the second term, the term reckoned as third can also be
reckoned as fourth, and instead of a triplicity, the abstract
form may be taken as a quadruplicity; in this way, the negative or the
difference is counted as a duality. (836)
Not only is there a dizzying vacillation between the three and the four, but
the very possibility of counting and knowing the count is itself brought into
question. In this ability to sustain a thought of the difficulty of
counting, Badiou comes closest to Lacan and by extension--at least to readers of
Lacan such as Jameson and iek--to Hegel and the dialectic.[26]
- Yet this overture to the complexity of the count, to something that
cannot be fully accounted for due to the temporal disjuncture it represents,
is, as I have been at pains to indicate here and elsewhere, at odds with the
very formalism of Badiou's work. To be sure, the problems of counting a
sequence--in short, the question of the cardinal and the ordinal--can be mapped
onto the framework of the set theory that underlies many of Badiou's
philosophical formulations. But what the problem of periodization reveals is
the difficulty of mapping itself, the problem of the translation entailed not only
in working between mathematics and philosophy but in positing any moment of
newness and its appearance. Badiou provides more of a rubric for such
appearance in his latest work Logiques des mondes, giving a number
of possible outcomes for the taking place or failing to take place of an
event.[27] But again, at issue here--and
this is where psychoanalysis becomes most prominent and necessary--is not so
much the concurrent mapping of Marx and Lacan, or of Mao and Lacan, or the
correlation between Lacan's notion of desire and Marx's notion of the party,[28] but the very desire for such procedures of
mapping, as noted above in Jameson's reading of Lacan. In this fashion, there
is a Badiouian desire that I would designate as numerical, a desire for the
uncountable proliferation of number itself (and this despite the claim that
number is not properly political).
-
While it might be debated to what extent Badiou's interest in Mao
(and that of the remainder of the French Maoists, past and present) relates to
the specificity of Chinese history[29]--though it is not the goal here to reject Badiou's
usefulness for thinking this history--it is nonetheless important to
distinguish the desire structure behind such a focus on Mao and the Cultural
Revolution from the writings and the person of Mao as such. One can, for
example, compare Badiou's Théorie du sujet from 1982 with
Samir Amin's more economically oriented study of Maoism from the year before,
in which Amin highlights the influence of the Cultural Revolution on four
problematics: "equality between the city and the countryside, a compressed
hierarchy of salaries, the development of national autonomy, and the option of
workers' management of economy as well as society" (129). Questions such as
that of the relation between the rural and the proletarian are hardly at the
forefront of Badiou's more philosophical analyses, which center instead on
dialectic, contradiction, and the question of the party itself.
-
The driving force behind Badiou's meditations on Mao and the Cultural Revolution might
be grouped into two sets of terms. One set is that of the party and the periodization
of the party, which becomes visible in the difficulty of narrating what happened
between Lenin and Mao. Was Lenin the one who inaugurated the very category of the
party--according to Sylvain Lazarus this was done before November, 1917--and Mao the
one who pushed the party structure to its limit and ultimate failure? Or did Mao
himself bring a new dimension to the form of the party, which then dissolved? Badiou's
writings seem to make a variety of claims on these counts, and even his own political
involvement in France moved from membership in the Marxist-Leninist UCFML (L'union
de communistes de France marxiste-léniniste) to the Organisation
Politique, from membership in an essentially party-oriented group to one that
espouses politics without the party. What the desire named Mao bears witness to is the
intractable difficulty of locating the form of the party, indeed of making this a
philosophical question per se.[30] Even in
abandoning the party, it seems that there is a desire not to give up on the question
of the party. If for Lacan ethics is to not give way on one's desire,[31] then Badiou's ethics vis-à-vis the Marxian and
Maoist moments is to not give up on a thought of the party structure, even to a point
beyond its dissolution.
- In a similar and even more pointed fashion, Badiou's Mao is a preeminent
thinker of contradiction, and specifically of the two terms that refuse to be
collapsed into one. If all of Badiou's work might be fashioned, at least in its
explicit formulation, as an attack on the question of the one, then for Badiou
Mao represents a thinker--as opposed to someone like Deleuze, whom Badiou reads
as falsely linking a theory of the multiple to that of the one[32]--who will insist that the politically progressive model
is that of the one dividing into two, whereas the reactionary one is that of
the two uniting into one (and this is where Badiou also criticizes a Hegelian
trinitarian urge to synthesize the three into one).[33] Evoking a temporality and a problematic outside that of
a recognizably Marxian periodization, Badiou goes so far as to claim in
The Century that "the century is a figure of the non-dialectical
juxtaposition of the Two and the One" (59). Badiou's short century now eschews
the dialectic but retains the division between the one and the two and in this
fashion continues to resonate with the basic themes of Badiou's earlier
writings on Maoist contradiction. If these two periodizations, or rather
non-periodizations or failed periodizations (that of the twentieth century and
that of the century dating from the Commune to the Cultural Revolution), can be
linked, then it is under the banner of the unconscious desire for the century
itself, a thought of the century. This might be said to be the Real of Badiou's
Marxism, which in many respects does not resemble anything typically Marxian
(though this claim could be made about certain aspects of Marx's work itself).
- Badiou's theory is most incomplete at those points where it does not
acknowledge its own unconscious, something in some sense endemic to any good
theory--what de Man terms the dialectic of blindness and insight. For Badiou,
this is all the more marked given his extensive indebtedness to, if not
engagement with, the work of Lacan. It might be claimed that Badiou's notion of
the void or what is inexistent in a situation has affinities with the Lacanian
Real. Yet for Badiou the void or inexistent is the space from which a potential
event would issue, one that would recognize and deploy that aspect of a
situation that lies outside the count, making that uncountable entity the
conduit to a universal accessibility. In contrast, the Lacanian Real is that
which is inaccessible to the subject (and for Lacan's subject, there is no
Other of the Other). For Badiou, there may be something uncountable, but it is
not precisely inaccessible: it is simply in a potential process of
transformation. In this respect, it is number itself that in its process of
division or failure of division somehow resists the specificity of the count.
If the century resists demarcation and coincidence with its number, if the one
divides into two, and sometimes the two divides into four, and from the four it
is possible to subtract and arrive at three, then we are left with something
that might approximate an economy, if not a libidinal economy, of number.
In the process of seeming to move or go somewhere, the count is also
what stops you in your tracks (as Lacan describes Antigone's beauty in
his seminar seven, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis). On the one hand,
movement and change are at the heart of what for Badiou constitutes the
political. The early Théorie de la contradiction presents
Marx, Lenin, and Mao as each advocating a notion of politics as movement, but
the difficulty of locating what is new in each of these thinkers proves a
vertiginous exercise that may have the opposite effect of inducing more of a
stupor.[34] In Théorie du
sujet, Badiou also links politics to waiting, and it seems that there is
a profound and unending waiting involved in the process of the recognition of
the event after the fact. While there is excitement at the moment, the more
significant step involves the assessment of the evental
status after the fact, in what must necessarily be an interval of some more
pronounced stasis. The question of immobility may seem to be of minor
significance when grappling with Badiou's oeuvre, yet it is on this count that
a concluding return to the thought of libidinal economy may be proffered, in a
move that would, as it were, come full circle.
- The preceding analysis has served to underscore that Badiou's work from
the 1980s and his more recent meditations on Marxism and psychoanalysis
represent an extreme departure from the work of the libidinal economy
theorists. When all is said and done, Badiou is much more of a literalist. Though he
may
dwell on numbers and the count and the dialectic (arguably some version of Sartre's
practico-inert), he maintains the significance of such terms as the
party, the workers, the masses, and the subject. By contrast, thinkers such as
Lyotard, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard and Klossowski are more decisively
bent on an overt undermining of these terms--hence, on showing that precisely
where you think there is practice, there is theory; where you think there is
the material, there is the ideal; and above all, where you think there is a
body, there is also language in a chiasmic and dialectical relation to that
body. Whereas Deleuze concludes his Logic of Sense with an
appendix on "Klossowski, or Bodies-Language" in which he signals the importance
and interchangeability of those two terms, Badiou opens his recent
Logiques des mondes with a denunciation of the conjunction of
bodies and languages, which for him is symptomatic of the "democratic
materialism" of our current moment, something he rejects in favor of a
"materialist dialectic" (which is more resonant with his work from the early
1980s at issue here than with the more mathematical-philosophical Being
and Event). Similarly, if the libidinal economists seek to foreground
the desiring mechanisms that underlie not only capital but their very attempt
to write it, Badiou eschews such self-reflexivity. Badiou's work is squarely at
odds with the project of libidinal economy on multiple counts, yet in
different ways both bump up against something that might be described as
an intemporal force of inertia. Lyotard speaks on several occasions of the
immobilized body outside of time. Sylvain Lazarus, Badiou's longstanding
partner in philosophical Maoism, also writes against time and speaks of the
inexistence of time.[35] As outlined above,
the realm of the immobile appears as the elusive yet necessary limit point of
this thought. Much of Badiou's work has an intemporal aspect to it, and this is
nowhere more central than in the waiting to decide what will have constituted
the event, that is, the stasis built into the time of the future anterior. It
is a strange meeting point indeed, but it seems that Marxian thought and
psychoanalysis are poised to discern in the problem of the new and mobile the
simultaneous presence of the old and the stuck. It will take innovative
disciplinary conjunctions to broach this terrain effectively, but it is my
claim that thinking the joint relation of inertia and stasis beyond simple
mobility is a central concern for our time. This is the limit that fascinates both
Badiou and the libidinal economy theorists; it is also the limit that stops both in
their tracks, and in this fashion marks a point where they are not at odds.
Department of Comparative Literature and Department of French and Francophone
Studies University of California, Los Angeles
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Notes
1. Lyotard published three additional works during this
time period that deal explicitly with a synthesis of Marx and Freud: Discours,
figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), Dérive à partir de Marx et
Freud (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, Collection "10/18," 1973), and
Des Dispositifs pulsionnels (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions,
Collection "10/18," 1973). For English language collections of Lyotard's essays that include
material from this period, see Driftworks, Toward the Postmodern, and The
Lyotard Reader and Guide. See also Baudrillard, For a Critique and
The System of Objects; Lacan, The Other Side; and Klossowski.
2. For a more recent engagement with this topic, see
Wolfenstein. See also more recent work in psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, including
Nandy and Khanna.
3. All translations from the French of
works not translated are my own. It is interesting that Badiou, in his
criticism of the libidinal economists, uses a language of long, urgent
sentences that leave one gasping for breath, very much in the exuberant style
of those theorists he is at pains to criticize and quite unlike his generally
restrained prose. It is as if in evoking them he cannot help but take on their
style.
4. See Feltham's discussion of Lacan's rejection of the
proposition that "all is flux" (188).
5. The 1970 version of Klossowski's bizarre economic
treatise is accompanied by a series of staged, tableau vivant-style photographs
featuring Klossowski and his wife Denise Morin-Sinclair. A subsequent edition of the text
appeared a quarter-century later without the photographs: see La
Monnaie
vivante 66-67. For a more extensive analysis of this example, see the
chapter "Objects,
Reserve, and the General Economy: Klossowski, Bataille, and Sade" in my Delirium of
Praise. For a somewhat different questioning of the hierarchy of use and exchange
value, see Spivak 154-75.
6. See Lyotard's discussion of prostitution in
Libidinal Economy 111-16, 135-43, 165-88. This is dramatized in fictional form in
Klossowski's trilogy Les Lois de l'hospitalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
I discuss the gender implications of this model of hospitality as prostitution in "Bodies,
Sickness, and Disjunction" in my Delirium of Praise.
7. Analysis follows on 209-11.
8. See iek's analysis of this
statement as marking the
"passage from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of the University as the hegemonic
discourse in contemporary society" in Iraq 131.
9. See esp. Lyotard, Libidinal 97-98.
10. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
esp. 1-22.
11. This is underscored in iek's
critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's somewhat disparaging remarks in
Empire (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000) on the radical inertia
dramatized by a literary character such as Melville's Bartleby. See iek,
Parallax 342, 381-85.
12. See Sartre, Critique.
13. See Deleuze and Foucault, "Le
Désir et le pouvoir."
14. See also 189, where he writes: "The Marxist analysis
in terms of the point of view of class is isomorphic to the Lacanian analysis according to
truth. Torsion is necessary in both cases, for the truth cannot say all (Lacan) and there is
no truth above classes (Marxism), thus it effectively cannot say all. Which signifies that it
should say not-all. Thus we have the subject, hysteric for one, revolutionary for the other."
It seems that these are not entirely parallel terms, however, for in the Marxian framework
Badiou references truth does exist at the level of class, and
it certainly does exist in Badiou's own Platonic truth-oriented framework. It is not clear that
the Marxian revolutionary or Badouian militant subject has the same conception of the not-all
as Lacan. Moreover, Badiou automatically positions this subject in relation to the not-all as
the hysteric, which, according to Lacan's schema of the four discourses in The Other
Side of Psychoanalysis, is the subject position in relation to knowledge. It seems that
it is the position of the analyst that is most aligned with the "not all," to be strictly
Lacanian about this.
15. Badiou singles out the impossible as a "category of
the subject, not of place (lieu), of the event, not of structure" (95). Indeed he
writes of the impossible that "it is being for politics." Despite their differences with
regard to the legacy of French Maoism, this might serve as a point of proximity between Badiou
and Rancière.
16. See Lyotard's equally provocative discussion of
prostitution in Libidinal Economy 114-15, 135-43, 165-88.
17. See Badiou, "Homage" 34-46 and also
Logiques 570-71, where Badiou writes: "In homage to Derrida, I
write here 'inexistence,' just as he created, long ago, the word
'différance.' Will we say that . . . inexistence=différance? Why
not?"
18. See especially Théorie du sujet
38, 62-65, 72, 246-47. This will be taken up in what follows.
19. For a helpful explanation of Badiou's
logic of the evental site and its emergence from that which is subtracted from
the count, using the example of the sans papiers, see Hallward 14,
116-18, 233-34.
20. See Jameson, Political Unconscious and
Lukács, Theory of the Novel and "Narrate or Describe?" Such works might be
said to think the historical in the intricacy of its relation to the temporal, whereas for
Badiou the historical is not an operative category per se.
21. See Badiou, Polemics,
especially "The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration of Politics" (257-90),
"The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?" (291-321), and "A Brief
Chronology of the Cultural Revolution" (322-28). See also the issue of
positions devoted to "Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution"
(13.3, Winter 2005). This issue contains Bosteels's definitive overview of
Badiou's relation to the Cultural Revolution: "Post-Maoism: Badiou and
Politics." See also Bosteels's "The Speculative Left," both part of his
forthcoming Badiou and Politics (Duke UP). This essay has also
benefited from the work of Alberto Toscano on Badiou's relation to communism,
especially "Communism as Separation" and "From the State to the World?" The
latter especially suggests that Badiou's oeuvre may be more caught up in a
logic of capital than he explicitly admits. See additional elaborations of this
argument by Brassier and Brown. Brown puts it in perhaps strongest form:
"Badiou cannot think Capital because Capital has already thought Badiou" (309).
22. In contrast, see his entire book
Le Nombre et les nombres, which would seem to go against such an
easy claim.
23. See Badiou, Saint Paul.
24. He accuses the idealist dialectic of
misrecognizing "the double scission that founds all historical
periodization," (Théorie du sujet 65).
25. Badiou explicitly notes that Lenin's
What is to be Done? is not so much a theory of the party as it is
a "breviary of Marxist politics" (64). This is very much in keeping with
Sylvain Lazarus's periodization of Lenin's writings, which locates the
earlier What is to be Done? (1902) as the inaugural moment of
Lenin's most significant political sequence, culminating in October 1917.
See "Lenin and the Party" 258.
26. Indeed, though Badiou generally
consideres Hegel as a thinker who is merely cyclical, he also gestures to the
dialectical and material dimension of Hegel, especially in Théorie
du sujet and Being and Event, something very much in
keeping with the work of iek.
27. Though certainly in no way Heideggerian, it would
be interesting to link Badiou's work on appearance in Logiques to something like
Heidegger's Introduction to Metaphysics, esp. "Being and Appearance," 98-114.
28. See Théorie du sujet 180.
29. See again the issue of positions
devoted to this question (note 21).
30. On the question of whether or not the
party is a philosophical concept, see Jameson, "Lenin and Revisionism" 61-62.
For an extended discussion of the waning of the notion of the party in Badiou's
thought, see Bosteels, "Post-Maoism," esp. 587-94.
31. See Lacan, Ethics 311-32.
32. See Badiou, Deleuze.
33. Though iek helpfully points out
that the synthetic
moment in Hegel is just one lens, and not necessarily the most significant one, of
interpretation.
34. See Badiou, Théorie de la
contradiction 37, 41, 54, 60-61, 78-82.
35. See Lazarus, Anthropologie du
nom.
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