The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May

The Philosophy of Restoration: Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May Nina Power and Alberto Toscano Liquidate ’68 “In this election,” Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed in 2007, “we’re going to find out if the heritage of May ’68 is going to be perpetuated or if it will be liquidated once and forever.” With the voicing of political principle and its antagonistic distillates an increasing rarity in the capitalist core— where enmity is naturalized (and racialized) by the imperatives of “national security” or violently, if antiseptically, outsourced to lands failed and threatening—some might have found it heartening to see the French revel yet again in the performance, if not always the reality, of political antagonism. Instead of pragmatically honing in on interest rates or pensions to prod the inevitable swing voters into action, Sarkozy saw it fit to evoke the specter of ’68 to dramatize the stakes of the then imminent second round of the French presidential election. It was as if the tiresomely descried stagnation, Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own. 1. For Sarkozy’s statements and their intellectual precursors, see Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 5–16. boundary 2 36:1 (2009) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-022 © 2009 by Duke University Press 28 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 or worse degeneration, of the French polity rested on the inexhaustible effects of that fated date. “Sarko” advertised his presidency as an opportunity, forty years on, retroactively to cleanse (or “karcheriser,” to use the infamous expression he used during the banlieue riots of 2005) the mutinous streets of the Latin Quarter, with all their unruly and malevolent connotations. Witness his catchy slogan: “I want to turn the page on May 1968.” His political biographers even tell us that it was only his mother that held Sarkozy back, at the age of thirteen, from joining in the massive pro–de Gaulle march against the students and workers which paraded down the Champs Elysées on May 30, 1968. It might be tempting simply to regard Sarkozy’s tirades as an obligatory rite for a French politician of the Right, and an attempt to swing Paris back, after the banlieue riots, the protests against the proposed contrat de première embauche (CPE, “first employment contract”), and mobilization against the European Constitution, to its status as “the capital of European reaction,” to cite Perry Anderson’s famous dictum. But Sarkozy’s wish to liquidate ’68—to repave the French political imaginary and erase the very memory of those events in anticipation of their (predictably melancholy) fortieth anniversary—seems to bespeak a harsher form of subjectivity than a merely reactionary one. Despite the presence of the intolerable André Glucksmann, epitome of reactionary subjectivity in Alain Badiou’s recent Logiques des mondes, alongside Johnny Hallyday and, alas, Charlotte Rampling, in Sarkozy’s entourage, the figure of the reactive subject—which we will examine more closely below—is still too mild to properly identify la singularité Sarkozy. Taking François Furet as emblematic of this kind of subjectivity, Badiou sees reaction as a manner of starkly denying the necessity of rupture embodied in a political event (e.g., the French Revolution) but nevertheless incorporating some of the novelties it carries within a narrative where radical subjectivity and collective action are simply hysterical and catastrophic gestures which, at best, give rise to changes that the gradual and reasonable unfolding of historical development would have led to anyway. In the final analysis, from the vantage point of reaction, the event and the implacable fidelity to its consequences are a hindrance to the very principles that motivate it. But Badiou’s recent thought, as we shall see in more depth below, introduces another figure of the subject, whose relationship to novelty and fidelity is more extreme, less mediated: the obscure subject. The aim of this subject is not to neutralize novelty by incorporating some of its effects and Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 29 despairing of its needless excess. Rather, political obscurantism is aimed at radically negating the new present that a faithful or militant subject of truth (an egalitarian subject) has arduously brought into being. As Badiou puts it in Logiques des mondes, the obscure subject “systematically resorts to the invocation of a transcendent Body, full and pure, an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God, Race . . .) whence it derives that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure subject) and, by way of consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed.” In this respect, Sarkozy’s gambit is that the very act of liquidating the divided body of ’68 may help in conjuring up the full body of a morally rearmed French nation. His ultimately sinister “Ensemble, tout est possible” (insofar as the body of this tous is brought together by the exclusion of immigrants, soixante-huitards, racaille, and so on) is thus infinitely distant from the slogan of the 1995 French protests: Tous ensemble. While Sarkozy is still functioning well within the ambit of reactive politics (capitalist parliamentarianism), his tendencies, following Badiou’s useful formalization, are obscure. As Badiou notes, It is crucial to gauge the gap between the reactive formalism and the obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture (which it calls “violence” or “terrorism”) is useless for engendering a moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls “modern”). . . . Things are very different for the obscure subject. That is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal data of fidelity. The monstrous full Body to which it gives fictional shape is the atemporal filling of the abolished present. [It entertains] everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any transparent language and of every uncertain becoming. (LM, 69) Sarkozy’s thirst for negation of course can’t be directed at political novelty itself—which in any instance has been squandered by much of the Left and systemically nearly obliterated in these years of neoliberal Restoration—and 2. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 69. This work has been translated into English by Alberto Toscano, as Logics of Worlds (London: Continuum, 2009). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as LM; page numbers refer to the French edition. 3. See Stathis Kouvélakis, La France en révolte (Paris: Textuel, 2007). 30 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 much less at a living political subject; on the contrary, in a typical manifestation of the obscurantist mind-set, it is directed at an eclectic set of noxious predicates and phenomena, a “divided body” indeed—“division” being the ominous specter that haunted much mainstream political discourse around the 2007 election. Thus 1968 is the proverbial “quilting point,” the Lacanian point de capiton for (to quote from a Sarkozy speech) “welfare dependency, fraud, thievery, egalitarianism,” “moral and intellectual relativism.” It is the deep cause of a “moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan of Arc.” In order to bury the body of political principles and subjects, what better than to portray 1968 as the very absence of principles? Also sprach Sarko: “The heirs of May ’68 have imposed the idea that everything has the same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that the victim counts for less than the delinquent.” Values, hierarchy, morality— all moribund, all to rise again into the full Body of the Republic once the canker of 1968 is finally excised. In order to mobilize the electoral hordes for his counterrevolutionary revolution, Sarkozy was even willing to depict ’68 as a kind of ethical catastrophe that made possible the “excesses of financial capital,” “golden handshakes” and “rogue bosses.” Sarkozy’s blessed rage for order did indeed seem to confirm one of Badiou’s hunches, to wit that an event and the faithful subject it catalyzes do not just generate an independent political trajectory, a truth, but that they reshape the whole of “subjective space,” forcing both reactionaries and obscurantists to develop their positions in relation to it. But what of Sarkozy’s defeated contender, Ségolene Royal, her camp, and the culprits of this decades-long moral malaise, the soixantehuitards? On one level, Royal responded to Sarkozy’s thirst for annihilation by laying claim to that legacy, having earlier in her campaign even flirted with the thought of Jacques Rancière and with proposals for participatory democracy. Hers was, after a fashion, a show of fidelity, declaring that “May 1968 is 11 million workers who obtained the Grenelle accords, the right of women to access contraception, a wind of freedom against a totally closed society.” Leaving aside the fact that the Grenelle accords, negotiated by 4. Alas, this take on 1968 has been put forward by less obnoxious sources: the otherwise excellent Adam Curtis, for instance, in his spurious attack on R. D. Laing’s antipsychiatry in the recent BBC documentary series The Trap; or Régis Debray, who, in the New Left Review ’s issue on the tenth anniversary of 1968 famously portrayed it as a vanishing mediator of sorts for American hedonistic capitalism. 5. This quote, and the one from Cohn-Bendit below, is taken from a pro-Royal Weblog, Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 31 Chirac, were held in contempt by much of the union rank and file and by the entirety of the Maoist and Trotskyist Left, another statement of Royal’s should also be kept in mind: she in fact accused Sarkozy of trying to provoke “another 1968.” In this second sense, closer to the reactive one in Badiou’s terminology, 1968 stands in for disorder, crisis, anomie, and a conflict that must be averted at all costs by the efforts of a stalwart reformism. It is not in any way the cipher for a moment of political invention, for the possibility of a radical restructuring of society. The tenor of the “Left” ripostes to Sarkozy in the French media were also symptomatic. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a rather self-regarding European parliamentarian, predictably rehashed his long-time anticommunism to brand Sarkozy’s liquidationism as “Bolshevik” and, in faultless Euro-liberal form, praised ’68 for its “liberation of the autonomy of individuals.” Many others emphasized the “values” of freedom and autonomy, but in the guise of a salutary infusion of joy, pleasure, and mobility into the polity, not in terms of a radical alternative to the status quo. available at http://desirsdavenir11.over-blog.net/article-6524006.html (last accessed September 15, 2008). 6. This section was composed during the French elections and prior to the publication of Badiou’s De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, the fourth volume in his Circonstances series. In that text, Badiou, drawing on a different aspect of his Logiques des mondes, presents Sarkozy as the latest incarnation of a “Pétainist” transcendental. As is clear from the following quote, taken from an excerpt recently published in the New Left Review, the Pétainist transcendental is a peculiar amalgam of reaction and obscurantism: “the unconscious national-historical roots of that which goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Pétainist configuration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the Restoration of 1815 when a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly supported by émigrés and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners’ baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a wornout population, that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the ‘nation,’ yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Pétain himself, an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment of national rebirth.” This politics of restoration under the simulacrum of rebirth is one in which “capitulation and servility” (to foreign occupiers or Capital) “are presented as invention and regeneration” (Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left Review 49 [January–February 2008]: 32–33). See also Peter Hallward’s perspicuous comments and criticisms in “L’hypothèse communiste,” Le revue internationale des livres et des idées 5 (2008): 28–30, a longer version of his review of Badiou’s Sarkozy book in Radical Philosophy 149 (2008): 50–52. 32 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 “I Fail, Therefore I Am.” As testified by the French controversies—especially in the pages of the daily Libération—around Badiou’s Circonstances 3 (his collection of interventions on Israel, Zionism, and Judaism, now in English in Polemics) and his best-selling screed against Sarkozy, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, the “antitotalitarian” credo of the nouveaux philosophes and the anticommunist philosophies of finitude, liberalism, and human rights are still enduring ideological forces, at least as far as the dreaded figure of the “media intellectual” is concerned. On a broader scale, the intellectual and philosophical suspicion of emancipatory philosophies—of any prospect of creating a “new man” or a new society—still pervades much political and ethical thought, whether in the guise of a concern with ineffable alterity or in an emphasis on precariousness and vulnerability pitted against any notion of the radical transformation or transvaluation of society. Whether they find their sources in Habermas or Levinas, many contemporary ethical and political philosophies are defined, explicitly or otherwise, by their reaction either to a supposed totalitarian hubris or to the “left-fascist” excesses of la pensée 68 (it is interesting that this Habermasian category has resurfaced in Peter Sloterdijk’s recent post-Nietzschean anticommunist tome, Zorn und Zeit). Aside from its assertive advocacy of philosophical speculation against any affectations of critical humility, the fortune of Badiou’s philosophy can be chalked up to his marked opposition to any intellectual approach that takes its cue from the supposed defeat of revolutionary aspirations. Indeed, for some time, the political philosophy of the “lesser evil” has been one of his specific adversaries. In a 1987 article, tellingly entitled “Down with Existing Society!” he railed against the “intellectual coma” that stems from treating the self-interested preference for living in parliamentary democracies rather than authoritarian states as the basis for a political doctrine. This ambient hedonistic defense of liberalism finds its sophistic apotheosis in the idea that the destiny of “the West” (itself one of the categories of the anti-’68 Restoration) is to fight radical Evil, and that its perdition lies in any project that would be predicated on an idea of the Good. In the 7. For the diagnosis of an emblematic case in this regard, see Daniel Bensaïd, Un nouveau théologien: Bernard-Henri Lévy (Paris: Lignes, 2007). Deleuze’s seminal analysis of the nouveaux philosophes, “A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un probleme general” (1977), now in Two Regimes of Madness (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), remains one of the most acute dissections of this phenomenon. Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 33 nouveaux philosophes’ apologia for local resistances to Evil over against revolutionary projects for the Good, Badiou discerns an ultimate conservatism, distilled into the motto “let’s hold on to what we have, since there is worse elsewhere.” Such a perspective forbids any immanent evaluation of one’s own political conjuncture, and more importantly prohibits the formulation of any political thinking worthy of the name. These observations lead Badiou to a sardonic remark that could be seen as an emblem for his whole philosophy: If the lamentable state in which we find ourselves is nonetheless the best of all real states this simply proves that up to now the political history of men has only given birth to restricted innovations and we are but characters in a pre-historic situation. . . . If, in terms of political thought and practice, of forms of collective life, humanity has yet to find and will not find anything better than currently existing parliamentary states, and the forms of consciousness associated with them, this proves that as a species, said humanity will not rank much higher than ants and elephants. The communist idea at least had the merit of announcing a fate that would be a little more capable of inscribing itself in the annals of the Universe. Badiou recognizes that the “lesser evil” argument is bolstered by its key subjective correlate, one that from a very different perspective had already been identified and condemned by Hannah Arendt in her 1950’s criticisms of “ex-communist” cold warriors—what Badiou encapsulates in the thesis “we tried, and it was a catastrophe,” or, more pithily: “I fail, therefore I am.” He paints an unforgiving portrait of those who—having learned the ropes of politics and strategy from their revolutionary commitment—now censure their previous fidelity as a youthful diversion which merely delayed their rise to positions of power and prestige. Badiou heaps contempt on the form of reasoning that underlies these comfortable conversions: “Imagine a mathematician who, having toiled with few results on a problem, would declare that since he failed, the problem no longer exists! Note that such a mathematician would not, because of his declaration, be propelled into the Academy of the Sciences, whilst it seems that having failed in revolutionary politics, if one flaunts it loudly enough, justifies the greatest hopes in journalism. I fail, therefore I am.” But for Badiou the political problems that 8. Alain Badiou, “À bas la société existante!” Le Perroquet 69 (March 23, 1987), 2. 9. Badiou, “À bas la société existante!” 2. 34 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 called forth revolutionary commitment abide, and their seemingly intractable difficulty is only a spur for further investigation. The supposed combination of morality and realism promoted by the likes of the nouveaux philosophes is but a confession of incapacity, and a commitment to opposing society as it stands demands ever-renewed conceptual and practical innovations, which no cozy abdication can ever dispel. In a recent conference in Paris devoted to Logiques des mondes, the sequel to his meta-ontological magnum opus Being and Event, Badiou made a strange but very telling confession: he explained that all of his work, including or even especially his most forbiddingly abstract philosophical investigations, stems from the need to answer how and why many of his generational peers could betray their revolutionary convictions, namely those convictions that came forcefully to the fore after May ’68. This avowal is odd for a number of reasons. To begin with, it almost suggests that militant fidelity—the putative cornerstone of Badiou’s constantly revised theory of the subject—albeit rare is itself not mysterious, or even that, from Badiou’s own point of view, it is its abandonment or perversion that stands as an enigma, not its emergence as such. Furthermore, though Badiou’s philosophy, especially in books such as Saint Paul, appears to propose a model of subjectivity that wrests it away from any continuity with everyday experience—where “subject” stands for a process of purifying subtraction from worldly entanglements and from embodied individuality, and for the construction of a singular truth—the role of betrayal in eliciting philosophical speculation suggests that subjects other than militant ones have a role to play in Badiou’s thought.0 In what follows, we would like to investigate some of the figures taken by these other subjects in Badiou’s thought, from its inception in the late sixties onwards. The object of this bestiary—which does not include just revisionists, reactionaries, and renegades, but also Thermidorians, democratic materialists, obscurantists, sophists, antiphilosophers, social-fascists, and opportunists, among others—is to explore the subjective aspect and the internal periodization of the phase that Badiou in The Century defines as the Restoration, that period of triumphant cynicism whose beginning in France he dates to the late seventies and early eighties, and which significantly overlaps with his mature philosophical production. This will allow us to give a sense of the cultural and polemical context whence Badiou’s 10. See Alberto Toscano, “The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of Politics,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 2, no. 1–2 (2006): 15–38. Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 35 thought arises, and some of the political motivations that lie behind his rather Althusserian treatment of philosophy as an activity not of critique or totalization but of polemical demarcation. Hopefully, a number of the lessons that may be drawn from Badiou’s rather singular trajectory will be of interest for a broader reckoning not just with the legacy of ’68 but more specifically with the many forms taken by its repudiation, disavowal, and negation. Much of the attraction of Badiou’s thought in the current conjuncture may be said to stem from the verve and precision with which he revives philosophy’s combative vocation. In Logiques des mondes, as we shall see and as we’ve already suggested, he even provides a transhistorical formalization of the subjective space in which militancy coexists with reaction and obscurantism. But what in the more recent work takes an often formal guise, in Badiou’s earlier writings, especially his Maoist pamphlets from the 1970s, is filled with very specific content. We will thus begin with a treatment of Badiou’s polemical view of the ideological field in the wake of ’68, proceed to his understanding of the philosophies of the Restoration in the 1980s and 1990s, and conclude by considering the place of antiegalitarian or nonuniversal subjects in Badiou’s formal theory of the subject, as set out in Book 1 of Logiques des mondes. The Revisionist Foe Arguably the key plank, as well as the source, of Badiou’s later ventures into polemology and demarcation is his discussion of revisionism in the early 1970s. In a number of texts principally concerned with outlining the stance of his Maoist organization, the UCFML (Groupe pour la fondation d’une Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste), toward the major French unions (CGT and CFDT) and the French Communist Party (PCF), Badiou engages in a seemingly orthodox application of the terminology of the Sino-Soviet clash, and its intensification in the period of the Cultural Revolution, to the context of post-’68 French politics. The epithets of social-imperialism, social-colonialism, and even the social-fascism of the “Third Period” Third International make their appearance (one could criticize these appellations using Badiou’s own refutation of notions like Islamic fundamentalism or “Islamofascism” in Infinite Thought, where the adjective-noun complex is deemed to hide the vacuity or vagueness 11. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and the ‘War against Terrorism,’” in Infinite Thought, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 141–64. 36 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 of the two terms). The strategic horizon is provided by what Badiou calls a “revisionist counter-offensive,” the PCF project for state power after the weakening of the revolutionary upsurge of ’68. Whereas other MarxistLeninist groups (PCMLF, Gauche prolétarienne) are targets of derision for their merely “ideological” criticism of the PCF line, Badiou depicts a situation in which the drive for emancipation is stuck between one bourgeois project (liberal capitalist) and another (that of the PCF, or what Badiou in his Maoist idiom calls “the state-bureaucratic monopolistic fraction of the French imperialist bourgeoisie,” whose aim is “an imperialist bourgeois state of a new type”—Badiou even goes so far as painting the PCF as a party whose intrinsic logic pushes it to a coup d’état scenario . . .). In this wholly militant period of Badiou’s production, it is not just political criteria that serve to identify and oppose antiegalitarian projects: revisionist subjectivities are also grounded in a class analysis of sorts. Though Badiou opposes the idea according to which the PCF is a petty-bourgeois party, he does seek its organizational basis in an elitist, hierarchical, and technical “labor aristocracy,” and reiterates that the diagnosis of social-fascism is founded on regarding the PCF from the perspective of its project: the seizure and administration of state power. The “social” in the term social-fascism thus refers to the instrumentalization of a mass base of working-class supporters and the employment of a counterfeit Marxist ideology, for the sake of a project that would propose to solve the crisis of capitalism through a nationalist, statist, and organic centralization of power within a bureaucratic apparatus. Viewed from the standpoint of Badiou’s own political line, the field is thus one of complex antagonism: the position of the UCFML is not only faced with two enemies juxtaposed to one another (classical monopolism and bureaucratic monopolism), but within the union movement itself it is confronted with revisionism (the CGT as pro-PCF union) and opportunism, that form of anarchosyndicalist unionism which promotes self-management and repudiates state-power but in the end is perfectly compatible with the parliamentary order (the CFDT and other organizations). We thus have an opposition between state projects, as well as an antagonism between different types of struggle. Finally, as Badiou’s 1978 pamphlet on the contestation within the PCF makes clear, where he lambastes Althusser and his ilk for their political debility, revisionism, and opportunism, all find their ultimate reason 12. See Alain Badiou, “Édification du parti et question syndicale,” Théorie et politique 3/4 (1975): 114–18; “Syndicalisme et révisionnisme moderne,” Théorie et politique 5 (1975): 58–87; La « contestation » dans le P.C.F (Paris: Éditions Potemkine, 1978). Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 37 in the manner that they react, however implicitly, to the “real” they are trying to repress: egalitarian revolutionary politics (needless to say, this “real” is Badiou’s own politics). The Philosophical Front As the decade of the 1970s proceeds, and the political context becomes even less favorable to the kind of struggle promoted by Badiou’s group, it is in the ideological field that his efforts and those of his comrades are most insistent. The key text in this respect, a remarkable precursor of his more recent polemics, as well as a valuable compass for orienting oneself around Badiou’s antagonistic image of philosophy, is the 1977 collective text published by the Groupe-Yénan Philosophie of the UCFML, The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front. The purpose of this book is to identify and drastically undermine those forms of post-’68 thought which are predicated on the revolutionary upheaval of May and its aftermath but which neutralize, pervert, or counter the political “real” whence they emerge. The role of philosophy here is depicted as an extreme version of Althusser’s “class struggle in theory.” Philosophy is a “distillate of antagonism” summoned by history and “the servant, not of science, but of weapons.” It is the “decisive figure of the actual, the divided, of class.” Lacan, Althusser, and Deleuze—the targets of this left attack on a certain pensée 68—stand as the masks of philosophical novelty. There is only one great philosopher . . . Mao, as the emblem of a confrontation between revolution and counterrevolution. Most importantly, and in sharp contrast to the avowed wish in Badiou’s later thought to “desuture” philosophy and politics (see Manifesto for Philosophy), the division between revolution and counterrevolution is anterior to every philosophy, and what matters is the frontline. Philosophy follows the periodization and confrontations of political struggle, and appears at the hinges of historical struggle. The philosophical front is here defined in terms of one simple question: What did May ’68 signify? The period ’68 engenders a kind of philosophical and subjective space, within which philosophical production takes place. This space is also matched by a periodization. For Badiou, the period ’68–’71 is one of the simplification of struggle, of a concrete fighting philosophy married to practice, devoid of speculation and subordinated to the “immediate density of content.” From 1972, incapable of holding the 13. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie (Paris: F. Maspéro, 1977). 38 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 line, many turn to terrorism (the hyper-leftist option), or decadence (the rightist one). It is the capitulation of those who didn’t accept the demanding labor—rather than the revelation—of suppressing oneself as a bourgeois intellectual, leading to the return to the “vengeful virtues of philosophy.” Philosophy appears here as a kind of revenge against history. Incapable of attaining Power, the likes of the nouveaux philosophes try to show that Power is Evil, snatching the victory of reprobation from the defeat of their previous designs. As Badiou quips, “Since they were no longer allowed to have the starring roles, they would show that the play itself was bad and that its protagonist (the proletariat) is guilty of a villainous fiasco.” The position of the nouveaux philosophes is accordingly synthesized in these theses: masses (revolts) are good; the proletariat (Marxism) is bad; Power (the State, whatever it may be) is Evil. For these renegades, revolt must be stripped of any organization, guidance, and roots in a class project. By repudiating the theme of dictatorship, or the very struggle for power, this intellectual petite bourgeoisie refuses politics and descends into metaphysics, nihilism, and so forth (thus laying the ground for the politics of the lesser evil that Badiou would later condemn). It is thus that a movement disarticulated from organization becomes morality and eventually a pretext for restoration. A certain sociologism is still present in these analyses—allowing Badiou, for instance, to contend that the “poststructuralist” themes of Bodies, Writing, and Jouissance are merely hypostases of the immediate social practice of the intellectual petite bourgeoisie. Finally, the analysis of the various ways in which the philosophies of Deleuze, Lacan, and Althusser disavow or suppress the “real” of revolt is linked to the strictly political and strategic analysis of the two bourgeois projects (capitalist-fascism and social-fascism, as it were), in a political cartography of French philosophy which gives some sense of how Badiou and his comrades conceived of the force field linking reaction to speculation. We reproduce below a diagram of the political topology of revolt and reaction and its conjunctural “fluctuations,” as ideological hegemonies are unsettled (Figure 1). The UCFML’s concentrated point of Maoism lies at the base, whence stem two lines, leading on the one hand to “nihilist fascist anti-Marxism” (the fascisme du pomme de terre or potato-fascism of the fans of the rhizome), on the other to the “social fascists false Marxism” which captures Althusserianism in its submission to the PCF. 14. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 11. Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 39 Figure 1. Diagram taken from La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 20. This picture is made more intelligible if we consider, following Bruno Bosteels, the centrality for Badiou of the concept of deviation, which identifies as immanent possibilities of any universalist, emancipatory philosophy a “leftist” penchant for pure force or act (as might be present in Deleuze’s vitalism) and a “rightist” affirmation that there is no exception, only structure (as might be argued of “high” structuralism). Though born of Badiou’s own diagnosis of the Maoist camp (the Gauche prolétarienne as leftist spontaneist deviation, the rigorously orthodox PCMLF as rightist dogmatism), this is a logic that will remain central to his later conceptualizations of subjectivity as well. This period of Badiou’s work leaves a number of questions pending if we consider it in terms of his later figures of polemic and enmity: Are there specific forms of philosophical antagonism that do not depend on the prior 15. See, among several important articles he has devoted to Badiou’s politics, Bruno Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 575–634. 40 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 delineation of a political and ideological front? If politics and philosophy are desutured, do notions such as reaction and revisionism remain purely political, or are their analogs present in all “truth procedures”? And what happens to the analysis of political reaction when the fundamental parts played by class perspective and the prospect of state power are so radically recast in Badiou’s later work? Thermidoreans, or, The Betrayers of Generic Humanity In an essay originally published in 1996, translated as “What Is a Thermidorean?” Badiou updates his continued polemic against the nouveaux philosophes by returning to an older French Revolutionary trope. In contrast to the postrevolutionary historical reaction of the original Thermidor, Badiou speaks of the “personal Thermidor” that characterizes many of the attitudes taken by the nouveaux philosophes to the narrative of their own supposed political development. This self-narration takes the form of positing a putative earlier “radical” self—in the French case, usually of a Maoist bent—with the supposedly “adult” realization that one must reconcile oneself to the existing order. Noam Chomsky has made a similar point, showing that this kind of retroactive political storytelling about oneself usually involves a fair amount of exaggerating—I was chucking bricks through windows and beating up cops!—when nothing of the sort had in fact taken place. The concept of the “personal Thermidor” promotes the idea both that the political affiliations one holds in one’s youth are the stuff of folly, but also that one is reconciled to the status quo in a more profound way, having been “on the other” side in an earlier incarnation. The idea that “there is no alternative” receives its justification from the supposed failure of the idea that at some earlier point there might have been one. For Badiou, “Thermidorean”—as one concept appropriate to the forms of reaction in the previous few decades—means, then, “the concept of the subjectivity constituted through the termination of a political sequence.” This consists of, according to Badiou, “statification”—rallying behind the political process, calculable interest, and the belief that all politics is motivated by the drive for power and prestige—and what Badiou calls “placement,” that is, the contrasting of Western democracy with the purported totalitarianism and the lack of human rights of the “elsewhere.” 16. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005). 17. Badiou, Metapolitics, 128. Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 41 Badiou’s attack on the use and abuse of the language of human rights is amongst his most trenchant of recent critiques, most particularly in his Ethics, from 1993. There he claims that the “return to the old doctrine of the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolutionary Marxism” and professes his fidelity to the line of French antihumanism that includes Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan. However, the question of Badiou’s relationship to the humanism-antihumanism debate is a much more complex one than his apparently straightforward attack on ethical and human rights discourse might suggest. Against the evacuation of any positive use of the term in Althusser’s work and its reduction to mere ideological effect, it is clear that Badiou wants to retain a post-Sartrean conception of the “subject,” and that this has been the case from his earlier, more heavily political works (Théorie du sujet, 1982), to his later exercises in meta-ontology and a theory of truth (Being and Event, 1988, and Logiques des mondes, 2006). However, we can immediately complicate this claim by noting that the later Badiou does take on board one aspect of the Althusserian claim that there are no extant “subjects” qua autonomous agents, alongside the seemingly opposed Sartrean idea that subjectivation is possible and, indeed, desirable. Badiou’s relationship to the claims and vicissitudes of the so-called humanism-antihumanism debate plays out over the question of how and why he retains and defines, not just a question of who or what the collective political subject might be but also what the significance of the “subject” might be for philosophy in toto. His work is an attempt to merge and go beyond the two terms of the debate, in which structuralism “opposes” humanism, by entering into a topological discourse that nevertheless permits the continued possible existence of the subject (indeed, we could say that Badiou’s preservation of the “subject” is the most consistent element of his work). Whilst Badiou seeks to align himself with the antihumanism of Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser, against both a “return to Kant” in human rights discourse and the “bad Darwinism” of a contemporary conception of man as finite animal, there are hints, both explicit and implicit, of his belonging to a longer trajectory of “political humanism.” Indeed, we see this in particular in Badiou’s mathematico-political deployment of terms such as generic, and its political correlate generic humanity. We don’t wish to argue that Badiou’s “mathematical turn” is necessarily over-determined by his politics, as some have suggested, but 18. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 4. 42 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 rather that the mathematics and politics coimplicate each other in ways which entail that when Badiou uses terms like revolution the resonances are intended to be heard at both levels, scientific and historico-political. The major claim made here is that Badiou’s use of the term humanism is, however, evidence of a political struggle whose vicissitudes have lent the philosophical implications of the word a different sense at different points between the original “debate” of the 1960s and the contemporary era: the story here with regard to Badiou’s work is how the impossibility of using the term in the era of Stalin (“a ‘Soviet humanism’ through which we can glimpse the well-heeled dachas and the black Mercedes,” he writes) has been transformed into the possibility of equating the quasi-Feuerbachian term generic humanity with the politics of an egalitarian communism (“Equality means that the political actor is represented under the sole sign of his specifically human capacity”0). The rationalist insistence that “people think” appears everywhere in Badiou. In an article titled “Democratic Materialism,” excerpted from Logiques de mondes, Badiou asks “what do we think, today?” We should not, of course, understand this as a Heideggerian worry that thought is not yet happening, but rather as the persistent claim that thought itself has been betrayed, in the various revisionist and reactionary antipolitical formations. Badiou’s claim in this piece that the status quo can be summed up by its “natural” belief that “There are only bodies and languages” conveys his contempt for identity politics and the superficial investment in cultural and linguistic differences. For Badiou, difference is not something to be dragged up and hailed, but rather the banal stuff of human life; to reify difference is to deny that sameness is also possible—the sameness of a political project, a shared commitment to a political goal (and here Badiou is extremely Sartrean). Against this democratic materialism, Badiou proposes a materialist dialectic—as he freely confesses, a rather old and unfashionable phrase—which adds the important proviso to the phrase “there are only bodies and languages” except that there are truths to the phrase “there are only bodies and languages.” This exception is precisely 19. See Alain Badiou, “Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution,” trans. Alberto Toscano with Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power, positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 635–48. 20. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics,” Radical Philosophy 96 (1999): 29. 21. Alain Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” Radical Philosophy 130 (2005): 20. 22. Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” 20. Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 43 what “democratic” materialism wishes to foreclose. In this return to a kind of Althusserian language, fused with Plato and Descartes, we see Badiou’s ambivalent struggle with an old vocabulary and a new subjective horizon; often he’ll speak of having to move beyond the logic of classical Marxism—the party, classes, et cetera—but the question of what might replace it remains open. Meta-physics of the Political Subject: Reactionaries and Obscurantists How are these various notions of enmity and polemic formalized in Badiou’s most recent work? Pitted against hermeneutic, moral, and ideological models of subjectivity, it is worth reiterating that Badiou’s theory is not interested in the experience of subjectivity but simply in its form. Nor is Badiou particularly concerned with the subject as a source of statements, a subject of enunciation capable of saying “I” or “we.” Rather, the subject is depicted as what exceeds the normal disposition and knowledge of “bodies and languages.” The theory propounded in Book 1 of Logiques de mondes, however, brackets the body (which is why Badiou dubs it a “meta-physics”), and provides the general parameters for thinking how subjects exceed the situations from which they arise. The notion of subject therefore “imposes the readability of a unified orientation upon a multiplicity of bodies” (LM, 58). The subject is thus viewed as an “active and identifiable form of the production of truths” (LM, 58). The emphasis, evidently, is on form. But does this entail that the only subjects deserving of our theoretical attention are subjects of truth, of the one truth that may affect and dislocate any given situation? The particular inflection of Badiou’s definition tells us otherwise: “Saying ‘subject’ or saying ‘subject with regard to truth’ is redundant. For there is a subject only as the subject of a truth, at the service of this truth, of its denial, or of its occultation” (LM, 58). This “with regard to” already indicates that there are, indeed, different subjective positions or comportments, determined by a subject’s stance toward the irruption of the event and the truths that may follow from it. Badiou himself presents this theory as a self-criticism of sorts, arguing that his earlier work (he is thinking of the Théorie du sujet in particular and its denial that there was such a thing as bourgeois subjectivity) stipulated an all-too-firm and drastic opposition between the new and the old. In this new formal theory he wishes instead to confront the existence, amongst others, of what he calls “reactionary novelties.” To resist the new, to deny it, one still requires 44 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 arguments and subjective forms. In other words, the theory of the subject needs to countenance the fact that reactionary forms of subjectivation exist—which for Badiou unsurprisingly take the shape of the anticommunist antitotalitarianism which spurred the backlash of revisionist historians (Furet) and the renegade nouveaux philosophes (Glucksmann) to the emancipatory innovations arising in the wake of May ’68. In the place of an earlier reliance on class analysis and political partisanship, the dependence of subjectivity on the event permits Badiou to propose a philosophical argument as to why “other” subjects are radically dependent on a subject of truth. As he writes, “From a subjective point of view, it is not because there is reaction that there is revolution, it is because there is revolution that there is reaction” (LM, 71). This Maoist thesis of the primacy of revolt, which Badiou had already formulated as early as his 1975 Théorie de la contradiction, is now philosophically articulated in terms of the key “temporal” category of Badiou’s theory of the subject, that of the present. In responding to the trace of a supernumerary, illegal event, and in constructing the body that can bring the implications of this event to bear on a given world, a faithful subject is involved in the production of a present. Indeed, the only subjective temporality, which is to say the only historicity, envisaged in Badiou’s system derives from such an irruption of generic universality into the status quo. But if the present, as a kind of rigorous and continued sequence of novelties belongs to the subject of truth, how can “other subjects” partake in it? Badiou’s contention is that they do so in a strictly derivative and parasitic (albeit by no means passive) manner. As he puts it, subjective “destinations proceed in a certain order (to wit: production → denial → occultation), for reasons that formalism makes altogether clear: the denial of the present supposes its production, and its occultation supposes a formula of denial” (LM, 71). Given the arduous and ongoing production of a truth, reactionary subjects seek to deny the event that called it into being, and to disaggregate the body which is supposed to carry the truth of that event. It is for this reason that reaction, according to Badiou, involves the production of another, “extinguished” present. The thesis of reaction, at base, is that all of the “results” of a truth procedure (e.g., political equality in the French revolution) could be attained without the terroristic penchant of the faithful subject, and without the affirmation of a radically novel event. As Badiou recognizes, this constitutes an active denial of truth, which demands the creation of reactionary statements and indeed of what we could call Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May 45 reactionary anti-bodies. Think, for instance, of the elaborate strategies of cultural organization, admirably narrated by Frances Stonor Saunders, with which the CIA and its proxies sought to incorporate some of the innovations of aesthetic radicalism in order to deny their link with communist politics, invariably borrowing many formal traits and discursive dispositions from their nemeses. While the reactionary suspends or attenuates the present produced by an event, denying its novelty but absorbing many of its traits, the second type of “unfaithful” subject, what Badiou calls the obscure subject, entertains a far more severe relation to the new present that the faithful subject had given rise to. Rather than denying its novelty, the obscure subject is focused on actually negating the very existence of this new present. As we already noted above, the obscure subject, in order to occult novelty, “systematically resorts to the invocation of a transcendent Body, full and pure, an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God, Race . . .) whence it derives that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure subject) and, by way of consequence, the real body, the divided body, will also be suppressed” (LM, 68). The obscure “anti-body” is thus very different than the reactive one. While the latter may be repressive, it is also aimed at persuading the faithful that “it’s just not worth it,” that they should resign themselves to a “lesser present” and enjoy its diminished but secure rewards. The transcendent body conjured up by the obscure subject is instead a kind of “atemporal fetish” (LM, 69), writes Badiou, under whose weight novelty must be thoroughly crushed and silenced. Most importantly, Badiou suggests that the faithful subject, the subject that produces a new present by drawing the worldly consequences of an event, must entertain a differentiated relationship to the other figures who inhabit the new subjective space that his fidelity has opened up. This is why, as quoted above, he thinks that it “is crucial to gauge the gap between the reactive formalism and the obscure formalism.” While the reactive or reactionary subject incorporates the form of faithfulness, the obscure subject seems to be defined by the twofold movement of laying waste to the immanent production of the new and generating a transcendent, monolithic novelty, essentially indistinguishable from the most archaic past. This logical geography of subjective space marks an important step in Badiou’s work, as well as a significant contribution to developing a political theory of reaction and betrayal—a theory which is of crucial importance if we are to truly confront the “subjective space” arising not just from the Parisian May ’68 but from the “world sixties,” especially in terms of the 46 boundary 2 / Spring 2009 myriad figures of reaction and obscurantism that currently occupy much of the global political scene. Badiou is of worth here inasmuch as he moves beyond the violent identification of rivals and enemies to trying to account, at least at a formal level, for how attempts at emancipatory politics are not merely quashed by external powers but determine the very forms that reaction takes, for how the traces of a generic politics may be read in the strategies of authority and oppression, and, finally, how the attempt to undermine egalitarianism can take radically different forms, which demand different evaluations and responses on the part of militant subjects, especially from those subjects which, in his meta-physics, Badiou suggestively calls the subjects of the resurrection of a truth.