Subject without object: the party in the thought of Alain Badiou
The party is the active purification of politics.
Alain Badiou. April 1975.
We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the model of the party.
Alain Badiou. February 2002.
In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on severing.
Beckett, Unnameable.
If “the 19th century’s Hegelian idea was to rely on the movement of history ‘to surrender to the life of the object’, the 20th century’s idea is to confront history, to master it politically.” Such is one of the central theses of Badiou’s summation of the last hundred years, The Century. He sketches out a whole series of methods by which such mastery was attempted; the party constituted the principle means by which an emancipatory politics could bring a political subjectivity into alignment with objective historical processes. The party, in the Marxist tradition of the 20th century, was the mediating force between an objective situation (capitalism), and the creation of a political subjectivity. In order for such a subjectivity to exist, it needed to purify itself of every reference to the objective historical stratum; in the language of the later Badiou, to subtract itself from the presentation of the situation.
In 1975, at the end of the Cultural Revolution in China, such a movement was still thinkable in terms of the party. By 2002, Badiou is actively involved in Organisation Politique, a political project that explicitly refuses the party model, and the space of the political project that runs along the axis revolution/state is firmly closed.
In the text from which the first quote is taken, the party is the engine of the political. In the second, the party has vanished from the proper horizon of politics. It is no accident that we should use the word “vanished.”
In Théorie du Sujet, the clinamen, what Badiou also calls the “vanishing term”, and which is a precursor to the notion of the event in Being and Event, takes place only to immediately vanish. While the clinamen can never be encountered in thought as such, through an adherence to the traces of the vanishing term, the clinamen can be the basis for a subject. One can find precisely such a tracing of the vanished party in the political thought of Badiou’s later works.
For instance, for the Badiou of Being and Event there is no Two that exists prior to the taking of a political position: it is through the particular statement that division emerges, and this division is not between two antagonistic enemies, as Schmitt might understand politics. Rather, it is between the adherents to the statement and the situation as such. Unlike classic Marxist discourse, where the subject adheres to a pre-existent objective stratum (e.g. the way the proletariat are attached to the working class), the subject here “is not a substance.” From out of the situation, a two is created, the political subject and the situation that resists, and through this procedure, there is a one, a singular political subjectivity. This is to say, there is not an antagonism between two equal parties but between a subject which is adhering to an event that has no relation to the situation, and the situation itself.
In a structurally similar fashion, in Maoism we can witness a process of thought which allows for the emergence of the bourgeoisie within the dictatorship of the proletariat itself. That is to say, if Lenin finds in the basis opposition between proletariat and bourgeoisie the fundamental motor of history, in Maoist thought, class conflict is not totally determined by pre-existing objective relations (i.e. the economic interests of the working class and the bourgeoisie) but can emerge as a two in any given situation. In the Maoist conception of the party, one can find a trace of what is to emerge in Badiou’s later work.
In the first quote from Badiou, the party is the mode of politics, in the second, the party has vanished.
Here, the question is not one of affirming, in Badiou’s later thought, a simple continuity with his Maoist period, as Bruno Bosteels seems tempted to do. However, nor is it the case that one can unproblematically assert a complete break between Badiou’s latest work and his Maoist period, as is Hallward’s tendency. Instead, it is question of understanding the specific lines of continuity between the two positions, and equally, the disjunctures between them. Ultimately, the challenge must be to think these disjunctures, not from outside the situation of Badiou’s thought, not, for instance, from the position of an inevitable development following the collapse of the USSR, but from within the thought of the party in the philosophy of Alain Badiou itself.
This essay will trace the notion of the party itself, as it is presented in the work of Alain Badiou. Due note will be taken, when possible, of the differences between the approach of De l’idéologie and Théorie de la contradiction, two early texts by Badiou, and his later work. However, the emphasis will be on tracing the development of the notion of the party during the 20th century, as it is presented by Badiou, and on accounting for the continuity between the problematic posed by the party and the political thought Badiou presents in his later work, principally The Century, Abrégé de Métapolitique, and Being and Event.
The thesis advanced is as follows. Communism, in all its various forms, poses the party as a solution to two problems: that of duration – which is to say, how does one keep people together – and that of mediating objective situations and political subjectivity. In the course of the 20th century, the failure of the party to achieve generic Communism is largely to be understood in terms of its insistent attempt to relate politically subjectivity to the existing situation. This insistence on relation leads, as we shall show, to an unending destructive movement that is unable to secure the movement from the state to communism. It is precisely this relation that Badiou’s political thought attempts to undo, and in so doing, suggests a way that one can achieve a generic communism from within an existing situation. It is not a question then, of marking out the thought of Badiou from the thought of the party, but understanding how Badiou’s thought emerges from the disjunctures present in the party. In Beckett’s words: “In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”; from the ruin of the party, in the space of what Badiou calls the second restoration, we again find the Two.
I. The party is purification
The new can only come about as the seizure of ruin. Novelty will only take place in the element of a fully accomplished destruction.
The party as an object of Marxist discourse emerges out of the events of the Paris Commune. Here, a heterogeneous set of forces were roundly crushed by the state. In Marxist thought there are two clear positions regarding the lesson to be drawn from these events. The first, set forward by Marx in The Civil War in France, argues that the commune clarifies the immediate political objectives of the (working) class with regard to the state – the task is to break the dominance of the state, without coming to occupy the same position. However, this analysis, while correct, does not set out how the working class is to break the dominance of the state; in Badiou’s view, it rests at a level which reads the subjective and objective as part of the same movement: objective considerations of the actually existing working class (they way they are inserted in a system of domination, for instance) are not distinguished from the subjective movement whereby the working class realises itself as proletariat: as a force which overcomes the system of class distinctions upon which the state is based.
The necessity for such a position is first theorised by Lenin, and his understanding of the Paris Commune constitutes the second clear position regarding the lesson to be drawn from these events. Lenin’s position, at its simplest level, argues that without a form of organisation that can condense the forces we see at play in the Paris Commune, there can be no duration to any political movement. The party, for Lenin, is thus posed principally as a question of time: Lenin “proposed a solution to the problem. What type of organization does the proletariat need to really and enduringly break the enemy state machine?”
The problem that Lenin answers is that of duration: how to give a figure of the I/We relationship (where I am understood as a collective, rather than as part of a body where I submit to a sovereign) that could be given duration. Lenin answers, in a simple sense, the question of time: how we can stay together for a long time, and correspondingly, how can the subjective political body enter history.
For the party is not simply a form that gives organisation to the proletariat, rather, in giving organisation to the proletariat, several fundamental structures change. If, initially, the working class is part of an objective situation: a class which has a place in an economic system, then it is the party, by giving a status to the working class over and above their naming in the situation, that allows the working class to emerge as proletariat – as a subjective force in history that is outside of the objective situation; outside in a precise way, because the proletariat is not created simply through enunciation: it is not the case that one could equally create any political subject from the objective situation. The proletariat is the one class that can form itself as a revolutionary subject precisely as a result of an objective dispossession (they are not counted in the situation) and a subjective divestment; the universal truth that they proclaim is precisely that which is outside of any class relation: the end of class relations.
Here we must be clear the extent to which Badiou’s position deviates from Leninist orthodoxy. For Lenin, the party functions as the element which will bring into line the subject (the proletariat) and the object (the inevitable course of history). In the present of Lenin’s writing (pre-October 1917), the proletariat are not conscious of their place in history. Thought is divorced from action. The party offers the mediation which will allow thought and action, life and history, to become unified. As Hallward succinctly puts it: “the party is that agent, produced by history, by which history overcomes itself as history, that is, by which history becomes political logic.”
For Badiou, in contrast, the party as political body emerges when thought subtracts itself from the objective situation. Now it does this in a particular way – one of the great advances Badiou makes as a philosopher is to rigorously think through how the Ideal emerges from within the given situation – but it does not at any point assure a meeting between a given situation and thought. The unity desired by Lenin is not given in Badiou’s philosophy.
Despite this difference, many aspects of Badiou’s reading of the development of the party, at least in its destructive moment, correlate to Lenin’s presentation. For Badiou, the working class, as it becomes the political subject known as the proletariat, subtracts itself from all relations defining social place. This movement also occurs in Lenin, where the proletariat is positioned as the inevitable overcoming of the contradictions of the class system. The initial moment here then, is a destructive one – the party destroys the previous social contradictions from which it emerged. This is the destruction that Badiou speaks of in the quote that opened this section: the new can only come about as the seizure of ruin. This destruction, in Lenin, is assured by the teleological progression of Marxism, whereby the contradictions in capitalism are exposed by the creation of the party. In Badiou’s later work, it is instead the event that is read through the situation, exposing its void; here the moment is entirely situational, and does not rely, as noted above, on a unity of thought and action, subjective political subject and objective conditions.
Badiou is fully aware of the importance given by Lenin and Mao, among others, to the correlation of political subjectivity and objective conditions. Indeed, in The Century, he makes this contradictory relationship the central motif of the last hundred years. In his reading of Mandelstam’s poem entitled The Age, he claims “there is an incompatibility of sorts between the ontology of life (in my view homogenous with the ontology of history) and the theory of voluntaristic discontinuity…this incompatibility constitutes the acting subjectivity of the beast-century.” In Badiou’s work, this incompatibility finds its expression in all the great truth procedures of the age. This search for purification of the objective situation, and the desire for an unmediated experience of the real, is nowhere more problematic than in the case of politics.
If we were to expand Badiou’s reading of this motif, then the work of Georg Lukacs, unmentioned in The Century, is perhaps exemplary of these contradictions. For Lukacs, the separation of subject and object corresponds to the structure of commodity relations in Marx, where the product is divorced from the social relations that created it. To understand the unity of subject and object one must remain faithful to the proletariat as the motor of history. However, the objective stratum of the working class would frequently act and think in ways that were in variance to Lukacs’ expectations of their behaviour given their historical position. To explain how Marxism should act with the proletariat (to unify subject and object, history and politics) though these actions may seem to go against the interest of the class as they themselves express it, Lukacs introduces a divide between the empirical consciousness of the working class, and their imputed consciousness (how they would behave if they were only aware of themselves as political subjects), with the party positioned as the third mediating term that carries one over to the other. Here, the party takes on the explicit form of praxis, as Lukacs states: “the pre-eminently practical nature of the Communist party presupposes its possession of a correct theory for otherwise the consequences of a false theory would soon destroy it.”
One can see in this statement the contradictions that would later come to destroy the revolutionary potential of the party. Because the party is thought of as theory in practice, and this theory is thought to be congruent with the objective conditions present in the world (history as dialectical unfolding), its actions can be justified as theory, just as its theory will always be found in its practice. This constant attempt to tie political subjectivity to objective conditions leads to significant problems, as we shall see below.
In its first movement, the party destroys the objective conditions that give rise to it. In so doing, it can find no justification within the situation – for the demands of the party are specifically excluded from the presentation of the situation. Thus revolution, for Badiou, authorises itself on the basis of nothing; the creation of a political subjectivity can find no authority other than in fidelity to itself, and at the moment of fidelity this is always the case, even if one believes that later the party will come to be understood as ensuring the passage between subjective and objective.
There is a then a second movement to the party that we should not ignore. The destructive self-authorisation of the first movement should then also lead to the destruction of the party itself, as the party in turn, at least in Marxist theory, is only the mediating agent between capitalism and communism. Thus, within the party, the dialectical movement that created it must then destroy itself; failure to do so would lead to the creation of the party as institution. In the end, for Badiou, it must be able to be said: “Nothing took place but the revolution.” This second movement is more problematic. For if the destruction of the objective conditions of capitalism carries with it, in Marxist thought, a historical logic, this logic cannot be invoked after the end of history and the triumph of the proletariat. For Badiou’s later work, such a movement is provided by the subject, a position already anticipated by the voluntarism present in TDC: “every subject is a forced exception, which comes in a second moment.” However, when the party has succeeded in achieving the dictatorship of the proletariat, and is itself the objective situation, how then is one to divide the party?
II. Purification as the party
A party becomes stronger by purging itself.
Stalin.
Communism was the idea of a collective mastery of truths. But what then happened, everywhere, was that a master rose up, since the truth was no longer separated from the mastery.
Alain Badiou. Abrégé de métapolitique.
Because, as Sainte-Juste demands: “What do they want who want neither Virtue nor Terror?” His response is well known: they want corruption, another name for the failure of the subject.
Alain Badiou.
In The Century, Badiou’s account of Communism is conflicted – both bittersweet and fiercely proud. It is also, remarkably for one who lived its battles so intensely, without the reactionary thoughtlessness that characterises so many of the accounts of the demise of the Communist project. We should not be deceived by the second quote that starts this section; Badiou by no means offers an account of Communism that sees its failure in the inevitable movement from utopian project to institutional framework. As we shall develop in the next section, Badiou sees a way to be faithful to Communism that does not lead to the Terror (or the show trials). In exploring the 20th century, he principally sees the problem of Communism in its relation to the real, and the guarantees that the party as an institution attempted to place on this relation. It is this relation to the real that for Badiou cannot be a relation at all.
The problem of Communism is not its truth – neither the fraternity of political struggle, nor the equality that is its goal, and that, for Badiou, is the presumption of all political struggles. Truth, for Badiou, is a production of freedom from all relations. This is, if we recall the last section, the function of the party with regard to the proletariat: to ensure its freedom from the existing situation and its constitution as a political subjectivity with duration. As Badiou states in the Petit Manuel d’inésthétique: “the idea of the link (lien), or of the relation (rapport) is fallacious. A truth is unlinked (déliée) and it is towards this local point where a link is undone that a truth procedure operates.” For the subjects of a truth procedure, in this case the members of the Communist Party, we can say that access to the truth is equivalent to what Hegel what consider the practice of freedom. The subject cannot be bound to the party by objective conditions –precisely what the party is set up to overcome – but can only be so by the strength of its own adherence. “The eventual nomination has always already taken place… and this already is our only guarantee. The rest is a matter of faith.”
In being bound only to itself, the fidelity to a truth procedure which is called the party resembles nothing so much as Hegel’s account of absolute freedom in The Phenomenology of Spirit. It is worth briefly considering this incredible text, for it precisely parallels Badiou’s analysis of the Stalin’s show trials, with one distinctive difference, which we shall explore later.
This undivided Substance of absolute freedom ascends the throne of the world without any power being able to resist it…What made the notion into an existent object was its diremption into separate subsistent spheres, but when the object becomes a Notion, there is no longer anything in it with a continuing existence…It comes into existence in such a way that each individual consciousness raises itself out of its allotted sphere, no longer finds its essence and its work in this particular sphere, but grasps itself as the Notion of will, grasps all spheres as the essence of this will, and therefore can only realise itself in a work which is the work of the whole…In this absolute freedom, therefore, all social groups or classes…are abolished; the individual consciousness that belonged to any such sphere, and willed and fulfilled itself in it, has put aside its limitation; its purpose is the general purpose, its language universal law, its work the universal work.
For Hegel, the French Revolution presented the subjective figure of absolute freedom. This figure is not defined by its interest in particular spheres in society (the bourgeoisie, for instance, and their class interest), but precisely and only in itself. It “grasps all spheres as the essence of this will.” In a time of revolution, the question arises: how does one know that the individual is indeed taking his place in absolute freedom: that his work is the universal work, his purpose the general purpose? This problem arises because absolute freedom, relating only to itself, is not bound to any particular conception of the good: it is self-authorising. The society of absolute freedom must be created by all of its members. In the quote given above, it is evident that such a society must be both the creation of decisions of the will, and that the decisions of the One are taken by the All. Such requirements run precisely contrary to the requirements of an institution, much as, in Badiou, a truth procedure is incommensurable to any re-presentation.
In Hegel’s account, this lack of authorisation means that nothing can ensure absolute freedom in the French Revolution – the Virtue referred to by Badiou in the quote that began this section. Because nothing can authorise this name other than itself, everyone, and everything, is suspected of being merely the semblance of virtue. This is to say, paradoxically, that at the height of the revolution, what one sees everywhere is corruption. Thus, the essence of absolute freedom comes to be: the fight against corruption in the name of an ideal that cannot be verified. In an attempt to assure absolute freedom, this means that everyone is a suspect. In the absence of a criterion by which virtue can be judged, it is precisely in the overzealous identification with virtue that one finds corruption. In an attempt to re-establish the link between the world and absolute freedom, the situation must be constantly purged, and purged precisely of those who seem to embody the general will the most. Hegel finishes his section on the terror by remarking that the logic of purification at play here can only end in nothing, in death. This is the meaning of the peculiar conjunction used by Sainte-Juste that Badiou quotes in the quotation that begins this section: ““What do they want who want neither Virtue nor Terror?” His response is well known: they want corruption, another name for the failure of the subject.”
Virtue and Terror. The necessary conjunction of the two elements in any pure politics (as Badiou understands it) finds echo nearly a century later in Merleau-Ponty’s grim defence of Stalin’s show trials, Humanism and Terror. It is precisely in the show trials that Badiou locates his re-reading of Hegel’s account of the Terror of the French Revolution. This account begins with a restaging of the name Virtue. Virtue, in Badiou’s account, becomes one of the many categories of revolutionary politics, along with “‘conviction’, loyalty’, ‘class position’, and ‘obeying the Party’.” All of these categories become ways of accessing the real, and, just as in Hegel’s account of virtue, the non-relational character of the real means that nothing can confirm that the real is what it is – every element of the real is “tainted by the suspicion that the supposedly real point of the category is actually nothing but semblance.”
To understand what is implied by this semblance, it is worthwhile briefly considering the concept of ideology in Marxism. In the work of Lukacs, for instance, ideology is a discourse in which the real effects of social relations are effaced in favour of a representation of society that justifies existing class relations as normal or natural (as opposed to transitory historical phenomenon). Nevertheless, ideology, while organising a discourse which is separated from the society, expresses that very society. It is in the chinks and contradictions of discourse that Adorno and the Frankfurt school later find a way to connect ideology to the functioning of society; it is in the semblance that the real is to be found, as the gap between semblance and real effects.
This conception of ideology shifts from Marx’s interpretation, where ideology hides the objective distribution of society. In this reading, the semblance unproblematically hides the real, and one can reveal the real through critique. In Brecht, by contrast, the violence of the real emerges when the gap between effect and presentation is demonstrated. The power of the real here cannot be directly re-presented, but can only be experienced in the form of a mask, or an ideology.
The real of revolution, be is loyalty or virtue, cannot be re-presented, and cannot be institutionalised. It can be experienced only as precisely the gap between its presentation and its effects. The party, as an institution-to-be, constantly struggles against the impossibility of re-presentation. This movement underlies the constant destructive energy of the Party in the 20th century: from the Stalinist show trials to the Cultural Revolution, and, to return to the last century, to the French Revolution. However, here one must note a crucial difference between Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology of Spirit and that of Badiou. For Hegel, the problem with absolute freedom occurs in its lack of relation to anything; that nothing guarantees the movement of the dialectic outside its absolute category. Salvation here would be a relation to the state. For Badiou, in contrast, the problem occurs because there is not a sufficient lack of relation; the revolution constantly tries to assure, like Marx’s notion of ideology, a notion of the real that resides in the objective, rather than in the gap between the real effects and their presentation. In The Century, Badiou tries to distinguish between two conceptions of the passion for the real in the 20th century. The first, which he finds primarily in art, conceives of the real as a subtraction. In reference to Malevich’s White on White, Badiou writes: “Why is this something other than destruction? Because, instead of treating the real as identity [e.g. the proletariat], it is treated right away as a gap. The question of the real/semblance relation will not be resolved by a purification that would isolate the real, but by understanding that the gap itself is real.”
It is not immediately evident what this formulation of subtraction means for politics. The first thing that is evident is that any structure or institution that attempts to correlate the real to an objective presentation immediately slips back into destruction; attempting to ensure the purification of the party and the correlation of the absolute with the particular. This destruction is un-ending: “Purification is a process doomed to incompletion, a figure of the bad infinite.” The next section will explore what happens the last moment of the sequence of the Party – the Cultural Revolution, where the incommensurable logics of party and state are most forcefully expressed. Then, through an exploration of the political thought of the Organisation Politique, we shall explore the possibilities of a politics based on the idea of subtraction we find in Malevich’s White on White.
III. Destroying destruction
In any case, the Cultural Revolution undeniably signals the closure of an entire sequence, whose central ‘object’ is the party, and whose main political concept is that of the proletariat.
Alain Badiou, The Century.
From 1965 to 1976, China experienced a chaotic period, a period at once incredibly violent and astonishingly productive of new forms of organisation, no matter how short lived. It is this period that now goes by the name of the Cultural Revolution. The new forms of organisation we see emerge during this period were of great interest to the radical thinkers of Europe. By 1965 it was evident that the USSR had made of the dictatorship of the proletariat a state form, and, to paraphrase Badiou’s formulation, if Communism was the idea of a collective mastery of truths, what then happened, everywhere, was that a master rose up, since the truth was no longer separated from the mastery. The Cultural Revolution was, retrospectively, the last attempt to see if from within the party, a truly generic communism could emerge, that did not end up returning to the state form. It was an attempt to answer anew what Badiou, in an earlier work, calls the primary political question: “The only real political question becomes, what is the organic link between the masses in revolt – the decisive historical actor – and the party, constituted as political subject.” In De l’idéologie and Théorie de la contradiction, the party remains the crucial enjeux (stake) for any true politics. This conviction underlies the theoretical positions he takes during the period – for the Badiou of DI and TDC, destruction, based in the party model, rather than subtraction, remains the principle operation of his thought.
As the quote that begins this section indicates, concretely, the project fails: the impossibility of the party form subtracting itself from the state is demonstrated by the Cultural Revolution. This failure begins the sequence of Badiou’s thought that attempts to subtract the political subject from all objective conditions. What this section will show, however, is that Badiou’s later thought does not break with the experiments undertaken by Maoism, rather, the thought of a politics without party begins in Maoism, and subtracts from it what cannot be accounted for within Maoism itself: namely, the irreducible, minimal difference between what takes place and the place in which it occurs; between the subject of politics and the situation of history – it is this that is occluded by the thought of the party, and this that Badiou attempts to resolve in the Organisation Politique.
In Badiou’s depiction of the Cultural Revolution, there is one central stake: does the one divide into two, or does the two become one? These two positions are called the leftist and rightist positions, and, as Bruno Bosteels sets out in his essay on Badiou’s Maoism, these positions become the basis for the early critique Badiou makes of Deleuze. Put simply, “the two becomes one” refers to the following thesis: following the institution of the Chinese Communist Party in the state apparatus, the time of division is over, and a process of synthesis must prevail; what is necessary for the Party is a process of unity, and with it the construction of a state, and the end of mass politics. Such a position was taken by, among others, Deng Xiaoping.
For the leftist position, this position is a conservative one. They claim – Lin Biao and Mao, paradigmatically – that the class war has not yet been victorious, and that by calling for One, rather than for division, what the rightist position is calling for is the restoration of the old One, under the cover of synthesis.
At the two extremities of Marxism, you will find the following theses: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness (Marx, Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).
“Marxism implies manifold principles, but, in the final analysis, they can all be reduced to a single sentence: “It is right to revolt against the reactionaries.” (Mao, ubiquitous quotation during the Cultural Revolution).
The rightist position justifies itself by saying that social being determines consciousness: that the arrival of the party means the end of class. For Mao, in contrast, social being never entirely determines consciousness. For instance, the working class are not automatically the proletariat; nothing about their social being necessarily determines their consciousness as a political subject. Equally, this means that the arrival of the party as social form does not end, for instance, bourgeois consciousness. This is the meaning of the ubiquitous quotation Badiou refers to above: the political here takes absolute precedent. It is a matter of assuming a political position – here that of generic communism – and ringing it throughout the situation (the presentation of a situation that is made to appear as a One), even if that means finding, within the party, a two (and thus, correlatively, a real One – the political subject – and the situation that does not account for it, even if that situation is the Chinese Communist party itself). “Maoism affirms that, even under socialism, what happens at the level of the state is subordinate to what happens in the class struggle.”
So as to properly differentiate between Badiou’s later politics and the thought of Mao, it is here important to emphasise that these divisions were to take place within the party itself. It was not the case that the logic of the party led Mao to abandon the concept of it (as is the case for Badiou). Instead, the internal division – the logic of purification we worked through earlier with reference to Hegel – can only take place within the domain of the party-state. This constitutes the great contradiction of Mao: he is the rebel in power who asserts, simultaneously, the right to rebel, and the unity of the Chinese Communist Party.
This contradiction finds itself registered in three central domains of Maoist thought: in the thought of revolution, in the thought of the state, and in the thought of the economy. We could sum up Maoist thought here in the following way.
Revolution: It is right to rebel against the reactionaries, as the famous slogan goes. There is a constant production of the Two from any One – the constant purification of a political subject which reveals the generic truth that needs to be subtracted from a situation. This occurs at a disjuncture from the objective situation. In saying this, Mao anticipates the absolute singularity of political process (singular processes inside singular situations) that is the characteristic of the Organisation Politique. In both cases, “the two is the process through which the one comes to be” – class does not exist outside of the determination of a political subject.
State: In its nature, the state is a machine destined to oppress hostile forces. Even if within the state there do not exists any forces before they are oppressed, this does not change the oppressive nature of the state regarding exterior hostile forces. When we speak of the form of the state, this does not mean anything other than an army, prisons, arrests, capital punishment, and so on. It is here that imperialism exists, and thus how can the form of the state be different with the coming of Communism? Mao here appears to be brutally frank about the dictatorship of the proletariat. The state is constituted by its oppressive form – its need to violently present a situation. Even if there are no contradictions within the state (for instance, if there is no class struggle within China because there is a Communist state), this does not change the fundamental structure of the state.
This brutal assessment is continued by Badiou in Organisation Politique: in the apparatus of the state, in its insistence to transform a political subject into a mastery of a situation, the false One of the state will only be re-produced. In Badiou, this thought comes with a twist. Because the state – and re-presenting the state of a situation – is abandoned as a task, the state no longer performs the task of structuring opposition to it. The political task is now one of formulating statements in specific situations, which will never follows the logic of the state, but are no longer structured in necessary opposition to them: “It is rather a matter of requiring something from the state, of formulating with respect to the state a certain number of prescriptions or statements…we have to work more through prescriptions against the state than in any radical exteriority to the state.”
Economy: In his notes on Stalin, Mao argues that Stalin depoliticises the will through economism: “All this touches on the superstructure, which is to say, on ideology. Stalin [in contrast] speaks solely of the economy: in any case, there is no politics [in Stalin’s thought].” Through his tying of the political subject of the party to the objective economic situation in the country, Stalin, Mao argues, effaces the political subject. Here we must note the disjunctural element of Mao’s thought. This is summed up, in slightly exaggerated form, by Zizek in his essay on Mao:
The paradox here is properly dialectical, perhaps in the ultimate application of Mao’s teaching on contradictions: its very underdevelopment (and thus “un-ripeness” for the revolution) makes a country “ripe” for the revolution. Since, however, such “unripe” economic conditions do not allow the construction of properly post-capitalist socialism, the necessary correlate is the assertion of the “primacy of politics over economy”: the victorious revolutionary subject doesn’t act as an instrument of economic necessity, liberating its potentials whose further development is thwarted by capitalist contradictions; it is rather a voluntarist agent which acts AGAINST “spontaneous” economic necessity, enforcing its vision on reality through revolutionary terror.
Now Zizek here distorts Mao somewhat – Mao would never claim to enforce Maoism on reality through revolutionary terror. However, the central point is correct: Maoism starts from the political subject, which operates at a disjuncture from the economic (objective) situation. This movement precisely prefigures the emphasis in Badiou, that: “there can be no economic battle against the economy.”
In these three central elements of Maoist thought, and, in the insistence on the irreducible difference between the subjective political subject and the objective situation, we find the inheritance of Maoism in Badiou’s thought. Fundamentally, however, what changes is a word: the word subtraction replaces destruction. In Badiou’s thought, it is no longer the case of destroying conditions to access the real, but in understanding the minimal difference that allows the real to be understood as the very gap between subject and object, world and politics. It is this difference, and its ambiguous implications for politics, we shall explore in our final section.
IV. Immortality without death
Politics, when it exists, grounds its own principle regarding the real, and is thus in need of nothing, save itself.
Alain Badiou.
In the final section of this essay, we will sketch out what this minimal difference means for politics. Briefly, our question will be: given the disjuncture between subject and world, how can one hope to make a difference to the world? Hallward alleges that Badiou seems to be endorsing a version of Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, “the stoical affirmation of a worthy ideal or subjective principle, but as divorced from any substantial relation to the material organization of the situation.” Ultimately this is a problem of the way in which Politics is subtracted from History. Contrary to Hallward’s critique, it will be shown that the disjunctural relationship between subject and situation is specific to the situation, though one could not have predicted the subject that emerges from an event from the situation, much as one cannot predict the event from a situation. That said, the subject “is a generic part of the situation insofar as it is an immutable excrescence whose entire being resides in regrouping presented terms.”
In Badiou, subjective thought is only thought from within the subjective itself: there is no objective mediation with the situation, there is no question of judgement (as in Kant), and there is no interpretation (as in the Frankfurt school) – truth and knowledge here are disjunctural terms. In many senses, it is a question of chance, and faith in chance, as Badiou says: “Chance, from which any truth is woven, is the matter of the subject.” This essay does not give me space to develop Badiou’s ontology, nor its equivalence with mathematics. Nevertherless, it is important to note, “that the sequence of (truth) might have some sort of constituent relation with the substantial individuality of what is being investigated is precisely what set-theoretic truth proscribes in advance.”
However, here we must distinguish between a constituent, or necessary relation, and having no relation at all. There are two critiques that must be refuted here if Badiou’s emphasis on singular truth procedures is to have any political validity. It remains to be shown that in asserting political subjectivity has no relation to established categories, Badiou manages to escape the problem of the French Revolution and absolute freedom. Second, while keeping no relation to the objective world, it is important for us to demonstrate that the political subject nevertheless emerged in the world, and will act there, though it is not bound by its distribution of the situation.
In the work that Organisation Politique does on immigration (which is not, we should emphasis, bound to an event, and does not follow the process of subjectification developed in B&E) there is a particular figure who is counted for nothing: the figure of the worker. In their work, to be counted for nothing means to be counted as capital, and not to be counted politically as a figure within the political field. So there is a specific figure whom is not counted, and this figure, to a degree, is open to be understood through investigation, and then, after an analysis of the situation, through a thinking through of the concrete measures that can be made in a situation.
Now it is entirely true that this is not, as I mentioned, the process by which a political subject emerges after an event, but it does mean that, on the basis of analysis of particular occlusions, questions can be asked, and actions formulated, on the basis of the thought of subtraction. Equally, in the case of the creation of a political subject, the subject is able to have such an influence on the situation precisely because it is that subject that has precisely revealed the void of the situation. It is because the subject is only faithful to itself, and the precise sequence it initiates, that it does not fall in the Hegelian problem of absolute freedom, which is inaugurated when the subjective figure of absolute freedom attempts to find guarantee for its work in the situation as such. However, because it emerges within the situation, the precise sequence the political subject initiates is not simply an unhappy consciousness: it is only thinkable in the world, in terms of the material organisation of the world which in which its occurrence was specifically impossible.
Badiou, in the figure of the political subject, is wary of the dangers of the Paris Commune, that heterogeneous anarchy without duration; questions of fidelity and duration are of paramount importance in his work. Equally, the long exposure to Communism, both as state project and as generic ideal (which emerges from the real), has tempered his reading of the party. If for Badiou, the passion for the real, with which he characterises the 20th century, was ultimately a passion for the generic, which is experienced as the real, then this passion led to a corresponding passion for formalisation, which characterises all the great truth procedures of the 20th century.
The Party is the name of the formalisation of Politics. It is also the name, today, of the closure of formalisation within the party, for its formalisation was not in terms of itself – it was not singular – but placed in terms of the situation. This attempted correlation to the objective, as this essay has demonstrated, was the great blockage to the Communist project in the last century. Badiou, in removing formalisation from relation to objective conditions, has offered us a reawakening of the project for the 21st. The real here emerges precisely in the gap: between the figure of the party and its objective representation. Like the Clinamen in Théorie du sujet, the party has vanished. Like the Clinamen, the subjective ideal of which it was the figure keeps on working. In the silence you don’t know, you must go on severing, I can’t go on, I’ll go on severing.
V. Bibliography
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Anonymous. 2005. The dialectical Mode. With Regard to Mao Zedong and Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War. Positions 13:3. pp.664-668. Originally published in May 1992, in the third issue of La Distance Politique, the newsletter of the Organisation Politique.
Badiou, Alain. 2007a. Being and Event. London: Continuum Press.
Badiou, Alain. 2007b. A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject. Parrhesia. No.2. pp.29-36.Translation of “Scholie: Une variante musicale de la métaphysique du sujet.” From Badiou, Alain. 2006. Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Seuil. pp.89-99.
Badiou, Alain. 2006. Logiques des Mondes. Paris: Seuil.
Badiou, Alain. 2005a. Further selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution. Positions 13:3. pp. 649-668.
Badiou, Alain. 2005b. Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution. Positions 13:3. pp.635-648.
Badiou, Alain. 2005c. The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? Positions 13:3. pp.481-514. Originally a presentation by Alain Badiou in February 2002, at the Maison des Ecrivains in Paris.
Badiou, Alain. 2005d. The Century. London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain. 2001. Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil. London: Verso.
Badiou, Alain. 1998a. Abrégé de Métapolitique. Paris: Seuil.
Badiou, Alain. 1998b. Petit Manuel d’inésthétique. Paris: Seuil.
Badiou, Alain. 1976. De l’idéologie. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”.
Badiou, Alain. 1975. Théorie de la contradiction. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”.
Beckett, Samuel. 1973. Unnameable. From Trilogy: “Molloy”, “Malone Dies”, “Unnameable”. Calder books: London.
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Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: a subject to truth. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Hegel, Georg. 1992. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hegel, Georg. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Marx, Karl. 1987. The German Ideology: Introduction to a critique of Political Economy. Lawrence & Wishart: London.
Marx, Karl. 1974. The Civil War in France. Progress Publishers: London.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem. Beacon Press: London.
Schmitt, Carl. 1963. On the Concept of the Political. Telos Press: New York.
Taylor, Charles. 1997. Hegel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
This quotation is from the section of Théorie du Sujet entitled “From subjective to objective”, dated April 15, 1975. It was reprinted in positions 13:3: 641. Badiou, Alain. 2005b. Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution. positions 13:3. pp.635-648.
This quotation is originally from the text of a lecture on the Cultural Revolution that Alain Badiou gave at the Maison des Ecrivains in Paris. It was reprinted in the same issue of positions as the quote above. Badiou, Alain. 2005c. The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? Positions 13:3. pp.481-514.
Badiou, Alain. 2005d. The Century. London: Verso. p.15. Henceforth TC.
The author is here reliant on the summary of Théorie du Sujet presented in Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou: a subject to truth. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. pp. 33-35. Henceforth BS.
Badiou, Alain. 2007a. Being and Event. London: Continuum Press. Henceforth B&E.
“The pinnacle of great politics is the moment in which the enemy comes into view in concrete clarity as the enemy.” Schmitt, Carl. 1963. On the Concept of the Political. Telos Press: New York. p.4.
“Badiou was and still is a Maoist, even though no longer the same Maoist he once was.” Bosteels, Bruno. 2005. Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics. Positions 13:3. p.576.
Badiou, Alain. 1976. De l’idéologie. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”. Henceforth DI.
Badiou, Alain. 1975. Théorie de la contradiction. Paris: François Maspero.Yenan “syntheses”. Henceforth TDC.
Marx, Karl. 1974. The Civil War in France. Progress Publishers: London.
One should here also see EPR: Part Three: Ethical Life. pp. 187-199. Given the lack of space, my account is necessarily compressed, and distorts Hegel to bring out the points of resemblance to Badiou. This is to say, I simply assert Hegel’s argument, rather than unfolding the complex dialectical proof he gives in PoS.
Marx, Karl. 1987. The German Ideology: Introduction to a critique of Political Economy. Lawrence & Wishart: London. pp.4-48.
Group for the Foundation of the Union of France Marxist-Leninist (UCFML). 2005. Maoism: A stage of Marxism. Positions. 13:3. pp. 517
