Philopolemology?

Reading Alain Badiou’s Polemics, one might initially have the sensation of having wandered into a conversation not meant for oneself. Polemics consists of an English translation of a series of three slender French books, Circonstances I-III, which themselves contain a good deal of previously published material. Two heretofore unpublished lectures (the meatiest pieces of the lot) have also been included. Except for these last two chapters, almost all the assembled pieces either pertain to topical controversies (the wars in Yugoslavia, in Iraq, the response to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s entry into the second round of the French presidential elections), or initiate such controversies (a series of articles on the word “Jew” that raised quite a furor in Paris at the end of 2005). They are thus specific to the French scene (where for example the role of France in the first Iraq war looked quite different at the time than it did here).
 
Nevertheless, the sense that one is witnessing a conversation already underway and not intended for present auditors appears wrong. Alain Badiou–do not most of us know it already?–is a philosopher of situations, of circumstances, of the event. Par excellence he seems to be the occasional philosopher, as well as the philosopher of the occasion. In addition, he is also the proponent of a new universalism and a novel and unexpected return to truth.[1] The daringness, the gamble of Badiou’s thought indeed consists in his resuscitation of the most standard philosophical reference points–truth, the universal–even as he recasts these to meet concerns that might seem to disqualify them. Truth and universals are wedded to themes to which they appear allergic: indetermination, the void, and most of all the event. Accordingly, Badiou’s is a return to truth, a standing by, a loyalty to this reference point, that also reckons on the pervasive questioning of truth that so many now take for granted.
 
On a “practical” or political plane, Badiou’s work is equally innovative. His political initiative, in fact, turns on a similar balance between the old and the new. For Badiou’s politics are at once militant–some of the most stout and innovative that we have–yet they are by no means Marxian, nor, even, dare I say, revolutionary. Working in the aftermath of twentieth-century Marxism, Badiou aims at a new understanding of political activity that can be the successor of this radical politics that shaped Badiou’s early years and so much of the last century. This endeavor gives these essays their singular importance.
 
Badiou’s radicalism’s stamp most shows through in Polemics in what Badiou stands against: left-liberal democracy in both its national and international forms. Though an affirmative strand of his thought exists, which he himself would highlight, what is plainest on Polemics‘ surface is that against which all these essays war.
 
The most provocative essays in Polemics are the final series, however, which gesture toward what politics (if not political order) Badiou would affirm in the place of the existing one. They mark an especially critical engagement, as Badiou no longer supports a recognizably revolutionary Marxian program (though he also denies that the predicates “Marxist” or “Marxian” carry any univocal semantic charge). In these two concluding pieces, Badiou returns to his Marxist roots, and reviews the history of the Paris commune and its subsequent Marxian interpretation for possible indices of a very different future radical politics.
 
The novelty of Badiou’s politics as a whole lies in its rejection of any embrace of the particular (including, for example, of every politics of an identitarian stripe), stemming from its insistence on a role for truth in politics, even as it denies that this truth can in any way be comprehensive, as in traditional Marxism. Such navigation between particularity and totality leaves Badiou closer to modern representative democracy than he often seems to realize. This form of political organization also rejects the premise that we possess all or no political truth, while itself continuing to show fealty to universals. Thus, the very features that make Badiou’s politics attractive cast doubt on his dismissal of that formation that here stands most accused.
 
In Badiou’s article on the French law banning the wearing of headscarves, the problematic character of his distance from present-day democracy becomes especially plain. This edict prohibiting the exhibition of any religious symbols in French public schools was widely understood to be aimed at a renaissance of wearing the scarf and the veil among female Muslim high school students. Badiou glosses this law as essentially a racist act aimed at the immigrant community, a form of subjugation and ultimately exclusion. And with this judgment in its concreteness, one might well concur. Badiou goes further, however. According to him, wearing the scarf essentially has no political significance at all; it is an inherently neutral practice, a matter of mere custom. Tapping into a Pauline spirit, Badiou announces:
 

Let people live as they wish, or can, eat what they are used to eating, wear turbans, headscarves, miniskirts, or tap-dancing shoes . . . not having the least universal significance, these kinds of “differences” neither hinder, nor support thought . . . . at the very most, the diversity of customs and beliefs is a surviving testimony to the diversity of the human animal.
 

(106).

 
The question arises, however, whether Badiou’s interpretation of this practice is indeed that of those who wear the scarf? Do they believe it makes no difference, has no political significance, that it is but custom? Does ” the human animal,” as Badiou puts it here and elsewhere, understand its own customs as custom–especially since, as is well-documented, wearing the headscarf and the burqa are practices often not of the most recent immigrants, but of a younger second generation that quite self-consciously dons them?
 
Badiou’s refusal to acknowledge the significance that the headscarf does have, which gives the flavor of many of Badiou’s discussions in Polemics, thus raises questions concerning the form his own universalism takes. Badiou’s casting of this practice in terms of the “human animal” distinguishes between a political realm (of the “immortal”) and an inherently apolitical one (of this “human animal”), an unexpectedly clear division that shapes Badiou’s political thinking and his militancy. Equally oddly, however, we here witness Badiou, the self-professed militant, embrace just that depoliticizing virtue, tolerance, associated with the political matrix that stands most accused in these pages–representative democracy–and doing so, clearly, with similarly silencing effects.[2] Badiou thus comes perilously close to repeating everything questionable in liberalism’s own universalism, even as he himself offers a potentially less nuanced version of this same problematic.
 
After all, not only would the majority of headscarf-wearers deny that the scarf makes no political difference, but, to take it a step further, they would deny that it has no universal significance–about relations among the sexes, as well as the truth of the human, of subjects themselves. Badiou, however, asserts that the scarf has no meaning whatsoever. Badiou, accordingly, tolerates the scarf in the fullest sense of this word: he affirms the wearing of it only insofar as he believes he knows better than these subjects what makes a difference and what doesn’t when it comes to politics and its truth.
 
Badiou’s political analysis may be less rich, less subtle, than that liberal-democratic viewpoint which he here momentarily recalls, though doubtless the latter is also already limiting and silencing. His own version of tolerance proves less nuanced, less supple than representative democracy’s. For not only is it in the teachings of actual religions that one finds many deeply held, universalist claims and a clash among these claims,[3] but the modern liberal democratic state itself (with secular, supposedly universal veridical presuppositions of its own) was at least in part conceived within this context. Representative democracy has its origins in universalist religious disagreements, and it invented a new kind of universalism, a more formal hyper-universalism in response.
 
Badiou underestimates this innovation. Badiou’s faltering at this juncture perhaps ought not surprise, however, since it is by no means on tolerance that Badiou’s politics stakes its claims to our attention. The passion and the glory of Badiou’s political thought stems explicitly from the systematic ignoring of the possibility just encountered here of principled dissensus: the eventuality of differing, albeit still fundamentally legitimate, political views. Badiou’s posture of total tolerance within the apolitical realm (“let people live as they wish”) meets up with an absence of tolerance (perfect intolerance) within the domain of the political.
 
Badiou’s stance in its totality is at once more and less tolerant than liberal democracy: both absolutely tolerant and intolerant at once. A useful contrast, indeed the other extreme (affirming still more mixing, greater tolerance than current democracies admit), is furnished by a notion found in Jacques Derrida’s late writings. Under the heading of autoimmunity, Derrida sketches how even radical democracy’s existence entails that it would never be fully democratic (never wholly open, perfectly tolerant), thus proving allergic to itself, autoimmune. Constitutively unable to sustain self-identical existence, democracy attacks itself, but also what allows it to survive, the non-democratic, the still-not-open (self and other here constantly switching places), this whole formation thus proving a spur to ever greater, albeit always imperfectly democratic practices.
 
Such an absence of a stable domain of politics with fixable political identities Badiou would clearly reject. Badiou joins up with Carl Schmitt (to whose work Derrida’s notion is in part a response) by way of reference to Rousseau. Badiou’s coincidence with Schmitt is noteworthy in its own right, moreover, since in so many other respects Badiou, a thinker of a renewed universalism, and Schmitt, a thinker of revived particularity, of just the situation, stand so deeply opposed.
 
In defense of his own militancy, Badiou explicitly refers to Rousseau’s assertion in The Social Contract that state dictatorship is permissible in the face of an existential threat to the existing regime (95). Badiou’s own non-representative militant politics, he argues, is justified, since even liberal republics may abandon democratic representation. Just this proviso was embodied, of course, in article 48 of the Weimar constitution, which Schmitt, its leading theoretician, urged Hindenberg to invoke, in order, as it happens, to prevent Hitler from coming to power.
 
Now, Schmitt, Badiou, and Rousseau may not be wrong about the absolutist character of politics, which a representative government may misprise or dissimulate; representative democracy’s inability to side with any substantive political doctrine including its own may prove a liability or simply an illusion. At the same time, this failing also confirms that a greater profundity concerning universals, if not the totality of the political, inheres in this arrangement than Badiou allows. Badiou, after all, unlike Schmitt, does not himself reject universal political truths altogether. The failure of representative government to coincide with itself harbors a final measure of uncertainty concerning such truth that Badiou lacks, an ultimate hesitation in regard to the universals it itself espouses. As a second-order political device marked by a contentlessness, a formlessness, a passivity that aggravates not only Badiou, representative democracy (doubtless without ever arriving at the extremity that Derrida affirms) already acknowledges that no final stabilization of the political is possible: that there exists no perfect tolerance, no ultimately defusing (as in its own case) nor identifying (as in Badiou’s case) what is political and what is not. The essence of politics, in sum, structurally eludes liberal-republican politics, something with which both Badiou and Schmitt in their own way would agree.
 
When one registers Badiou’s proximity to Rousseau and Schmitt, the ground of Badiou’s own militant stance becomes clearer. Badiou’s radicalism is not wholly a function of the concrete political causes that he upholds (the rights of the sans papiers or his rejection of globalizing imperialism). His militancy originates from a rejection of what liberal politics yields in terms of activity and life. Badiou prefers political presentation over representation, activity over passivity–ultimately the labor of a disciplined, active minority. He thus denies legitimacy to representative democracy owing to the passivity of this politics and of representation as such, on account of what Badiou explicitly identifies as its non-present (non-eventful) character in both a temporal as well as an agential sense.
 
Both for Badiou and for Schmitt, representative government dangerously (and perhaps disingenuously) etiolates the decisiveness of political action, and they condemn it, correspondingly, on what could be called ethical or even transcendental grounds, as making impossible the ennobling that true politics permits. Indeed Badiou, in one memorable passage, affirming this moral or transcendental difference, emphasizes the lengths to which one must go to defend it and its essentially polemical nature. He declares:
 

Every fidelity to an authentic event names adversaries of its perseverance. Contrary to consensual ethics . . . the ethic of truths is always more or less militant, combative . . . . [For, it entails] the struggle against all sorts of efforts at interruption, at corruption, at the return to the immediate interests of the human animal, at the humiliation and repression of the immortal who arises as subject.
 

(179)

 
Having earlier seen Badiou’s unexpected tolerance, here we confront his militancy. Events of “truth” and the procedures that sustain them, in Badiou’s eyes, bring with them what in other contexts would be the human difference as such: a rupture, a break between “the human animal” and “the immortal who arises as subject” (such an unwieldy hybrid perhaps being all that this creature is). Badiou’s commitment to a politics of “truth,” his universalism thus entails a split between these immortals and everyone else. One’s enemies are agents of finitude, particularity, death, and the “obscene,” as he puts it elsewhere. They resist the difference in which the whole dignity of the self has been invested (though such dignity, to be sure, always remains open to them in principle), having fallen away from the human (or here supra-human) essence.
 
The potentially toxic brew Badiou’s mixture of militancy and universalism yields thus appears at this moment. For his politics demands that one have nothing in common with those who do not hold to one’s positions. An absolute enmity necessarily results, even while such politics wages war on the basis and on behalf of humanity (or of the “immortal” in it). Badiou’s position in principle thus yields total war, victory at any price. And such a manner of conceiving politics, with just these consequences, has indeed long been thought by some to be the true Pauline political legacy. As Marc Shell memorably puts it: with and after Paul, the other is either my brother or s/he is not even an other at all. Badiou, to his credit, does not flinch from, nor dissimulate, what such absolutist politics (no matter how eventful or relativized in other respects) entails: what is demanded by his radical politics, which is also (perhaps always) a politics of truth. Badiou affirms violence, potentially even on a massive scale. For Badiou’s remarks come in the midst of a refined, and largely convincing reflection on Nazism. And Nazism, Badiou asserts, was not simply a massive aberration, an act of quasi-theological evil, but instead an essentially political crime. Nazism is isomorphic to genuine politics , according to Badiou. It is a version or simulacrum of true, affirmative politics–one turned inward, gone bad, to be sure, and, of course, unjustifiable and indefensible on the basis of Badiou’s own thinking.
 
Yet affirming such militancy in principle, himself the willing “chilled support of a universal address” (144), as he puts it in the aesthetic context, Badiou is lucid about the potentially violent effects of his politics, as well as about the alternatives to it required in the present situation. For all his unflinching resolve, Badiou’s politics are not really revolutionary. When compared to Mao’s or Lenin’s, his program is but a “militancy lite.” A gesture of retraction, a movement of tempering, also marks Badiou’s conception of the future of radical politics, the subject that occupies the final two chapters of his book. These chapters are doubtless some of Badiou’s most important. Badiou in these pieces aims to reconceptualize the very framework of politics. Arriving at the scene of his own earlier political convictions–the history of Marxism and Maoism–Badiou practices an exemplary thoughtfulness in respect to his own precursors. Badiou’s reflection on the possibility of a present and future radical politics proceeds in two phases. First, the events of the Paris commune are recounted, with an eye to its interpretation in the subsequent history of Marxism (Marx, Lenin, Mao). Second, Badiou reflects on the history and historicity of the Cultural Revolution, whose dates he limits to 1965-68. Taken together, these two events teach a single lesson, according to Badiou: true politics, radical politics, today must break with what he calls the “party-state.”
 
Thus the Commune, which indeed proved that workers were capable of inventing their own revolutionary practice (apart from the bourgeoisie and the “professional left”), according to Badiou, has also long been seen to have failed at functions (finances, military action) most proper to the state. In part as a response to this perceived failure, there emerged in Marx and in those who followed him a double demand: to capture and commandeer the state while maintaining the party alongside it, as embodying their authentic, active, and truly political goals (263-64). This conception of a “party-state,” Badiou argues on the basis of his interpretation of the Cultural Revolution, is no longer endorsable (294). It has outlived its usefulness and today can be seen to harbor a wholly irresolvable tension.
 
No matter how provocative (or correct) this analysis may be, Badiou himself at this moment, clearly backs away from the potentially more cataclysmic side of his own politics; he relinquishes any scenario in which the liberal state would be violently overthrown, not to mention “wither.” Whatever militancy will look like going forward, it will not look like what Marx, or Lenin, or Mao envisioned. To be sure, Badiou here also proves potentially prescient. His intuition that politics at its core may be transformed, that the reigning model of state revolutions in the West only appertains to a finite (and completed) historical epoch (roughly the eighteenth-twentieth century), may quite possibly be right.
 
Nevertheless, one cannot help but wonder about the results of this position of diminished ardor in combination with Badiou’s still resolute militancy. This question goes beyond Badiou’s own perhaps idiosyncratic politics, as its two sides mirror some of the radical politics found in the American academy. Such politics also insists on its own militancy, while the practical organization and program allied to it remain distinctly attenuated, and its own confabulation of the future party-state remains unclear. Badiou, by contrast, is always alert to the implications of his own positions. Yet breaking with the state as a focus of any sort for his politics (a decision that runs throughout almost all his published writings since the 1980s), his future radical politics is an enterprise that in some sense now systemically fails to take into account the actual forces and structures of powers to which it is opposed. This politics dismisses the liberal-democratic site of dissensus, to the point of not even wishing to dismantle it. What can be the consequences of this approach for the struggles it actually takes up? The sheer insistence on the correctness of putatively self-evident (political) “truth” may be persuasive. Yet the views of the inactive majority having here been deemed meaningless (and any principled differences, any clash of universals impossible or ignored), what political rhetoric can Badiou and his followers mount, with what form of persuasion may they engage? Who can they talk to, other than themselves?
 
Badiou can only heed such concerns at the price of ceasing to be militant altogether. And his extreme disregard for the persuasiveness of his political prescriptions, in fact, takes a rather comic (and thus benign) form at one memorable moment in Polemics. Addressing an audience of French and German diplomats in Argentina, Badiou argues for a merger, or alliance of some sort, between Germany and France. To motivate his suggestion, he proffers world-historical (not materialist) grounds. Appealing to what he calls “a psychology of peoples” (122), Badiou claims that France today is but a “weary grandeur,” and Germany “a hackneyed question,” and to balance out their respective psychologies and destinies these nations or entities should merge (126). One can only imagine what his audience of professional politicians made of this, nor of course have signs of such a merger blossomed since Badiou’s speech.
 
It is at moments such as these that the reader may well wonder whether she has wandered into the wrong room. Nevertheless, that a first run-through of Polemics indicates that Badiou himself is unclear about just what war he wishes to fight, as well as how finally to fight it, given how lucid a thinker Badiou is, demonstrates the gravity of the situation in which all of us sympathetic to genuinely progressive political change today find ourselves. Those views of history and concepts of political change suitable to political progress no longer seem viable, even as these goals themselves continue, as they must, to be avowed. For this predicament, no one today has has an answer more convincing than Badiou’s