Badiou and Politics

Badiou and Politics

THE RED YEARS

In "So Near! So Far!;' the first section in his polemicaI Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, Badiou briefly recalls the tense ideological situation in the late 1960s and early 1970S in which he once went so far as to boycott his oIder colleague's course at the recently created University of Paris-VIII at Vincennes: "Then came the red years, 1968, the University of Vincennes. For the Maoist that I was, Deleuze, as the philosophical inspiration for what we called the 'anarcho-desirers; was an enemy aIl the more formidable for being internaI to the 'movement' and for the fact that his course was one of the focal points of the university:'l In the original French version this passage-like the remainder of the briefintroduction in which it appearsis actually not written in the past tense but in the present. Pour le maoïste que je suis, Badiou writes, literaIly: "For the Maoist that I am:'2 Of course, the French usage merely represents a sudden shift to the narrative presentj technically speaking, we are still in the past, and, in this sense, the English translation is by no means incorrect. Nevertheless, something of the heightened ambiguity attached to the use of the narrative present is lost in the passage from one language to the other, as the overall image of a potentiaIly discomforting past replaces the suggestion of an ongoing loyaity, or at the very least a linge ring debt, to Maoism. In this chapter 1 want to argue that Badiou's relation to Maoism, which 1 will suggest amounts to a form of post-Maoism, can in fact be summarized in the ambiguous use of the narrative present. If we were to spell out this ambiguity, we could say that Badiou was and still is a Maoist, even though

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he no longer is the same Maoist that he once was. There is no real mistake, therefore, in reading the line quoted above as if it applied to the present. As Badiou himself also says at the beginning of a recent talk on the Cultural Revolution, quoting Rimbaud to refer to his red years: "J'y suis, j'y suis toujours" (translated as "1 am there, 1 am still there" [or "1 am here, 1 am still here"J). 3 Yet we also sense that an impression of pastness undeniably overshadows the past's continuing presence in the present. What seems so near is also exceedingly far; and what is there is perhaps not quite here. By the same token, we should not overlook the possibility that a certain inner distancing may already define the original rapport of Maoism to itself. In fact, Mao's role for Badiou williargely have consisted in introducing an interior divide into the legacy of Marxism-Leninism, including therefore a division of Maoism. "From the Jinggang Mountains to the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong's thought is formulated against the current, as the work of division;' Badiou summarizes in Theory of Contradiction, before identifying Mao's logic of scission as a prime example of such dialectical thinking: "Rebel thinking if there ever was one, revolted thinking of the revoit: dialectical thinking:'4 Maoism, then, in more strictly philosophical terms will come to mark an understanding of the dialectic as precisely such a thinking of revolt, the logic of scission, which proceeds without end through inner splits and divided recompositions. As Badiou would write several years later in an article for Le Perroquet, one of the periodicals of his Maoist group: ''At stake are the criteria of dialectical thinking·-·general thinking of scission, of rupture, of the event, and of recomposition:'s

THE TWO SOURCES OF FRENCH MAOISM

One of the unfortunate side-effects of the belated reception of Badiou's work in the English-speaking world, with most readings, as 1 mentioned in my introduction, typically limiting themselves to texts from after Being and Event, is a strong disregard precisely for Badiou's long-standing debts to Maoism and to the political sequence of the Cultural Revolution. Badiou explains in his Ethics that this Maoist period actually involved a double allegiance, that is, a fidelity not to one but to two events, referring to "the politics of the French Maoists between 1966 and 1976, which tried to think and practise a fidelity to two entangled events: the Cultural Revolution in

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China, and May' 68 in France:'6 By now many readers are of course familiar with the fa ct that during those tumultuous years, while never being strictly speaking "pro-China;' Badiou was a staunch defender of the ideas of Chairman Mao. The author himself makes enough references throughout his work to suggest how formative this experience was, and still continues to bel for his thinking. Furthermore, as l also mentioned ab ove, part of the commonly accepted wisdom among Badiou's readers now holds that, by the mid-to-Iate 1980S, we witness a clean break from aIl dialectical forms of thinkingincluding a break away from the thought of Mao Zedong. Thus, after devoting the first chapter of his introductory guide to Badiou's "Maoist Beginnings;' Jason Barker seems to reduce the lasting impact ofMaoism to little more than a form of "militant vitality" now long gone: "Today the legacy of Maoism has aIl but disappeared:'7 Peter Hallward has the virtue of outlining the possibility of a much more painstaking investigation into the continuing legacy of Badiou's Maoism. This legacy involves not just an unflinching fidelity to forms of political commitment but also a whole series of theoretical and philosophical invariants. "What should be stressed is that Badiou's properly decisive concepts-concepts of the pure, the singular, and the generic-are themselves at least relatively constant;' HaIlward writes. "Certainly, for every disclaimer of 'early excesses' there have been many suggestive symptoms of a global continuity, at least from May 68 to the present:,g If this is indeed the case, however, should we not beware of drawing too quick a line in the sand between the" early" and the "later" Badiou?

THE MAOIST INVESTIGATION

Even today Badiou's concept of politics as a procedure of truth remains to a large extent inseparable, despite the apparent self-criticisms, from the theory and practice ofhis vision ofMaoism. In fact, to give but one symptomatic indication of this continuity, aIl procedures of truth, and not just the political one, involve a sustained "enquiry" or "investigation" into the possible connection or disconnection between the various aspects of a given situation and that which will have taken place in this situation under the sign of an event. Badiou writes in Being and Event: "In the end, therefore, we can legitimately treat the enquiry, a finite series of minimal reports

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[constats], as the truly basic unit of the procedure of fidelity" and, thus, through "the subtle dialectic between lmowledges and post-evental fidelity" that is at stake in sueh procedures, as part of "the very kernel of the dialectic between knowledge and truth:'9 Badiou certainly has not forgotten that the task of undertaking sueh "enquiries" or "investigations" (enquêtes in French) in many parts of the world was one of the most important lessons drawn from Maoism. A whole chapter in Mao's Little Red Book is dedieated to this very question under the title "Investigation and Study;'l0 proposing a method of which one of the earliest eoncrete examples can be found in Mao's own 1927 Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, the main topic of which-the revolutionary role of the peasantry that already sounded a strong note of dissonance in comparison with orthodox Marxism and Leninism-he would later revisit among other places in his 1941 Rural Surveys (again, in French editions of these texts, the same term, enquête, is used to translate the concepts that appear as "investigation" and "survey" in English). In the preface to this last text Mao reiterates the principle of the investigation as a form of concrete analysis of a concrete situation, so to speak, going against the abstraction of pure and unconditioned theory: "Everyone engaged in practical work must investigate conditions at the lower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who know theory but do not lmow the actual conditions, for otherwise they will not be able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, 'No investigation, no right to speak; has been ridiculed as 'narrow empiricism; to this day l do not regret having made itj far trom regretting it, l still insist that without investigation there cannot be any right to speak:'ll Among French Maoists, furthermore, interest in the investigation is both systematic and widespread. In April 1967 Garde Rouge, the central journal of the Maoist U]C(ML), or Union of Communist Youths (MarxistLeninist), publishes its fifth issue with a cover that reproduces the original assertion, "No investigation, no right to speak;' first made in a 1930 text by Mao, ''Against the Cult of the Book:' Serge July, a leading member of the soon to become ex-Gauche Prolétarienne, by far the most famous French Maoist group, and a subsequent cofounder of the communist daily Libération, would later go on to observe that "the investigation is the theoretical key to French Maoism:'12 In fact, the principle of the investigation, or enquête, together with the so-called

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assessment of experience, or bilan d'expérience, is one of the fundamental features behind Badiou's own Maoist organization, the UCFML, or Union of Communists of France Marxist-Leninist. The investigation is precisely that which enables any given militant pro cess to continue moving along in the spiral between the various political experiences and their effective theoretical concentration. Thus, in a collection of texts summarizing the achievements of the UCFML'S first year of existence, we read: "The Maoist investigation is not a simple observation of facts [un simple constat], not even the enthusiastic observation of the consequences of our interventions. lt solves a problem. Which problem? That of the takeover of the effects of the intervention by the workers;' and later on, in another document from the same collection: "The investigation must not only bear on the search for a new objective in the struggle, it must propose the putting into place of lasting practices, set off the ideological struggle. Before and after the struggle, something has change d, we must know how to make this live on:'13 Following Mao, moreover, the UCFML sees an urgent task in carrying out investigations not just in the urban working class but also among the poor peasants: "In particular, it is of prime importance to lead militant investigations on the great revolts of poor peasants, especially in West and Central France:' 14 To a large extent this last task is taken up in the UCFML'S The Book of the Peasant Poor, which sums up the organization's militant activity in the countryside in the 1970S in France and which in many ways is the local equivalent of Mao's Rural Surveys. Finally, we may also mention the even more recent survey performed hi China, in March and April 1989, by Badiou's close friend and collaborator Sylvain Lazarus, together with his ltalian comrades Sandro Russo, Claudia Pozzana, and Valerio Romitelli, part of whose joint follow-up discussion was subsequently published in the UCFML'S newsletter Le Perroquet. 1S If l have go ne into this much detail regarding the question of the investigation, raised anew in the context of Being and Event, my reason for doing so is merely to showcase the pivotaI role of certain Maoist concepts and principles including in the so-called later works by Badiou. The point is not just to underscore the mere fact that these concepts and principles persist, but also and above all to grasp how, where, and to what purpose they are put to work. In Being and Event they tend to come into the picture precisely at the point where truth and knowledge are articulated in what is still called a dialectic-despite the introduction's claim of supposedly having

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left behind the" stillborn" tradition of dialectical materialism with the turn to mathematics. "This is to say that everything revolves around thinking the truth/knowledge couple;' writes Badiou. "What this amounts to, in fact, is thinking the relation [rapport]-which is rather a non-relation [dérapport] -between, on the one hand, a post-evental fidelity, and on the other, a fixed state of knowledge, or what l will caU the encydopaedia of a situation. The key to the problem lies in the way in which a procedure of fidelity traverses the existing knowledge, starting from the supernumerary point which is the name of the event:'16 From these statements we can already see at which point in the overaU theory concepts such as the investigation operate: there where a truth "traverses" knowledge and subsequently opens the way to "force" the available encydopedia of a given situation, so as to change the old into the new. Without any explicit mention of its Chinese sources, even for Badiou's later work the investigation is that which ensures the possible connection of certain elements in the existing situation to the break introduced by a rare event. 1 would contend that the dialectical rapport between truth and knowledge is precisely the place of inscription of most of Badiou's debts to Maoism. At the same time, the pro cess of fidelity and the sequence of investigations in which such fidelity finds its most basic organized expression also keep the dialectic of truth and knowledge from turning into an inoperative, quasi-mystical or miraculous, duality of the kind that so many critics seem to want to stick on Badiou's own work. This would seem to confirm the fundamental thesis that only an understanding of Badiou's ongoing debts to Maoism can give us insight into his proposed renewal of the materialist dialectic, while, conversely, a miraculous and antidialectical understanding of the relation between truth and knowledge is often the result of an undigested failure to come to terms with the Maoist legacy in Badiou's work. My aim in fleshing out this thesis regarding Badiou's Maoism, based on the continuing role of notions such as the investigation, is not to reconstruct the facts pertaining to French Maoism, let alone the facts pertaining to Maoist China, but rather to analyze how this double series of events has impacted the work of Badiou in terms of politics and philosophy. Rather than having become a self-confessed post-Marxist, foUowing a career path paraUel to that of authors such as Ladau or the early Zizek, Badiou is indeed better described as a post-Maoist. This can be said to be the case, however,

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onlyifwe are able} in spite ofso much backlashin the wake of the postmodernism debate} to retain the active} almost psychoanalytical} meaning of the prefix so as to signal a critical attempt to work through the lasting truths as weIl as the no less undeniable blind spots of Maoism. "Post-Maoism;' in other words} not as that which cornes simply after the end of Maoism} or even more simplisticaIly after the death of Mao Zedong and the coming into power of Deng Xiaoping} but as the name for a peculiar historical configuration in which critical thought returns} even if surreptitiously SOl to the half-forgotten and half-repressed lessons of Maoism. This configuration is} of course} largely international} with contemporary varieties of postMaoism existing not only in France but also in Argentina} Chile} the Basque country:, or even the United States of America-to name but a few cases beyond the more obvious instances of Peru} Nepal} or the Philippines. In sorne ways the current conjuncture in political philosophy can even be said to suffer the consequences of a failed or incomplete passage through Maoism. Indeed} sorne of the best-known political thinkers of our time} including those who otherwise consider themselves loyal to a certain Marx} become caught in the trappings of a conceptual framework that might have benefited from a more sustained confrontation with sorne of the Maoist lessons taken up by Badiou. 1 am thinking} for instance} of the pivotaI role attributed to "antagonism" in the writings on radical democracy by Laclau and Moufte} to whom 1 will return in chapter 7} or even in the coIlaborative work by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt-with the latter duo swearing off any pretense ta a dialectical interpretation of the concept of antagonism} and the former showing little or no theoretical appreciation at aIl for the author of"On Contradiction:'17 As a result} these political philosophers seem ta calI for recognition of the structural or even ontological fact of antagonism as being constitutive of the social field} rather than working through the peculiar nature of antagonistic contradictions} or the lack thereof, in the global situation today. The irony is that in sa doing these political thinkers may very weIl give themselves an irrefutable air of radicalism while at the same time foreclosing the possibility of actuaIly changing a particular situation-of changing the old into the new} which is precisely what always was ta have been done according ta Badiou} since for him this ideological struggle between the old and the new} as the effect of lasting contradictions among the people} was precisely one of the more famous universallessons of the Cultural Revolution.

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MAOISM AS POST-LENINISM

Even a quick survey ofBadiou's work supports the thesis of an ongoing and sustained debt to Maoism. Not only do his first publications, from Theory of Contradiction to The Rational l