Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere: Re-thinking Emancipation

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BADIOU, BALIBAR, RANCIERE Rethinking Emancipation

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: james Fieser, U niversity ofTennessee at Martin, USA Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research. Adorno's Concept rifLife, Alastair Morgan Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Balibar, Ranci7re, Nicholas Hewlett Deconstruction and Democracy, Alex Thomson Deleu::;e and Guattari's Philosophy rifHistory, jay Lampert Deleu::;e and the Meaning ofLife, Claire Colebrook Deleu::;e and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and Allison Weiner Foucault's Heidegger, Timothy Rayner Heidegger and the Place rifEthics, Michael Lewis Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction, Michael Lewis Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy,jason Powell Husserl's Phenomenology, Kevin Hermberg The Irony ofHeidegger, Andrew Haas Levinas and Camus, Tal Sessler Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, Kirk M. Besmer The Philosophy rifExaggeration, Alexander Garcia Diittmann Sartre's Ethics rifEngagement, T. Storm Heter Sartre's Phenomenology, David Reisman Ricoeur and Lacan, Karl Simms Who's Afraid rifDeleu::;e and Guattari? Gregg Lambert

BADIOU, BALIBAR, RANCIERE Rethinking Emancipation

Nick Hewlett

.\\

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Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX

80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038 © Nick Hewlett 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

British library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 0-8264-9861-2 978-0-8264-9861-8

library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hewlett, Nick. Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere : re-thinking emancipation

I By Nick Hewlett.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978- 0-8264-9861-8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8264-9861-2 (alk. paper)

1. Political science-Philosophy. 2. Democracy. 3. Equality. 4. Badiou, Alain. 5. Ranciere, Jacques. 6. Balibar, Etienne, 1942- 7. France-Intellectual life -20th century. I. Title. JA71.H47 2oo7 320.092'244-dc22 2007007729

Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, King's Lynn, Norfolk

I n memory offfinone Hewlett, 1 920-2006

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Contents

Acknowledgements Note on Translations Abbreviations

IX X Xl

Contexts and Parameters Three characteristics of modern French thought The legacy of Louis Althusser Concluding remarks

10 17 22

2

Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth The role of philosophy Truth The event, movement and change Concluding remarks

24 28 33 37 45

3

The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics Politics, the event and truth procedures Against and beyond the postmodern Marxism and historical materialism Democracy Parliamentary politics Badiou's political activism Concluding remarks

47 49 59 62 69 72 75 81

4

Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy Listening to the unheard Liberal democracy and language Defining the political Democracy and post-democracy Concluding remarks

84 86 95 1 00 1 08 III

Contents

Vlll

5

6

Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity The political Ambivalence, universality, ideology Political violence Lenin and Gandhi Concluding remarks

1 19 1 27 1 29 1 36 1 39

With and Beyond Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere

1 42

1 16

References and Bibliography

1 55

Index

1 73

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gary Browning, Christopher Flood and two anonymous readers for commenting on drafts of individual chapters of this book. Thanks also to participants at conferences and seminars at the Universities of Fukuoka, Budapest and Leeds, at King's Col lege, London, and at University College, London, who commented on some of the ideas in this book. I n particular, I would like to thank Gregory Elliott for a detailed, sensitive and highly insightful reading of the manuscript as a whole. Sarah Douglas at Continuum showed immediate enthusiasm for the project when I first approached her, and was very helpful and encouraging thereafter. Nick Fawcett did an excellent job copy-editing the manuscript. The final shape of the book, including any errors and infelicities, is of course my responsibil ity alone. My appreciation goes to the Arts and Humanities Research Coun cil for funding a period ofleave in order to bring the project to fruition and to the British Academy for two travel grants. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in 2004 in Modern and Contemporary France 1 2 (3) and an earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in 2006 in Contemporary Political Theory 5 (4) . I would like to thank Bridget Taylor, who has not only given con sistently sound advice during the time I was writing this book, but has also shown huge patience as I went through authorial highs and lows. My children Emily and Gus have been moving towards adulthood over the past few years and remain constant sources of happiness. Lasting happiness and enduring love are qualities I associate strongly with my mother, <Enone, to whose memory this book is dedicated.

Note on Translations

In the two chapters on Badiou and the chapter on Ranciere, I have translated quotations from the original, French editions of their works, except where the original is in English, or where I have indicated otherwise. In the chapter on Balibar, I have quoted from English translations of his work, except where I have indicated that the translations are my own. Where I quote from or refer to an English translation, the date of the original (French) version of the work is indicated in square brackets.

Abbreviations

Full details of the following works are found in the bibliography.

Abbreviations for works by Alain Badiou

AM B BF C1 C DO D E EB EE IT LM MP PH PM PP S SP TC TS

Abregi de metapolitique ( Seuil, 1 998) . Beckett: L'increvable desir (Hachette, 1 995) . 'Beyond Formalisation' (interview with Peter Hallward in Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2, 2003, pp. 1 1 1-36) . Circonstances, 1. Kosovo, 11 septembre, Chirac/ Le Pen :Leo Scheer, 2003) . Conditions (Seui1, 1 992 ) . D'un Disastre obscur. Sur la fin de la virite d'itat (1' Aube, 1 998) . Gilles Deleuze: ' La clameur de l'etre' (Hachette, 1 99 7 ) . L'Ethique: Essai sur la conscience du mal (Hatier, 1 993) . 'Entretien de Bruxelles' (in us Temps Modernes, no. 526, mai 1 990, pp. 1 -26). L'Etre et l'ivenement (Seui1, 1 988) . Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy ( Continuum, 2003) . Logiques des mondes. L'etre et l'ivenement, 2 (Seuil, 2006) . Manifeste pour laphilosophie (Seui1, 1 989) . ' Politics and Philosophy' (interview with Peter Hallward in Angelaki, vol. 3, no. 3, 1 998, pp. 1 1 3- 33) . Petit manuel d'inesthitique (Seui1, 1 998) . Peut-on penser La poLitique? (Seuil, 1 985) . Le Siecle (Seui1, 2005) . Saint-Paul. Lafondation de l'universalisme ( Paris, PUF, 1 99 7 ) . Thiorie de la Contradiction (Maspero, 1 975) . Thiorie du sujet (Seui1, 1 982) .

Xll

Abbreviations Abbreviations for works by Jacques Ranciere

AB

AL

CD CT DW LA LH LP

M MI NH PP SP TT

Aux bords dupolitique (Osiris, 1 992) . 'Althusser' . In Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder ( eds) A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Blackwell, 1 998, pp. 530-36) . La Chair des mots. Politiques de l'ecriture (Galilee, 1 998) . Chronique des temps consensuels (La Fabrique, 2005) . 'Dissenting Words. A Conversation withJacques Ranciere.' (diacritics, summer 2000) . La Lefon d'Althusser (Gallimard, 1 974) . La Haine de la democratie (Seuil, 2005) . 'Jacques Ranciere: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Democratic Disagreement.' Interview withJacques Ranciere by Solange Guenoun and James H . Kavanagh (SubStance, no. 92, 2000, pp. 3-24) . La Mesentente (Galilee, 1 995) . Le Maftre ignorant. Cinq Lefons sur I'emancipation intellectuelle (Fayard, 1 987) . Les Noms de I'Histoire. Essai depoetique du savoir (Seuil, 1 992). Le Philosophe et ses pauvres ( Fayard, 1983) . Les scenes du peuple. Les Revoltes logiques, 1975-1985 (Horlieu, 2003) . 'Ten Theses on Politics', Theory and Event 5:3 (200 1 �.

Abbreviations for works by Etienne Balibar

DC HW

IC LC LG

Droit de citi ( PUF, 2002) . 'Gewalt', in Das Historisch-Kritisches Worterbuch des Marxismus, Das Argument Verlag, Berlin. Available online in French at http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk. netl article. php3?icLarticle=36 (accessed January 2006) . 'The I nfinite Contradiction', i n Yale French Studies 88, 1 995, pp. 1 42-64. La Crainte des masses: politique et philosophie avant et apres Marx (Galilee, 1 997) . 'Lenine et Gandhi: une rencontre manquee?' Communication au Colloque MARX INTERNATIONAL IV, «Guerre

Abbreviations

Xlll

imperiale, guerre sociale », Universite de Paris X Nanterre, Seance pleniere, 2 Octobre-1 novembre 2004; http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?icLarticle=36. MCI Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1 994) . PM The Philosophy ofMarx (Verso, 1 995) . RNC Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1 99 1 , with Immanuel Wallerstein) . SP Spinoza and Politics (Verso, 1 998) . SS 'Sub species universitatis'. In Topoi no. 1 -2, September 2006, pp. 3-16. Viewable at: http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.netarticle. php3?icLarticle=8 1 . We, the People ofEurope? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship WP :Princeton University Press, 2004) .

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Chapter 1

Contexts and Parameters

Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere each work within the intellectual and political tradition which embraces the notion of human emancipation. Associated with political struggle, resistance, and freedom from oppression, the emancipatory paradigm is inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. It famously found intellectual expression in the Enlightenment and its landmark political moments include the American Revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century and the French Revolu tion of 1 789. In the twentieth century, emancipation was often asso ciated with independence from colonial rule, the emancipation of women from male domination, and the emancipation of the working classes from capitalist exploitation. By adopting the view that freedom is closely linked with freedom from oppression, advocates of the eman cipatory tradition set themselves apart from liberals, who tend to con ceive offreedom as absence from interference. Such an approach to ideas and politics became less influential in France from the mid- l 970s onwards, having been highly prevalent for two hundred years. But Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere have each vigorously resisted the trend towards the various types of liberal thought that have become so much more current in France, and each has made a significant contribution to the emancipatory tradi tion. Even superficial acquaintance with the work of these writers thus suggests that those who have rushed to write the obituaries of France's tendency to produce radical intellectuals may have been too categorical, too soon. Although I am by no means in full agree ment with Badiou, Balibar or Ranciere, I have chosen to examine their work in part precisely because they each place the collective and rebellious action of ordinary people at the very heart of their phi losophical systems, whilst at the same time engaging with French and

2

Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere

other thought which has emerged since Sartre was the dominant force in European philosophy. They should not be seen as forming any kind of united philosophical school, for disagreements and differences between them are sometimes considerable, but their common and steadfast refusal to make concessions to a variety of more mainstream intellectual and political currents both sets them apart from numerous other thinkers and suggests treatment within the same book. Each of these writers has adopted as a major aim to explore notions of equality, and the relationship between equality and emancipation. For Badiou, the very idea of politics is intimately related to equality and his philosophy includes an egalitarian presumption. His philoso phical system is organized around the notion of the event, which is virtually synonymous with a broad concept of revolution, and as far as politics is concerned the event is often an actual political and social revolution in a traditional sense. For Balibar, his term 'equaliberty' is at the heart ofhis understanding of politics, meaning that there can be no freedom without equality, and vice versa. The notions of emanci pation and transformation are central to his definition of what is poli tical. For Ranciere, a discussion of equality is so central to his thought that in a characteristically provocative way he argues that equality is a starting point for any definition of politics and not just a distant goal. Politics is intimately related to uprising and insurgency on the part ofexcluded groups and against the unj ust status quo; a disruption of the normal order of things via a bold intervention by those who have no voice. In the broadest of terms, the work of these three thinkers is influ enced by Marxism, the ground from whence they all sprang in the early years of their intellectual and political development. However complex their intellectual discourses might be, and however unex pected some of their points of reference, they each still return fre quently to a common idea that an intellectual position of any real significance must relate to an intervention in the material world in order to change that world in an egalitarian direction. Despite some highly novel, unorthodox and eclectic philosophical points of reference, each seeks to interpret the world from a position that starts with a belief in the need to pursue the logic of defending the interests of ordinary people. Although none are now likely to describe


3

themselves as Marxist, none are studiously post-Marxist either, in the sense that they might want to announce their passage from a stage where they were strongly influenced by Marx to one where they definitely are not. The overarching question which I pose in order to evaluate and engage with the work of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere perhaps reflects my training as a historian and political analyst, rather than as a philosopher. It is: how can the powers of reflection be put to use for transforming and egalitarian ends at the beginning of the twenty first century? The question of how to make thought relevant and useful to the organization of human societies is of course one which permeates all forms of political thought. John Locke, who divides knowledge and science into three categories,psike, praktike and semi otike, defines praktike as 'the skill of rightly applying our own powers and actions, for the attainment of things good and useful' (Locke 1 989 [ 1 690] : 46 1 ) But for each of these writers the more precise notion of praxis is appropriate. Praxis extends further the idea of praktike and, in addition to applying the powers of the intellect to the material world, also includes as a major consideration the influence of the material world on thought. The result is a dialectical relationship between theory and practice. This approach is arguably central to each of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's own endeavours and I am thus to an extent assessing them by their own criteria, judging the suc cesses and failures of their projects in terms which they themselves broadly work to: how useful is their work in terms of both understand ing the contemporary world and changing it for the better, and how has the material world influenced their thought? Certainly, many pages of this book are devoted to evaluating the internal logic of their thought, to comparing Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere with each other and with other philosophers, or with think ers in different domains. If one or other is similar to or remote from a particular intellectual tradition or thinker, or represents a radical break from a tradition or thinker, this is relevant and important. By the same token, I seek to trace the intellectual origins and develop ment of these three writers. But if! examine their thought qua thought in this way, I also do so as a means, ultimately, to assessing their relevance to the material, and broadly speaking political, world with

4


a view to examining the possibility of applying their philosophy to the world around us. The importance of Bad iou, Balibar and Ranciere's work is gradu ally being recognized more widely. I n addition to their considerable originality and intellectual breadth, the sheer volume of output on the part of these thinkers helps explain why each is being taken increas ingly seriously. Since the publication in 1 988 of Bad iou's major work, L'Etre et l'evenement, he has written more than twenty further books, together with numerous articles and interviews, ranging from abstract discussions to pamphlets and newspaper articles on contem porary politics, via comments on historical events. His most signifi cant philosophical work since his first magnum opus is Logique des mondes ( 2006) , which is intended as a sequel to and refinement of some of the major propositions contained in L'Etre et l'evenement and is indeed subtitled L'Etre et l'ivenement, 2. Balibar has also published a great deal, ranging from a close reading of and re-interpretation of Spinoza, in Spinoza and Politics ( 1 998 [ 1 985] ) to extended commentary on European citizenship and racism, for example in We, the People rif Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship ( 2004 [200 1 ] ) , via essays containing innovative definitions of politics itself and of political vio lence, in, inter alia, Masses, Classes, Ideas ( 1994) and Politics and the Other Scene (2002) . Ranciere has likewise been prolific and has published over thirty books. He began his career with explorations of political thought and political economy, then spent many years working in labour and social history, before returning to political thought as well as writing widely on aesthetics. His most important work of poli tical thought to date is La Misentente ( 1 995) but almost as important are his brief but extremely rich Ten Theses on Politics ( 200 1). In particular, the international renown of these writers is increas ing. Each has been widely translated, especially (but not only) into English, as the References and Bibliography section of this book illus trates, and the rate of translation into English accelerated greatly in the first few years of the new century; all this of course has a dynamic ofits own as non-French-speaking readers become interested in and in some cases politically committed to the works, following the logic of their enquiry. Indeed, it is probably true that, as with some of the major proponents of poststructuralism, the reception for the ideas of


5

these thinkers has been and will continue to be greater in Britain and the USA than in France itself. Taking the case of Alain Badiou, although he teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and attracts large audiences to his seminars and lectures, there has been, to date, only one major conference on his work in France, in 1 999, in whose proceedings many contributors are from outside France (Ramond 2002) . There have by contrast been a number of confer ences on Badiou's work in Britain and the USA. Moreover, there are two general works on Badiou's philosophy in English (Barker 2002 and Hallward 2003) and only one in French (Tarby 2005a) , and two collections of essays on Badiou in English (Hallward 2004 and Riera 2005) where they are absent in French. The same applies to special issues ofjournals. A brief look at the careers of these writers also helps explain why I have decided to group them together for treatment in this book. Alain Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1 937, was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and began to work within a broadly Althusserian framework. He taught philosophy at the U ni versity of Paris VIII from 1 969 to 1 999 and then began teaching at the Ecole Normale. Greatly influenced by the May 1 968 uprising, he became a leading member of the Union des communistes de France marxistes-leninistes ( UCFML) . He has been politically active ever since, in particular as one of the most prominent activists in Organisa tion politique, a 'post-party' grouping launched in 1 985 which orga nizes around a small number of key issues including housing, illegal immigrants lsans papiers) and industrial change. Etienne Balibar was born in Avalon, France, in 1 942 and also stu died at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He worked at the Uni versity of Algiers, Algeria in the mid- 1 960s and then taught at the Lycee de Savigny-sur-Orge, in France, then at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne) from 1 969 to 1 994. He held the Chair in Political and Moral Philosophy from 1 994 to 2002 at the University of Paris X (N anterre) and in 2000 took a Chair as Distinguished Professor in Cri tical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He was a contri butor, with Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere, to the original edition of Reading Capital ( 1 965), writing chapters on the concepts underlying historical materialism.

6


Balibar was a member of the French Communist Party for twenty years and was expelled in 1 9 8 1 after publicly criticizing the party's attitude towards immigration. Since 1 98 1 he has frequently spoken out on political issues of the day and has likewise written articles and books on social and political issues including race, nationalism, social exclusion and citizenship. Jacques Ranciere was born in Algiers in 1 940 and studied at the Ecole Norma1e Superieure in Paris. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-St Denis) from 1 969 to 2000, holding the Chair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1 990 and was a Director of Programmes at the College I nternationale de Philosophie from 1 986 to 1 992. He was also a contributor to Reading Capital, with a chapter on the critique of political economy and the differences between Marx's critique of 1 844 and that of 1 867, but after May 1 968 he reacted strongly against the Althusserian project. He was a founder and editor of the labour and social history journal, Revoltes logiques, from 1 97 5 to 1 986, whose approach was developed as a reaction against Al thusser's theory. Ranciere's work spans philosophy, political theory, historiography, literary theory, film theory and aesthetics. He has remained politically active, particularly around issues concerning immigration and social exclusion, but has moved away from his earlier allegiance to Maoism as well as the Althusserian perspective. Let us note in passing that even at the most general level the three writers share a number of characteristics as far as both their profes sional careers and their politico-intellectual development are con cerned. They are all trained in philosophy, all are graduates of the Ecole Normale in Paris, and all made careers teaching philosophy in mainly Parisian higher education. They are all former students of Althusser and - especially in the case ofBadiou and Ranciere - they were profoundly affected by the events of May 1 968. They were all influenced by Maoism and have remained engaged in left politics to this day, swimming against the current of so many other former left wing activists of their generation, who took one or other ofthe possible routes away from activism, as described for example in Hamon and Rotman's Gineration ( 1 987 [ 1 988] ) . Another characteristic they share is to have made important contributions beyond the discipline in which they were all trained, namely philosophy: Badiou to literary


7

criticism and political history, Balibar to politics and human rights, and Ranciere to aesthetics and historiography, to mention but the most obvious divergences. For all three, their most important work has appeared since 1 985, during a period characterized - particularly in France - by intellec tual conservatism and the decline of the influence of thought to the left of social democracy. Governmental politics in France have often combined a superficially consensual approach with largely market driven economic policy, and there has been widespread disillusion ment with mainstream politicians. This climate, I shall argue, has had an influence on the way in which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's thought has evolved. The rapid growth of interest in the work of these thinkers in recent years cannot be attributed solely to its intrinsic merit, considerable though this may be; their increased reception also reflects a more gen eral renewal ofinterest in left-oriented thought over the past decade or two, a renewal which has taken place on an international scale. Mentioning but the most prominent advocates, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri dissect the current world order in Empire (2000: and Multitude ( 2004) , in a manner that suggests an updating and by no means an outright rejection of Marx's Capital, first published over a century previously. In these books, which have been discussed well beyond the confines of the left intelligentsia in America and Britain, Hardt and Negri argue that the new world order, Empire, is not domi nated by one country such as the USA, or even one continent. This is a postmodern and global form of sovereignty which is deterritorialized in terms of source, scope and logic. The most important characteristic of these two books is not the detail of their analysis nor supporting evidence - which it has to be said is sparse - but their attempt to sug gest that such an approach to the analysis of modern capitalism can help the cause of what Hardt and Negri describe (after Spinoza) as the 'multitude' in inventing new ways of combating Empire. Meanwhile, David Harvey combines an interest in the (broadly Marxist) approach of the French Regulation School to political econ omy with an exploration of the culture of the late twentieth century in The Condition ofPostmodernity ( 1 989) and examines the changing rela tionship between politics, economics and social structure in both The

8


New Imperialism (2003) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005 ) . Frederic Jameson draws o n the economic theory of the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel in order to examine the nature and sig nificance of culture in the late twentieth century in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism ( 1 99 1 ) and in both The Cultural Turn ( 1 998) and A Singular Modernity (2002) . Finally Slavoj Z izek has become well known in particular for his analysis of culture and ideology, drawing on Marx and Lacan in a way which is, again, expli citly anti-capitalist. Each of these writers of widespread international repute espouses the notion that we are living in a postmodern age, or one which is different enough from modernity to merit a debate about redefinition, but equally if not more important is the fact that each of these writers draws heavily on a fairly traditional Marxist his torical materialism. The international reception that Noam Chomsky has enjoyed and continues to enjoy for his ferocious and sophisticated critique of US policy overseas is another example of a small but important change in the intellectual political climate over the past few years, no doubt nourished by the growth and increasingly visible movement against corporate globalization as the neoliberal agenda fails large sections of society in advanced capitalist countries and by the exasperation felt by many hundreds of thousands of people in Britain and the United States in particular, in response to the US and British invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moreover, the break-up of the Soviet Union might have removed the most elaborate experiment in developing a practical alternative to capitalism, offering the possible conclusion that communism can only fail. But its passing might also have removed one of the greatest obstacles to arguing for a socialist alternative, given the profoundly unjust nature of many aspects of life in the Eastern Bloc, a fact that was constantly highlighted by Cold War rhetoric. One might also suggest, as has Stathis KouvClakis (200 1 : 53), that when capitalism is very successful it is likely that sooner or later there will be an anti capitalism that, at least in the theoretical domain, confronts capital ism head-on. More popular versions of what could broadly be described as works which seek to redress the balance for those who suffer most from the form which capitalism now takes have been


9

published by Susan George ( 1 999, 2004), Naomi Klein (200 1 ), George Monbiot (2000) ,John Pilger (2002) and Arundhati Roy (2004) . Although the re-emergence of a more general interest in engaged left thought is probably slower in France than in Britain or the USA, in addition to the three thinkers explored in the chapters which follow, there are other French writers who continue to work broadly within an emancipatory framework and who have by no means abandoned the left radical framework which has in a more general sense been so weakened. Any list of such writers might include Jacques Bidet, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, Pierre Macherey and Daniel Bensa'id, not forgetting the economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy. Each in their own way is involved in work which takes a highly critical stance on contemporary society and politics from a left perspective. Moreover, the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, despite coming to poli tically engaged intellectual work relatively late and despite remaining a figure whose work invokes deep controversy within the left as well as beyond it, argued for many years that any serious approach to the analysis of modern societies needs to highlight and examine the existence of a huge section of society that he described as the 'dis possessed' (Ies depossedes) (e.g. Bourdieu 1 998) . Even the late Jacques Derrida, often thought to have travelled far from committed intellec tual work in his major writings, argues forcefully in Specters of Marx 1 994 [ 1 993] ) that the time is ripe for a reappraisal of Marx and his torical materialism. If France is still lagging behind somewhat in terms of more gener ally accepted left theoretical exploration, since the widespread strikes of winter 1 995 there has been increased activism within the non mainstream left. For example, workplace activists formed the trade union Solidarite, Unite, Democratie (SUD), which strongly empha sizes more traditional labour movement democracy. The results ofthe presidential elections of 2002 likewise tend to reinforce the view that France has not entirely abandoned its legendary propensity for revolt, given that almost 1 0 per cent of votes cast went to Trotskyist (LCR) or quasi-Trotskyist ( LO) candidates. The hundreds of thousands of 'often young) people on the streets protesting against the National Front leader Le Pen and his passage to the second round also sug gested that taking to the streets in large numbers is not a thing of the

lO


past. Rank and file response to President Sarkozy's measures is likely to confirm this. Most importantly, in spring 2006 France saw what was probably the largest and most sustained popular mobilization since 1 968. Like 1 968, the movement began with widespread demon strations and occupations by students and it then spread to the work ing population. Unlike May 1 968, the focus of the protests was crystal clear: the government's new law - which it had pushed through on a confidence vote using article 49 paragraph 3 of the constitution - and which sought to introduce more precarious working contracts for young people under 26 in order, the government argued, to create jobs. The labour legislation was disliked by a substantial majority of the French according to opinion polls, many of whom saw it as the unwelcome introduction of further neoliberal economic measures along Anglo-American lines. I have attempted to indicate various characteristics of the general climate in which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere are now working, some conducive and some less conducive to the positive reception of their work. But in order to situate these writers in a preliminary fashion in the modern history of French political thought and to begin to con struct the discursive parameters ofthe book in a more nuanced fashion I will now look at three aspects of France's modern intellectual history.

Three characteristics of modern French thought

To begin with, I wish to elaborate on the point I made in the opening lines ofthis chapter. With a strong tradition of revolutionary caesura in the realm of political practice, neither liberalism nor social democ racy properly took root in France, and both broader political developments and intellectual life itself were dominated by bodies of thought which emphasized such notions as emancipation, salva tion and total change. The heritage of 1 789 was expressed in and reinforced by the revolutions of 1830, 1 848, the Paris Commune of 1 8 7 1 , the strikes and factory occupations of April-May 1 936, the revolutionary impetus borne of resistance to Nazi Occupation 1 94044, and the uprising of May 1 968, to mention but the most obvious instances of revolt and uprising. This meant that political thought


11

was predominantly revolutionary or republican o n the left, and o n the right nationalist and often with elements of anti-Semitism. As a con sequence of this radicalism on both left and right there was only a weak tradition ofliberal political thought. In the three decades following the Second World War, France was indeed the land par excellence of Marxist-influenced work in philoso phy and other areas of intellectual activity, including history, anthro pology, semiology, discourse analysis and literary theory. Taking the iconic example of Jean-Paul Sartre, notwithstanding his philosophi cal complexity he wrote in such a way that the conditions of the mate rial world and the urgency of changing that world were constantly present, and Sartre himself was famously politically active. This is not the place for a fuller exploration of the intellectual engagement of the postwar years, which has been adequately described elsewhere. But suffice it to say that from 1 945 to the early 1 970s Sartre and later Althusser were but the best-known proponents of a much larger Marxist and quasi-Marxist constituent which took for granted the intimate relationship between theory and practice as expressed by his torical materialism, and the Communist Party dominated in terms of left party politics (e.g. d' Appollonia 1 99 1 , Drake 2002, Spaas 2000). During this postwar heyday of thought inspired by Marx, few would have predicted that by the early 1 980s Paris could be convin cingly described by Perry Anderson ( 1 983: 32), in his oft-quoted phrase, as the 'capital of European intellectual reaction'. By this time a reaction against left, committed thought was indeed well under way. With the zeal of the converted, the ex-Maoist New Philosophers Bernard-Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann and ChristianJambert had a brief heyday and argued that the left had no plausible explanation for the Gulag. Then in a more sustained and serious way the prolific but until then largely ignored liberal political philosopher Raymond Aron enjoyed a belated and before long posthumous promotion to the position offather of modern French political liberalism, with Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant as rediscovered grandfathers. I n the meantime, quite an array of writers made their careers on the strength of rewriting the modern history of either French thought or the lives and times of French intellectuals, in terms which sought to show how mistaken, irresponsible and ultimately futile were attempts

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by politically committed intellectuals of the left to unite communist leaning political activism on the one hand and intellectual activity on the other. The former Communist Franc;ois Furet published his anti Marxist Interpreting the French Revolution ( 1 98 1 [ 1979]) and many other books of revisionist historiography, including Dictionnaire des oeuvres politiques (ed. 1 989, 1 995) and The Passing ofan Illusion: Theldea ofCom munism in the Twentieth Century ( 1 999 [ 1 995]). Furet and his collabora tors succeeded in writing a new, revisionist agenda for the study of French - and by implication Russian and other revolutionary - his tory, arguing that several generations ofeminent historians had them selves gone very astray and had profoundly misunderstood the nature of historical change. According to Furet's revised historiography, the revolution of 1 789 was not an uprising that had in the fullness of time changed the world, signalling the dawn ofmodernity. Neither was it a revolution that had swept away injustices and brought progress and the potential for further progress. On the contrary, the most impor tant and revealing characteristic of the French Revolution was that, like so many other revolutions, it had quickly been followed by terror and other major injustices and cruelties (Furet 1 978, 1 988, 1 995a, 1 995b). One had to conclude, then, that all revolutions - 1 789, 1 848, 1 9 1 7 - were bound to bring more harm than good. In the Anglo-American world to which the new French liberals looked with respect and for inspiration, Tony Judt and Sunil Khi1nani are among the best-known advocates of the view that Sartre et al. were seriously wrong; they authored accounts where left intellectuals inhabited a world described in Judt's book title as 'past imperfect' and where, by contrast, as he argued in a later book, Leon Blum, Ray mond Aron and Albert Camus held - again quoting the title - the 'burden of responsibility' for keeping the liberal candle burning (Judt 1 992, 1 998; Khi1nani 1 993). Mark Lilla has also strived to pro mote French liberalism and to investigate what he describes as the 'reckless mind' of twentieth-century European intellectuals whom he accuses of supporting tyrannical regimes and totalitarian political ideas. These include Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and the Hegel scholar Alexandre Kojeve (Lilla 200 1 ). Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut sought to consign what they choose to describe as La Pensie 68 - primarily Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu and


13

Lacan - to the recycling bin of history, attempting to deal a blow against structuralism and poststructuralism and any other thought associated in their eyes with the activist upturn around May 1 968 (Ferry and Renaut 1 985) . All this apparently pioneering franco liberal exploration, archaeology and revisionism by intellectual and socio-political historians, historiographers and political theorists who were determined to cast the past and therefore the present in a new and very different light, seemed to some to be in perfect harmony with the Mitterrand era. After the U-turn of 1 982, when the Socialists in government discovered the virtues of free enterprise and centre oriented government, the Communist Party declined rapidly, the trade unions were less militant than they had been for many years, and Franvois Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Julliard were able to declare triumphantly in their popular account of sea changes in society, politics and public opinion ( 1 988: 1 1 ) : 'we have fallen into line'. I t is worth noting in passing that even this alleged 'end of French exceptionalism' was described in the form of grand gestures on the part of intellectuals keen to champion the - in this case - pro pragmatic and 'post-conflictual' cause. Despite the recent signs ofincreased left combativity in France, and internationally, and despite some other scholars pursuing a more radical left agenda than many, the general intellectual and political backdrop against which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere produced their most important work was one characterized by increasing intel lectual conservatism. This, I will argue in the chapters that follow, had an impact on some aspects of their thought. The second characteristic of modern French thought I wish to dis cuss is the predominance ofphilosophy over other disciplines in Marx ist or quasi-Marxist thought. In Perry Anderson's influential study of Western Marxism he points out that European Marxist intellectuals gradually abandoned any serious theoretical exploration of economic or political structures and concentrated almost to the exclusion of other areas on philosophy (Anderson 1 976: 49-74) . This was, inciden tally, the reverse of Marx's own trajectory, who began his intellectual career in philosophy and spent the most productive years of his life exploring political economy. Moreover, the vast majority of these philosophers worked in universities for a large part of their career,

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including Lukacs, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Korsch, Marcuse, Della Volpe, Adorno, Colletti and Althusser. The reasons for this predomi nance ofprofessional philosophers in Western Marxism are, Anderson argues, threefold. Most importantly, the progress of the struggle for socialism suffered many setbacks from the 1 920s onwards, discoura ging serious study of material questions and encouraging a preference for the abstract; the rise of fascism and the outbreak of the Second World War, the degeneration of the USSR and the onset of the Cold War might be included amongst such obstacles. Next, the publication for the first time in 1 9 3 1 of Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1 844 and their translation into French in 1 933 persuaded many scholars that in order to understand historical materialism one needed to understand the philosophical lineage of Marxism, and in particular the relationship between Marx and Hegel. This reinforced a tendency towards philo sophical exploration and prompted multiple returns to intellectual history before Marx, not only to Hegel but also to Spinoza, Kant and Rousseau. Finally, the practice of the French and other Commu nist Parties, which for many years identified so closely with the Soviet U nion, was often determined by the needs of the increasingly tragic parody of socialism in the USSR, so intellectuals in search of a truer Marxist heritage were further attracted to abstraction - ultimately to ideas measured solely against other ideas - instead of properly taking on board the rigours and controlling influence of politics in the mate rial world. This increasing specialization in the discipline of philoso phy, alongside an ever-greater retreat to the confines of the academy, also helps explain the emergence of an ever more obscure language, much of it incomprehensible to the mass of ordinary people, as specia lists communicated with other specialists, and as Marxist intellectuals tended to have less and less contact with ordinary working people. I would agree with Anderson's general thesis, which helps explain the trajectory of some post-Marxist and non-Marxist European thought as well as that of Marxism itself. But I would nevertheless sug gest that this retreat into the more abstract forms of intellectual endeavour and withdrawal from the testing grounds of the material world was not entirely damaging for the history of Western Marxism. If the perceived needs and at any rate the instructions emanating from the Eastern bloc were increasingly unlike those that fuelled the 1 9 1 7


15

Revolution, philosophical reflection and the retreat into the academy were to an extent to serve as a protective shield from the caricature of communism that the USSR and its satellites increasingly became. Thus to some extent the growing importance of philosophy helped protect intellectuals from a more pragmatic adaptation to either Stalinism or for that matter to outright support for capitalism. The work ofBad iou, Balibar and Ranciere is in each case primarily philosophical, or at least strongly informed by philosophy. Badiou staunchly defends philosophy as an intellectual tool ofprimary impor tance, and is concerned with how philosophy is able to both throw light on and draw inspiration from politics, art, science and love. Balibar combines an interest in the philosophy of Marxism and its antecedents with interests in issues regarding rights and other aspects of politics. Ranciere's interests span aesthetics, film and history, as well as politics, and his starting point for political theory is philos ophical reflection, often incorporating references to classical anti quity. Arguably, one of the strengths of this approach is precisely that, as philosophers, they are more remote from material concerns than, for example, many political theorists working in academic poli tics departments, or practitioners of politics such as trade unionists, elected representatives of political parties and civil servants. They are thus less likely to have been swayed by the profound disillusion ments of many others of the 1 968 generation. If they are, as we might suggest, now appealing to a new generation of intellectuals and activists who have been radicalized by anti-racist movements, anti corporate globalization movements and ecology movements, their thought is as much influenced by other thought as by concrete events. But in this process they have resisted some of the excessive conces sions to either Stalinism or liberalism. On the other hand, the emphasis on the abstract which is found in Badiou, Ranciere and often in Balibar also has its drawbacks. My argument is that when tested on or subjected to the rigours of the material world, important aspects of the theories of each of these writers are flawed; translating theory into practical relevance - into intervention in the world as we live it - is made difficult at some point in each case precisely by insufficient reference to the material world. The primarily abstract vantage point of philosophy has not

16


been tempered and counterbalanced by sufficient attention to other domains, including the economic and the political. The third general aspect of French thought since 1 945 I wish to mention is the rise and dominance of structuralism and post structuralism. In the broadest of terms, and without even attempting to distinguish between structuralism and poststructuralism (whose distinction is anyway made far less in France than in the English speaking world) , I want to raise the question of whether this intellec tual tendency is in the tradition of the emancipatory philosophical tradition or not. I have already pointed out that amongst the authors I identifY as contributing to a renewal ofleft thought, Harvey, Jame son, Hardt, Negri and Zizek are each either influenced by aspects of poststructuralism or draw on theory which itself can be described as structuralist or poststructuralist. Some of those who are thought of as being at the heart of this, including Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, have positioned themselves in support of minority groups and the women's movement, so associated with progressive politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen tury. However, as I have argued elsewhere at greater length (Hewlett 2003: 1 2 7-35 ) , the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism should be understood in part in the context of a certain de-politicization of intellectual life, or at least the decline of the left, in France since the early 1 9 70s. I will illustrate this view only briefly. As far as descrip tions of society are concerned, it is perhaps in Jean Baudrillard's work that this sort of approach becomes most extreme, where images are omnipresent and the distinction between the concrete and repre sentation no longer exists. But even Foucault, well known for taking stands in favour of the anti-nuclear and gay movements in the 1 960s and 1 970s, portrays power as so diffuse that it becomes very hard to locate at all, and therefore it would seem difficult to resist (e.g. Foucault 1 980). Jean-Fran�ois Lyotard's argument in The Postmodern Condition ( 1 984 [ 1 9 79]) is no doubt the clearest example of a break with the emancipatory tradition, where the 'grand narra tives' of the past, associated strongly with the Enlightenment, are, according to Lyotard, decreasingly relevant; contemporary reality has become so diffuse, fragmented and heterogeneous that it is impos sible to make generalizations about it, including ones relating to


17

transformation. Alex Callinicos, in Against Postmodernism ( 1 989) , has argued that far from being a system of thought which was part of the legacy of May 1 968, postmodernism is more accurately described as part of the failure of l 968. In a more recent book, he argues that ' [0] ne sub-theme of postmodernism is that social critique - which depends on the possibility of transcendence, since it thematizes the limitations of existing social relations and therefore if only implicitly adverts to the necessity of surpassing these relations - is no longer possible' (Callinicos 2006: 4) . This is a debate which will and should continue and it will be clear that my own position is close to that of Callinicos and other left critics (e.g. Dews 1 987 and Starr 1 995) . I suspect that a substantial renewal of activism and the material circumstances which encourage the left would make much debate within poststructuralism seem poorly grounded, rather irrelevant and indeed the result of a relative detachment of intellectuals from political struggles rather than any sort of reflection of them. For the time being, suffice it to say that whereas the explicitly praxis-oriented thought of the immedi ate postwar period left no doubt as to the link between intellectual activity and political activism - if one espoused Sartre's thought one was virtually obliged to at least believe in the necessity for left politi cal activism - much poststructuralist thought does not do this. Although poststructuralism is intrinsically radical in its method. its political consequences are not necessarily radical by any means. Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere each, in their own ways, substantially depart from what has become known as poststructuralism. However, as we shall see, all three are either influenced by this tradition or engage with it in one way or another. Badiou engages in a rather ambivalent fashion with Deleuze, Ranciere is influenced by decon struction, and Balibar by Derrida. However, each is certainly more obviously aware of the contemporary political conjuncture than the major exponents of poststructuralism.

The legacy of Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser had a formative influence on the writers under consideration in this book and there is an enduring, if complex

18


relationship between their mature work and that of Althusser. Badiou says of Althusser that his attempt to 'think subjectivity with out a subject is admirable', if flawed in many ways (AM 67-76) . Ranciere in particular defined himself against Althusser from the late 1 960s, a reaction which had an important influence on the course of his own thought. Balibar's work, on the other hand, often has strong and more positive echoes of Althusser's. These relation ships to Althusser will become clearer in the chapters which follow, and here I confine myself to brief remarks regarding Althusser him sel£ (Readers who are already familiar with Althusser's work may wish to skip this section.) In the opening lines ofFor Marx ( 1 969 [ 1 965] : 2 1 ) Althusser argues that for Marxists philosophical enquiry was 'essential if we are to emerge from the theoretical impasse history has left us in' and Reading Capital ( 1 970 [ 1 965]) is indeed one of the most serious philosophical interpretations of Marx's mature work that have been written. It out lines a theory ofpolitical economy as a structure which is complex and over-determined and constructs an anti-Hegelian interpretation which challenges what the authors see as the mistaken, teleological approach to history which characterized much of postwar Marxism. At first glance Althusser's project might seem quite un-philosophical, for he is keen to elaborate what he regards as a truer, scientific Marx ism (or more accurately Marxism-Leninism) , which proposed a new version of historical materialism as the science of the history of social formations. Seeking a return to a more explicitly class-based Marx ism, he was writing against, in particular, the interpretations of Marx pursued by Lukacs, Gramsci and especially Sartre. But science, politics and philosophy are all inextricably linked: Philosophy is a certain continuation of politics, in a certain domain vis-a-vis a certain reality. Philosophy represents politics in the domain of theory, or to be more precise: with the sciences - and vice versa, philosophy represents scientificity in politics, with the classes engaged in the class struggle. (Althusser 1 97 1 : 64-5) Put more simply: 'Philosophy is, in the last instance, the class struggle in theory' (Althusser 1 973: 1 1 ) .


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Althusser was insistent that there was a substantial and crucial dif ference between the young Marx and the mature Marx. He argues that in Marx's early writings, which were enjoying much positive attention in the postwar period in France, Marx had not broken philo sophically with Hegel, and the thesis contained within the early writ ings that Man was alienated and would later achieve self realization was pure ideology rather than rational analysis. But in Marx's work starting from The German Ideology (with Engels, 1 9 70 [ 1 932] ) and the Theses on Feuerbach ( 1 968a [ 1 888] ) , there emerged a true science ofhis torical materialism (both these works were written in 1 845 and both remained unpublished for some time ) . I n fact, this 'epistemological break', as Althusser describes it, was a scientific revolution in the realm of history just as significant as the development of mathematics in Greek antiquity and Galileo's pioneering work in scientific physics. Althusser's theoretical innovations are without a doubt more nuanced than the way in which they emerged from the heated debates of the 1 960s and 1 970s and his posthumous works have on the whole served to portray a more subtle philosophical and political analysis than those seen during his lifetime. However, at risk of simplification for the sake of concision, some of the other main aspects of his reading of Marx and further elaboration of historical materialism can be sum marized as follows. Again in For Marx, Althusser declares his intention to 'draw a line of demarcation between Marxist theory and the forms of philosophical 'and political) subjectivism which have compromised it or threatened it' (Althusser 1 969 [ 1 965] : 1 2 ) . By the time Marx wrote Capital, he could no longer be regarded as a thinker who emphasized the role of the subject in history and humanist interpretations of his later works were highly misleading. In fact, history was a 'process without a sub ject or goal' and he argued that ' [t]o be dialectical materialist, Marx ist philosophy must break with the idealist category of the "Subject" as origin, Essence and Cause, responsible in its interiority for all the deter minations of the external "Object", whose internal " Subject" it is called' (Althusser 1 9 73: 94) . The role of the individual in history, he argued, is one where s/he embodies the process but is not a subject of history itself. Althusser pursues this argument by suggesting that in relation to the capitalist mode of production, individuals are its

20


agents, whether capitalist or worker, and whether in support of or against capitalism. This certainly does not mean the individual is unable to think or act politically; far from it. But it does mean that different types of individuality are peculiar to different modes of pro duction and this is not general individuality. The specific form these individuals take is greatly inflenced by ideology. I t is precisely in his exploration of the nature and role of ideology that Althusser made the most enduring contribution, at least from the standpoint of the beginning of the twenty-first century, and this is the aspect of his work that has perhaps had the most enduring influ ence on Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere. In his powerful and highly lucid essay entitled ' Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses. Notes towards an Investigation' (in Althusser 200 1 [ 1 97 1 ] : 85- 1 26 ) _ Althusser begins by arguing that in order to be sustainable, capitalist societies must enable the reproduction oflabour power, including the 'reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology or of the "prac tice" of that ideology' (89) . I n other words, in order to be compliant, labour must believe in the system they are playing a crucial role in propping up, via a complex mix of, for example, religious, ethical, legal and political ideologies. Certainly, the capitalist ideological edifice is determined (in two famous phrases) 'in the last instance' by the economic base, as Marx argued on many occasions, but the superstructure is nevertheless 'relatively autonomous' from the base. In this scheme of things, the capitalist state plays a crucial role in helping perpetuate an ideology that is conducive to the interests of capitalism via Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) , which include schools, the family, the mass media, and 'the cultural I SA' , which includes literature, the arts and sports (96) . The traditional Marxist Leninist view of the role of the capitalist state as one of repression and ultimately violence, in particular on the part of the army, the police, the courts and prisons, is not wrong. But it needs to be supplemented with a theory of ideology. Whereas the Repressive State Apparatuses (the army, the police, and so on [RSAs] ) function primarily 'by violence', ISAs function first and foremost 'by ideology', although there is often an element of ideology supporting RSAs and an ele ment of repression supporting ISAs (97-8) . Add to this Althusser's adoption of elements of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory in a section


21

of his essay entitled ' Ideology is a "Representation" of the Imaginary Relationship of I ndividuals to their Real Conditions of Existence' and the Althusserian legacy regarding theories of ideology becomes clearer still. It is perhaps the clarity of Althusser's argument, combined with the rapid growth of what has come to be known as 'popular culture', that has meant this particular aspect of his thought has enjoyed such influ ence over the past few decades, especially in the field of Cultural Stu dies in British and North American universities. I n this domain, Althusser's theory of ideology has been so influential in one form or another that it is often taken for granted without any acknowledge ment of its origins. Althusser's polemic against what he regarded as historicist and tel eological versions of Marxism was influenced in part by Claude Levi Strauss' structuralist anthropology, and possibly to a greater extent by Spinoza. On the whole, and despite the exaggeration of his posi tions to which his critics were prone (especially Thompson 1 978) , it is probably fair to label Althusser's thought 'structural Marxism'. Just as importantly, however, it is necessary to emphasize that his positions should be seen in the context of his long-term membership of, but marginal political position within, the PCF. Althusser joined the Party in 1 948 and from 1 956, the year of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, international commun ism was in crisis; it became increasingly clear that the Soviet l! nion itself had not only compromised many of the principles and goals upon which it was founded, but had achieved the particular social and governmental order which existed in the country by means of the most terrible repression. In the European Communist Parties, domestic politics as well as international outlook had become ever more preoccupied with the particular needs of the Soviet Union rather than considerations regarding the progress of communism on a world scale, a development which would lead European Communist Parties to the systematic compromise with social-democratic govern ment. Althusser's declared aim was to find once again a revolutionary form of Marxism in both theory and practice, which included sympa thy with Maoism, and he argued for example that the Cultural Revo lution was implicitly a left critique of Stalinism. In 1 9 78 Althusser

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confirmed his dissidence within the PCF with the publication of his essay 'What Must Change in the Party', which denounced the weak ness of democracy and the entrenched bureaucracy within the Party. (Elliott 2006) . The above remarks on some key aspects of Althusser's thought are intended to help understand over the course of this book the ways in which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's thought has developed, both in terms of the influence of Althusser and reaction against him. For the time being, suffice it to say that Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere all share characteristics which relate them directly to Althusser. Most obviously, they each take an approach which is informed by a back ground in philosophy. Next, they each have strong views on the nature of the human subject, which become an integral part of their systems of thought. They are also each intensely political, to the extent that they are part of the tradition ofpraxis, as discussed towards the beginning of this chapter, and, like Althusser, view thought, including philosophy, as an activity with profoundly practical ends. Finally, they each remain influenced by Marxism - and arguably Althusserian Marxism - on what are sometimes important points.

Concluding remarks

I have attempted in this introductory chapter to suggest some of the intellectual and political contexts and parameters which help under stand the nature and development of the thought of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere. This is in keeping with both my and their view that in order to understand thought, and in order to judge its relevance (which is arguably part of the same process) , some discussion is neces sary of the material and ideological-intellectual conditions of its pro duction. I will return to many of the themes discussed in this introductory chapter as we proceed through the book, and will once again address some of the questions raised in this chapter in the book's conclusion. The structure of this book is straightforward, but a few words of explanation might nevertheless be useful. Badiou's thought is the most elaborate and complex, so Chapter 2 introduces his thought to


23

readers who have little familiarity with him, together with some dis cussion of what I regard as overall problems, relating in particular to Badiou's ontology and his failure properly to explain movement and change. Chapter 3 explores Badiou's theory of politics in more depth and covers a wider range of areas of his political thought. I then turn in Chapter 4 to an examination ofRanciere's theory of politics, adopt ing this sequence mainly because of the direct comparability between some important aspects of Badiou's and Ranciere's thought. This sequence also allows the two thinkers with the more totalizing view of the world and of philosophy to be examined side by side. In Chap ter 5 I examine what I regard as the key aspects of Balibar's thought, arguing that it is important to understand his political positions since the early 1 980s in order to understand his thought. Both Badiou and Ranciere ultimately position themselves at a considerable distance from the lived reality of politics and this weakens their ability to forge a wholly relevant theory of politics. Balibar, on the other hand, despite profound insights in some areas, ultimately fails to reconcile a body of theory strongly influenced by Marxism with a more terre-ii terre orientation towards the real world of liberal democratic politics which is in some respects highly conciliatory.

Chapter 2

Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth

There is little doubt that Alain Badiou is among the most powerful thinkers of our time and his thought is only beginning to receive the attention it deserves. His project is profoundly innovative, radical and contemporary, yet he is at the same time committed to some of the central concerns of classical philosophy. He defines philosophy in such a way that it is intimately connected with and dependent upon issues of our time, but argues that the Platonic concerns of truth and being are the sine qua non of philosophical enquiry. His influences are varied and include Plato, Lacan, Sartre, Althusser, Mallarme and Rousseau, but in the key area of the political he is clearly just as influ enced by his own activism on behalf of exploited groups. Badiou is in strong and forthright disagreement with the central figures of post structuralist thought such as Lyotard and Derrida and more generally with proponents of the linguistic turn and notions of the Other. But whilst he condemns the 'sophistry' of poststructuralism he is no more part of either the analytic or hermeneutic folds, also criticizing con temporary philosophers such as John Rawls who are persuaded by the central importance to thought of human rights and individual lib erties. His relationship with Marx is more difficult to categorize, and despite - or perhaps because of - the extraordinarily broad scope of his theoretical references, he has not yet undertaken a systematic engagement with Marxism. Above all, Badiou seeks to explore momentous change in the form of what he describes as ivinements, and the consequences of these events, which are both of universal rele vance and defined in a highly subject-oriented way. Such events only take place in the realms of science, art, emancipatory politics and love, and human beings can only fully become subjects when acting in a way which is faithful to an event. Badiou's thought is political to the core, in that it explores the commitment, or fi diliti, of a subject or


25

subjects to an event which might become part ofa transformative pro cess, but it stretches far beyond politics as well. Badiou's thought is highly original to the extent that it is not strongly influenced by one particular school of thought to the near exclusion of others; it breaks out of previously existing moulds, pursu ing a line of enquiry which often resorts to first principles and does not conform strictly to any particular lineage. He insists that in order to have an understanding of philosophy we need to have some grasp of the history and current state of its own 'conditions', which are also science, art, emancipatory politics and love. He staunchly defends the autonomy of philosophy, arguing that many modern philosophers have wrongly abandoned metaphysics, and that in order to compre hend virtually anything we need to develop an understanding of the nature of truth. He defends philosophy from , for example: party poli tical concerns, popular culture and other sorts of trivialization (or superficial manifestations) of contemporary reality (MP) . It should also be said at the outset that, by contrast with much Western philo sophy of the late twentieth century, Badiou takes ontology, or the science of being, very seriously. For him, ontology is mathematical and in order to understand the special nature of the event and why it is literally extraordinary, we must have recourse to set theory, as elaborated by Georg Cantor. Only by taking this route can we under stand why the event is so central to an understanding of the world and how it relates to subject, truth and being. Thus, Badiou's complex weltanschauung draws on a wide range of philosophical and other traditions and puts together elements which have not been matched in the same way before, with the inevitable corollary that there is to an extent a new language. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the breadth and ambition of his philosophical project which, whatever conclusions one might wish to draw regard ing its usefulness, is certainly groundbreaking. As Peter Hallward (2003: xxiii) puts it, 'Badiou's work is today almost literally unread able according to the prevailing codes - both political and philoso phical - of the Anglo-American academy.' Badiou's intellectual and political trajectory can be summarized as follows. He was one of the founder members of the Parti socialiste unifie (PSU) in 1 958, whose creation was largely a response to the

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active or tacit collusion by large parts of the French left with the gov ernment's war against Algerian nationalists in the struggle for national liberation. He was part of the Lacano-Althusserian Cahiers pour l'analyse group in the 1 960s and was profoundly influenced by the student and workers' revolt in May 1 968, an uprising which has had a key influence on his thought and to which he frequently refers. In 1 968 he co-founded the Maoist splinter organization, the U nion des communistes de France marxistes-leninistes (UCFML) and con tinued to act and write as an orthodox Maoist during the 1 9 70s, up to and including his Theorie du sujet, published in 1 982. I n 1 988 Badiou published DEtre et l'ivinement, which can be seen in part as a major rebuttal of the postmodern idea that philosophy itself no longer had anything to say in terms of universal values, and had become a mere reflection of developments in other spheres. This work effectively established Badiou's philosophy as being independent from other major modern schools (although there were clear and acknowledged influences of a number of other thinkers) and it is here that he elabo rates at length his argument that mathematics, and in particular set theory, offers the most useful model for understanding the nature of being. Badiou has been politically active in defence of oppressed groups since 1 968 and since 1 985 has been a leading member of the small, 'post-party' political organization, simply called Organisation politique, which intervenes directly in a variety of campaigns around issues such as housing, immigration and rights at work and pub lishes a regular bulletin, entitled La Distance politique. I n addition to his numerous philosophical works he has published novels, plays and the libretto of an opera. I n this chapter I examine what can be described as Badiou's mature work, that is his philosophy from L'Etre et l'ivinement onwards, a period which is generally thought of as post-Maoist, although traces of Maoism are still found in the later Badiou. Badiou is reasonably well known in France, at least within aca demic and intellectual circles concerned with left philosophy or politics; he has taught philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure since 1 999 and before that taught at the University of Paris VIII for thirty years. Neither in France nor elsewhere, however, has Badiou received anything like the attention enjoyed by intellectuals


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associated with postmodernism, in particular Derrida and Lyotard. The very richness, originality and volume of Badiou's work and the fact that one can take little for granted in terms of philosophical pre cedent is, paradoxically, one of the reasons he is relatively little known in Britain and the USA. The English translation of his major work to date, L'Etre et /'evenement, was published in 2005, more than fifteen years after its original publication in France, and other, shorter works have appeared in English translation recently. There is begin ning to be a serious interest in and engagement with his work, parti cularly perhaps on the part of a younger generation of scholars who are interested in looking outside both the traditional Marxist framework and poststructuralism, but are unwilling to accept the Anglo-American-infiuenced liberal alternative; they are, I would argue, convinced neither by the social implications nor the ethics free logic of neoliberal economics, nor by the defensive individual ism of political liberalism. They are keen to explore the legacy of May 1 968 but do not feel obliged to take a position wholly in favour of orthodox Marxism and are drawn still less to the political cyni cism that has become associated with poststructuralism. In short, the growing interest in Badiou is not only post-Soviet Union but also post Cold War, and is informed by struggles against corporate globaliza tion. Badiou stands in partial opposition to the combative melancholy of the 1 980s and the early 1 990s, without resorting to a philosophy which largely responds to political developments; his thought is carefully built on solid foundations and is therefore enduring. Perhaps as the star of poststructuralism begins to wane, intellectuals and acti vists alike are once again becoming interested in bodies of thought which encourage approaches which offer radical alternatives to the status quo, although Badiou stresses that he has no clear vision of an alternative future now it seems that communism is not a viable alternative. However we choose to interpret Badiou's rising popular ity in the English-speaking world, we can be sure that his second magnum opus, Logiques des mondes, published in 2006, will take rela tively little time to find its way into an English-language edition. In the discussion below I take a particular interest in the political aspects (broadly defined) of Bad iou's work. But just as importantly I offer a summary - with much inevitable simplification - of his

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thought, without which the political aspects would remain unclear for readers with little familiarity with Badiou's work. I then move on to a brief critique of general aspects of the philosopy, in order to prepare the ground for a more thorough critique of the political aspects ofBadiou's work in Chapter 3. Because of the totalizing nature of his thought, it would make little sense to critically examine the explicitly political aspects without giving reasonable attention to the overall project. I begin by looking at Badiou's conception of the nature of philosophy itself, followed by an examination of his notions of truth and the event, before identifying what I believe are prob lems with his system.

The role of philosophy

Taken as a whole, Badiou's thought can be described as having two major and closely related objectives. It is first an elaborate assertion of the idea that the way to understand the world and to achieve self realization is to intervene in it. Second, it is a robust critique of the various value systems and schools of thought which over the past quarter-century in particular have sought to minimize the potential for large-scale change in favour of, at best, limited and partial pro gress. He argues that philosophy must 'propose a principle of inter ruption', rise above its current position of semi-subordination to the world as it is and regain a necessary distance. Badiou's own contribu tion, then, is no less than to 'interrupt' both contemporary philosophy and the world as it currently exists, and to 'rediscover a foundational style, a decided style, a style in the school of a Descartes, for example' (IT 48-50) . Philosophy should be 'open to the irreducible singularity of what happens, a philosophy that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected. Such a philosophy would then be a philo sophy of the event' (IT 56) . An appropriate starting point for a more detailed discussion of Badiou's work (and a place at which Badiou himself has chosen to begin an exposition of it) is a series of comments on the climate in which philosophy is operating today, which I will summarize briefly (IT 39-5 7 ) . I n order to thrive, he argues, philosophy must encompass


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four dimensions, namely revolt, logic, universality and risk, each of which is currently under such severe pressure that 'the very existence of philosophy is at stake'. Revolt is under pressure because today's life in the West does not make room for thought as revolt, both because the West declares itself already free - by contrast, advocates of the West argue, with the enslavement of the rest of the world - and because everything is expressed in the form of commerce; the need for revolt is apparently obsolete because commercial 'freedom' has been achieved. As far as logic is concerned, life in the West 'is sub mitted to the profoundly illogical regime of communications', which consists of the transmission of disconnected and incoherent state ments, images and impressions so that 'mass communication presents the world to us as a spectacle devoid of memory' . There is little room for the pursuit oflogic in such circumstances. Flying in the face of many contemporary philsophical trends, and setting himself apart from a broad range of theorists, including Levinas and Rawls, for example, Badiou asserts the importance of universality. This is part of what puts him in a quite different category from many contemporary cultural theorists and analysts who depend on such notions as the Other and difference, notions and approaches which have influenced both the intellectual and political arenas, espe cially campaigns in defence of minority rights. Examination of the universal is in hostile territory in the contemporary world because this world is so fragmented and specialized, especially as regards tech nology, production and skills. One result of this fragmentation and specialization is precisely that it is hard for people to see what might be universal, or 'valid for all thinking'. Finally, because people pay so much attention to calculating what will make them more secure in various ways, the important dimension of risk cannot develop; our desire for the known and the safe precludes decisions which involve elements of the unpredictable or the unknown. Philosophy finds itself in hostile territory today, then, and its gen eral task is to meet the challenge posed to it by the rule of merchan dise, communication, technical specialization and a perceived need for security. All three major schools in contemporary philosophy, Badiou argues, contribute in their different ways to the impoverishment and

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increasing impotence of philosophy. First, the hermeneutic tradition, whose best-known proponents are Heidegger and Gadamer, is mainly concerned with interpretation. Next, analytic philosophy, inspired by logical positivism and the later Wittgenstein, in particular seeks through the use of logic and grammar to analyse language and to separate meaningful from non-meaningful utterances. Finally, the postmodern orientation, borrowing from the other two, seeks to deconstruct and show we no longer have any use for the generally agreed aspects of modernity: in particular the concepts of the histori cal subject, progress, revolution, humanity and the ideal of science. Postmodern philosophy attempts to deconstruct the notion of totality, asserting instead that what characterizes postmodernity is the mul tiple, plurality and heterogeneity. Most famously, perhaps, Jean Franc;:ois Lyotard announces the 'end of metanarratives', including those of revolution, the proletariat and progress, thus denying philo sophy any ability to totalize. More generally: 'Language games, deconstruction, weak thought, ruin of Reason, promotion of the frag mentary, bitty discourse: all this argues in favour of a line of argu ment which is sophistry, and leads philosophy up a blind alley' (C 76) Badiou argues that these three orientations - hermeneutic, analytic and postmodern - have two, on the whole undesirable, characteris tics in common (IT 45-47) . First, they each treat metaphysics as a thing of the past. 'In a certain sense, these three orientations main tain that philosophy is itself situated within the end of philosophy, or that philosophy is announcing a certain end of itself.' Despite their profound differences in many respects, both Heidegger and Carnap believe that the history of metaphysics is now closed and so does Lyotard, for example, in announcing the end of metanarratives, and in particular the end of the subject and of history. Another way of putting this is that philosophy is no longer a search for truth, but a search for the plurality of meanings. The other point that these orien tations have in common is that they each put language centre-stage, which again implies that a contemporary quest for meaning replaces a classical (and more valid) quest for truth. These two characteristics - the declaration of the end ofmetaphy sics and an emphasis on the importance of language - 'represent a real danger for thinking and for philosophy in particular', because


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they do not allow philosophy to explore properly the realms of revolt, logic, universality and risk, as discussed above. If the notion of truth is abandoned, and analysts simply explore the plurality of meaning, philosophy will become a simple object of circulation like any other. If philosophy primarily comments on language, it accepts the frag mented and incoherent nature of communication and does nothing to promote any type of universality; if it does not move away from this framework philosophy will be ever more an exercise in the description oflanguage games. In the initial essay of Conditions, entitled 'Le (re) tour de la philoso phie elle-meme' ('The (re) turn of philosophy itself ' ) , Badiou goes a little deeper into the argument that philosophy has lost its way. Many of today's thinkers believe that philosophy's history is coming to an end and the result is that philosophy is either grafted on to other areas of activity - such as art, poetry, science, political action or psy choanalysis - or philosophy is presented as being nothing but an account ofits own history, a museum piece. So contemporary philoso phy 'combines the destruction of its past and the empty expectation of its future' (C 58) . Philosophy must now break with historicism, with the 'geneological imperative', and it must express itself without refer ence to its own history. There should be an autonomous legitimation of philosophy, such as Descartes or Spinoza practised. The modern sophists, according to Badiou, who present themselves as philosophers but are in fact a threat to philosophy, are those who, following Wittgenstein, believe that: thought finds itself before the following choice: either the effects of discourse, language games, or silent indication, pure 'showing' of what is subtracted from the grip of language. Those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between truth and error or wander ing [errance] , but between word [ parole] and silence, between what can be said and what is impossible to say. Or between pronounce ments which have meaning and those which do not. ( C 62) Whilst it would be hard to exaggerate Badiou's ambitions on behalf of philosophy, at the same time the vitality of philosophy is directly dependent on developments in the other domains, and only moves

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forward as a result ofdevelopments which are outside ofits immediate sphere of activity: The fact that philosophy does not itself produce truth is directly linked to regimes of truth which are precisely the conditions of it . . . philosophy is conditioned by truths. I would therefore say: there must be truths in order for there to be philosophy because philoso phy must examine and think the regime of compossibility of the truth events which condition it. (EB 9) By 'compossibility' (compossibiliti) Badiou means 'possibility in common'. Badiou argues that events that have taken place in the realms of science, art, thought about love and politics allow for a much-needed renewal of philosophy (MP 59) . As far as science is concerned, the event is the pioneering work of mathematicians who include in parti cular Cantor and Paul Cohen, work which establishes the theory of the multiple. I n the realm of love, the writings of Jacques Lacan have altered this particular condition of philosophy. As far as politics is concerned, the event is found in the historical sequence which runs roughly from 1 965 to 1 980. This comprises May 1 968 (a crucial moment for Badiou both personally and in terms of the way he under stands politics) , the Cultural Revolution in China, the Iranian Revo lution against the Shah in 1 980 and the workers' uprising in Poland a little later (MP 65) . By contrast with the situation when Stalinist Marxism prevailed, 'philosophy is again possible precisely because it does not have to legislate on history or politics, but simply think the contemporary re-opening of the possibility ofpolitics, from the basis of obscure events' ( MP 66) . Finally, in the realm of art, Badiou singles out poetry in particular, because ' [t]he poem is without mediation' and 'has nothing to communicate. It is only a saying, a declaration that draws its authority only from itself' (in Hallward 2003: 1 97 ) and is therefore of universal relevance. More specifically, the event is the poetry of Paul Celan (MP 66) . Badiou also singles out Beckett as especially significant in the realm of prose writing (B) . These are the events which, in each of the generic procedures, should condition con temporary philosophy and the challenge is precisely to remodel philo sophical enquiry in terms that are faithful to these events (MP 69) .

Alain Badiou: Event. Subject and Truth

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I would like to pause for a moment to comment on Badiou's over view of the definition and practice of philosophy. One may well wish to agree with Badiou in suggesting that the three dominant schools of philosophy reflect the current state of the material world to such extent that they militate against the distance philosophy needs for a proper engagement with transformative processes in the world at large. In other words these schools are each in their own way philoso phies of the status quo. One might also want to welcome Badiou's insistence that it is the material world that conditions the develop ment of philosophy, not the reverse. We might applaud his frontal attack on the slippery scepticism of much postmodern philosophy and its reluctance to take sides. But I would at this stage simply ques tion the choice of the four generic procedures, which are also the con ditions of philosophy. Badiou tells us that these are the only areas in which we are able to become subjects, but, short of mentioning that philosophical preoccupation with these areas goes back a long way, he does not explain why these and only these are the only four relevant realms, the only realms in which individuals can become subjects. The precise reasons for this are not clear. Moreover, given the lingering influence of Marx on Badiou's work and given an enduring concern to relate philosophy directly to the material world, it is odd that the economy plays no part in the core structure of his scheme of things. There seems to be no residual influ ence of Marx's political economy on the philosophical infrastructure, however much Badiou might condemn and combat the social effects of today's all-pervasive, virtually unfettered drive for profits. He does of course wish to avoid the pitfalls of exaggerated economic determin ism, but allowing the economy no central place in the philosophical scheme of things does seem to weaken his case, all else being equal.

Truth

I want to explore further this blend of ambition and modesty on behalf of philosophy by looking at Badiou's conception of truth, the aspect of his system where this blend is perhaps best expressed: ' the only question that philosophy is concerned with is that of truth,

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not because it produces any, but because it offers a way of accessing the unity of a moment of truths, a conceptual site where the generic procedures are reflected as being compossible' (MP 1 8 ) . Certainly, according to Badiou the notion of truth is under attack in contempor ary philosophy (EB 10) and 'the idea of the End of philosophy is also the idea of the end of the category of Truth' (C 75) . It will be clear that Badiou's conception of truth is very far from a positivist one; he is emphatic that knowledge does not in itself constitute truth (e.g. MP 1 8 ) . Neither is it Stalinist-Marxist, nor is it postmodern, as postmodernism sets out to promote multiplicity and non-universality of truth. We might add that it is not Foucauldian either, as Foucault sought to explore the relationship between power and truth in a framework where in any society there are many sorts of power relations and institutional arrangements which are associ ated with multiple 'discourses of truth' (Foucault 1 980: 92- 1 08 ) . For Foucault the category of truth is often in a position of subordination to power and has negative connotations, whereas for Badiou it is both positive in nature and universal in its significance; by contrast with Foucault's conception of truth, Badiou's cannot possibly be con fused with ideology. Truth in this schema is certainly universal, in keeping with classical metaphysics and central to Plato's concerns, by whom Badiou is influ enced in this respect. On the other hand, for Badiou truth only occurs in particular circumstances where there are three indissociable com ponents of one process: an event, a subject of the event and fidelity to the event on the part of the subject. A truth emerges thanks to the subject or subjects who declare fidelity to an event and it is only in doing this that they become subjects. Truth, then, is not waiting out there in the world to be revealed by learning, or by any other process for that matter, but is created by individuals, either singly or in groups, regardless ofwhether philosophy or any other branch ofintel lectual activity is taking any notice. The coincidence of truth and the event (itself exceptional and rare [MP 1 7] ) is perhaps the most con troversial element of this approach, which Badiou expresses as fol lows: ' [A]ny truth has its origin in an event . . . Let us say that it is futile to imagine that one can invent anything (and all truths are inventions) if nothing happens, if "nothing takes place but the


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place'" (PM 24) . Put slightly differently: 'Something must happen, in order for there to be something new. Even in our personal lives, there must be an encounter, there must be something which cannot be calculated, predicted or managed, there must be a break based only on chance . . . ' (PH 1 24 ) . Bearing i n mind that truth can only occur i n the domains ofpolitics, love, art and science, perhaps the most straightforward example we can give is indeed in the realm oflove between two individuals. Two people meet by chance and fall in love, they commit to each other on the basis of this encounter (the event) and remain faithful to it. These individuals may not be able to understand fully their mutual attrac tion and commitment or be able to explain it to others. They might not have been able to predict such a development given what they knew of themselves and each other before it happened. The faithful ness to the event oftheir coming together might last for the rest of their lives, or far less long. But having met each other and fallen in love, the individuals embark upon a process of truth and self-realization as sub jects in the only way possible, that is in fidelity to an event. It is not possible to prove (in an empirical, positivist sense) that an event has taken place, as the truth process associated with the event only exists through the active commitment of those who declare its existence and importance. It even eludes definition. Truth is thus pri marily a matter of conviction, intervention and action, a process which allows us in the only way possible to enjoy self-realization as subjects. It occurs rarely and each manifestation of it is unique, but its significance is universal. Badiou's distance from positivism and empiricism is emphasized by frequent assertions that truth contrasts starkly with knowledge, which is 'what transmits, what repeats' (IT 6 1 , EE 269, C 20 1 ) . In the normal course of things, if 'nothing happens', there can be knowledge and there can be facts, but truth cannot occur (MP 1 6-1 7 ) . Drawing inspiration from Lacan (C 20 1 ) , he describes the relationship between knowledge and truth thus: [A] truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge. This means that all is played out in the thought of the duo truth/knowledge. This amounts, in fact, to thought about the rela tion - which is actually a non-relation - between, on the one hand

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post-evental fidelity, and on the other hand a fixed state of know 1edge . . . The key to the problem is the way in which a procedure of fidelity traverses existing knowledge, starting at this supernumery point which is the name of the event' (EE 36 1 , italics in original) So subj ective is this conception of truth that it is not possible to say exactly where a truth begins. An individual or individuals have to make a 'wager' on the happening and a truth begins with an 'axiom of truth', and a 'groundless decision' regarding the question of whether the happening is in fact an event or not ( IT 62) . The role of philosophy is to be a tool by which to access truths as they occur in the world at large. Badiou describes the relationship between philosophy and truths in the realms ofscience, politics, art and love as one of , saisie', meaning 'capture, taking, and also seizing, astonish ment'; philosophy seizes these truths and philosophers are seized by them ( C 68) . One of Badiou's most enthusiastic and effective illustrations of his philosophy is found in his Saint Paul. Lafondation de l'universalisme. In this short book he argues that the road to Damascus experience of the apostle Saint Paul, when he comes to believe in the resurrection of Christ and in its universal significance, is an excellent example of an individual becoming a subject through a life-changing faithfulness to and belief in an event (in this case the resurrection) : 'at the heart of Christianity there is this event, situated and exemplary, which is the death of the son of God on the cross . . . All the parameters of the doctrine of the event are found in Christianity' (EE 235) . Badiou's interest in Saint Paul and his insistence that all the elements of the philosophy of the event are contained in Christianity have led Slavoj Z izek to suggest that the barely hidden logic of his philosophy is a religious one ( Z izek 1 999: 1 27-70; also Bensai'd 200 1 : 1 43-7 1 ) . Zizek also points out that religion is not one of the truth procedures, but is nevertheless the site for Badiou's most developed example of an event. This criticism would seem rather inappropriate, as the religious comparison is only one example among many, and Badiou makes it clear that the example of Saint Paul and Christianity is particularly powerful because of the subsequent success of the Christian religion which is so crucially based on the universal significance of the event


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of the resurrection generated by people acting in fidelity to it. If there is an unexplained leap between the non-material and the material I would suggest that it is between Badiou's ontology and the material world, a point to which I return below. Another, more worldly example of a process of event-subject-truth is found in relation to the May 1 968 uprising, where those involved in May and who subsequently remained faithful to it were also embark ing on a process of truth which has universal significance. Badiou is in profound opposition to the postmodern, anti-Platonic standpoint that we can no longer construct views about political action on timeless or universal truths of any kind, that the world can only be explained or changed in far smaller chunks and far less radically than was once thought possible. According to the ultimately highly conservative postmodern line of argument, a project which has such 'metanarra tives' as a key reference point is bound to lead to totalitarianism of some kind, as happened on both left- and right-wing versions of such ideologies in the twentieth century. The theoretical consequence of this argument is that relativity abounds, the political implications are that change must be minimal and driven by a clinging to the safety of what is, as any grander schemes are both methodologically unsound and profoundly dangerous. Badiou's philosophy is in part a bold, elaborate and elegant rebuttal of this view, and an expression of the counter-view that a substantially better world inspired by radi cally novel events in various domains is possible, and depends for its realization on the energy and commitment offorward-looking people.

The event, movement and change

From the point of view of emancipatory politics, the general idea of the event is inspiring because it suggests that the unexpected can happen, that change is possible, even that tout est possible. On a perso nal, intuitive level the notion of the event is perhaps one of the most appealing aspects of Badiou's system, partly because it addresses and integrates as a central part of an explanatory framework the sheer wonder we might feel if we commit to something momentous: roman tic love, an exciting political development, a work of art, philosophy

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or literature, a baby . . . One can sometimes be at a loss to explain a happening in terms that others will understand; one is lost for words. 'It will therefore always be doubtful that an event has taken place, except for the one who intervenes, who decides on its belonging to the situation' (EE 229) . Highlighting the importance of subjective commitment to an event, perhaps with the elements of doubt, risk, surprise and inability to explain properly one's commitment, and making it central to a theory of transformative processes is appealing for this and other reasons. But in my view this sort offeeling probably cannot be made part of the way we develop theories of transforma tion, and more generally the notion of the event is the most proble matic aspect of Bad iou's thought. Taking the example of the French Revolution, for Badiou this event and all others must be seen as a happening which owed a large part to chance and contingency. The circumstances of French society at the end of the eighteenth century can be described using the knowledge we have of it. We can understand the nature ofland ownership, distri bution of wealth, relations between classes, institutional arrange ments for ruling the country, foreign relations, and so on, and we can examine the intellectual debates of the time. But no amount ofknow1edge of the circumstances of the ancien regime, according to Badiou, will allow us properly to understand or explain the event of 1 789 and what followed (e.g. EE 20 1 , EB 9 ) . Rather, the revolution must be seen as a supplement to the 'situation' (a concept whose usage is informed by Wittgenstein) in which it occurred and as an event whose truth was created by the commitment of men and women to the event, not only while it was taking place but also in its aftermath. Not only was the French Revolution far more than the sum of its causal parts, but it cannot be properly explained through scrutiny of these parts. Badiou makes the same point about the May 1 968 uprising, when the partici pants were: seized by what was happening to them, as ifby something extraor dinary, something properly incalculable . . . well beyond what any one person might have thought possible - that's what I call an eventmental dimension. None of the little processes that led to the event was equal to what actually took place . . . I simply think that


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none of the calculations internal to the situation can account for its interruption, and cannot, in particular, elucidate this kind of break in scale that happens at a certain moment, such that the actors themselves are seized by something of which they no longer know if they are its actors or its vehicle [supports] , or what carries it away . . . (PH 1 24) The strong element of surprise in the emergence of the event, and our inability to explain it in retrospect in terms of what already existed, is - although a familiar feeling to historians of May 1 968 in particular - perhaps the most difficult aspect of the event to accept. (An event is 'purely chance, uninferable from the situation' [EE 2 1 5] .) The event moves away from the repetition of the situa tion and in Saint Paul Badiou stresses that 'it is the essence of the event not to be preceded by any sign, and to surprise us by its grace, however vigilant we may be . . . "The day of the Lord will come like a thief in , the night" [Paul] (SP 1 1 9) . Put in more abstract terms, which he describes as 'the rock of my entire edifice', Badiou comments that ' [i]f there is an event, its belonging to the situation of its site is undecidable from the point ofview ofthe situation itself' (EE 202, italics in original ) . I will now raise some further questions regarding the nature of the event. First, it is not clear how significant an event needs to be to qua lify as an event. The examples Badiou gives tend, apart from in the domain of love, to be generally agreed as being momentous (at least in retrospect) : the resurrection of Christ, the French Revolution of 1 789, May 1 968, paradigm shifts in music, art, mathematics and so on. Badiou might reply that whether or not an occurrence becomes an event depends upon the response of individuals who might become faithful to it, but he also suggests, as we have seen, that an event is rare and exceptional. This raises the question of whether someone who fre quently and fleetingly falls in love, for example, in what others might consider to be a superficial way, is responding to (or rather creating) a genuine event and is therefore more (or more frequently) a subject than someone who does not do this. Can one practice fidelity and therefore become a subject in relation to a 'trivial' event? An event must be of universal significance, but what exactly does this mean when it is defined so subjectively? Also, do the French enjoy more

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'subjecthood' than the English because they are faithful to more revo lutions than the British, say, who have arguably arrived at a compar able socio-economic and political place without so many instances of sudden, momentous change? �ext, it is still not clear to me why fidelity (generating subjecthood and truth) must always be to an event, rather than to a state of affairs. Is not love something that can emerge gradually, without an obvious starting point, rather than as a coup deJoudre? (Badiou is emphatic that love is not just sex, incidentally.) Is not an expression of fidelity to the 1 9 1 7 revolution as much shorthand for a commitment to a much broader process, a particular view of the world and set of emancipa tory aspirations, which need not be expressed in terms of fidelity to an event at all, but can be put in terms of, say, fidelty to the aspirations and processes of socialism or communism, however they might be defined? Could we not in fact one day be faithful, in theory at least, to a (far more egalitarian and socially just) status quo, rather than to a dramatic point of change? Why must fidelity necessarily be to a per haps disputed and/or somewhat arbitrarily defined point ofdeparture for what might become the status quo? Some of Badiou's responses to these questions would no doubt emphasize the mathematical nature of his ontology, which again he derives in part from Lacan and which is a major focus ofL'Etre et I'eve nement. He is in search of the highest possible level ofpurity, which is as removed as possible from the material, and for him this level of abstraction is achieved by multiplicity as articulated by set theory. Philosophy has excluded maths for too long, he argues, in part because of its profound preoccupation with language, and must now become re-involved with maths, not as a philosophy rif mathematics but as philosophy which depends on and is conditioned by maths, which is accountable only to itself - it is axiomatic and does not inter pret or represent - and is thus sovereign in an absolute sense. I n par ticular, Badiou's ontology is based on set theory as elaborated by Georg Cantor, who radically redefined the relationship between the finite and the infinite, and the relationship between the parts and the whole. Being in these terms is pure multiplicity, and in set theory multiplicity is multiples of multiples and nothing more. We can describe Badiou's concept of the 'situation' as being the same as a set,


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that is 'presented multiplicity' ('toute multiplicite presentee' [EE 32] ) . The event, by stark contrast, does not belong to any existing set and belongs only to itself. It is a 'breakdown of the count' (PH 1 29 ) . In Logiques des mondes Badiou uses the mathematics of category theory to explain the nature of appearance (LM 4 1 9-47) . I can accept that all of this makes sense in terms of pure mathematics - which is why Badiou believes maths is ontologically valid, because maths represents nothing but itself - and that set theory is used here as a paradigm. But there does not seem to be any convincing bridge from his mathemati cal ontology to the emergence and operation of events (and subjects) in the various material realms in which they take place. In other words there seems to be little evidence that set theory actually works as a paradigm for significant developments in the material world. Badiou asserts that set theory works, but fails ultimately to show how; maths remains on one plane and eventmental developments on another, parallel and apparently disconnected one. A subtractive account of change might work in set theory, but is not convincing in the real world, or at least not as the dominant explanation of general change. Instead, we need an account of change which explores con stant movement and explains radical change as springing from - as well as adding to - this process of constant movement. Badiou's system is better at exploring the additional element in the form of event but fails to explain adequately the event's genesis because of an un-dynamic view of the status quo. I would argue therefore that Badiou's explanatory framework is in fact rather a static one which is not able to explain transformation at all. According to him, in the realm of the real the situation constantly repeats, and into this repetition bursts the event, which we cannot properly explain in terms of the nature of the situation. Put slightly differently, knowledge is wholly disconnected from truth. Certainly, Badiou's account of the genesis of the event emphasizes the impor tance of subjective commitment, of getting involved, but Badiou is so hostile to the idea that we might be able to understand the world with the help of empirical evidence that the nature of 'what is' (facts, knowledge, the situation) seems to be taken out of the equation of change altogether. In his eagerness to assert the importance of post eventmental, subjective intervention and the poverty of empiricism,

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he throws out any proper explanation of the emergence of the event in terms of the nature of the situation. The logic ofthis would seem to be that we should not attempt to understand the world properly but should wait until events happen and then act in fidelity to them. Cer tainly, Badiou insists that we should not in fact wait for the event, and that there are plenty of events in the past we can remain faithful to: 'If everything depends on an event, should one wait? Certainly not. Many events, even very distant ones, still require that one acts in fide lity towards them . . . ' (SP 1 1 9) . But the logic of his philosophy does indeed seem to be that we are playing a waiting, reactive game. There seems almost to be an inverted teleology taking place here: instead of 'final cause' explanations, or history leading inexorably towards one certain outcome, we seem on the contrary to be required to wait for the (inevitable) event which will push us forwards as long as we are faithful to it and work in favour of its consequences. I would like for a moment to compare Badiou with two great the ories of change, namely those of Darwin and Marx. Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection cannot be transferred directly to human societies, but it is exemplary in its ability to explain meta morphosis. It takes as its premise the idea that both the world of ani mals and plants on the one hand and their environment on the other are in a constant state of flux. Darwin goes on to make three general izations in order to explain his theory. First, individual members of a species differ to an extent from one another. Second, these differences between members of a species are to some degree hereditary. Third, animals and plants multiply at a rate which is faster than the environ ment can cope with, which means many must die at an early stage (Darwin 1 968 [ 1 859] : 7 1- 1 29 ) . Putting these three generalizations together, Darwin puts forward the following model of change: If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions of life, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisa tion . . . if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increase of each species . . . a severe struggle for life; then . . . I think it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variation oflife ever had occurred useful to each being's own welfare . . . But if variations useful to any organic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised


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will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to pro duce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preserva tion, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection. (Darwin 1 968 [ 1 859] : 1 69-70) I evoke Darwin's theory of evolution not because it is transferrable as a general theory of change to human societies, as I have said. But it does provide an excellent example - perhaps the example - of how organisms in a constant state of flux can, precisely because of this cea seless mobility, both evolve slowly and undergo substantial change. (What is missing in Darwin's account - a lacuna he fully acknowl edges - is the process by which characteristics are inherited and by which organisms are eventually generated which are incompatible with other individuals with common ancestors; the answer to this was later provided by the science of genetics.) The seed of a particular change, whilst not predictable in any precise sense, and not inevitable in its detail, is entirely contained in the logic of what is already in existence ( the 'si tuation' in Badiouian terms) . Darwinism explains change in terms which fully integrate an interpretation of the condi tions of 'what was' into 'what is now' . Marx, meanwhile, uses a theory of political economy to inform an explanation of historical movement and change, involving most cen trally a contradiction between forces of production and relations of production. The forces of production comprise all components of the means of production and labour power, including such diverse ele ments as machinery, the labour process and education of the working class. The relations of production, meanwhile, are the way in which the productive forces are owned (from an economic point of view) , a system of ownership investigated by Marx most fully, of course, under capitalism, where the bourgeoisie owns the means of production and the proletariat only its ability to work, or labour power. For Marx, the productive forces in particular are constantly changing and tend to become decreasingly compatible with the relations of production of a given time, which means social relations become more unstable. This is the core of his approach to the political economy of historical change, which he famously expresses thus:

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In the social production of their life, men enter into definite rela tions that are indispensible and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society , the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general . . . At a certain stage in their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is just a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. (Marx 1 968b [ 1 859] : 1 8 1-2) For both Darwin and Marx the theories of the status quo (to the extent that there can be a status quo where there is constant move ment) incorporate a theory of change within them. For both writers, the 'event' - for Darwin adaptation and for Marx social revolu tion - takes place as a result of aspects of the 'situation' explained in large part by their more general theories of this ever-changing status quo. For Badiou it is the other way round; something happens which cannot properly be explained by reference to the already-existing circumstances - ·the idea of massive change whose origin is a state of totality is imaginary' (EE 197) - and becomes an event of significant proportions because someone or some people commit themselves to what has happened. (Thus for Badiou an event cannot possibly be a natural event because there are no subjects in nature [EE 1 94] . ) In the case of Marx, the subject i s certainly important t o the extent that without agents of revolution there can be no revolution, but revolution in France for Marx, for example, was absolutely explic able with reference to, in particular, the socio-economic contradi tions under the ancien regime, in conjunction with an understanding of, for example, political developments. Badiou might in both cases respond by saying that the subject is absent from the cores of both


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these theories of change. In the case of Darwin's theory regarding bio logical change, this is of course the case and is not directly applicable to social change. As far as Marx is concerned, I would interpret his theory as allowing a substantial role for agency whilst insisting on definite tendencies in the development of human societies. Even more famously, Marx suggests that people make their own history, but within given circumstances. In Logiques des mondes Badiou responds to criticism for having no theory of change beyond the event, no explanation of what happens in the normal, 'non-evental' order of things. He devotes many pages to developing a more general explanation of change and takes us through the idea that there can be 'weak singularities' which are important instances of change which are less significant than 'strong singularities', also called events. What he calls 'materialist dialectics' la dialectique matirialiste) is clearly intended to respond to those who alleged his theory was, paradoxically, rather static and to those who accuse him of ignoring dialectics and not placing enough empha sis on the material; the proximity of the term materialist dialectics to Marx's dialectical materialism is entirely intentional, as is the dis tancing transposition of the words. But there is still, apparently, no fully explained connection between the emergence of smaller changes and the emergence of the event, not, at least, in terms of the overall theory ofthe emergence of the subject through fidelity to the event.

Concluding remarks

I will firstly summarize some important aspects of Badiou's philoso phy. He sets out to challenge the fundamental assumptions of a number of established schools of thought and individual thinkers and, by asserting a blend of universalism, intervention of the subject and an argument in favour of the importance of the event, offers a radical, praxis-driven alternative to much contemporary Western thought. In particular, Badiou takes postmodern philosophy to task, arguing that its declaration of the end of metanarratives, its relati vism, its marginalizing of the role of philosophy itself and by implica tion certain forms of political activism are all leading philosophy into

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a blind alley from which it must now remove itself. But he has little time either for any of the schools of philosophy which espouse forms of liberalism. I have suggested that Badiou succeeds in exposing much contemporary philosophy - postmodern and otherwise - as essentially a series of areas of intellectual activity which are unwilling or unable to engage with the material world in a way that offers a manner of thinking about changing the material world in anything more than the most modest and unthreatening ways. I have also sug gested that his assertion of the importance of intervention in order to achieve understanding which in turn leads to further intervention is a persuasive line of argument. I have also suggested, however, that the theory of the event, at the very heart ofBad iou's scheme of things, is problematic for a number of reasons. Among these are, first, that Badiou is not able to explain the genesis of the event from the status quo from which it springs. Second, I fail to see why we cannot act in fidelity to the status quo, or a process, or a series of aspirations, for example, rather than to an event. Third, and perhaps most importantly, sophisticated though Badiou's mathe matical ontology may be, he does not seem to show convincingly that set theory explains the world as it actually is, and more importantly how the world changes. I have suggested that in order to understand radical transformations - events - we need to have a theory of the status quo which describes an already-existing state of flux, whereas Badiou's status quo is rather static. I hope to have prepared the ground for a more detailed examina tion of Bad iou's political thought in the next chapter.

Chapter 3

The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics

Despite a strong conviction about the usefulness ofphilosophy qua phi losophy and despite scepticism with regard to much of what today passes as political philosophy, the work of Alain Badiou is in impor tant ways profoundly political. We have seen that, drawing on classi cal philosophy, he explores at great length the question of truth, which according to him can only come about via the commitment or fidelity - ofa subject or subjects to an event which has taken place in one of the crucial realms of science, art, love or emancipatory politics. Indeed the realm of politics occupies a special place among the four realms where truth procedures can take place, as truth activity in this domain is necessarily collective - therefore universal - in its practice as well as universal in its orientation, as are all truth procedures (AM 1 55-6) . Moreover, Badiou's core philosophy, involving the interplay of event, subject and truth, is in certain respects reminiscent of Marx and other revolutionary writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centu ries, in that substantial change takes place where something seems at one stage to be oflittle importance and then in a process of revolution comes to matter a great deal; subjects act in ways which promote the importance of the event and ways which run counter to the logic and the spirit of the status quo. Using the language of historical change through struggle, then, the role of the activist or activists is crucial to the process of radical transformation and in particular to the creation ofa new status quo built on new bases; in more Badiouian, philosophi cal terms, a subject's or subjects' fidelity to an event generates truth, which transfonns the situation along egalitarian lines (whether it be in the domain of science, art, love or politics) for ever. Thirdly, Badiou's thought is profoundly political because it is influenced by many years ofhis own political activism, discussed in Chapter 2 .

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In this chapter I concentrate on Badiou's theory of politics, which in many ways contrasts greatly with the dominant intellectual trends in contemporary France. He is in fundamental disagreement with and systematically opposes intellectuals who have discovered or rediscov ered Kant, Tocqueville and Rawls in order to lend authority to a defence of liberalism and the status quo and attacks on left politics. I ndeed, he defends in uncompromising fashion the legacy and the spirit of combativity of May 1 968, without any hint of the apology, mocking or irony that has permeated much discussion of the events of that year, both within France and beyond. He also strongly defends the validity of the notion of universalism and criticizes those who, in embracing the linguistic turn and promoting the importance of the Other, also often promote a cynicism towards left militancy. Badiou not only insists that a true event has universal significance and includes in his totalizing system of thought phenomena as diverse as the 1 789 French Revolution, Cantor's set theory, Mallarme's poetry and Lacan's writings on psychoanalysis, perhaps making his theory the ultimate metanarrative and the antithesis of any postmodern approach to contemporary thought. He also argues that a true event in any of the four realms is also necessarily egalitarian: 'the generic is egalitarian, and all subjects are ultimately defined by the egalitarian' (EE 447) . He is tireless in his condemnation of neoliberal economics and the injustices which are so integral to it, frequently speaking out on national and international politics and social issues. In what follows I examine Badiou's thought from a point of view which seeks ultimately to come to conclusions regarding the transfor mational potential of a theory which attempts both to explain and to help change the material world via an ambitious new philosophical system. There is a claim in other words both of philosophy's useful ness to the material world and of top-to-bottom coherence. My gen eral argument is that whilst there is a lot to recommend individual aspects of Badiou's thought, in particular his emphasis on political commitment and the importance of the human subject, there is a lack of coherence between two major influences on his writings: the Platonic and idealist on the one hand and the materialist and acti vist on the other. In keeping with this disjunction between the differ ent aspects of his thought, it is perhaps his reflections on the less

The Paradoxes ofAlain Badiou's Theory ojPolitics

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philosophical areas - democracy, parliamentary politics, elections and trade unions - that are the most problematic. I begin with a more detailed examination of Bad iou's notion of pol itics as truth procedure. I then move on to consider his relationship with historical materialism and Marxism, followed by an examina tion of his notion of democracy. I then explore his approach to some of the more conventional preoccupations of empirical social scientists, especially parliamentary politics. Finally, I address the question of Badiou's political activism and suggest ways in which his conception of activism relates to his thought. Despite Badiou flying in the face of the conservatism of much contemporary French thought, his philoso phy also bears the scars of the difficulty of maintaining a position on the left with contemporary relevance in what has been for many years a hostile climate.

Politics, the event and truth procedures

As we have seen, Badiou's belief in the usefulness of philosophy and the need to defend it against frontal attacks, marginalization or gra dual erosion can hardly be overstated. However, he is highly sceptical about the idea of political philosophy because philosophy is condi tioned by politics (and by developments in the realms oflove, art and science) and so-called political philosophy cannot rise above politics in order to understand it in the way contemporary liberal analysts would have us believe. What passes as political philosophy tends, then, not to question the status quo, but simply to reflect 'public opinion' , and entirely to miss the point that the only way in which politics and thought can be linked is through examining the agita tional nature of politics. Conventional political philosophy is there to encourage the watching of things political from the sidelines and is only tenuously related to activist participation in politics. Hannah Arendt, for example, explores this form of political philosophy, put ting discussion rather than action at the heart of her thought, thus promoting parliamentary debate as the essence of politics. For Badiou, by contrast, politics is primarily decision and intervention (AM 1 9-26) . Badiou advocates what he calls 'metapolitics', which is

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representation in thought of actual political acts, and for him this is the valid way of exploring politics in the intellectual domain. This is not and should not be confused with subsuming philosophy as a whole to politics, where philosophy becomes simply a way of thinking politics, which is quite wrong according to Badiou. He admits regret fully that he did at one time indulge in this practice himself, in a clear reference to his orthodox Maoist phase (MP 57) . For Badiou true politics is something quite specific, short-lived and momentous, which often involves a revolution or revolt of a collective, egalitarian and emancipatory nature, an irruption of positive politi cal energy which may well take the form of an uprising or at least some sort of revolt against the established order (EB 1 9 ) . ' [P]olitical truth always begins in trial and trouble . . . in rupture and disorder' (AM 1 14) and ' [p]olitical thinking always ruptures with the dominant state of things' (IT 82) . It is not only both rare and momentous, but also, often ephemeral: 'What I call politics is something that can be discerned only in a few, brief sequences, often quickly overturned, crushed or diluted by the return of business as usual' (BF 1 2 1 ) . The possibility of the impossible is the basis of politics. I t is mas sively opposed to everything we are taught today, which is that pol itics is the management of the necessary. Politics begins with the same gesture by which Rousseau reveals the basis of inequality: leave all facts to one side. (PP 78) In short, true politics takes the form ofan event. It seems to come from nowhere, depends for its existence on the militant activity of people who become subjects in the process of acting in fidelity towards the event, and has universal significance. Following his long-term activist and theorist friend Sylvain Lazarus, Badiou identifies four historical 'modes' as far as politics is concerned: the revolutionary mode, from 1 792 to 1 794 in France and represented on an individual level by Robespierre and Saint Just; the classist mode, from the publication of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto in 1 848 to the Paris Commune in 1 87 1 ; the Bolshevik mode, identified in particular with Lenin, running from the publica tion of Lenin's What is to be Done? in 1 902 to 1 9 1 7; and finally the

The Paradoxes ofAlain Badiou's Theory ofPolitics

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dialectical mode, associated with Mao Zedong, which stretches from the publication of Why is it that Red Political Power can Exist in China? in 1 928 to the end of the 1950s (AM 49; Lazarus 1 996: 88-95) . Each mode contains proper political events and for example the revolution of 1 789 - and even more so the period between 1 792 and 1 794 constitutes a political event, true politics, as do many other revolu tions or revolts which are emancipatory and egalitarian in nature. Included among these is the May 1 968 uprising, which is a classic example when activists were 'seized by what was happening to them, as by something extraordinary, something properly incalculable' : PH 1 25 ) , and May 1 968 is a revolt which 'transformed from top to bottom the content and forms of ideological struggle and theoretical investigation' (TC 8 ) . When Badiou describes the political event as collective, h e does not simply mean that there are many people involved who share the same goals; the term collective is a political and not a mathematical one. The political event is necessarily collective precisely because it is poli tical and therefore has universal significance, by contrast with events within the three other truth procedures: the mathematician needs only one other person to agree with the validity of a mathematical breakthrough; love only needs two people to act in fidelity to the event of their falling in love; the artist needs no-one besides him self or herself (as a minimum) to act in fidelity to an artistic event 'AM 1 55-6) . The political truth procedure, then, occupies a special place among truth procedures because it is the 'only truth procedure which is generic, not only in its result, but also in the local composition of its subject' (AM 1 56) . In some respects the political event is appealing and convinc ing as an explanatory device, precisely because it tries to incorporate more enigmatic and inexplicable developments into the grander scheme of explaining change, making the political event much more than the sum of its parts. After years of political argument and divi sion. a watershed political happening can unite former opponents, make previous differences seem irrelevant, and inspire activists and former non-activists alike to pursue the logic of the event. The fact that for Badiou the event cannot be predicted adds to this inspira tional quality .

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Badiou's system is thus very much a philosophy of praxis and as such flies in the face of much contemporary political thought, in particular political liberalism. His entire philosophical edifice rests upon the idea that transformations take place via the commitment of individuals and groups to a particular happening and that they some times maintain this commitment through thick and thin, often in the face of criticism, derision, marginalization and sometimes punish ment. Through their commitment to a particular cause, or in the j argon 'fidelity to the event', individuals and groups can change the domain into which they are putting their energies for ever, creat ing the possibility and legitimacy of something that had previously been impossible and illegitimate. Badiou not only encourages us to believe in the legitimacy of loyalty to a revolutionary break of uprising worked through to a thoroughly new state of affairs, of believing in the lasting potential of an amorous 'coup de foudre', of committing to a radical new paradigm in art or to scientific break through - he puts it at the very heart of his thought. Activism and commitment are thus key elements of Badiou's system, not j ust desir able, practical add-ons if time permits beyond intellectual pursuits; this is not the liberal model where the philosopher with a social con science is impartial intellectual during the day and activist intellec tual at night, working around one or two worthy causes. On the contrary, in the tradition ofSartre and Althusser, Badiou's philosophy is a philosophy that invites an understanding of the world via the taking of sides and defending a highly controversial view to the hilt; it is an elaborate exploration ofpractical partiality. In order to under stand, one simply must intervene, both as activist and intellectual. Perhaps the most striking difference between Badiou's philosophy and that of many other French theorists of the late twentieth century is his treatment of the human subject. For Badiou the subject plays a crucial role in the process of major change, because major change takes place when and only when there is an event, a subject acting in fidelity to an event and a truth process, all ofwhich emerge as part and only as part of the three-way process: event-subject-truth. Subject hood, then, does not exist in relation to something as general as 'his tory', or 'thought', for example; one is not a subject simply by virtue of being part of a general historical process (and being a subject is thus


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very different from most notions of agency) or because one is a think ing being. Subjecthood comes only with being part of the truth process involved in acting in fidelity towards a new art form, a person with whom the subject has fallen in love, scientific innovation or a momen tous political happening. The subject, then, is as central as the event itself to Badiou's philosophical system (and is indeed always found alongside the event) , and is by definition, to put it simply, committed to a cause of some description; this is the subject as activist, although not necessarily political activist. Subjecthood is exceptional and extraordinary and certainly not the rule, or part of the normal way of things. The subject is certainly not any and every individual, an ordinary human being, any more than a truth is an empirically verifi able representation of what is, what exists. However, any individual can become a subject in the process of committing to a particular cause as part of a truth procedure, where subjects, truths and events create each other. Badiou's strong emphasis on the role of the subject thus very much sets him apart from structuralist and much poststructuralist thought which has been so prevalent in France since it largely eclipsed Sartre in the early 1 960s, and Badiou indeed conceives of disputes within French philosophy in the late twentieth century primarily as conflict over the nature and importance of the human subject (Badiou 2005b ': , In his own work he brings the subject back to the very centre of the stage, as we have seen, and in a respectful but critical essay on Althus ser, Badiou accuses his sometime mentor of failing to develop any theory of the subject because Althusser deals only with processes, removing the subject entirely from his philosophy of Marxism and instead ascribing the subject with a role only in relation to the capital ist state; the Althusserian subject can only, according to Badiou, be a bourgeois subject (MP 68) . For Badiou the subject is quite the oppo site; individuals and groups of individuals become subjects when they are, in the broadest of senses, revolutionaries, when they commit to an extraordinary event and defend it to the hilt, altering the status quo substantially and for ever. To put it slightly differently, by contrast with deconstructionist philosophers (and arguably Althusser as well) , Badiou is greatly pre occupied with a form of agency, but agency - in the form of radical

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action on the part of someone (or some people) who becomes a sub ject - is for him not part of the normal course of things. Instead, it comes about as part of a chance encounter with an event towards which individuals decide to act with fidelity and which radically changes the situation in which they exist. One problem with Badiou's conception of the subject is that, even if one accepts subjecthood emerging amongst individuals who commit to an event, the subject is only partially a subject in that slhe reacts to events which Badiou tells us simply happen; the subject plays no part in causing the event. Badiou is thus still quite a long way from Sartre's interpretation of the subject where each individual is at liberty to shape their own destiny and bear the consequences of this course of action, and indeed in some senses compared with Sartre, Badiou comes closer to Althusser's notion of history as 'process without a sub ject', precisely because for Badiou subjecthood is so uncompromis ingly retrospective. A thorough theory of the subject lying between Sartre's arguably excessively free individual and Badiou's after-the event activist is, it would seem, still to be written, influenced more clo sely perhaps by Marx's notion of human beings creating their own history but within particular circumstances. As with the event in relation to the subject in the other domains where truth procedures take place, there is in Badiou's reflections on the political event a peculiar mix of the highly passive and highly active on the part of the subject of the event, whose own perspective is the only one which is of real note: A political process is a chance fidelity, militant and only partially shared, to a singular event, which is legitimised only by itself. The universality of the political truth which results from this process is itself only recognisable, like any truth, retrospectively, in the form of knowledge . . . the point from which a political process can be thought, from where its truth can be recognised, is the actors' and not the spectators' . . . It is via Saint-Just and Robespierre that one enters the singular truth of the French Revolution, from where you can gain knowledge of it, and not via Kant or Franr;ois Furet. (AM 33)


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Thus before the event the subject-to-be does not yet exist as a subject, to the extent that he or she, or more accurately in the case of politics they, only create the event (and themselves as subjects) after it has taken place. Once the event has happened the subject becomes crucial to the event's (retrospective) existence and significance: 'It will always remain doubtful that an event has taken place, except for the one who intervenes' (EE 229 ) . For a committed view of politics, and one which is arguably highly influenced by the notion of praxis, it is rather odd that the role of the activist is so retrospective in relation to the event and a matter of faith, rather than being one of planning a course of (perhaps revolutionary) action and changing the world. For example, the Bolsheviks surely did not wait for the 1 9 1 7 revolu tion before behaving in a revolutionary manner and becoming agents of change, and one does not necessarily fall into a teleological trap if one believes otherwise. Even the May 1 968 uprising in France, which is famous for not having been predicted, is surely explicable only if one takes into account such factors as: prolonged struggles against coloni alism in the 1950s and 1 960s; both the strength of the PCF and its par tial discrediting during this same period, thus generating many activists to the left of the PCF; the immediate international context of the anti-Vietnam war movement; years of resistance to de Gaulle's authoritarian regime; and finally. decades of work on the part of the PCF itself and sympathetic trade union organizations such as the CGT, which (albeit somewhat belatedly) contributed to building the general strike in May-June 1 968, and helped to give the uprising the historic, eventmental significance which Badiou identifies. This is not to deny that when the trade unions negotiated with the employers at the end of May and beginning ofJune in the Grenelle negotiations, this had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of the workers' protests. Moreover, the Grenelle negotiations certainly resulted in changes which were meagre compared to the strength of the May movement (see Capdevielle and Mouriaux 1 988) . I n short, history suggests that the role of activists resisting aspects of the status quo was crucial in terms of preparing the ground for and sustaining the momentum of May 1 968, which is not to say by any means that the uprising was inevitable. If, on the other hand, events,

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including political events, are mysterious, completely unpredictable and random, then why organize, if only to make a marginal differ ence, to make very small changes which can be eroded and in particu lar can be adapted to suit the needs of capitalism? There is a danger that in Badiou's scheme of things political activism remains entirely defensive and local, highly limited in its impact, and in relation to the overall course of history, ironically rather minimal. This is one of the costs ofBadiou making subjecthood retrospective and indissoci ably and solely linked with an event in the past. Badiou might respond that one must grasp the mathematical nature of his ontology, but as I argued in Chapter 2, his mathematical ontology does not convin cingly translate into the world of material politics. A discussion of the more political aspects of Bad iou's thought also raises an important question regarding the truth procedures, namely: can they really all be described in broadly the same way, within the same general explanatory framework? A revolution such as 1 789 or 1 9 1 7 banishes (or at least plays a decisive part in banishing) a whole social, political, economic and ideological system and helps replace it with another, thanks to the commitment of many revolu tionaries and countless other people through subsequent generations. Arguably the 1 789 revolution played a key role in France's and to an extent much of Europe's passage to modernity, with all the economic, social, political and cultural ramifications that this notion implies. By the same token, 1 9 1 7 arguably revolutionized economic, social, political and cultural aspects of modernity, whatever one might think of the development of these aspects in the USSR and the rest of the Eastern Bloc in the longer term. Can these revolutions and their vast social, economic, political and cultural consequences really be explained largely in the same terms as two individuals falling in love and deciding to commit to each other in the long term, perhaps to live together and have children? Moreover, do social and political revolu tions proceed with the same logic as scientific or artistic ones? Is the relationship between events in different domains (for example politics and art) sometimes more important than Badiou suggests by explain ing events' importance in terms of retrospective fidelity within the (political or artistic) domain? What is the relationship for example between the 1 9 1 7 revolution and Russian Constructivism? To pose it

The Paradoxes ojAlain Badiou's Theory ofPolitics

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in terms which Badiou might not acknowledge as being valid: can cause, effect and logic of history apply in similar ways across the four domains and if not, can these notions (cause, effect and logic of history) really be relegated in the way Badiou's system suggests? My own, very brief, answer would be that Badiou's portrayal of the subject coming out of the blue, his almost exclusive concentration on the event to explain the way in which movement takes place and on the exclusively retrospective relationship between subject and event, contributes to an unconvincing or at best partial description of the process of change, in politics and in other domains as well. Certainly, what Badiou describes as events are vital, but they cannot be under stood without recourse to a thorough examination of what goes before them - the context of their genesis - just as much as what follows them. This in turn helps understand the relationship between events. Returning to broader definitions of politics, Badiou's notion of how not to define politics is just as enlightening. According to Badiou, the study of politics is not a way of understanding the general nature of power in society and the way in which individuals and groups struggle for that power in organized or less organized ways. Still less is it the way in which the contemporary state relates to civil society, and it is certainly not an examination of the operation of government. Indeed, the governmental 'management of the affairs of the state' has nothing to do with politics and is instead an attempt to neutralize politics and create an artificial and harmful consensus (EB 1 9 ) . In fact, anything to do with established political practices which are closely associated with the status quo \including not only parliamentary politics but also trade unions, for example) cannot be counted as true politics in the sense that he understands it. I return to these sorts of question below. My response to Badiou's theory of politics as described so far can be summarized as follows. Certainly, the academic examination of poli tics in its various forms is often dominated by empiricism and descrip tion to such an extent that, taken as a general approach rather than as individual studies, it has virtually no distance from the present order of things and is therefore unquestioning of the status quo; on the contrary, it has a tendency to reinforce and legitimize the status quo. However, Badiou's conception of politics goes so far in the opposite direction that in a sense it is almost as powerless to enable

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and explain change as the approach of conventional empirical politi cal science. If true politics only begins with the rare and the extraor dinary, with an event whose genesis is impossible to explain properly or to predict even partially, it also leaves the political analyst in a passive, rather ineffectual position. The idea of having to engage in order to understand is perfectly acceptable. But for Badiou engage ment - fidelity - apparently only allows one to understand properly a particular event, and not the world more generally. In fact, truth resulting from achieving subjecthood in fidelity to an event is argu ably not understanding at all, but something far more subjective, akin perhaps to quasi-inexplicable belief, or faith; consistent with this approach, Badiou is emphatic that truth is not the same as knowledge (EE 36 1 , MP 1 8) . I would suggest that if, on the contrary, we conceive of politics as the interplay of various forms of power, some more progressive and egalitarian, others more reactionary and elitist, then it becomes possi ble to understand political developments in an ongoing, more organic way. For Gramsci, for example, politics in a capitalist society must be understood as competing entities attempting to achieve hegemony, which the bourgeois class is on the whole most successful in doing. By extension, progressive politics are in part about attempting to establish a counter-hegemony. This is an ongoing process, which in normal, non-revolutionary times is a constant 'war of position' , rather than a sudden and revolutionary 'war of manoeuvre'. When a serious challenge to the status quo takes place in the form of an upris ing, it is in part the work by activists during the period of war of posi tion that allows the passage to war of manoeuvre. For Badiou, on the contrary, politics is only politics when it is egalitarian and emancipa tory and takes the form of a sudden rupture with the status quo; slow, ongoing struggles to convince others in the ideological realm, or to make small material gains apparently do not count as politics. Certainly, this approach which puts emphasis on the big break is positive, optimistic and provocative, a broadside attack on both liberal and revisionist trends currently so prevalent in France, which of course seek greatly to play down the importance of revolt and revolution. But it also largely avoids many political issues, includ ing the questions of what the state does when it rules, the nature


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of exploitation, the relationship between the capitalist mode of pro duction and liberal democracy, why revolutions happen when they do, and so on. If we do not take a more holistic view of politics then our analysis is bound to be left wanting and be less useful in terms of explaining how to counter the status quo as necessary and move onwards. Badiou as political activist takes far more notice of the different instances of political power than his theory might suggest, as I show later in this chapter.

Against and beyond the postmodern

Given Badiou's hostility towards postmodern philosophy and decon struction, it is perhaps surprising to find that his attitude towards Gilles Deleuze is not one of unmitigated condemnation but one of ambivalence. In his orthodox Maoist days, Badiou was indeed vitrio lic in his denunciation of Deleuze, dismissing him as a loathsome counter-revolutionary. But in Gilles Deleuze: La clameur de !'eIre, pub lished in 1 997, Badiou not only engages with him seriously but almost attempts to rescue Deleuze from postmodern philosophy alto gether, suggesting that Deleuze is far more influenced by Plato and the classical tradition than most readers (including Deleuze himself) would wish to allow (D 42) . Although Badiou does present Deleuze's philosophy as being the opposite of his own in many ways, instead of exploring the ambiguities and multiple interpretations for which Deleuze is well known, Badiou argues that Deleuze's work is in fact characterized by univocity and that one ofits most important aspects is a philosophy of the One (e.g. D 94) . An insightful and ongoing engagement with Badiou has come from Slavoj Ziiek, who praises Badiou's notion of a singular truth with uni versal relevance in relation to a particular event, which contrasts starkly with the postmodernist notion of multiple truths and the end of universal and eternal narratives. Moreover, Badiou's event con fronts the postmodern notion of politics where 'nothing really hap pens' and asserts, on the contrary, that political events are real, crucial and determine the shape of things to come for many years.

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Zizek points out that this approach also confronts head-on the histor ian Fran�ois Furet's revisionist approach to the French Revolution, where Furet attempts to remove the evental-revolutionary signifi cance of 1 789 and instead presents it as a series of individual historical facts C Zizek 1 999: 1 3 1-2, 1 35-6) . But Zizek goes on to question Badiou's elaboration of the place of the subject in his system, arguing that the subject plays a far more ideological role than Badiou is pre pared to admit, and that Badiou's Truth-Event is in fact close to Althusser's notion ofideological interpellation. Zizek also argues con vincingly that Badiou's most compelling example of the event and the emergence of subjects via fidelity to the event is the Christian religion as explored in his book on Saint Paul, and that this religious event does not fit within the four generic procedures, namely love, art, science and politics. There is, then, an unacknowledged ideological and religious logic at the heart of Badiou's thought ( 1 4 1 ) . (See also Daniel Bensai:d's chapter, 'Alain Badiou et Ie miracle de l'evenement', in Bensai:d 200 1 : 1 43-70.) I have argued above that in the broader context of much French philosophy of the final third of the twentieth century, Badiou is nota ble in particular for his assertion of the importance of the role of the subject. We should no doubt add that Badiou is in this context also notable for the emphasis he places on the notion of equality and on the political more generally. In light of this it is worth anticipating somewhat the next chapter and pausing to compare Badiou's work with that of Jacques Ranciere, who has a substantial amount in common with Badiou, and who might also be deemed to be exploring philosophy beyond the postmodern. (See especially Ranciere 1 992, 1 995, 2001 and Robson 2005a.) Ranciere's conception of politics relies on a notion of the gap between the established order on the one hand and on the other hand political interventions on the part ofmar ginalized individuals or groups who disrupt the injustice of the status quo. By intervening in this way the excluded assert their right to be understood in a way that the discourse of received wisdom does not allow; the rebels' statements cannot be understood by the ruling order (or 'police' as Ranciere describes it) and the conditions of com prehension are created in the process of rebellion and its aftermath, through the rebels seizing the opportunity to assert themselves and,


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in linguistic terms, to assert the comprehensibility of their utterances. In this sense Ranciere's theory is a theory of the subject similar to some extent to Badiou's, in that subjects must believe in their actions and statements and make them true by creating the revolutio nizing criteria by which they are j udged. (Before this their statements are, according to Ranciere, meaningless utterances.) In Ranciere, however, it seems there is far more premeditation on the part of the subject than in Badiou, so people are implicitly at least subjects before the event as well as after. Rather like Badiou, Ranciere empha sizes the subject so much that the circumstances of the occurrence of the event are somewhat overlooked. As Badiou himself suggests, some aspects of Ranciere's work are borrowed from his own (AM 1 29-38) , an influence which Ranciere ( 1 995: 32) acknowledges to a certain extent. First, Ranciere's notion of police appears to draw on Badiou's 'state of the situation', which is pure multiplicity, or metastructure. Second, Ranciere, like Badiou, believes that politics comes about when individuals and/or groups act (in Badiou's language) in fidelity towards an event, in effect creat ing this event by naming it. It is only when this process of creation of subjecthood takes place that political activity also takes place. Third, both agree that politics comes about when there is an assertion of equality and Badiou reminds us that, like Ranciere, he believes that declarations can be an important manifestation of the political. Finally, they both agree that politics is in part a process whereby the invisible elements of a situation become visible, so that from a situa tion where the most important characteristics of the political event are not recognized, the actions of individuals - and only these actions assert the legitimacy and indeed the existence of the event. Summing up their similarities, or more precisely his influence on Ranciere, Badiou points out (AM 1 34--5) that for Ranciere politics 'is not the exercise of power' and that politics is 'a specific rupture in the logic of the arkhe', that politics is rare and subjective and that politics is 'the action of supplementary subjects who act in such a way that they are surplus to any counting of parts of a society'. Badiou suggests however that Ranciere is not only anti-Platonist but also anti-philosophical, particularly in his Le philosophe et ses pauvres ( 1 983) , where Ranciere accuses PIa to, Marx and Bourdieu of

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inventing a proletariat with particular characteristics in order to sui t their own philosophical needs. Ranciere allegedly misses the point that any political process is an organized process and that whereas he tends to pit fictitious masses against a nameless state (Etat inommi) , the reality is one of a few isolated activists up against a highly dominant parliamentary state. The key political figure for Badiou, then, is the political activist, whereas for Ranciere, Badiou claims, the activist is totally absent (AM 1 3 7 ; '

Marxism and historical materialism

Badiou has not systematically explored his relationship with Marxism since he distanced himself from orthodox Maoism in the early 1 980s. He was, as we have seen, very much formed in the Marxist mould and still retains a combativeness on behalf of oppressed groups as an inte gral part ofboth his philosophy and his political practice, with a sort of revolution in the form of the event at the heart ofhis political thought. So a phrase such as 'the essence of the political is the emancipation of the collective' (DO 54) , which is anathema to so much liberal political theory, is entirely typical of Badiou's approach. Moreover, in a gen eral sense he is still keen to invoke and to praise the thought of indivi duals whose practice was revolutionary, and among the political thinkers singled out for special praise are Robespierre, Saint-Just, Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao (IT 79) . Marx too is praised in a gen eral way, and Badiou asserts for example that the Communist Manifesto is 'the great political text of the nineteenth century' (BF 1 23 ) . However, despite Badiou's praise and admiration for revolution aries and despite the fact that he integrates the notions of engagement, emancipation and revolution into the very core ofhis thought, there is a profound ambivalence on his part with regard to Marx and to his torical materialism. Certainly, he asserts that his own philosophy is profoundly materialist and that ' (f]rom the point of view of what composes us, there is nothing except matter. Even a procedure of truth is never anything other than the seizing of materiality.' But he quickly qualifies this, commenting that ' [h]aving said that, I do think that, by grace, this particular [human] animal is sometimes seized by


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something that thought cannot manage to reduce strictly to the thought of animality as such' (PH 1 2 7-8, 1 29) . Grace, or 'laicized grace', is a concept Badiou explores in Saint Paul, using the term to describe the leap offaith required by a subject in order to act in fidelity to an event, flying in the face of the logic or the rules of the circum stances, or 'situation', in which the event arises (e.g. SP 80-1 ) . More over, ' [f]undamentally, and this is why I always declare myself a Platonist, Platonism says that there is something other than bodies and language. There are truths . . . ' (BF 1 29, also LM 9 ) . This is the Badiou who believes in the power of mathematics because it is able to unite thought and being, which are one and the same (EE 49) . This could hardly be further from Marx's conception of the relationship between the material world and thought, which Engels ( 1 968 [ 1 883] : 429) describes as follows: . . . Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that there fore the production of the immediate means of subsistence and con sequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch forms the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved . . . There are various other key aspects of Marx's thought that are absent or only found in very weak forms in Badiou's work. Most obviously, we have seen how Badiou almost entirely rules out any role for the economy and when referring to the economy, perhaps tell ingly, appears happy not to contest what Marx says (commenting that 'global trends have essentially confirmed some of Marx's funda mental intuitions' [PH 1 1 7] ) , but simply to endorse it without how ever integrating it into his own work. For Marx, of course, however much one might wish to interpret his thought as 'non-reductionist', an understanding of the emergence and development of the capitalist economy is key to understanding the emergence of the bourgeoisie as the dominant exploiting class, the emergence of the proletariat as a

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revolutionary class, the potential for socialist revolution and com munism, and the concept of alienated labour, to mention only some of the most obvious consequences. But such an understanding is also important in any attempt to understand less clearly political domains, including intellectual history, culture, personal relations and the family. So important was the economy to Marx, of course, that he spent much of his mature intellectual life in the pursuit of an under standing of the capitalist economy. Ifanything, Badiou seems to have done the opposite to Marx in this respect and the central place of the economy has been replaced by the event, which arguably has for Badiou become the motor of history, but in a retrospective way, where things change with the emergence of truth as a subtraction from history, as opposed to being a logical outcome of, for example, the growing contradiction between forces of production and relations of production at the heart of the historical process, as Marx ( 1 968b [ 1 859] : 1 8 1 -2) argues. By the same token, the notion of class also plays no role in Badiou's overall explanation of the scheme of things, at least in his work since and including L'Etre et l'evenement ( 1 988) ; he indulges in little or no social or socio-economic analysis in his later theoretical work. This stands in stark contrast with, and arguably in contradiction to, Badiou's and his activist comrades' insistence on the importance of directly supporting proletarian struggles in the work place, which I discuss below. I t seems in fact that Badiou is in search of a complete alternative to the historical and dialectical method of Marx, of a theory which breaks with the idea of any logic of history, but where engagement with the circumstances of the time is nevertheless crucial to any pro cess of profound change and any understanding of this process, which for Badiou is arguably one and the same thing. Badiou comments that he is keen to 'refute the vulgar Marxist concept of the logic of history and the idea that radical and sudden change could have as its origin a "state of totality" (EE 1 96-7 ) . Rather, radical transformation origi nates at one point, in an eventmental site (EE 1 9 7 ) . One of Marx's key overall contributions is indeed to explain the nature of historical change, which involves an exploration of the dia lectical relationship between various aspects of society, and the place of social revolutions within the context of this dialectical relationship. ,


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Marx thus carefully explains how events (especially revolutions happen within the circumstances of the particular period. Badiou, on the other hand, argues precisely that an event cannot be explained fully from 'within' the situation surrounding it; indeed if it can it is not an event at all (this is part of the definition of the event) . Badiou, then, appears particularly static (or at least stop-go) com pared with Marx, precisely because of the key place of the event in his philosophy. (See Bosteels 2004 for a contrary view.) Badiou himself has commented that he needs a more detailed theory of change, adding that ' I distinguish between four types of change: mod ifications (which are consistent with the existing transcendental regime) , weak singularities (or novelties with no existential conse quences) , strong singularities (which imply an important existential change but whose consequences remain measurable) and, finally, events (strong singularities whose consequences are virtually infinite) . (BF 1 32; also see Badiou 2004 ['Afterword ] : 236) . It is not yet clear how these new categories regarding change relate to Badiou's general theory. Badiou's notion of subtraction, which he defines as 'that which, from within the previous sequence itself, as early as the start of the twentieth century, presents itself as a possible alternative path that differs from the dominant one' (BF 1 1 5 ) , is very different from dialec tics and does not work on the assumption that there is constant move ment. This contrasts with what he describes as an antagonistic (Marxist) approach to politics, which he believes is no longer useful. Badiou seems, then, to have abandoned almost all of Marx's base superstructure model. In order to understand history, including poli tical history, one does not turn to and examine changes in modes of production and relations of production. When discussing the 1 789 revolution, for example, Badiou is emphatic that we can know a great deal about the circumstances prevailing in France before the revolution took place and still not be able to explain it properly (PH 1 24) , and the same could be said of the Paris Commune of 1 87 1 . Badiou's treatment of art is also revealing in this respect, because artistic change is explained in terms of what went before it in the realm of art, where events, subjects, fidelity and truth operate within the realm of art rather than within a broader context, where .

.

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according to Marx the development of the economy ultimately has a determining influence on other domains, including the artistic one. Badiou's account contrasts, then, with the fairly orthodox - but no less inspired for that - Marxist versions of artistic and cultural change put forward by Marcel Berman in All that is Solid Melts in Air ( 1 983) and by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity ( 1 989) , where the modernizing and 'postmodernizing' economic base brings with it radically new forms of art and culture which are fascinating in themselves, but whose proper understanding must include an understanding of the socio-economic circumstances of their emer gence. To put it slightly differently, the relationship between (or rather apparent absence of relationship between) events in different domains in Badiou's scheme of things is quite different from the rela tionship between events in different domains in a more orthodox Marxist framework; for example for Berman the relationship between the emergence of modern art and the rise of the city, or for Harvey the emergence of postmodern architecture and the development of post Fordism in the economic domain. For Badiou, by contrast, there is no such organic connection between developments in the different domains. He is emphatic that he is 'not a historicist, in that I don't think events are linked in a global system. That would deny their essentially random character, which I absolutely maintain' (Being by Numbers 1 994: 1 1 8, in Hallward 2003a: 240) . There are certainly lingering influences of Maoism in Badiou's later work. As Jason Barker reminds us, in Mao's theory of knowledge intellectuals are guided by the masses instead of the more classically Leninist, vanguardist conception of the role of intellectuals. For Mao, the masses are far more spontaneously inclined to be revolution ary than intellectuals (Barker 2002: 32; also see Bosteels 2005) . As we shall see below, this is very much in keeping with Badiou's approach to political activism, which emphasizes the need to work locally and on particular issues rather than in a national vanguard organization with a view to countering the power of established structures; as we have seen, he is not attempting to create what Gramsci might have described as a national or international 'counter-hegemony' by work ing within existing or by setting up new national or international


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trade unions to counter the power of capital. One might for example expect an activist left intellectual to work with a trade union like SUD, which was formed in 1 989 and attempts to rediscover the tradi tional radicalism of French trade unionism, declaring in its charter that a transformation of society is necessary and that this will involve a 'profound break with the logic of capitalism' (in Blakey 200 1 ) . SUD is also at pains to be innovative and open to influences which are not part of the traditional core of trade union preoccupations, such as those of the homeless and illegal immigrants. But Badiou is insistent that it is wrong to attempt to take on one's adversaries on their own territory, including in the context of trade unions. By the same token, the antiglobal movements, whose supporters have demonstrated at international meetings ofglobal capital in Genoa and elsewhere, 'ded icate themselves to a systematic and economist identification of the adversary, which is already utterly misguided' (BF 1 20) . Badiou also emphasizes the importance of the concept of 'two counted as one' in any attempt to understand political processes, in a way that is also strongly influenced by Maoism (e.g. PP l O6) . His notion of the two is highly complex and varied, but taking the case of the event, when an event takes place the situation is divided into two because the subjects of the event act in fidelity to certain aspects of the situation which relate to the event and not to those which do not relate to the event. Once the event has taken place, there is no relationship between these two groups of aspects (or these two sets of elements) �EE 229; C 290; S 89-l O2) . Again, the theory of the two reinforces the perception ofBadiou as a discontinuous philosopher, rather than one who can explain history in continuous or evolutionary terms. Rather than approaching Badiou as a Marxist thinker, then, it is more helpful to see his thought as being influenced in a general way by the emancipatory spirit of Marx, without what might be described as Marx's scientific method. I n spite of Badiou's elaborate mathema tical discussions, his thought does not share what Marx and Engels described as a scientific approach to socialism, which dissects the mechanisms of capitalist society and in light of this dissection explains the transformational potential these mechanisms offer. Writing in the early 1 980s, Badiou suggests that Marxism is far less able than it once was to help understand the nature of reality. 'We are thus brought

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back to the figure of the beginning . . . We proceed from the "there is" of a break, and . . . we are putting forward, like Marx in the Manifesto, inaugural political hypotheses. More particularly, we are (re)formu lating the hypothesis of a politics determined by non-domination . . . We must re-write the Manifesto' (PP 59-60) . He goes on to say that the 'previous Marxism - of the completed cycle of Marxisation - serves as a whole body of thought as a "Hegelian-type" reference: both necessary and not prescribing anything particular. Marxism has become in relation to itself its own Hegelianism' ( PP 6 1 ) . Marx is thus a source for 'the beginning of a different way of thinking politics' but the destruction of Marxism-Leninism at the same time highlights the necessity for, as well as creating the possibility of, 'an entirely new practice of politics' ( PP 63-4) . With only a little exaggeration, one might suggest that in relation to Marx, Badiou's work represents a reinvertion of the dialectic, putting Hegel's dialectic on its head again. Badiou certainly shares with Hegel a belief in the generative power of abstract and absolute universals, which for Hegel takes the form of Geist and which for Badiou takes the form of the logic of mathematics. In both cases the material world is a sort of local manifestation of the abstract and the spiritual (or the mathematical) rather than the other way round. In fact Badiou goes far in this direction and defines a subject as a more concrete manifestation of the abstract, as 'any local configuration of a generic procedure where a truth is sustained' (EE 429 ) , a 'finite instance ofa truth' (EE 447) . To conclude this brief discussion of Badiou's relationship with Marx, it is worth quoting Marx's discussion of Hegel, by way of high lighting Badiou's very different position: My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain. i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of ' the Idea', he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenom enal form of ' the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is noth ing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought. (Marx 1 954 [ 1 873] : 29)


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Democracy

Badiou has a profound ambivalence towards the notion ofdemocracy. On the one hand, he comes close to equating democracy with com munism, almost in the way Lenin did, or at least with an ongoing, anti-establishment, anti-capitalist struggle; communism is 'the pas sion for equality', 'intolerance towards oppression, the desire for the end of the State' and the ontological concept of democracy and com munism are 'one and the same' (DO 1 3-14) . For Badiou democracy in this sense has manifested itself in rare instances, for example in the Soviets during and after the Russian Revolution and in the liberated zones in Mao's China, but it is highly praised. More recently and closer to home, he suggests that the groupings of sans papiers from immigrant hostels and from Organisation politique are democratic (AM 1 67 ) . But Badiou's positive view of democracy is restricted to a very small number of actual political phenomena, and beyond these the positive approach often becomes a mainly subjective way oforder ing his view of the event, rather than a way of describing an ongoing and potentially widespread form of political organization, which is, it would appear, impossible now that communism is a thing of the past: it seems democracy is now barely possible in a material sense, and exists only as an abstract notion with little relation to political acti vism on a day-to-day basis. Indeed, Badiou at his most polemical and vigorous asserts that democracy in an organizational sense is nothing other than parlia mentary, liberal democracy, in France and elsewhere, and is some thing to be combated, condemned and boycotted. Commenting on his lectures on thinking the present philosophically, he remarks that one of the two main ideas by which he is guided is 'that, in order to think the contemporary world in any fundamental way, it's necessary to take as your point ofdeparture not the critique ofcapitalism but the critique of democracy . . . no one is ready to criticize democracy. This is a real taboo, a genuine consensual fetish. Everywhere in the world, democracy is the true subjective principle - the rallying point - of liberal capitalism' (BF 1 27) . At times Badiou is apparently not simply talking about liberal democracy as promoted by defenders of contemporary capitalism, and he goes a long way towards a critique

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any notion of democracy, in part because he believes that any repre sentation of political opinion is impossible. Invoking Rousseau, he argues that politics comes about as a result of a (non-historically based) event, in the form of a social contract. Politics is the same as equality, which is in turn the main point of reference of the general will (EE 380 2 ) . Now, as 'a procedure with fidelity to the contract event, politics can neither be delegated not represented. It is to be found entirely in the "collective being" of its militant-citizens' and 'Rousseau's genius was to define politics abstractly as a generic proce dure' (EE 383, 389) . Here Badiou is once again expressing the idea that politics is intimately bound up with the notions of event and truth, where it is perhaps less important to share one's ideas with large numbers of people (let alone a majority) , or try to convince them that you are correct, than to be right in an abstract sense. 'What supports the procedure is solely the zeal of citizen-militants, whose fidelity engenders an infinite truth which no constitutional or organizational form can express adequately' (EE 389) . In one sense revolutionaries through the ages have been in this posi tion, which lies at the heart of Badiou's account of transformation; radical change takes place via fidelity on the part of an often small number of people to an event (although arguably they have often been faithful to an event which has not yet happened) . Most revolu tionaries have in the longer term, however, sought as a priority to win over the majority to their point of view. Badiou insists that the ques tion of number is not important (PP 68) , but it is hard to see how any sort of deeper socialist system of organization and government could be realized (or 'correct' positions achieved) without having won over large numbers of people to the idea of transformation. I ndeed large numbers of people would need to be convinced of the need for active participation by large numbers of people; the idea of democracy (including the numerical idea of majority participation and deci sion making) becomes very important in the transformational pro cess. So attitude towards and critical support for the more democratic aspects of liberal democracy are also important; in addition to uni versal suffrage, freedom of expression, equality before the law, and other established aspects of liberal democracy, a discussion which, for example, extends the notion of rule by the people to the economy, -

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including economic equality, is surely a more fruitful way forward than to appeal for a boycotting of elections and other trappings of liberal democracy, as does Badiou. Holding a 'correct' political posi tion in extreme isolation seems to have stronger moral than political connotations. Badiou mentions that as part of his approach to democracy he has incorporated 'a careful re-reading of Plato's critique of democracy' (BF 1 2 7 ) . Plato is of course well known for his condemnation of democracy in the Republic, based on direct knowledge of Athenian democracy, and he argues that such an approach to political organi zation promotes an unhealthy egalitarianism, whereas a more elitist form ofpolitical organization works far better. By contrast, Rousseau, Marx, Engels and Lenin (all of whom Badiou admires) all condemn partial, representative democracy but insist on the importance of a more direct form of democracy. Lenin ( 1 969 [ 1 9 1 7] : 237) goes as far as arguing that 'in capitalist society we have a democracy that is curtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the min ority . . . Communism alone is capable of providing really complete democracy . . . '. Badiou's approach to democracy is closely connected with his views on contemporary parliamentary politics in France, in which substan tial change has taken place since the early to mid- 1 980s. The Socialist Party, which has moved towards the centre-right, has formed many governments and has been the pioneer of centre-oriented policies which differ far less from those of the mainstream right than was the case before about 1 983. The Communist Party, meanwhile, has gone into rapid decline, partly as a result of participating in coalition gov ernments with the Socialists which implemented austerity measures in the early 1 980s. On the right, the Gaullist party has become far less distinctive than it was during de Gaulle's lifetime or the decade fol lowing his death (the 1 9 70s) and has, for example, embraced neo liberal economic policy and adapted a less grandiose foreign policy, falling far more into line with the rest of the right. In short, main stream parliamentary politics in France has become more consensual, with far less difference between the various mainstream parties than there once was (Hewlett 1 998: 60-9 1 ) . (The important exception to this general rule is of course the rise of the National Front. )

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For Badiou, this 'democratico-nihilist consensus' (BF 1 28) which very much works against a more j ust form of politics, draws its legiti macy from the word democracy. I n mainstream discourse, then, to evoke democracy is to evoke a form of politics which above all pro motes the reign of capital, with all the inj ustices this implies. Badiou chooses not to enter into a more detailed debate regarding the nature of democracy as it could be experienced; he could, for example, address the question of whether there might be an alternative, more properly democratic and socialist version of democracy than the very superficial democracy practised by many systems of national government in the West (Hewlett 2003: 1 -2 7 ) . On the whole ignoring the concrete practice of politics in his discussions of democracy has the effect of making Badiou seem anti-democratic rather than being in favour of a deeper form of democracy. Rather than reappropriate the term to its full political potential and insist in a more traditionally socialist way that it is powerful, revolutionary and transformative, Badiou, on the contrary, chooses almost to embrace the idea that in practical terms liberal parliamentary democracy is the only possible widespread version of democracy, and that democracy is therefore to be condemned.

Parliamentary politics

In light of the above discussion it will come as no surprise that Badiou is often particularly critical about other people's commentary on par liamentary politics. Much of what passes as political analysis, he argues, is simple and unhelpful quantification and, he adds, ' [p] olitics will only become thinkable once it is delivered from the tyranny of number, number of voters as well as number of demonstrators or stri kers' ( PP 68) . He is reacting in part to a tremendous preoccupation with all aspects of elections amongst political scientists and journalists, parti cularly in France. There is also at times almost obsessive attention given to opinion polls regarding political parties, policy and voting intentions, closely followed by seemingly endless poring over the actual election results. The ubiquity of quantification can take on


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such a dynamic ofits own that studies sometimes have little or nothing to say, for example, about what election results can tell us about poli tics more generally, in these studies' eagerness to quantify to the nth degree. This is not to deny the usefulness of some empirical and quan titative studies and some commentary on election results can be very useful in that it throws light on politics in a deeper sense. To take one example, Collette Ysmal (2004) provides a fascinating, detailed ana lysis of the French elections of 2002 which also has a lot to say about French politics and society more generally. But the general effect of widespread quantification is indeed to detract from debates regarding how parliamentary politics might be made more democratic, for example, or what the alternatives might be. However, Badiou does seem to miss the point that although elections in liberal democracy are a very poor substitute for profounder democracy, they do never theless have a real relationship with a deeper democracy. They are a form of politics which is to an extent influenced by a deeper and more valid notion of democracy than Badiou would give credit for, which means that - without neglecting other spheres of political activity and activism - this is an arena with which progressive thin kers ought also to engage and at times intervene in. Badiou appears to believe that once one is tainted with participation in such a process one is bound to capitulate to the mainstream view of everything. This view of partial participation in more mainstream political activ itv such as the elections or trade union work reflects in part a view that radical, innovative movements such as feminism and green politics can and have been adapted, de-radicalized and adopted, ultimately, to suit the needs of capital. In the language of activists of the decades following May 1 968, during which time this type of development was common (and arguably has been perhaps even more so since the beginning of the 1 980s ) , this is recuperation. Badiou discusses developments in parliamentary politics at some length in an article entitled 'On the Presidential Election of April May 2002' (C l 1 3-43), commenting that 'the election result certainly seemed to me to be important, because politically - and I have been saying this for many years - this country is very ill' (C l 1 5) . In the presidential elections of that year, the National Front leader Jean Marie Le Pen went through to the second round in a run-off with the

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Gaullist (and eventual victor) J acques Chirac, after winning 1 6.9 per cent of the vote in the first round. Badiou argues that popular reac tions to the relative success ofLe Pen in the first round - huge protest demonstrations, meetings, mass distribution of leaflets, and so on were yet another way of showing that elections serve mainly to rein force the politics of moderate consensus which is so characteristic of France today (C 1 1 8- 1 9 ) . Elections do not reflect free expression, he argues, and in the same way the right would have demonstrated mas sively if a Trotskyist candidate had gone through to the second round, reminiscent of right-wing backlash demonstrations on 30 May 1 968 and in 1 982 in defence of private schools and against moves to bring them more in line with state schools. 'The only reasonable conclusion one can draw is that nothing ever happens with regard to decisive transformations in the politics of a country if one relies on elections, because the principle of homogeneity hangs over them . . . making sure that things continue as before' ( C l 20, italics in original) . Badiou argues that instead of simply protesting against Le Pen, demonstra tors should have denounced elections and he reminds us of the slogan from May 1 968: 'elections, trahison' (C 1 22) . Reminiscent ofthe anar chist slogan, 'whoever you vote for the government will get in', this comment also echoes other instances when Badiou insists that for him the guiding principles in this domain are 'don't stand for election, don't vote, don't expect anything from any political party' (PH 1 1 5) . For him there is no real difference between Le Pen and recent French gov ernments which have persecuted sans papiers ( C l 25) . He argues that the word democracy 'crystallises consensual subjectivity' ( C l 28) and that the huge number of abstentions recorded in the elections of 2002 show that 'democracy is becoming a minority interest' (C 33) . One might ask if a dwindling vote is not what Badiou is advocating, given that 'voting is the only known political procedure of which immobilism is the more or less inevitable consequence' (C 1 34) . Badiou goes further than one might expect in this direction, arguing that 'voting is by principle a contradiction of principles, and of any idea of protest or emancipation' ( C l 35) . He again asks why number is so dominant when scientific and artistic innovation has always taken place against the flow of dominant opinion, and reminds us of the minority nature of Resistance, anti-colonial activists, and so on.


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As I commented above, this point about minority views and innova tion is indisputable, but the medium- to long-term goal of any aspir ing democratic politics is surely to convince a majority that one's (for the time being minority) views are correct, as indeed happened in the cases of both the Resistance and the anti-colonial movements of the 1 950s in France, amongst many others. Discussing the 2002 elec tions, then, Badiou appears either as an authoritarian voice or as an analyst who is in a rather ultra-left realm of abstraction when he reminds us that Hitler was elected and that Petain was approved as head of state by an elected parliament, that Rousseau is against repre sentative democracy ('the [general] will cannot be represented' ) , that Rousseau according to Badiou correctly allows a 'symbolic majority' to be expressed in one person, and that both Rousseau and Marx (in a reference to the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat) agree that number is the wrong method for making really important deci sions (C 1 39-4 1 ) . Elsewhere, Badiou suggests that 'the essence of pol itics is to exclude . . . Its essence is found entirely in fidelity to the event as it materializes in the context of activist interventions' (PP 82� .

Badiou's political activism

For Badiou it is as important to understand and participate in grass roots activism as it is to engage intellectually with a variety of schools of philosophy and with other areas of thought. Indeed, there are few philosophers either living or dead whose work moves so readily between the realm of philosophical abstraction on the one hand and details of the militant activities of political groups and campaigns on the other; the theoretical and the material are interwoven in an unusual and highly developed way. Throughout Badiou's writings, then, there are frequent references to actual political struggles and, explicitly or more obliquely, to his own activism. In many ways Badiou's activist politics are, like his political theory, a politics ofpurity, perhaps in keeping with his belief that there is little to distinguish political thought from political action. His energies are now mainly channelled into the very small, 'post-party' l'Organisation politique (OP) , which intervenes at grass-roots level on such questions

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immigrant hostels, sans papiers and equality in education and health, taking stands on a limited number of issues but insisting that it has no programme. It publishes a regular bulletin, La Distance poli tique (LDP) , which contains a mixture of commentary on current affairs and more theoretical writing, and although the articles are anonymous many of them are apparently written by Badiou himself and his close associates, Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel (see LDP online at http://www . organisationpolitique.com/index.php? page=distance) . Reminiscent in important ways of French Maoist organizations of the 1 970s, OP is highly oriented towards workers, especially factory workers, and sets up its own groups in factories whilst shunning established trade unions and trade union activities. Much of OP's work in factories is an attempt to promote what it describes as 'a new figure of the worker' (PH 1 1 5 ) , which is an abstract - arguably idealized - notion, distinct from a more empiri cal approach to the working class and any deference that might per haps be expected from a left intellectual towards grass-roots trade unionism, for example. 'By figure of the worker we mean a political subjectivity constituted in the factory, in an ability to make declara tions about the factory and the worker that are different from those of management, the unions . . . and the state. This intrication is essential. It alone puts an end to the classist figure which founded trade union ism . . . ' (LDP, 26-7.02.98, p. 8, in Hallward 2003: 7 ) . (Badiou and his activist friends almost invariably use the word ouvrier, meaning blue collar worker, rather than travailleur, which means worker in a more general sense, and encompasses both blue- and white-collar workers. ) The view that trade union activity does no good is often asserted and is perhaps rather odd for someone so inspired by May 1 968, an uprising whose historical (and eventmental) significance is surely found largely in the three-week-long general strike. Badiou argues that strikes 'only modify salaries' (PH 46) . His fascination with Saint Paul is explained partly because Paul is seen as the ultimate model of the modern, post-Bolshevik activist, as he explains at the beginning of his book on Paul: as

If I wish now to outline in a few pages the singularity of this con nection as far as Paul is concerned, it is certainly because there is

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everywhere a search - including in the denial of its possibility - for a new figure of the activist, destined to succeed the one put in place at the beginning of the century by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, which can be described as the party activist. (SP 2) This contemporary version of the political activist must have an unmediated presence - in particular with no parliamentary or trade union affiliation - at the sites of popular struggles, including in parti cular amongst sans papiers and of course in factories (SP 83) . In prac tice, OP's orientation towards workplace-based politics takes the form of intervention on specific issues via small groups of OP supporters. For example, in the run-up to the historic closure of Renault Billan court in 1 99 1 - a factory which had become an important, even iconic, symbol of working class resistance and a magnet for post- 1 968 militant activity - OP encouraged a campaign in support of more favourable redundancy packages, criticizing the trade unions for being too conciliatory (Hallward 2003b: 1 0-1 1 ) . Badiou and O P are and have long been active in defence of sans papiers, arguing their cause in LDP, in articles in mainstream newspa pers, in books and speeches, where he and his comrades demand full rights for all immigrants. They also help organize rallies to support them, for example. Badiou believes that the hostility and racism experienced by immigrants is intimately linked with the consensus associated in particular with the Mitterrand era and which has helped create the rise of the National Front. This climate is strongly linked, according to Badiou, with the decline of the figure of the worker and a reassertion of the figure of the worker is needed in order to combat this (AM 1 33) . However, Badiou is highly sceptical with regard to political move ments which are based around ethnic or gender oppression, asking what is meant by 'black' or 'woman'. Capitalism, he believes, can easily absorb demands for increased rights for oppressed groups with out threatening capitalism itself, which means such movements are not properly political (PH 1 1 8- 1 9 ) . Badiou's position is reminiscent to an extent of French Republicanism, which is reluctant to promote special conditions for the flourishing of particular ethnic, religious or gendered groups and cultures, by contrast with the positions of many

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progressive intellectuals and activists in the United States and Britain, for example. This view also extends to ethnic and religious groups within disputed territories, where Badiou argues that the way forward is to 'count all people as one', rather than create small states along ethnic lines. It is perhaps instructive to contrast the activities of OP with the views and activities of the French Trotskyist movement. Since the early 1 9 70s, French Trotskyists, and especially the Ligue communiste revolutionnaire (LCR) and Lutte ouvriere (LO) , have had a small but ongoing impact on national politics and trade unionism, in part via tactical alliances with more moderate left political forces which have included, for example, critical support for the PS-PCF Union of the Left in the 1 970s on the part ofthe LCR. In the trade union movement, these organizations are very active at grass-roots level, and LO in par ticular has also won positions of considerable national influence, espe cially in the trade union confederation Force ouvriere. I n local and national elections it is the same case, with the combined LO and LCR vote in the 2002 presidential elections totalling 10 per cent ofvotes cast. This system of tactical alliances in the form of the united front was advocated by Trotsky, who argued that activists could retain their ideological and practical allegiance to revolutionary politics by belonging to the party, thus helping to resist the temptation of adapt ing to the reformist attitude of the organizations with which they were allying, in particular trade unions. As we have seen, OP by contrast shuns any ongoing work with reformist organizations, retaining a purist approach which promotes the importance of a correct political (but emphatically not politically correct) stance over any considera tion of weight of numbers influenced. In fact, as we have also seen, Badiou states quite explicitly that there is too much emphasis on num bers and majorities, reminding us that revolutions and uprisings in various domains have taken place because of the actions ofa minority. As I comment above, it would be hard to argue that Badiou is entirely wrong here, given that, almost by definition, opinions that end up being dominant and influential begin as minority views. But sooner or later weight of number must surely begin to matter, unless we decide that - as sometimes seems to be the case with Badiou - it is more important to be a small number of people with entirely correct


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theoretical positions than a large number of people who can make a real impact with even a small degree of perhaps temporary compro mise. (This relates back to Badiou's position on democracy and to his interpretation of Rousseau's theory of democracy and the general will.) Badiou's approach to political activism would seem to spring more from his philosophical abstraction and an activist residue of Maoism than from a real adherence to the notion of deeper democ racy and influence on things political. Arguably, in order to have a politically appropriate position you need widespread contact with ordinary activists, not to mention non-activists, in part therefore starting where people are, rather than from a position of isolationist purism where activist intellectuals are likely to be quite out of touch and come up with unrealistic positions, which in turn compound their isolation. This has been a dilemma for far-left organizations in France and elsewhere for many years and in part explains their fissiparous nature. Ifwe compare the attitude of the LCR with OP on the question of the French Communist Party (PCF ) , we see that the LCR - at least until the PCF participated in government in the early 1 980s regarded the PCF as the party where the French working class (albeit mistakenly) placed its faith and was therefore worth having an ongoing orientation towards, as was the old Labour party for the Brit ish working class. Badiou and OP, by contrast, believed that it was necessary to attempt to destroy the PCF. Badiou's position regarding activist politics is indeed, in essence, a particular position within the long-running debate within the far left regarding the nature of revolutionary politics as opposed to reformist politics, that is, acceptance that benign capitalism is as good as things are likely to get. This is a discussion which has been ongoing since the 1 930s in France, when the PCF supported (but did not participate in) the Popular Front government led by Leon Blum and made up of centre-left and centrist ministers. It was heightened by debates sur rounding the PCF's participation in the postwar government in France in 1 944-47, the PCF's attitude towards the events of May 1 968, its programmatic alliance with the Socialist Party during the 1 970s and most recently and most conclusively, perhaps, participa tion in various predominantly Socialist governments since 1 9 8 1

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which have seen the implementation of some policies which would have been previously associated only with the right. The core of the debate, although not always articulated in precisely this way, has always regarded how to j uggle participating in grass roots activities where working-class and progressive-minded people are actually found, on the one hand, and retaining a revolutionary path ahead; too far in either direction and groups either get swallowed into purely reformist practices which have no relation with the strug gle for socialism, or into a position of total isolation. This balancing act has been an ongoing and overriding concern for the far left in France and elsewhere since the early 1 9 70s. Lenin's view was that the revolutionary party, made up largely of petit bourgeois intellec tuals in the years when the advent of communism remains fairly remote, should keep the flame of revolutionary purity burning whilst its members are active in other areas as well, hopefully recruiting acti vists to the revolutionary cause. There are indeed many elements of engagement and positioning within this sort of debate in both Badiou's political practice and in his activist writings, engagement and positioning which many intellectuals and activists alike have left long behind them. But, as in his philosophical system, Badiou seems to have a dual - but not coherent - approach to activist politics. On the one hand, he is in search of revolutionary purity in a way that is akin to the practices of French Maoist groups in the 1 970s. On the other hand, OP engages in campaigns which would certainly be seen as pro gressive by most left-leaning individuals and organizations, but hardly revolutionary, or even in many respects particularly challen ging to the centre-left-centre-right consensual mainstream in France. In what is perhaps LDP's oddest and least-expected intervention, it published an article in 1 995 on constitutional reform which recom mends: the abolition of the President of the Republic as an elected position, replacing the President by one who has merely a role as fig urehead; reforms which ensure that the leader of the party with the most votes becomes Prime Minister; and electoral reform which makes sure that there is one leading party (LDP 1 2, Feb. 1 995: 5-6) . As Peter Hallward (2003: 239) comments, ' [t]he once Maoist Orga nisation Politique now recommends something very like the British Constitution!'


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Concluding remarks

A key chapter of Badiou's Abrigi de Mitapolitique is entitled 'Politics as Thought' (AM 35-66) . He explains: 'Politics is thought. This state ment excludes any recourse to the doublet theory/practice. There is certainly a "doing" associated with politics, but it is in an immediate sense the pure and simple testing of thought, its localization. There is no distinction' (AM 56) . The chapter as a whole is a glowing review and endorsement of Sylvain Lazarus's book, Anthropologie du nom, in which Lazarus himself insists that 'my fundamental thesis on politics is that it should be approached as a form of thought' (Lazarus 1 996: 1 1 ) . The fact that Alain Badiou's point of departure is in the realm of the ideal means that, despite a keen interest in politics as lived reality, he is unable to unite the two aspects of his theory - the metaphysical and the material - in a coherent system. By contrast with Marx, who strove to bring theory far closer to material reality than it had pre viously been and who argued that the abstract was determined by the material, Badiou does the opposite, insisting that in order to understand the material one must understand the nature of truth via a highly abstract, mathematical ontology. Certainly, he argues that philosophy is conditioned by developments in the material world, but his theory of the event relies on essentialism in order to achieve internal coherence. I have argued that this fundamental problem with Badiou's system of thought has serious consequences for his theory of politics. For example, the role of the subjects of a political event is, paradoxically, a highly passive one until the event has taken place, at which point the role of the subjects becomes crucial. Also, what is the relationship, if any, between events in the different domains? Is there any hierarchy of causation (a term Badiou would certainly shun) between events in the different domains, between say a social revolution and an artistic revolution? Badiou has retained Marx's commitment to the notion of emancipation and egalitarianism (although in a far less material and more abstract way) , but has relinquished Marx's scientific, or histor ical materialist, approach to change. For Badiou true politics is about sudden and serious change in the form of an event, and not about ongoing power struggles which sometimes erupt into emancipatory

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events and sometimes into momentous setbacks for egalitarian politics such as coups d'etat, dictatorship, invasion or some combination of these. The event not only springs from nowhere, but it is also always egalitarian and emancipatory. This conception of the nature of poli tics means that Badiou on the whole refuses to engage with politics where the mass of politically active ordinary people are - in trade unions, political parties and pressure groups and local campaigns, for example - except in a negative sense, to wholly criticize established structures. As far as democracy is concerned, Badiou is often so scep tical about the idea ofmajority rule or any form of representation that he condemns the idea of democracy altogether, invoking both Plato and Rousseau, rather than pursuing the idea of an extension of democracy in a practical sense. In other words he does not believe that it is possible to encourage some aspects ofliberal democracy and to discourage others, to identify those features of liberal democracy that are preferable and closer to socialist democracy than others, and see them as progress compared with what went before. On the other hand, by contrast with either deconstruction or liberal approaches to the philosophy of politics, Badiou places commitment to radical and progressive change at the heart of his system. He puts struggle by ordinary people at the centre and argues that it is above all this which has universal meaning. This revolutionary and praxis driven approach makes discussion of and engagement with his thought both fruitful and necessary. To conclude, I would like to suggest that both the nature of, and debates regarding, the May 1 968 uprising in France could be seen as pivotal to Badiou's approach to the political. We know that, as for so many French intellectuals, May 1 968 was a watershed for Badiou, after which nothing was ever to be the same. I t was also doubtless the major political event (in the Badiouian as well as the more widespread meaning of the word) in France between 1 945 and the present. May arguably shares more of the characteristics of Badiou's general con ception of the event than do many other political phenomena. First, it took place in a country which had one of the most advanced and apparently stable capitalist economies in the world and the uprising was kindled neither by the Communist Party nor by the more radical trade unions, but by middle-class students. In this sense it seemed to

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come out of the blue and did not seem to fit with the circumstances of its genesis (the 'situation' in Badiouian language) . From President de Gaulle to the activists taking part, via analysts who had the benefit of hindsight, many have struggled to explain convincingly the causes and nature of the movement but few have succeeded and no widely respected view has emerged. During May, activists quickly became passionate about revolt in favour of greater justice in many and pro found ways, keeping this idea going for many years after the uprising itself had ended; Badiou would describe this as subjects acting in fide lity towards May. In a way, to examine rationally the causes of May is to spoil the specialness, the excitement and the 'inexplicability' of .May, and it might be argued that Badiou extends this reluctance to his approach to all events. But it is necessary to continue to attempt to examine the reasons for the May uprising, just as it is for all upris ings and other phenomena which Badiou would describe as events . .May did spring out of the circumstances of the time and historians must continue to examine the revolt in that way, however difficult it might be to imagine such an uprising today.

Chapter 4

Jacq ues Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy

In 1 973 Jacques Ranciere attempted to withdraw his chapter on Marx's political economy from the new edition of Reading Capital and by so doing firmly distance himselffrom the theory of Louis Althusser. The attempted withdrawal failed, but it was preceded, in 1 969, by the publication of a highly critical essay and followed in 1 9 74 by a full length book, La Lefon d'Althusser. The May 1 968 uprising had inter vened since the publication of the original edition of Reading Capital in 1 965, obliging Marxist intellectuals, according to Ranciere, to take notice of real revolt and to become less dependent on the sup posed rigours of abstraction ( LA 228) . May had indeed dramatically changed Ranciere's views, persuading him, as he put it in the preface to La Lefon d'Althusser, that Althusser's school was a 'philosophy of order' whose main tenets set its followers apart from the struggle against the bourgeoisie (LA 9 ) . Not only was Althusser's interpreta tion of Marx incapable of enabling an understanding of the May 1 968 uprising, it was being used by the peF as an analytical tool in an ideo logical offensive against the far left. Ranciere explained that his own most important difference with Althusser concerned the role of the subject in human history, which he believed his former mentor greatly underestimated. He also accused Althusser of elitism, because of Althusser's claim that there was a firm distinction between Marxism as science on the one hand and ideology on the other. In a much later essay, Ranciere argues that Althusserian Marxism, 'with its notion of the subject-free process and its radical opposition to all humanism' , had to fly completely i n the face of what Marx actually wrote in order to achieve compatibility between this pseudo-Marxism and structuralism. In fact, he argued, Althusser was not simply influenced by the structuralism that was so prevalent in Parisian

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intellectual circles at the time, but by drawing on Levi-Strauss in anthropology, Lacan's interpretation of Freud, and Foucault on knowledge-power, Althusser was a foremost pioneer of structuralism and 'more than any other, made structuralism a philosophical para digm' (AL 532-3) (also CD 1 5 7-77) . This strong reaction against Althusser was to have a determining influence on Ranciere's work for many years and has arguably shaped both its considerable strengths and its various weaknesses. By the late 1 9 70s he was deeply engaged in what became a decade of historical research in nineteenth-century worker archives, which resulted in several books whose purpose was to allow working people to speak for themselves instead of, as he saw it, being spoken for and in most cases mis-represented by historians and philosophers alike. Ranciere's mature work is often difficult to place according to conventional disciplines and he consciously seeks to challenge tradi tional disciplinary divisions and boundaries. His historical work is found for example in Les Noms de l'histoire. Essai de poetique du savoir ( 1 992) , and his political thought, perhaps best described as the point at which politics and philosophy meet, is found in particular in Aux Bords du politique ( 1 992 and 1 998) , La Mesentente. Politique et Philo sophie ( 1 995) , Ten Theses on Politics (200 1 ) , Chronique des temps consensuels (2005) , and La Haine de la democratie (2005) . In addition to history and politics, his work spans aesthetics (e.g. Esthitiques du peuple [ 1 985] ; Le Partage du sensisble: Esthitique etpolitique [2000] ; L'Inconscient esthitique [200 1 ] ; Malaise dans l'esthitique [2004] ) , literary criticism (La Paroh muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la la litterature [ 1 998] ) and film theory (La Fable cinematographique [200 1 ] ) . The two most obvious strands linking all these works across the disciplines are a strong inter est in language and a commitment to egalitarian politics. In this chapter I begin with a brief look at Ranciere's earlier, but nonetheless firmly post-Althusserian works, and move on to an analy sis ofhis treatment of democracy, consensus and dissensus, and a com parison of his work with that of Alain Badiou. I thus follow his path from his parting with Althusser to history and historiography, then to political thought. I argue that in some important respects Ran ciere's approach to politics is effective, relevant and timely, particu larly in the way it offers a powerful expose and critique of liberalism

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and liberal democracy, and there are key elements of his discussions of democracy, consensus and dissensus that are useful and insightful. It is a powerful and substantial intervention which is in some ways useful as a tool to understand politics in advanced capitalist countries in the early twenty-first century. But I also argue that Ranciere's con ception of politics is too narrow to be useful as a general method in approaching the political, and that his definition of politics seems to contain elements of self-destruction where progressive, egalitarian politics can only fail and revert to the unjust status quo.

Listening to the unheard

With only a little exaggeration, one can sum up Ranciere's entire project since his break with Althusser as an assertion of the impor tance of the human subject. I t is a statement both of the right of the ordinary person to be listened to and a celebration of the profound usefulness oflearning from what the ordinary person has to say, unme diated as far as possible by the intervention of the more powerful. In this respect his work is intended to fly in the face ofmany accepted wisdoms regarding the division of labour between expert and ama teur, teacher and student, wise and unwise. It is in itself a bold state ment - and an intended exemplar - of the possibility of a different type of politics, and he consciously mixes analysis and intervention which begins with the premise of equality instead of viewing equality as a distant goal to be achieved at a far later date (a point to which I return below) . Between his close association with Althusser and his return to political theory in the 1 990s, Ranciere wrote and edited a number of historical works which are particularly clear expressions of this approach, which also underpins the more theoretical of his recent writings. In precisely this spirit of allowing ordinary people to speak for themselves, Ranciere edited (with Alain Faure) La Parole ouvriere, 1830-1851 ( 1 976) , a collection oflong-neglected texts by workers writ ing in this period of intense popular political activity. I t was a project reflecting Ranciere's more general attempt at the time to, as he

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put it, 'establish what working class tradition was, and to study how Marxism interpreted and distorted it . . I posited the existence of a specifically working-class discourse' (Ranciere 1 997b) . Searching for a 'real' history unmediated by historians with a particular paradigm or school ofhistoriography to defend, La Parole ouvriere reflected a view that in order to understand the true nature of working-class values and their expression one should turn to this period and in particular to the socialism of the French artisans. Embarked on a quest for the authentic and essential voice of the progressive, nineteenth-century working class, Ranciere was at this point wide open to the allegation of populism, to the accusation that he and his collaborators had a naIve faith in the forward-looking and egalitarian outlook of this particular section of the French work ing class. But a new, if no less controversial, twist was to make such criticisms less relevant. As a result of his intense archival activity, Ranciere came to believe that the nineteenth-century working class behaved less autonomously and with far less pride in itself than he had previously thought, and was 'a working class which was more mobile, less attached to its tools and less sunk in its poverty and drun kenness than the various traditions usually represent it' (Ranciere 1 988: 5 1 ) . He now argued that, contrary to the belief of many his torians of the nineteenth-century working class, many ordinary working people did not take pride in their work and in their way of life. Quite the contrary; many - including the most significant and militant artisans - were primarily preoccupied with planning or at least dreaming about an escape from their own trades and ways of life and were hankering after the lifestyles and cultures of the bour geoisie. The aspirant, self-taught and articulate amongst these indivi duals, who imitated the more privileged, were the most impor tant object of study for the socialist historian: 'A worker who had never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verses to suit the taste of his times was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs' (Ranciere 1 988: 50) . This approach of course constituted a substantial shift away from Marxist historiography. For Marx, the future was likely to be shaped by the collective might of the proletariat, of wage labourers and their .

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allies, who would work for the cause of socialism because it was they who suffered most from the process and consequences of the Industrial Revolution. It was they who were most likely to organize resistance and revolt, in part because they had the least to lose. Aspirant arti sans, Marx had argued, had far more to lose than the proletariat and in fact benefited from the status quo, compared with proletarians at least. Whatever one might make of Ranciere's new approach, it was indeed this particular shift, which was arguably as significant as his earlier strong reaction against Althusser, that led to some unique posi tions and placed his thought in a far less identifiable place in a disci plinary sense than had previously been the case. He was now working on the boundaries between history, aesthetics and critical theory, and later political theory as well. Ranciere was now looking at working class history as culture, as writing, rather than social or political his tory in the more conventional sense. His work was certainly intended to be provocative and to challenge much accepted wisdom, including orthodox historical materialism. The Nights r:if Labour: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France ( 1 989 [ 1 98 1 ] ) follows in great detail intellectual expressions of work ing class life of the 1 830s and 1 840s such as workers' debates with the F ourierists and St Simonians, views expressed in popular newspapers, diaries, letters and poetry. Many of the individuals and groups who produced this material were affected by the July 1 830 uprising in a way Ranciere and his generation were by the events of May 1 968. Via an examination of these documents Ranciere attempts to demon strate how working-class thought in the nineteenth century, far from identifying proudly with a culture of the working class, on the con trary strived to effect a rupture with any such culture and instead sought to take on the mantle of writers and poets. 'At the birth of the "workers' movement", there was thus neither the "importation" of scientific thought into the world of the worker nor the affirmation of a worker culture. There was instead the transgressive will to appro priate the "night" of poets and thinkers, to appropriate the lan guage and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality were indeed real and effectual' (Ranciere 2003 [Mterword] : 2 19 ) . In other words, these worker-intellectuals, far from writing in order to con solidate a popular culture with pride in its honest simplicity and

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worker solidarity, were in fact trying to be other people; they were aspirational. As we shall see, this also anticipated Ranciere's theory whereby politics and democracy both consist of a radical affirmation of the claim to legitimate activity of individuals or a group whose acts are deemed illegitimate by the rules of the status quo. Discussing The Nights ofLabour Ranciere comments: [t]he idea of a 'poetics of knowledge' that would cut across all dis ciplines thus expresses a very close relationship between subject and method. The Nights ofLabour was a 'political' book in that it ignored the division between 'scientific' and 'literary' or between 'social' and 'ideological', in order to take into account the struggle by which the proletariat sought to reappropriate for themselves a common language that had been appropriated by others, and to affirm transgressively the assumption of equality. (LP 5) The Nights of Labour was also the beginning of what would become a more developed critique of historicism (in NH) , exemplified in particular by the histoire des mentalitis approach of the Annales school, and Ranciere later argued that to interpret a historical phenom enon by reference to its time was to lend such an interpretation a wholly spurious authority. The view that many historians were prac tising a 'discourse of propriety' and serving to consolidate a received wisdom about past and present was to push Ranciere even further into a studied a-disciplinarity and an ever stronger opposition to anything remotely or partially relying on positivism or empiricism rDW 1 2 1 -2 ) . There is, i t would seem, an irony with this shift away from a view of the working class as a progressive force because ofits pride in working class traditions and practices, to a view of ordinary people as being most challenging to the status quo in a progressive sense when they seek to imitate other (more privileged) groups and classes. However problematic Marx's claim might be in its empirical detail that the working class, by acting in a way which is true to itself, can be the vehicle of its own emancipation, Ranciere's determination to shed any remnants of claims to scientific references - including 'scientific socialism' - is at least equally problematic. If Ranciere viewed other

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historians as being unchallenging to the status quo by describing and attempting to explain generalities, he now seemed to have shifted from a populist stance to an approach where he was highly selective regarding whom he studied in order to support a view of the world which relied more on its own internal logic than on a thorough exploration of the world as it is. Ironically, by abandoning all notions of generalization and testability in an empirical way he was putting the intellectual in a position of authority because it was now the scho lar who decided who was worthy of study and who was not, appar ently without reference to broader criteria. By adopting an approach that was arguably in part at least a form of critical theory, he was allowing the interpreter of history full reign to pick and choose at will, influenced largely by the logic of the historian's own abstrac tions - Ranciere's own story - rather than more generalizable cri teria, be they historical or sociological or both. Ranciere however reached the opposite conclusion, namely that it was established philosophy and sociology that were intrinsically eli tist, including not only and most obviously the work of Plato, but also the writings of Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu, which he explores in The Philosopher and His Poor (2003 [ 1 983] ) . These and other thinkers, he argues, all of whom wrote major texts where the poor (or others whose role in society was not to think) play an important part, para doxically reinforce the separation that exists between the mass of ordinary people on the one hand, and thought and art on the other. In what turned out to be a contributing factor to his passage back to theory, Ranciere attempts to show that the foundations of philosophy (and in Bourdieu's case sociology) are built on the exclusion of the poor rather than their integration, where the poor are firmly placed in one position in society and the philosopher (or sociologist) in another. The thinker examines the poor, who do not think for them selves; they are intellectual objects, not subjects. Philosophy, includ ing Marxist and neo-Marxist philosophy, seeks to explain why there is a particular distribution of social roles and serves to reinforce the injustices and inequalitites of the status quo. Philosophy is thus a jus tification of domination. He points out that Plato is quite clear that there is and should be a strict division oflabour between people whose social role is to do one


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thing or another, in particular to be either artisan or philosopher, doer or thinker, but never both. From a fairly uncontentious review of Plato's comments on social roles, Ranciere moves more controver sially to Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu. According to Ranciere, Marx views the poor - the proletariat - in a similar fashion to the way Plato views the poor, to the extent that for Marx the historic role of the working class is to rise up, to revolt and to overthrow capitalism. It does this not because of what it has to contribute in a positive sense, socially, politically or culturally, but because ofwhat it is not, because it is emptied by the capitalist mode of production of all positive attributes: 'The proletarian has only one role, to make revolution, and s/he cannot not make revolution, given who s/he is. For the proletarian is the pure loss of any attribute, the identity of being and non-being' (PP 1 22, italics in original) . Once again, then, according to Ranciere, Marx the philosopher, like Plato before him, treats the poor as a cog in the philosopher's explanatory machine and not as a group of indivi duals who take any initiatives, or pursue creative activities. Sartre also takes the function and potential freedom of ordinary working people to be crucial in any proper understanding of the world. But like Marx, Sartre as interpreted by Ranciere only treats them as rounded and intrinsically interesting people who think for themselves in a distant and imaginary future, not in the present, when by contrast the philosopher has depth and a great deal of under standing and the poor have neither. Finally, Bourdieu is a particularly important object of criticism in The Philosopher and his Poor, partly because, whilst Ranciere was finishing his book, Bourdieu's sociology of education in The Inheritors ( 1 979 [ 1 964] ) , Reproduction in Education ( 1 977 [ 1 970] ) and Distinction ( 1 984 [ 1 979] ) was being taken seriously by the new Socialist government in France, after the election of President Mitterrand in 1 98 1 . For Ranciere, Bourdieu's description of education as being designed almost exclusively for the educated classes, as culture for the already cultured, does not challenge the ini quities ofthe status quo any more than Plato had. Certainly, Bourdieu defends the dispossessed against the privileged, but this popular align ment still leaves no room for individuals to do any of the social shifting that had become so crucial to Ranciere's view of any real struggle for emancipation:

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[T]his 'taking sides' consists in explaining backwards the same thing as the philosopher. But this reversed order is not indifferent. The philosopher started from the arbitrary in order to reach necessity. The sociologist reaches necessity starting from the illusion of free dom. He proclaims that it is the illusion of their freedom that binds artisans to their places. The declared arbitrariness thus becomes a scientific necessity, and the redistribution of cards an absolute illu sion . . . [Bourdieu] doubled Marxist necessity with the Parmeni dian necessity of its eternity. (PP: 1 79) Ranciere's critique of Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu in The Philosopher and his Poor would seem to stem from a broader position regarding the ories of socialist emancipation. For socialist theorists, the most oppressed and excluded members of society are also, by definition, those who are the most marginal with regard to advanced formal edu cation and participation in theoretical discussions. The theoretical agenda tends very much to be set and explored by the highly educated who are often also part of other social elites. The poor (in Ranciere's parlance) are therefore likely to seem at times like objects rather than subjects ofsocialist theories. Having sprung from the Althusserian fold where this tendency was arguably pronounced - and Althusser was himself, after all, professor at an elite grande ecole Ranciere's reaction was to go far in the opposite direction, to a position that could easily be described, once again, as populist, where theory was shunned almost entirely in order to record and then disseminate the words and thoughts of workers. This approach and the pursuit of theory are not wholly incompatible, although Ranciere might have at least seemed to think so at the time. A corrective to the idea that one must choose between accepting uncritically the views of worker intellec tuals and rejecting theory by intellectuals deemed part of a social elite might lie in the notion of Marx's 'revolutionizing practice', sug gesting that ideas (including theory) are bound to change as practical struggles take place and reflect back on and inform ideas which influ enced the struggles in the first place. Ranciere's response to his conclusions regarding philosophy and the poor was to distance himself from the practice of many radical intellectuals who, it seemed to him, suggested to the oppressed and -


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exploited what they should be doing and thinking, how they should remain in their respectives roles and places. If The Philosopher and his Poor was one transitional work on Ran ciere's way back to theory, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation ( 1 99 1 [ 1 987]) was the other. In this slightly later book he challenges the dominant notions of the nature of teaching and learning by exploring the emancipatory pedagogy of the eccentric Joseph Jacotot ( 1 770-1 840) . Jacotot was a multi-skilled emigre teacher at the University of Louvain who took as a starting point the belief that all human beings have equal intelligence and that differences in educational attainment stem almost exclusively from differential opportunities and experiences. This relatively un contentious starting point, which is indeed found in many liberal and left-leaning approaches to pedagogy, leadsJacotot to a far more radi cal assertion that the position of the teacher is not one of authority where she or he imparts to students what slhe knows and what the students do not know. Quite the contrary; the best learning takes place along the same lines as infant language learning, where experi ment, exploration and imitation are far more important and effec tive than the conventional pedagogic process which involves receiving and absorbing knowledge passively from one's teacher and then reproducing it. Perhaps more reminiscent of supervision of disser tations or theses in higher education than of conventional school teaching or even some undergaduate teaching, Jacotot's challenge to conventional pedagogy is so extreme that, as Ranciere puts it: ' [t]he duty of Joseph Jacotot's disciples is thus simple. They must announce to everyone, in all places and all circumstances, the news, the practice: one can teach what one does not know' (IS 1 0 1 ) . This highly unorthodox approach to pedagogy could hardly be further removed from that of Althusser, whom Ranciere quotes in La Lefon d'Althusser as follows: 'The object of pedagogy is to transmit a particu lar body of knowledge to subjects who do not possess this knowledge. The pedagogical situation therefore relies on the absolute condition of inequality between knowledge and absence of knowledge' (LA 1 7, italics in original) . Jacotot apparently did teach languages to students from a position of having no knowledge of the languages himself and according to Ranciere this de-mystified form of teaching which

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takes as its starting point an assumption of equality is the essence of emancipatory practice. From a pedagogical point of view, many questions can be raised regarding this approach. For example, for learners to pursue an inde pendent line of enquiry implies a high level of motivation or a high level of understanding of the process of learning, or both. Moreover, particularly at more elementary stages, the student arguably benefits greatly from the more extensive knowledge of the teacher in a fairly conventional way, especially with regard to the technical skills oflan guage learning or the basics of chemistry, for example. Leaving such practical objections aside for the moment, I would suggest that this view of pedagogy and in particular the social analysis that underpins it is a partial challenge to Enlightenment notions of progress and emancipation. Instead of the idea that human beings can strive to improve their lot by working towards equality and freedom, Ranciere, likeJ acotot, takes equality to be a starting point for all poli tical analysis and not a medium- or long-term goal to be striven for with the help of an approach located within the Enlightenment tradi tion of social progress. As we shall see, this has considerable conse quences for Ranciere's more fully-fledged political thought, in particular in Au Bords dupolitique ( 1 992) , La Mesentente ( 1 995) and Ten Theses on Politics ( 200 1 ) , all of which are influenced by J acotot's views. In the meantime, one of Arthur Rimbaud's poems provided the title for the journal of which Ranciere was one of the founding editors in 1 975 and with which he remained involved until its demise in 1 98 1 (see S P and Ross 2002: 1 24-3 7 ) . The name Les Rivoltes logiques was taken from Rimbaud's poem 'Democracy', written after the defeat of the Paris Commune and which describes how the bourgeois class was 'destroying all logical revolt'; the parallel with the period after May 1 968 is clear and the title was also a reference to the slogan 'On a raison de se revolter' ('We're right to revolt') adopted by the Maoist group the Gauche prolitarienne of which some of the editors had been members. The journal was concerned with the social history of labour, working from the premise discussed above that there was often a considerable difference between what workers said and wrote about themselves on the one hand and what professional intellectuals said about them on the other.


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In the first issue of the journal, the mainly philosophy-trained edi torial collective stated that they intended to write a different sort of history from any of the established French schools of historiography, and most importantly to 'resituate . . . thought from below' (in Ross 2002: 1 28) . Contributors would be concerned with searching archives for examples of primary speech and text in particular, thus allowing worker-intellectuals to speak for themselves. Highly reminiscent of Ranciere's approach in The Nights if Labour, the journal's inaugural statement expressed particular interest in workers who emulated people from other cultures and classes, including those who adopted a language more associated with the bourgeoise. Ranciere's return to theory thus emerged against a background of strong reaction against the scientific structuralism of Louis Althusser, a Maoist and populist influence, much meticulous research in histor ical archives, and some highly unorthodox and original conclusions regarding both the historiography of the working class and actual conclusions drawn from an archive-based study of its history.

Liberal democracy and language

During the many years he spent arguing in favour of listening to unheard voices and promoting unsung heroes, Ranciere was attempt ing to assert the importance of the experiences and views of ordinary people who were, he believed, overlooked by liberals and by left phi losophers alike; both groups contributed to keeping the poor in their place. So Ranciere's project during what might be termed his histor ical period, discussed above, confronted the notion that modernity and the liberal order allowed all individuals equal opportunity and allowed them to interact with each other as equals. But it also con fronted analysts working in the socialist tradition who highlighted from afar (as Ranciere saw it) the historic, progressive role of the oppressed, but who knew little of their real lives. Since his return to political thought, Ranciere has taken these themes as a point of departure and, seen as a whole, his thought can be interpreted as a powerful critique of the very bases upon which liberal democracy is built and the consequences ofliberal-democratic assumptions for the

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day-to-day reality of both politics and people's lives more generally. ( I discuss the consequences for socialist theory below. ) I will argue that he identifies some crucial ways in which liberalism is flawed as a progressive and supposedly egalitarian doctrine and that, broadly speaking, highlighting the notion of democracy linked to a radically egalitarian notion of politics is a useful way to pursue a critical exploration ofliberal democracy. Language, which Ranciere explores partly as a metaphor and partly in a more literal way, is at the heart of his approach and as I mention above it is one of the unifying factors in his entire political, historical, aesthetic and literary oeuvre. However, if some of the most important detail of his theoretical writing investigates the nature and results of speech acts, he is by no means part of the mainstream structuralist or poststructuralist 'linguistic turn', and is far more con vinced of the theoretical centrality of popular revolt than either Derrida or even Foucault, for example. But the importance of what can broadly be termed 'discourse' certainly borrows from the post structuralist tradition. Before examining Ranciere's exploration of language more fully, let us pause in order to remind ourselves of the major tenets of a liberal democratic approach to politics. Liberal democracy promotes the importance offreedom to vote, regular elections and eligibility of vir tually all adults for public office. I nstead of emphasizing the impor tance of collective interests and popular rule, it defends the rights of the individual. John Rawls ( 1 9 7 1 : 6 1 ) , for example, argues that there are certain fundamental liberties that should take precedence over popular rule in order to ensure that individuals are free and equal, including freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience and freedom of thought, the right to hold personal property, and freedom from arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the rule of law. Rawls and many other liberals argue that defence of these aspects of personal freedom helps protect the individual's private sphere against what he sees as often counterposing interests of the public sphere. Liberalism thus stresses individual rights, equality before the law and formal equality of opportunity, often before even minimal electoral concerns. It relies upon notions of equality of opportunity and equality before the law, equalities which are

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achieved in part via a defence of the rights of the individual. This, according to liberals, enables equality of rights and equality of com petition between individuals playing by the same rules. For Ranciere, any such approach to the notion of equality and democracy is profoundly misleading. Liberal approaches to equality take as read the idea that the fundamentals ofpolitical equality can be upheld despite inequalities of wealth, status and influence. But for Ranciere there are profound structural ways in which the poor are kept in their traditional place. The way he puts this is that in normal times not only is the speech of ordinary people ignored, but their words are not recognized as speech at all; rather, they are taken to be mere noise, a type of Aristotelian blaberon of meaningless utterances. One can think of daily, minor but actual examples of this. From chil dren in the company of adults to discussions in a cafe or pub or at dinner parties, in trade union and political meetings, to intellectual debates in many arenas, there are instances where words uttered by some seem to count so much more than words uttered by others, at times regardless of the substance of the words themselves. Words are not simply words with inherent, context-free meaning, but are received very differently according to who is uttering them and where they are uttered. Thus when the powerless rise up and assert their legitimacy and their right to be taken notice of, it is a legitimacy to be heard. Ran ciere argues that radical, and in particular insurrectional, assertions cannot be recognized as speech by those in harmony with the status quo and this is where deliberation politics (and consensus politics) are particularly wrong: they assume people are talking in a context where they fully understand each other, and assume that they are communicating on the same wavelength. In this respect, Ranciere is explicit in his critique ofJiirgen Habermas' theories of communica tive action and deliberative democracy which also have a linguistic orientation, but which rely on the notion that human speech acts can and indeed do tend to enable mutual understanding, agreement and consensus: . . . what radically distinguishes my thinking from a communicative rationality model is that I do not accept the premise that there is a

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specific form of political rationality that may be directly deduced from the essence of language or from the activity of communica tion. The Habermasian schema presupposes, in the very logic of argumentative exchange, the existence of a priori pragmatic con straints that compel interlocutors to enter into a relation of inter comprehension, if they wish to be self-coherent. This presupposes further that both the interlocutors and the objects about which they speak are preconstituted; whereas, from my perspective, there can be political exchange only when there isn't such a pre established agreement - not only, that is, regarding the objects of debate but also regarding the status of the speakers themselves. It is this pheonomenon that I call disagreement . . .' (DW 1 1 6) Political discussion, then, 'is never a simple dialogue' (M 7 7 ) , never a rational debate between competing but equally represented and equally representable interests, but is a battle to make one's voice count as one that is recognized as legitimate. As is so often the case with Ranciere, this characteristic of all politics is best understood by reference to classical antiquity, and in this case the secession at Aven tin in Rome. For Ranciere the patricians at Mount Aventin did not recognize the noises the plebeians were making as speech and took their utterances to be meaningless. The plebeians were therefore obliged not only to argue their case, but also to frame what they were saying in such a way that the patricians recognized their words as being endowed with meaning in the first place. 'The principal of poli tical interlocution', Ranciere concludes from this, 'is thus disagree ment; that is, it is the discordant understanding of both the objects of reference and the speaking subjects' (DW 1 1 6) . I n the spirit of the slogan 'We are all German Jews', chanted in May 1 968 in response to xenophobic remarks about Daniel Cohn Bendit, he thus considers words not as mere superstructural manifes tations of something deeper and more significant, but items of signifi cance in themselves, real political acts; speaking of The Nights of Labour, he explains that he 'treated these texts not as documents that either expressed or concealed the "real" conditions of the workers and the forms of domination they had endured but rather as evidence of the controversial polemical configurations resulting in that form of

Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy political subjectivity known as "the worker'" He goes on to explain that, beginning from

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(M 1 72, DW 1 1 4) .

a different reading of Plato's critique of writing . . . the central ques tion for me rests upon the politically fertile potential of the opposi tion between two differing accounts of how words circulate. The 'silent word of writing', according to Plato, is that which will sway no matter what - making itself equally available both to those entitled to use it and to those who are not. (DW 1 1 5) Human beings are political, then, precisely because they are literary, because the meanings of words are contested and struggled over in disputes between the powerful and the powerless, those who have to date determined the meaning of words and those who have not. Applying this approach in The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge ( 1 999 [ 1 992] ) , Ranciere attempts to demonstrate the way in which it can recognize the power of speech acts. I ndeed, when Ranciere comes to lay down systematically his views on a theory of politics, a notion as central to his thought as equality is itself a speech event. I would suggest that Ranciere's political thought can be read in part as an exploration of the notion of power in a general sense. Power is the generally accepted logic of what Ranciere describes as the orderly domination of the arkhe, which is the logic of liberalism and the denial of the voice of ordinary people, the sans-part. I n fact, Ranciere's approach is in some ways reminscent of Steven Lukes' thesis in Power: A Radical View ( 1 9 74) . Lukes argues that a proper, 'three-dimensional' view of power must certainly take into account more conventional and restricted views of power which emphasize overt instances of people preventing other people from doing what they would otherwise have done, or compelling them to do what they do not want to do. But a more complete theory of power should also include the idea that those who are more powerful set the agenda in the first place and thus prevent the emergence of other views or desires on the part of the less powerful. When Ranciere describes the way in which the language of the sans-part is unitelligi ble to those who only speak the language of the status quo, he

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appears to be making a similar point. The powerful not only con sciously and obviously override the less powerful in terms of what does and does not get done, and what people are and are not allowed to do, but they also set the terms of debates in such a way that the views and demands of the less powerful cannot be understood, or sometimes even formulated. Having said that, Ranciere's belief that normal politics is charac terized by absence of understanding contributes to a very limited view of what politics is, a position which, I believe, weakens his case. Before moving on, it is worth saying that Ranciere himself uses lan guage in a way that is often open to different interpretations, which at times makes it both intriguing and difficult to understand. Of course, punning and wordplay more generally are characteristic of poststruc turalist thought and have to an extent become part ofRanciere's phi losophy as well. This is of course familiar territory to students of Derrida in particular, who goes out of his way to include in his writing elements of ambiguity and performativity via the manipulation of the form of the language itself; punning, hyphenation and mis-spellings become part of the philosophy and the distinction between form and content is blurred. Ranciere practises linguistic games in a relatively minor way compared to Derrida and other major figures in poststruc turalist thought, but playful linguistic devices are certainly present. This is in part informed by Ranciere's belief that there is no strict demarcation between aesthetics and politics in particular and between other traditional disciplines such as literature and philoso phy; elements more traditionally associated with one discipline thus infuse others, most commonly, aspects oflinguistic or discourse analy sis infusing political thought. We have already seen that for Ranciere, writing itself is a form of political intervention, a form of performance, not a type of detached analysis.

Defining the political

It will now be clear that the heart ofRanciere's political thought is a beliefin the right of the mass ofordinary people to play a different role in society from the one they have been playing, and more generally to


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lead different lives from the ones they have been leading. True politics exists when there is a popular uprising of a particular type, when the sans-part revolt and disrupt the status quo by asserting their right to be equal with all others. This direct challenge to the unjust status quo itself takes the form of a declaration of radical equality on the part of the excluded and is necessarily j ust: [P]olitics exists where the count of parts of society is disturbed by the assertion of a part of those who have no part [l'inscription d'une part des sans-part] . It begins when the equality of anyone with anyone else is declared as being liberty of the people . . . those who are nothing assert that they are collectively identical to the whole of the community. (M 1 69; Highly reminiscent of the powerful phrase in the original French ver sion of the Internationale, 'nous sommes rien, scryons tout' (we are nothing, let us be everything) , Ranciere places emphasis on the importance of insurrection and rare, radical disruption of the status quo which can be altered in positive fashion only by the determined, subjective actions of the dominated. Influenced by classical reflections on poli tics, real politics appeared for the first time in Ancient Greece when parts of the demos insisted they should be listened to and their views and demands regarded as legitimate and equal with those who were in positions of power, and these members of the demos insisted this should happen in the public sphere. Even more importantly, this crucial group, whose individual members were insignificant in the previous order of things, put themselves forward as representatives of society as a whole. Those who had counted for nothing audacioush presented themselves as having universal significance. Central to Ranciere's theory of politics is his notion of police. He splits the conventional notion of the political into police on the one hand, which he describes as 'a certain manner of partitioning the sen sible . . . [e] very thing in its place' (TT 7) and where inequality and injustice abound. On the other hand, politics - in the true, Rancier ian sense disrupts and overturns the order of the police in an interven tion which explores radical equality. The essence of politics is thus disagreement (la mesentente) between orderly inequality and disorderly

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equality (M 1 7, 28-9) . It is this disorderly - one is tempted to say anarchic - equality which Ranciere champions. A proper understanding of the emergence of politics, Ranciere argues, needs to take account of an aesthetic of the political, where the process ofpolitical interrruption enables that which was previously invisible or inaudible to become seen or heard. I n the normal state of affairs, the police determines what is perceptible and audible and what is not, people's and groups' places and functions, the social and politi cal hierarchy and more generally the social and political system. As we have seen, in Ranciere's j argon the very essence ofpolitics is the disrup tion of the partition of the sensible by supplementing it with a part of those who have no part; in this way the perception ofwhat is visible and audible is altered. Despite his strong reaction against Althusser, one cannot help but see aspects of Althusser's theory of ideology here, where the status quo is maintained in important ways by Ideological State Apparatuses and where moving beyond the status quo depends in part at least on tackling these apparatuses. Much of Ranciere's political theory was written during Franc;ois Mitterrand's l 4-year presidency, beginning in 1 98 1 . Mitterrand came to power with a neo-Keynesian programme of reform, which included nationalizations, job creation, higher public sector wages, social security reform and a more progressive foreign policy than France had known before. All of this was wholly out of step with what key governments were doing elsewhere in the world, when Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the USA and Helmut Kohl in West Germany were pursuing vigorous programmes of neoliberal economic policy and regressive social agendas. By the end of 1 982, Mitterrand and his Socialist-Communist government had embarked upon a U-turn which was to set the tenor for successive gov ernments for the next decade and beyond; austerity measures in eco nomic policy to attempt to stem the rising tide of unemployment, only the mildest social reform, highly pragmatic, conformist foreign policy, and 'cohabitation' between left and right when for two periods of two years ( 1 986-88 and 1 993-95) there were right-wing govern ments working with the Socialist President Mitterrand. As Ranciere points out (AB 5 ) , when Mitterrand was re-elected in 1 988 he made not a single promise of reform, compared with 1 1 0 proposals for


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significant change in 1 98 1 . The Mitterrand era came to be known as one which was characterized by consensus-oriented politics, when divisions ofleft and right were supposedly far less relevant than in the past and when private enterprise was championed more than it had been by any other French government since 1 945. Many intellectuals applauded the new governmental pragmatism and joined the search for the ultimate form of managerial, centre-oriented government. In institutional terms this notably found expression in the Fondation Saint Simon think-tank, where intellectuals, professional politicians and business people met to discuss the intersection between business, politics and the world of ideas. Although those schooled in the ideas of May 1 968 were under no illusions that profound change would follow the elections of 1 98 1 , neither did they have the direct experience of adaptive social democ racy that those on the left in many other countries ofWestern Europe had, for example in West Germany, Britain and Sweden. When the Socialist-Communist government performed its economic policy V-turn of 1 982-83, implementing austerity measures and embracing the market, many intellectuals and activists alike were genuinely taken by surprise. Ranciere himself certainly had few illusions regard ing either the Socialist Party or the Communist Party, and would not have seen the 1 98 1 Mitterrand victory as the beginning of a socialist new dawn. But his thought does seem to contain elements of impas sioned reaction to the rapid move to the right on the part of the traditional parties of the left. As we have seen, the only way that pol itics comes about in his theory of politics is via the disruption of the logic of the police and through disagreement; Ranciere is emphatic not only that politics is anomalous and 'exists as a deviation from this normal order of things' (TT: 8) but also that the essence of politics is indeed dissensus (TT: 8) . Against the precepts ofliberal democracy and centre-oriented con sensus politics, against a celebration of the alleged demise of the French revolutionary spirit, and against the managerial claims of pro fessional politicians who have long forgotten what more participative politics might be like, we have seen that Ranciere suggests that a radi cal assertion on the part of the dispossessed that they have legitimate demands (demands that are not even recognized as such in the

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language of the arkhe) can transform a situation dramatically towards the achievement of greater justice. The sans-part must rise up in order to assert the legitimacy of their demands and without such an uprising they will be permanently overlooked, no matter how much dialogue and deliberation takes place along liberal lines. Read in the con text of the Socialist U-turn and its aftemath, Ranciere's theory is a strong reminder that another type of politics is possible, more organi cally connected with ordinary people, and his theory suggests that the abandoning of more traditional left politics is not inevitable. His theory of politics is in this sense an antidote to the depoliticization of governmental and party politics which has been so pronounced in France, contributing both to a rise in the level of abstentions at national elections and indirectly, no doubt, to the rise of the extreme right National Front. It is perhaps not suprising, then, that in Ranciere's work the politi cal is ephemeral and fleeting. I t emerges only at points of tension and polemic between two or more areas, at boundaries and divisions and points of flux, and never in areas or times of stablity and calm. The political subject is 'defined by its participation in contrarities' and pol itics itself is a 'type of paradoxical action' (TT 2) . He explains that he chose the particular title for his book The Nights of Labour precisely because it suggests these worker-intellectuals were exploring emanci pation by transgressing the normally assigned division between day and night, which usually implied work and sleep respectively, but which they replaced with work and emancipatory writing (LP 4-5 ) . This particular type of exploration o femancipation is exactly the sort of exceptional, temporary and illegitimate (according to prevailing norms) form that politics takes in his theory, and indeed at times it has almost dream-like overtones. I t would be hard to imagine a more extreme theoretical challenge to the politics of Fraw;ois Mitterrand after 1 982, or to the politics of many other centrist politians who have embraced a pragmatic approach to government, once labelled Third Way, whether in Brit ain, Germany or a host of other industrialized countries. Ranciere, by stark contrast with this sort of governmental pragmatism, sug gests that a substantial departure from the unjust status quo is possi ble, a departure which had previously seemed impossible to many.


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He does this by placing emphasis on the subject and on political activism, and his theory is to an extent reminiscent of what Marx describes as 'revolutionizing practice' . He advocates progress via political experimentation informing theory and belief in the insight and soundness of ordinary people - 'the paradox of "the competence of incompetents" that is the basis of politics in general' (LP 2 1 ) and he suggests, contrary to the tendency for professionalization of much politics, that the ordinary person is best - in fact is alone equipped to partake in politics. His theory offers hope and promotes beliefin the possibility of radical change in a situation where normally the large numbers of people whose voices are not heard suffer huge dis-advantages, which according to police logic is part of the natural order of things. Ranciere's ideas are, however, problematic in a number of further respects. First, given his highly restricted definition of politics, he does not offer any way of interpreting ongoing characteristics of and changes in what we would normally call politics, whether this be a more restricted, party and parliamentary politics, or a broader defini tion which takes on board a large number of manifestations of power, including many lower-level power struggles which need to be under stood in order to make sense of and encourage more radical change. For Ranciere much of what political and social analysts do when they analyse power is to analyse the police order and not politics at all. He is emphatic (in the very first sentence of his Ten Theses) that ' [p]olitics is not the exercise of power'. But if politics is defined so narrowly, as rare moments of disruption, how are we to understand what happens in between these moments? Ranciere might answer that we also have to understand the police order. But how do we distinguish and analyse more positive, progressive political acts short of uprising in this schema and how do we understand 'bad politics'? Moreover, is there any hope for a more stable, ongoing form of social and political orga nization which is not unjust? According to Ranciere, politics 'exists when the natural order of domination is interrupted by a part of those who have no part. Without this interruption there is no politics' (M 3 1 ) . Real politics is thus defined against an enduring and stable order and apparently cannot itself be enduring or stable. Because of Ranciere's highly specific definition of politics, his theory does not

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seem to equip us to examine what happens outside the extraordinary event of politics, nor to properly understand how one situation leads to the other. As Bob Jessop (2003: 1 7) suggests, there seems to be a 'recurrent cycle' whereby when political insurrection takes place, it is bound to fail and is 'doomed to re-institutionalization'. It is not at all clear that there is a possibility of ongoing democratic and egalitarian politics because the interruption of the police seems bound to be temporary and fleeting, because it is defined as an exception to the status quo rather than as a potentially normal and ongoing state of things (or slowly evolving situation) in its own right. Failure of radical politics seems to be built into radical politics' very definition. This seems again to break with an Enlightenment concept of progress, without convincingly replacing it with another. Indeed, Ranciere's notion of politics is ahistorical to the extent that politics takes much the same form in Ancient Greece as today; it is not, for example, class-specific in a historical sense except to say that it is the poor, the oppressed, the (in Bourdieu's language) 'dispossessed' that bring it about. In the quotation his theory does not seem to to embrace any notion that one type ofpolice politics represents progress compared with another, although in his polical commentary he does suggest distinct advantages of liberal democracy over other forms of government (e.g. LH 8 1 ) . Finally, the notion of equality breaks with more conventional notions of it, to the extent that, as we have seen, it is a theoretical starting point rather than an objective: 'Equality is not a goal that governments and societies could succeed in reaching. To pose equal ity as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, who widen endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish. Equality is a presupposition, an intial axiom, or it is nothing' (Ranciere 2003 [Afterword] : 223) . Once again, this approach seems to be a direct challenge to Enlightenment notions of progress and equality. Since human beings clearly do not live equal lives in so many ways, should not material and other forms of equality therefore remain a goal to be striven for? Ranciere's theory of politics seems deliberately to break with the idea that material equality is in fact a major goal of egalitarian politics. Moreover, it seems to suggest a sort

Jacques Ranciere.' Politics is Equality is Democracy

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of political passivity, by stark contrast with what some other aspects of his theory suggest. What are the sans-part rising up in favour of if not greater equality? Ifequality is taken as given and as a starting point not a goal - then it seems the struggle for a better life is not a practical one but a state of mind, a particular consciousness, which is ironically rather unthreatening to the police state of affairs and possibly rather unmotivating for people wanting to get involved in a struggle for a fairer world. At times it is not clear if Ranciere is in fact developing a praxis informed, progress-oriented, emancipatory theory or ifhe is thinking more in aesthetic terms of the Utopian and an impractical ideal, which might ultimately inspire the practical but is itself quite removed from it; in Le Maitre ignorant, talking about the self-education of artisans in the early nineteenth century, he comments: Thus one can dream of a society of emancipated individuals that would be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate the divide between those who know and those who do not know, between those who possess or who do not possess the property of intelligence. It would recognize only active minds . . . (MI 1 20- 1 ) Ranciere's notion ofpolitics is political - and not politico-economic, and sometimes not materialist for that matter, and certainly not his torical materialist - in that it relies on a notion of the gap between the established order - the police and political interventions as speech acts on the part of individuals or groups who disrupt the inj ustice of the status quo; by doing this the sans-part assert their right to be under stood in a way that the discourse of received wisdom does not allow; the rebels' statements cannot be understood by the ruling police and the conditions ofcomprehension are created in the process of rebellion and its aftermath, through the rebels seizing the opportunity to assert themselves and, in linguistic terms, asserting the comprehensibility of their utterances. In this sense Ranciere's theory is a theory of the sub ject similar to Badiou's, in that subjects must believe in their actions and statements and make them true by creating the revolutionizing criteria by which they are judged. In Ranciere, however, it seems there is far more premeditation on the part of the dominated than in -

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Badiou (people are subjects before the event as well as afterwards) . In this particular respect Ranciere's theory is not unlike Marx's idea that people make their own history, but what is missing is the idea that people make their history in very particular circumstances, so the importance of the subject is there but not the importance of specific material circumstances, it seems. To sum up my views on Ranciere's definition of politics, despite my generally favourable comments above regarding his approach to the role of ordinary people in politics and conclusions we might draw about his approach to power generally, on closer inspection his defini tion of politics is more limited.

Democracy and post-democracy

We are now in a position to analyse Ranciere's conception of democ racy, which we can do fairly briefly, because true democracy is synon ymous with true politics. Thus democracy has nothing to do with government or any institution, or any ongoing, stable organization of society at all, but is on the contrary sudden confrontation with the established police order. Democracy is a transforming force where the demos, defined as 'those who have nothing, who do not have spe cific properties allowing them to exercise power' (DW 1 24) , crea tively disrupts the status quo where everything has its place in order to create space for polemic and dissensus, where the place of things is subject to intense debate and dispute. Highly activist and concerned with creating political subjects, Ranciere's conception ofdemocracy is disruptive and exceptional. Democracy thus defined is to an extent effective as a tool in a left critique of the lived reality of liberal democracy and a number of contemporary discussions of democracy. Ranciere's emphasis on the active and activist role of ordinary people contrasts sharply with the minimally political versions of liberal democracy which have become prevalent, where political structures do as much to shelter the individual from politics as encourage participation, and he insists on a discussion of important areas which many versions of democracy leave untouched. Ranciere uses this approach to great effect in his


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writings on the conventional domain of politics and society and is particularly effective in countering more mainstream interpreta tions of the supposed 'end of exceptionalism' in French politics, society and intellectual life, as I have already argued. In On the Shores of Politics (2007), he argues convincingly that the superficially con sensual characteristics of the Mitterrand era and post-Mitterrand era are certainly not the characteristics of democracy but are, with the increasing professionalization of governmental politics, the decline of interest in party politics and government on the part of ordinary people and the convergence of centre-left and centre-right, quite the opposite of democracy; real democracy allows the demos to undo arrangements and alliances as much as create them and is certainly not there simply to rubber-stamp what the political elite is doing. In La Raine de la democratic (2005) he continues his analysis both of various aspects of the established order and of its intellectual advo cates, such as the historian Franyois Furet and the neo-Tocquevillian social analyst Gilles Lipovetsky. Ranciere argues that these writers amongst many others promote a highly superficial and simplified ver sion of democracy, where the person in the street is reduced to an occasional, reluctant and uninterested voter, which is precisely one reason why there is in fact no democracy. Proper democracy, by con trast, sends liberal democracy into disarray: [D]emocracy is the name of a singular interruption of this order of the distribution of bodies in a community that I have suggested should be conceptualized as police. It is the name of that which interrupts the smooth functioning of this order through a singular process of subjectivization. ( M 1 39) By contrast, many forms ofwhat is called 'representative democracy', he argues, are in fact a type of functioning of the state based on an unhappy compromise between the privileges of supposedly natural elites, on the one hand, and on the other the results of long struggles for more genuine democracy. The best example of this is found in Britain, with its tradition of liberalism combined with a history of struggles for electoral reform. The goal of liberal and representative democracy today, he argues, is in fact to govern without the people,

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or at least with an undivided people, and thus to govern without politics (LH 6 1 , 88) . Thus Ranciere's discussion of democracy is put to use in uncompro mising fashion to expose the severe democratic shortcomings ofliberal democracy, especially in the form it has taken in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is once again a bold assertion of the political legitimacy of ordinary people and is a theory which serves as an effective critique of aspects of the status quo. In Chronique des temps consensuels (2005) , a series of short pieces formerly published as news paper articles, he sets out an alternative vision of a variety of phenom ena, ranging from international political developments to new films, from the bicentenary of Victor Hugo's birth to the philosophy of Adorno and Horkheimer. He explains at the beginning of the book that he is attempting in this writing to contribute to creating the space for proper politics (CT 1 0) . Most of what passes for democratic politics in the West today, then, is post-democracy (M 1 35 ) , which promotes supposed consensus politics, which is in fact a depoliticized form of government where the people disappears, and one of whose major goals is to keep everyone in their place and not to allow the eruption of real politics (M 1 42-3) . Consensual democracy is in fact a contradiction in terms because democracy is about disagreement. One characteristic of post democracy is that what is supposed to be democratic opinion is in fact opinion polls. Another is the apparent submission of politics, in the form of the state, to the judiciary, which is the submission of politics to the state (M 1 5 1 ) . The modest state, which is supposedly not over bearing, in fact puts politics into abeyance, sidelines the demos and in various ways strengthens its position; it does this notably by claiming not to have any choice or room for manoeuvre regarding econ omic policy, because of international constraints. Ranciere points out that when today's governments claim to be nothing but the simple servants of international capital, they have taken on board Marx's once-ridiculed views in this respect and use them to legitimize their behaviour (M 1 56) . Ranciere's theory of democracy is thus a rare and forceful anti dote to the prevailing views on democracy and politics more widely. He argues that we need to rethink how we create politics by thinking


III

differently about disagreement in such a way that this process con fronts the supposed consensus of the status quo, without however creating a new form ofpolice society and politics. Ranciere's theory of democracy is, however, problematic in the ways described above in relation to his definition of politics. It is for example always defined in terms of what it is against and seems necessarily fleeting. Crucially, there is no hint at how a democratic society would be organized, nothing approaching a model of sus tained democracy. If the demos is defined as 'those who have nothing, who do not have specific properties allowing them to exercise power' (DW 1 24) , how would the demos play an active role in a more demo cratic society if, as it seems, an upturn in the demos' political (and pre sumably material) fortunes automatically disqualifies them from political influence? If democracy comes about when 'those who have no business speaking, speak, and those who have no business taking part, take part' (LP 1 9 ) , how could democracy ever be sustained? How could the sans-part, whom Ranciere promotes so effectively in his theory, ever play a full and positive role in a democratically orga nized society if the very existence of democracy depends on their play ing a marginal role and being in an apparently constant state of revolt? It seems the demos is defined in terms that only allow it to play a part which is against the prevailing, unjust order of things, and is therefore condemned for ever to a marginal role. Ranciere says as much when he comments: Democracy means firstly that: an anarchic 'government' founded on nothing but the absence of any entitlement to govern (LH 48) .

Concluding remarks

Jacques Ranciere has developed a radical and emancipatory approach both to popular history and to political theory which asserts the importance of an engaged - as opposed to managerial - form of politics and which poses sound theoretical challenges to liberal ism and liberal democracy in particular. In a body of work which challenges many fundamental aspects of the status quo, he puts the

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ordinary person at the heart of his system and suggests that a form of self-realization, or political subjectivity, comes about via an asser tion of equality in a process by which the views and interests of the sans-part assume universal significance. Taken as a whole, Ranciere's approach is an innovative and uncompromising defence of the politi cal legitimacy of the demos and the importance of self-organization of non-experts. I would suggest that this interpretation of politics is particularly effective when seen as a critique of the professionaliza tion, cynicism, elitism and depoliticization which often characterize parliamentary politics in advanced capitalist societies in the early twenty-first century, which is often accompanied by rising levels of abstentions at elections, profound disillusionment with professional politicians, and the rise of extreme right political parties. Ranciere's theory is also useful in terms of exploring the nature of power more generally and the ways in which many people fail to assume any measure of self-realization because of the structures and practices of what Ranciere describes as police practice. By contrast with what is often described as democracy in liberal theory and more general parlance, democracy for Ranciere is both an active and activist term, where the demos intervenes directly not to endorse the legitimacy of the political elite, to smoothe over differ ences or to achieve consensus, but, on the contrary, to assert the legiti macy of a different type of politics and systematically undermine complacent practices of the existing order. Extraparliamentary activ ity is thus crucial (e.g. LH 84) and all true political activity takes place in the name of equality. Ranciere's project is thus, implicitly at least, also a challenge to large areas of debate and research in the social sciences, especially political science, sociology and economics, whose starting point is often to take as read the legitimacy of the established order and whose conclusions therefore reinforce its pur ported legitimacy. I have argued that in these ways Ranciere's work is sound and useful. I have also argued, however, that his work suffers from various shortcomings. The nature of Ranciere's reaction against Althusser means that there is a reluctance to identify a class or subsec tion of a class as a progressive force in a historic sense. This is

Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democra�r

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particularly clear both in his writings on the nineteenth century and in his discussion of the work of Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu. One apparent consequence of this for Ranciere's political theory is that he does not suggest how a radical, egalitarian politics can be sustained; his socialist uprising is to an extent one without an empirically defined agent. Next, his definition of politics is so narrow that politics can only, it seems, be fleeting and any progressive uprising will soon revert to the status quo. Roughly the same applies to Ranciere's theory of democracy, given that politics and democracy are virtually synonymous. Ranciere uses a notion ofspeech as a political act, aesthetics and the 'poetics of politics' in order to illustrate the need for radical emancipa tion. But his discussion of disagreement (misentente) in these respects is strongly reminiscent of ideology, and even Althusser's notion of inter pellation. Could it be that a virtual equating of revolution on the one hand and the assertion of ideological change on the other explains the extremely fragile nature of Ranciere's real politics? If uprising is in fact ideological rather than a process where material circumstances are substantially changed, then uprising is bound to be vulnerable to swift reversion to the status quo. Finally, and more generally, we have seen in the opening para graph of this chapter that Ranciere criticized Althusser for construct ing a 'philosophy of order', a philosophy that left too much intact and did not sufficiently challenge the status quo, and that Ranciere pro ceeded to react strongly against his former mentor. I would suggest that the degree and the nature of reaction is such that when one looks at the detail of his definition of politics, appealing as an idea though this ephemeral disorder of egalitarian revolt may be, Ran ciere's own system often becomes a philosophy of exception or even a philosophy of disorder. Let us for a moment compare Ranciere and Badiou, both of whom have a commitment to the idea of emancipation via activist and ega litarian politics. Badiou suggests (in AM 1 29-38) that the following aspects of Ranciere's work are borrowed from his own, an influence which Ranciere acknowledges to some extent (e.g. AB 32) . First, Ranciere's notion of police appears to draw on Badiou's 'state of the

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situation', which is pure multiplicity, or metastructure. The state (or for Ranciere the police) attempts to prevent the event taking place, and denies its possibility (AM 1 34) . Next, Ranciere, like Badiou, believes that politics comes about when individuals and/or groups act (in Badiou's language) in fidelity towards an event, in effect creat ing this event by naming it. It is only when this process of creation of subjecthood takes place that political activity takes place. Third, both agree that politics is a linguistic expression of radical equality and Badiou reminds us that, like Ranciere, he believes that declarations can be an important manifestation of the political. Finally, they both believe that politics renders visible formerly invisible aspects of a situation, so that from a situation where the terms of the event are not recognized, the actions of individuals - and only these actions assert the legitimacy and indeed the existence of the event. Summing up their similarities, or more precisely his own influence on Ranciere, Badiou points out (AM 1 34-5) that for Ranciere politics 'is not the exercise of power' and that politics is 'a specific rupture in the logic of the arkhe', that politics is rare and subjective and that politics is 'the action of supplementary subjects who assert themselves as super numerary by conventional methods of counting parts of society'. I would suggest that Badiou's advantage over Ranciere in his over all scheme of things is that human beings are able to sustain tremen dous and positive change in the long term through their commitment to the event. Badiou's philosophy is in this way a philosophy which looks to the future in its concentration on after-the-event change, which to an extent offers a way out of existing injustices. Ranciere, by contrast, does not include any real hints as to how to move beyond police rule, as we have seen. One of Badiou's overall weak nesses, on the other hand, is that he is unable to explain properly the pre-evental genesis of change, or movement more generally and indeed is adamant that the emergence of the event is not explicable by reference to the circumstances in which it came about. Ranciere, on the other hand, places emphasis on explaining the genesis of his event-equivalent, which is the disagreement which leads to rupture and which allows the emergence of politics. Both writers conceive of politics proper as a process where the human subject is of crucial importance. Without the political activism


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of individuals or groups there is no (in Badiouian language) political event. For Ranciere, a rupture in the logic of the arkhe generates political subjectivity, that is proper politics. For both, then, people become subjects when they rise up and create or act in fidelity towards new rules and circumstances.

Chapter 5

Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity

Like Badiou and like Ranciere, Etienne Balibar has resisted any temp tation to adopt a wholesale liberal approach in his interpretation of politics, or to succumb in a maj or fashion to poststructuralism. At the heart ofhis definition of the political is the notion ofemancipa tion, with the defiant actions of ordinary people taking centre-stage. Taken as a whole, Balibar's preoccupations are often reminiscent of those ofAlthusser - both are interested in Spinoza, Marxism as philo sophy, ideology, and conjuncture, to mention but the most obvious although the conclusions Balibar draws diverge increasingly with those of his former mentor as time goes by. Balibar worked closely with Althusser and wrote important parts of Reading Capital ( 1 970 [ 1 965] ) , in which he explores the role of modes of production in the process of historical change. He continued to write from within a Marxist perspective and remained engaged with some of the central questions of Marxism until the late 1 970s, examining in particu lar the nature and role of ideology, the scientific and philosophical claims of historical materialism, the meaning and relevance of the notion of class struggle, and the capitalist state. By the early 1 980s he was moving away from a strictly Marxist approach, although he continued to make a significant contribution to the study of Marx's writings and continued to work broadly within a materialist and historical framework. Again like Badiou and Ranciere, much of Balibar's work since the early I980s relates in one way or another to the question of the human subject. In his general theory of politics and emancipation, it is the emergence and role of the subject in relation to politics and society that one must understand first and foremost. In his reading of

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Spinoza, he develops a theory of 'transindividual subjectivity' which promotes the importance of the imaginary and of ideology, and in his work on citizenship, borders and racism he also discusses theories of subjectivation (SP, WP, RNC) . Unlike Badiou and Ranciere, how ever, Balibar's major later writings are characterized by growing attention to the lived reality of politics, in particular international politics as it relates to borders, citizenship and racism. In this chapter I discuss some of the important contributions Balibar makes to debates concerning both the general nature and detail of emancipatory politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. I argue that the rather fragmented and uneven character of Balibar's work and some of the consequent weaknesses are an integral aspect of it, which can be explained in part by the political and histor ical context in which his writing career developed and by his own position within this context. Born in 1 942, Balibar joined the French Communist Party in 1 96 1 , studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure and became one of Althusser's closest intellectual allies. He remained active within the PCF throughout the 1 960s and 1 9 70s and was one of the party's most prominent public intellectuals. This was the decade during which the party was making the first serious bid for many years to participate in the national government of France, to such an extent that the PCF was in a formal electoral pact with the re emerging Socialist Party: both parties had signed the Union of the Left Common Programme of Government in 1 972 and both hoped vainly as it turned out - jointly to win a majority at the 1 978 parlia mentary elections. For any intellectual steeped in the Marxist tradi tion, this Euro-communist venture, accompanied by the growing crisis of Marxism among intellectuals in France, raised certain funda mental questions in a particularly acute way. For example: can the capitalist state be reformed in order to serve the interests of the work ing class properly, or does it have to be dismantled in order to do this? What is the nature of bourgeois versus proletarian democracy? And what are the consequences for communist parties themselves of alli ances with social-democratic parties such as the French Socialist Party? Balibar's voice became increasingly one of dissent within the PCF and his On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat ( 1 977 [ 1 976] ) openly criticizes the leadership of the PCF for its concessions to liberal

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democracy and its pursuit of short-term electoral gains. He con demned the party's abandonment of the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and he asserted the continued importance of work ing to destroy the capitalist state rather than attempting to reform it from within. Despite these and other serious differences with the party leadership, Balibar remained within the peF until he was expelled for his open and forceful criticism of the party's position on immigration in 1 98 1 , the same year the peF finally joined the Socia lists in government. Balibar's uneasy position as both Marxist intellectual and peF activist during this crucial period has, it would seem, manifested itself in his writings. His mature work is characterized by an ambiva lence towards some crucial questions in modern politics and philoso phy and this ambivalence appears to leave a defining mark in some areas. These include some of the central questions of Marxism, and indeed arguably some of the central questions regarding the nature of political modernity. For example, what is the role of the state in modern emancipatory politics, and to what extent can liberal democ racy and the structures that accompany it be harnessed for more pro gressive ends? Many of Balibar's arguments are important and insightful as individual positions, and some are brilliant, but they do not, when put together, amount to a unified system or worldview. As Balibar himself comments regarding a collection of essays pub lished in English, he ' [does] not claim to present a systematic doctrine of political philosophy' ( Mel vii) , and this is a remark which might be extended to his work as a whole. In what follows I examine some of the areas where Balibar has had significant insights regarding the analysis of politics and human socie ties in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I begin by examining his overall approach to the question of politics, where he embraces and explores the notion of emancipation and links it with a term which he has himself coined, namely 'equaliberty'. Next, I examine his use of the Althusserian term 'conjuncture', his conception of citi zenship and the formation and role of the subject in politics. I then return to the question of Balibar's ambivalence in some areas of his thought, before looking at his approach to political violence, civil dis obedience, Lenin and Gandhi.

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The poIi tical

In Balibar's discussions of what constitutes the political, the influence of traditional Marxism is clear. He emphasizes the emancipatory and revolutionary potential of modernity, with apparent glimpses of what might lie beyond the era born of bourgeois revolutions. In a landmark essay entitled 'Trois concepts de la politique: Emancipation, transfor mation, civilite', he argues that emancipation, transformation and civility are the key notions for understanding modern politics. They occur all together, or not at all (LC 1 9-53 ) . Emancipation is closely bound to the notion ofequaliberty (which I discuss in more detail below) , meaning the inseparability of equality and freedom. Politics thus defined, as politics of emancipation, is a practical exploration of the self-determination of the people; all obsta cles to greater equality and freedom are illegitimate and must be abol ished. A precondition for collective self-government is freedom from all reference to a supposedly natural order, in a clear allusion to the watershed and progressive nature of Enlightenment thought. Collec tive politics can only exist in the form of self-government, whether this collective politics concerns society, the nation, the state, the people more broadly or even humanity as a whole, and in the process of col lective self-determination the political sphere becomes autonomous (LC 22) . This type of government must also be free from institutiona lized and systematic discrimination and constraints. Still in the spirit of popular self-determination, Balibar empha sizes the importance of a universal right to inclusion in the political sphere, and argues that no-one can 'be emancipated' by an external entity; they cannot be granted political freedom by an outside agency. He argues that although rights won in the process of emancipation are individual rights of equaliberty, they not only have to be struggled for and won (they will not be simply granted to the deserving in the fullness of time) , but the process must be a collective one (LC 22: . Balibar's subject as citizen and collective subject as demos is thus highly active and he comments on democratic politics as follows: . . . the continuous process in which a minimal recognition of the belonging of human beings to the 'common' sphere of existence

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(and therefore also work, culture, public and private speech) already involves - and makes possible - a totality of rights. I call this the 'insurrectional' element of democracy, which plays a determinant role in every constitution of a democratic or republican state. Such a state, by definition, cannot consist (or cannot only consist) of sta tutes and rights ascribed from above; it requires the direct partici pation of the demos. (WP 1 1 9)

Defined in this way, political subjects embody the universal in the sense that they represent themselves. Reminiscent in this respect of Ranciere and indeed of Marx, for Balibar the emancipation of those who are dominated is conceived by them as the emancipation of all; the dominated beome the universal class. Balibar does however allow for political representation, as long as delegation is controlled and recallable (LC 23) . For Balibar any process of progressive political transformation is, like or perhaps even more so than emancipation, bound up with the process of subjectivation, which is indeed intimately part of all poli tics. It is in the struggle for emancipation and transformation that participants become autonomous subjects. Arguing again on the whole with Marx, he suggests that particular historical conditions lar gely determine the nature of the process of transformation and subjec tivation, during which these historical conditions themselves change. These are what Balibar, with direct reference to Althusser, calls 'con juncture'. For both Althusser and Balibar, all writing, including phi losophy, must be interpreted in the context of the historical and political conditions in which it is written. This is what both these phi losophers practise in their writings on Marx, Spinoza, Machiavelli and others. Balibar's insistence that 'philosophy is never independent from specific conjunctures' ( I C 44) is reminiscent of Althusser's description of the new practice of philosophy which he argued Marx had pioneered: 'The measure of Marx's materialism is less the materi alist content ofhis theory than the acute, practical consciousness ofthe conditions, forms and limits within which these ideas can become active' (Althusser 1 990: 275) . For Althusser and Balibar the notion of conjuncture must also be understood in terms of the contradictory


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elements that make up a historical and political context. Althusser interprets Lenin's writings between the 1 905 and 1 9 1 7 revolutions as an analysis of the uneven and contradictory relations within the Rus sian political economy of the time, which offered the preconditions for socialist revolution. In an approach similar to Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development (a likeness not mentioned by Althusser) , Lenin points to an explosive mixture of industrial devel opment characteristic of advanced capitalism, alongside rural socio economic conditions containing elements of feudalism, all faced with the challenges and demands ofa world war (Althusser 1 969: 1 78-80) . Perhaps Balibar's most tangible application of analysis using con juncture is found in We, the People ofEurope? Riflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004 [200 1 ] ) , as Jason Read has argued in comprehensive and convincing fashion (Read 2004) . In this book Balibar argues that the expansion and consolidation of the European Union offers in the same broad gesture both opportunities and substantial threats to large numbers of ordinary people. On the one hand, enlargement offers the possibility of deeper democracy on an international scale. On the other, it threatens to bring a form of European apartheid accompa nied by the further rise of the extreme right in many countries. It is this contradiction, or at least this situation which he argues has both progressive and reactionary elements, that must be explored. The question of the border must be addressed in order to democra tize Europe, for at present the border acts as a means of discrimi nating between 'legitimate' Europeans on the one hand, who are mainly white, indigenous inhabitants, and on the other hand 'illegiti mate' Europeans, who are mainly non-white and non-indigenous to Europe. This latter group is an important and integral part of the suc cessful economy of Europe, but its members are politically excluded using many means, including violence. Balibar's proposed solution is a form of 'transnational citizenship', where the Rights of Man are applied in a radical way to all residents, including all immigrant workers and asylum seekers. As long as one lived in the EU, one would have full voting rights and full rights to draw on state-provided social protection. This is an example of Balibar applying the notion of conjuncture where economic and political aspects of a situation are pulling in

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different directions - in order to explore the construction, or poten tial construction, of the political subject. The economic benefit which immigrant workers bring to Europe combined with political exclusion, and any resolution or partial resolution of this contradic tion, is an important part of this particular process of subjectivation. We might comment at this point that the practical political solution proposed by Balibar is far less radical than his complex theoreti cal framework might suggest. This particular argument for practical exploration of political subjectivization and emancipation seems to lead to a somewhat less discriminatory approach (compared with the status quo) to relations between individuals on the one hand and the national and emerging international state on the other, but little more. The practical conclusions of this sophisticated theory would appear to leave many unjust structures and practices untouched, including, incidentally, routine exploitation of non-immigrants, which seems to be overlooked. Civility, meanwhile, Balibar defines as the speculative idea ofa politics of politics, or a politics in the second degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible, or at least is not made absolutely impossi ble . . . In particular, 'civility' does not necessarily involve the idea of a suppression of'conflicts' and 'antagonisms' in society, as if they were always the harbingers ofviolence and not the opposite. Much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss in fact results from a blind political preference for 'consensus' and 'peace' . . . (WP 1 1 5- 1 6) Civility thus creates the space in which politics takes place and elim inates the extremes of violence without suppressing all violence and revolt (LC 47; . If Balibar's discussion of politics becomes less threatening to the status quo and indeed less emancipatory the nearer it gets to reality, his discussion of his term equaliberty (igalibertej is often radical and inspiring. By equaliberty he means, in the broadest of terms, that freedom can only be fully realized if equality is also fully realized,


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and vice versa. The historical conditions where liberty and equality arise are the same, and therefore the one cannot exist without the other, and this is a truth that is discovered through revolutionary struggle. Moreover, if liberty is maximized then equality is as well. By the same token, any circumstances that limit or suppress freedom also limit or suppress equality; increased social inequality always accompanies limits to freedom and vice versa. Thus there are both political and ethical obligations to eradicate exploitation and domi nation ( Mel 48) . Balibar's starting point for this radical notion, the logic of whose adoption is a form of politics dedicated to a struggle against all types of exploitation and domination, is a critical attitude towards contem porary liberalism. In liberalism freedom and equality cannot possibly occur alongside each other, apart from within the narrow confines of the juridical, where equality before the law is strongly defended. But a belief in the mutual exclusivity of the two concepts, he argues, is also found among some socialists and in West European anti-racist move ments, for example (Mel 39) . This mistaken approach, Balibar argues, relies on three fundamental misconceptions. The first is the mistaken belief that equality is mainly economic and social, whereas freedom is mainly legal and political. The second is the belief that equality can only be realized via actions by the state, above all through material distribution, whereas freedom implies limited state intervention. Finally, there is a misconception that whilst equality is a collective goal, freedom is above all an individual one. It is these pre cepts, Balibar argues, that lead to a gulf between contemporary dis cussion on the 'rights of man' on the one hand and the 'rights of citizen' on the other. By contrast with the 1 789 Declaration if the Rights if Man and the Citizen, modern liberalism and other ideologies uphold a strict non-identity between man and citizen, with the view that an equation between man and citizen means everything is politi cal, which in turn leads to totalitarianism. Balibar's other starting point for the discussion of equaliberty is thus the Declaration itself, which he argues - controversially - does not take the pre-existing ideology of human nature, or natural rights, as the basis for law and politics, but is a bold assertion of wholly modern democratic principles ( Mel 43-4) . The core and indeed the

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major goal of the text, he contends, is precisely the identity ofman and citizen. Moreover, the upholding of the right to resist oppression asserted in article two of the Declaration is effectively an assertion of the right to collective freedom, whose corollary is indeed the right to resist oppression: 'to be free is to be able to resist any compulsion that destroys freedom' (MCI 45) . Equality, meanwhile, is implicitly at least the notion that links all others together, although this is not spelled out in the Declaration in so many words. Balibar continues his argument for a re-reading of the Declaration as a statement of the principles of equaliberty by suggesting that Marx was quite wrong to invoke (in On the Jewish Q,uestion) the text as an expression of the separation of public and private spheres of human existence, characteristic of bourgeois notions of modern poli tics. On the contrary, according to Balibar the Declaration puts for ward a new idea regarding the relationship between equality and freedom, expressed as a universal: What is this idea? Nothing less than the identification of the two concepts. If one is willing to read it literally, the Declaration in fact says that equality is identical to freedom, is equal tofreedom, and vice versa. Each is the exact measure of the other. This is . . . the proposi tion ofequaliberty: a portmanteau word that is 'impossible' in French (and English) but that alone expresses the central proposition. For it gives both the conditions under which man is a citizen through and through, and the reason for this assimilation. Underneath the equation of man and citizen, or rather within it, as the very reason of its universality - as its presupposition lies the proposition of equal iberty. (MCI 46-7, italics in original) -

It would seem that the most important part of Balibar's argument is a view that political aspects of modernity offer the immediate possibi lity of a more radical form of emancipation than humanity as a whole or any part of it has experienced to date. It was in the logic of some aspects of the revolution of 1 789 to establish the precondi tions for overcoming all exploitation and domination. I ndeed in Balibar's The Philosophy ofMarx, he comments that for Marx commun ism is 'a social movement with demands that were merely a coherent


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application of the principle of [the 1 789] Revolution - gauging how much liberty had been achieved by the degree of equality and vice versa, with fraternity as the end result' (PM 20) . As a general idea this is satisfyingly optimistic with regard to the revolutionary and pro foundly just potential of modernity. But I would argue that it is also characteristic of Balibar's over-optimistic interpretation of the direct legacy of 1 789 and an underestimation of the depth of transformation necessary to enable profound democracy and justice. Indeed, one certainly should take issue with Balibar's exaggerat edly radical reading of the Declaration, a text which does in fact make explicit reference to natural rights (articles ii and iv) . Moreover, as Kouvelakis has argued, Balibar ignores certain aspects of the Declara tion and in certain respects misinterprets Marx's discussion of the dis tinction between citizen and man in order to argue the case for the Declaration containing important elements of equaliberty. Marx makes the distinction in relation to the Declaration precisely because he interprets the document as one building block for bourgeois - and therefore restrictive - politics, which will serve the interests of the bourgeoisie more than others ( Kouvelak's 2004: 1 5-22) . This does not, however, invalidate what seems to be Balibar's more general thesis, namely that 1 789 and other bourgeois revolutions helped create the social, economic and ideological circumstances where emancipatory politics consonant with such a notion as equaliberty could be played out. This is also one of the powerful messages of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto. In order to explore Balibar's approach to the citizen and modernity further, let us return for a moment to the question of the human sub ject. As we have seen, in one way or another, Balibar's discussion of politics is always concerned with the emergence of political subjects. His reading of Spinoza seeks to interpret Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise in part as a study of the construction of the subject. Marx, meanwhile, is a 'philosopher of the subject in the most classical sense' I I C 1 5 1 ) , whose view of the subject as achieving self-realization and freedom through revolutionary activity is most clearly expressed in the Theses on Feuerbach, although the naming and fuller exploration of the role of 'subject of history' in the form of the proletariat comes only with Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness. Balibar even suggests,

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many years after his collaboration with Althusser had ended, that his own contribution to Reading Capital in the shape of an exploration of forms of historical individuality and also his denial of the importance of the subject to structural Marxism was in some sense laying the ground for subsequent studies of its importance (IC 1 49) . When Balibar comes to address the question of the human subject in his own philosophy, he comes up with what is perhaps a surprising position. In response to Jean-Luc Nancy's question, 'Who comes after the subject?', Balibar answers: . . . after the subject comes the citizen. For the 'subject', which has haunted the whole problematic of liberty and of the individual [ personne] for fifteen centuries, is not an ontological figure, that of an objectum or hypokeimenon, but a legal, political, theological and moral figure . . . What - or rather who - comes after the subject (first around 1 789-93) , is the universal, national, and cosmopolitical citizen who is indissociably both a political and philosophical figure . . . there is no doubt that with the revolutionary event the subjectus irre versibly cedes his place to the citizen. (IC 1 52, italics in original; also see Cadava et al l 99 l ) Thus for Balibar the modern subject is necessarily political; modernity offers for the first time the possibility of both citizenship and subjectiv ity, and he talks of his 'research on the revolutionary relieving and replacing of the subject by the citizen, and on the becoming-citizen of the subject' (IC l 56 ) . Balibar disagrees with what he sees as Marx's belief that man is private and part of civil society and that the citizen is the political entity with political rights and political involvement. Whatever one might think of this comment on Marx, Balibar is not, it would seem, particularly ambitious for his subject, who is an indivi dual who becomes subject via rather minimal political rights afforded by the Declaration and the modern state, albeit with much participa tion by the citizen-subject. Rather than emancipation and transfor mation leading to the formation of a more self-realized human being who could at last determine his or her own fate free from the fetters of socio-economic and political exploitation and all that goes with it, as


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Marx suggested, for Balibar the emancipated human subject appears above all to enjoy a series of political rights determined by and relat ing to the state.

Ambivalence, universality, ideology

I suggest that Balibar's ambivalence towards certain key aspects of modern politics has resulted in an often incomplete and inconclusive aspect to his work. In an essay perhaps tellingly entitled 'The Infinite Contradiction' which offers an overview of his own work, he says himself that his writing is 'governed by disparity and abounds in palinodes' (IC 1 42) . He frequently writes of 'aporia', suggesting a sense of wonder but also preoccupation with paradoxes and confu sion. He comments that 'aporia does not mean error of course but double bind of a simple discovery or simply of a revolutionary theore tical question, posed in the very terms of its denial or in the impossi bility of its solution' (IC 1 59 ) . Indeed, he talks of 'incompleteness [inachevement] proper to philosophical texts - an incompleteness that my readings constantly illustrate, and that has led me to use the verb to incomplete [inachever] in the active form' (IC 147, italics in original) . He goes on to suggest that Marx 'incompleted' Capital, Heidegger 'incompleted' Being and Time and Spinoza 'incompleted' his Political Treatise, and that the nature of great philosophy is both to incomplete itself and to incomplete others. Balibar is influenced by Derrida's close attention to the text and does not always impose his own (that is Bali bar's) conclusions on the text, allowing the text to serve as its own con clusion, with the reader of Balibar's own text feeling left, again, with a sense of ambiguity and absence of conclusion. We have already seen that Balibar is emphatic that he does not have a complete political philosophy, what one might call a worldview, and both the structure of his work and its frequent asides add to an already unfinished qual ity; he often comments that what he is saying is a briefer or more par tial account than he might wish, or that he has run out of time. Moreover, one is reminded of the postmodern rejection of grand nar ratives when he comments that ' I am not proposing here a general theory that is nowhere to be found in my essays' (IC 1 47) .

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I wish to dwell briefly on the manner in which Balibar, in an article entitled 'Sub species universitatis' (2006) , reflects on the way philoso phy addresses the question of universality, for this discussion might give us further indicators as to the nature of his overall approach to philosophy and politics. Balibar discusses what he describes as the 'Hegelian-Marxist strategy' regarding universality, and more specifi cally the notions of consciousness and antagonism in the early Hegel, and in Marx the notions of ideology and ideological domination ( SS 8-1 2 ) . In a nutshell, universality of either ideas or actions always takes the form of domination over other ideas or actions. 'Therefore, universality and hegemony become equivalents, and conversely no ideology (system of representation, figure of consciousness) can become 'universal' unless it becomes also dominant, more precisely works as a process of domination, a 'dominant ideology' (herrschende Ideologie) ' (SS 8/ . In what Balibar describes as 'Hegel's paradox', he reminds us of Hegel's thesis in the Phenomenology ofSpirit that when one speaks of uni versality it becomes a particular discourse or representation. This conscious representation of the world in general thus in fact becomes not the world in general but the world according to the point of view of the individuals or groups expressing the view. This has a clear influ ence on Marx's notion of ideology, which draws on Hegel's idea that domination is achieved via the triumph of a particular view of the world and which puts other views into a position of relative inferiority. For Marx, the challenge for communists is to achieve hegemony for a communist worldview against one that privileges private property and all that goes with it. Up to a point, opposition to the dominant ideology serves to reinforce the authority of the dominant ideology, or dominant view of universality, although this process is not, of course, insurmountable. I have summarized this particular discussion because it would seem to help us understand the course which Balibar's work has taken over the past few decades. First, and most obviously, it suggests a continued and major preoccupation with the question of ideology, a central con cern of the whole Althusserian project. Second, choosing to highlight the way in which some philosophy deals with the universal suggests an ambivalence regarding the capacity of philosophy to deal with

Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity

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universality; universality itself is intrinsically and necessarily both relative (and relativity is a quality which characterizes much of Balibar's work) and evolving over time. Finally, and leading on from this, it perhaps helps explain the somewhat fragmentary and incon clusive nature of Balibar's work. Balibar's belief in the importance of ideology is such that he rejects Althusser's view of philosophy as 'theory of theoretical practice' and instead locates philosophy within ideology. He is insistent that what he calls (after Althusser) the 'imaginary' is not, in traditional Marxist parlance, simply a superstructural manifestation of the economic base, but is a determining influence in its own right. There are in fact two bases: [T] he mode ofsubjection and the mode ofproduction (or, more generally, the ideological mode and the generalized economic mode . . . ) Both are material, although in opposite senses. To name these different senses of the materiality of subjection and production, the tradi tional terms imaginary and reality suggest themselves. One can adopt them, provided that one keep in mind that in any historical conjuncture, the effects of the imaginary can only appear through and by means of the real, and the effects of the real through and by means of the imaginary . . . ( I C 1 60, italics in originalFor Balibar, then, ideology is very much part of the base and is no less determined by economics than economics is determined by ideology. This is the theoretical starting point of Race, Nation, Class, where imaginary communities are as real or more real than more tangible entities. Thus, Balibar's theory leaves little room for any ongoing influence of the economy and one wonders if there is really anything left of Marx's political economy ,

Political violence

If Balibar's overall approach to the political has certain serious drawbacks, he has made a significant contribution to a general theory

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of political violence, an area which has, I would argue, taken on increased significance - or has at least become more complex - in the last part ofthe twentieth century and the early part of the twenty first century. This is for at least four reasons. First, since the break-up of the USSR and the more general disintegration of communism, histor ians and political theorists have been preoccupied with the question of whether Marxist-inspired politics are inevitably violent, as the repression in the Soviet Union and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia ( to givej ust two examples) might suggest. Second, professional politi cians in advanced capitalist countries with centre-oriented govern ments often suggest that their apparently highly consensual regimes and political parties do not in the least rely on political violence and indeed that these sorts of politics have helped achieve the end of poli tical violence in the advanced capitalist world; this is a question which can only be addressed within a developed theoretical framework regarding the nature of political violence. Next, in the post-Cold War reality of global politics, political violence often takes a form which is different to that of the political violence which was prevalent before the break-up of the Eastern bloc. Where advanced capitalist countries intervene in less developed regions, the huge imbalance between the two sides in terms ofweaponry, intelligence and technical back-up is often presented by the more powerful country or counties as a non-war - or at least some sort of ,smart' war - and bloodshed is greatly played down, especially as far as enemy casualties are con cerned. Finally, questions of political violence, revolution, uprising and cruelty now have renewed urgency both given the renewal of con flict in, and as a result of conflict in, the Middle East, including of course recourse to terrorism and various forms of counter-terrorism on an increased, international scale. Balibar addresses aspects of political violence relating to the reality ofinternational politics in a variety of works, in a way which I will dis cuss below. But first I will turn to his valuable discussion ofthe theory of political violence and Gewalt (a term which combines the notions of both violence and power and for which there is no direct equivalent in French or English) in the Historisch-Kritisches Wiirterbuch des Marxismus (HW) . Balibar's general thesis is that Marx's thought has a paradoxi cal relationship with the question of violence. Certainly, it makes a


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major contribution to understanding the role of violence in history, in particular with reference to the relationship between forms of dom ination and exploitation under capitalism, the inevitability of class struggle, and revolution, thus contributing to defining the conditions and nature of modern politics. But Marxism has been incapable of properly addressing the tragic association between politics and vio lence. The reasons for this include in particular an absolute emphasis in Marxist theory on one form of domination, namely the exploitation oflabour, of which the others are mere 'epiphenomena'. The result of this is that other forms of exploitation are ignored or at least played down in discussions of violence. The second reason for Marx's failure properly to address the ques tion of the relationship between politics and violence is the 'anthropo logical optimism' at the heart of his concept of progress, contained in the notion of the development of human productive forces which is central to his theory of the history of social formations. Finally, Balibar blames the Marxist metaphysics of history, which, via the alienation and reconciliation of the human essence, incorporates a theological and philosophical conversion of violence into justice. According to Balibar, this recognition of the social role of violence and misunderstanding of the specifically political role of violence has had considerable consequences for socio-political struggles and revo lutionary movements inspired by Marxism. A thorough discussion of the relationship between Marxist theory and violence, he argues, is crucial to the search for political alternatives during the current phase of capitalist globalization (HW 1-2 ) . Via a reconsideration of the work ofEngels, Lenin, Fanon and Lux emburg, as well as Marx's own work, and distinguishing historically between periods ofintense class struggle and anti-capitalist revolutions on the one hand, and anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and post-colonial struggles on the other, Balibar examines the strengths and weaknesses of Marxism in relation to the theory of political violence more gener ally. Given, in particular, the multiple catastrophes of the twentieth century, of which Marxism was both perpetrator and victim, it is necessary to rethink Marxism, he argues, in terms of a 'civilising of revolution' (,?,ivilisierung der Revolution) , on which depends a 'civil ising of politics' more generally. A discussion of political violence, of

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Gewalt more broadly and at the same time a reappraisal of the notion of revolution is thus 'not j ust one question amongst others but the fundamental question for politics' and one which allows a theore tical and ethical reappraisal of Marxism overall, enabling its contin ued usefulness (HW 7) . Balibar's contribution to this particularly important area of reappraisal is to detect a dual approach to the matter of political violence, an ambivalence which lies at the heart of Bali bar's belief in Marx's contemporary relevance to understand ing the question: [W]e believe . . . one can detect, each time, a very strong tension in Marx's thought between two ways of thinking about the status and the effects of extreme violence: one which undertakes, if not to 'nat uralise' then at least to incorporate it in a chain of causes and effects, to make it a process or a dialectical moment of the process of social transformation whose actors are the antagonistic classes, in a way which makes intelligible the conditions of real politics (wirk lichePolitik) (as opposed to moral or ideal politics) ; and another way of thinking which finds in certain extreme or excessive forms ofvio lence - at once structural and conj unctural, ancient and modern, spontaneous and organised - what one might call the real of poli tics (das Reale in der Politik?) , that is to say the unpredictable or the incalculable which confers on it a tragic character, which it feeds off and which also threatens to destroy it . . . (HW 1 0-1 1 . Despite Marx's oscillation between different perspectives on violence, including an 'ultra-J acobin' one, which tends virtually to glorify pop ular violence in times of revolutionary change, and despite Lenin's subsequent development of this particular perspective into a fully fledged 'politics of violence', including a new conception of the dictatorship of the proletariat, Ba1ibar insists on the contemporary relevance of Marx's other, more open-ended view of political violence and argues that this other approach is the more useful one. Certainly, Balibar agrees that intense exploitation which includes extreme vio lence is inherent in the capitalist mode of production, and capitalist modernization involving the abolition of pre-capitalist modes of life and culture at times takes on extremely violent forms which today

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we might call ethnocide or genocide (HW 1 3) . But Balibar also con tends that in Capital itself Marx argues that a violent and final confon tation with the bourgeoisie is not the only possible outcome for struggles between capital and labour. According to Balibar: . . . the work [i.e. Capita!] had opened up other possibilities, which it will always be possible to turn to without abandoning the 'Marxist' reference: namely a process of reforms imposed on society by the state under pressure from increasingly powerful and organised workers' struggles, which would oblige capital to 'civilise' its meth ods of exploitation, or to innovate constantly in order to overcome resistance from 'variable capital'; also the exporting of overexploi tation to the 'periphery' of the capitalist mode of production, in such a way that the effects of 'primitive accumulation' are pro longed . . . In these scenarios the proletariat no longer appears as the predetermined subject of history, and the Gewalt which it either suffers or wields does not lead 'naturally' to the final goal. The subjectivization of the working class, that is its transformation into revolutionary proletariat, then appears as an indefinitely dis tant horizon, an improbable counter-tendency, or even a miracu lous exception to the course of history. (HW 1 7) Balibar is insistent that debates between Marxists regarding reform and revolution have been posed in the wrong way and at any rate that the really important question is how to 'civilize revolution' , as discussed above. But it seems that Balibar's reflections in this respect are at least influenced by long-running (and at one time often bitter i debates and disputes within the European left around the theme of 'reform or revolution'. These debates have evolved over time but certainly have not disappeared completely and indeed are likely to intensify if the left continues to gather strength again. As a dissident within the French Communist Party, and as an intellectual deeplY immersed in Marxist theory, Balibar was intensely involved with such questions for many years. Balibar's position certainly seems at times to under-estimate the extent to which, for example, govern ments and other political or quasi-political entities are prepared to use violence against even the most 'civilized' revolution in order to prevent it from taking place.

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However, Balibar is no doubt correct to point out that advanced capitalist societies 'export' violence in part in order to continue to ensure that rates of profit remain high whilst the domestic (and rela tively comfortably off) labour force remains fairly docile, a process which Marxists have long referred to as involving the creation of an aristocracy of labour in the imperialist heartlands. Examples of the exporting of violence at the end of the twentieth century and begin ning of the twenty-first century might include the wars which are at least in part informed by a desire to protect oil interests in the Middle East. Another is the political economy ofglobal production in this era, which involves paying barely subsistence wages, offering extremely backward conditions (by Western standards) and in some cases child labour in less developed countries in order to maintain a flow of cheap goods to Western outlets; this aspect of the political economy of advanced capitalism depends on forms of what should be construed as political violence. However, it is likely that at some point in the medium-term future such conditions will evolve further, either as a result of revolt in developing countries or as a result ofrapid industria lization of countries such as China and India, making exploitation of cheap labour in developing countries less possible, or a combination of both. I n other words, the question of revolutionary violence may well return to the political agenda in the West as exploitation intensifies again in countries which were the first to industrialize. Balibar's writings on the reality of global politics and violence re flect some of the themes of his more theoretical writings on violence and here again he offers some real insights. His general contention with regard to what he describes as the present 'era of global violence' is that the level of actual violence or the threat of violence is such that the very existence of politics is at risk. This he contrasts with the notion ofcivility, which he defines in this context as the 'circumstances where the practice of politics is made possible' (WP 1 1 5) . On a global scale, he argues, extreme violence and mass insecurity is used as a form of 'preventative counterrevolution or counterinsurrection' against emancipatory movements but it also stems from a predilection in the developed world for supposedly consensual and conflict-shy forms of governance (WP 1 1 6) . This approach to governance, which treats politics as a mere superstructure where conflict and antagonism are

Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas ofModernit;,

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avoided wherever possible, denies the essential 'insurrectionary ele ment' of politics and direct, popular participation (WP 1 1 9 ) . Drawing on the work of international relations specialist Pierre de Senarclens, Balibar argues that since the end of the Cold War, the boundaries on some forms of political violence imposed by the two blocs have collapsed and the distinction between war and peace has become blurred. Since 1 989, there has been a proliferation of armed conflict, in particular civil war, enabled in part by the transformation of international power structures. Balibar suggests that mass and extreme violence is replacing politics, or that the fields of politics and violence have now merged (WP 1 25) . For Balibar, this global culture of political violence is part of a global system of socio-political control, dividing the world into 'life zones' and 'death zones'. The death zones suffer a variety of mortal problems ranging from civil war and inter-state wars, to communal rioting, famine and extreme poverty. Apparently natural phenomena such as Aids are made far worse by material hardship. Although the causes of these disasters may be numerous, the overall effect is to create a large, international population of very insecure, and in some cases re-proletarianized, people, who have little or no influence on national or international politics. There is, then, a sort of planned obsolescence of human beings on a global scale, which is, in clinically capitalist terms, economically wasteful but has a perverse and tragic political logic, sometimes involving self-destruction through civil war, for example. Concluding this discussion, Balibar again suggests that theorists and activists must develop the idea of'counter-counter revolution', or simply revolution. But unless the future is to become, in the words of Hobsbawm, another age of extremes, revolutionaries must civilize the notion and practice of revolution. In Balibar's discussion both of theoretical and more factual aspects of violence, Gewalt, cruelty and global politics, he thus puts forward a remarkable case for placing these matters centre-stage in any serious analysis of contemporary politics and any discussions of the politics of emancipation. As Zizek suggests, Balibar's theory of political violence can be positioned in a place which is distinct from the other two major theories which seek to account for the appalling bloodshed of the maj or catastrophes of the twentieth century. Habermas argues that

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the Enlightenment and modernity are inherently emancipatory and contain no grain oftotalitarianism. The mass violence of the twentieth century suggest that the Enlightenment project is unfinished and the major political task is to complete the project. Meanwhile, for Adorno and Horkheimer (and now Agamden ) , the dictatorships and mass destruction of twentieth-century Europe are part of the Enlighten ment's totalitarian potential and mass murder part of the logic of the rationalism of modernity. For Balibar, modernity has very positive consequences but also new risks and it is the task of politics to ensure that the long-term outcome is humane and democratic and that suf fering is minimized ( Zizek 2006: 337-8) . Rather like in his broader discussion of the theory of politics, Balibar combines what we might term elements of radical, deeply transformational politics which offer hope for a better world, with elements of far more moderate, reformist politics which appear to leave many important injustices untouched.

Lenin and Gandhi

Such dilemmas are also explored in a thought-provoking paper on the question of transformational practice and violence in relation to Lenin and Gandhi. Balibar argues that these two 'revolutionary activist-theorists' are the most important such figures of the first half of the twentieth century (LG) . Not only did their theories, actions and movements have a profound effect on the course of the twentieth century, but in the longer term the results are still being felt and are still the subject of profound controversy. In the case of Lenin, one principal alleged result was the horrors of Stalinism, and in the case of Gandhi the partition of India along ethnic and religious lines. These assertions already make substantial assumptions, of course, which are partially acknowledged by Balibar; most importantly, they assume that these outcomes (Stalinism and partition) are directly attributable to Lenin's and Gandhi's actions, theories and influence, rather than being attributable to quite other phonomena. Balibar argues that there are certain important areas of common ground between Leninism and Gandhi's theory and practice. First,


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both place centre-stage popular mass movements, which in the course of their development go through more active and less active periods, and whose engagement with the appropriate issues of the time must in both cases be sustained over a long time. The second shared charac teristic is a confrontational attitude towards the state and thus they both advocate systematically breaking the law; for Lenin the interests of the working class override the supposed legitimacy of the law, taking in extremis the form of dictatorship of the proletariat in order to overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. For Gandhi, civil dis obedience is used as a tactic in order to attempt to force the state to act against its own constitutional principles, and thus to push it towards reform. In Lenin's theory of revolution, both institutional and anti institutional organized violence plays a central role, in his conception of state power as class dictatorship, in his directive issued frequently from 1 9 1 4 onwards to 'turn the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war', and indeed in the whole concept of dictatorship of the pro letariat (LG 6) . Balibar suggests that the extreme violence against the Soviet people after the 1 9 1 7 revolution might have been linked in part to the pre- 1 9 1 7 practice of revolutionary violence against the Tsarist regime and its allies, as well as being partly attributable to the siege mentality of the Soviet Union as revolution failed to spread to other countries. Gandhi, by stark contrast, emphasized what he saw as the need to overcome a hatred of the enemy and to organize 'aggressive' but 'con structive' non-violent, illegal acts. One important aspect of this approach is the underlying idea that the nature of the struggle affects the nature of the outcome, an idea which might be described as the opposite of the notion of ends justifying the means (or perhaps a con sequence of this approach) , which it might be argued underpinned Lenin's theory and practice of violence. Gandhi's theory of 'dialo gism' holds that mass movements must engage in tactical concessions to the adversary, a tactic which helps control the process of transfor mation, and in limiting the actions of the masses in terms of degree of violence, for example. In this thought-provoking but inconclusive - at times even indeci sive - discussion, Balibar does not suggest how elements of Lenin's

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and Gandhi's thought might be reconciled. He suggests briefly, how ever, that an attempt to answer this question might be approached by examining whether the era of revolutionary mass movements is now over, a question which he also leaves unanswered. As far as the ques tion of means and ends is concerned, I would suggest that there are situations where violence in the form of resistance becomes not only a tactic but also a matter of survival, if not in the short term then cer tainly in the longer term; examples of this include French resistance against Nazi occupation, wars of national liberation (including those in French Indochina and Algeria, for example) , and the Vietnamese struggle against the USA in the 1 960s and 1 9 70s. The possibility and tactical efficacy of non-violence certainly depend on the circum stances of the struggle, including the degree of violence in which the adversary is prepared to indulge. Balibar's distant but at times approving stance towards the modern state is demonstrated in an article published in Le Monde newspaper in February 1 997 on the question of civil disobedience, as part of a debate regarding a bill on immigration known as the Debre bill ( projet de loi Debri) . This proposed legislation was legally to oblige all those sheltering non-French nationals to inform the police of both their arrival in and departure from France. Originally published under the title 'Democratic State of Emergency' (and reproduced in the book Droit de citi as 'Sur la desobeissance civique' (DC 1 7-22) , Balibar argues in this essay that by stark contrast with what the then Prime Minister Alain] uppe had declared, citizens must sometimes re create their citizenship by disobeying the state. Writing in response to a petition launched by film makers who declared that they had and would again give shelter to illegal immigrants, Balibar argues that a government is only legitimate as long as it does not contradict certain higher laws of humanity which, whilst perhaps unwritten, take prece dence over written legislation. These higher laws include basic respect for human beings alive or dead, hospitality, the inviolability ofhuman beings, and the sanctity of truth. When the two groups of laws higher and written - are in contradiction, citizens have a duty to obey the higher laws and thus bring themselves into conflict with the law of the land, and in the process defend legality in an expression of the 'general will'.

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This type of action, Balibar argues, is inevitably necessary from time to time, as governments are not perfect. In modern French his tory civil disobedience has been crucial, he argues, for example during the Dreyfus affair, during resistance against Nazi occupation and at the abortion trial in Bobigny, France in 1972 when 1 2 1 well-known women signed a petition claiming to have had illegal abortions. Putting the debate on immigration in this broader context and in the context of the rise of the extreme right in Europe, Balibar suggests that citizenship at times involves (in the words of article two of the Declaration of the Rights of Man) 'resistance against oppression'. Impli citly, this includes resistance against the oppression of others. Here again, then, the conclusions Balibar draws from an important and insightful discussion are rather timid. His support for civil disobe dience is not put in the context of a greater project for change, which might perhaps relate to his own interpretations of emancipation and transformation. On the contrary, he seems to be arguing ultimately that civil disobedience is necessary in order to reinforce the legitimacy of the law as devised and upheld by the modern state, rather than to contribute to a practical and theoretical critique of the very nature of the modern state.

Concluding remarks

In his substantial and complex (Euvre, Balibar raises some crucial ques tions for our time and discusses them in a way that contibutes to a greater understanding of these questions. For example, many who take his work seriously will recognize the relevance of the notion of human emancipation which contrasts with the preoccupation with mild reform which is so prevalent in parliamentary and party politics in the West. The same could be said for his discussion of universality, a notion that is seldom taken seriously except in a religious context in a world which is often so preoccupied with surfaces and transience. Meanwhile, his own term equaliberty is a constructively provocative blending of equality and liberty which insists on their mutual depen dence in a way which also flies in the face of much contemporary received wisdom. More specifically, Balibar is an insightful theorist

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of political violence, exploring a complex relationship between means and ends in any political struggle involving violence. Moreover, he is emphatic that the extreme preoccupation with superficially consen sual politics in the West has a direct relationship with the extreme vio lence that has become more prevalent elsewhere, and which threatens the very existence of politics. My major reservation with regard to Balibar's position is, how ever, that he has too much faith in the capacity of the modern state and its structures in bringing about radical transformation, whereas the evidence - often in fact referred to by Balibar himself - is so often to the contrary. Both Badiou and Ranciere, I have argued, go to the other extreme and virtually ignore the liberal democratic state in their discussions of politics. Balibar, by contrast, for example in his virtual equation of modern man, citizen and subject as enabled by the 1 789 revolution and its consequences, appears to believe that the necessary political as well as socio-economic upheavals have been achieved to bring about the flowering of a profoundly democratic and just society. This combination of positions in support of emanci patory investigations on the one hand and political positions which would effect relatively little change on the other is, I suggest, sympto matic of his position as philosopher schooled in classical Marxism whilst at the same time having been an activist in an increasingly reformist and pragmatic Communist Party. Balibar's undue faith in what the modern state can deliver is also informed by his relative disregard for the political economy of capit alism as opposed to its purely political structures. Whilst it is relatively straightforward to argue that liberal republican politics can be radi calized to such an extent that profound injustices can be addressed, it is far more difficult to do so in the economic domain, where vastly powerful interests defend the extreme exploitation and violence of which Balibar is so aware but which in terms of economic underpin ning feature far less in his writings. Marx's base-superstructure model, which in its most vulgar forms is unhelpful, speaks volumes in its more thoughtful versions as to the nature ofpolitics, economics and interna tional relations in the present period. Balibar's overemphasis on ideol ogy and the 'imaginary' detracts from this.

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Alongside some important insights, then, Balibar's uneasy blend of liberal republicanism, radical republicanism and residual Marxism, together with influences ofpoststructuralism, fails to draw satisfactory conclusions. While some of the individual parts of his work are highly stimulating and useful, the whole fails to deliver a convincing emanci patory political theory.

Chapter 6

With and Beyond Badiou, Balibar and R anciere

In this book I have attempted to assess the contribution of Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere to political thought and reflect on how their work is relevant to the lived reality of politics at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this concluding chap ter, I wish to reiterate in succinct form some of my views regarding their strengths and weaknesses and highlight the differences and simi larities between them. I will then go on to make some broader obser vations and comments regarding the renewal of thought which is in the emancipatory tradition. Both the most obvious and the most important point to make is that each of these writers begins from the premise that, compared with the world we live in, other, far more ega litarian and just forms of human society are possible. A major goal of each of them in their work is therefore to help understand the nature of the world as we know it and explore the potential for change. One of their collective strengths is to contribute to reopening properly the debate on the left regarding the viability of profound socio-political transformation, precisely because they are not overly preoccupied with, or influenced by, the political or politico-intellectual develop ments which have contributed to weakening the debate about a socia list emancipatory project over the past few decades. Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere each retain at the heart of their sys tems a radical break with the status quo, a position which is at odds with various forms of political thought which deny the possibility ofa profoundly different future. None are prepared to add their voices to those who condemn Marxism wholesale or condemn as being inher ently totalitarian other revolutionary thinkers and leaders, such as Lenin. None are influenced in their core work by Eurocommunist notions of pragmatic compromise, involving electoral pacts with

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social democratic parties, for example, although I have argued that if one looks at some details of Bali bar's thought, there is ambivalence in this respect. None take the end of Stalinist communism in the Eastern bloc as proof that all societies that seek to follow an egalitarian path are bound to suffer dictatorship and failure. None are persuaded by the various forms of French or Anglo-American liberalism which have become so prevalent. One is in fact reminded of the rebellious spirit of May 1 968, a spirit which has so often been mocked or dismissed over the past few decades and which is unapologetically integrated into their thought. Is not Badiou's notion of the event as sudden, life changing rupture precisely the explosion of desire for change against the odds which characterizes May 1 968? Is not Ranciere's radical assertion by the sans-part, which profoundly challenges the terms of debate, also reminscent of the out-of-the-blue May uprising which de Gaulle and the ruling arkhe found so incomprehensible? Finally, is not Balibar's notion of equaliberty, which holds that the conditions of the realization of freedom are also the conditions of the realization of equality (the two concepts being indissociable) , again reminiscent of the spirit of the 1 968 movement, which voiced apparently outland ish demands and said insistently and provocatively: 'why not?' These core ideas all seek to restore a belief in the notion of radical transformation. Perhaps even more importantly, they reassert a belief in the political and theoretical usefulness of listening to and learning from the enormous wealth of the ideas of ordinary people, an approach that flies in the face of much contemporary mainstream pol itics which promotes above all the legitimacy of professional expertise in organizing societies and systems of governance, and whose logic is an increasing distance between political elites and ordinary people. For each of these thinkers, politics is about the emergence of the human subject as collective and activist subject and it is the ordinary person - as opposed to professional politicians, specialist intellectuals or consultants of some kind - who have the most to offer in terms of ideas for transformation. In this sense each of their systems is a way of enabling politics to take place, or detecting it and encouraging it where it does, rather than devising some sort of model for change. I have also suggested that although Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere are each influenced to a certain extent by poststructuralism, they

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might play an important part in offering a long-term alternative to the aspects of poststructuralist and postmodern theory which empha size difference and the relative rather than the general and the absolute, the partial and fragmentary rather than the whole. Ran ciere and in particular Badiou have devised totalizing theories whose spirit, and often whose detail, runs counter to what I have argued is the depoliticizing logic of postmodernism. Ranciere uses as a spring board to the development of his own theory a critique of the way in which Plato, Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu approached the role of the oppressed and exploited in their thought. His later political thought then becomes, I have argued, in part an exploration of power in gen eral and politics proper is an abstracted, universalized form ofpopular revolt. Balibar, whilst constructing a totalizing theory around the idea that both freedom and equality must be maximized, and arguing the importance of universals, is arguably more affected than either Badiou or Ranciere by the fragmentary and the inconclusive, which are characteristics of a postmodern approach. Badiou emphasizes the crucial nature of universals and constructs a philosophy which is arguably the ultimate metanarrative. By stark contrast with the post modern insistence that it is now impossible to base thought or politics on timeless truths - a path which leads inexorably to totalitarian destruction - Badiou insists on the power and importance of universal and eternal truth. Moreover, truth exists when people act with pro found, unflinching belief, an idea which again flies in the face of post modern cynicism towards commitment to a cause. Finally, Badiou's event is of profound and enduring significance, which challenges the postmodern emphasis on surfaces, illusion, simulacra and contin gency. For Badiou, earth-shattering events do happen and they assume universal significance through belief on the part of the event's followers; they follow a cause. What could smack more of Enlighten ment thought and modernity? However, I have argued that in some respects Badiou's philosophy is uncharacteristic of thought which is in the tradition of the Enlight enment. He is insistent that the event cannot be explained in terms of the situation from within whose context it emerges, thus challenging important aspects of modern rationalism, and insisting instead on a theory of subtraction from given circumstances in order to explain


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the event. This, I argue, means that Badiou is unable to construct a general theory of movement and change. Ranciere does not appear to incorporate a modern view of progress into his thought, and the essence of the political is the same in Ancient Greece as it is today. Moreover, for both Badiou and Ranciere, enquiry based closely on empirically testable fact appears to be of little value - in a way which is a clear and deliberate departure from Marx and Engels' 'scientific socialist' method - and seems to lead to what might be described as an assertive mode, where assertions are made without systematic reference to empirical evidence. In the introductory chapter of this book, I suggested that, in addi tion to the emergence and increasing influence of structuralism and poststructuralism in France since the 1 970s, in order to understand the nature of these thinkers it is necessary to take into account other intellectual developments. In general, the intellectual and political climate in both France and beyond has not been favourable for thought which embraces the idea that emancipation is both possible and necessary. Although Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere avoid many of the major intellectual concessions I referred to above, this climate, I suggest, has nevertheless contributed to weakening each of their phi losophies in certain respects. Badiou's system is certainly the most optimistic and detailed; human beings are described as having tre mendous, albeit often unrealized, potential, capable of wonderful things in the domains of love, art, science and politics. The human subject is a convincingly profound subject. But what I have just called the assertive mode - often characterized by a certain detach ment from lived reality - is perhaps a reflection of the less hopeful times in which we have been living and offers no clear argument to take us from lived reality to the abstract and then back again to lived reality. In other words, it lacks this particular form of dialectics. Simi larly. and in some respects more so, Ranciere adopts a position which is remote from the dialectics of change and his system sees real politics as the ephemeral moment of uprising with little exploration of the evolution of circumstances leading to change or the perhaps less dra matic sequel to uprising. Balibar is caught between the radical con ception of politics as emancipation, transformation and equaliberty on the one hand, and far more pragmatic conclusions drawn from an

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analysis of, for example, the European Union, and finally an unhap pily over-optimistic interpretation of the legacy of 1 789, which seems to suggest that, after all, no further dramatic emancipatory transfor mation is necessary. In Badiou and Ranciere, then, there are margin alist tendencies, whereas in Balibar there are weakening concessions to more conventional, mainstream politics. Each of these thinkers offers important insights into the nature of the supposedly consensual and centre-oriented governmental politics so prevalent in the past few decades in Western Europe and the USA, politics which serve to disguise and leave un-debated many forms of injustice and exploitation. Balibar suggests convincingly that this sort of consensus politics goes hand in hand with the extreme violence found in less developed countries. Ranciere's On the Shores of Politics (2007 [ 1 998] ) is one of the most insightful and trenchant analyses to have appeared of France's superficially consensual form of govern ment since the early 1 980s. However, such is both Badiou's and Ranciere's position regarding the political and intellectual climate and practice of the period, they offer little purchase in their core the ories on the nature of politics outside the exceptional occurrence of the event (for Badiou) and popular uprising by the sans-part (for Ranciere) . In other words, in their theories proper they leave us little the wiser regarding the nature of politics beyond the extraordinary; nothing else really counts as politics so cannot be analysed within their core framework. Indeed Ranciere insists in the opening line of his Ten Theses on Politics that ' [p] olitics is not the exercise of power' . In the introductory chapter of this book I also referred to Perry Anderson's suggestion that Western Marxism moved increasingly into the realm of philosophy and into the academy from the 1 920s onwards and that in some respects Western Marxism had suffered as a result. Whilst agreeing with Anderson's view in general terms, I also suggested that Western Marxism had benefited from this move in that it had managed to maintain a certain distance from some of the prag matic and damaging adaptations made by some Marxists in and close to communist parties in particular and others who became persuaded of the merits of embracing liberal democracy and the values of the West more generally. I hope to have shown that the exploration of the philosophical on the part of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere has,


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despite some associated shortcomings, enabled a distance from adap tations and political pragmatism so prevalent in both party politics and thought. In this way their relative intellectual distance from the material world has been a strength as well as a weakness. I have sug gested that some of Balibar's weaknesses are attributable to his posi tion as a communist activist (albeit leaving the party in 1 98 1 ) closely subjected to the Eurocommunist arguments of the 1 9 70s and 1 980s. Given the generally conservative nature of the current era, it is no surprise that in the academy any renewal of radical thought about politics is less likely to be found in politics, economics and sociology departments, which tend (with some exceptions) to stick fairly close to the mainstream political agenda, a practice which is encouraged and reinforced by availability of selectively allocated government funding. Radical, egalitarian thinking is more likely to be found in philosophy departments, but also English literature, French and German departments. If we take Hardt, Harvey, Jameson, Negri and Zizek as some of the foremost international representatives of contemporary radical thought, only David Harvey has had a long term career in a social science (geography) department; Michael Hardt and Frederic Jameson are in comparative literature, Slavoj Zizek is in philosophy and Antonio Negri is an independent re searcher, although he did at one time teach political science. If we add the three thinkers studied in this book to this list, who are all pro fessional philosophers, it is small wonder that the role of the economy and the state has been rather overlooked. The above remarks and the more detailed critique expressed in the preceding chapters suggest the need for additional lines ofintellectual enquiry which both complement the thought of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere, and compensate for and move beyond their weaknesses. I have made the point several times in the course of this book that in particular neither Badiou nor Ranciere pay enough attention to the economic sphere, which perhaps significantly is the reverse of the way in which we in the West experience the world; on a daily basis, the reign of commodities seems to make itself felt ever more intensely and influence ever more spheres of our lives, including of course parts of our private lives. One of Marx's most significant contributions was

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Badiou. Balibar, Rancure

to argue that a proper understanding ofvirtually any aspect ofhuman existence would take into account the (broadly speaking) economic circumstances of the era in which they lived and this has of course become a key aspect of the Marxist materialist legacy. Similarly, any change in the nature of human existence must take into account the evolving economic circumstances which accompany it. I am not advocating some form of vulgar economism, but any continued renewal of the theoretical aspects of emancipatory politics would need to take far more notice of the political economy than do Badiou and Ranciere in particular, who in their core theories have margin alized the economic virtually out of existence. Balibar has not gone quite as far, but his thought is still weakened as a result of relatively little emphasis on the economic. I have already pointed out that the strong tendency towards abstraction is due not only to these thinkers' philosophical training but also to the particular trajectory which Western Marxism - and now quasi- or post-Marxism - has taken. But this tendency might also be related to the legacy of Louis Althusser. Certainly, Althusser famously spoke ofthe 'ultimately determining instance' of the mode of production, and suggested that 'we owe to [Marx] the greatest discov ery of human history: the discovery that opens for men the way to a scientific (materialist and dialectical) understanding of their own his tory as a history of class struggle' (AI thusser 200I : xv) . The nature of economic relations and other aspects of the capitalist mode ofproduc tion were very much part of Althusser's materialism and 'scientific understanding'. \Ve have seen, however, that Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere have retained in particular elements of Althusser's work on ideology. I have suggested that Badiou's philosophy is quite un-mate rialist in parts and that this weakens it considerably. Ranciere's defi nition of politics is essentially aesthetic in that politics involves the formerly invisible becoming visible, or else linguistic, as those who speak a different language from the dominant language - one is tempted to say from the dominant ideology - assert their right to be heard and be understood. At the centre ofRanciere's philosophy there is also an ahistorical description of the way in which an uprising offers a 'true moment' of politics. Balibar is particularly clear in his preoccu pation with the ideological sphere, or the 'imaginary' as he (after


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Althusser) often calls it, and the ideological becomes very much a determining influence. Part of the Althusserian legacy seems indeed to be the process of subjectivation, which as others have pointed out is close to Althusser's notion of interpellation, where forms of commit ment mean individuals are interpellated into subjects. It will be clear that I would wish to place greater emphasis on the major theories of Marx as originally stated by him than do any of these thinkers. In particular, I would reassert the importance of his analysis of the political economy of capitalism in order to help under stand the nature of the current period and the potential for change within and beyond it. A thorough examination of the political econ omy of late capitalism and its integration into a more general theory could offer a greater understanding of the current epoch, and an indi cation of possible futures. Marxist analysis is, however, greatly enriched by many forms of quasi-Marxist, post-Marxist and non Marxist approaches (the distinction between these categories is often not in itself important) , particularly when they are motivated by pro gressive goals. Frederic Jameson makes roughly the same point when he says: Marxism is not a philosophy . . . it is, like psychoanalysis and unlike any other contemporary mode of thought, what I will call unity-of theory-and-practice. This means that it has concepts, but that those concepts are also forms of practice, so that one cannot simply debate them in a disinterested philosophical way without the uncomfortable intervention of practical positions and commit ments. But it also means that the various philosophical currents of the time have always been able to seize on those concepts and to transform them into so many distinct and seemingly autonomous philosophies . . . Each of these 'philosophies' has in my opinion something to teach us, and illuminates a new aspect of that original unity-of-theory-and-practice which is Marxism as such; but the latter is always distinct from them. (Jameson 200 l : ix) I would also argue that a thorough exploration of the notion and practice of democracy is necessary. Badiou is profoundly ambivalent on the question of democracy, praising it only in rare and isolated

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instances. At his most extreme, he suggests that we do not need to rethink and radicalize democracy but to invent a new system and set of parameters in order to replace it altogether (talk at Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, 25 September 2006 ) . For me this is quite wrong. Certainly, as I have argued elsewhere (Hewlett 2003) , much of the discussion regarding democracy is concerned with very weak forms of democracy, often infused more with liberalism than notions of popular rule, with more reference to individual rights and managerial approaches to government than debate regarding what it would be to have rule by the people in a more direct sense. There is a gulf between what often passes for democracy on the one hand and genuine, deeper democracy on the other. But elections and other aspects of contemporary liberal democracy, which Badiou argues has nothing to do with real politics, should not simply be dismissed. They might be a very poor relation ofdeeper democracy, but they are a sig nificant advance on previous forms of political organization, offering both the opportunity of debate around the nature of democracy and an actual platform for debate, as well as political participation, how ever much this might often consist of arrangements to select elites who operate within highly restricted parameters. For Ranciere democracy is not an ongoing form of political practice, but an interruption of the unj ust status quo. Thus he offers a version of democracy which is a generic and appealing form of popular uprising with wholly just motives, but he seems to have little faith in democracy being sustained in the longer term. Its life is intense but fleeting. This also brings us to the question of the modern state. Because of, in particular, Badiou and Ranciere's view of real politics as exception, or at least an activity that is very marginal, neither of them offer a way of understanding the role of the state. Again, this suggests an under estimation of the extent to which the modern state is an obstacle to radical change and as something the uprising will take care of because it is intrinsically correct and the state intrinisically wrong. As with the economy, if anything we are more likely to have a rather crude view of the state ifwe do not properly analyse it. We need to understand it as a complex entity, which in practice for example lessens the suffering of some of the poorest in society as well as defending mechanisms and structures which keep the poor in poverty. It also for example


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protects its citizens against violence and itself perpetuates violence against them, as well as against others outside its national boundaries. Balibar, in his writings on racism, violence and borders, is more com mitted to an approach which explores this practical but also theo retical complexity than either Badiou or Ranciere. Indeed, I have argued that Balibar in some respects goes too far in the opposite direc tion and has too much faith in the state's willingness to enable debates around crucial issues, particularly human rights. Also virtually absent from Badiou and Ranciere's writings is a treat ment of the oppression of women, perhaps reflecting a rather franco republican approach to the question of ordinary people. Neither seek to explore this particular form of oppression which is an important structural characteristic of all contemporary societies. A continued project of attempting to understanding politics and society from a feminist viewpoint will also offer insights into the nature of oppres sion, exploitation and thus emancipation in other domains. As we know, there has been and continues to be a Maoist influence on these thinkers. This means that there is at least a residual notion of an idealized proletariat which is fiercely defended in a fashion that is detached from any concept of tactical alliances which might win short-term battles and build support along the way. On the contrary, Badiou and Ranciere in particular conceive of real politics as an explosion of powerful emotions on the part of the oppressed in a sort of essential expression of truth, after which in the case of Badiou it depends on converts to the cause to ensure that the world changes in a way that is faithful to the explosion, and for Ranciere things are likely to revert to the status quo. I n neither schema are we offered a view as to how we might get from where we are now to the moment of egalitarian uprising. I n an attempt to maintain a sort of revolutionary purity and perhaps out of fear of being tainted with capitulation to either reformist Stalinism or social democracy, Badiou and Ranciere shun virtually all aspects of what might be seen as mainstream politi cal groups, including trade unions, which are seen as part of the problem and bound to lead to massive concessions to the status quo. I would suggest that Trotsky's theory of the united front might serve as inspiration for a way out of this dilemma of capitulation versus marginalism. Trotsky advocated a strategy of alliances with other,

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non-revolutionary groups on particular points in order to win certain modest demands and persuade other activists of the legitimacy of revolutionary politics. As a general strategy, this does open the way for a course of action for those who seek to follow a radically emanci patory path and also relate to - without being part of - more main stream politics. It avoids the dilemma of a bipolar view of political activism with a stark choice between capitulation and marginalism. The British Anti-war Coalition against US and British occupation of Iraq is an example of such politics of the united front, where activists of many persuasions unite on a single issue, without compromising their own, broader politics of the longer term, and some groups within this coalition no doubt hope to win other activists over to their own worldviews. In my appraisal of the work of Balibar, I have emphasized how important it is to raise, as he does, the question of political violence. Such a discussion brings us to crucial questions for the present age. First, in asking whether, for example, domestic violence, or extreme physical hardship characteristic of a particular type of industrial or agricultural production should be included in a definition of political violence, we also beg the question ofwhere politics begins and where it ends, in other words how to define it. Second, in analysing the rela tionship between 'consensus' politics in the West and violence ofvar ious kinds in developing countries, as does Balibar, we gain insights into both the nature of contemporary forms of political regimes in the West and the nature of international productive relations and political relations (or political and economic aspects of international relations) . Next, it raises the question of the legitimacy and effects of the use ofviolence in the struggle for a better world. Is Balibar correct to suggest that we need to 'civilize revolution' and in so doing explore an imaginary encounter between Lenin and Gandhi? Do violent meansjustify (hopefully) non-violent ends, and to what extent do vio lent means necessarily lead to violent outcomes, as many pacifists and others argue? It is certainly true that the contemporary world politi cal order is one where violence abounds; to take just one example, in December 2006 alone the official statistics issued by the I nterior Min istry in Baghdad put the death toll among Iraqi civilians at 1 ,930, a figure which only hints at the physical suffering of the Iraqi people


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due to political circumstances over the previous decade (Saddam Hussein's regime, economic sanctions by the West, the US-led inva sion and finally occupation and uprising) . We know that countless thousands of innocent people have died under regimes purporting to be communist. But to suggest that if the struggle for emancipation involves violence the outcome is also neces sarily violent - which is the logic of Bali bar's argument - means that one only and at all times counters the violence of the status quo with peaceful means and when these peaceful means do not work one accepts the violence of the status quo. Unlike Furet, Balibar is keen to emphasize the just legacy and positive effects of 1 789, but his discus sions on political violence in the modern era are nevertheless some what reminiscent of Furet's position that revolution is inevitably followed by terror. Balibar also points out, however, that (as I suggest above) there are many terror-equivalents in today's world. Zizek sug gests that unless one eternally resides in the margins, and for ever dodges the question of the exercise of power, there may well be moments when one must take responsibility for the 'passage a l'acte, of accepting all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realiz ing [a] political project' ( Zizek 1 999: 236) . The practical detail of such dilemmas is at present remote. Despite what I argue in the introductory chapter regarding a certain upturn in left radicalism and thought over the past decade or so, it is safe to assert that we are still living in a conservative age. Since well before the break-up of the Soviet Union, even grass-roots activists, along with professional politicians and many intellectuals, have often argued that we must broadly speaking accept the world as it is, whilst perhaps addressing some of the worst excesses of injustice and exploitation. Outside the confines of small far-left political groups, and publications either by these small groups or by individuals who are broadly sympathetic to them, the generally accepted view of the last few decades has been that any radical, structural transformation of the way in which human beings relate to one another within socie ties is not possible, and is probably not desirable either. In this sense, Anderson's argument in La Pensee tiMe (2005) that France is now characterized by conservative and liberal-democratic thought is largely correct.

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He is not, however, entirely correct. I opened this book by suggest ing that we might explore the work of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere in the context of thought as praxis, where the relationship between theory and material aspects of the world is particularly important. Certainly, one striking and uniting characteristic of these thinkers is that in order to understand the world one must, in addition to reading and debating, actively intervene in it. At risk of exaggerating the common features of their thought, I will close by suggesting not only that theirs is the most engaged philosophy since Sartre and Althusser, but that we may be glimpsing a series of different, more politically committed systems of thought that will grow in influence in the years to come.


Principal works by Alain Badiou Books

1 969: Le concept de modele. Paris: Maspero. 1 975: Thiorie de la contradiction. Paris: Maspero. 1 976: De l'Ideologie. Paris: Maspero. (With F. Balmes .. : 1 977: Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique higelienne. Paris: Maspero. (With L. Mosso! andJ. Bellassen. 1 982: Thiorie du sujet. Paris: Seuil. 1 985: Peut-on penser la politique? Paris: Seuil. 1 988: L'Etre et l'evenement. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Oliver Feltham as Being and Event, London: Continuum, 2005.) 1 989: Manifeste pour la philosophie. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Norman Madarasz as ManifestoJor Philosophy, New York: SUNY, 1 999.1 1 990: Le Nombre et les nombres. Paris: Seuil. 1 99 1 / 1 998: D'un Disastre obscur (Droit, Etat, Politique) . Paris: L' Aube. 1 992: Conditions. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Gabriel Riera as Philosophy Under Conditions. New York: SUNY Press, 2005. 1 993: L'Ethique: Essai sur la conscience du mal. Paris: Hatier. (Trans. By Peter Hall ward as Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding ojEvil, London: Verso, 200 I . 1 995: Beckett. L'increvable desir. Paris: Hachette. (Trans. by Nina Power and Alberto Toscano as On Beckett, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003. ) 1 997: Gilles Deleuze: 'La clameur de retre'. Paris: Hachette. (Trans. by L. Burchill as Deleuze: The Clamor ofBeing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 999. . 1 997: Saint-Paul. LaJondation de l'universalisme. Paris: PUF. (Trans. b y Ray Brassier as Saint Paul: The Foundation oj Universalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2003.) 1 998: Abrige de mitapolitique. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Jason Barker as Metapolitics. London: Verso, 2005./ 1 998: Court traite d'ontologie transitoire. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Norman Madarasz as Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, Albany: State U niver sity of New York Press, 2006 .. 1 998: Petit manuel d'inesthitique. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Alberto Toscano as Handbook oJlnaesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.)

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2003: Circonstances, 1. Kosovo, 11 septembre, Chirac/Le Pen. Paris: Editions Lignes et Manifestes. 2003: Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. London: Continuum. 2004: Circonstances, 2. Irak,foulard, Allemagne/France. Paris: Editions Lignes et Mani festes. 2004: Theoretical Writings. London: Continuum. (Edited and translated by Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano.) 2005: Circonstances, 3. Porties du mot 'juij'. Paris: Editions Lignes et Manifestes. 2005: Le Siecle. Paris: Seuil. 2006: Logiques des mondes. Paris: Seuil. 2006: Polemics. London: Verso. (Various essays trans. by Steven Corcoran. ) Works of literature

1 964: Almagestes. Paris: Seuil (novel) . 1 967: Portulans. Paris: Seuil ( novel) . 1 979: L'Echarpe rouge. Paris: Maspero (libretto ) . 1 994: Ahmed Ie subtil. Aries: Actes Sud (play) . 1 995: Ahmed sefache, suivipar Ahmedphilosophe. Aries: Actes Sud (play) . 1 995: Citrouilles. Aries: Actes Sud ( play) . 1 997: Calme bloc ici-bas. Paris: P. O. L. (novel) . Selected shorter works by Alain Badiou

1 966: 'L'autonomie du processus historique'. In Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes, Paris: Ecole Normale Superieure, 1 2- 1 3, pp. 761 -89. 1 967: 'Le (re)commencement du materialisme dialectique'. In Critique 240 (May) , pp. 438-67. 1 98 1 : Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: Potemkine ( Pamphlet) . 1 985: 'Six proprietes de la verite'. In Ornicar? 32 ( Jan. ) , pp. 39-67; and Ornicar? 33 (April) , pp. 1 20-49. 1 986: Est-il exact que toute pensie emet un coup de dis? Paris: Conferences du Peroquet (Pamphlet ) . 1 988: Une Soiriephilosophique. Paris: Potemkine/Seuil. With ChristianJambet,Jean Claude Milner and Fran�ois Regnault (Pamphlet) . 1 989: 'D'un sujet enfin sans objet'. In Cahiers Confrontations 20, pp. 1 3-22. (Trans. by Bruce Fink as 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Who Comes after the Subject?, Ed uardo Cadava, Peter Connor and J ean- Luc Nancy [eds], London: Routledge, pp. 24-32.) 1 990: 'L'Entretien de Bruxelles' . In Les Temps Modernes, May, no. 526, pp. 1 -26. 1 99 1 : 'L'Etre, l'evenement et la militance'. In Futur antirieur 8, pp. 1 3 -23. ( Inter view with Nicole-Edith Thevenin.) 1 992: 'L' Age des poetes'. In Jacques Ranciere (ed.) , La Politique des poetes: Pourquoi despoetes en temps de ditresse? Paris: Albin Michel, pp. 2 1 -38.


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1 993a: 'Nous pouvons redeployer la philosophie'. In Le Monde, 3 1 Aug., p. 2. ( Inter view with Rober-Pol Droit. ) I 993b: 'Qu'est-ce que Louis Althusser entend par "philosophie"?'. In Sylvain Lazarus ( ed . ) , Politique et Philosophie dans l'lEuvre de Louis Althusser, Paris: Presses U niversitaires de France, pp. 29-45. 1 994: 'Being by Numbers' (interview with Lauren Sedajsky) . Artforum 33: 2 (Oct.) , pp. 84-7. 1 998: 'Politics and Philosophy'. Interview with Peter Hallward in Angelaki: Journal ofthe Theoretical Humanities, 3:3, pp. 1 1 3-33. 1 998: 'Penser le surgissement de l'evenement'. In Cahiers du Cinema (May ) , pp. 53-8. ' Interview with E. Burdeau and F. Ramone.) 2000: 'Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics'. In Plio Warwick Journal of Philosophy 1 0, pp. 1 74-90. (Trans. Alberto Toscano. ) 2000: 'Huit theses sur l'universel. ' In Sumic, Jelica (ed . ) , Universel, singulier, sujet. Paris: Kime, pp. 1 1 -20. Viewable at: http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.netJarticle. php3? id....article=44. 200 1 : 'The Political as a Procedure of Truth' . In lacanian ink 19 (fall ) , pp. 70-8 ! . Trans. Barbara P. Fulks.) .:?00 1 : 'Who is Nietzsche?' In Plio Warwick Journal ofPhilosophy 1 1 , pp. 1-1 1 . (Trans. Alberto Toscano. ) 2002: La Revolution culturelle: la derniere revolution? Paris: Les Conferences d u Rouge Gorge, Feb. ( Pamphlet) . 2002: 'Que penser? Que faire?' Le Monde, 28 April. (With Sylvain Lazarus and :'Il"atacha Michel. ) 2003: 'One Divides into Two', Culture Machine, http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/ Cmach/BackissuesJj004/Articles/Badiou.htm. 2003: 'Beyond Formalisation: An Interview' with Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hall ward. In Angelaki 8:2, August (special issue: The One or the Other? French Philosophy Today) , pp. 1 1 1-36. 2004: 'Mterword. Some Replies to a Demanding Friend'. In Peter Hallward (ed.) , Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. London: Continuum Press, pp. 232-7. 2005a: 'Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectics'. In Radical Philoso phy 1 30. 2005b: 'The Adventure of French Philosophy'. In New Left Review 35, Sept.-Oct., pp. 67-77. 2006: 'The War on Terror', Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, 25 Septem ber (Talk) .

Special issues ofjournals on Alain Badiou

2003: Communication & Cognition 36: 1-2. 'The True is Always New: The Philosophy of Alain Badiou', ed. by Dominiek Hoens.

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2005: Polygraph no. 1 7. 'The Philosophy of Alain Badiou', ed. by Matthew Wilkens. 2005: positions: eastasia cultures critique 1 3:3. 'Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution' , ed. b y Tani E. Barlow.

Principal works by Jacques Ranciere Books

1 965: 'Le concept critique et la critique de I'economie politique des "Manuscrits de 1 844" au "Capital" ' , in Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey andJacques Ranciere, Lire le Capital, Paris: Maspero. 1 974: La LUjon d'Althusser. Paris: Gallimard. 1 976: (ed., with Alain Faure) La Parole ouvriere, 1830/1851. Paris: 1 0 1 1 8 . 1 98 1 : La Nuit des Protetaires. Paris: Fayard. (Trans. b y Donald Reid as The Nights of Labour, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1 989. :. 1 983: Le Philosophe et ses pauvres. Paris: Fayard. (Trans by John Drury, Corinne Oster and Andrew Parker as The Philosopher and his Poor, London/Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.) 1 983: (ed.) Gabriel Gauny, Le philosophe ptebeien, Paris: Presses U niversitaires de Vincennes. 1 984: (ed.) L'Empire du sociologue. Paris: La Decouverte. 1 985: (ed. ) Esthitiques du peuple. Paris: La Decouverte/Presses U niversitaires de Vincennes. 1 987: Le Maitre ignorant. Cinq Leljons sur l'emancipation intellectuelle, Paris: Fayard. ( Trans. By Kristin Ross as The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford U niversity Press, 1 99 1 .) 1 990: Courts Voyages au pays du peuple. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. By James B. Swenson as Short Voyages to the Land ofthe People, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.) 1 992: Aux bords du politique. Paris: Osiris (Trans by Liz Heron as On the Shores ofPoli tics, London and New York: Verso, 1 995.; 1 992: Les Noms de l'histoire. Essai depoitique du savoir. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Hassan Melehy as The Names ofHistory: On the Poetics ofKnowledge, Minneapolis: Univer si ty of Minnesota Press, 1 999. ) 1 992: (ed.) La Politique des poetes: Pourquoi des poetes en temps de detresse? Paris: Albin Michel. 1 993: (ed.), with Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Genevieve Fraisse) Jean Borreil, La Raison nomade. Paris: Payot. 1 995: La Mesentente. Politique et Philosophie, Paris, Galilee. (Trans. by Julie Rose as Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis and London: U niversity of Minnesota Press, 1 998.; 1 996: Mallarme. Lapolitique de la sirene. Paris: Hachette. 1 997a: Arretsurhistoire, Paris: Edns du Centre Pompidou (withJean-Louis Comolli) .

Riferences and Bibliography

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1 998: La Chair des mots. Politiques de recriture, Paris: Galilee. (Trans. by Charlotte Mandell as The Flesh of Words. The Politics of Writing, Stanford: Stanford U niver sity Press, 2004.) 1 998: Aux bords du politique. Paris: GaIIimard. (2nd edn.) (Trans. by Steve Corcoran as On the Shores ofPolitics, London and New York: Verso, 2007.) 1 998: La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la litterature. Paris: Hachette. 2000: Le Partage du sensible. Esthitique etpolitique. Paris: La Fabrique. (Trans. by Gab riel Rockhill as The Politics ofAesthetics: The Distribution ofthe Sensible, London and � ew York: Continuum, 2006. ) 200 I : L'Inconscient esthitique. Paris: Galilee. 200 1 : La Fable cinimatographique. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Emiliano Battista as Film Fables, Oxford: Berg, 2006. ) 2003: Les Scenes du peuple. (Les Revoltes logiques, 1975-1985) . Lyon: Horlieu. 2003: Le Destin des images. Paris: Fabrique. (Trans. by Gregory Elliott as The Fate of the Image, London: Verso, 2007.) 2004: Malaise dans l'esthitique. Paris: Galilee. 2005: La Haine de la democratie. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. by Steve Corcoran as Hatred of Democracy, London: Verso, 2007. ) 2005: Chroniques des temps consensuels. Paris: L a Fabrique. 2005: La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la litterature. Paris: Hachette. 2006: Mallarme: la politique de la sirene. Paris: Hachette. 2007: La Politique de la litterature. Paris: Galilee.

Selected shorter works by Jacques Ranciere

1 973: ' Mode d'emploi pour une re-edition de Lire Ie Capital'. In Les Temps modernes, �ovember. 1 974: 'On the Theory ofIdeology - Althusser's Politics', Radical Philosophy 7. ( Rep rinted in Roy Edgely and Richard Osborne, The Radical Philosophy Reader, London: Verso, 1 985.) 1988: ' Good Times or Pleasure at the Barricades' , in Voices ofthe People: The Politics and Life of'La Sociale' at the End ofthe Second Empire, ed. by Adrian Rifkin and Roger Thomas, trans. by John Moore, London: Routledge, 1 988, pp. 45-94. 1 99 1 : 'Mter What?'. In E. Cadava, P. Connor and J .-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge, pp. 246-52. 1 994: 'Post-democracy, Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Jacques Ran ciere', Angelaki 1 :3, pp. 1 7 1 -8. 1 997b: 'Democracy Means Equality.' I nterview with Andrew Parker and Jean Philippe Deranty in Radical Philosophy no. 82, March-April 1 997, pp. 29-36. (Trans. David Macey. ) 1 998: 'Althusser'. I n Simon Critchley and William R . Schroeder (eds) , A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 530-6.

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2000: 'Jacques Ranciere: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Demo cratic Disagreement' (interview with Solange Guenoun and James H. Kava nagh), trans. R. Lapidus, SubStance, no. 92, pp. 3-24. 2000: 'Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Ranciere' (interview with Davide Panagia) , diacritics 30:2, pp. 1 1 3-26. 200 1 : 'Ten Theses on Politics' . Theory and Event 5:3, n.p. 2002: ' Eclipse de la politique'. L'Humaniti, 29 May. http://www.humanite.presse.fr; journalj2002-05-29j2002-05-29-34588. 2002: 'Guantanamo,J ustice and Bushspeak: Prisoners of the Infinite'. Counterpunch, 30 April. 2003: 'Politics and Aesthetics' (interview with Peter Hallward, trans. Forbes Morlock) , Angelaki 8:2, pp. 1 9 1 -2 1 2. 2003 : The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics'. Paper presented at the conference ' Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Ranciere and the Political', Goldsmiths College, University of London, 1 6- 1 7 September. 2003: 'Afterword to the English-Language Edition ( 2002)" The Philosopher and his Poor, pp. 2 1 9-227. 2003: ' Comments and Responses'. Theory and Event 6:4. 2004: 'The Politics of Literature' Substance, 33: I , pp. 1 0-24. .

2004: 'Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics' (trans. Ray Brassier) . In Peter Hallward (ed . ) , Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. London: Continuum, pp. 2 1 8-3 1 . 2005: ' From Politics to Aesthetics?' I n Robson 2005a (ed.), pp. 1 3-25.

Special issues ofjournals on Jacques Ranciere

1 997: Critique 60 1 /2. 'Autour deJacques Ranciere', ed. by Philippe Roger. 2003: Theory and Event 6:4. 2004: Substance 33: I . 'Contemporary Thinker: Jacques Ranciere', ed. by Eric Mechoulan. 2004: Racques Ranciere, l'indiscipline, Special issue of Labyrinthe, winter 2004.

Principal works by Etienne Balibar Books

1 965: Lire le Capital (With Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey, and Jacques Ranciere) . Paris: Maspero. 1 974: Cinq Etudes du matirialisme historique. Paris: Maspero. 1 976: Sur la Dictature du prolitariat. Paris: Maspero. (Trans. by Grahame Lock as On the Dictatorship ofthe Proletariat, London: NLB, 1 977.)

References and Bibliograpkr

161

1 979: Ouvrons lafenetre, camarades! ( With Guy Bois, Georges Labica and Jean-Pierre Lefebvre.) Paris: Maspero. 1 979: Marx et sa Critique de la politique. (With Cesare Lupotini and Andre Tosel. Paris: Maspero. 1 985: Spinoza et la politique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. (Trans. by Peter Snowdon as Spinoza and Politics, London and New York: Verso, 1 998.) 1 988: Race, nation, classe: les identites ambiguis. (With I mmanuel Wallerstein.) Paris: La Decouverte (Trans. by Chris Tumer as Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, London: Verso, 1 99 U 1 99 1 : Ecrits pour Althusser. Paris: La Decouverte. 1 992: Les Frontieres de la democratie. Paris: La Decouverte. 1 993: La Philosophie de Marx. Paris: La Decouverte. (Trans. by Chris Tumer as The Philosophy ofMarx, London: Verso, 1 995.: 1 994: Lieux et noms de la virite. Paris: Ed. de I' Aube. 1 997: La Crainte des masses: politique et philosophie avant et apres Marx. Paris: Galilee. (Trans. partially by James Swenson as Masses, Classes, Ideas, London: Routledge, 1 994 and partially as Politics and the Other Scene, London: Verso, 2002.) 1 999: Sans-papiers: l'archafsme fatal. (With J. Costa-Lascoux, M. Chemillier Gendreau, E. Terray.) Paris: Editions La Decouverte. 200 1 : Nous, citoyens d'Europe: us Frontieres, l'Etat, le peuple. Paris: La Decouverte. (Trans. in modified form by J ames Swenson as We, the People ofEurope? Riflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. 2004.) 2002: Droit de cite. Paris: PUF. (Trans. partially byJames Swenson as We, the People of Europe? Riflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton U niversity Press. 2004. 2003: L'Europe, l'Amerique, la guerre: rijlexions sur la midiation europeenne. Paris: La Decouverte. 2005: Europe constitutionfrontiere. Paris: Editions du Passan�.

Selected shorter works by Etienne Balibar

1 985: Entries in Gerard Bensussan and Georges Labica (eds ) , Dictionnaire critique du marxisme, Paris, PUF (2nd edn, revised and enlarged) : 'Appareil', 'Bakounisme' , ' Classes' , ' Critique de l'economie politique', 'Contre-revolution', 'Deperisse ment de l'Etat', 'Dictature du proletariat', 'Division du travail manuel et intel lectuel', ' Economique politique (critique de 1') ', 'Droit de tendances', 'Lutte de classes' , 'Pouvoir'. 1 99 1 : 'Citizen Subject'. In E. Cadava, P. Connor andJ.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes After the Subject? New York: Routledge, pp. 33-5 i . 1 993: 'Some Questions o n Politics and Violence' . In Assemblage: A Critical Journal rif Architecture and Design Culture. April, 20: 1 2 .

1 62


1 993: 'The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser'. In E. Anne Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (eds) , The Althusser Legacy, London: Verso. 1 994: 'Subjection and Subjectivation'. InJ. Copjec (ed . ) , Supposing the Subject, New York: Verso, pp. 1 - 1 5. 1 995: 'La violence des intellectuels'. In Etienne Balibar and Bertand Ogilvie (eds), Violence et politique. Special issue ofLignes, 25, May. 1 995: 'The Infinite Contradiction'. In rale French Studies 88 (special issue: Deposi tions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labor tifReading) , pp. 1 42-64. 1996: 'Is European Citizenship Possible?' Public Culture: Society for Transnational Cultural Studies 8:2, pp. 355-76. (Trans. by Christine Jones of 'Une citoyennete europeene est-il possible?' 1 996: 'On Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions'. ( With Pierre Macherey.) In Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne ( eds) , Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, pp. 275-6. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. 1 996: 'What is "Man" in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy?' In Janet Coleman ed. ) , The Individual in Political Theory and Practice. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1 996: 'On Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions'. With Pierre Macherey.) In Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (eds), Marxist Literary Theory: A Reader, pp. 275-6. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1 996. 1 999: 'Conjectures and Conjunctures'. Interview in Radical Philosophy, Septemberl October. 2003: 'Structuralism: A Destitution of the Subject?' In differences: A Journal ofFemin ist Cultural Studies 1 4: 1 , Spring 2003, pp. 1 -2 1 . 2004: 'The History of Truth: Alain Badiou in French Philosophy'. I n Peter Hall ward (ed.) , Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future ofPhilosophy. London: Conti nuum Press, pp. 2 1 -38. 2004: 'Gewalt'. In Das Historisch-Kritisches Worterbuch des Marxismus, Das Argument Verlag, Berlin. Available online in French at http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article. php3?id.article=36. 2004: ' Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible? New Reflections on Equal iberty' . In The South Atlantic Quarterly, 1 03:2/3, pp. 3 1 1-22. 2004: 'Violence et civilite. Sur les limites de l'anthropologie politique'. In Alfredo Gomez-Muller (ed. ) , La Question de l'humain entre l'ethique et l'anthropologie, Paris: L. Harmattan. Viewable at: http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?icLarticle=83. 2004: ' Lenine et Gandhi: une rencontre manque?' Communication au Colloque MARX INTERNATIONAL IV, Guerre imperiale, guerre sociale, Universite de Paris X Nanterre, Seance pleniere, 2 Octobre-l novembre 2004. http:// ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article. php3?icLarticle=36. 2006: 'Sub species universitatis'. I n Topoi no. 1-2, September, pp. 3-1 6 . Viewable at: http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?id-

Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere: Re-thinking Emancipation

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Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere: Re-thinking Emancipation