One of the great pastimes of the literati, aside from complaining about the Bush administration and attending live tapings of A Prairie Home Companion, is collective hand-wringing about the sad fact that Americans no longer read. Apparently, most of us would sooner watch Rock of Love--Bret and Ambre are so not going to make it--than pick up a novel. Enter Mikita Brottman: Maryland Institute College of Art professor, Oxford scholar, author, and patron saint of the tome-averse masses in her new book The Solitary Vice: Against Reading. Brottman is the latest in a long line of philosophers and writers to question reading's value, and in this day of reading campaigns and self-important book clubs, the question of whether reading per se is a virtuous activity is timely.

I've been collecting examples of quotes and articles concerning the decline of reading, as the debate about whether reading is good or bad for you seems to have been rolling around since the origins of the English novel. Other required reading on reading is Steven Johnson's Dawn of the Digital Natives, whose perspective is closer to Brottman's than the unnamed literati of the article.

I fall into more of the rah-rah reading crowd, both for personal and societal reasons. The argument about writing and reading changing our culture resonates with me, as even people who never read have been affected by the innumerable writers and reformers of various kinds whose work extends perpetually backwards in time. In addition, as Foucault argues, power and knowledge are inherently bound, and the most efficient way to transmit knowledge seems to be reading.

Why have we dismantled most forms of racial discrimination or many of the barriers to women in the workforce or other kinds of discrimination based on things other than ability? Why do we let atheists maintain their beliefs openly? It's largely because some people were willing to challenge the larger culture, chiefly through writing, and enough people were interested in reading to have absorbed those principles or ideas, which now come at us through a thousand outlets. I just read in Alain Badiou's 'Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (Wo Es War): "When Nietzsche proposes to 'break the history of the world in two' by exploding Christian nihilism and generalizing the great Dionysian 'yes' to Life [...]" I thought, really? Although I don't necessarily buy the "exploding Christian nihilism" bit (what nihilism?), count me as a late convert to the Dionysian principle. Without books, it's doubtful that I would've made it there, and it's in part my own trajectory that leads me to believe, perhaps irrationally, in the transformative value of thinking about the world through reading.

To delve into personal territory, books helped me leave the social carapace that hardened when I was 10 or 11, not create it, as Brottman says happened to her. Books were a recovery from an unhappy move and from video games and helped me articulate more of a worldview and change my behavior, and while I don't think of books as therapy, they do have some therapeutic aspects to them. To bring the level of seriousness back to an appropriate level, consider what Richard Feynman said in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: "And Von Neumann gave me an interesting idea: that you don't have to be responsible for the world that you're in. So I have developed a very powerful sense of social irresponsibility as a result of Von Neumann's advice. It's made me a very happy man ever since. But it was Von Neumann who put the seed in that grew into my active irresponsibility!"

Without reading, I might lack this powerful sense of social irresponsibility and instead just have accepted accepted received wisdom instead of revising received wisdom. Let this be a lesson, by the way, to the natterers, including myself, on getting young people to read—instead of pushing reading ceaselessly like whole wheat bread, maybe it's time to forbid it, and stock copies of Henry Miller and Bret Easton Ellis in the liquor store, thereby necessitating that teenagers get their older siblings or boyfriends or whatever to buy it for them. They might pass copies of Lost Girls around like furtive bongs at parties. I call this the "gateway drug" approach to reading, as opposed to the "whole wheat" approach.

Still, on a marginally more serious note, if no one reads, then who will write the challenges to cultural, legal, social, and technical problems? And who will read them? That, implicitly, is what many of hand-wringers worry about. Steven Johnson might argue, perhaps correctly, that those challenges will come from visual media, and that's possible—but I doubt most visual media can match the depth of depth of text. I'm convinced that reading causes you to think—as Caleb Crain's Twilight of the Books argues—differently and gives you the tools to argue against bad public policy, bureaucracies, and the like. To me, reading is linked to freedom itself, and I don't think it's mere correlation that the initial moves toward democracy coincided with the rise of what evidence we have for written languages, or that repressive governments fear and try to control books and knowledge. Thus, I see reading as important in the personal sphere for individual growth and in the societal sphere for correcting the excesses of organizations with power. And they're fun—Feynman often criticized such organizations through his social irresponsibility, and has helped transmit that sense to others. Reading doesn't have to be antisocial, and I usually find being social around people who read is more fun than being around people who don't, simply because the readers get more and get it faster. Once again, the correlation/causation issue arises, but from my perspective, it doesn't matter—I'll take the reader over the non-reader, and many people not in positions of, say, government authority would probably do the same. Without falling prey to Godwin's Law, I'll note that many authoritarian regimes try to control knowledge and specific manifestations of knowledge, like books and professors. As a result, I see reading as both a public and private good, although one that, paradoxically, might be best inculcated in young people by trying to show it as dangerous, rather than good for you like Wheaties.

This argument might not matter, since surveys keep appearing that claim people read less and less, but like any believer, I'm still convinced of the faith's importance. I'm not as much a proselytizer as someone who thinks others should come to it on their volition—I'm less of a Christian missionary and more of a Buddhist monk. Or maybe I've just got an economic interest in reading, since I spend an enormous amount of time writing. I think it's deeper than that, although I won't be so ridiculously grandiose as to say things like, "The future depends on it!" like a character from a bad superhero movie, I will say that reading still matters as a component of free thought and free life, and it doesn't have to come at the expense of sociability. It can be good for you but shouldn't necessarily be pitched that way. The culture, however, will move in whatever way it does, and I suspect those in the debate will be increasingly on the margins of the culture as a whole.

EDIT: Added last paragraph on 6/11/08.

El internet permite la proliferacion de sitios, archivos y revistas, y entre otras, nos informa de la creacion de una revista internacional dedicada a S. Zizek. Acepta colaboraciones en diversos idiomas (atención castellano-escribientes). Trae articulo de y sobre Zizek, entre otros algunas discusiones con A. Badiou.

Se puede visitar en: LEER

This essay by Alain Badiou is one of the places where he speak directly on political issues. We post this to encourage exploration and debate. Kasama includes earlier discussion of Badiou's work.

Embedded within this essay are Badiou's comments on Negri's book empire -- on questions of whether revolutionary change emerges from the evolution of longstanding structural conflicts or the eruption of conjunctural events.

In the process, Badiou suggests that revolutionaries must reconceive the question of how social forces serve as vehicles for change -- touching on both the Marxist view of the proletariat and the Leninist view of the party.

Alain Badiou gave this interview when he attended the "Is a History of the Cultural Revolution Possible?" conference at University of Washington, in February, 2006.

Q: I'd like to ask you about your political and intellectual trajectory from the mid 60s until today. How have your views about revolutionary politics, Marxism, and Maoism changed since then?

Badiou: During the first years of my political activity, there were two fundamental events. The first was the fight against the colonial war in Algeria at the end of the 50s and the beginning of the 60s. I learned during this fight that political conviction is not a question of numbers, of majority. Because at the beginning of the Algerian war, we were really very few against the war. It was a lesson for me; you have to do something when you think it's a necessity, when it's right, without caring about the numbers.

The second event was May 68. During May 68, I learned that we have to organize direct relations between intellectuals and workers. We cannot do that only by the mediation of parties, associations, and so on. We have to directly experience the relation with the political. My interest in Maoism and the Cultural Revolution during the end of 60s and the beginning of the 70s, was this: a political conviction that organizes something like direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

I'll recapitulate, if you like. There were two great lessons: It's my conviction today that political action has to be a process which is a process of principles, convictions, and not of a majority. So there is a practical dimension. And secondly, there is the necessity of direct relations between intellectuals and workers.

That was the beginning, the subjective beginning. In the political field, the correlation with ideologies --Marxism, Cultural Revolution, Maoism and so on -- is subordinate to the subjective conviction that you have to do politics directly, to organize, to be with others, to find a way for principles to exist practically.

Q: What is your idea of fidelity?

Badiou: That's already contained in the first answer. For me, fidelity is fidelity to great events which are constitutive of my political subjectivity. And perhaps there is also something much older, because during the war my father was in the Resistance against the Nazis. Naturally, during the war, he did not say anything about it to me; it was a matter of life and death. But just after the war, I learned that he had been a resistant, that he was really in that experience of resistance against the Nazis. So my fidelity is also a fidelity to my father. At the beginning of that war, very few were in the resistance; after two or three years, there were more. It is the same lesson, if you like, this lesson from my father.

Generally speaking, my fidelity is to two great events: the engagement against the colonial war, and to May 68 and its consequences. Not only the event of May 68 as such, but also its consequences. Fidelity is a practical matter; you have to organize something, to do something. This is the reality of fidelity.

Q: You've said that there has been a rupture, that the entire question of politics is currently in great obscurity. Also, you have written that we must think a politics without party. After the saturation of the class-party experiment, what next?

Badiou: I think a fidelity does not really finish, but sometimes it is saturated; that is my term for it. There is a saturation; you cannot find anything new in the field of your first fidelity. Many people, when this is the case, just say, "It's finished." And really, a political sequence has a beginning and an end, too, an end in the form of saturation. Saturation is not a brutal rupture, but it becomes progressively more difficult to find something new in the field of the fidelity.

Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity.

For my generation, it's a choice between saying, on the one hand, "Nothing is possible today in the political field; the reactionary tendency is too strong." That's the position of many people in France today; it's the negative interpretation of saturation.

When the fidelity is saturated, you have a choice. The first possibility is to say it's finished. The second possibility is this: With the help of certain events-- like the events in South America today-- you find what I name a fidelity to the fidelity. Fidelity to the fidelity is not a continuation, strictly speaking, and not a pure rupture, either. We have to find something new. When I was saying yesterday that "from outside, you can see something you don't see from inside," that's merely a rule by which to find something new.

Q: If I can press you further about the something new: After the saturation of party politics, what now?

Badiou: If the answer to that were clear, the discussion would be finished, too. You have to find that out; it's not so clear. Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field -- not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find -- with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts -- the new synthesis.

I think our situation is much more similar to that of the 19th century than to that of the 20th. Nearer Marx than Lenin, if you like, metaphorically speaking. Lenin was really the thinker of the new concept of revolutionary politics, with the idea that we could be victorious, that the revolution was a possibility. That's not exactly the situation today; the idea of revolution is obscure in itself today. But we can do as Marx did--it's a metaphor, an image. You have to think the multiplicity of popular experiences, philosophical directions, new studies, and so on. You must do these things as Marx himself did.

The situation today is also similar to 19th century in the brutality of capitalism today. It's not absolutely new; capitalism was of a terrible brutality in the 19th century in England, with the laws against the poor and so on. Today, there's something violent and cynical in capitalism, very much like the capitalism of the 19th century. In the 20th century, capitalism was limited by revolutionary action.

Today, the capitalists have no fear of anything. They are in the stage of primitive accumulation, and there is a real brutality to the situation. That's why I think the work today is to find a new synthesis, a new form of organization, like our predecessors of the 19th century. Our grandfathers, if you will, rather than our fathers in the political field.

Q: I'd like to ask about the current global situation and of the relationship of the US to that situation. Is the US simply a privileged node in a network of global sovereignty (as Hardt and Negri argue) or is the US playing the role of a traditional imperialist power in Lenin's sense?

Badiou: I don't completely agree with Negri. It's a very complex theoretical discussion, but, in a few words, I think Negri's perception is too systemic. Empire is a system, finally. Negri's conviction is always that within the system there are also resources for something new on the side of revolutionary politics, or politics of emancipation. There is always in Negri the conviction that the strength of capitalism is also the creativity of the multitude. Two faces of the same phenomenon: the oppressive face and, on the other side, the emancipatory, in something like a unity. Not exactly a dialectical unity in the Hegelian sense, but still a unity. So there is no necessity of an event in Negri, because there's something structural in the movement of emancipation.

I don't see the situation that way; it's not my conviction. It's not possible to discuss this precisely here and now, because it's too technical. But one consequence for Negri is that the great question in the political field is the question of the movement. Movements are certainly of great importance. But the real question today is not the relation between the movement and the state. The real question is, what is the new form of organization after the party? More generally, what is a new political discipline?

People who have nothing--no power, no money, no media--have only their discipline as a possibility of strength. Marxism and Leninism defined a first form of popular discipline, which was trade unions and party. There were many differences, but finally that was the form of popular discipline, and the possibility of real action. And today we cannot hope that this form will continue. The real situation is that we have no discipline in the popular camp, and so we have a great weakness. In fact the best situations today are ones where the state is not really in the hands of the reactionaries, for example, the situation of Chavez in Venezuela. But that's not a complete change of the situation; it's a chance, a local chance, nothing more. It's something, but it's not the solution. The solution of the problem in the long term will be the invention of a new form of immanent discipline in the popular camp. That will be the end of the long weakness of the popular camp after the success-- but also the failure-- of the form of the party.

Q: Philosophy has a long history of alternately including and then excluding mathematics. You, almost alone among your contemporaries, include it. You have also stated that your aim is a new articulation of politics and mathematics. Apart from any biographical, contingent factors that might explain your own relationship to mathematics, what's mathematics got to do with politics today? Why do you see a hope today for, as you've said, "a new articulation of politics and mathematics"?

Badiou: The political question of the new discipline is also, philosophically, the question of a new logic. The question of a new logic is always also the question of the relationship between philosophy and mathematics. Because mathematics is the paradigm of deduction, of formal rationality; not of empirical rationality, not of concrete rationality, but the paradigm of formal rationality. During the phase of party politics, the logical paradigm was the Hegelian dialectic; it was the theory of contradiction. During the entire development of Marxism, Leninism, and Maoism, the theory of contradiction was the heart of the logical framework. In my conviction, that is also finished. For the same reason as for the party, dialectical logic in the Hegelian sense is saturated today. We can no longer simply use the paradigm of contradiction. Naturally, there are contradictions; it's not a question of fact. But for the definition of a new discipline, we cannot directly use the logic of contradiction; we have to find another paradigm.

Mathematics is not the paradigm itself for me, but it's the possibility of finding a new logical paradigm in the political field, and finally in all fields of new human experiences.

(As you may know, Marx himself was very interested in mathematics. There are long manuscripts by Marx about the differential calculus and so on; it was something he studied for himself.)

In the search for the new logical paradigm, we have something to learn from mathematics. So my use of mathematics is not only a family obligation or a Platonist imitation; it's a real necessity.

Q: In a recent issue of the journal Positions, in an essay on your post-Maoism, Bruno Bosteels quotes you as having written, "Maoism, in the end, has been the proof for me that in the actual space of effective politics, and not just in political philosophy, a close knot could be tied between the most uncompromising formalism and the most radical subjectivism." But in your own philosophy, this knot seems to be looser. It is the uncompromising formalism that comes through in your philosophy.

Badiou: I think the discussion with Bruno Bosteels is about the distinction between philosophy and politics. Radical subjectivity is a matter of politics; when I speak of Maoism, I speak of politics. Philosophy is not politics, which may not be clear to Bosteels, or to some others. Naturally, philosophical formalism--to use that word-- can help to open some possibilities in the political field. But it is not the political solution; the political solution is never found inside the philosophical framework. So I agree, in the philosophical field, we can find a formalism adequate to radical subjectivity. But we cannot find radical subjectivity itself there, because radical subjectivity is a matter of action, of engagement; it's a matter of politics, finally.

The question of Maoism, of radicality, is a political one. In the philosophical field, we have to find the conceptual framework--the formalism, if you like--which is a disposition of thinking that is adequate to the possibility of a radical subjectivity. So philosophy is more or less in the situation of compatibility with politics, but it is never a substitute for politics. There is no unity between philosophy and politics; instead, there is something like compatibility between philosophical formalism and radical subjectivity. I think that in Bosteels' interpretation there is something like a circulation between politics and philosophy, which is not exactly my vision of the correlation of the two.

A word on the expression "post-Maoism": My interpretation of post-Maoism is that Maoism is the name of the last experience within the framework of classical Leninism. Maoism is not the same as Leninism; it's a creative development, but it's the last form of revolutionary politics, the last attempt in the field of revolutionary politics. After that, the framework itself is saturated. If we have something like post-Maoism, it's because Maoism itself is the saturation of the field. We can interpret the work of Mao, the Cultural Revolution, that's all very interesting, but we cannot forget that it's also the end of something, much more than a beginning. But an end is also something new. It's the beginning of the end, the newness of the end. After that, though, the field is saturated. And so post-Maoism is something very important. We are in something like post-Marxism, post-Leninism.

Q: Some people on the left argue for direct democracy as a response to global neoliberalism, sometimes under the heading of a Spinozist concept of 'multitude' and sometimes under the heading of anarchism. But you seem quite critical of democracy. Can you explain your critique of democracy?

Badiou: The question of democracy has two parts. The first one is the question of the form of the state. That's the classical, contemporary definition. There are governments, and you have to say which ones are democratic, which ones despotic, and so on. That is the common definition, the definition of Bush, and also of the majority today, finally. Democracy in this first sense is a form of the state, with elections and so on.

The second possible definition of democracy is what is really democracy within politics, in action. Hardt and Negri's concept on this point is that democracy is the creativity of the movement. It's a vitalist concept: democracy is the spontaneity and the creative capacity of the movement. Ultimately, Negri's concept remains inside the classical opposition of movement and state.

We have on the one side the definition of democracy as a form of the state, and on the other, democracy as an immanent determination of the collective movement. But I think the classical opposition of state and movement is saturated. We cannot simply oppose state oppression or the oppressive system, with, on the other side, the creativity of the movement. That's an old concept, not a new one. We have to find a new concept of democracy, one that is outside the opposition of formal democracy (which is democracy as form of state) and concrete democracy (which is the democracy of the popular movement). Negri remains inside this classical opposition, while using other names: Empire for state, multitude for movement. But new names are not new things.

Q: I'd like to ask about the politics of identity, which can be summed up in the thesis that for every oppression there must be a resistance by the group which is being oppressed--otherwise the oppression (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc...) will remain unaddressed--this politics of identity is something you are quite critical of.

Badiou: The question of the political process is always a question that goes beyond identities. It's the question of finding something that is, paradoxically, a generic identity, the identity of no-identity, the identity which is beyond all identities. For Marx, "proletariat" was the name of something like that. In the Manuscripts of 1844, Marx writes that the very nature of the proletariat is to be generic. It's not an identity. It's something like an identity which is non-identity; it's humanity as such. That's why for Marx the liberation of the working class is liberation of humanity as such, because the working class is something generic and not a pure identity. Probably that function of the working class is saturated. We cannot substitute a mere collection of identities for the saturated generic identity of the working class. I think we have to find the political determination that integrates the identities, the principles of which are beyond identity. The great difficulty is to do that without something like the working class. Without something that was a connection between particularity and universality, because that's what the working class was. The particularity of the working class was its location in a singular place; the working class was generic. The solution of the problem for Marxism was the human group which is not really an identity, which is beyond identity.

We have to do the same thing, but probably without that sort of solution. We cannot say that today this group is the generic group and that the emancipation of this group is also the emancipation of us all. So we have to find something more formal. Why formal? Because it's less inscribed in the singularity of a group. It's a relation between principles, between the formalism of the new discipline and all identities in the social field. It's a problem now for which we don't yet have the solution.

Marx's solution a sort of miracle: you find the group which is also the generic group. It was an extraordinary invention. The history of this Marxist invention, in its concrete political determination, was not so much the history of the generic group, of the working class as such, but rather history of the representation of this generic group in a political organization: it was the history of the party. The crisis now is the crisis of representation, and also the crisis of the idea of the generic group.

When you see that a sequence of politics of emancipation is finished, you have a choice: you can continue in the same political field, or you can find the fidelity to the fidelity. It's the same thing here: If the idea of the working class as a generic group is saturated, you have the choice of saying that there are only identities, and that the best hope is the revolt of some particular identity. Or you can say that we have to find something much more universal, much more generic. But probably without the representative generic group.

Son éditeur n'en revient pas: plus de 20 000 exemplaires écoulés, des libraires enthousiastes et des lecteurs qui d'habitude n'ouvrent jamais un livre de philo. Alain Badiou, vieux mao sur le retour, a tapé juste.

En 155 pages, son pamphlet, "De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?", aussi brutal que bien écrit, étrille sans concession celui qu'il surnomme "l'Homme aux rats" -allusion à la fable du "Joueur de flûte de Hamelin", et au titre de l'une des "Cinq psychanalyses" de Freud, qui présente un personnage obsessionnel.

Sarkozy et sa "rupture" sont le produit, dit-il, d'un "pétainisme" transcendental de la France, qui se nourrit de peurs. De même que la Restauration voulait effacer la Révolution française et Pétain, le Front populaire, Sarkozy, lui, veut "liquider" Mai 68.

Comme il l'avait fait dans "Circonstances 1", Badiou fustige au passage la "démocratie électorale" (autrefois il aurait écrit "bourgeoise") qu'il considère comme une imposture:

"Le suffrage universel serait la seule chose qu’on aurait à respecter indépendamment de ce qu’il produit? Et pourquoi donc?"

Le succès de son petit livre, et l'antiparlementarisme qu'il véhicule, a soulevé de nombreux haut-le-coeur, notamment chez les intellectuels "antitotalitaires". Alain Finkielkraut, abasourdi par le retour à la mode de Badiou, a ainsi déploré ce "symptôme du retour de la radicalité et de l'effondrement de l'antitotalitarisme".

A 70 ans, il se définit toujours comme un "ultragauchiste"

Vénérable mandarin de l'Ecole normale supérieure (ENS), où les étudiants font la queue pour suivre son séminaire annuel (cette année consacré à Platon), Alain Badiou est, après Jacques Derrida, l'un des philosophes français les plus connus au monde. Très estimé par ses collègues, il a bâti un univers conceptuel cohérent, mélange néo-platonicien et marxiste pur et dur. Il est réputé pour sa capacité à synthétiser l'histoire des idées.

Aujourd'hui, il se définit encore comme "ultragauchiste". En publiant ce quatrième volume de la série "Circonstances", cet ami de Louis Althusser entend faire acte de militance.

Et s'il défend bec et ongles "l'hypothèse communiste" c'est parce qu'il n'y en a "pas d'autres", juge-t-il. Le communisme est une idée, au sens platonicien, indestructible. Le fait même de renoncer à l'utopie d'une société égalitaire, collective, débarrassée de l'Etat, est impensable, sauf à se faire complice des violences inégalitaires du système capitalisme.

Quelle forme prendra le communisme? Certainement pas celle d'un parti discipliné, modèle qui a échoué. La réponse est à chercher, selon lui, dans les initiatives "expérimentales" actuelles. (Voir la vidéo.)

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Les "huit points praticables" pour refonder une pensée de gauche

Au troisième chapitre de son essai, Badiou dresse une liste de "huit points praticables", sorte de piliers sur lesquels appuyer une refondation conceptuelle de la gauche. Des ouvriers au monde, en passant par l'art, les malades ou l'amour...

"Point 4. L'amour doit être réinventé (point dit 'de Rimbaud'), mais aussi tout simplement défendu.

Point 7. Un journal qui appartient à de riches managers n’a pas à être lu par quelqu’un qui n’est ni manager ni riche."

Le philosophe défend aussi la nécessité de penser l'unicité du monde, dans des univers de plus en plus éclatés.

La politique? A 70 ans, l'ancien militant de l'UCMLF, scission du PC-MLF (le Parti communiste marxiste-léniniste de France, groupe maoïste), fait mine de ne pas s'intéresser au jeu politique classique. Besancenot et sa tentative de créer un parti anticapitaliste? Son approche est trop traditionnelle à ses yeux. Le débat sur la "politique de civilisation"? Foutaise sans intérêt, selon lui: "Sarkozy peut se réclamer de tout finalement, sauf de la civilisation. A mes yeux, c'est un barbare..." (Voir la vidéo.)

Reste Mai 68, auquel Badiou reste fidèle. Il y voit quatre dimensions: une révolte de la jeunesse, une grève ouvrière, un mouvement libertaire, et, de façon moins visible, une recherche de figures politiques novatrices. Mais il se méfie de la commémoration des "événements", quarante ans après. (Voir la vidéo)

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Pascal Riché et David Servenay

► "De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, Circonstances 4" d'Alain Badiou - Nouvelles éditions lignes - 155 pages - 14 euros.

Source = Rue 89

"...Dans le monde instantané où les concepts se
commercialisent, l'éclectisme est de règle." Cette phrase
d'Alain Badiou caractérise avec précision, la débauche
idéologique dont cette pseudo-école qu'on a nommée
structuralisme a été l'occasion. L'affaire continue : on
trouvera ci-contre une liste non-exhaustive des publications -
intéressantes ou significatives - consacrées à ce "problème"
dans les revues françaises. Mais on a quelque scrupule à la
dresser, tant à la signaler on contribue, malgré soi, à
entretenir la confusion ; on risque, à son tour, par souci
d'information, de sombrer dans la platitude éclectique.
Permettons-nous donc de préciser des fils directeurs ; notons
que - dans ce domaine difficile de la recherche -, il ne suffit
pas d'avoir les mêmes adversaires ou les mêmes détracteurs
pour être, d'un seul coup et tout simplement, d'accord
théoriquement. L'unité du structuralisme est artificiellement
créée par ceux qui croient trouver, dans un ennemi
arbitrairement fabriqué, un remède à leur vacuité
intellectuelle. Et la probité de ceux qu'on appelle
"structuralistes" est de continuer à chercher, dans le domaine
que chacun s'est fixé, le moyen d'assurer, concernant les
objets empiriques ou les productions théoriques qu'ils
interrogent, l'intelligibilité maximale.
Une méthode
Dans ce qu'on désigne comme "structuralisme", aujourd'hui,
en France, il y a :
1. les travaux scientifiques de Claude Lévi-Strauss et de son
groupe. Il s'agit de travaux ethnologiques dont le domaine et
la méthode ont été définis par des années d'enquêtes et
d'élaboration conceptuelle. Comme l'a souligné Luc de
Heutsch, la méthode structurale a ici une signification précise
elle oppose à l'"ethnologie historique" et à "l'ethnologie
fonctionnaliste" un certain mode de traitement des sociétés
dites primitives. A son propos, la question est, d'une part, de
savoir si - comme cela a lieu dans les sciences de la nature -
elle offre des hypothèses explicatives plus riches et plus
rigoureuses que celles qui avaient été jusqu'ici proposées ;
elle est, d'autre part, de déterminer, au cas où la réponse à
cette question serait positive, quels remaniements devraient
s'imposer les sciences de l'homme, en raison même de la
nouvelle conception introduite. La discussion passe ici par
deux niveaux. Le premier, dont dépend le second, se situe
au sein de la science ethnologique même et de son statut et
il serait comique que la pensée idéologique
spéculative ait l'audace d'instruire une affaire dont elle ne
connaît pas les pièces
2. les travaux de Jacques Lacan et de son groupe. Il s'agit de
travaux ressortissant, simultanément à la compréhension de
l'ouvre de Freud - qui a donné de l'homme une approche
radicalement nouvelle - et à un domaine particulier de
recherches, celui de la maladie mentale et de son articulation
à la culture. Inutile de s'agiter, de clamer, à l'avance, au
génie ou à un humanisme fabriqué ! Les pratiques théoriques
et empiriques, ici aussi, ne manqueront pas d'introduire les
légitimations ou les contestations sérieuses, dans une
échéance qui sera plutôt brève que moyenne. Quant aux
procès d'intention, ils sont, proprement, dérisoires. Ne
parlons pas des polémiques concernant le style ou les
procédés d'exposition ils renvoient à cette mentalité de "valet
de chambre" qu'aimait évoquer Hegel
3. des ouvrages fort divers, parmi lesquels, pour ne citer que
les plus célèbres et les plus pertinents, se trouvent ceux de
Michel Foucault et de Roland Barthes. Participent-ils d'un
esprit commun ? Ils ont, en tous cas, la commune volonté,
d'une part, d'explorer des registres culturels jusque là
abandonnés à la contingence - la folie ou la mode - et,
d'autre part, d'essayer d'obéir, aussi strictement qu'il est
possible, à cet impératif de "probité philosophique" que s'était
fixé Nietzsche. C'est dire qu'ils se tiennent au plus loin et
quelquefois jusqu'à l'outrance - des banalités édifiantes et
verbeuses dont s'est nourrie l'idéologie française depuis vingt
ans, de l'existentialisme à Teilhard, en passant par le Hegel
christiano-marxiste
4. les travaux de Louis Althusser et de son groupe (on
remarquera que cette formule "et de son groupe" revient trois
fois sur quatre).
Il s'agit d'un type de recherches qui, là encore, est différent. Il
faut remarquer, d'abord, qu'Althusser et ses amis se veulent
engagés politiquement : ils revendiquent hautement leur
appartenance à une institution politique, le P.C.F. Il importe
de noter également que leurs travaux se réclament de l'ouvre
de Marx, qu'ils considèrent comme fondatrice d'un nouveau
statut de la science des sociétés. Il convient de signaler enfin
que leur ambition - contrairement à celle déclarée par
Lévi-Strauss - est philosophique, qu'elle vise à rien moins
qu'à définir, sous le nom de matérialisme dialectique, une
conception nouvelle de l'activité théorique et de ses normes
(ou, comme le note A. Badiou, de (re) commencer, à la suite
de Marx, celle-ci). A ce genre de recherches, il convient
d'associer les travaux de Maurice Godelier qui - à mi-chemin
de Lévi-Strauss et d'Althusser cherche à définir et à explorer
techniquement le champ d'une Anthropologie sociale qui,
conjuguée à l'Histoire, constituerait l'un des secteurs
théoriques du matérialisme historique...
Il faut une lecture bien hâtive, on le voit, pour constituer un
corps doctrinal nommé "structuralisme". A peine peut-on
parler d'une méthode. Et, en ce cas, ce commun
dénominateur méthodologique se définit plus aisément par
ce qu'il refuse que par ce qu'il institue. Disons pour simplifier
que ce qu'il refuse, c'est l'empirisme, qui dans tous les
domaines de la pensée, s'est imposé, au nom des "faits", du
vécu, du concret, de l'efficacité. Cet empirisme est
omniprésent ; dans les philosophies de l'histoire (chrétiennes
ou marxistes) tout autant que dans la sociologie ou
l'économie dites positives ; il ressortit à cette conception
simpliste qui par crainte de la "métaphysique", par souci de
l'expérience - comprend la vérité (d'une science) comme
reflet (de ce dont elle est science) ; qui voit dans le concept
une généralité abstraite grâce à laquelle on collectionne les
faits ; qui juge d'un corps scientifique en fonction non de sa
production théorique, mais de sa "capacité de prévisions"...
Quant à savoir ce qu'est un fait, quant à définir
soigneusement le domaine d'une science au moment où on
entreprend de la construire, quant à délimiter la nature des
concepts qui sont alors en jeu, l'empirisme ne veut point s'en
préoccuper ! Il a trop à faire : il court après l'information, celle
qui lui vient, de l'extérieur, sur les téléscripteurs des agences
de presse ou, pis, de l'intérieur, des tréfonds du vécu et de
l'expression concrète.
Aussi bien, François Furet, dans son article "Les Français et
le structuralisme" a-t-il raison de noter que le succès du
"structuralisme" est lié à la fin de l'âge idéologique : "La
déstalinisation, le schisme sino-soviétique, la crise du
tiers-monde - et la prospérité française et européenne - ont
atteint profondément le progressisme des années 1950...
D'où une disponibilité de l'opinion intellectuelle, une sorte
d'attente - un peu comme, il y a un siècle, l'échec sans gloire
des quarante-huitards romantiques a précédé et facilité la
formation de la génération réaliste et positiviste." Il est bien
vrai que l'idéologie des quinze dernières années, en France,
a été occupée par des rêveries qui se croyaient fondées sur
des faits que d'autres faits ont bientôt démentis. L'expérience
stalinienne, "existentialiste", "tiers-mondiste" s'est, à force
d'expérience, détruite elle-même... Mais, demande François
Furet, comment se fait-il qu'à cette faillite des "romantismes"
n'ait pas succédé une pensée positive et libérale qui, elle, ne
rêve pas sur les faits, mais les recueille et les organise pour
en tirer la bonne signification ; "Pourquoi n'est-ce pas
Raymond Aron qui règne, mais Lévi-Strauss ?"
Cette transformation ne relève pas d'une explication
sociologique, suggère-t-il. Il ne s'agit pas de sociologie, en
effet, au moins si on se place dans le domaine de la
production des oeuvres. Il s'agit d'une transformation qui
s'est produite au sein de la théorie même. Ce que
Lévi-Strauss, Lacan - qui travaillaient, depuis longtemps, sur
des domaines empiriques qu'ils avaient pris soin de
circonscrire rigoureusement -, ce que Louis Althusser ont
établi, c'est que face à une telle crise, le seul remède était,
non de substituer aux "gros faits" des philosophes de
l'histoire (par exemple, le prolétariat mondial) les "petits faits"
de la sociologie (par exemple, l'augmentation des "petits
porteurs" d'actions aux U.S.A.), mais d'essayer de définir des
méthodes exactes d'investigation permettant de savoir ce
qu'on peut effectivement recevoir comme fait.
Pour y parvenir, Levi-Strauss s'est inspiré de l'analyse
mathématique et des recherches linguistiques ; Lacan,
lecteur intransigeant de Freud, a adopté, lui aussi, cette
dernière source. S'il fallait trouver des parents directs à
Althusser (et, d'une manière différente, à Foucault), ce serait
Koyré, Bachelard, Cangitilhem... et Levi-Strauss. En vérité, il
s'agit pour la pensée, en France, d'une mutation, d'un
arrachement, qui étaient déjà largement annoncés, mais qui
maintenant se réalisent (et quel lecteur de Bachelard se
plaindra que ce soit en des directions diverses et des
secteurs différents, alors qu'y préside - un esprit commun !)
Cette pensée "française", si l'on excepte certains textes de
Comte, de Cournot, de Durkheim, n'était jamais vraiment
sortie de l'empirisme psychologique que lui imposa Maine de
Biran. La voici, peut-être, qui, en ordre disparate, retrouve la
rigueur de la vocation théorique...
Fleurs et insectes
Pensée "hyperintellectualiste et systématique", déclare
encore François Furet. L'imputation, cette fois, est tout à fait
illégitime. Qui donc est plus près de la nature et la fait mieux
vivre que Levi-Strauss ? Qui se préoccupe aussi étroitement
de la "réalité politique" que Louis Althusser lorsqu'il tente de
redonner le sens théorique à des organisations ouvrières qui,
au gré des circonstances, ont floué du fanatisme sectaire à
l'oecuménisme ? Et, des "réalités universitaires" que Michel
Foucault lorsqu'il dénonce le vide fondamental des
disciplines qu'on enseigne sous les vocables sociologie et
psychologie ?
Le refus du fait empirique n'est nullement le refus de la
réalité et de ce qu'elle impose. Il signifie seulement - et cela
est décisif qu'un fait (c'est-à-dire, au fond, une information)
ne prouve rien comme tel, que ce qui est probant, c'est le
corps scientifique systématique qui, explicitant les raisons et
les moyens grâce auxquels il a produit, dans son domaine,
des faits (produire, au sens cartésien, mettre à jour), les
organise d'une manière intelligible.
"Hyperintellectualisme" ? Le risque existe. Au plus bas
niveau, il apparaît dans la constitution de ces petites
chapelles exclusives et agressives qui, serrées autour de la
seule vérité (qu'elles détiennent), distribuent, à l'envi,
excommunications et clins d'oeil. Au plus haut niveau, il se
dessine dans un article comme celui d'Alain Badiou. C'est là,
sans doute, le meilleur texte qu'on ait écrit sur, les
recherches d'Althusser et de son groupe (plus explicite que
celui, excellent déjà, de Saul Karsz, encore à l'abri de la
philosophie de l'histoire). Son mérite et de désigner très
précisément la place de ces recherches, de souligner leurs
ambiguïtés, de poser la question de fond, que la recherche
althussérienne a éludée jusqu'ici : celle du rapport théorique
entre la philosophie idéologie et la philosophie théorie (qui
n'est autre que celle de la relation théorique entre théorie et
pratique). On doit se demander, pourtant, si en proposant
cette "figure allégorique" : "Althusser ou, pour penser Marx,
Kant dans Spinoza", Alain Badiou, par son interprétation, ne
fait pas régresser l'entreprise vers des origines dont elle ne
tirera que des minces "profits" théoriques. Car il semble bien
que Marx - qui n'ignorait pas le problème difficile du statut de
la théorie - ne le posait pas en ces termes. Avait-il tort ? Ou
était-il préoccupé par autre chose ?
Dans le dernier article d'Althusser, "Sur le travail théorique.
Difficultés et ressources", il y a une phrase qui, pour
énigmatique qu'elle soit, déplace, peut-être, la question :
"n'existent, au sens fort du terme, que des objets réels et
concrets singuliers". Voici, en tous cas, une formulation qui,
tout autant que l'évocation par Levi-Strauss des fleurs et des
insectes, l'analyse, naguère, par Koyré, des travaux de
Gaulée ou la révélation par Foucault des techniques passées
de la clinique médicale, nous met bien loin de cet idéalisme
dont on fait grief à ceux que l'on nomme structuralistes.
Revues à consulter, à propos du structuralisme :
Le numéro 246 des Temps modernes (novembre 1966)
entièrement consacré aux problèmes du structuralisme
(articles de J. Pouillon, M. Barbut, A.- J. Greimas, M
Godelier, P. Bourdieu, P. Macherey, J Ehrmann) ;
François Furet, "les Français et le structuralisme", Preuves,
n° 192, février 1967, pp. 3.12
Le numéro 2 de Raison présente (février 1967), articles d'O.
Revault d'Allonnes, "les Mots contre les Choses" et d'E.
Bottigelli, "En lisant Althusser"
André Glucksmann, "Un structuralisme ventriloque", Les
Temps modernes, N° 250 (mars 1967), pp. 1557.1398 ;
Aléthéia, N°6 (avril 1967), trois textes B. Besnier, "Deux
livres marxistes pour la théorie économique", M. Godelier,
"Sciences de l'histoire et théorie des systèmes (réponse à B.
Besnier)", S. Karsz, "Après Althusser (ou la fin des
orthodoxies)" ;
L. Althusser, "Sur le travail théorique. Difficultés et
ressources", La Pensée, N° 132 (avril 1967), pp. 3-22 ;
Le numéro de mai 1967 d'Esprit intitulé "Structuralisme,
idéologie et méthode", avec des contributions de J.- H.
Domenach, M. Dufrenne, P. Ricoeur, J. Ladrière, J.
Cuisenier, P. Burgelin, Y. Bertherat, J. Conilh ;
E. Leach, "C. Lévi-Strauss, anthropologue et philosophe",
Raison présente, N° 3 (mai 1967), pp. 91-106 ;
A. Badiou, "le (re) commencement du matérialisme
dialectique", Critique, N° 240 (mai 1967), pp. 438-467 ;
La réédition (la seconde) du remarquable numéro 26 de l'Arc
consacré à Lévi-Strauss avec des textes de B. Pingaud, L.
de Heusch, C. Levi-Strauss, G. Génette, C. Deliège, J.
Pouillon, J. Guart, J.- C. Gardin, P. Clastres ;
F. Wahl, "Littérature, Science, Idéologie", Critique, N° 241
(juin 1967), pp. 537-543.

François Châtelet

Oh Man…this is so wild. Spent the last few hours thinking about how I wanted to write you re: López Obrador (AMLO). Returned to my abode, checked in with Kasama first, and found this new post by John Steele re Alain Badiou.

Keep in mind, I’d never heard of Badiou until this moment, but am now anxious to read his writings, as well as yours, about his theories, etc.

Just to excerpt one paragraph from J.S.’s piece, which in my mind dovetailed with what I wanted to share about AMLO:

“What to think? Well, let’s take a more familiar political example. Suppose you are a revolutionary militant or cadre. You have been grasped in your life and activated by a great eruption in the world, and the experience has completely up-ended the conventional system of facts and categories and hierarchies – all that you thought you knew. You have entered into a process of synthesizing and recognizing and establishing new truths in the world, a process which is not just yours, but yours along with many others. I am sure many of us on this site have experienced this, and have entered into such processes, and have had this shape our lives.”

And suppose you are not a revolutionary militant per se, or part of some revolutionary cadre, but through individual and collective experience and struggle, have had your world turned upside down, your life reshaped, etc.

Observations of the Movement around AMLO

Want to preface my comments on AMLO by saying first off–the relevance of the López Obrador phenomena did not “shape my life” in a profound way, but has been a radical rupture in the lives and thinking of many Mexicanos. Something I don’t think can be ignored by the more revolutionary forces, and summarily dismissed because this phenomena unfolded in the sphere of electoral politics. What do we do when the masses are in motion, in this case in their millions? To me this was a struggle that went way beyond electoral politics. Do we join forces with the people, and within that not try and up the ante, or do we simply sit back and mechanically criticize a figure like López Obrador?

During all these years of living in Mexico, I have had only one gringa friend and have always tried to immerse myself AS MUCH AS IS POSSIBLE, in Mexican culture, etc.; definitely amongst the people–including different strata, but mostly among the obreros, campesinos, artisans and indigenous people. This was not done in some conscious way, or to formulate any kind of political line, but those are the people I’ve always gravitated toward, feel an affinity for and am most comfortable with, even with all of their contradictoriness. (And I sure as hell didn’t move to Mexico to be part of some snotty and isolated gringo community–could have moved to Palm Springs for that b.s.)

But something I have observed over the years is — even among the Mexican people who are politically aware, there has been an incredible apathy, acceptance of the status quo (even tho they complain endlessly about it), etc. “Ni modo” (more or less “oh well,” or “c’est la vie”) is undoubtedly the favorite expression of the majority of people. Things suck but what can you do? More currently– after almost a century of their being beaten down, oppressed, exploited, etc., in the last several years, I’ve thought that it’s not always the case, certainly not automatically, that where there’s oppression, there’s resistance. For sure there have been pockets of rebellion, movements and “for real” struggle in Mexico–and historically real revolutionary struggle. (Interestingly enough, Emiliano Zapata, and to some extent Pancho Villa, along with those who were the catalyst for Independence and “revolution” are still very much revered to this day. It’s a big deal w/lots of fireworks and celebrating when Zapata’s or Morelos’, etc. birthday comes around. I would venture to say that the majority of mexicanos know their history–and are not only proud of their more political ancestors, but their pride includes the Mayans, Olmecs, Zapotecs, Purépechas, etc. as well.)

“We’re standing up, we’re rising up…we’re not afraid.”

Back to AMLO…ended up attending many of his rallies– (pre election–even some meetings) — alongside a minimum of 30,000 people–just in Morelia. (Many people traveling for hours in giant buses from all over Michoacán.) Read everything I could get my hands on about him, but more so his platform and program. AMLO became a lightening rod for the people, and people from all strata, but mainly the lower strata, who became active; there was less talk of “ni modo”, and more talk of changing both the economic and political course of Mexico.

And probably more important, at least in my eyes, was–I went from Chiapas to D.F. (Mexico City, Distrito Federal) to participate in a demo after the fraudulent election. I was in the midst of a demonstration with OVER A MILLION PEOPLE!!!! And here’s what moved me no end–the main chant, the main thrust of the demo wasn’t about more bourgeous politics coming from bourg. politicians, or even so much AMLO–what people were in unison about was captured in the din of their unified voice: “We’re standing up, we’re rising up…we’re not afraid.” Secondarily, “We’re with you Peje.”

(At one point I was thinking about Woodstock of all things–because amongst a million people in the AMLO demo, everyone was so kind and helpful to one another, organized, etc., knowing full well that people had differences politically. Along the route of the march to the Zocalo–which I couldn’t even get to because there were so many people–Mexican artists (some famous some not), writers, musicians, etc. had come together and installed these giant — encased pieces of art and writings, reflecting the struggle, that were totally captivating, and spurred the people on.)

Thing was–to me and many others–this had become a struggle as part of the people’s transformation in the ideological sphere (not just another election)…also provided an opportunity to take things further by the conscious forces. This was a real movement, and developed from the bottom up. L.O. also had a lot of credibility amongst the masses because when he was governor (?) of D.F., he actually stood with the people in many cases, against the Mexican gov’t.

(A total aside–while I understand that the revolutionary forces — solid core, etc. in the history of revolution are usually a relatively small core, I think it a grave error to make a principle of that…i.e., their numbers.)

So here’s the thing that I argued as well as united with folks over. While López Obrador became a hero to many, it wasn’t him as an individual that moved people. (Certainly it wasn’t his party, the PRD, who are mostly scumbags.) There was even lots of struggle over the word “populist”–populist in Spanish has a very pejorative connotation. Whether or not L.O. would have been able to affect real change remains to be seen–but his platform, his ideas, his willingness to take on the U.S. and not kiss their friggin’ ass, his proposals about immigration (and exposure of the real enemies of the “migrantes”), his staunch stance against the war in Iraq, and all imperialist wars, ignited the best in people. He didn’t just stir folks up around bread and butter issues (a relatively easy approach in a “third world” country)…and the people united behind him.

There were tons of slanders by the bourg. press here and abroad, likening him to someone who was in Hugo Chavez’ or Fidel’s pocket…but really, the majority of people in Mexico support and identify, and have a history of solidarity with the Cubans and Venezuelans, so this pretty much fell on deaf ears.

Albeit, L.O. was mainly dealing in the electoral sphere, but we’re not talking about Obama…we’re talking about someone who raised the spectre of fighting against and ending oppression and exploitation, extreme poverty, waging class struggle, and that the people could be masters of their own destiny, etc. One has to try and keep in mind the historical context here–the Mexican people have been ruled by PRI for 71 years. I truly believe that the only reason friggin’ pig ass, arch reactionary Fox (Bush’s twin except for the bigote) got in was because he was an (electable) alternative to PRI.

After the fraudulent election, a very dear friend, dared to take on the PRD, and even the pitfalls that L.O. fell into afterwards. He had a polemic published in La Jornada, and a dialogue ensued. I agree with him wholeheartedly. Instead of further mobilizing the masses, and involving the astounding base that L.O. had inspired and amassed, the opportunistic/careerist PRD solely concentrated on the fraudulent elections, and reduced the whole impact of the phenomena in and around L.O. to shit. Everyone knew the election was rigged…so new? But where do we go from here?

Well, L.O. still has some credibility, and I watched him twice recently; his new cause and a worthy fight, is around Calderon’s wanting to DEnationalize (if there is such a word) Pemex…and while Pemex has definitely fallen prey to the INCREDIBLE, out of this world, corruption here, it is still the only (besides electricity) resource that has not been completely taken over by the U.S. and its imperialist allies.

So…while all this was going on, I checked into the RW/Rev. website, because I wanted to see what their position was. Their “analysis” was totally mechanical, and ill-informed. AMLO a reformist, fuck elections, boycott, yada yada…in other words, anything short of calling for the d.o.p., or promoting Bob Avakian, screw it…

Meanwhile, the Zapatistas, from what I read in the more progressive Spanish-speaking press, vacilated on the elections…one minute, boycott, the next…well, we’re not sure, or similar to the RCP, silence on the issues.

About the Zapatistas

But here’s something I want to say about the Zapatistas: while I still of course support them, and much more so the indigenous people of mainly Chiapas (who Marcos claims to represent)– I really think the Zapatistas blew it.

Needless to say, the Zapatistas at first were pretty controversial. (I actually moved here when the Zapatistas initiated their struggle.) At the same time, the majority of people adamently supported the struggle of the indigenous people culturally, against extreme poverty, racism, etc. (Yes, there is racism in Mexico.)

After some years, while the Zapatistas, and especially Marcos, remained an enigma, they finally came out of the jungles, and had a nationwide tour that was extremely powerful and successful. Thousands upon thousands of people, came to their rallies. All the while, Marcos remained suspect–who was he? Where did he come from? Some intellectual, petit bourgeois, opportunist, ??? etc. (or to quote Lenny Bruce, “who was that masked man?”–literally) I actually attended a couple of these rallies–very excited about the whole thing–and invited lots of pals who were not necessarily “political”. “Hey we gotta be there…this is an historic moment!!” So I dressed quasi-incognito ’cause I didn’t want to get deported. My “cover” pretty much blown since for the most part am a head taller than most folk, and was greeted with…”Hola Leenda. ¿que tal?”

Remember seeing a few people, in and out of the bus for the press, knowing full well who the hell they were…but hey fine…good, hope you’re giving a realistic/objective picture of what’s going on…but TOTALLY SUBJECTIVELY have to say, those particular folks mostly had the well-worn arrogant/we’re in the know/we’re important/disconnect sneer on their faces, that we’ve all grown to know and love, and wanting to be seen like they had a real “in”–almost like some starlet who’d just arrived on the RED carpet–literally and figuratively.

Well, the nationwide tour culminated in a huge fight and controversy in el congreso–the reactionary forces trying to bar the Zapatistas from addressing the congress–which only gained the Z’s more support. Their statements to the congress were right on, from what I could glean, and they had broadened their base well beyond the jungles of Chiapas. So then what?–after this incredible momentum, they returned to “their base”, and have practically disappeared. Rumor had it that Marcos was really getting orders from the Peruvians, and was engrossed in study. Whether or not there is any truth to the rumor…is not the point. The point is–the more or less disappearance of the Zapatistas, after a huge groundswell of support, made a whole lot of honest folk very cynical, and while there is still tremendous support for the people within that struggle, the leadership of the Z’s is pretty much viewed as–same ol’ same ol’…and fuck ‘em.

I think this is a tragedy…

Similarities of Error

And without getting into the why’s and wherefore’s of the RCP, I can’t help but think there are some similarities here insofar as some of their practice. I still will continue to read what R. Lotta has to say, and still maintain some respect for him, but when I said that his summation–albeit at the beginnings of, and maybe even the pinnacle of the Zapatistas influence, was “pure fantasy” I wasn’t being snide. Oh goody…armed struggle breaking out in Mexico…therefore…they’re on the brink of revolution. This is what the RCP wanted to see but that wasn’t necessarily what was happening. That still doesn’t mean that the Zapatistas, and moreover, the indigenous people should not be supported. But the Zapatistas are one thing…to me, for an organization that calls itself MLM, to be silent about line struggle in, e.g. Nepal, where a real revolution is taking place -- and frankly before that Peru -- is criminal.

At any rate, can’t wait to read more of, and about, Badiou. Thanks Steele.

Linda D.

What about Alain Badiou, the contemporary philosopher? Like Zizek, he has attracted much attention among people looking for new avenues both intellectually and politically. A friend in Latin American studies has told me his name is everywhere in Latin American intellectual circles.

Badiou’s background is within Marxism and Maoism. He was a student of the French communist philosopher Louis Althusser in the early sixties, an activist within the French uprisings of May 1968, and a Maoist activist and theorist in the 1970s. He has concluded, beginning in the 1980s and for a nest of reasons both political and philosophical, that this tradition of political practice (that is, basically, the international communist movement as it had emerged that far), has reached a point of “saturation,” as he terms it, and that a new beginning – a new truth-process, as he calls it – is necessary. He has gone on since then to outline a new approach in some very basic fields of philosophy.

In a February 2006 interview at University of Washington, he summed up:

"Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity.... Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field -- not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find -- with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts -- the new synthesis."

So, does he have worth for us, for our moment, our project, our need to “reconceive as we regroup”? Speaking for myself here, I believe we have, very much, something to learn from him.

Alain Badiou has developed a distinctive philosophical system over the last decades – one sharply focused on understanding the way in which something new, a radical rupture, can jump out of nowhere, changing how we understand ourselves and the situation, and profoundly changing the status quo. His view of ethics revolves around understanding how to have “fidelity” to powerful breaks with conventional thinking, and militantly pursue those breaks as far as they can go – in theory and practice.

His philosophy covers many wide areas, but what relates most closely to concerns on this site is his thinking around the question of how to understand the emergence – the eruption -- of deep breaks in the social and political world that challenge (or even demolish) the status quo (which Badiou calls “the situation” and “the state” of affairs).

Such a rupture – Badiou calls it an event, which becomes a special term in his philosophy – such a rupture or event is the start of a process which changes both the world and the people involved in it, and creates and synthesizes new truths. The event is the starting point for both a truth-process and a subject, in Badiou’s terminology. (The subject is not the particular person, but all who participate in the truth-process.)

He gives as examples of “events” such things as the upheaval in France of May 1968 – or equally the birth of modern physics in the time of Galileo. I think it’s easy to see how we could say that out of these was born both a new subject (socially collective, not merely individual), and a truth-process. Neither subject nor truth-process is possible without the other, and they construct each other.

Studying Militancy, Examining Paul

Like most philosophers, Badiou writes very systematically, and to grasp a particular point or passage, some grasp of his overall argument is needed.

I think we can get a better sense of what Badiou is saying by looking a just one of his works – the influential book he wrote on Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.

Paul is generally viewed as a deeply reactionary character by Marxists and even by many progressive Christians. One could say that Paul took an early egalitarian Jewish sect, and played a pivotal role in transforming it into an established Church with a novel, codified doctrine, and the ability to “take over” the Roman empire, Europe and beyond.

So why does a revolutionary like Badiou write about Paul? Well – we don’t need to just examine an historical figure like this from the point of view of “was his doctrine correct?” or “do we see him as reactionary?”

Badiou is examining Paul as an archetype of militancy – as a person with “fidelity” to a world historic “event” and the “truth-process” emerging from it (in this case, a resurrection [undocumented to be sure] and a certain universal set of messages that were unprecedented for their times.)

On the second page of this book, Badiou characterizes Paul as someone who “practices and states the invariant features of what can be called the militant figure.”

Badiou goes on to say, “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure¼called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant.”

He thinks that now, when such a step forward is needed, a look back at the distant and apparently very dissimilar case of Paul is highly illuminating.

Badiou says he wants to trace the connection, embodied in Paul, “between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-process which is this rupture’s subjective materiality.” It’s the connection, in other words, between an event and the truth-process and the subject which are both born out of it. The “militant figure” is the militant of a truth-process and part of a new subjectivity. (Subjectivity in this philosophical sense does not mean, as in Maoist usage, being un-objective or anti-scientific. It means in this case, being a new subject (or part of a new social subject), a newly defined and awakened actor on the social stage and within the new process of truth-formation.)

To rephrase slightly, Badiou’s quest is for a new way to be a revolutionary in our present circumstances. He approaches Paul in this light, for those reasons, and interprets Paul’s life and practice in terms of his own (Badiou’s) philosophy of event, subject, truth-process, and fidelity. A “new militant figure” would be the militant of a new truth process.

That’s the background of his concern with Paul. He goes on to say that what he’s going to focus on in Paul’s work is “a singular connection, which it is formally possible to disjoin from the fable [that is, Christianity] and of which Paul is...the inventor: the connection that establishes a passage between a proposition concerning a subject and an interrogation concerning the law.”

What Paul contributed, Badiou believes, is the insight and practice of separating truths (and truth-processes) from their particular historical context. Badiou opposes this to the contemporary practices of dissolving truths into forms of cultural, linguistic or historical relativisms.

A Universal Singularity

In the world today, Badiou says, on the one hand there is a vast “extension of the automatisms of capital,” which imposes “the rule of an abstract homogenization,” while “on the other side there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation.” Both of these processes, and their ideological expressions, are inimical and deadly to the creation of new truth today. Moreover, the two processes are complementary:

“Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action....”

A new truth-procedure, Badiou believes, will on the one hand interrupt and disrupt the repetition of the same which is the logic imposed by capital. On the other hand: although the eruption of new truth is a singular process, “its singularity is immediately universalizable.” In other words: a truth-process originates in a particular event, breaking out at a particular time and place; but the process is one which brings into being new truths which are universal, or which can be universalized. So the truth-process also breaks with particular identities and relativist logic.

Badiou concludes in this line of thought:

“Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?” (All quotes in the last few paragraphs are from the first chapter of Badiou’s Saint Paul.)

It is precisely on this question that he thinks it’s helpful to look at Paul, because this is his (Paul’s) question. A dispute arose between Paul and the historic apostles in Jerusalem (Peter and some others), apparently concerning whether all Christians need be circumcised, that is, whether they needed to take on the traditional marks of belonging to the Jewish community. The position in Jerusalem was yes, because they saw Jesus as fulfilling the process of Judaism. Paul said no:

“In his eyes, the event renders prior markings obsolete, and the new universality bears no privileged relation to the Jewish community.” (Badiou, 23)

Badiou sides with Paul on the general issue involved. The question, rephrased in Badiou’s terms, is this:

“What is the relation between the supposed universality of the postevental truth (that is, what is inferred from Christ’s resurrection) and the evental site, which is, indubitably, the nation bound together by the Old Testament?” (22)

This becomes for Badiou a general question about the relation between the old and the new, after the occurrence of an event: Does the new truth incorporate the old within it, or is there a decisive break? Badiou believes there is a break.

This relates to what Badiou is getting at in talking of “universal singularity.”An event is singular and unique: it breaks with the boundaries and categories of the situation out of which it erupts. But the event marks the beginning of a truth-process, which is a process of creating universal truths.

So you could say that the break-out represented by an event, and its initiation of a truth-process, is how singular –> universal works. But Badiou also wants to stress what is something like the reverse process: how the truth which is essentially universal, traverses the differences and particularities of the world: “With regard to the world in which truth proceeds, universality must expose itself to all differences and show, through the ordeal of their division, that they are capable of welcoming the truth that traverses them.” (106)

Mass Line

This becomes one of Badiou’s chief themes in this book: the way in which new universal truths “traverse” or travel through and incorporate the differences and particularities of the world. “It is in fact the search for new differences,” he says,

“New particularities to which the universal might be exposed, that leads Paul beyond the evental site properly speaking (the Jewish site) and encourages him to displace the experience historically, geographically, ontologically. Whence a highly characteristic militant tonality, combining the appropriation of particularities with the immutability of principles, the empirical existence of differences with the essential nonexistence, according to a succession of problems requiring resolution, rather than through an amorphous synthesis.”

Badiou then quotes Paul from Corinthians I (First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, in the New Testament):

"For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law—though not being myself under the law—that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law—not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ—that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men. "(Cor. I.9.19-22)

Badiou says:

“This is not an opportunist text, but an instance of what Chinese communists will call ‘the mass line,’ pushed to its ultimate expression in ‘serving the people.’ It consists in supposing that, whatever people’s opinions and customs, once gripped by a truth’s postevental work, their thought becomes capable of traversing and transcending those opinions and customs without having to give up the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.” [St. Paul, page 99]

What to think? Well, let’s take a more familiar political example. Suppose you are a revolutionary militant or cadre. You have been grasped in your life and activated by a great eruption in the world, and the experience has completely up-ended the conventional system of facts and categories and hierarchies – all that you thought you knew. You have entered into a process of synthesizing and recognizing and establishing new truths in the world, a process which is not just yours, but yours along with many others. I am sure many of us on this site have experienced this, and have entered into such processes, and have had this shape our lives.

Let’s say that these new truths are universal (in the sense of being “addressed to all” as Badiou often puts it). These truths demand to be made real in the world, which means changing the world. Wrong ways of approaching this demand: either preaching to people (“here’s the truth; accept it, believe it”), or enforcing it as truth, if you have the power to do that (“here’s the truth; you must accept it or else”). Rather, the truth has to be made real in the world, not by opposing itself abstractly to the differences and particularities of people and groups, but through them. This would be what the mass line is about, as Badiou is interpreting it here. “From the masses, to the masses” – taking “the ideas of the masses,” synthesizing them through the universal truth in a way that does not dissolve their particularity, and bringing them “back to the masses.”

And this is what Badiou sees in this text of Paul: an expression of how a truth, universal in character and sweep, can come to “seize the masses” in a way which does not obliterate or abolish “the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.”

Mao’s “mass line” has often been understood as addressing questions of methods of leadership (“learning while leading, leading while learning”) or political work (concentrating and sifting out correct from incorrect in the ideas of the masses, then “returning” them in the form of line and policy). As such, it remains on the level of means and policy. Badiou, however, is seeing it as a way in which the universal becomes particular, and how a new truth becomes materially expressive within and through individual people and groups. It is a profound philosophical question, as well as profoundly political.

There’s much more to his thinking, which is very rich and variegated. There’s a lot in Badiou that one can argue with, and I am still grappling with his thought. But he’s one of the very few really original, deep, and path-breaking philosophers of the present – and someone who’s seriously trying to think or rethink the questions of revolution (or of a truly emancipatory politics, as he prefers to say). These ideas are not repackagings of our own familiar Marxisms… they are often strange to us, as if the same world and problems are suddenly seen from a new angle with fresh eyes. It is provocative and thought-provoking. And for those reasons alone, there’s a lot of value in his work (we need it, in fact) and he needs to be seriously engaged -- irrespective of whether we adopt his philosophical system as a whole, or any particular aspects of it.

Videos of Badiou

• (French) "Autour des Logiques des Mondes" at The American University of Paris
• Art as a Place for Politics (Video - Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, 11/16, 2006)
• Truth Procedure in Politics (Video - Abreu Gallery, New York, 11/18, 2006)
• Truth Procedure in Art (Video - Tilton Gallery, New York, 11/17, 2006)
• Jacques Lacan's Seminar On Anxiety (Video - The Drawing Center, New York, 03/07, 2006)

Dozens of videos of Badiou lectures are available on youtube.

Websites devoted to Badiou

• Alain Badiou at Lacan Dot Com
• Alain Badiou Bibliography
• Collège International de Philosophie
• Badiou at the European Graduate School
• Cosmos and History

Articles by Badiou

In English

• The Contemporary Figure of the Soldier in Politics and Poetry, UCLA
• Destruction, Negation, Subtraction Art Center College of Design - Pasadena
• The Uses of the Word "Jew"
• The Adventure of French Philosophy
• Behind the Scarfed Law, There is Fear (On the French headscarf ban)
• Bodies, Languages Truths
• The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? (PDF)
• Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic
• The Desire for Philosophy and the Contemporary World
• Destruction, Negation, Subtraction - on Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Eight Theses on the Universal
• An Essential Philosophical Thesis: "It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries" (PDF)
• The Event in Deleuze (PDF)
• Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art
• The Formulas of L'Etourdit
• The Factory as Event Site
• Further Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution (PDF)
• Highly Speculative Reasoning on the Concept of Democracy (from Metapolitics)
• Lacan and the Pre-Socratics
• A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject (PDF)
• Number and Numbers
• On the European Constitution
• On the Truth-Process
• One Divides into Two (On Lenin)
• Philosophical Considerations of the Very Singular Custom of Voting
• Philosophy as Creative Repetition
• Philosophy and Politics
• The Political as a Truth Procedure (from Metapolitics)
• Politics: a Non-expressive Dialectics (PDF)
• The Scene of Two (English translation from De l'amour)
• Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution (PDF)
• The Subject of Art (Deitch Projects, New York, April 1, 2005)
• The Triumphant Restoration (PDF)
• What Happens (On Beckett; PDF)
• What is to be Thought? What is to be Done? (On the 2002 French elections; written by Badiou, Sylvain Lazarus and Natasha Michel)
• A Musical Variant of the Metaphysics of the Subject
• The Event in Deleuze
• What is a Philosophical Institution?
• 'What is the Left?' An excerpt from 'The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration'
• What is Love? (PDF)
• The Communist Hypothesis

In French

• L'aveu du philosophe
• Considérations philosophiques sur des événements récents (On the September 11, 2001 attacks; PDF)
• De la demande de faire des lois et de la façon d'y répondre

• De la dialectique négative dans sa connexion à un certain bilan de Wagner (part one; part two) (Two lectures on Theodor Adorno and Richard Wagner)
• De l'idéologie (PDF)
• L'Homme aux Rats (On the 2007 French presidential election)
• Huit thèses sur l'universel
• L'humiliation ordinaire (On the 2005 civil unrest in France; translation)
• Notes sur Le Dernier des hommes (On the movie The Last Laugh by Murnau)
• Panorama de la philosophie française contemporaine
• La subversion infinitésimale (PDF)
• Théorie de la contradiction (PDF)
• Un, multiple, multiplicité(s) (On Gilles Deleuze)

In other languages

• (Spanish) en "Grupo Acontecimiento"
• (Spanish) en "antroposmoderno"
• (Spanish) en "Turbulencias"
• (Spanish) La Etica (Translation of Badiou's book on ethics)
• (Spanish) Nietzsche, filosofía y antifilosofía (On Friedrich Nietzsche)
• (Italian) Il cinema come falso movimento
• (Italian) Si può parlare di un film?

Interviews

• On Evil (Badiou interviewed by Christoph Cox and Molly Whalen)
• Matters of Appearance: An Interview with Alain Badiou (Badiou interviewed by Lauren Sedofsky)
• AGR interviews Professor Alain Badiou (Badiou interviewed by Shane Perlowin)

• Being by Numbers (part one; part two; part three; part four; part five; Badiou interviewed by Lauren Sedofsky)
• Beyond Formalisation (Badiou interviewed by Peter Hallward and Bruno Bosteels; questions in English, answers in French)
• A Conversation with Alain Badiou (Badiou interviewed by Mario Goldenberg)

• (Spanish) "Las democracias están en guerra contra los pobres" (Badiou interviewed by Héctor Pavón; PDF)

• (Spanish) Entrevista a Alain Badiou (Badiou interviewed by Julia Goldenberg)

• (French) L’être, l’événement, la militance (Badiou interviewed by Nicole-Édith Thévenin)

• (Spanish) "Las ideas existen y tienen poder" (Badiou interviewed by Pedro B. Rey)

• (French) "L'intellectuel de gauche va disparaître, tant mieux" (Badiou interviewed by Nicolas Weill)
• "Universal Truths & the Question of Religion" (Badiou interviewed by Adam S. Miller)
• Carceraglio: Interview (Badiou interviewed by Diana George and Nic Veroli)

• (French) "Alain Badiou: Le XXIe siècle n'a pas commencé" (Badiou interviewed by Elie During)
• New Horizons in Mathematics as Philosophical Condition: an Interview with Alain Badiou (Badiou interviewed by Tzuchien Tho; PDF)
• Interview with Alain Badiou from InDigest Magazine (Interviewed by Genoa Mungin)

Political movements & organisations influenced by Badiou's works

• Abahlali baseMjondolo
• Congolese Rally for Democracy
• L'Organisation politique
• Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign

Commentry and Interpretation

Arguably, the most important commentators on Badiou in English are considered to be

• Peter Hallward, see for instance his Badiou: A Subject to Truth (2003) and Think Again: Alain Badiou & the Future of Philosophy (2004) and
• Bruno Bosteels, see his Badiou and Politics, forthcoming Duke UP, and Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialectico, Palinodia, 2007.

Other commentary:

• Fractal Ontology (English) featuring original translations of Alain Badiou's work by Taylor Adkins and Joseph Weissman
• On Badiou and Logiques des mondes by Slavoj Zizek

Works

[edit] Philosophy

• Le concept de modèle (1969 , 2007)
• Théorie du sujet (1982)
• Peut-on penser la politique? (1985)
• L'Être et l'Événement (1988)
• Manifeste pour la philosophie (1989)
• Le nombre et les nombres (1990)
• Conditions (1992)
• L'Éthique (1993, 2005)
• Deleuze (1997)
• Saint Paul. La fondation de l'universalisme (1997, 2002)
• Abrégé de métapolitique (1998)
• Court traité d'ontologie provisoire (1998)
• Petit manuel d'inesthétique (1998)
• D'un désastre obscur (1998)
• Le siècle (2005)
• Logiques des mondes. L'être et l'événement, 2. (2006)

[edit] Critical essays

• Rhapsodie pour le théâtre (1990)
• Beckett, l'increvable désir (1995)
• Le Siècle (2005)

[edit] Literature and drama

• Almagestes (1964)
• Portulans (1967)
• L'Écharpe rouge (1979)
• Ahmed le subtil (1994)
• Ahmed Philosophe, followed by Ahmed se fâche (1995)
• Les Citrouilles, a comedy (1996)
• Calme bloc ici-bas (1997)

[edit] Political essays

• Théorie de la contradiction (1975)
• De l'idéologie, with F. Balmès (1976)
• Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégelienne, with L. Mossot and J. Bellassen (1977)
• Circonstances 1 (2003)
• Circonstances 2 (2004)
• Circonstances 3 (2005)
• Circonstances 4: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom ? (2007)