Neo-Durkheimiamism?: Alain Badiou and the Subject of Politics (HM NYC 2013) (original) (raw)

Alain Badiou"s theory of political subjectivity entails a strict division between what he calls, in many places throughout his work, an "individual" and a "subject." 1 Individuals cannot be true political subjects and true political subjects are not, once "subjectivized" merely individuals, but rather become, as Badiou describes it, "one of the elements of another body, the body of truth, the material existence of a truth in the making in a given world." 2 Such a political subject, according to Badiou, arises in relation to an "event," which has the effect of producing the possibility of such a subjectivity. The "event" thus marks the dividing line between the individual and the subject. This division tracks quite nicely a division in Badiou"s acknowledged philosophical education, that between the quasi-structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and Jean-Paul Sartre"s late work on collective subjectivity found mainly in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. 3 This paper does three things. First it articulates the Badiouan theory of the distinction between the political subject and the apolitical individual in relation to Badiou"s reading of Althusser and Sartre. Second, it offers a further attempt at making sense of Badiou"s concept of the emergence of communal political subjectivity in connection with the "event" by reading it in relation to the Durkheimian idea of "collective effervescence" as reconstructed by