Neo-Durkheimiamism?: Alain Badiou and the Subject of Politics (HM NYC 2013) (original) (raw)
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Žarko Paić THE ANTI-THEOLOGY OF THE NEW EVENT: ALAIN BADIOU AND THE CONTINGENCY OF POLITICS
Why did politics, for Badiou, become something of a new "absolute" that almost everything depends on, every possible event in the relationship between humans and even the way of shaping the space between the Being as a multitude and the event as a condition for the emergence of a new condition and situation? Undoubtedly, throughout his work from the early 1960s to today, the fact that such a high place is devoted to politics stems from his belief that a change in life is possible only if it also means a change in thought. We cannot change the world without changing our thinking or our interpretation of the world. This "re-philosophizing" of Marx, however, does not mean much more than an attempt at getting rid of the traces of scientificity and at freeing the world of the deposition of pseudo-humanism. All of this marked the reading of Marx in France of the 1960s and beyond. If politics indicates neither the field of moral inscription, nor the scientific verification of what is happening in the world, it is because of Badiou's intervention in the area of the irreducibility of the political, which he performed together with Rancière in contemporary philosophy-an original intervention in the way it was released from the stranglehold of the economy and culture, rights and morals, sciences and cultures. We know that the beginning of this process is signified by Schmitt's notion of the political as polemic struggles and the understanding of politics in the conflicts of friends against enemies. Badiou does not even deal with the question of so-called realpolitik. True to the will, this is a cancer of almost the entire normative theory of politics and the political by thinkers from Habermas and Rawls, the most significant representatives of the so-called liberal consensus, to Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière. Because of this, the nomos of the political is exposed to him as being beyond the obsession with the idea of the sovereignty of the people in the modern form of the rule of a democratic or
A Cartesian Rereading of Badiou's Political Subjectivity
Philosophy Today, 2019
This article traces the consequences for Badiou’s political subjectivity if his understanding of the Cartesian subject is incorrect. For Badiou, the faithful subject, political and otherwise, is formed through fidelity to the appearance of an event of truth, and the process of this fidelity creates a world. These truths are immanent to the worlds in which they appear. An obscure subject, however, is faithful to a negation, while a reactive subject denies the appearance of a truth’s event. Badiou’s subject radicalizes Lacan’s radicalization of the Cartesian subject, but for him both Descartes and Lacan consider the subject stable since they are caused by truth rather than by the event of a truth. However, immanent to Descartes’s philosophy is an unstable subject, thanks to the role of the imagination in the discovery of the cogito. Fidelity to this immanent Cartesian subject shows Lacan as an obscure subject and Badiou as reactive.
Today's first impressions leave us little room for doubt that between philosophy and politics there is nothing more to be said. Insofar as the former names a beleaguered, culturally peripheral disciplinary practice, it shares with stenography and bowling that dusty sense of lost necessity proper to all extinct, but once glowingly actual life-forms and habits. When it is not simply outright forgotten philosophy, like military history or Sudoku, fulfills the role of an involving cultural 'pastime'. Obama famously huddled over Seneca at midnight: our moment's dominant conception of the relationship between politics and philosophy defaults onto the grimly literal image of a presidential reading list. Such anecdotes, of course, consign philosophy to the same space reserved for religion and yoga, a marginal zone of leisured reflection where the vigorous actuality of politics can be regenerated by healing slowness and spirit. However bureaucratized its imperatives, however automated its contemporary forms, politics remains symptomatically attached to the Romantic particularity of the lawgiver, a mind and body that must periodically exit the bustle of policy to later return refreshed from discourse in the sober fora of the ancients. Such is seemingly the best possible destiny of the philosopher: court whisperer, scratchy voice of reason, high-flown ancient wisdom on the margins of actually existing power. This is the case, however, only for as long as we continue to confuse philosophy with what Jean Paul Sartre once called " a determined segment of culture, " " the Grey Eminence of humanity " (3). If, following Gramsci, we insist on the inherently philosophical nature of thinking politics once again finds itself solicited, inflected by, and even shamed by philosophy proper. It ceases to function as a wise, but impotent supplement to the serious business of politics and instead becomes nothing more or less than the latter's medium, its substance. It is not simply that philosophy breathes in the norms of its time and is thereby deemed 'political'('conditioned by the social' as we so often say); it is that philosophy itself has been a frequent site for the gestation of concepts that will only much later come to be registered as commonplace or imperceptible. Though this argument can tend in the direction of an idealism (a tendency still present, incidentally, in Sartre's Search a for Method), it is undeniable that texts like Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise or Rousseau's The Social Contract (to say nothing of the great 18th C declarations and constitutions) have had afterlives with direct (if not ramifying and subtle) effects on the common sense of later periods. The social complexity of postmodern societies is such that this linear, almost mechanist linkage between an act of writing and its (or a later) time appears unrecognizable. Interestingly, however, even a cursory sense for contemporary business culture makes clear the extent to which we continue to posit a relationship between the 'Idea' and 'changing the world': this is the very
This essay traces the genealogy and evolution of the category of the subject as it developed in the thought of Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Alain Badiou. As will be seen, within the fruitful and complementary dialogue about the subject and subjectivity formation among these three French thinkers, there are major discrepancies in their approaches, from Althusser's seemingly passive view of the subject as a victim of state oppression, to Foucault's one, embedded in power but with the capacity of resistance, and, finally, to Badiou's understanding, in his book Théorie du sujet (Theory of the Subject, 1982), of the subject as the one who courageously takes risks to put into practice the truth brought about by the event in order to radically transform the present situation.
Alain Badiou: A Student of Sartre
After Existentialism: UKSS 2017, 18 July, Oxford University, Oxford, 2017
Alain Badiou has famously called Sartre his “absolute Master,” and scholarly attempts have been made to connect his work, which The Guardian has called “post-existentialist,” with Sartre’s. These efforts, however, have mostly either focused on superficial similarities or discussed merely a narrow portion of the large philosophical oeuvre of both thinkers. In this paper, I will show that Badiou’s philosophical system is an extension of Sartre’s thought, and that the two thinkers complement each other. I will trace a line of ethics through Sartre’s and Badiou’s thoughts in parallel and draw explicit conceptual links between them. The main extension originating in Badiou is his solution to what Thomas Flynn calls the fraternity-terror problem plaguing the fused group in the Critique of Dialectical Reason I. Instead of having the fused group pledge to each other, which introduces exis into pure praxis, Badiou has the fused group continue to seek and oppose an Outside, and the structural mathematics that underlies his system is aimed at delineating how this movement can be possible. In this sense, he takes up Sartre’s challenge of formulating a structuralism that accounts for praxis and develops concepts that Sartre merely intuits and sketches out in his later works.
Review of _Badiou and Politics_ (2011) by Bruno Bosteels
Culture Machine, 2012
The ambitious challenge taken on and met by Badiou and Politics is to add to one of a handful of meta-tropes defining our current era and to add to an already sizable literature base surrounding one of the world's most significant continental philosophers and living theorists. Bruno Bosteels meets this challenge head on by dividing the major uptake on Badiou's work into two primary trajectories: the 'being' camp that stresses the logical ontology of oneness as pure multiplicity, and the 'event' camp that traces the ways a subject assumes certain truths as situations prompt particular procedures. Once Bosteels has set up these two approaches, he proposes a third way to encounter Badiou. Bosteel's corrective borrows from both approaches, settling on an affirmation of the politics of a dialectical materialism that would deploy both 'being' and 'event' strategies in a substantial reanimation of Badiou's place on, and contribution to, the philosophical map. This project goes beyond academic intervention for Bosteels, who shows how his friendship with Badiou springs from a passion and connection to his ideas that enriches both of them. Politics is a tough topic to tackle on any level. Badiou is a tough thinker to engage with. Bosteels unites, complements, and distinguishes both in his 436-page book working through the theories of a thinker who himself is grappling directly with politics: politics as an event, politics as being, and politics as one of four truth procedures defining the subject. Following and resisting many of the paths blazed by Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Butler among others, the works of Badiou feature a deeper philosophical conversation about being, power, time, and subjectivity led by earlier giants such as Heidegger, Marx, and Mao, even stretching back further to logical binarisms represented by Plato and Aristotle, or the 'plus one' practices of St. Paul within BOSTEELS • BADIOU AND POLITICS
The Truth of Politics in Alain Badiou: ‘There is Only One World.'
In this paper, I couple Alain Badiou’s more theoretical writings with his recent political treatises on the “communist hypothesis” to show how his ontology and theory of the event can offer us a better way of considering the problem regularly addressed by resorting to human rights. Arendt and Agamben both describe this problem in the terms of the logic of the nation-state: the power to recognize belonging is precisely the power to exclude; those not recognized by a governmental power have no recourse or body of appeal that would recognize or enforce their belonging. Jacques Rancière argues that this logic follows from dividing bios from zoē as Arendt does and Agamben follows. The dilemma and impotence of human rights requires a new logic of community, one not grounded in the capacity to exclude, a logic that I argue Badiou’s two claims that the multiple is ontologically basic and that the world is one accomplish. Together, these claims jointly expose the exclusionary logic of the state while encouraging a politics that unites instead of dividing the world, as it has been divided in the service of wealth. The maxim, “there is only one world,” encourages, in place of the logic of human rights, a performed politics that manifests and activates the belonging of all who are present.