Marxism Expatriated: Alain Badiou's Turn

BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 528 8/14/2007 8:05:47 PM Chapter Twenty-Eight Marxism Expatriated: Alain Badiou’s Turn1 Alberto Toscano If there is a crisis of Marxism, it is the crisis of a politics, of a politics for communism, what we call, strictly speaking, Marxist politics.2 Marxist origins and post-Marxist chimeras Much of today’s radical political theory is the offspring of a crooked dialectic of defeat and reinvention. Many of the defining traits of recent theoretical writings on the Left are obscured if we fail to address how they emerged out of a reckoning with the failure or distortion of Marxist politics, and, moreover, if we disregard the extent to which they often retain an underlying if ambiguous commitment to the Marxist impulse whence they arose. The manner of taking leave from the organisational and theoretical tenets of Marxism, in whatever guise, can speak volumes about the present resources and limitations of contributions to political thought that drew initial sustenance from it. This is certainly the case with the work of Alain Badiou, whose complex relationship 1 An earlier version of this essay appeared in the Belgrade journal Prelom. I thank Ozren Pupovac and the editors for the initial stimulus to formulate these arguments, and for their comradeship. 2 Sandevince 1984c, p. 10. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 529 8/14/2007 8:05:48 PM 530 • Alberto Toscano to his own Maoist militancy and to Marxist theory has recently become the object of rich and detailed investigations, above all in several essays by Bruno Bosteels. Bosteels’s characterisation of Badiou’s approach in terms of ‘postMaoism’3 already suggests that Badiou’s intellectual biography stands at a considerable remove from the entire ‘post-Marxist’ tendency, chiefly encapsulated in Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, and persuasively dismantled in Ellen Meiksins Wood’s The Retreat from Class.4 Having said that, the effects of a common ‘poststructuralist’ theoretical conjuncture, along with a departure from a Hegelian-Marxist preoccupation with dialectics and social ontology, might lead one to suspect that ‘the theoretical edifices of Laclau and Badiou are united by a deep homology’.5 This ‘deep homology’ – which Slavoj Žižek identifies in the notion of a contingent, subjective rupture of ontological closure (or of any totality) – is nevertheless offset by a fundamental divergence, to the extent that ultimately, Badiou’s ‘post-Marxism’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the fashionable deconstructionist dismissal of the alleged Marxist ‘essentialism’; on the contrary, he is unique in radically rejecting the deconstructionist doxa as a new form of pseudo-thought, as a contemporary version of sophism.6 Rather than either homology, or frontal opposition, it might be more precise then to argue that Badiou’s post-Maoism and the post-Marxism of Laclau and his ilk intersect in manners that generate a kind of ‘family resemblance’, but that, when push comes to shove, they are incommensurable, born of divergent assessments of the end or crisis of Marxism. Their theoretical trajectories connect many of the same dots but the resulting pictures differ radically. In order better to delineate the specific difference of Badiou’s project, and of the problems that spurred it on, this chapter will examine the period between the highest speculative product of Badiou’s heterodox Maoism, Théorie du sujet (1982), and the cornerstone of his mature work, L’être et l’événement (1988), in particular the book Peut-on penser la politique?, published in 1985, which is to say contemporaneously with Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony. I claim that 3 Bosteels 2005a. Bosteels’s acute analyses of Badiou’s political thought will soon be brought together in the book Badiou and Politics. See also Badiou’s comments on Maoism in a recent interview with Bosteels, Bosteels 2005c, pp. 241–6. 4 Laclau and Mouffe 1985; Wood 1998. 5 Žižek 1999, p. 172. 6 Žižek 1998. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 530 8/14/2007 8:05:48 PM Marxism Expatriated • 531 this hitherto underexamined moment in Badiou’s theoretical production is rich with insights about the guiding parameters of his further work, but also contributes to a broader reflection on the fraught relationship between contemporary radical political theory and Marxism.7 Like many post-Marxists, and indeed anti-communists, Badiou condemns the ‘metaphysics’ that haunt Marxist politics. In a Heideggerian pastiche, he even describes Marxism-Leninism as the ‘metaphysical epoch of Marxist political ontology’.8 Most deconstructions of the Marxist canon have looked for such a metaphysics in Marx’s supposed reductionist economism or in an imaginary constitution of the social, and of class antagonism in particular, whose correlate would lie in the putative transparency of a post-revolutionary polity.9 While some of these points may be gleaned from Badiou’s texts from the mid-1980s, the emphasis is firmly on a conceptual dyad that persists to even greater effect in more recent works like Metapolitics. This is the distinction between politics and the political. At the heart of Badiou’s call to counter the supposed crisis of Marxist thought by its ‘destruction’ and ‘recomposition’, is the thesis that Marxism has succumbed to the homogenising political fiction that imagines the possibility of measuring, anticipating and representing political action. In this regard, ‘the political has never been anything but the fiction which politics punctures through the hole of the event’.10 One’s initial impression is of a substantial overlap with Laclau in terms of the notions of working class, proletariat or people as fictions of social cohesion, empty signifiers wherein political action would seek its guarantee. Indeed, the fundamental political fiction for Badiou is that of the ‘alliance of the social relation and its measure’.11 But Badiou does not draw from this the customary post-Marxist lessons regarding the intractable plurality of discursively generated identities and the need for hegemony. He is far from espousing the post-Marxist mix of strategic populism, sociological description, discursive ontology and de facto liberalism. Rather, the assault on social fictions and the 7 For further thoughts on the periodisation of Badiou’s work, see Toscano 2006a. Badiou 1984, p. 8; Badiou 1985, p. 61. 9 See Laclau 1991. 10 Badiou 1985, p. 12. 11 As the treatment of the concept of ‘state’ in Being and Event suggests, measure is equated by Badiou to representation. I have dealt with some of the problems incumbent on Badiou’s theory of the state – especially the obstacles it poses to a thinking of capital and capitalism – in Toscano 2004b. 8 BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 531 8/14/2007 8:05:49 PM 532 • Alberto Toscano suspension of Marxism’s foundational commitment to a critique of political economy are viewed by Badiou as the occasions for a renovation, and a kind of purification, of the politics of emancipation. Marxism, according to Peut-on penser la politique?, is unable to critique its own critique of political economy,12 thereby distorting its original political impetus, and binding it to the mediations of economy and society.13 Marxism’s retention of the categories of totality and system is accused of imprisoning the encounter and creation of a politics in the fiction of the political.14 The political is what occludes the hiatus between state and civil society, representation and presentation. The aim of politics should not lie in the creation of a new bond; the inconsistency of the social does not open onto periodic and formally identical disputes over its content, but on the idea of an autonomy and heterogeneity of politics, which exists at a remove from any relational dialectic: [W]hat is dissipated is the thesis of an essence of the relations internal to the city, an essence representable in the exercise of a sovereignty, be it the dictatorship of the slaves, even if the relation is that of civil war within the class structure.15 Grasping this theme of detotalisation in Badiou’s struggles with Marxism and its social ontology is crucial to an understanding of the development of his later work. Behind the ontology of the multiple of Being and Event and the attempt philosophically to establish the basis for a politics of radical equality divorced from any notion of the Whole lies Badiou’s experience of and response to the crisis of Marxist politics in the 1980s.16 So, while there might appear to be a convergence or homology between Badiou and post-Marxist positions around a certain anti-essentialism, what 12 Badiou 1985, p. 14. In this regard, Badiou’s emphasis in the 1980s on retaining a commitment to ‘Marxist politics’ should be related to his conviction that the critique of political economy is tributary to a politics of emancipation, or to what he elsewhere calls ‘communist invariants’ (see Toscano 2004a). On the secondary status of the critique of political economy to Marxist politics, see Badiou 1982, p. 296. 14 Ibid. 15 Badiou 1985, p. 13. 16 Besides the initial meditations on the One and the Multiple in Being and Event, perhaps the key text to evaluate Badiou’s break with the category of totality is ‘Hegel and the Whole’, Badiou 2004, pp. 221–32. For a discussion of the possibility of thinking capitalism within Badiou’s detotalised ontology, with specific reference to his concept of ‘world’ from the recent Logiques des mondes, see Toscano 2004b. 13 BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 532 8/14/2007 8:05:49 PM Marxism Expatriated • 533 follows from Badiou’s own suspicion towards the very idea of a totality of social relations results in a link between (social) inconsistency and (political) events that still seeks to maintains an emancipatory, rationalist reference to transmissible principles and a communist reference to generic equality.17 The ‘destruction’ of that political fiction that Badiou diagnoses within ‘metaphysical’ Marxism is not an opportunity to affirm the pluralism of political struggles, but rather a chance to argue simultaneously for their singularity (as irreducible to a dialectical totality) and their sameness (as struggles for nondomination or equality). Badiou insists, during this period, in writing of the ‘recomposition’ of Marxism, putting his work under the aegis of ‘Marxist politics’ because of what he views as the unsurpassable character of the Marxist hypothesis, the hypothesis of a politics of non-domination irreducible to the state. In Peut-on penser la politique? we can thus observe, in a quasi-deductive manner, the passage from an internal dislocation of Marxism to the ‘metapolitical’ thinking of the event that will determine Badiou’s further intellectual production: ‘the determination of the essence of politics, unable to find a guarantee either in structure (inconsistency of sets, unbinding), nor sense (History does not make a whole), has no other benchmark than the event’.18 Minimal Marxism, or, the insistence of equality Thus, Badiou does not offer an immanent critique of Marxism as a science of capitalism and revolution, but displaces what he regards as core Marxist principles to a dissimilar practical and theoretical framework, where politics and philosophy are ‘desutured’.19 In this transitional period of his work, the aim is to bolster the retention of a minimal Marxism that conjoins the political hypothesis of non-domination with the rational identification of the sites of subversion, without thereby committing political practice to an instrumental, revolutionary or programmatic framework. Such a stress on the subjective element in Marxist politics differs markedly from the post-Marxist preoccupation with subject-positions and the hegemonic reconfigurations of identity. The anti-essentialist discursive ontology of the (empty) social is alien to Badiou, 17 On Badiou’s rationalism, see Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano, ‘Aleatory Rationalism’, in Badiou 2004. 18 Badiou 1985, p. 67. 19 Badiou 1999, pp. 61–8. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 533 8/14/2007 8:05:49 PM 534 • Alberto Toscano whose concern, as demonstrated quite consistently even in more recent books like his Ethics, does not lie in the political interplay of identity and difference. Rather, Badiou’s thought works at the juncture between, on the one hand, the fact of identity-and-difference as a feature of the status quo, or what he calls the encyclopaedia of knowledges,20 and, on the other, the production of the Same.21 Despite the deceptive resonance, this is not to be confused with the two logics of Laclau and Mouffe, differential and equivalential. Why? Because in the latter these two logics remain transitive to one another and map out the transcendental horizon of political contention, whilst in Badiou the production of sameness in the political field – the production of equality rather than equivalence – is a real production of truth that does not involve the strategic rearrangement and occupation of discourse (what Badiou would call ‘the language of the situation’), but requires instead an organised subtraction or separation from its manner of structuring and stratifying our experience of the world. Instead of shifting from the terrain of classical revolutionary politics, that of (the seizure of) political power, to that of discourse, Badiou’s development is marked by the attempt to consolidate and purify the collective subject of politics. In a distinction that would surely strike the likes of Wood as spurious – to the degree that it circumvents class – for Badiou it is not the state but ‘proletarian capacity’ that lies at the heart of Marxist politics. Portraying the question of class struggle as a crucial node in the so-called crisis of Marxism, and reflecting on the possibility of a ‘party of a new type’, Paul Sandevince (a.k.a. Sylvain Lazarus) writes in Le Perroquet (the publication of Badiou’s group, the UCFML, between 1981 and 1990), that: ‘For Lenin, the essential is not struggle, but “antagonism against the entirety of the existent political and social order”.’ Lenin’s declaration is then read as a warning against the logic of the absorption of the party into the state, whilst the ‘other path’ involves assigning ‘the process of politics to the masses/State contradiction grasped in terms of consciousness [conscience]’.22 This is one of the sources of Badiou’s 20 Badiou 2006, pp. 327–43. Badiou 2001, pp. 25–7. 22 Sandevince 1984, p. 5. UCFML refers to the ‘Groupe pour la formation d’une Union des communistes de France marxiste-leniniste’. In 1985, the UCFML disbanded and was succeeded by L’Organisation politique, a non-party organisation, whose basic theses can be accessed at L’Organisation politique 2001. See Hallward 2003 and Bosteels 2005a for detailed accounts of Badiou’s militancy. 21 BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 534 8/14/2007 8:05:49 PM Marxism Expatriated • 535 own continuing insistence on politics viewed not as strategy for power, or a way of ordering the social, but as an organised practice of thought (a ‘truth procedure’ in the later work). The link between the hypothesis of non-domination, the egalitarian and organised capacity for thought, and a separation from the state thus appears as one of the key tenets of this self-described ‘Marxist politics’. This gives us an inkling as to why the appellations post-Maoism or postLeninism (the one favoured by the various authors in Le Perroquet)23 are more fitting than post-Marxism. Having already stipulated that Marxist politics is not the consequence of a critical analysis of capitalism, but is rather the means, within capitalist conditions, for the production of communism, the direction taken in the 1980s by Badiou and his comrades is primarily born out of the crisis of the Marxist political subject (the party), and not, as with ‘traditional’ post-Marxism, out of a critique of the metaphysical tenets and sociological shortcomings of Marxism as a science of capitalism. If Badiou’s Théorie du sujet had declared that the every subject is political and that subject equals party, what is at stake in this period (approximately 1982–8) which hovers between the option for a ‘party of a new type’ and that of ‘politics without a party’? Fredric Jameson has argued that Marxism qua science of capitalism gives rise to post-Marxism at moments of systemic crisis.24 Whatever the links between such crises and the forms taken by political organisation, for Badiou it is the party qua subject which is the focus of the crisis, not the ability of Marxism to cope with the vicissitudes of the mode of production. Indeed, Badiou is rather sanguine about the Marxist understanding of capitalism, and does not seem to think that Marx has really been surpassed in this domain. In any instance, he is immunised against the stance according to which the failure of social ontology or economic analysis would debilitate Marxist politics. He mocks this very possibility in a vicious piece caricaturing the ‘old Marxist’, the one who waits for the proper study of ‘social formations’ before acting, who thinks that ‘one of these days the “workers’ movement” will give us something to talk about’.25 To the contrary: 23 This is argued in particular in Sandevince 1984a. Jameson 1997. 25 Peyrol 1983, p. 5. In Peut-on penser la politique?, Badiou puts the point as follows ‘Communist politics must be wagered upon: you will never deduce it from Capital’ (Badiou 1985, p. 87). Of course, it could be argued that far from signalling a caesura, 24 BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 535 8/14/2007 8:05:49 PM 536 • Alberto Toscano Marx starts, absolutely, not from the architecture of the social . . . but from the interpretation-cut of a symptom of social hysteria, uprisings and workers’ parties. . . . For the symptom that hystericises the social to be thus grasped, without pinning it to the fiction of the political, proletarian political capacity – as a radical hypothesis of truth and a reduction to fiction of every foregoing notion of the political – must be excepted from any approach via the communitarian and the social.26 Marxism beyond self-reference Badiou is renowned today as a philosopher of the event, conceptualised as a drastic break with the status quo and catalyst for new truths and new subjects. But could we speak of events of closure, failure, saturation, and not just novelty and truth? Badiou grounds his treatment of the ‘destruction and recomposition’ of Marxism in what he calls ‘the end of referents’, a position presaged by an article by the same title in Le Perroquet, penned by Sandevince.27 To the extent that ‘Marxism alone presented itself as a revolutionary political doctrine which, if not historically confirmed . . . was at least historically active’ it cannot evade a reckoning with its concrete incarnations.28 These are synthesised by Badiou in terms of three primary referents: (1) the statist referent: the actual existence of Marxist states, as emblems of the possible victory of a Marxist politics, and of ‘the domination of non-domination’;29 (2) wars of this ‘long wager’ (p. 90) is a feature of Marx’s own thinking, which never advocated such a chimerical ‘deduction’. See Kouvelakis 2004. The idea of Marxism as promoting a ‘deduction’ of politics from the critique of Capital runs the risk of converging with the ‘straw-Marxism’ denounced by Wood. See Wood 1998, p. 187. 26 Badiou 1985, p. 20. This rethinking of the notion of capacity, it should be noted, is ‘eventally’ bound to the Polish workers’ movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. See the section of Peut-on penser la politique? precisely entitled ‘Universal meaning of the Polish workers’ movement’, Badiou 1985, pp. 45–8, as well as Lebovici 1983. 27 There is a sense in this article, and others from Le Perroquet, of a political ‘return to Marx’, a (re)commencement of Marx that would sublate the Leninist experience. Sandevince 1984c, p. 10. But see especially UCFML 1983. The whole issue, under the heading ‘Un Perroquet-Marx’, marking the hundredth anniversary of Marx’s death, is devoted to these questions. 28 Badiou 1985, p. 26. 29 Badiou 1985, p. 27. Post-Leninism is thus defined by the break with ‘reason of state’ in all its forms, a break that draws its sustenance from the founding drive of Marxism itself: ‘It is not the State which is the principle of universality of Marxist politics, but rather the communist process in the deployment of class struggles and revolutions’. Sandevince 1984c, p. 10. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 536 8/14/2007 8:05:49 PM Marxism Expatriated • 537 national liberation as another emblem of actually victorious Marxist politics, and the ‘fusion of the national principle and the popular principle’30 in the invention of new ways of linking politics and war; (3) the workers’ movement, especially in its incarnation in ‘working-class parties’ with an explicit Marxist reference, ‘mixed figures of a distant revolutionary Idea and the proximity of an oppositional activity’.31 Yet again, it is not the critical or analytical force of Marxism qua science of capitalism that is paramount, but the collapse of its specificity as a revolutionary thinking and politics that was historically manifest and fundamentally ‘self-referential’ – meaning that its manifestations were, to various degrees, homogeneous with its theory. Though Badiou will never repudiate what he calls the ‘eternity of communism’,32 what is at stake here is the historicity of Marxism and the impossibility for Marxism to continue to draw any value from its actual history in the present. As Badiou puts it, ‘its credit has run out’.33 Not only has Marxism lost its historical foothold, it no longer serves as an internal referent for nascent forms of emancipatory politics. This is what is meant by the expatriation of Marxism, the key aspect of a crisis which Badiou deems must be ‘destructively’ traversed – we should recall that for the Badiou of Théorie du sujet, the becoming of a subject, and of a proletarian subject especially, is intimately linked to its own destruction, so that the call to be heeded here is for Marxism to truly subjectivise itself, after having gone through the subjective destitution of its referents. In a piece from 1983, Badiou thus declares: Today, the referents of Marxist politics are not Marxist. There is a fundamental delocalisation of Marxism. Previously, there was a kind of selfreference, because Marxism drew its general credit from States that called themselves Marxist, from wars of national liberation under the direction of Marxist parties, from workers’ movements framed by Marxist unionists. But this referential apparatus is gone. The great mass historical pulsations no longer refer to Marxism, after, at least, the end of the cultural revolution in 30 31 32 33 Badiou 1985, p. 28. Badiou 1985, p. 29. Badiou 2003, p. 131. Ibid. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 537 8/14/2007 8:05:49 PM 538 • Alberto Toscano China: see Poland, or Iran. Therefore, there is an expatriation of Marxism. Its historical territoriality is no longer transitive to it. The era of selfreference is closedited by Marxism no longer has a historical home. All the political referents endowed with a worker and popular life are, with regard to Marxism, atypical, delocalised, errant. Any orthodox Marxist today will object that the Polish movement is national and religious, that the Iranian movement is religious and fanatical, that there is nothing there that fundamentally matters for Marxism. And this orthodox Marxism will be nothing but an empty object in the process of the destruction of Marxism.34 This theme of expatriation thus permits Badiou to maintain, albeit in a problematic register, the reference to ‘worker and popular life’, as well as the communist hypothesis of non-domination, in the face of some of the very events that served as grist to the post-Marxist mill. By thinking in terms of the dislocation of Marxist politics and the tentative invention of new forms of political consciousness, Badiou can turn the political conjuncture of the 1980s – the death throes of historical Communism and the flashes of heterogeneous movements of revolt – into an opportunity for the recomposition of a politics of emancipation.35 Crucially, this is not done in relation to a return to logics of electoral alliance or the articulation of group demands beyond the working-class referent, but in view of the possibility of a new workers’ politics at a distance from the state, a non-classist, non-systemic experience of proletarian capacity. Instead of saluting the vacillation of Marxism as a chance for singing the praises of political plurality, Badiou proposes to seize it as the opportunity for a further purification and consolidation of emancipatory politics. The wager then is to look for the traits of a new politics of anti-statist emancipation in these mass symptoms, these ‘hysterias’ of the social. Though it transcends the limits of this chapter, it would 34 Badiou 1984, p. 1. Badiou also refers to this issue in terms of the separation of Marxism from the history of the ‘Marxisation’ of the workers’ movement, now that Marxism is no longer ‘a power of structuration of real history’, meaning that politics may be freed from ‘the Marxified [marxisée] form of the political philosopheme’. Hence the radical caesura vis-à-vis the previous sequence of Marxist politics, and the proposal of the figure of (re)commencement. See Badiou 1985, pp. 5–9. 35 Another crucial moment is of course to be registered in the death-knell of the trajectory begun in the Cultural Revolution. See Bosteels 2005a and Badiou’s Le Monde editorial on the trial of the Gang of Four, Badiou 2005a. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 538 8/14/2007 8:05:50 PM Marxism Expatriated • 539 be fruitful to follow the attempts – ultimately frustrated by the religious and populist sclerosis of the Polish and Iranian situations – made in Le Perroquet to track moments of organisational invention and worker capacity in nonMarxist political scenarios. Contrary to post-Marxism, which welcomes, in the rise of ‘new social movements’, a radical-democratic pluralism beyond universalist36 and communist hypotheses, Badiou’s post-Leninism is committed, from the 1980s onwards, to producing a metapolitical framework for thinking the persistence of communism as a minimal, universalising hypothesis even in political scenarios where the name ‘communism’ is anathema. Of liberals and renegades: between modern and contemporary politics The requirement that the destruction and recomposition of Marxist politics be internal – dictated neither by its supposed explanatory shortcomings nor by extraneous moral or historical evaluations – is motivated by an appraisal of the subjectivity that dominates the post-revolutionary restoration of the virtues of liberalism and parliamentary democracy.37 As Badiou provocatively suggested at a recent symposium on Logiques des mondes, all of his work can be placed under the sign of a confrontation with the betrayal of emancipatory politics.38 The peculiarity of the reactive (or renegade) subjects who, from the mid-1970s onwards, publicised the return to liberty on the basis of their own failures derived from their experience of the crisis of Marxism merely as the subjective discovery of an objective fact: the fact of the impossibility of emancipation (the nouveaux philosophes are here emblematic). This turn is acerbically crystallised by Badiou in the typical utterances: ‘we tried, it was a catastrophe’ and ‘I fail, therefore I am’. But for Badiou all that such failures and disasters prove is that resolute opposition to existent society is a ‘difficult’ problem. Just like a mathematician who fails in a proof does not thereby 36 According to Laclau and Mouffe, ‘there is no radical and plural democracy without renouncing the discourse of the universal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point of access to “the truth”, which can be reached only by a limited number of subjects.’ Laclau and Mouffe 1985, p. 191. 37 Badiou’s condemnation of the past two decades as a new post-revolutionary ‘Restoration’ is summed up in Badiou 2007. 38 On Badiou’s understanding of non-emancipatory or anti-universal subjectivities, see Toscano 2006b. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 539 8/14/2007 8:05:50 PM 540 • Alberto Toscano declare as inexistent the problem that proof stemmed from, so a political militant does not make failure into either a necessity or a virtue: So that what is presented to us as a conjoined progress of morality (liberating us from the totalitarian phantasm) and of realism (seeing the objective virtues of the existent state of things) is in fact a confession of incapacity. The essence of reneging is incompetence.39 Badiou here intervenes directly in the anti-Marxist philosophy of the liberal Restoration, anchored as it is in the defence of the ‘negative liberties’ at the heart of parliamentary democracy (or capitalist parliamentarianism, as he will later dub it). He repeats the idea of a termination or exhaustion of the MarxistLeninist sequence, of its specific configuration of political activity.40 But he contends that antagonism to the status quo is still at the heart of any politics of emancipation. Moreover, a return to the Enlightenment thematic of liberty is simply insufficient, since the question of equality, which determines the ‘current stage of the political question’, cannot be evadedited by The issue, in wake of what Badiou dubs the Marxist-Leninist ‘montage’, is how to practice, under the conditions of a non-despotic state, a politics whose axiom is equality: a contemporary politics beyond the modern juxtaposition between the state of right and law (parliamentary constitutional liberal democracy) and tyranny. We cannot turn away from ‘contemporary’ politics, initially marked by the entrance of the signifier ‘worker’ into the political field, for the sake of a merely ‘modern’ anti-despotic politics of liberal democracy. Following Badiou’s risky ‘de-socialisation’ of Marxism, however, equality must not be thought in terms of the equality of ‘material positions’ (‘economistically’), but in strictly political terms. The maxim of equality becomes the following: ‘what must the world be such that an inegalitarian statement is impossible within it?’ Using a common Lacanian distinction, Badiou here draws a crucial difference between the modern politics of liberty, which, ever since Saint-Just, functions in a symbolic register as a form of non-prohibition, and a contem- 39 Badiou 1987a, p. 2. See also the section in Peut-on penser la politique? entitled ‘The reactive meaning of contemporary anti-Marxism’, Badiou 1985, pp. 48–51. 40 ‘It is certain that [the Marxist] montage is exhausted. There are no longer sociopolitical subjects, the revolutionary theme is desubjectivated, History has no objective meaning. All of a sudden, the antagonism of two camps is no longer the right projection for global hostility to existing society’. Badiou 1987a, p. 3. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 540 8/14/2007 8:05:50 PM Marxism Expatriated • 541 porary politics of equality, whose aim is to engender the real impossibility of inegalitarian statements (this will remain the chief trait of Badiou’s later concept of the generic). What is surprising here, especially in terms of the earlier commitment to a communist dialectic of destruction, is the idea of a complementarity between the politics of liberty and the politics of equality, along with the stipulation of the general problem of equality in ‘times of peace’, as detached from the revolutionary problematic of power, war and the state. As Badiou writes: ‘under the general conditions of a non-despotic state, how can one think and practice a politics whose overarching philosophical category is equality?’41 A politics of equality, in this framework, works within the symbolic politics of prohibition for the sake of an equality that is real but which the symbolic order relegates to impossibility (Badiou’s position repeats here the Lacanian link between the Real and the impossible). Two problematic consequences ensue from these considerations. The first is that politics cannot be primarily or directly concerned with the betterment of the polity itself, for ‘politics must be thinkable as a conjoined excess over the state and civil society, even if these are good or excellent’.42 The second lies in the implicit suggestion that the politics of emancipation, having rescinded the project of power (in short, the dictatorship of the proletariat) is externally conditioned (‘in times of peace’) by a kind of liberal frame. We can register here the entire ambiguity of Badiou’s later conception of ‘politics at a distance from the state’43 – a position that maintains the antagonism against ‘existing society’ and, to an extent, the problem of how to change it, but combines this seemingly stark antagonism with the toleration of the symbolic framework provided by the very same society: ‘We therefore continue to demand modern freedom (symbolic according to non-prohibition) from within which we work towards contemporary equality (real, according to the impossible)’.44 Is this to say that Marxist politics can only persist from within a liberal envelope? Can we ‘reformulate from within politics the synthetic vision of the backwards and nefarious character of our society and its representations’ and maintain the ‘difficult’ problem of ‘changing existing society’, if we do not unequivocally pose and seek to resolve the problem of the tension between liberty 41 42 43 44 Ibid. Badiou 1985, p. 20. Badiou 2005b, pp. 150–1. Badiou 1987a, p. 3. See also Badiou 1992, p. 248. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 541 8/14/2007 8:05:50 PM 542 • Alberto Toscano (in the state) and equality (in politics), together with their mediation by issues of power, authority and, most importantly, exploitation? To put it otherwise, can a post-Leninist radical politics of equality really afford to be post-revolutionary? Towards a refutation of political idealism At times, Badiou’s 1980s ‘expatriation’ of Marxism, which already presupposes a disarticulation of Marxist politics and the Marxist critique of political economy, seems to dissolve the consistency of the Marxist project, casting doubt on the very possibility of holding onto the term ‘Marxism’. After all, will not Badiou, in Metapolitics, peremptorily declare that ‘Marxism doesn’t exist’,45 in the sense that its political instances – its ‘historical modes’ to use Lazarus’s terminology – are absolutely inconsistent, non-totalisable? And yet, throughout the 1980s, prior to the publication of Being and Event, Badiou retains the liminal validity of the notion of ‘Marxist politics’, at least in the sense that it is only by rigorously undergoing its destruction (and not its ironic deconstruction) that a new politics of emancipation will be ‘recomposed’. What is at stake in this retention, in extremis, of the name of Marxism? If anything, the now moribund anglophone vogue for post-Marxism was driven by a rejection of the articulation between social class and revolutionary politics, which reduced the idea of the proletariat to a mere contested and hegemonically posited identity among others. Yet again, despite surface similarities, the move beyond class operated by Badiou and his cohorts is based on a political judgment, that is on the idea of a lost efficacy of the ‘classist’ mode of politics (dominated by the category of contradiction, and the transitivity between society and politics).46 Badiou thus declares that there are more things in the crisis of Marxism than anti-Marxism can dream of – in the main because anti-Marxism merely registers an objective crisis without being able to think through its primary, subjective aspect.47 Moreover, while Badiou is forthright about the exhaustion of the working class as a socio-political class (making no 45 46 47 Badiou 2005, p. 58. See Lazarus 2005. Badiou 1985, p. 51. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 542 8/14/2007 8:05:50 PM Marxism Expatriated • 543 such claims for the end of social class per se), he is equally insistent that no emancipatory politics can bypass workers. This plea for a minimal Marxism can be observed in two steps. The first involves what Badiou, explicitly harking back to the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason, calls a ‘refutation of idealism’. If Marxist politics is detached from the social as the ‘place of bonds [le lieu des liens]’, what prevents the kind of idealist pluralism according to which any site and any subject, unbound from the requirements of transitivity with an ordered and ontologically grounded social structure, can be the locus or bearer of emancipation? Badiou is very aware that having abandoned a dialectics of social latency and political subjectivation he cannot depend on the ‘substantial presupposition’ of a political privilege of workers. Yet he knows that a maximal interpretation of his political axiomatic could lead to viewing the emergence of a political subject as possible at any point in the social field, as in the pluralist ‘idealism’ of most post-Marxist theories. To counter this prospect, Badiou proposes the minimal inscription of the egalitarian wager-intervention on an event in what he calls ‘pre-political situations’.48 Whilst this minimal, anticipatory interregnum between politics and the social does not allow a pre-emptive construction of political subjectivity (for instance, the party of the working class), it permits, by analogy with Kant, a merely negative reductio ad absurdum of the maximal claim of political contingency (namely, that any subjects can arise anywhere). Forbidding himself any substantive resort to social ontology, Badiou nevertheless wishes to argue that to evade ‘worker singularities’ in the formation of a political subject would be to suppose that a politics of emancipation could deploy itself without including in its trajectory any of the places or points inhabited by the dominatedited by Whence the following ‘theorem’: Political intervention under current conditions . . . cannot strategically avoid being faithful to events, whose site is worker or popular. Let us suppose that it can . . . it would follow that this politics could deploy itself without ever including in its immediate field places where the mass (whatever its number) of the dominated . . . materially exists, i.e. in factories, in the estates 48 ‘I call pre-political situation a complex of facts and statements in which the collective involvement of worker and popular singularities is felt, and in which the failure of the régime of the One is discernable’. Badiou 1985, p. 76. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 543 8/14/2007 8:05:50 PM 544 • Alberto Toscano in the banlieues, in immigrant housing, in the offices of repetitive IT work. Especially if we consider factories, the exception would be radical, since we can easily establish that factories are separated from civil society and from the moderating laws that sustain its social relations. According to this supposition, the politics of non-domination would only exist, for the dominated themselves, in the form of representation, since no event giving rise to an intervention would include them in terms of its site.49 The point is not simply that an emancipatory politics must include the lowest rungs, the excluded, the oppressed, but that they and their ‘site’ must be directly involved – in other words ‘presented’ – by the emergent political subject. Otherwise, we remain at the level of state representation. So, this refutation of idealism does not simply attack (or literally reduce to absurdity) the ‘new social movements’ ideology according to which emancipation may take place anywhere, anytime, by anyone. It also undermines any notion that the dominated may be represented in a political programme without partaking of political action themselves. It is moving from this idea of a pre-political ‘site’, and warding off both an idealist pluralism and any kind of ‘speculative leftism’,50 that Badiou will then seek to provide a metaontological solution to these problems of Marxist politics in Being and Event, showing the extent to which his major work remains anchored in the concepts and orientations hatched in the period of his turn away from Marxism-Leninism. From the hidden abode of production to the factory as event-site Starting from the refutation of anti-worker political idealism, Badiou initially develops his theory of the event-site – a crucial component of his mature philosophy – in terms of the factory and of the worker as the subjective figure of politics. This is the second step, as it were, in the argument for a Marxist politics that would be capable of surviving its own metaphysical destitution. In ‘The Factory as Event-Site’, a text published in Le Perroquet in 1987 and originally intended for inclusion in Being and Event, we encounter both a potent distillate of Badiou’s overall doctrine and his last explicit attempt to defend 49 50 Badiou 1985, pp. 81–2. See Bosteels 2005b. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 544 8/14/2007 8:05:50 PM Marxism Expatriated • 545 a notion of Marxist politics.51 My arguments hitherto have sought to demonstrate the internal theoretical and political necessity leading to this work on the event-site and, in so doing, to show how Badiou’s intimate confrontation with Marxism is at the very foundation (albeit a vanishing one, since he eventually chose to omit this ‘example’ from his major work) of the project crystallised in Being and Event, and more recently prolonged in Logiques des mondes. Far more than any of the other texts in Le Perroquet, this excised fragment of Being and Event pleads for a return to Marx (and Engels), leaving aside the matter of post-Leninism. Badiou puts his metaontological and metapolitical investigation under the aegis of two conceptual inheritances of the Marxian thinking of worker politics, which the attempt to ‘recompose’ a Marxist politics seeks to weave together. These are the void, which in the Marxist apparatus is connected to the specificity of the proletarian subject (having nothing to sell but his labour-power, the proletarian is the bearer of a generic capacity), and the site, which Badiou links to Engels’s inquiries into the localised conditions according to which exploitation is organised and counteredited by In a pithy declaration, Badiou defines his philosophical undertaking precisely in terms of a different articulation, a different dialectic, of these two terms, one that moves beyond the ‘fictions’ of orthodox Marxism: at the very heart of the objectivist version of the necessity of a worker reference, we encounter two terms, the void and the site, which as we will see only acquire their full meaning once we decentre them toward the subjective the vision of politics.52 By asserting that a political event can only take place if it takes into account the factory as event-site, Badiou aims to provide a kind of minimal objectivity (that is, another refutation of idealism) without making the intervention of politics and of political subjectivation transitive to a socio-economic dynamic. As he puts it: The paradoxical statement I am defending is finally that the factory . . . belongs . . . to the socio-historical presentation (it is counted-as-one within it), but not the workers, to the extent that they belong to the factory. So that the 51 52 Badiou 1987b. Ibid. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 545 8/14/2007 8:05:51 PM 546 • Alberto Toscano factory – as a workers’ place – is not included in society, and the workers (of a factory) do not form a pertinent ‘part’, available for State counting.53 This is the sense in which the factory is not the hidden abode of a production that could be reappropriated and disalienated, but a pre-political site ‘at the edge of the void’ (at the edge of the unpresented fact of domination), into which politics can intervene. The correlate of this notion is that the (proletarian) void itself is detached from an expressive logic of (dis)alienation and reconnected to the notion of a production of the Same, a production of communism no longer immanently bound to a communism of production.54 It is on the basis of the speculative trajectory laid out in ‘The Factory as EventSite’ that Badiou can then reassert his (contorted, heterodox, errant) fidelity to Marxism: Reduced to its bare bones, Marxism is jointly the hypothesis of a politics of non-domination – a politics subtracted from the statist count of the count – and the designation of the most significant event sites of modernity, those whose singularity is maximal, which are worker sites. From this twofold gesture there follows that the intervening and organised experimentation of the hypothesis must ceaselessly prepare itself for the consideration of these sites, and that the worker reference is a feature of politics, without which one has already given up subtracting oneself from the State count. That is the reason why it remains legitimate to call oneself a Marxist, if one maintains that politics is possible.55 To the extent that Badiou’s subsequent work remains more or less wholly consistent with the research programme exposed in this 1987 article, we could consequently hazard to read it as an attempt to think Marxism ‘reduced to its bare bones’. By way of conclusion, I would like to touch on two problems that are especially acute in this phase of Badiou’s thought and which might be seen to resonate with some of his more recent work. The first concerns the manner in which Badiou remains faithful to a certain Marxian intuition about prole- 53 Ibid. On the question of the transitivity between society and the political, and the distinction between the communism of production and the production of sameness (or production of communism), see Toscano 2004. 55 Badiou 1987b. 54 BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 546 8/14/2007 8:05:51 PM Marxism Expatriated • 547 tarian subjectivity and its political vicissitudes. Badiou, after all, defines the continuity-in-separation between the legacy of Marx and his own recomposition of Marxism as follows: ‘we (re)formulate the hypothesis of a proletarian political capacity’.56 However, the refutation of idealism and maintenance of the ‘worker reference’ in other texts seems to demand the evacuation of any pre-political subjective privilege accorded to workers per se (politics must touch on their sites, but they are not latent political subjects qua workers). Can the void of the situation be equated with a political capacity? And if this capacity is only the retroactive effect of a post-evental intervention (the politicisation of the factory axiomatically prescribes that ‘workers think’) is the term ‘capacity’ really viable, considering its inescapable links to notions of disposition and potential and to the theory of (dis)alienation? I would suggest that Badiou’s philosophical conceptualisation of the concept of the generic in Being and Event may be read as an attempt to transcend the tensions in his earlier ‘Marxist politics’ by maintaining the link between the void, equality and the subject but dispensing any latency whatsoever.57 The second problem concerns the impetus behind emancipatory politics. Badiou obviously wishes to purify and politicise the concept of equality, sever its dependence on merely material criteria. But, in his allergy to the socialising fictions of orthodox Marxism, he appears to step back from contemporary criteria of politics to merely modern ones by framing his entire vision of Marxist politics in terms of the politico-philosophical concepts of exclusion, domination and representation. In a manner that is perhaps most obvious in the section on the ‘ontology of the site’ in ‘The Factory as EventSite’, Badiou seems to deny the possibility that the concept of exploitation may be an uncircumventable touchstone of any contemporary politics. As I have suggested elsewhere, the difference between a politics at a distance from the state and a politics against capital might lie in the fact that the latter cannot be encompassed by the question of representation, to the extent that capitalist power, while reliant on mechanisms of representation, also works ‘directly’ on singularities themselves, in ways that cannot be easily mapped in terms of 56 Badiou 1984, p. 8. At the same time, I think that Badiou’s farewell to political anthropology may be somewhat premature. For an initial statement of this problem, see Power and Toscano 2003. See also Power 2005. 57 BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 547 8/14/2007 8:05:51 PM 548 • Alberto Toscano exclusion, invisibility or domination.58 This is precisely what is at stake in the concept of value in the critique of political economy, a concept that I would suggest cannot be easily harnessed by the logic of re/presentation and whose links to subjectivity and antagonism cannot be ignoredited by The resulting (and rather formidable) challenge would be to combine the direct politicisation of exploitation that characterises Marx’s own work,59 with some of the meta-ontological and metapolitical guidelines provided by texts such as ‘The Factory as Event-Site’. A traversal of the logic of exploitation and its effects on our thinking of political subjectivity would also allow us to ward off the possibility of an ‘aristocratic’ solution, distantly reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s republican and councilist advocacy of the autonomy of politics against the disastrous impingements of the ‘social question’.60 This would perforce oblige us to confront head-on one of the most arresting questions raised by Badiou’s ‘expatriation’ of Marxism: is contemporary politics (the politics of positive equality) compatible with the continuation of modern, statist politics (the politics of negative freedom)? Or must it risk being ‘anti-modern’, and work on equality not just at a distance from, but against the state? This is not to suggest that Marx, like a political Odysseus, may soon be repatriated, and that we, faithful Penelopes warding off our post-Marxist suitors, can finally recognise him under unfamiliar garb. More modestly, let us suggest that Badiou’s connection between the expatriation of Marxism and the (re)commencement of a Marxist politics under the aegis of the void and the site is a salutary alternative to the quarrels between antiquarian ‘old Marxists’ and treacherous new liberals, as well as a unique philosophical platform from which to (re)think Marx’s politics. 58 See Toscano 2004b. This article also seeks to delve into the tensions and contradictions in Badiou’s conceptualisation of capitalism and his apparent indifference to the critique of political economy. 59 See Kouvelakis 2004, as well as Massimiliano Tomba’s ‘Differentials of SurplusValue’, Historical Materialism (forthcoming). 60 Arendt 1963, especially Chapter 6: ‘The Revolutionary Tradition and Its Lost Treasure’. BIDET2_F29_528-548.indd 548 8/14/2007 8:05:51 PM