HEWLETT (2007) Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere. Re-thinking Emancipation

BADIOU, BALIBAR, RANCIERE Rethinking Emancipation

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy Series Editor: james Fieser, University of Tennessee at Martin, USA

Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy is a major monograph series from Continuum. The series features first-class scholarly research monographs across the field of Continental philosophy. Each work makes a major contribution to the field of philosophical research.

Adorno's Concept rif Life, Alastair Morgan Badiou and Derrida, Antonio Calcagno Badiou, Balibar, Ranci7re, Nicholas Hewlett Deconstruction and Democracy, Alex Thomson Deleu::;e and Guattari's Philosophy rif History, jay Lampert Deleu::;e and the Meaning of Life, Claire Colebrook Deleu::;e and the Unconscious, Christian Kerslake Derrida and Disinterest, Sean Gaston Encountering Derrida, edited by Simon Morgan Wortham and

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BADIOU, BALIBAR, RANCIERE Rethinking Emancipation

Nick Hewlett

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Nick Hewlett 2007

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British library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: HB: 0-8264-9861-2 978-0-8264-9861-8

library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hewlett, Nick.

Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere : re-thinking emancipation I By Nick Hewlett. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978- 0-8264-9861-8 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8264-9861-2 (alk. paper) 1. Political science-Philosophy. 2. Democracy. 3. Equality. 4. Badiou, Alain. 5. Ranciere, Jacques.

6. Balibar, Etienne, 1942- 7. France-Intellectual life -20th century. I. Title.

JA71.H47 2oo7 320.092'244-dc22

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

2007007729

In memory offfinone Hewlett, 1 920-2006

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Contents

Acknowledgements IX Note on Translations X Abbreviations Xl

Contexts and Parameters Three characteristics of modern French thought 1 0 The legacy of Louis Althusser 1 7 Concluding remarks 22

2 Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 24 The role of philosophy 28 Truth 33 The event, movement and change 37 Concluding remarks 45

3 The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics 47 Politics, the event and truth procedures 49 Against and beyond the postmodern 59 Marxism and historical materialism 62 Democracy 69 Parliamentary politics 72 Badiou's political activism 75 Concluding remarks 8 1

4 Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy 84 Listening to the unheard 86 Liberal democracy and language 95 Defining the political 1 00 Democracy and post-democracy 1 08 Concluding remarks III

Vlll Contents

5 Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equaliberty and the 1 16 Dilemmas of Modernity

The political 1 19 Ambivalence, universality, ideology 1 27 Political violence 1 29 Lenin and Gandhi 1 36 Concluding remarks 1 39

6 With and Beyond Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere 142

References and Bibliography 1 55

Index 1 73

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gary Browning, Christopher Flood and two anonymous readers for commenting on drafts of individual chapters of this book. Thanks also to participants at conferences and seminars at the Universities of Fukuoka, Budapest and Leeds, at King's College, London, and at University College, London, who commented on some of the ideas in this book. In particular, I would like to thank Gregory Elliott for a detailed, sensitive and highly insightful reading of the manuscript as a whole. Sarah Douglas at Continuum showed immediate enthusiasm for the project when I first approached her, and was very helpful and encouraging thereafter. Nick Fawcett did an excellent job copy-editing the manuscript. The final shape of the book, including any errors and infelicities, is of course my responsibility alone.

My appreciation goes to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding a period ofleave in order to bring the project to fruition and to the British Academy for two travel grants. An earlier version of Chapter 2 was published in 2004 in Modern and Contemporary France 1 2 (3) and an earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in 2006 in Contemporary Political Theory 5 (4) .

I would like to thank Bridget Taylor, who has not only given consistently sound advice during the time I was writing this book, but has also shown huge patience as I went through authorial highs and lows. My children Emily and Gus have been moving towards adulthood over the past few years and remain constant sources of happiness. Lasting happiness and enduring love are qualities I associate strongly with my mother,

Note on Translations

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

Abbreviations

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

Abbreviations for works by Alain Badiou

AM Abregi de metapolitique (Seuil, 1 998) . B Beckett: L'increvable desir (Hachette, 1 995) . BF 'Beyond Formalisation' (interview with Peter Hallward in

Angelaki, vol. 8, no. 2, 2003, pp. 1 1 1-36) . C 1 Circonstances, 1. Kosovo, 11 septembre, Chirac/ Le Pen

:Leo Scheer, 2003) . C Conditions (Seui1, 1 992 ) . DO D'un Disastre obscur. Sur la fin de la virite d'itat (1' Aube, 1 998) . D Gilles Deleuze: ' La clameur de l'etre' (Hachette, 1 997 ) . E L' Ethique: Essai sur la conscience du mal (Hatier, 1 993) . EB 'Entretien de Bruxelles' (in us Temps Modernes, no. 526,

mai 1 990, pp. 1 -26). EE L' Etre et l'ivenement (Seui1, 1 988) . IT Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy

(Continuum, 2003) . LM Logiques des mondes. L'etre et l'ivenement, 2 (Seuil, 2006) . MP M anifeste pour la philosophie (Seui1, 1 989) . PH 'Politics and Philosophy' (interview with Peter Hallward in

Angelaki, vol. 3, no. 3, 1 998, pp. 1 1 3- 33) . PM Petit manuel d'inesthitique (Seui1, 1 998) . PP Peut-on penser La poLitique? (Seuil, 1 985) . S Le Siecle (Seui1, 2005) . SP Saint-Paul. Lafondation de l'universalisme (Paris, PUF, 1 997 ) . TC Thiorie de la Contradiction (Maspero, 1 975) . TS Thiorie du sujet (Seui1, 1 982) .

Xll Abbreviations

Abbreviations for works by Jacques Ranciere

AB Aux bords du politique (Osiris, 1 992) . AL 'Althusser' . In Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder

( eds) A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Blackwell, 1998, pp. 530-36) .

CD La Chair des mots. Politiques de l'ecriture (Galilee, 1 998) . CT Chronique des temps consensuels (La Fabrique, 2005) . DW 'Dissenting Words. A Conversation withJacques Ranciere.'

(diacritics, summer 2000) . LA La Lefon d'Althusser (Gallimard, 1 974) . LH La Haine de la democratie (Seuil, 2005) . LP 'Jacques Ranciere: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics:

Approaches to Democratic Disagreement. ' Interview withJacques Ranciere by Solange Guenoun and James H. Kavanagh (SubStance, no. 92, 2000, pp. 3-24) .

M La Mesentente (Galilee, 1 995) . MI Le M aftre ignorant. Cinq Lefons sur I' emancipation intellectuelle

(Fayard, 1 987) . NH Les Noms de I'Histoire. Essai de poetique du sa voir (Seuil, 1 992). PP Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Fayard, 1983) . SP Les scenes du peuple. Les Revoltes logiques, 1975-1985

(Horlieu, 2003) . TT 'Ten Theses on Politics', Theory and Event 5:3 (2001 .

Abbreviations for works by Etienne Balibar

DC Droit de citi (PUF, 2002) . HW 'Gewalt', in Das Historisch-Kritisches Worterbuch des Marxismus,

Das Argument Verlag, Berlin. Available online in French at http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk. netl article. php3?icLarticle=36 (accessed January 2006) .

IC 'The Infinite Contradiction', in Yale French Studies 88, 1 995, pp. 142-64.

LC La Crainte des masses: politique et philosophie avant et apres Marx (Galilee, 1 997) .

LG 'Lenine et Gandhi: une rencontre manquee?' Communication au Colloque MARX INTERNATIONAL IV, Guerre

Abbreviations Xlll

imperiale, guerre sociale , Universite de Paris X Nanterre, Seance pleniere, 2 Octobre-1 novembre 2004; http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article.php3?icLarticle=36.

MCI Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1 994) . PM The Philosophy of Marx (Verso, 1 995) . RNC Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1 99 1 , with

Immanuel Wallerstein) . SP Spinoza and Politics (Verso, 1 998) . SS 'Sub species universitatis' . In Topoi no. 1-2, September 2006,

pp. 3-16. Viewable at: http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.netarticle. php3?icLarticle=8 1 .

WP We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship :Princeton University Press, 2004) .

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Chapter 1

Contexts and Parameters

Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere each work within the intellectual and political tradition which embraces the notion of human emancipation. Associated with political struggle, resistance, and freedom from oppression, the emancipatory paradigm is inspired by the philosophy ofSpinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx. It famously found intellectual expression in the Enlightenment and its landmark political moments include the American Revolution in the second half of the eighteenth century and the French Revolution of 1 789. In the twentieth century, emancipation was often associated with independence from colonial rule, the emancipation of women from male domination, and the emancipation of the working classes from capitalist exploitation. By adopting the view that freedom is closely linked with freedom from oppression, advocates of the em ancipatory tradition set themselves apart from liberals, who tend to conceive offreedom as absence from interference.

Such an approach to ideas and politics became less influential in France from the mid- l 970s onwards, having been highly prevalent for two hundred years. But Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere have each vigorously resisted the trend towards the various types of liberal thought that have become so much more current in France, and each has made a significant contribution to the emancipatory tradition. Even superficial acquaintance with the work of these writers thus suggests that those who have rushed to write the obituaries of France's tendency to produce radical intellectuals may have been too categorical, too soon. Although I am by no means in full agreement with Badiou, Balibar or Ranciere, I have chosen to examine their work in part precisely because they each place the collective and rebellious action of ordinary people at the very heart of their philosophical systems, whilst at the same time engaging with French and

2 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere

other thought which has emerged since Sartre was the dominant force in European philosophy. They should not be seen as forming any kind of united philosophical school, for disagreements and differences between them are sometimes considerable, but their common and steadfast refusal to make concessions to a variety of more mainstream intellectual and political currents both sets them apart from numerous other thinkers and suggests treatment within the same book.

Each of these writers has adopted as a major aim to explore notions of equality, and the relationship between equality and emancipation. For Badiou, the very idea of politics is intimately related to equality and his philosophy includes an egalitarian presumption. His philosophical system is organized around the notion of the event, which is virtually synonymous with a broad concept of revolution, and as far as politics is concerned the event is often an actual political and social revolution in a traditional sense. For Balibar, his term 'equaliberty' is at the heart of his understanding of politics, meaning that there can be no freedom without equality, and vice versa. The notions of emancipation and transformation are central to his definition of what is political. For Ranciere, a discussion of equality is so central to his thought that in a characteristically provocative way he argues that equality is a starting point for any definition of politics and not just a distant goal. Politics is intimately related to uprising and insurgency on the part of excluded groups and against the unjust status quo; a disruption of the normal order of things via a bold intervention by those who have no voice.

In the broadest of terms, the work of these three thinkers is influenced by Marxism, the ground from whence they all sprang in the early years of their intellectual and political development. However complex their intellectual discourses might be, and however unexpected some of their points of reference, they each still return frequently to a common idea that an intellectual position of any real significance must relate to an intervention in the material world in order to change that world in an egalitarian direction. Despite some highly novel, unorthodox and eclectic philosophical points of reference, each seeks to interpret the world from a position that starts with a belief in the need to pursue the logic of defending the interests of ordinary people. Although none are now likely to describe

Contexts and Parameters 3

themselves as Marxist, none are studiously post-Marxist either, in the sense that they might want to announce their passage from a stage where they were strongly influenced by Marx to one where they definitely are not.

The overarching question which I pose in order to evaluate and engage with the work of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere perhaps reflects my training as a historian and political analyst, rather than as a philosopher. It is: how can the powers of reflection be put to use for transforming and egalitarian ends at the beginning of the twentyfirst century? The question of how to make thought relevant and useful to the organization of human societies is of course one which permeates all forms of political thought. John Locke, who divides knowledge and science into three categories,psike, praktike and semiotike, defines praktike as 'the skill of rightly applying our own powers and actions, for the attainment of things good and useful' (Locke 1989 [ 1 690] : 46 1 ) But for each of these writers the more precise notion of praxis is appropriate. Praxis extends further the idea of praktike and, in addition to applying the powers of the intellect to the material world, also includes as a major consideration the influence of the material world on thought. The result is a dialectical relationship between theory and practice. This approach is arguably central to each of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's own endeavours and I am thus to an extent assessing them by their own criteria, judging the successes and failures of their projects in terms which they themselves broadly work to: how useful is their work in terms of both understanding the contemporary world and changing it for the better, and how has the material world influenced their thought?

Certainly, many pages of this book are devoted to evaluating the internal logic of their thought, to comparing Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere with each other and with other philosophers, or with thinkers in different domains. If one or other is similar to or remote from a particular intellectual tradition or thinker, or represents a radical break from a tradition or thinker, this is relevant and important. By the same token, I seek to trace the intellectual origins and development of these three writers. But if! examine their thought qua thought in this way, I also do so as a means, ultimately, to assessing their relevance to the material, and broadly speaking political, world with


a view to examining the possibility of applying their philosophy to the world around us.

The importance of Bad iou, Balibar and Ranciere's work is gradually being recognized more widely. In addition to their considerable originality and intellectual breadth, the sheer volume of output on the part of these thinkers helps explain why each is being taken increasingly seriously. Since the publication in 1 988 of Bad iou's major work, L' Etre et l'evenement, he has written more than twenty further books, together with numerous articles and interviews, ranging from abstract discussions to pamphlets and newspaper articles on contemporary politics, via comments on historical events. His most significant philosophical work since his first magnum opus is Logique des mondes (2006) , which is intended as a sequel to and refinement of some of the major propositions contained in L' Etre et l' evenement and is indeed subtitled L' Etre et l'ivenement, 2. Balibar has also published a great deal, ranging from a close reading of and re-interpretation of Spinoza, in Spinoza and Politics ( 1 998 [ 1 985] ) to extended commentary on European citizenship and racism, for example in We, the People rif Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004 [200 1 ] ) , via essays containing innovative definitions of politics itself and of political violence, in, inter alia, Masses, Classes, Ideas ( 1994) and Politics and the Other Scene (2002) . Ranciere has likewise been prolific and has published over thirty books. He began his career with explorations of political thought and political economy, then spent many years working in labour and social history, before returning to political thought as well as writing widely on aesthetics. His most important work of political thought to date is La Misentente ( 1 995) but almost as important are his brief but extremely rich Ten Theses on Politics (200 1) .

In particular, the international renown of these writers is increasing. Each has been widely translated, especially (but not only) into English, as the References and Bibliography section of this book illustrates, and the rate of translation into English accelerated greatly in the first few years of the new century; all this of course has a dynamic of its own as non-French-speaking readers become interested in and in some cases politically committed to the works, following the logic of their enquiry. Indeed, it is probably true that, as with some of the major proponents of poststructuralism, the reception for the ideas of


these thinkers has been and will continue to be greater in Britain and the USA than in France itself. Taking the case of Alain Badiou, although he teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and attracts large audiences to his seminars and lectures, there has been, to date, only one major conference on his work in France, in 1999, in whose proceedings many contributors are from outside France (Ramond 2002) . There have by contrast been a number of conferences on Badiou's work in Britain and the USA. Moreover, there are two general works on Badiou's philosophy in English (Barker 2002 and Hallward 2003) and only one in French (Tarby 2005a) , and two collections of essays on Badiou in English (Hallward 2004 and Riera 2005) where they are absent in French. The same applies to special issues of journals.

A brief look at the careers of these writers also helps explain why I have decided to group them together for treatment in this book. Alain Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1 937, was a student at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and began to work within a broadly Althusserian framework. He taught philosophy at the U niversity of Paris VIII from 1 969 to 1 999 and then began teaching at the Ecole Normale. Greatly influenced by the May 1 968 uprising, he became a leading member of the Union des communistes de France marxistes-leninistes (UCFML) . He has been politically active ever since, in particular as one of the most prominent activists in Organisation politique, a 'post-party' grouping launched in 1 985 which organizes around a small number of key issues including housing, illegal immigrants lsans papiers) and industrial change.

Etienne Balibar was born in Avalon, France, in 1942 and also studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He worked at the University of Algiers, Algeria in the mid- 1 960s and then taught at the Lycee de Savigny-sur-Orge, in France, then at the University of Paris I (Sorbonne) from 1 969 to 1 994. He held the Chair in Political and Moral Philosophy from 1 994 to 2002 at the University of Paris X (N anterre) and in 2000 took a Chair as Distinguished Professor in Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He was a contributor, with Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and Jacques Ranciere, to the original edition of Reading Capital ( 1 965), writing chapters on the concepts underlying historical materialism.


Balibar was a member of the French Communist Party for twenty years and was expelled in 1981 after publicly criticizing the party's attitude towards immigration. Since 1 98 1 he has frequently spoken out on political issues of the day and has likewise written articles and books on social and political issues including race, nationalism, social exclusion and citizenship.

Jacques Ranciere was born in Algiers in 1 940 and studied at the Ecole Norma1e Superieure in Paris. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-St Denis) from 1 969 to 2000, holding the Chair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1 990 and was a Director of Programmes at the College Internationale de Philosophie from 1 986 to 1 992. He was also a contributor to Reading Capital, with a chapter on the critique of political economy and the differences between Marx's critique of 1 844 and that of 1 867, but after May 1 968 he reacted strongly against the Althusserian project. He was a founder and editor of the labour and social history journal, Revoltes logiques, from 1 975 to 1 986, whose approach was developed as a reaction against Al thusser' s theory. Ranciere's work spans philosophy, political theory, historiography, literary theory, film theory and aesthetics. He has remained politically active, particularly around issues concerning immigration and social exclusion, but has moved away from his earlier allegiance to Maoism as well as the Althusserian perspective.

Let us note in passing that even at the most general level the three writers share a number of characteristics as far as both their professional careers and their politico-intellectual development are concerned. They are all trained in philosophy, all are graduates of the Ecole Normale in Paris, and all made careers teaching philosophy in mainly Parisian higher education. They are all former students of Althusser and - especially in the case ofBadiou and Ranciere - they were profoundly affected by the events of May 1 968. They were all influenced by Maoism and have remained engaged in left politics to this day, swimming against the current of so many other former leftwing activists of their generation, who took one or other of the possible routes away from activism, as described for example in Hamon and Rotman's Gineration ( 1 987 [ 1 988] ) . Another characteristic they share is to have made important contributions beyond the discipline in which they were all trained, namely philosophy: Badiou to literary


criticism and political history, Balibar to politics and human rights, and Ranciere to aesthetics and historiography, to mention but the most obvious divergences.

For all three, their most important work has appeared since 1985, during a period characterized - particularly in France - by intellectual conservatism and the decline of the influence of thought to the left of social democracy. Governmental politics in France have often combined a superficially consensual approach with largely marketdriven economic policy, and there has been widespread disillusionment with mainstream politicians. This climate, I shall argue, has had an influence on the way in which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's thought has evolved.

The rapid growth of interest in the work of these thinkers in recent years cannot be attributed solely to its intrinsic merit, considerable though this may be; their increased reception also reflects a more general renewal of interest in left-oriented thought over the past decade or two, a renewal which has taken place on an international scale. Mentioning but the most prominent advocates, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri dissect the current world order in Empire (2000:and Multitude (2004) , in a manner that suggests an updating and by no means an outright rejection of Marx's Capital, first published over a century previously. In these books, which have been discussed well beyond the confines of the left intelligentsia in America and Britain, Hardt and Negri argue that the new world order, Empire, is not dominated by one country such as the USA, or even one continent. This is a postmodern and global form of sovereignty which is de territorialized in terms of source, scope and logic. The most important characteristic of these two books is not the detail of their analysis nor supporting evidence - which it has to be said is sparse - but their attempt to suggest that such an approach to the analysis of modern capitalism can help the cause of what Hardt and Negri describe (after Spinoza) as the 'multitude' in inventing new ways of combating Empire.

Meanwhile, David Harvey combines an interest in the (broadly Marxist) approach of the French Regulation School to political economy with an exploration of the culture of the late twentieth century in The Condition of Postmodernity ( 1 989) and examines the changing relationship between politics, economics and social structure in both The


New Imperialism (2003) and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005) . Frederic Jameson draws on the economic theory of the Belgian Marxist Ernest Mandel in order to examine the nature and significance of culture in the late twentieth century in Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism ( 199 1 ) and in both The Cultural Turn ( 1 998) and A Singular Modernity (2002) . Finally Slavoj Zizek has become well known in particular for his analysis of culture and ideology, drawing on Marx and Lacan in a way which is, again, explicitly anti-capitalist. Each of these writers of widespread international repute espouses the notion that we are living in a postmodern age, or one which is different enough from modernity to merit a debate about redefinition, but equally if not more important is the fact that each of these writers draws heavily on a fairly traditional Marxist historical materialism.

The international reception that Noam Chomsky has enjoyed and continues to enjoy for his ferocious and sophisticated critique of US policy overseas is another example of a small but important change in the intellectual political climate over the past few years, no doubt nourished by the growth and increasingly visible movement against corporate globalization as the neoliberal agenda fails large sections of society in advanced capitalist countries and by the exasperation felt by many hundreds of thousands of people in Britain and the United States in particular, in response to the US and British invasion and occupation of Iraq in the early years of the twenty-first century. Moreover, the break-up of the Soviet Union might have removed the most elaborate experiment in developing a practical alternative to capitalism, offering the possible conclusion that communism can only fail. But its passing might also have removed one of the greatest obstacles to arguing for a socialist alternative, given the profoundly unjust nature of many aspects of life in the Eastern Bloc, a fact that was constantly highlighted by Cold War rhetoric. One might also suggest, as has Stathis KouvClakis (200 1 : 53) , that when capitalism is very successful it is likely that sooner or later there will be an anticapitalism that, at least in the theoretical domain, confronts capitalism head-on. More popular versions of what could broadly be described as works which seek to redress the balance for those who suffer most from the form which capitalism now takes have been


published by Susan George ( 1 999, 2004), Naomi Klein (200 1 ), George Monbiot (2000) ,John Pilger (2002) and Arundhati Roy (2004) .

Although the re-emergence of a more general interest in engaged left thought is probably slower in France than in Britain or the USA, in addition to the three thinkers explored in the chapters which follow, there are other French writers who continue to work broadly within an emancipatory framework and who have by no means abandoned the left radical framework which has in a more general sense been so weakened. Any list of such writers might include Jacques Bidet, Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, Pierre Macherey and Daniel Bensa'id, not forgetting the economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy. Each in their own way is involved in work which takes a highly critical stance on contemporary society and politics from a left perspective. Moreover, the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, despite coming to politically engaged intellectual work relatively late and despite remaining a figure whose work invokes deep controversy within the left as well as beyond it, argued for many years that any serious approach to the analysis of modern societies needs to highlight and examine the existence of a huge section of society that he described as the 'dispossessed' (Ies depossedes) (e.g. Bourdieu 1 998) . Even the late Jacques Derrida, often thought to have travelled far from committed intellectual work in his major writings, argues forcefully in Specters of Marx 1 994 [ 1 993] ) that the time is ripe for a reappraisal of Marx and his

torical materialism. If France is still lagging behind somewhat in terms of more gener

ally accepted left theoretical exploration, since the widespread strikes of winter 1 995 there has been increased activism within the nonmainstream left. For example, workplace activists formed the trade union Solidarite, Unite, Democratie (SUD), which strongly emphasizes more traditional labour movement democracy. The results of the presidential elections of 2002 likewise tend to reinforce the view that France has not entirely abandoned its legendary propensity for revolt, given that almost 10 per cent of votes cast went to Trotskyist (LCR) or quasi-Trotskyist (LO) candidates. The hundreds of thousands of 'often young) people on the streets protesting against the National Front leader Le Pen and his passage to the second round also suggested that taking to the streets in large numbers is not a thing of the

lO Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere

past. Rank and file response to President Sarkozy's measures is likely to confirm this. Most importantly, in spring 2006 France saw what was probably the largest and most sustained popular mobilization since 1 968. Like 1968, the movement began with widespread demonstrations and occupations by students and it then spread to the working population. Unlike May 1 968, the focus of the protests was crystal clear: the government's new law - which it had pushed through on a confidence vote using article 49 paragraph 3 of the constitution - and which sought to introduce more precarious working contracts for young people under 26 in order, the government argued, to create jobs. The labour legislation was disliked by a substantial majority of the French according to opinion polls, many of whom saw it as the unwelcome introduction of further neoliberal economic measures along Anglo-American lines.

I have attempted to indicate various characteristics of the general climate in which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere are now working, some conducive and some less conducive to the positive reception of their work. But in order to situate these writers in a preliminary fashion in the modern history of French political thought and to begin to construct the discursive parameters of the book in a more nuanced fashion I will now look at three aspects of France's modern intellectual history.

Three characteristics of modern French thought

To begin with, I wish to elaborate on the point I made in the opening lines ofthis chapter. With a strong tradition of revolutionary caesura in the realm of political practice, neither liberalism nor social democracy properly took root in France, and both broader political developments and intellectual life itself were dominated by bodies of thought which emphasized such notions as emancipation, salvation and total change. The heritage of 1 789 was expressed in and reinforced by the revolutions of 1830, 1 848, the Paris Commune of 187 1 , the strikes and factory occupations of April-May 1 936, the revolutionary impetus borne of resistance to Nazi Occupation 1 940-44, and the uprising of May 1 968, to mention but the most obvious instances of revolt and uprising. This meant that political thought

Contexts and Parameters 1 1

was predominantly revolutionary or republican on the left, and on the right nationalist and often with elements of anti-Semitism. As a consequence of this radicalism on both left and right there was only a weak tradition ofliberal political thought.

In the three decades following the Second World War, France was indeed the land par excellence of Marxist-influenced work in philosophy and other areas of intellectual activity, including history, anthropology, semiology, discourse analysis and literary theory. Taking the iconic example of Jean-Paul Sartre, notwithstanding his philosophical complexity he wrote in such a way that the conditions of the material world and the urgency of changing that world were constantly present, and Sartre himself was famously politically active. This is not the place for a fuller exploration of the intellectual engagement of the postwar years, which has been adequately described elsewhere. But suffice it to say that from 1 945 to the early 1 970s Sartre and later Althusser were but the best-known proponents of a much larger Marxist and quasi-Marxist constituent which took for granted the intimate relationship between theory and practice as expressed by historical materialism, and the Communist Party dominated in terms of left party politics (e.g. d' Appollonia 1 99 1 , Drake 2002, Spaas 2000).

During this postwar heyday of thought inspired by Marx, few would have predicted that by the early 1 980s Paris could be convincingly described by Perry Anderson ( 1983: 32), in his oft-quoted phrase, as the 'capital of European intellectual reaction'. By this time a reaction against left, committed thought was indeed well underway. With the zeal of the converted, the ex-Maoist New Philosophers Bernard-Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann and ChristianJambert had a brief heyday and argued that the left had no plausible explanation for the Gulag. Then in a more sustained and serious way the prolific but until then largely ignored liberal political philosopher Raymond Aron enjoyed a belated and before long posthumous promotion to the position offather of modern French political liberalism, with Alexis de Tocqueville and Benjamin Constant as rediscovered grandfathers. In the meantime, quite an array of writers made their careers on the strength of rewriting the modern history of either French thought or the lives and times of French intellectuals, in terms which sought to show how mistaken, irresponsible and ultimately futile were attempts

1 2 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere

by politically committed intellectuals of the left to unite communistleaning political activism on the one hand and intellectual activity on the other. The former Communist Franc;ois Furet published his antiMarxist Interpreting the French Revolution ( 1 98 1 [ 1979]) and many other books of revisionist historiography, including Dictionnaire des oeuvres politiques (ed. 1 989, 1 995) and The Passing of an Illusion: Theldea ofCommunism in the Twentieth Century ( 1 999 [ 1 995]). Furet and his collaborators succeeded in writing a new, revisionist agenda for the study of French - and by implication Russian and other revolutionary - history, arguing that several generations of eminent historians had themselves gone very astray and had profoundly misunderstood the nature of historical change. According to Furet's revised historiography, the revolution of 1 789 was not an uprising that had in the fullness of time changed the world, signalling the dawn of modernity. Neither was it a revolution that had swept away injustices and brought progress and the potential for further progress. On the contrary, the most important and revealing characteristic of the French Revolution was that, like so many other revolutions, it had quickly been followed by terror and other major injustices and cruelties (Furet 1 978, 1 988, 1 995a, 1 995b). One had to conclude, then, that all revolutions - 1 789, 1 848, 1 9 1 7 - were bound to bring more harm than good.

In the Anglo-American world to which the new French liberals looked with respect and for inspiration, Tony Judt and Sunil Khi1nani are among the best-known advocates of the view that Sartre etal. were seriously wrong; they authored accounts where left intellectuals inhabited a world described in Judt's book title as 'past imperfect' and where, by contrast, as he argued in a later book, Leon Blum, Raymond Aron and Albert Camus held - again quoting the title - the 'burden of responsibility' for keeping the liberal candle burning (Judt 1 992, 1 998; Khi1nani 1 993). Mark Lilla has also strived to promote French liberalism and to investigate what he describes as the 'reckless mind' of twentieth-century European intellectuals whom he accuses of supporting tyrannical regimes and totalitarian political ideas. These include Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and the Hegel scholar Alexandre Kojeve (Lilla 200 1 ).

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut sought to consign what they choose to describe as La Pensie 68 - primarily Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu and


Lacan - to the recycling bin of history, attempting to deal a blow against structuralism and poststructuralism and any other thought associated in their eyes with the activist upturn around May 1 968 (Ferry and Renaut 1 985) . All this apparently pioneering francoliberal exploration, archaeology and revisionism by intellectual and socio-political historians, historiographers and political theorists who were determined to cast the past and therefore the present in a new and very different light, seemed to some to be in perfect harmony with the Mitterrand era. After the U-turn of 1 982, when the Socialists in government discovered the virtues of free enterprise and centreoriented government, the Communist Party declined rapidly, the trade unions were less militant than they had been for many years, and Franvois Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Julliard were able to declare triumphantly in their popular account of sea changes in society, politics and public opinion ( 1 988: 1 1 ) : 'we have fallen into line'. I t is worth noting in passing that even this alleged 'end of French exceptionalism' was described in the form of grand gestures on the part of intellectuals keen to champion the - in this case - propragmatic and 'post-conflictual' cause.

Despite the recent signs of increased left combativity in France, and internationally, and despite some other scholars pursuing a more radical left agenda than many, the general intellectual and political backdrop against which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere produced their most important work was one characterized by increasing intellectual conservatism. This, I will argue in the chapters that follow, had an impact on some aspects of their thought.

The second characteristic of modern French thought I wish to discuss is the predominance of philosophy over other disciplines in Marxist or quasi-Marxist thought. In Perry Anderson's influential study of Western Marxism he points out that European Marxist intellectuals gradually abandoned any serious theoretical exploration of economic or political structures and concentrated almost to the exclusion of other areas on philosophy (Anderson 1 976: 49-74) . This was, incidentally, the reverse of Marx's own trajectory, who began his intellectual career in philosophy and spent the most productive years of his life exploring political economy. Moreover, the vast majority of these philosophers worked in universities for a large part of their career,


including Lukacs, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Korsch, Marcuse, Della Volpe, Adorno, Colletti and Althusser. The reasons for this predominance of professional philosophers in Western Marxism are, Anderson argues, threefold. Most importantly, the progress of the struggle for socialism suffered many setbacks from the 1 920s onwards, discouraging serious study of material questions and encouraging a preference for the abstract; the rise of fascism and the outbreak of the Second World War, the degeneration of the USSR and the onset of the Cold War might be included amongst such obstacles. Next, the publication for the first time in 193 1 of Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1 844 and their translation into French in 1 933 persuaded many scholars that in order to understand historical materialism one needed to understand the philosophical lineage of Marxism, and in particular the relationship between Marx and Hegel. This reinforced a tendency towards philosophical exploration and prompted multiple returns to intellectual history before Marx, not only to Hegel but also to Spinoza, Kant and Rousseau. Finally, the practice of the French and other Communist Parties, which for many years identified so closely with the Soviet Union, was often determined by the needs of the increasingly tragic parody of socialism in the USSR, so intellectuals in search of a truer Marxist heritage were further attracted to abstraction - ultimately to ideas measured solely against other ideas - instead of properly taking on board the rigours and controlling influence of politics in the material world. This increasing specialization in the discipline of philo sophy, alongside an ever-greater retreat to the confines of the academy, also helps explain the emergence of an ever more obscure language, much of it incomprehensible to the mass of ordinary people, as specialists communicated with other specialists, and as Marxist intellectuals tended to have less and less contact with ordinary working people.

I would agree with Anderson's general thesis, which helps explain the trajectory of some post-Marxist and non-Marxist European thought as well as that of Marxism itself. But I would nevertheless suggest that this retreat into the more abstract forms of intellectual endeavour and withdrawal from the testing grounds of the material world was not entirely damaging for the history of Western Marxism. If the perceived needs and at any rate the instructions emanating from the Eastern bloc were increasingly unlike those that fuelled the 1 9 1 7


Revolution, philosophical reflection and the retreat into the academy were to an extent to serve as a protective shield from the caricature of communism that the USSR and its satellites increasingly became. Thus to some extent the growing importance of philosophy helped protect intellectuals from a more pragmatic adaptation to either Stalinism or for that matter to outright support for capitalism.

The work of Bad iou, Balibar and Ranciere is in each case primarily philosophical, or at least strongly informed by philosophy. Badiou staunchly defends philosophy as an intellectual tool of primary importance, and is concerned with how philosophy is able to both throw light on and draw inspiration from politics, art, science and love. Balibar combines an interest in the philosophy of Marxism and its antecedents with interests in issues regarding rights and other aspects of politics. Ranciere's interests span aesthetics, film and history, as well as politics, and his starting point for political theory is philosophical reflection, often incorporating references to classical antiquity. Arguably, one of the strengths of this approach is precisely that, as philosophers, they are more remote from material concerns than, for example, many political theorists working in academic politics departments, or practitioners of politics such as trade unionists, elected representatives of political parties and civil servants. They are thus less likely to have been swayed by the profound disillusionments of many others of the 1 968 generation. If they are, as we might suggest, now appealing to a new generation of intellectuals and activists who have been radicalized by anti-racist movements, anticorporate globalization movements and ecology movements, their thought is as much influenced by other thought as by concrete events. But in this process they have resisted some of the excessive concessions to either Stalinism or liberalism.

On the other hand, the emphasis on the abstract which is found in Badiou, Ranciere and often in Balibar also has its drawbacks. My argument is that when tested on or subjected to the rigours of the material world, important aspects of the theories of each of these writers are flawed; translating theory into practical relevance - into intervention in the world as we live it - is made difficult at some point in each case precisely by insufficient reference to the material world. The primarily abstract vantage point of philosophy has not


been tempered and counterbalanced by sufficient attention to other domains, including the economic and the political.

The third general aspect of French thought since 1 945 I wish to mention is the rise and dominance of structuralism and poststructuralism. In the broadest of terms, and without even attempting to distinguish between structuralism and poststructuralism (whose distinction is anyway made far less in France than in the Englishspeaking world) , I want to raise the question of whether this intellectual tendency is in the tradition of the emancipatory philosophical tradition or not. I have already pointed out that amongst the authors I identifY as contributing to a renewal ofleft thought, Harvey,Jameson, Hardt, Negri and Zizek are each either influenced by aspects of poststructuralism or draw on theory which itself can be described as structuralist or poststructuralist. Some of those who are thought of as being at the heart of this, including Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, have positioned themselves in support of minority groups and the women's movement, so associated with progressive politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. However, as I have argued elsewhere at greater length (Hewlett 2003: 1 2 7-35 ) , the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism should be understood in part in the context of a certain de-politicization of intellectual life, or at least the decline of the left, in France since the early 1970s. I will illustrate this view only briefly. As far as descriptions of society are concerned, it is perhaps in Jean Baudrillard's work that this sort of approach becomes most extreme, where images are omnipresent and the distinction between the concrete and representation no longer exists. But even Foucault, well known for taking stands in favour of the anti-nuclear and gay movements in the 1 960s and 1 970s, portrays power as so diffuse that it becomes very hard to locate at all, and therefore it would seem difficult to resist (e.g. Foucault 1 980). Jean-Franois Lyotard's argument in The Postmodern Condition ( 1 984 [ 19 79]) is no doubt the clearest example of a break with the emancipatory tradition, where the 'grand narratives' of the past, associated strongly with the Enlightenment, are, according to Lyotard, decreasingly relevant; contemporary reality has become so diffuse, fragmented and heterogeneous that it is impossible to make generalizations about it, including ones relating to


transformation. Alex Callinicos, in Against Postmodernism ( 1 989) , has argued that far from being a system of thought which was part of the legacy of May 1 968, postmodernism is more accurately described as part of the failure of l968. In a more recent book, he argues that ' [0 ]ne sub-theme of postmodernism is that social critique - which depends on the possibility of transcendence, since it thematizes the limitations of existing social relations and therefore if only implicitly adverts to the necessity of surpassing these relations - is no longer possible' (Callinicos 2006: 4) . This is a debate which will and should continue and it will be clear that my own position is close to that of Callinicos and other left critics (e.g. Dews 1 987 and Starr 1 995) . I suspect that a substantial renewal of activism and the material circumstances which encourage the left would make much debate within poststructuralism seem poorly grounded, rather irrelevant and indeed the result of a relative detachment of intellectuals from political struggles rather than any sort of reflection of them. For the time being, suffice it to say that whereas the explicitly praxis-oriented thought of the immediate postwar period left no doubt as to the link between intellectual activity and political activism - if one espoused Sartre's thought one was virtually obliged to at least believe in the necessity for left political activism - much poststructuralist thought does not do this. Although poststructuralism is intrinsically radical in its method. its political consequences are not necessarily radical by any means. Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere each, in their own ways, substantially depart from what has become known as poststructuralism. However, as we shall see, all three are either influenced by this tradition or engage with it in one way or another. Badiou engages in a rather ambivalent fashion with Deleuze, Ranciere is influenced by deconstruction, and Balibar by Derrida. However, each is certainly more obviously aware of the contemporary political conjuncture than the major exponents of poststructuralism.

The legacy of Louis Althusser

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


relationship between their mature work and that of Althusser. Badiou says of Althusser that his attempt to 'think subjectivity without a subject is admirable' , if flawed in many ways (AM 67-76) . Ranciere in particular defined himself against Althusser from the late 1 960s, a reaction which had an important influence on the course of his own thought. Balibar's work, on the other hand, often has strong and more positive echoes of Althusser's. These relationships to Althusser will become clearer in the chapters which follow, and here I confine myself to brief remarks regarding Althusser himsel (Readers who are already familiar with Althusser's work may wish to skip this section.)

In the opening lines of For Marx ( 1 969 [ 1 965] : 2 1 ) Althusser argues that for Marxists philosophical enquiry was 'essential if we are to emerge from the theoretical impasse history has left us in' and Reading Capital ( 1 970 [ 1 965]) is indeed one of the most serious philosophical interpretations of Marx's mature work that have been written. It outlines a theory of political economy as a structure which is complex and over-determined and constructs an anti-Hegelian interpretation which challenges what the authors see as the mistaken, teleological approach to history which characterized much of postwar Marxism. At first glance Althusser's project might seem quite un-philosophical, for he is keen to elaborate what he regards as a truer, scientific Marxism (or more accurately Marxism-Leninism) , which proposed a new version of historical materialism as the science of the history of social formations. Seeking a return to a more explicitly class-based Marxism, he was writing against, in particular, the interpretations of Marx pursued by Lukacs, Gramsci and especially Sartre. But science, politics and philosophy are all inextricably linked:

Philosophy is a certain continuation of politics, in a certain domain vis-a-vis a certain reality. Philosophy represents politics in the domain of theory, or to be more precise: with the sciences - and vice versa, philosophy represents scientificity in politics, with the classes engaged in the class struggle. (Althusser 1 97 1 : 64-5)

Put more simply: 'Philosophy is, in the last instance, the class struggle in theory' (Althusser 1 973: 1 1 ) .


Althusser was insistent that there was a substantial and crucial difference between the young Marx and the mature Marx. He argues that in Marx's early writings, which were enjoying much positive attention in the postwar period in France, Marx had not broken philosophically with Hegel, and the thesis contained within the early writings that Man was alienated and would later achieve self realization was pure ideology rather than rational analysis. But in Marx's work starting from The German Ideology (with Engels, 1 9 70 [ 1 932] ) and the Theses on Feuerbach ( 1 968a [ 1 888] ) , there emerged a true science of historical materialism (both these works were written in 1 845 and both remained unpublished for some time) . In fact, this 'epistemological break' , as Althusser describes it, was a scientific revolution in the realm of history just as significant as the development of mathematics in Greek antiquity and Galileo's pioneering work in scientific physics.

Althusser's theoretical innovations are without a doubt more nuanced than the way in which they emerged from the heated debates of the 1 960s and 1 970s and his posthumous works have on the whole served to portray a more subtle philosophical and political analysis than those seen during his lifetime. However, at risk of simplification for the sake of concision, some of the other main aspects of his reading of Marx and further elaboration of historical materialism can be summarized as follows.

Again in For Marx, Althusser declares his intention to 'draw a line of demarcation between Marxist theory and the forms of philosophical 'and political) subjectivism which have compromised it or threatened it' (Althusser 1 969 [ 1 965] : 1 2 ) . By the time Marx wrote Capital, he could no longer be regarded as a thinker who emphasized the role of the subject in history and humanist interpretations of his later works were highly misleading. In fact, history was a 'process without a subject or goal' and he argued that ' [t]o be dialectical materialist, Marxist philosophy must break with the idealist category of the "Subject" as origin, Essence and Cause, responsible in its interiority for all the determinations of the external "Object", whose internal "Subject" it is called' (Althusser 1 973: 94) . The role of the individual in history, he argued, is one where s/he embodies the process but is not a subject of history itself. Althusser pursues this argument by suggesting that in relation to the capitalist mode of production, individuals are its


agents, whether capitalist or worker, and whether in support of or against capitalism. This certainly does not mean the individual is unable to think or act politically; far from it. But it does mean that different types of individuality are peculiar to different modes of production and this is not general individuality. The specific form these individuals take is greatly inflenced by ideology.

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


of his essay entitled ' Ideology is a "Representation" of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence' and the Althusserian legacy regarding theories of ideology becomes clearer still.

It is perhaps the clarity of Althusser's argument, combined with the rapid growth of what has come to be known as 'popular culture', that has meant this particular aspect of his thought has enjoyed such influence over the past few decades, especially in the field of Cultural Studies in British and North American universities. In this domain, Althusser's theory of ideology has been so influential in one form or another that it is often taken for granted without any acknowledgement of its origins.

Althusser's polemic against what he regarded as historicist and teleological versions of Marxism was influenced in part by Claude LeviStrauss' structuralist anthropology, and possibly to a greater extent by Spinoza. On the whole, and despite the exaggeration of his positions to which his critics were prone (especially Thompson 1 978) , it is probably fair to label Althusser's thought 'structural Marxism' . Just as importantly, however, it is necessary to emphasize that his positions should be seen in the context of his long-term membership of, but marginal political position within, the PCF. Althusser joined the Party in 1 948 and from 1 956, the year of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, international communism was in crisis; it became increasingly clear that the Soviet l! nion itself had not only compromised many of the principles and goals upon which it was founded, but had achieved the particular social and governmental order which existed in the country by means of the most terrible repression. In the European Communist Parties, domestic politics as well as international outlook had become ever more preoccupied with the particular needs of the Soviet Union rather than considerations regarding the progress of communism on a world scale, a development which would lead European Communist Parties to the systematic compromise with social-democratic government. Althusser's declared aim was to find once again a revolutionary form of Marxism in both theory and practice, which included sympathy with Maoism, and he argued for example that the Cultural Revolution was implicitly a left critique of Stalinism. In 1 9 78 Althusser


confirmed his dissidence within the PCF with the publication of his essay 'What Must Change in the Party', which denounced the weakness of democracy and the entrenched bureaucracy within the Party. (Elliott 2006) .

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

Concluding remarks

I have attempted in this introductory chapter to suggest some of the intellectual and political contexts and parameters which help understand the nature and development of the thought of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere. This is in keeping with both my and their view that in order to understand thought, and in order to judge its relevance (which is arguably part of the same process) , some discussion is necessary of the material and ideological-intellectual conditions of its production. I will return to many of the themes discussed in this introductory chapter as we proceed through the book, and will once again address some of the questions raised in this chapter in the book's conclusion.

The structure of this book is straightforward, but a few words of explanation might nevertheless be useful. Badiou's thought is the most elaborate and complex, so Chapter 2 introduces his thought to


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

Chapter 2

Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth

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

Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 25

subjects to an event which might become part of a transformative process, but it stretches far beyond politics as well.

Badiou's thought is highly original to the extent that it is not strongly influenced by one particular school of thought to the near exclusion of others; it breaks out of previously existing moulds, pursuing a line of enquiry which often resorts to first principles and does not conform strictly to any particular lineage. He insists that in order to have an understanding of philosophy we need to have some grasp of the history and current state of its own 'conditions', which are also science, art, emancipatory politics and love. He staunchly defends the autonomy of philosophy, arguing that many modern philosophers have wrongly abandoned metaphysics, and that in order to comprehend virtually anything we need to develop an understanding of the nature of truth. He defends philosophy from, for example: party political concerns, popular culture and other sorts of trivialization (or superficial manifestations) of contemporary reality (MP) . It should also be said at the outset that, by contrast with much Western philosophy of the late twentieth century, Badiou takes ontology, or the science of being, very seriously. For him, ontology is mathematical and in order to understand the special nature of the event and why it is literally extraordinary, we must have recourse to set theory, as elaborated by Georg Cantor. Only by taking this route can we understand why the event is so central to an understanding of the world and how it relates to subject, truth and being.

Thus, Badiou's complex weltanschauung draws on a wide range of philosophical and other traditions and puts together elements which have not been matched in the same way before, with the inevitable corollary that there is to an extent a new language. Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the breadth and ambition of his philosophical project which, whatever conclusions one might wish to draw regarding its usefulness, is certainly groundbreaking. As Peter Hallward (2003: xxiii) puts it, 'Badiou's work is today almost literally unreadable according to the prevailing codes - both political and philosophical - of the Anglo-American academy.'

Badiou's intellectual and political trajectory can be summarized as follows. He was one of the founder members of the Parti socialiste unifie (PSU) in 1 958, whose creation was largely a response to the


active or tacit collusion by large parts of the French left with the government's war against Algerian nationalists in the struggle for national liberation. He was part of the Lacano-Althusserian Cahiers pour l'analyse group in the 1 960s and was profoundly influenced by the student and workers' revolt in May 1 968, an uprising which has had a key influence on his thought and to which he frequently refers. In 1 968 he co-founded the Maoist splinter organization, the Union des communistes de France marxistes-leninistes (UCFML) and continued to act and write as an orthodox Maoist during the 1970s, up to and including his Theorie du sujet, published in 1 982. In 1 988 Badiou published DEtre et l'ivinement, which can be seen in part as a major rebuttal of the postmodern idea that philosophy itself no longer had anything to say in terms of universal values, and had become a mere reflection of developments in other spheres. This work effectively established Badiou's philosophy as being independent from other major modern schools (although there were clear and acknowledged influences of a number of other thinkers) and it is here that he elaborates at length his argument that mathematics, and in particular set theory, offers the most useful model for understanding the nature of being. Badiou has been politically active in defence of oppressed groups since 1 968 and since 1 985 has been a leading member of the small, 'post-party' political organization, simply called Organisation politique, which intervenes directly in a variety of campaigns around issues such as housing, immigration and rights at work and publishes a regular bulletin, entitled La Distance politique. In addition to his numerous philosophical works he has published novels, plays and the libretto of an opera. In this chapter I examine what can be described as Badiou's mature work, that is his philosophy from L' Etre et l'ivinement onwards, a period which is generally thought of as post-Maoist, although traces of Maoism are still found in the later Badiou.

Badiou is reasonably well known in France, at least within academic and intellectual circles concerned with left philosophy or politics; he has taught philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure since 1 999 and before that taught at the University of Paris VIII for thirty years. Neither in France nor elsewhere, however, has Badiou received anything like the attention enjoyed by intellectuals


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

In the discussion below I take a particular interest in the political aspects (broadly defined) of Bad iou's work. But just as importantly I offer a summary - with much inevitable simplification - of his


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

The role of philosophy

Taken as a whole, Badiou's thought can be described as having two major and closely related objectives. It is first an elaborate assertion of the idea that the way to understand the world and to achieve selfrealization is to intervene in it. Second, it is a robust critique of the various value systems and schools of thought which over the past quarter-century in particular have sought to minimize the potential for large-scale change in favour of, at best, limited and partial progress. He argues that philosophy must 'propose a principle of interruption', rise above its current position of semi-subordination to the world as it is and regain a necessary distance. Badiou's own contribution, then, is no less than to 'interrupt' both contemporary philosophy and the world as it currently exists, and to 'rediscover a foundational style, a decided style, a style in the school of a Descartes, for example' (IT 48-50) . Philosophy should be 'open to the irreducible singularity of what happens, a philosophy that can be fed and nourished by the surprise of the unexpected. Such a philosophy would then be a philosophy of the event' (IT 56) .

An appropriate starting point for a more detailed discussion of Badiou's work (and a place at which Badiou himself has chosen to begin an exposition of it) is a series of comments on the climate in which philosophy is operating today, which I will summarize briefly (IT 39-57 ) . In order to thrive, he argues, philosophy must encompass


four dimensions, namely revolt, logic, universality and risk, each of which is currently under such severe pressure that 'the very existence of philosophy is at stake'. Revolt is under pressure because today's life in the West does not make room for thought as revolt, both because the West declares itself already free - by contrast, advocates of the West argue, with the enslavement of the rest of the world - and because everything is expressed in the form of commerce; the need for revolt is apparently obsolete because commercial 'freedom' has been achieved. As far as logic is concerned, life in the West 'is submitted to the profoundly illogical regime of communications', which consists of the transmission of disconnected and incoherent statements, images and impressions so that 'mass communication presents the world to us as a spectacle devoid of memory' . There is little room for the pursuit oflogic in such circumstances.

Flying in the face of many contemporary philsophical trends, and setting himself apart from a broad range of theorists, including Levinas and Rawls, for example, Badiou asserts the importance of universality. This is part of what puts him in a quite different category from many contemporary cultural theorists and analysts who depend on such notions as the Other and difference, notions and approaches which have influenced both the intellectual and political arenas, especially campaigns in defence of minority rights. Examination of the universal is in hostile territory in the contemporary world because this world is so fragmented and specialized, especially as regards technology, production and skills. One result of this fragmentation and specialization is precisely that it is hard for people to see what might be universal, or 'valid for all thinking'. Finally, because people pay so much attention to calculating what will make them more secure in various ways, the important dimension of risk cannot develop; our desire for the known and the safe precludes decisions which involve elements of the unpredictable or the unknown.

Philosophy finds itself in hostile territory today, then, and its general task is to meet the challenge posed to it by the rule of merchandise, communication, technical specialization and a perceived need for security.

All three major schools in contemporary philosophy, Badiou argues, contribute in their different ways to the impoverishment and


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

These two characteristics - the declaration of the end ofmetaphysics and an emphasis on the importance of language - 'represent a real danger for thinking and for philosophy in particular', because

Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 3 1

they do not allow philosophy to explore properly the realms of revolt, logic, universality and risk, as discussed above. If the notion of truth is abandoned, and analysts simply explore the plurality of meaning, philosophy will become a simple object of circulation like any other. If philosophy primarily comments on language, it accepts the fragmented and incoherent nature of communication and does nothing to promote any type of universality; if it does not move away from this framework philosophy will be ever more an exercise in the description oflanguage games.

In the initial essay of Conditions, entitled 'Le (re) tour de la philosophie elle-meme' ('The (re) turn of philosophy itself' ) , Badiou goes a little deeper into the argument that philosophy has lost its way. Many of today's thinkers believe that philosophy's history is coming to an end and the result is that philosophy is either grafted on to other areas of activity - such as art, poetry, science, political action or psychoanalysis - or philosophy is presented as being nothing but an account of its own history, a museum piece. So contemporary philosophy 'combines the destruction of its past and the empty expectation of its future' (C 58) . Philosophy must now break with historicism, with the 'geneological imperative', and it must express itself without reference to its own history. There should be an autonomous legitimation of philosophy, such as Descartes or Spinoza practised.

The modern sophists, according to Badiou, who present themselves as philosophers but are in fact a threat to philosophy, are those who, following Wittgenstein, believe that:

thought finds itself before the following choice: either the effects of discourse, language games, or silent indication, pure 'showing' of what is subtracted from the grip of language. Those for whom the fundamental opposition is not between truth and error or wandering [errance] , but between word [parole] and silence, between what can be said and what is impossible to say. Or between pronouncements which have meaning and those which do not. (C 62)

Whilst it would be hard to exaggerate Badiou's ambitions on behalf of philosophy, at the same time the vitality of philosophy is directly dependent on developments in the other domains, and only moves


forward as a result of developments which are outside of its immediate sphere of activity:

The fact that philosophy does not itself produce truth is directly linked to regimes of truth which are precisely the conditions of it . . . philosophy is conditioned by truths. I would therefore say: there must be truths in order for there to be philosophy because philosophy must examine and think the regime of compossibility of the truth events which condition it. (EB 9)

By 'compossibility' (compossibiliti) Badiou means 'possibility in common' .

Badiou argues that events that have taken place in the realms of science, art, thought about love and politics allow for a much-needed renewal of philosophy (MP 59) . As far as science is concerned, the event is the pioneering work of mathematicians who include in particular Cantor and Paul Cohen, work which establishes the theory of the multiple. In the realm of love, the writings of Jacques Lacan have altered this particular condition of philosophy. As far as politics is concerned, the event is found in the historical sequence which runs roughly from 1 965 to 1 980. This comprises May 1 968 (a crucial moment for Badiou both personally and in terms of the way he understands politics) , the Cultural Revolution in China, the Iranian Revolution against the Shah in 1 980 and the workers' uprising in Poland a little later (MP 65) . By contrast with the situation when Stalinist Marxism prevailed, 'philosophy is again possible precisely because it does not have to legislate on history or politics, but simply think the contemporary re-opening of the possibility of politics, from the basis of obscure events' ( MP 66) . Finally, in the realm of art, Badiou singles out poetry in particular, because ' [t]he poem is without mediation' and 'has nothing to communicate. It is only a saying, a declaration that draws its authority only from itself' (in Hallward 2003: 1 97 ) and is therefore of universal relevance. More specifically, the event is the poetry of Paul Celan (MP 66) . Badiou also singles out Beckett as especially significant in the realm of prose writing (B) . These are the events which, in each of the generic procedures, should condition contemporary philosophy and the challenge is precisely to remodel philosophical enquiry in terms that are faithful to these events (MP 69) .

Alain Badiou: Event. Subject and Truth 33

I would like to pause for a moment to comment on Badiou's overview of the definition and practice of philosophy. One may well wish to agree with Badiou in suggesting that the three dominant schools of philosophy reflect the current state of the material world to such extent that they militate against the distance philosophy needs for a proper engagement with transformative processes in the world at large. In other words these schools are each in their own way philosophies of the status quo. One might also want to welcome Badiou's insistence that it is the material world that conditions the development of philosophy, not the reverse. We might applaud his frontal attack on the slippery scepticism of much postmodern philosophy and its reluctance to take sides. But I would at this stage simply question the choice of the four generic procedures, which are also the conditions of philosophy. Badiou tells us that these are the only areas in which we are able to become subjects, but, short of mentioning that philosophical preoccupation with these areas goes back a long way, he does not explain why these and only these are the only four relevant realms, the only realms in which individuals can become subjects. The precise reasons for this are not clear.

Moreover, given the lingering influence of Marx on Badiou's work and given an enduring concern to relate philosophy directly to the material world, it is odd that the economy plays no part in the core structure of his scheme of things. There seems to be no residual influence of Marx's political economy on the philosophical infrastructure, however much Badiou migh

HEWLETT (2007) Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere. Re-thinking Emancipation

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