Badiou and Politics

by Bruno Bosteels

Badiou and Politics offers a much-anticipated interpretation of the work of the influential French philosopher Alain Badiou. Countering ideas of the philosopher as a dogmatic, absolutist, or even mystical thinker enthralled by the force of the event as a radical break, Bruno Bosteels reveals Badiou’s deep and ongoing investment in the dialectic. Bosteels draws on all of Badiou’s writings, from the philosopher’s student days in the 1960s to the present, as well as on Badiou’s exchanges with other thinkers, from his avowed “masters” Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan, to interlocutors including Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, Daniel Bensaïd, Jacques Derrida, Ernesto Laclau, and Judith Butler. Bosteels tracks the philosopher’s political activities from the events of May 1968 through his embrace of Maoism and the work he has done since the 1980s, helping to mobilize France’s illegal immigrants or sans-papiers . Ultimately, Bosteels argues for understanding Badiou’s thought as a revival of dialectical materialism, and he illuminates the philosopher’s understanding of the task of to define a conceptual space for thinking emancipatory politics in the present.

Genres: Philosophy

464 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Bruno Bosteels is a philologist, a translator, an Associate Professor of Spanish Literature at Cornell University, and the current editor of Diacritics. Bosteels is best known to the English-speaking world for his translations of the work of Alain Badiou. Bosteels has research interests spanning contemporary philosophy and critical theory, and has published over 30 articles in French, Spanish and English.

Reviews

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by Bruno Bosteels, the noted translator of Alain Badiou, impressed me a great deal. It is not just a book about Badiou but rather uses his career as both philosopher and militant as a focal point for an epic history of French radicalism since May of 1968. I have no reservations about Bosteels work, except to say that it did not fully convince me of the originality of Badiou's thought. Having gotten through this challenging and rewarding tome, I still feel that while Badiou's thinking appeals to me on many levels, I cannot shake the suspicion that he is simply repackaging old, Hegelian ideas in a new philosophical language.

Bosteels's commentary differs from most western treatments of Badiou's work. He does not wish to obscure his subject's politics- his role in the French Maoist movement of the 1960s and '70s, nor does he understand Badiou's turn towards an ontology of mathematics as a rejection of his former radicalism. Instead, Bosteels argues that politics has always been, and remains in the “mathematical” period, a privileged category of inquiry for Badiou. Indeed, Bosteels does not see “Being and Event,” the work in which Badiou turns towards math, as a “break” so much as a reassessment of Badiou's own idiosyncratic take on dialectical thinking.

Bosteels argues that Badiou's oeuvre introduced a new version of dialectical thinking that is based on the relationship between void and excess rather than the process of Hegelian (and, to a degree, Marxian) totalization. Badiou thinks that change is possible only when representation breaks down, rather than when it achieves a messianic “completion.”

For Bosteels, almost all of Badiou's work can be seen as an example of Metapolitics- philosophy in the context of politics, not a philosophy of politics. Indeed, for Badiou, philosophy is always subordinated to other practices- such as science or art. Political philosophy is doomed to be reactionary, it can only think about politics as historically practiced. It is inherently a practice of what Badiou terms the “State”- the totality of factors that make a world represented in a certain way and of which the political state is but one manifestation. Metapolitics, on the other hand, attempts to learn new philosophical lessons from the practice of politics in the present.

Every living situation, for Badiou, has more that one possible outcome, just as every mathematical set creates the possibility of multiple sub-sets within it. The State is that which tries to represent the situation through the denial of the possibility of certain outcomes, of certain sub-sets within the set or situation. The recognition of the excess of possibilities, or sub-sets, within a certain situation or set, the realization that the representation of the situation is not totalizing, gives rise to the political subject.

This subject realizes that the truth of the situation, of being, is multiplicity. Yet the political subject must also come to understand that the outcome of the situation has universal implications. The outcome will ultimately effect the entire nature of the set, of being, and so the identity of the political subject must be generic. Instead of thinking of the Event, the breakdown of one State of representation and the rise of a new one, as a truth procedure that declares, anew, the boundaries of the Real, the political subject must instead understand that a new situation presents itself in a static field of being as a result of the articulation of the multiplicity of truth.

Bosteels traces Badiou's apprenticeship both as a philosopher and as militant. Badiou studied under Althusser, and it is clear that the early Althusser of “For Marx” was seminal for him. They both held that philosophy, political or otherwise, could never hope to discover anything meaningful on its own but felt that philosophy can illuminate newly discovered truths from science by applying them in intellectual practice. And both men, of course, were true believers in Marxism as a “science” of history. In this way, both Althusser and Badiou were practicing philosophy as a kind of Maoist “investigation”- attempting a concrete analysis of a concrete intellectual situation- a newly discovered scientific truth- in order to avoid the dangers of allowing oneself to practice pure theory detached from day to day life, which Mao, Althusser, and Badiou all acknowledged Marxist “science” could degenerate into. Badiou was also influenced by the (at least early) Althusserian notion of “overdetermination”- that just as a Freudian subject imbues many subconscious meanings into a single dream or fetish object- societies suppress too many tensions within a single ideological representation- and lead to explosions of social energy and, potentially, revolution.

But Badiou thought Althusser's understanding of the relationship between science and philosophy to be too static and simplistic. While Badiou agreed with Althusser that science produced new forms of rationality that revolutionize philosophy, he also held that not every scientific break registers efficiently with philosophy. Badiou also held that Althusser's differentiation of Theory (philosophy based on science) vs. theory (philosophy based on ideology) was overly Platonic- Althusser was insisting on a clear line demarcating truth from opinion. For Badiou, rather, science and ideology are intertwined. It is a process from one to another, not a “clean break” as Althusser would have it.

Badiou also interpreted Althusser's later works, like his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” as an assertion that subjectivity itself is purely and only ideological, and that thus there is no way for the subject itself to engage in a truth procedure, an experiment in thought and change. In attempting to think through a radical Maoist line, Althusser had instead, thought Badiou, retreated to a kind of Stalinist metaphysics, in which only inevitablist laws of history could change the subject from above. (I want to say here that I disagree with Badiou's take on mid-period Althusser. I think that even in the era of the ISAs, Althusser was not saying that subjective action could not lead to effective change – he never gave up on the notion of political overdetermination, which, after all, takes a subjective model as its starting-point- but was rather following a Gramscian line of thought as to why it was difficult for the subject of “advanced,” “democratic” societies to engage in truly radical subjectivity- a line of thought Althusser continued to pursue in his late work on the encounter.)

There was something worth preserving in the Althusserian project, thought Badiou, but it was going to need to be radically transformed. Badiou's own thought would try to refine Althusserian theory into one of impure breaks from ideology to science, or theory into Theory, and it would also need to take into consideration the participatory “discoveries” of art, politics and love. Badiou would use dialectics not to show the irreversible direction of Society, but rather show why a given society can only present itself in certain ways without being radically transformed from within.

Just as Maoist thought had influenced Badiou's early philosophical development, so too did it shape Badiou's early career as a political radical. Indeed, Badiou's political and philosophical careers cannot be fully distinguished. The radicality of both is dependent on the transfer from the politicization of history to the historicization of politics. The task of the revolutionary was to articulate a mass line of what revolution meant in an exact time and place. If for Althusser, the super-structure was unalterable and would change only according to its own inner logic, Badiou held that structure, he would later re-name it the representation-of-a-given-world, is only the movement of its own loss. Dialectics, held Badiou, was itself dialectical.

As Mao held, contradictions were always acting upon one another, and what was revolutionary in one position may become reactionary in another. Force and place are in a constant dialectic of struggle. Rightists communists, such as Badiou held Althusser to be, held place, structure, to be unalterable. They ignored the role of force in social change. Those Badiou identified as ultra-leftists, such as Guiles Deleuze, were guilty of the opposite sin of omission. They wanted to ignore the role of place completely and rely on pure force, pure desire, to change the world, reducing action to an end in itself. Badiou held that both force and place had to be articulated without equating one with the other. Maoist thought seemed to Badiou the best mode of inquiry for such a task.

Badiou's first major attempt to use Maoism in this new way was “Theory of the Subject,” published in France in 1982, after the decline of the French Maoist movement. Bosteels devotes one chapter to this book, two to “Being and Event” and one to “Logic of Worlds”, Badiou's three most ambitious works. His ability to elucidate the key concepts from these three huge and difficult works in thirty to fifty pages is quite impressive.

“Theory of the Subject” takes as its primary polemical target not Althusser, as one might expect, but a thinker foundational to Althusser's thinking and indeed to all of the French intellectual landscape of the era- Jacques Lacan. Badiou points out the utterly idealistic nature of Lacan's structuralism- the notion that the nature of the self cannot be altered, that it must always be the subject of an invisible Big Other, the only being that can validate the self with its unifying, but also impossible, perspective. It is impossible, Badiou announces in true Maoist fashion, for any “truth” to be indivisible. Structuralism, for Badiou, is just another idealism- it elevates language to a Divine that cannot be questioned or altered. Structuralism, then, must be challenged by a new materialism. Badiou spends much of the book dividing Lacan into his materialist and idealist tendencies, much as Althusser had done to Marx.

For Badiou, the useful, materialist concepts in Lacan include his notions of anxiety and the real. For Lacan, anxiety denoted the sub-conscious suspicion on the part of the subject that the real- the totality of reality- contained an excess beyond the limits of presentation in the symbolic world. In other words, the self knows on some unspoken level that the gaze that unifies the subject is imaginary- the world, and the self along with it, is incoherent. The super-ego, thought Lacan, fills the uncertainty left by anxiety with the sheer force (by the self against the self) of non-law presented as law.

Anxiety, thought Badiou, could guide the self to the revelation of a new truth beyond its subjected status to the Big Other. Some of Lacan's models were useful, but they did not adequately describe the full potentialities of the self. Badiou proposed new concepts to describe these unappreciated capacities of subjectivity. “Courage” was Badiou's designation of the process by which the self not only sub-consciously suspects a default in the existing symbolic order but consciously proves that this excess does in fact exist thereby necessitating a new articulation of the real. The super-ego is then re-imagined as “justice”- non-law acting as law when it has become undeniable that the existing state of things- the symbolic world as presented- is inadequate.

Badiou's proposed revisions transform Lacanian thought profoundly. Anxiety is now no longer merely the terrifying notion that all is incoherent and that the true nature of self is lack, but rather the understanding of the lack of lack, a revelation itself terrifying albeit in an empowering way. For now the formerly passive subject is transformed into an active force, one that understands that nothing really separates it from its determining place, the imaginary, yet powerfully radical perspective of the Big Other that shapes the world from its imaginary perspective. Force can, in rare instances, inhabit its own determining place and disrupt the order of things.

“Theory of the Subject” challenges Lacan in two essential ways. First, the subject, rather than being structural, arises from a rare and contingent event. Second, there may indeed be an other other than the Big Other, and that other may start off as the subject itself, later transformed by courage and justice into Force. As Badiou's humanist critics all pointed out at the time, this is indeed a very Maoist work. The dialectic of force is seen very much as one of destruction of the old by the new. This is a criticism that the “mathematical turn” attempted to address, and it is one that Badiou has only stopped retreating from in recent years.

With “Being and Event”, published in 1988, Badiou seemed to be abandoning what could be recognized as Marxist, or even broadly dialectical, thinking. Bosteels, however, argues that the book should instead be understood as a radical refashioning of the Maoist intellectual project. In an intellectual environment that condemned dialectics for leading to the totalitarian disasters of the twentieth century, and that sometimes declared philosophy, itself, to be dead, Badiou declares that ontology survives modernity. In truly Platonic fashion, Badiou asserts that ontology is and has always been rooted in mathematics and set theory. To socially exist is to be counted as an element of a set, and any set that contains any one element necessarily contains a multiplicity, as one can always be divided. To socially exist, then, is to exist as a multiple of multiples.

In the interviews with Badiou that form the appendix of the book, Badiou reveals an unlikely inspiration to his mathematical turn- his first “philosophical hero”- Jean-Paul Sartre. The existential notion that nothingness is at the core of all being helped lead Badiou to set theory. All mathematical sets, and therefor all ontology, proceeds from the empty set, from nothingness, which is included in every set but contains in and of itself (as itself a set) no elements. The empty set is, therefor, both foundational and invisible.

The role of the state, which is to be understood as the totality of factors that make a world, or set, represented in a given way is, according to Badiou, to obscure the foundational void. The state relies on what Badiou terms the “count of the count” to further cover-up the empty set. Badiou's example of a “count of the count” is a state census. If there are elements within a set, and we call these elements “people” then a census creates sub-sets by counting these elements not simply as themselves but also along racial/ genderal/ national lines. The count of the count thereby creates an excess of representation over the situation. The excess of representation may sound like it would make an element count for more than itself. However, the count of the count ultimately counts certain elements as “inexistent”. Anything that can be counted as belonging to a set implies the non-belonging of certain other elements. Indeed, the non-belonging nature of certain elements is itself counted, itself an element of the set. So, for the “French people” or the “American people” to be counted in a census, certain elements, such as “illegal immigrants” must also be counted as inexistent. The not-counting of the inexistent is literally counted within the count of the count. Thus, the empty set at the heart of all that can be counted is unevenly distributed within the different elements.

Here, the concepts put forth in “Theory of the Subject” are re-introduced in a different context. The inertia created by the excess of representation inspires anxiety in the subject. The state's representation does not seem to coincide with the real situation. An element counted by the state as inexistent is revealed to in fact exist fully, and the entire count of the count is invalidated. When representation breaks down in a radical way- in historical moments that Badiou has famously labeled radical events, the void at the foundation of every set is revealed, and the fluid, multiplicitous nature of being is realized. One state breaks down, and another eventually comes into being. But during the course of the Event itself, the situation is stateless and possibility is infinite.

If “Being and Event” at first seems like an abandonment of the Maoist tradition, Bosteels argues, it ends by re-imagining that tradition. Indeed, the latter book tackles Maoist notions of contradiction and transformation more directly than did “Theory of the Subject.” Mao held that contradiction could never be fully resolved, but more importantly, that it never really begins. The Maoist phrase, “One divides into two” had been traditionally understood to mean that contradiction would arise in every situation until (some form of) one side had destroyed (some form) of the other side. This could describe the way Badiou had embraced a dialectics of destruction in “Theory of the Subject”. But in “Being and Event” the Maoist dialectic is re-imagined not as one of destruction but of division- if one divides into two, then we never truly leave one behind. An event is not the destruction of the set, it is the realization of its multiplicitous nature.

With "Logic of Worlds" (subtitled Being and Event II), Badiou shifts the focus of his enquiry from being itself to the nature of its appearance. A subject,for Badiou, is a body capable of producing effects (experiencing the revelation of truths) that a given world deems impossible.  As we have already seen, anxiety causes the subject to realize that the real is not as it is represented by the state. A "site," in Badiou's terminology, is a point which indexes itself and thereby puts its own "completion" into question.  The site is the location at which the state's representation of the real starts to break down.  A site disappears quickly but one can recover the truths of a site by following the series of consequences that arise from it after its disappearance.  An event is the most intense and transformational of sites.  It proves the truth that the old world had deemed impossible, thereby invalidating the old representation of the real. 
 
Again, the event does not "create" a new truth, but uncovers what had always been true, but not understood.  Galileo's discoveries were events that uncovered what had always been true, but which the world Galileo lived in deemed impossible. For Badiou, politics is always the art of the impossible. The “impossible” can only be recognized as such in lieu of a subjective intervention, such as Galileo's, that makes the impossible real. Truths, such as that the Earth revolves around the sun, are eternal and universal. But they are also revealed historically and subjectively. One cannot separate the concept from the genealogy of its revelation. Badiou thinks that if we trace the history of past events, we can see how the impossible is overcome by infinite truths. That which a world deems impossible, is also the key to historically understanding a particular world. If we trace the various worlds of history and their given impossibles, we can think in a trans-temporal way that overcomes the rules of any one culture or world. We can begin to understand, through history, the eternal and universal platonic form of truth and think not as mortal individuals but as agents of infinite existence- the idea that outlives any individual, and indeed, any world.

Bosteels believes that if we are to follow Badiou's logic we must ask what the world of liberal capitalism tells us is most impossible if we are to understand our world. In his shorter works since “Logic of Worlds” Badiou argues that our state tells us that what is impossible is to live

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

This will not be a full review. More like a couple of quick notes for a recommendation: Bruno Bosteels really is a clear writer which helps to understand Badiou much better. I have read a lot of Badiou at this point and this book helped me understand the philosopher much better.
Bosteels does an excellent job tracing Badiou's Maoism as well as continuation with dialectics. I had been thinking along the same lines but needed this book to confirm my thoughts. I would have given this 5 stars if Bosteels had spent more time showing the connections to set theory and category theory in Badiou's work, afterall for Badiou even his math is connected to his politics.

[AG · Rating 3 out of 5]

I get sense, as someone who was not on the scene at the time (let’s be honest, I was basically an infant), that the philosophical world was in dire need of this book at the time of its publication. I can appreciate the work that Bosteels has done to correct the voluntarist misreading of Badiou’s theory of the event by emphasizing that truth — of which the event only indicates the possibility — is dependent upon the tracing of consequences within a historical conjuncture. Bosteels’ characterization of the theory of evental site and truth-procedure as a “politicization of history” (contra the historicist thesis of the history of politics) is apt, though it leaves the reader with more questions than answers.

In an interview with Badiou in the appendix, he himself points to the very problem which I believe Bosteels leaves unsolved. It concerns the relationship between local intervention and global antagonism. Badiou argues that the fault of ultra-leftist “movementist” groups, such as the alter-globalization movement of the 90s, is to jump too quickly to a global antagonism — between the people and the state — and bypasses more specified local interventions which could constitute a genuine political opposition. By organizing a spontaneous mass politics on the national and international scale, the “movementists” assume that the singular situation “can be reduced to the idea that the situation is expressive of the totality”. This strategy follows what could be a “vulgar Leninist” logic whereby the correct analysis of the particular stage of development of capitalism creates revolutionary consciousness. Badiou doubts the validity of this thesis: “The subjectivization of a singular situation cannot be reduced to the idea that this situation is expressive of the totality.”

This final claim, that the situation can never be reduced to an expression of the total order, seems to me to be the crux of Badiou’s “post-Maoism”. Bosteels’ argument in Badiou and Politics, which seeks to connect his earliest Maoist writings to Being and Event, and finally to his latest work (at the time), Logics of Worlds, bears the burden of being an expressed attempt to “extend” Badiou’s meta-ontological thinking to the domain of political theory. But it buckles under the weight of this challenging endeavor precisely at the point where it have to define what “post-Maoism” *is* — what its tenets are, specifically in its supplementation of “Maoist logic” and its supercession of “Leninist logic”.

There are some interesting gestures to Laclau’s conception of democracy as a twin inheritor of the post-Maoist legacy which suggest that the heart of post-Maoism is the recognition of the absent center of the political, the recognition that the defeat of Actually Existing Socialism spells the death of the historical totality and the global telos of rational politics. It is the “destruction of Marxism”, whose last gasp is the Cultural Revolution, which leads Badiou to develop a theory of the transmissibility of political truth in the absence of an absolute referent. Bosteels also indicates that the legacy historical materialism looms for Badiou’s “politicization of history”. To what extent can Badiou’s torsional dialectic be understood in the context of a Marxist history which must think the contingent determinacy of base, of economy, on superstructure? Bosteels is right to point to this, as the openness of this question, a hangover from Althusserianism, is a logical outcome of a theory which banishes the concept of historical totality.

These are all interesting questions. The issue I have is that Bosteels does not properly deliver a thesis which would extend Badiou’s meta-ontology to historical materialism. Instead he is stuck, as an unfortunate result of his philosophical conjuncture, defending Badiou from the poor readings of others. I don’t wish to detract from the importance of these questions, but it doesn’t seem to be enough to simply pose them, especially if Marx’s formula, that mankind does not pose problems that it can't solve, is to be vindicated.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

What is perhaps most astounding about this work is that it explicitly presents itself as an apologetics: in reaction to the reception of Badiou's work, not all positive, Bosteels sets out to "correct the record," so to speak. But what we are left with is simply an explication on Badiou's work in defense of his critics, charging them with misrepresentation. A lot of this comes down to tracing the development of his thought from his early to late works, finding continuity between them, clarifying his relation to Hegel, etc. Unfortunately, I don't find it particularly convincing, and if I wanted to understand Badiou, I would simply read Badiou.

[Zach · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really careful and clear as it seems it is possible to be with Badiou. Had only read Can Politics Be Thought prior to this and therefore missed the point of some sections that seem to require more familiarity. Good articulation of the political import of Badiou, but would have benefitted from more meta-philosophical reflection on Badiou's levels of analysis and what his philosophical beginning is. From what philosophical place does Badiou's enterprise take off? I'm unclear after my reading.

[Slow Reader · Rating 5 out of 5]

the best there is out there. great integration of the Theory of Subject stuff w first 2 volumes of Being and Event trilogy and much of the smaller essays etc that came before. interviews at the end are a treat too