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The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic
The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic is the last in a trilogy of political-philosophical essays, preceded by Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology, written during the dark days at the end of the decade after May '68. With the late 1970's "triumphant restoration" in Europe, China and the United States, Badiou and his collaborators return to Hegel with a Chinese twist. By translating, annotating and providing commentary to a contemporaneous text by Chinese Hegelian Zhang Shi Ying, Badiou and his collaborators attempt to diagnose the status of the dialectic in their common political and philosophical horizon. Readers of Badiou's more recent work will find a crucial developmental step in his work in ontology and find echoes of his current project of a 'communist hypothesis'. This translation is accompanied by a recent interview that questions Badiou on the discrepancies between this text and his current thought, on the nature of dialectics, negativity, modality and his understanding of the historical, political and geographical distance that his text introduces into the present.
- GenresPhilosophyPolitics
138 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2011
About the author
Alain Badiou
380 books1,029 followersAlain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.
Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 22, 2022
A translation of Zhang Shiying's text on Hegel. Interesting for historical reasons, and shows that the Cultural Revolution debates on dialectics anticipated many contemporary disputes over the legacy of Hegel. The overview of Hegel on judgment is especially helpful. Recall that there are 4 types of judgment: immediate, reflection, essential, conceptual.
Immediate - the rose is red.
Reflection - roses are useful in making bouquets.
Essence - roses belong to the category of plants.
Concept - this particular bouquet of roses is beautiful (corresponds to roses in general)
Why does this matter? Marxists often think that materialism is limited to the first 2 types of judgments, and that our job is done when we have described the properties and uses of our subject matter, forgetting or neglecting essence and concept. As a result, Marxists often misunderstand their own categories, leading to methodological incoherence. This book is a bit basic, but it shows clearly why taking Hegel seriously does in fact make a difference in practice.
Immediate - the rose is red.
Reflection - roses are useful in making bouquets.
Essence - roses belong to the category of plants.
Concept - this particular bouquet of roses is beautiful (corresponds to roses in general)
Why does this matter? Marxists often think that materialism is limited to the first 2 types of judgments, and that our job is done when we have described the properties and uses of our subject matter, forgetting or neglecting essence and concept. As a result, Marxists often misunderstand their own categories, leading to methodological incoherence. This book is a bit basic, but it shows clearly why taking Hegel seriously does in fact make a difference in practice.
August 21, 2022
While this short book is without a doubt a very important introductory study for anyone interested in G.W.F. Hegel and his reception, especially in different places such as the 20th century France and China, it has one huge major drawback: The book itself is set into a "Badiouian" framework, and in contemporary philosophical literature there is not much to hate more than those annoying ideologists of new metaphysics disguising themselves as followers of Badiou in English language.
Thus, to even get to the basic text on Hegel, the reader is forced through a disgusting reflexive 'Introduction' about the minor nuances of the "Badiouian system" as it developed over the decades (as if this has anything to do with Hegel's work itself, since we all know Badiou outside of these pages is defined by anything but being a Hegelian), and then after going through a very concise hundred pages or so of a study on Hegel and the reception of his dialectics in the 20th century, one is again forces to swallow a self-indulgent 'Interview' with Badiou himself, yet again written in this disgusting, arrogant, self-glamorizing way of pumping-up the importance of Badiou, as if this has anything at all to do with Hegel or his philosophy.
The stupidity of the Badiou-glamorizing 'Introduction' is that much greater as it states the included paper on Hegel "has no connection to the notion of truth", while the term truth itself explicitly appears within the middle 100 pages of the book, as short as it is without the Badiouian baggage in the front and at the end.
So for anyone vaguely interested in Hegel and his dialectics, you can simply skip the sandwich parts of the book with the masturbatory 'Introduction' and the concluding 'Interview', and you're left with a short, concise, easily readable essay on the aspects of Hegel's thought.
This particular publication would have been a far more qualitative of a read, were it not laced in this way on both ends and would not have unecessarily burdened the reader with the Badiou-as-persona ideology so prevalent in his English reception for the past few decades.
Yet another question that arises is the one of the choice of the book's title and its political connotations: While "the rational kernel of the Hegelian dialectic" might appear as a "red book" politically speaking, at least the introduction want's to persuade us it is, especially with all of those references to Lenin and Mao within it, it's worth noting this exact expression was in use in the 20th century anglo-saxon "Liberal" reception of Hegel also, see for example Pippin's book titled 'Hegel's Idealism' (which is probably the best positive example of this Liberal appropriation of Hegel).
Thus, to even get to the basic text on Hegel, the reader is forced through a disgusting reflexive 'Introduction' about the minor nuances of the "Badiouian system" as it developed over the decades (as if this has anything to do with Hegel's work itself, since we all know Badiou outside of these pages is defined by anything but being a Hegelian), and then after going through a very concise hundred pages or so of a study on Hegel and the reception of his dialectics in the 20th century, one is again forces to swallow a self-indulgent 'Interview' with Badiou himself, yet again written in this disgusting, arrogant, self-glamorizing way of pumping-up the importance of Badiou, as if this has anything at all to do with Hegel or his philosophy.
The stupidity of the Badiou-glamorizing 'Introduction' is that much greater as it states the included paper on Hegel "has no connection to the notion of truth", while the term truth itself explicitly appears within the middle 100 pages of the book, as short as it is without the Badiouian baggage in the front and at the end.
So for anyone vaguely interested in Hegel and his dialectics, you can simply skip the sandwich parts of the book with the masturbatory 'Introduction' and the concluding 'Interview', and you're left with a short, concise, easily readable essay on the aspects of Hegel's thought.
This particular publication would have been a far more qualitative of a read, were it not laced in this way on both ends and would not have unecessarily burdened the reader with the Badiou-as-persona ideology so prevalent in his English reception for the past few decades.
Yet another question that arises is the one of the choice of the book's title and its political connotations: While "the rational kernel of the Hegelian dialectic" might appear as a "red book" politically speaking, at least the introduction want's to persuade us it is, especially with all of those references to Lenin and Mao within it, it's worth noting this exact expression was in use in the 20th century anglo-saxon "Liberal" reception of Hegel also, see for example Pippin's book titled 'Hegel's Idealism' (which is probably the best positive example of this Liberal appropriation of Hegel).
August 12, 2018
This book is divided into four parts: the introduction by Tzuchien Tho, the translation of a chapter of Zhang Shiying's book Hegel's Philosophy (1972), introductions and commentaries on Zhang's book by Badiou and collaborators, and a lengthy interview with Badiou by Tho placing the text in philosophical and political context.
Of these, the introduction and interview are most worth reading. Zhang's text is interesting only as a presentation of the late Maoist interpretation of Hegel, but reads like an introductory text with shades of polemic, and contains few novel insights. Badiou's commentaries are more substantive, but are clearly the precursors to the development of his mature thinking on dialectics and Maoist ontology in Theory of the Subject, which was published four years after this work. There are early articulations of his theses on the relation of force, the out-place, and the space of placement as outlined in Theory of the Subject. This was his early attempt to introduce dynamism into the heretofore static structuralism of Althusser et al, by articulating the relation of quantity and quality as that of the foreclosure of a given term in a structure, which through quantitative accumulation comes to force a change in the structure itself. The example given is the Maoist party, which with a small number of adherents may be allocated a position within class society (Zizek's "constitutive exception"), but which at a significant level of quantitative development is forced either to seize power or be crushed by a state which can no longer tolerate it. This motivates the notions of event (in early texts rendered as the appearance of a collective subject), and the voluntarism introduced by the decision of whether to maintain fidelity to this novel appearance of force in structure.
We also see the division, outlined in great detail in ToS, of the "rational kernel" of materialistic dialectics against the twin forces of idealistic dialectic and metaphysical materialism. For Badiou, the preference for materialistic dialectic is a metaontological or nonfoundational decision, but one that aligns itself with the only framework capable of assimilating the relation of structure and novelty - particularly with regard to the dynamism of contradiction within class struggle. The core of Maoist philosophy is, "One divides into two," the immanent contradiction within every supposed totality, so that even the rational kernel of the dialectic itself is internally riven. This has far-reaching consequences, which extend from the presence of class division even within the revolutionary class itself, to the paradoxical recursion relation inherent to an unbounded division. In Being and Event, this is reframed as the counting of the void as pure multiplicity. There are clear sympathies here with the Leibnizian and Eleatic accounts of the continuum as infinite divisibility, which for Leibniz was the philosophical foundation of the infinitesimal calculus. Elsewhere there are more immediate responses to the concrete conditions of critique, namely the status of the Maoist party in Chinese and French society, and the post-'68 French resurgence of liberal neo-Kantianism in the name of anti-totalitarian politics.
Tho's interview begins with an outline of Badiou's political commitments at the time of writing. As a member of the Maoist party UCFML, Badiou and his associates edited a series of texts on Maoist philosophy known as the Yenan Collection, in which this book was originally published. There is an intriguing discussion of a distinction Badiou makes in Logics of Worlds between classes of negation - classical (which holds to the Principle of Excluded Middle and the Principle of Non-Contradiction), intuitionistic (which rejects the excluded middle) and paraconsistent (which rejects non-contradiction). For Badiou, Hegel's concept of negation must be thought of, not as classical, but as intuitionistic and paraconsistent. In his striking formulation, "When the world is intuitionistic, a true change must be classical, and a false change paraconsistent."
There is further discussion of the relation between Hegel and Mao's dialectic (with Hegel emphasizing negation and Mao contradiction), as well as important debates in early modern philosophy on the relative causative roles of contingency, necessity and miracles. Badiou also addresses the question of appearance as a function of scientific description- in his words, "We should admit that the scope of a phenomenon, thus the transcendental of a world where it appears, is an immanent given of its scientific rationalization." He connects this principle to the scale relativity theory of fractal space-time, which holds that scales are only physically meaningful in ratio terms, but that absolute scale does not exist.
If your interest is in the founding motivations of Badiou's late ontology, this book provides a snapshot of the militant Maoist "red years." The primary text may be passed over without much loss for Theory of the Subject, which is his first systematic work, but still remains in the context of political immediacy and dialectical materialism. These are replaced by the further abstracted notions of event and truth from Being and Event onwards. The more substantive early works are The Concept of Model and Mark and Lack (published in the post-Lacanian journal Cahiers pour l'analyse), but these were written under the shadow of Althusserian structuralism. If nothing else, Tho is a fine commentator and sharp critic, and his discussion provides excellent context for Badiou's work.
Of these, the introduction and interview are most worth reading. Zhang's text is interesting only as a presentation of the late Maoist interpretation of Hegel, but reads like an introductory text with shades of polemic, and contains few novel insights. Badiou's commentaries are more substantive, but are clearly the precursors to the development of his mature thinking on dialectics and Maoist ontology in Theory of the Subject, which was published four years after this work. There are early articulations of his theses on the relation of force, the out-place, and the space of placement as outlined in Theory of the Subject. This was his early attempt to introduce dynamism into the heretofore static structuralism of Althusser et al, by articulating the relation of quantity and quality as that of the foreclosure of a given term in a structure, which through quantitative accumulation comes to force a change in the structure itself. The example given is the Maoist party, which with a small number of adherents may be allocated a position within class society (Zizek's "constitutive exception"), but which at a significant level of quantitative development is forced either to seize power or be crushed by a state which can no longer tolerate it. This motivates the notions of event (in early texts rendered as the appearance of a collective subject), and the voluntarism introduced by the decision of whether to maintain fidelity to this novel appearance of force in structure.
We also see the division, outlined in great detail in ToS, of the "rational kernel" of materialistic dialectics against the twin forces of idealistic dialectic and metaphysical materialism. For Badiou, the preference for materialistic dialectic is a metaontological or nonfoundational decision, but one that aligns itself with the only framework capable of assimilating the relation of structure and novelty - particularly with regard to the dynamism of contradiction within class struggle. The core of Maoist philosophy is, "One divides into two," the immanent contradiction within every supposed totality, so that even the rational kernel of the dialectic itself is internally riven. This has far-reaching consequences, which extend from the presence of class division even within the revolutionary class itself, to the paradoxical recursion relation inherent to an unbounded division. In Being and Event, this is reframed as the counting of the void as pure multiplicity. There are clear sympathies here with the Leibnizian and Eleatic accounts of the continuum as infinite divisibility, which for Leibniz was the philosophical foundation of the infinitesimal calculus. Elsewhere there are more immediate responses to the concrete conditions of critique, namely the status of the Maoist party in Chinese and French society, and the post-'68 French resurgence of liberal neo-Kantianism in the name of anti-totalitarian politics.
Tho's interview begins with an outline of Badiou's political commitments at the time of writing. As a member of the Maoist party UCFML, Badiou and his associates edited a series of texts on Maoist philosophy known as the Yenan Collection, in which this book was originally published. There is an intriguing discussion of a distinction Badiou makes in Logics of Worlds between classes of negation - classical (which holds to the Principle of Excluded Middle and the Principle of Non-Contradiction), intuitionistic (which rejects the excluded middle) and paraconsistent (which rejects non-contradiction). For Badiou, Hegel's concept of negation must be thought of, not as classical, but as intuitionistic and paraconsistent. In his striking formulation, "When the world is intuitionistic, a true change must be classical, and a false change paraconsistent."
There is further discussion of the relation between Hegel and Mao's dialectic (with Hegel emphasizing negation and Mao contradiction), as well as important debates in early modern philosophy on the relative causative roles of contingency, necessity and miracles. Badiou also addresses the question of appearance as a function of scientific description- in his words, "We should admit that the scope of a phenomenon, thus the transcendental of a world where it appears, is an immanent given of its scientific rationalization." He connects this principle to the scale relativity theory of fractal space-time, which holds that scales are only physically meaningful in ratio terms, but that absolute scale does not exist.
If your interest is in the founding motivations of Badiou's late ontology, this book provides a snapshot of the militant Maoist "red years." The primary text may be passed over without much loss for Theory of the Subject, which is his first systematic work, but still remains in the context of political immediacy and dialectical materialism. These are replaced by the further abstracted notions of event and truth from Being and Event onwards. The more substantive early works are The Concept of Model and Mark and Lack (published in the post-Lacanian journal Cahiers pour l'analyse), but these were written under the shadow of Althusserian structuralism. If nothing else, Tho is a fine commentator and sharp critic, and his discussion provides excellent context for Badiou's work.
August 14, 2021
Useful, but a bit tedious
November 27, 2012
Badiou's writing is at points obtuse but then again, consider his topic. This book overall is interesting and very useful to those interested in Hegelian thought. Zhang Shi Ying's views on Hegel as a philosopher in modern China, which are the lion's share of the focus here, are a welcome departure from the typical Eurocentric approach.
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June 22, 2018Badiou was a badass when he was a Maoist.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews