Status Updates From Logics of Worlds: Being and...

Reviving James C. Scott from the dead just to make him read Badiou's analysis of Brasilia, watching him throw up, and then putting him back in the ground again.

Things appear. Sometimes they appear identically, sometimes they appear differently. Sometimes the differences are differenter than others, sometimes the identities are identitier than others. [Math]. 325 pages.

It constitutes the kernel of a trans-temporal political truth, of which Mao’s meditations on Stalin of 1959 and the Great Secretary’s diatribes against the Confucians in 81 BC are instances: forms of its appearing in separate worlds.

The Stalinist conception entails that ‘the state exerts an asphyxiating control over the peasantry’

In truth, if Stalin does not want ‘subjective activism’ or-it’s the same thing-a ‘communist movement’, it is by dint of his systematic distrust of the great mass of the people, who are still peasants. Mao repeats it unceasingly: in the writings of Stalin, one ‘discerns great mistrust towards the peasants’.

As Mao never tires of repeating, in a key formula: ‘Without a communist movement, it is impossible to advance into communism’.

70 years over his death....

In truth, Mao indicts Stalin for a veritable depoliticization of the will:

All of this relates to the superstructure, that is to ideology. Stalin speaks only of the economy; he does not deal with politics.

Similarly, Mao rises up against Stalin’s objectivism. He argues that Stalin‘wants only technology and cadres’ and only deals with the ‘knowledge of the laws’.

This campaign drew on the ancient Legalists, and proposed a new reading of the Discourse, whose watchword was that ‘Lin Biao and Confucius are two badgers on the same hill

--a quarrel which is recorded in the great Chinese classic (obviously written by a Confucian), the Discourses on Salt and Iron.
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It is even more striking that this confrontation between the Stalin of the thirties to the fifties and Mao at the threshold of the sixties evokes, down to its very detail, an infinitely older quarrel: the one that took place in 81 BC in China between the Legalists and the Confucian conservatives after the death of the emperor Wu

It is altogether striking that, in Mao Tse-tung’s work during this period, the critique of Stalin occupies a very important place, as if, in order to find a new path, it was necessary to return to the balance-sheet of the USSR’s collectivization in the thirties.

Ten years after the seizure of power by the Chinese communists, in the years 1958-59, bitter debates arise in the Party over the country’s development, the socialist economy, the transition to communism. Some years later, these debates will lead to the turmoil of the Cultural Revolu-tion.

5. POLITICAL EXAMPLE: THE STATE REVOLUTIONARY (EQUALITY AND TERROR)

This example will combine the temporal gap (between 81 BC and 1975) and the geographical one (it comes from China)

A famous cynic thought he was laughing behind Plato’s back by saying: ‘I do see some horses, but I see no Horseness’. In the immense progression of pictorial creations, from the hunter with his torch to the modern millionaire, it is indeed Horseness, and nothing else, which we see.

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[...] art is not a reliance of peoples on the ephemeral, on their houses and their furniture, but on the Truth they have created, step by step. It does not depend on the grave, but on the eternal.
in A. Malraux's Anti-memoirs

This means that- as in the Platonic myth, but in reverse- to paint anv animal on the wall of a cave is to flee the cave so as to ascend towards the light of the Idea. This is what Plato feigns not to see: the image, here, is the opposite of the shadow.

For Picasso instead, animals are nothing more than the indices of a declining peasant and pre-technological world (whence their innocence and their appeal).