Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere - The Eye...5 Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity The political Ambivalence, universality, ideology Political violence

BADIOU, BALIBAR, RANCIERE

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

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BADIOU, BALIBAR, RANGIERE

Re-thinking Emancipation

Nick Hewlett

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Contents

AcknowledgementsNote on TranslationsAbbreviations

1

2

3

4

Contexts and ParametersThree characteristics of modern French thoughtThe legacy of Louis AlthusserConcluding remarks

Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and TruthThe role of philosophyTruthThe event, movement and changeConcluding remarks

The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of PoliticsPolitics, the event and truth proceduresAgainst and beyond the postmodernMarxism and historical materialismDemocracyParliamentary politicsBadiou's political activismConcluding remarks

Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is DemocracyListening to the unheardLiberal democracy and languageDefining the politicalDemocracy and post-democracyConcluding remarks

ixX

xi

11017

22

2428333745

4749596269727581

848695

100108111

viii Contents

5 Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equaliberty and theDilemmas of Modernity

The politicalAmbivalence, universality, ideologyPolitical violenceLenin and GandhiConcluding remarks

6 With and Beyond Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere

References and Bibliography

Index

116

119127129136139

142

155

173

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gary Browning, Christopher Flood and twoanonymous readers for commenting on drafts of individual chaptersof this book. Thanks also to participants at conferences and seminarsat the Universities of Fukuoka, Budapest and Leeds, at King's Col-lege, London, and at University College, London, who commentedon some of the ideas in this book. In particular, I would like to thankGregory Elliott for a detailed, sensitive and highly insightful readingof the manuscript as a whole. Sarah Douglas at Continuum showedimmediate enthusiasm for the project when I first approached her,and was very helpful and encouraging thereafter. Nick Fawcett didan excellent job copy-editing the manuscript. The final shape of thebook, including any errors and infelicities, is of course my responsibil-ity alone.

My appreciation goes to the Arts and Humanities Research Coun-cil for funding a period of leave in order to bring the project to fruitionand to the British Academy for two travel grants. An earlier version of

Chapter 2 was published in 2004 in Modern and Contemporary France12 (3) and an earlier version of Chapter 3 was published in 2006 inContemporary Political Theory 5 (4).

I would like to thank Bridget Taylor, who has not only given con-sistently sound advice during the time I was writing this book, but hasalso shown huge patience as I went through authorial highs and lows.My children Emily and Gus have been moving towards adulthoodover the past few years and remain constant sources of happiness.Lasting happiness and enduring love are qualities I associate stronglywith my mother, (Enone, to whose memory this book is dedicated.

Note on Translations

In the two chapters on Badiou and the chapter on Ranciere, I havetranslated quotations from the original, French editions of theirworks, except where the original is in English, or where I haveindicated otherwise. In the chapter on Balibar, I have quoted fromEnglish translations of his work, except where I have indicated thatthe translations are my own. Where I quote from or refer to anEnglish translation, the date of the original (French) version of thework is indicated in square brackets.

Abbreviations

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

AMBBF

Cl

cDODEEB

EEIT

LMMPPH

PMPPSSPTCTS

Abbreviations for works by Alain Badiou

Abrege de metapolitique (Seuil, 1 998) .Beckett: Uincrevable desir (Hachette, 1995).'Beyond Formalisation' (interview with Peter Hallward inAngelaki, vol. 8, no. 2, 2003, pp. 1 1 1-36).Cir Constances , 1. Kosovo, 11 septembre, Chirac /Le Pen

(Leo Scheer, 2003).Conditions (Seuil, 1992).D'un Desastre obscur. Sur la fin de la verite d'etat (P Aube, 1 998) .Gilles Deleuze: ' La clameur de I' etre' (Hachette, 1997).UEthique: Essai sur la conscience du mal (Hatier, 1 993) .'Entretien de Bruxelles' (in Les Temps Modernes, no. 526,mai 1990, pp. 1-26).L'Etre et 1' evenement (Seuil, 1988).Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy(Continuum, 2003).Logiques des mondes. Uetre et I' evenement^ 2 (Seuil, 2006) .Manifeste pour la philosophie (Seuil, 1989).'Politics and Philosophy' (interview with Peter Hallward inAngelaki, vol. 3, no. 3, 1998, pp. 1 13-33).Petit manuel d' inesthetique (Seuil, 1 998) .Peut-onpenserlapolitique? (Seuil, 1985).LeSiecle (Seuil, 2005).Saint-Paul. Lafondation de I'universalisme (Paris, PUF, 1997).Theorie de la Contradiction (Maspero, 1975) .Theoriedusujet(Seuil, 1982).

xii

ABAL

CDCTDW

LALHLP

MMI

NHPPSP

TT

DCHW

1C

LC

LG

Abbreviations

Abbreviations for works by Jacques Ranciere

Aux bords dupolitique (Osiris, 1 992) .'Althusser'. In Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder(eds) A Companion to Continental Philosophy (Blackwell, 1998,pp. 530-36).La Chair des mots. Politiques de I'ecriture (Galilee, 1 998) .Chronique des temps consensuels (La Fabrique, 2005) .'Dissenting Words. A Conversation with Jacques Ranciere.'(diacritics, summer 2000).La Legond' Althusser (Gallimard, 1974).La Haine de la democratic (Seuil, 2005) .Jacques Ranciere: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics:Approaches to Democratic Disagreement.' Interviewwith Jacques Ranciere by Solange Guenoun andJames H. Kavanagh (SubStance, no. 92, 2000, pp. 3-24).La Mes entente (Galilee, 1995).Le Maitre ignorant. Cinq Lemons sur I' emancipation intellectuelle(Fayard, 1987).Les Noms de I'Histoire. Essai depoetique du savoir (Seuil, 1 992) .Le Philosophe et ses pauvres (Fayard, 1 983) .Les scenes dupeuple. Les Revokes logiques, 1975—1985(Horlieu, 2003).'Ten Theses on Polities', Theory and Event 5:3 (2001).

Abbreviations for works by Etienne Balibar

Droitdecite(PUF, 2002).'Gewalt', in Das Historisch-Kritisches Worterbuch des Marxismus,Das Argument Verlag, Berlin. Available online in French athttp://ciepfc.rhapsodyk. net/article. php3?id_article=36(accessed January 2006).'The Infinite Contradiction', in Yale French Studies 88, 1995,pp. 142-64.La Crainte des masses: politique et philosophic avant et apres Marx(Galilee, 1997).'Lenine et Gandhi: une rencontre manquee?' Communicationau Colloque MARX INTERNATIONAL IV, « Guerre

Abbreviations xiii

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

MCI Masses, Classes, Ideas (Routledge, 1994).PM RNC Race, Nation, Class. Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991, with

Immanuel Wallerstein).SP Spinoza and Politics (Verso, 1998).SS 'Sub species universitatis'. In Topoi no. 1-2, September 2006,

pp. 3-16. Viewable at: http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.netarticle.php3?id_article=81.

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

The Philosophy of Marx (Verso, 1995).


Chapter 1

Contexts and Parameters

Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere each workwithin the intellectual and political tradition which embraces thenotion of human emancipation. Associated with political struggle,resistance, and freedom from oppression, the emancipatory paradigmis inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel andMarx. It famously found intellectual expression in the Enlightenmentand its landmark political moments include the American Revolutionin the second half of the eighteenth century and the French Revolu-tion of 1789. In the twentieth century, emancipation was often asso-ciated with independence from colonial rule, the emancipation ofwomen from male domination, and the emancipation of the workingclasses from capitalist exploitation. By adopting the view that freedomis closely linked with freedom from oppression, advocates of the eman-cipatory tradition set themselves apart from liberals, who tend to con-ceive of freedom as absence from interference.

Such an approach to ideas and politics became less influential inFrance from the mid-1970s onwards, having been highly prevalentfor two hundred years. But Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere have eachvigorously resisted the trend towards the various types of liberalthought that have become so much more current in France, andeach has made a significant contribution to the emancipatory tradi-tion. Even superficial acquaintance with the work of these writersthus suggests that those who have rushed to write the obituaries ofFrance's tendency to produce radical intellectuals may have beentoo categorical, too soon. Although I am by no means in full agree-ment with Badiou, Balibar or Ranciere, I have chosen to examinetheir work in part precisely because they each place the collectiveand rebellious action of ordinary people at the very heart of their phi-losophical systems, whilst at the same time engaging with French and

2 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere

other thought which has emerged since Sartre was the dominant forcein European philosophy. They should not be seen as forming any kindof united philosophical school, for disagreements and differencesbetween them are sometimes considerable, but their common andsteadfast refusal to make concessions to a variety of more mainstreamintellectual and political currents both sets them apart from numerousother thinkers and suggests treatment within the same book.

Each of these writers has adopted as a major aim to explore notionsof equality, and the relationship between equality and emancipation.For Badiou, the very idea of politics is intimately related to equalityand his philosophy includes an egalitarian presumption. His philoso-phical system is organized around the notion of the event, which isvirtually synonymous with a broad concept of revolution, and as faras politics is concerned the event is often an actual political and socialrevolution in a traditional sense. For Balibar, his term 'equaliberty' isat the heart of his understanding of politics, meaning that there can beno freedom without equality, and vice versa. The notions of emanci-pation and transformation are central to his definition of what is poli-tical. For Ranciere, a discussion of equality is so central to his thoughtthat in a characteristically provocative way he argues that equalityis a starting point for any definition of politics and not just a distantgoal. Politics is intimately related to uprising and insurgency on thepart of excluded groups and against the unjust status quo; a disruptionof the normal order of things via a bold intervention by those whohave no voice.

In the broadest of terms, the work of these three thinkers is influ-enced by Marxism, the ground from whence they all sprang in theearly years of their intellectual and political development. Howevercomplex their intellectual discourses might be, and however unex-pected some of their points of reference, they each still return fre-quently to a common idea that an intellectual position of any realsignificance must relate to an intervention in the material worldin order to change that world in an egalitarian direction. Despitesome highly novel, unorthodox and eclectic philosophical pointsof reference, each seeks to interpret the world from a position thatstarts with a belief in the need to pursue the logic of defending theinterests of ordinary people. Although none are now likely to describe

Contexts and Parameters 3

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

The overarching question which I pose in order to evaluate andengage with the work of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere perhapsreflects my training as a historian and political analyst, rather thanas a philosopher. It is: how can the powers of reflection be put to usefor transforming and egalitarian ends at the beginning of the twenty-first century? The question of how to make thought relevant anduseful to the organization of human societies is of course one whichpermeates all forms of political thought. John Locke, who dividesknowledge and science into three categories, fysike, praktike and semi-otike, defines praktike as 'the skill of rightly applying our own powersand actions, for the attainment of things good and useful' (Locke1989 [1690]: 461) But for each of these writers the more precisenotion of praxis is appropriate. Praxis extends further the idea ofpraktike and, in addition to applying the powers of the intellect to thematerial world, also includes as a major consideration the influence ofthe material world on thought. The result is a dialectical relationshipbetween theory and practice. This approach is arguably central toeach of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's own endeavours and I amthus to an extent assessing them by their own criteria, judging the suc-cesses and failures of their projects in terms which they themselvesbroadly work to: how useful is their work in terms of both understand-ing the contemporary world and changing it for the better, and howhas the material world influenced their thought?

Certainly, many pages of this book are devoted to evaluating theinternal logic of their thought, to comparing Badiou, Balibar andRanciere with each other and with other philosophers, or with think-ers in different domains. If one or other is similar to or remote from aparticular intellectual tradition or thinker, or represents a radicalbreak from a tradition or thinker, this is relevant and important.By the same token, I seek to trace the intellectual origins and develop-ment of these three writers. But if I examine their thought qua thoughtin this way, I also do so as a means, ultimately, to assessing theirrelevance to the material, and broadly speaking political, world with


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

The importance of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's work is gradu-ally being recognized more widely. In addition to their considerableoriginality and intellectual breadth, the sheer volume of output on thepart of these thinkers helps explain why each is being taken increas-ingly seriously. Since the publication in 1988 of Badiou's major work,L'Etre et I'eveminent, he has written more than twenty further books,together with numerous articles and interviews, ranging fromabstract discussions to pamphlets and newspaper articles on contem-porary politics, via comments on historical events. His most signifi-cant philosophical work since his first magnum opus is Logique desmondes (2006), which is intended as a sequel to and refinement ofsome of the major propositions contained in L'Etre et Vevenement and isindeed subtitled L'Etre et I'evenement, 2. Balibar has also published agreat deal, ranging from a close reading of and re-interpretation ofSpinoza, in Spinoza and Politics (1998 [1985]) to extended commentaryon European citizenship and racism, for example in We, the People ofEurope? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship (2004 [2001]), via essayscontaining innovative definitions of politics itself and of political vio-lence, in, inter alia, Masses, Classes, Ideas (1994) and Politics and the OtherScene (2002). Ranciere has likewise been prolific and has publishedover thirty books. He began his career with explorations of politicalthought and political economy, then spent many years working inlabour and social history, before returning to political thought aswell as writing widely on aesthetics. His most important work of poli-tical thought to date is La Mesentente (1995) but almost as importantare his brief but extremely rich Ten Theses on Politics (2001).

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


these thinkers has been and will continue to be greater in Britain andthe USA than in France itself. Taking the case of Alain Badiou,although he teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris andattracts large audiences to his seminars and lectures, there has been,to date, only one major conference on his work in France, in 1999, inwhose proceedings many contributors are from outside France(Ramond 2002). There have by contrast been a number of confer-ences on Badiou's work in Britain and the USA. Moreover, there aretwo general works on Badiou's philosophy in English (Barker 2002and Hallward 2003) and only one in French (Tarby 2005a), and twocollections of essays on Badiou in English (Hallward 2004 and Riera2005) where they are absent in French. The same applies to specialissues of journals.

A brief look at the careers of these writers also helps explain why Ihave decided to group them together for treatment in this book. AlainBadiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937, was a student at theEcole Normale Superieure in Paris, and began to work within abroadly Althusserian framework. He taught philosophy at the Uni-versity of Paris VIII from 1969 to 1999 and then began teaching atthe Ecole Normale. Greatly influenced by the May 1968 uprising, hebecame a leading member of the Union des communistes de Francemarxistes-leninistes (UCFML). He has been politically active eversince, in particular as one of the most prominent activists in Organisa-tion politique, a 'post-party' grouping launched in 1985 which orga-nizes around a small number of key issues including housing, illegalimmigrants (sanspapiers] and industrial change.

Etienne Balibar was born in Avalon, France, in 1942 and also stu-died at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He worked at the Uni-versity of Algiers, Algeria in the mid-1960s and then taught at theLycee de Savigny-sur-Orge, in France, then at the University ofParis I (Sorbonne) from 1969 to 1994. He held the Chair in Politicaland Moral Philosophy from 1994 to 2002 at the University of Paris X(Nanterre) and in 2000 took a Chair as Distinguished Professor in Cri-tical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He was a contri-butor, with Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey andJacques Ranciere, to the original edition of Reading Capital (1965),writing chapters on the concepts underlying historical materialism.


Balibar was a member of the French Communist Party for twentyyears and was expelled in 1981 after publicly criticizing the party'sattitude towards immigration. Since 1981 he has frequently spokenout on political issues of the day and has likewise written articles andbooks on social and political issues including race, nationalism, socialexclusion and citizenship.

Jacques Ranciere was born in Algiers in 1940 and studied at theEcole Normale Superieure in Paris. He taught at the University ofParis VIII (Vincennes-St Denis) from 1969 to 2000, holding theChair of Aesthetics and Politics from 1990 and was a Director ofProgrammes at the College Internationale de Philosophic from 1986to 1992. He was also a contributor to Reading Capital, with a chapteron the critique of political economy and the differences betweenMarx's critique of 1844 and that of 1867, but after May 1968 hereacted strongly against the Althusserian project. He was a founderand editor of the labour and social history journal, Revoltes logiques,from 1975 to 1986, whose approach was developed as a reactionagainst Althusser's theory. Ranciere's work spans philosophy, politicaltheory, historiography, literary theory, film theory and aesthetics. Hehas remained politically active, particularly around issues concerningimmigration and social exclusion, but has moved away from his earlierallegiance to Maoism as well as the Althusserian perspective.

Let us note in passing that even at the most general level the threewriters share a number of characteristics as far as both their profes-sional careers and their politico-intellectual development are con-cerned. They are all trained in philosophy, all are graduates of theEcole Normale in Paris, and all made careers teaching philosophy inmainly Parisian higher education. They are all former students ofAlthusser and - especially in the case of Badiou and Ranciere - theywere profoundly affected by the events of May 1968. They were allinfluenced by Maoism and have remained engaged in left politics tothis day, swimming against the current of so many other former left-wing activists of their generation, who took one or other of the possibleroutes away from activism, as described for example in Hamon andRotman's Generation (1987 [1988]). Another characteristic they shareis to have made important contributions beyond the discipline inwhich 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 themost obvious divergences.

For all three, their most important work has appeared since 1985,during a period characterized - particularly in France - by intellec-tual conservatism and the decline of the influence of thought to theleft of social democracy. Governmental politics in France have oftencombined a superficially consensual approach with largely market-driven economic policy, and there has been widespread disillusion-ment with mainstream politicians. This climate, I shall argue, hashad an influence on the way in which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere'sthought has evolved.

The rapid growth of interest in the work of these thinkers in recentyears cannot be attributed solely to its intrinsic merit, considerablethough this may be; their increased reception also reflects a more gen-eral renewal of interest in left-oriented thought over the past decade ortwo, a renewal which has taken place on an international scale.Mentioning but the most prominent advocates, Michael Hardt andAntonio Negri dissect the current world order in Empire (2000)and Multitude (2004), in a manner that suggests an updating and by nomeans an outright rejection of Marx's Capital, first published over acentury previously. In these books, which have been discussed wellbeyond the confines of the left intelligentsia in America and Britain,Hardt and Negri argue that the new world order, Empire, is not domi-nated by one country such as the USA, or even one continent. This is apostmodern and global form of sovereignty which is deterritorializedin terms of source, scope and logic. The most important characteristicof these two books is not the detail of their analysis nor supportingevidence — which it has to be said is sparse — but their attempt to sug-gest that such an approach to the analysis of modern capitalism canhelp the cause of what Hardt and Negri describe (after Spinoza) asthe 'multitude' in inventing new ways of combating Empire.

Meanwhile, David Harvey combines an interest in the (broadlyMarxist) approach of the French Regulation School to political econ-omy with an exploration of the culture of the late twentieth century inThe Condition of Postmodernity (1989) and examines the changing rela-tionship between politics, economics and social structure in both The


New Imperialism (2003) and A Brief History of JVeoliberalism (2005).Frederic Jameson draws on the economic theory of the BelgianMarxist Ernest Mandel in order to examine the nature and sig-nificance of culture in the late twentieth century in Postmodernism,Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and in both The CulturalTurn (1998) and A Singular Modernity (2002). Finally Slavoj Zizekhas become well known in particular for his analysis of culture andideology, drawing on Marx and Lacan in a way which is, again, expli-citly anti-capitalist. Each of these writers of widespread internationalrepute espouses the notion that we are living in a postmodern age,or one which is different enough from modernity to merit a debateabout redefinition, but equally if not more important is the fact thateach of these writers draws heavily on a fairly traditional Marxist his-torical materialism.

The international reception that Noam Chomsky has enjoyed andcontinues to enjoy for his ferocious and sophisticated critique of USpolicy overseas is another example of a small but important change inthe intellectual political climate over the past few years, no doubtnourished by the growth and increasingly visible movement againstcorporate globalization as the neoliberal agenda fails large sections ofsociety in advanced capitalist countries and by the exasperation feltby many hundreds of thousands of people in Britain and the UnitedStates in particular, in response to the US and British invasion andoccupation of Iraq in the early years of the twenty-first century.Moreover, the break-up of the Soviet Union might have removedthe most elaborate experiment in developing a practical alternativeto capitalism, offering the possible conclusion that communism canonly fail. But its passing might also have removed one of the greatestobstacles to arguing for a socialist alternative, given the profoundlyunjust nature of many aspects of life in the Eastern Bloc, a fact thatwas constantly highlighted by Cold War rhetoric. One might alsosuggest, as has Stathis Kouvelakis (2001: 53), that when capitalism isvery successful it is likely that sooner or later there will be an anti-capitalism that, at least in the theoretical domain, confronts capital-ism head-on. More popular versions of what could broadly bedescribed as works which seek to redress the balance for those whosuffer most from the form which capitalism now takes have been


published by Susan George (1999, 2004), Naomi Klein (2001), GeorgeMonbiot (2000), John Pilger (2002) and Arundhati Roy (2004).

Although the re-emergence of a more general interest in engagedleft 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 withinan emancipatory framework and who have by no means abandonedthe left radical framework which has in a more general sense been soweakened. Any list of such writers might include Jacques Bidet, LucBoltanski, Eve Chiapello, Pierre Macherey and Daniel Bensaid, notforgetting the economists Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy.Each in their own way is involved in work which takes a highly criticalstance on contemporary society and politics from a left perspective.Moreover, the late sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, despite coming to poli-tically engaged intellectual work relatively late and despite remaininga figure whose work invokes deep controversy within the left as wellas beyond it, argued for many years that any serious approach tothe analysis of modern societies needs to highlight and examine theexistence of a huge section of society that he described as the 'dis-possessed' (les depossedes] (e.g. Bourdieu 1998). Even the late JacquesDerrida, often thought to have travelled far from committed intellec-tual work in his major writings, argues forcefully in Specters of Marx(1994 [1993]) 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 strikesof winter 1995 there has been increased activism within the non-mainstream left. For example, workplace activists formed the tradeunion Solidarite, Unite, Democratic (SUD), which strongly empha-sizes more traditional labour movement democracy. The results of thepresidential elections of 2002 likewise tend to reinforce the view thatFrance 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 NationalFront leader Le Pen and his passage to the second round also sug-gested that taking to the streets in large numbers is not a thing of the


past. Rank and file response to President Sarkozy's measures is likelyto confirm this. Most importantly, in spring 2006 France saw whatwas probably the largest and most sustained popular mobilizationsince 1968. Like 1968, the movement began with widespread demon-strations and occupations by students and it then spread to the work-ing population. Unlike May 1968, the focus of the protests was crystalclear: the government's new law — which it had pushed through on aconfidence vote using article 49 paragraph 3 of the constitution - andwhich sought to introduce more precarious working contracts foryoung people under 26 in order, the government argued, to createjobs. The labour legislation was disliked by a substantial majority ofthe French according to opinion polls, many of whom saw it as theunwelcome introduction of further neoliberal economic measuresalong Anglo-American lines.

I have attempted to indicate various characteristics of the generalclimate in which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere are now working,some conducive and some less conducive to the positive reception oftheir work. But in order to situate these writers in a preliminary fashionin the modern history of French political thought and to begin to con-struct the discursive parameters of the book in a more nuanced fashionI 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 openinglines of this chapter. With a strong tradition of revolutionary caesurain the realm of political practice, neither liberalism nor social democ-racy properly took root in France, and both broader politicaldevelopments and intellectual life itself were dominated by bodiesof thought which emphasized such notions as emancipation, salva-tion and total change. The heritage of 1789 was expressed in andreinforced by the revolutions of 1830, 1848, the Paris Commune of1871, the strikes and factory occupations of April-May 1936, therevolutionary impetus borne of resistance to Nazi Occupation 1940—44, and the uprising of May 1968, to mention but the most obviousinstances of revolt and uprising. This meant that political thought


was predominantly revolutionary or republican on the left, and on theright nationalist and often with elements of anti-Semitism. As a con-sequence of this radicalism on both left and right there was only aweak tradition of liberal political thought.

In the three decades following the Second World War, France wasindeed the land par excellence of Marxist-influenced work in philoso-phy and other areas of intellectual activity, including history, anthro-pology, semiology, discourse analysis and literary theory. Taking theiconic example of Jean-Paul Sartre, notwithstanding his philosophi-cal complexity he wrote in such a way that the conditions of the mate-rial world and the urgency of changing that world were constantlypresent, and Sartre himself was famously politically active. This isnot the place for a fuller exploration of the intellectual engagement ofthe postwar years, which has been adequately described elsewhere.But suffice it to say that from 1945 to the early 1970s Sartre and laterAlthusser were but the best-known proponents of a much largerMarxist and quasi-Marxist constituent which took for granted theintimate relationship between theory and practice as expressed by his-torical materialism, and the Communist Party dominated in terms ofleft party politics (e.g. d'Appollonia 1991, Drake 2002, Spaas 2000).

During this postwar heyday of thought inspired by Marx, fewwould have predicted that by the early 1980s Paris could be convin-cingly described by Perry Anderson (1983: 32), in his oft-quotedphrase, as the 'capital of European intellectual reaction'. By this timea reaction against left, committed thought was indeed well under-way. With the zeal of the converted, the ex-Maoist New PhilosophersBernard-Henri Levy, Andre Glucksmann and Christian Jambert hada brief heyday and argued that the left had no plausible explanationfor the Gulag. Then in a more sustained and serious way the prolificbut until then largely ignored liberal political philosopher RaymondAron enjoyed a belated and before long posthumous promotion to theposition of father of modern French political liberalism, with Alexis deTocqueville and Benjamin Constant as rediscovered grandfathers.In the meantime, quite an array of writers made their careers on thestrength of rewriting the modern history of either French thought orthe lives and times of French intellectuals, in terms which sought toshow how mistaken, irresponsible and ultimately futile were attempts


by politically committed intellectuals of the left to unite communist-

leaning political activism on the one hand and intellectual activity on

the other. The former Communist Francois Furet published his anti-

Marxist Interpreting the French Revolution (1981 [ 1979]) and many other

books of revisionist historiography, including Dictionnaire des oeuvres

politiques (ed. 1989, 1995) and The Pas sing of an Illusion: The Idea of Com-

munism in the Twentieth Century (1999 [1995]). Furet and his collabora-

tors succeeded in writing a new, revisionist agenda for the study of

French — and by implication Russian and other revolutionary — his-

tory, arguing that several generations of eminent historians had them-

selves gone very astray and had profoundly misunderstood the nature

of historical change. According to Furet's revised historiography, the

revolution of 1789 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 impor-

tant 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 1978, 1988, 1995a,

1995b). One had to conclude, then, that all revolutions — 1789,

1848, 1917 — 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 Khilnani

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, Ray-

mond Aron and Albert Camus held - again quoting the title - the

'burden of responsibility' for keeping the liberal candle burning

(Judt 1992, 1998; Khilnani 1993). Mark Lilla has also strived to pro-

mote 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 2001).

Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut sought to consign what they choose to

describe as La Pensee 68 — primarily Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu and


Lacan — to the recycling bin of history, attempting to deal a blowagainst structuralism and poststructuralism and any other thoughtassociated in their eyes with the activist upturn around May 1968(Ferry and Renaut 1985). All this apparently pioneering franco-liberal exploration, archaeology and revisionism by intellectual andsocio-political historians, historiographers and political theorists whowere determined to cast the past and therefore the present in a newand very different light, seemed to some to be in perfect harmonywith the Mitterrand era. After the U-turn of 1982, when the Socialistsin government discovered the virtues of free enterprise and centre-oriented government, the Communist Party declined rapidly, thetrade unions were less militant than they had been for many years,and Frangois Furet, Pierre Rosanvallon and Jacques Julliard wereable to declare triumphantly in their popular account of sea changesin society, politics and public opinion (1988: 11): 'we have falleninto line'. It is worth noting in passing that even this alleged 'end ofFrench exceptionalism' was described in the form of grand gestureson the part of intellectuals keen to champion the — in this case — pro-pragmatic and 'post-conflictuaP cause.

Despite the recent signs of increased left combativity in France, andinternationally, and despite some other scholars pursuing a moreradical left agenda than many, the general intellectual and politicalbackdrop against which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere producedtheir most important work was one characterized by increasing intel-lectual 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 dis-cuss is the predominance of philosophy over other disciplines in Marx-ist or quasi-Marxist thought. In Perry Anderson's influential study ofWestern Marxism he points out that European Marxist intellectualsgradually abandoned any serious theoretical exploration of economicor political structures and concentrated almost to the exclusion ofother areas on philosophy (Anderson 1976: 49—74). This was, inciden-tally, the reverse of Marx's own trajectory, who began his intellectualcareer in philosophy and spent the most productive years of his lifeexploring political economy. Moreover, the vast majority of thesephilosophers worked in universities for a large part of their career,


including Lukacs, Lefebvre, Goldmann, Korsch, Marcuse, DeliaVolpe, Adorno, Colletti and Althusser. The reasons for this predomi-nance of professional philosophers in Western Marxism are, Andersonargues, threefold. Most importantly, the progress of the struggle forsocialism suffered many setbacks from the 1920s onwards, discoura-ging serious study of material questions and encouraging a preferencefor the abstract; the rise of fascism and the outbreak of the SecondWorld War, the degeneration of the USSR and the onset of the ColdWar might be included amongst such obstacles. Next, the publicationfor the first time in 1931 of Marx's Paris Manuscripts of 1844 and theirtranslation into French in 1933 persuaded many scholars that in orderto understand historical materialism one needed to understand thephilosophical lineage of Marxism, and in particular the relationshipbetween Marx and Hegel. This reinforced a tendency towards philo-sophical exploration and prompted multiple returns to intellectualhistory before Marx, not only to Hegel but also to Spinoza, Kantand Rousseau. Finally, the practice of the French and other Commu-nist Parties, which for many years identified so closely with the SovietUnion, was often determined by the needs of the increasingly tragicparody of socialism in the USSR, so intellectuals in search of a truerMarxist heritage were further attracted to abstraction — ultimately toideas measured solely against other ideas — instead of properly takingon board the rigours and controlling influence of politics in the mate-rial world. This increasing specialization in the discipline of philoso-phy, 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 specia-lists communicated with other specialists, and as Marxist intellectualstended to have less and less contact with ordinary working people.

I would agree with Anderson's general thesis, which helps explainthe trajectory of some post-Marxist and non-Marxist Europeanthought as well as that of Marxism itself. But I would nevertheless sug-gest that this retreat into the more abstract forms of intellectualendeavour and withdrawal from the testing grounds of the materialworld was not entirely damaging for the history of Western Marxism.If the perceived needs and at any rate the instructions emanating fromthe Eastern bloc were increasingly unlike those that fuelled the 1917


Revolution, philosophical reflection and the retreat into the academywere to an extent to serve as a protective shield from the caricature ofcommunism that the USSR and its satellites increasingly became.Thus to some extent the growing importance of philosophy helpedprotect intellectuals from a more pragmatic adaptation to eitherStalinism or for that matter to outright support for capitalism.

The work of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere is in each case primarilyphilosophical, or at least strongly informed by philosophy. Badioustaunchly defends philosophy as an intellectual tool of primary impor-tance, and is concerned with how philosophy is able to both throwlight on and draw inspiration from politics, art, science and love.Balibar combines an interest in the philosophy of Marxism and itsantecedents with interests in issues regarding rights and other aspectsof politics. Ranciere's interests span aesthetics, film and history, aswell as politics, and his starting point for political theory is philos-ophical reflection, often incorporating references to classical anti-quity. Arguably, one of the strengths of this approach is preciselythat, as philosophers, they are more remote from material concernsthan, for example, many political theorists working in academic poli-tics departments, or practitioners of politics such as trade unionists,elected representatives of political parties and civil servants. Theyare thus less likely to have been swayed by the profound disillusion-ments of many others of the 1968 generation. If they are, as wemight suggest, now appealing to a new generation of intellectuals andactivists who have been radicalized by anti-racist movements, anti-corporate globalization movements and ecology movements, theirthought is as much influenced by other thought as by concrete events.But in this process they have resisted some of the excessive conces-sions to either Stalinism or liberalism.

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


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

The third general aspect of French thought since 1945 I wishto mention is the rise and dominance of structuralism and post-structuralism. In the broadest of terms, and without even attemptingto distinguish between structuralism and poststructuralism (whosedistinction is anyway made far less in France than in the English-speaking world), I want to raise the question of whether this intellec-tual tendency is in the tradition of the emancipatory philosophicaltradition or not. I have already pointed out that amongst the authorsI identify as contributing to a renewal of left thought, Harvey, Jame-son, Hardt, Negri and Zizek are each either influenced by aspects ofpoststructuralism or draw on theory which itself can be described asstructuralist or poststructuralist. Some of those who are thought ofas being at the heart of this, including Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault,Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva, have positioned themselves in supportof minority groups and the women's movement, so associated withprogressive politics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first cen-tury. However, as I have argued elsewhere at greater length (Hewlett2003: 127—35), the rise of structuralism and poststructuralism shouldbe understood in part in the context of a certain de-politicization ofintellectual life, or at least the decline of the left, in France since theearly 1970s. I will illustrate this view only briefly. As far as descrip-tions of society are concerned, it is perhaps in Jean Baudrillard'swork that this sort of approach becomes most extreme, where imagesare omnipresent and the distinction between the concrete and repre-sentation no longer exists. But even Foucault, well known for takingstands in favour of the anti-nuclear and gay movements in the1960s and 1970s, portrays power as so diffuse that it becomes veryhard to locate at all, and therefore it would seem difficult to resist(e.g. Foucault 1980). Jean-Frangois Lyotard's argument in ThePostmodern Condition (1984 [1979]) is no doubt the clearest exampleof a break with the emancipatory tradition, where the 'grand narra-tives' of the past, associated strongly with the Enlightenment, are,according to Lyotard, decreasingly relevant; contemporary realityhas become so diffuse, fragmented and heterogeneous that it is impos-sible to make generalizations about it, including ones relating to


transformation. Alex Callinicos, in Against Postmodernism (1989), hasargued that far from being a system of thought which was part of thelegacy of May 1968, postmodernism is more accurately described aspart of the failure of 1968. In a more recent book, he argues that' [o] nesub-theme of postmodernism is that social critique - which dependson the possibility of transcendence, since it thematizes the limitationsof existing social relations and therefore if only implicitly adverts tothe necessity of surpassing these relations - is no longer possible'(Callinicos 2006: 4). This is a debate which will and should continueand it will be clear that my own position is close to that of Callinicosand other left critics (e.g. Dews 1987 and Starr 1995). I suspect that asubstantial renewal of activism and the material circumstances whichencourage the left would make much debate within poststructuralismseem poorly grounded, rather irrelevant and indeed the result of arelative detachment of intellectuals from political struggles ratherthan any sort of reflection of them. For the time being, suffice it tosay that whereas the explicitly praxis-oriented thought of the immedi-ate postwar period left no doubt as to the link between intellectualactivity and political activism — if one espoused Sartre's thought onewas virtually obliged to at least believe in the necessity for left politi-cal activism - much poststructuralist thought does not do this.Although poststructuralism is intrinsically radical in its method, itspolitical consequences are not necessarily radical by any means.Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere each, in their own ways, substantiallydepart from what has become known as poststructuralism. However,as we shall see, all three are either influenced by this tradition orengage with it in one way or another. Badiou engages in a ratherambivalent fashion with Deleuze, Ranciere is influenced by decon-struction, and Balibar by Derrida. However, each is certainly moreobviously aware of the contemporary political conjuncture than themajor exponents of poststructuralism.

The legacy of Louis Althusser

Louis Althusser had a formative influence on the writers underconsideration 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 with-out a subject is admirable', if flawed in many ways (AM 67—76).Ranciere in particular defined himself against Althusser from thelate 1960s, a reaction which had an important influence on thecourse of his own thought. Balibar's work, on the other hand, oftenhas strong and more positive echoes of Althusser's. These relation-ships to Althusser will become clearer in the chapters which follow,and here I confine myself to brief remarks regarding Althusser him-self. (Readers who are already familiar with Althusser's work maywish to skip this section.)

In the opening lines of For Marx (1969 [ 1965]: 21) Althusser arguesthat for Marxists philosophical enquiry was 'essential if we are toemerge from the theoretical impasse history has left us in' and ReadingCapital (1970 [1965]) is indeed one of the most serious philosophicalinterpretations of Marx's mature work that have been written. It out-lines a theory of political economy as a structure which is complex andover-determined and constructs an anti-Hegelian interpretationwhich challenges what the authors see as the mistaken, teleologicalapproach 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 Marx-ism (or more accurately Marxism-Leninism), which proposed a newversion of historical materialism as the science of the history of socialformations. Seeking a return to a more explicitly class-based Marx-ism, he was writing against, in particular, the interpretations ofMarx 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 domainvis-a-vis a certain reality. Philosophy represents politics in thedomain of theory, or to be more precise: with the sciences - and viceversa, philosophy represents scientificity in politics, with the classesengaged in the class struggle. (Althusser 1971: 64-5)

Put more simply: 'Philosophy is, in the last instance, the class strugglein theory' (Althusser 1973: 11).


Althusser was insistent that there was a substantial and crucial dif-ference between the young Marx and the mature Marx. He arguesthat in Marx's early writings, which were enjoying much positiveattention in the postwar period in France, Marx had not broken philo-sophically with Hegel, and the thesis contained within the early writ-ings that Man was alienated and would later achieve self realizationwas pure ideology rather than rational analysis. But in Marx's workstarting from The German Ideology (with Engels, 1970 [1932]) and theTheses on Feuerbach (1968a [1888]), there emerged a true science of his-torical materialism (both these works were written in 1845 and bothremained unpublished for some time). In fact, this 'epistemologicalbreak', as Althusser describes it, was a scientific revolution in therealm of history just as significant as the development of mathematicsin Greek antiquity and Galileo's pioneering work in scientific physics.

Althusser's theoretical innovations are without a doubt morenuanced than the way in which they emerged from the heated debatesof the 1960s and 1970s and his posthumous works have on the wholeserved to portray a more subtle philosophical and political analysisthan those seen during his lifetime. However, at risk of simplificationfor the sake of concision, some of the other main aspects of his readingof Marx and further elaboration of historical materialism can be sum-marized as follows.

Again in For Marx, Althusser declares his intention to 'draw a line ofdemarcation between Marxist theory and the forms of philosophical(and political) subjectivism which have compromised it or threatenedit' (Althusser 1969 [1965]: 12). By the time Marx wrote Capital, hecould no longer be regarded as a thinker who emphasized the role ofthe subject in history and humanist interpretations of his later workswere highly misleading. In fact, history was a 'process without a sub-ject or goal' and he argued that '[t]o be dialectical materialist, Marx-ist philosophy must break with the idealist category of the "Subject"as origin, Essence and Cause, responsible in its interiority for all the deter-minations of the external "Object", whose internal "Subject" it iscalled' (Althusser 1973: 94). The role of the individual in history,he argued, is one where s/he embodies the process but is not a subjectof history itself. Althusser pursues this argument by suggesting thatin relation to the capitalist mode of production, individuals are its


agents, whether capitalist or worker, and whether in support of oragainst capitalism. This certainly does not mean the individual isunable to think or act politically; far from it. But it does mean thatdifferent types of individuality are peculiar to different modes of pro-duction and this is not general individuality. The specific form theseindividuals take is greatly inflenced by ideology.

It is precisely in his exploration of the nature and role of ideologythat Althusser made the most enduring contribution, at least fromthe standpoint of the beginning of the twenty-first century, and this isthe aspect of his work that has perhaps had the most enduring influ-ence on Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere. In his powerful and highlylucid essay entitled 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.Notes towards an Investigation' (in Althusser 2001 [1971]: 85-126),Althusser begins by arguing that in order to be sustainable, capitalistsocieties must enable the reproduction of labour power, including the'reproduction of its subjection to the ruling ideology or of the "prac-tice" of that ideology' (89). In other words, in order to be compliant,labour must believe in the system they are playing a crucial role inpropping up, via a complex mix of, for example, religious, ethical,legal and political ideologies. Certainly, the capitalist ideologicaledifice is determined (in two famous phrases) 'in the last instance'by the economic base, as Marx argued on many occasions, but thesuperstructure is nevertheless 'relatively autonomous' from the base.In this scheme of things, the capitalist state plays a crucial role inhelping perpetuate an ideology that is conducive to the interests ofcapitalism via Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), which includeschools, the family, the mass media, and 'the cultural ISA', whichincludes literature, the arts and sports (96). The traditional Marxist-Leninist view of the role of the capitalist state as one of repression andultimately violence, in particular on the part of the army, the police,the courts and prisons, is not wrong. But it needs to be supplementedwith a theory of ideology. Whereas the Repressive State Apparatuses(the army, the police, and so on [RSAs]) function primarily 'byviolence', ISAs function first and foremost 'by ideology', althoughthere is often an element of ideology supporting RSAs and an ele-ment of repression supporting ISAs (97—8). Add to this Althusser'sadoption of elements of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory in a section


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

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

Althusser's polemic against what he regarded as historicist and tel-eological versions of Marxism was influenced in part by Claude Levi-Strauss' structuralist anthropology, and possibly to a greater extentby Spinoza. On the whole, and despite the exaggeration of his posi-tions to which his critics were prone (especially Thompson 1978), itis probably fair to label Althusser's thought 'structural Marxism'.Just as importantly, however, it is necessary to emphasize that hispositions should be seen in the context of his long-term membershipof, but marginal political position within, the PCF. Althusser joinedthe Party in 1948 and from 1956, the year of the Twentieth Congressof the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, international commun-ism was in crisis; it became increasingly clear that the Soviet Unionitself had not only compromised many of the principles and goalsupon which it was founded, but had achieved the particular socialand governmental order which existed in the country by means ofthe most terrible repression. In the European Communist Parties,domestic politics as well as international outlook had become evermore preoccupied with the particular needs of the Soviet Unionrather than considerations regarding the progress of communism ona world scale, a development which would lead European CommunistParties to the systematic compromise with social-democratic govern-ment. Althusser's declared aim was to find once again a revolutionaryform of Marxism in both theory and practice, which included sympa-thy with Maoism, and he argued for example that the Cultural Revo-lution was implicitly a left critique of Stalinism. In 1978 Althusser


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

The above remarks on some key aspects of Althusser's thought areintended to help understand over the course of this book the ways inwhich Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's thought has developed, both interms of the influence of Althusser and reaction against him. For thetime being, suffice it to say that Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere allshare characteristics which relate them directly to Althusser. Mostobviously, they each take an approach which is informed by a back-ground in philosophy. Next, they each have strong views on thenature of the human subject, which become an integral part of theirsystems of thought. They are also each intensely political, to theextent that they are part of the tradition of praxis, as discussed towardsthe 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 arguablyAlthusserian Marxism — on what are sometimes important points.

Concluding remarks

I have attempted in this introductory chapter to suggest some of theintellectual and political contexts and parameters which help under-stand the nature and development of the thought of Badiou, Balibarand Ranciere. This is in keeping with both my and their view that inorder to understand thought, and in order to judge its relevance(which is arguably part of the same process), some discussion is neces-sary of the material and ideological-intellectual conditions of its pro-duction. I will return to many of the themes discussed in thisintroductory chapter as we proceed through the book, and will onceagain address some of the questions raised in this chapter in the book'sconclusion.

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


readers who have little familiarity with him, together with some dis-cussion of what I regard as overall problems, relating in particular toBadiou's ontology and his failure properly to explain movement andchange. Chapter 3 explores Badiou's theory of politics in more depthand covers a wider range of areas of his political thought. I then turnin Chapter 4 to an examination of Ranciere's theory of politics, adopt-ing this sequence mainly because of the direct comparability betweensome important aspects of Badiou's and Ranciere's thought. Thissequence also allows the two thinkers with the more totalizing viewof the world and of philosophy to be examined side by side. In Chap-ter 5 I examine what I regard as the key aspects of Balibar's thought,arguing that it is important to understand his political positions sincethe early 1980s in order to understand his thought. Both Badiou andRanciere ultimately position themselves at a considerable distancefrom the lived reality of politics and this weakens their ability toforge a wholly relevant theory of politics. Balibar, on the other hand,despite profound insights in some areas, ultimately fails to reconcile abody of theory strongly influenced by Marxism with a more terre-a-terre orientation towards the real world of liberal democratic politicswhich 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 powerfulthinkers of our time and his thought is only beginning to receive theattention it deserves. His project is profoundly innovative, radical andcontemporary, yet he is at the same time committed to some of thecentral concerns of classical philosophy. He defines philosophy insuch a way that it is intimately connected with and dependent uponissues of our time, but argues that the Platonic concerns of truth andbeing are the sine qua non of philosophical enquiry. His influences arevaried and include Plato, Lacan, Sartre, Althusser, Mallarme andRousseau, but in the key area of the political he is clearly just as influ-enced by his own activism on behalf of exploited groups. Badiou is instrong and forthright disagreement with the central figures of post-structuralist thought such as Lyotard and Derrida and more generallywith proponents of the linguistic turn and notions of the Other. Butwhilst he condemns the 'sophistry' of poststructuralism he is no morepart of either the analytic or hermeneutic folds, also criticizing con-temporary philosophers such as John Rawls who are persuaded bythe central importance to thought of human rights and individual lib-erties. His relationship with Marx is more difficult to categorize, anddespite - or perhaps because of - the extraordinarily broad scope ofhis theoretical references, he has not yet undertaken a systematicengagement with Marxism. Above all, Badiou seeks to exploremomentous change in the form of what he describes as evenements,and the consequences of these events, which are both of universal rele-vance and defined in a highly subject-oriented way. Such events onlytake place in the realms of science, art, emancipatory politics andlove, and human beings can only fully become subjects when actingin a way which is faithful to an event. Badiou's thought is political tothe core, in that it explores the commitment, orfidelite, of a subject or

Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 25

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

Badiou's thought is highly original to the extent that it is notstrongly influenced by one particular school of thought to the nearexclusion of others; it breaks out of previously existing moulds, pursu-ing a line of enquiry which often resorts to first principles and does notconform strictly to any particular lineage. He insists that in order tohave an understanding of philosophy we need to have some grasp ofthe history and current state of its own 'conditions', which are alsoscience, art, emancipatory politics and love. He staunchly defendsthe autonomy of philosophy, arguing that many modern philosophershave wrongly abandoned metaphysics, and that in order to compre-hend virtually anything we need to develop an understanding of thenature of truth. He defends philosophy from, for example: party poli-tical concerns, popular culture and other sorts of trivialization (orsuperficial manifestations) of contemporary reality (MP). It shouldalso be said at the outset that, by contrast with much Western philo-sophy of the late twentieth century, Badiou takes ontology, or thescience of being, very seriously. For him, ontology is mathematicaland in order to understand the special nature of the event and whyit is literally extraordinary, we must have recourse to set theory, aselaborated by Georg Cantor. Only by taking this route can we under-stand why the event is so central to an understanding of the world andhow it relates to subject, truth and being.

Thus, Badiou's complex Weltanschauung draws on a wide range ofphilosophical and other traditions and puts together elements whichhave not been matched in the same way before, with the inevitablecorollary that there is to an extent a new language. Indeed, it wouldbe difficult to overstate the breadth and ambition of his philosophicalproject which, whatever conclusions one might wish to draw regard-ing its usefulness, is certainly groundbreaking. As Peter Hallward(2003:xxiii) puts it, 'Badiou's work is today almost literally unread-able according to the prevailing codes — both political and philoso-phical — of the Anglo-American academy.'

Badiou's intellectual and political trajectory can be summarized asfollows. He was one of the founder members of the Parti socialisteunifie (PSU) in 1958, whose creation was largely a response to the


active or tacit collusion by large parts of the French left with the gov-ernment's war against Algerian nationalists in the struggle fornational liberation. He was part of the Lacano-Althusserian Cahierspour Vanalyse group in the 1960s and was profoundly influenced bythe student and workers' revolt in May 1968, an uprising which hashad a key influence on his thought and to which he frequently refers.In 1968 he co-founded the Maoist splinter organization, the Uniondes communistes de France marxistes-leninistes (UCFML) and con-tinued to act and write as an orthodox Maoist during the 1970s, up toand including his Theorie du sujet, published in 1982. In 1988 Badioupublished UEtre et I'ev eminent, which can be seen in part as a majorrebuttal of the postmodern idea that philosophy itself no longer hadanything to say in terms of universal values, and had become a merereflection of developments in other spheres. This work effectivelyestablished Badiou's philosophy as being independent from othermajor modern schools (although there were clear and acknowledgedinfluences of a number of other thinkers) and it is here that he elabo-rates at length his argument that mathematics, and in particular settheory, offers the most useful model for understanding the nature ofbeing. Badiou has been politically active in defence of oppressedgroups since 1968 and since 1985 has been a leading member of thesmall, 'post-party' political organization, simply called Organisationpolitique, which intervenes directly in a variety of campaigns aroundissues such as housing, immigration and rights at work and pub-lishes a regular bulletin, entitled La Distance politique. In addition tohis numerous philosophical works he has published novels, playsand the libretto of an opera. In this chapter I examine what can bedescribed as Badiou's mature work, that is his philosophy fromUEtre et I'evemment onwards, a period which is generally thought ofas post-Maoist, although traces of Maoism are still found in thelater Badiou.

Badiou is reasonably well known in France, at least within aca-demic and intellectual circles concerned with left philosophy orpolitics; he has taught philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieuresince 1999 and before that taught at the University of Paris VIIIfor thirty years. Neither in France nor elsewhere, however, hasBadiou received anything like the attention enjoyed by intellectuals


associated with postmodernism, in particular Derrida and Lyotard.The very richness, originality and volume of Badiou's work and thefact that one can take little for granted in terms of philosophical pre-cedent is, paradoxically, one of the reasons he is relatively little knownin Britain and the USA. The English translation of his major work todate, UEtre et I'ev eminent, was published in 2005, more than fifteenyears after its original publication in France, and other, shorterworks have appeared in English translation recently. There is begin-ning to be a serious interest in and engagement with his work, parti-cularly perhaps on the part of a younger generation of scholarswho are interested in looking outside both the traditional Marxistframework and poststructuralism, but are unwilling to accept theAnglo-American-influenced liberal alternative; they are, I wouldargue, convinced neither by the social implications nor the ethics-free logic of neoliberal economics, nor by the defensive individual-ism of political liberalism. They are keen to explore the legacy ofMay 1968 but do not feel obliged to take a position wholly in favourof orthodox Marxism and are drawn still less to the political cyni-cism that has become associated with poststructuralism. In short, thegrowing interest in Badiou is not only post-Soviet Union but also post-Cold War, and is informed by struggles against corporate globaliza-tion. Badiou stands in partial opposition to the combative melancholyof the 1980s and the early 1990s, without resorting to a philosophywhich largely responds to political developments; his thought iscarefully built on solid foundations and is therefore enduring. Perhapsas the star of poststructuralism begins to wane, intellectuals and acti-vists alike are once again becoming interested in bodies of thoughtwhich encourage approaches which offer radical alternatives to thestatus quo, although Badiou stresses that he has no clear vision ofan alternative future now it seems that communism is not a viablealternative. However we choose to interpret Badiou's rising popular-ity in the English-speaking world, we can be sure that his secondmagnum opus, Logiques des mondes, published in 2006, will take rela-tively little time to find its way into an English-language edition.

In the discussion below I take a particular interest in the politicalaspects (broadly defined) of Badiou's work. But just as importantly Ioffer a summary — with much inevitable simplification — of his


thought, without which the political aspects would remain unclearfor readers with little familiarity with Badiou's work. I then moveon to a brief critique of general aspects of the philosopy, in orderto prepare the ground for a more thorough critique of the politicalaspects of Badiou's work in Chapter 3. Because of the totalizing natureof his thought, it would make little sense to critically examine theexplicitly political aspects without giving reasonable attention tothe overall project. I begin by looking at Badiou's conception of thenature of philosophy itself, followed by an examination of his notionsof truth and the event, before identifying what I believe are prob-lems with his system.

The role of philosophy

Taken as a whole, Badiou's thought can be described as having twomajor and closely related objectives. It is first an elaborate assertionof the idea that the way to understand the world and to achieve self-realization is to intervene in it. Second, it is a robust critique of thevarious value systems and schools of thought which over the pastquarter-century in particular have sought to minimize the potentialfor large-scale change in favour of, at best, limited and partial pro-gress. He argues that philosophy must 'propose a principle of inter-ruption', rise above its current position of semi-subordination to theworld as it is and regain a necessary distance. Badiou's own contribu-tion, then, is no less than to 'interrupt' both contemporary philosophyand the world as it currently exists, and to 'rediscover a foundationalstyle, a decided style, a style in the school of a Descartes, for example'(IT 48-50). Philosophy should be 'open to the irreducible singularityof what happens, a philosophy that can be fed and nourished by thesurprise of the unexpected. Such a philosophy would then be a philo-sophy of the event' (IT 56).

An appropriate starting point for a more detailed discussion ofBadiou's work (and a place at which Badiou himself has chosen tobegin an exposition of it) is a series of comments on the climate inwhich 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 ofwhich is currently under such severe pressure that 'the very existenceof philosophy is at stake'. Revolt is under pressure because today's lifein the West does not make room for thought as revolt, both becausethe West declares itself already free - by contrast, advocates of theWest argue, with the enslavement of the rest of the world — andbecause everything is expressed in the form of commerce; the needfor revolt is apparently obsolete because commercial 'freedom' hasbeen achieved. As far as logic is concerned, life in the West 'is sub-mitted to the profoundly illogical regime of communications', whichconsists of the transmission of disconnected and incoherent state-ments, images and impressions so that 'mass communication presentsthe world to us as a spectacle devoid of memory'. There is little roomfor the pursuit of logic in such circumstances.

Flying in the face of many contemporary philsophical trends,and setting himself apart from a broad range of theorists, includingLevinas and Rawls, for example, Badiou asserts the importance ofuniversality. This is part of what puts him in a quite different categoryfrom many contemporary cultural theorists and analysts who dependon such notions as the Other and difference, notions and approacheswhich have influenced both the intellectual and political arenas, espe-cially campaigns in defence of minority rights. Examination of theuniversal is in hostile territory in the contemporary world becausethis world is so fragmented and specialized, especially as regards tech-nology, production and skills. One result of this fragmentation andspecialization is precisely that it is hard for people to see what mightbe universal, or 'valid for all thinking'. Finally, because people pay somuch attention to calculating what will make them more secure invarious ways, the important dimension of risk cannot develop; ourdesire for the known and the safe precludes decisions which involveelements of the unpredictable or the unknown.

Philosophy finds itself in hostile territory today, then, and its gen-eral task is to meet the challenge posed to it by the rule of merchan-dise, communication, technical specialization and a perceived needfor security.

All three major schools in contemporary philosophy, Badiouargues, 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 mainlyconcerned with interpretation. Next, analytic philosophy, inspiredby logical positivism and the later Wittgenstein, in particular seeksthrough the use of logic and grammar to analyse language and toseparate meaningful from non-meaningful utterances. Finally, thepostmodern orientation, borrowing from the other two, seeks todeconstruct and show we no longer have any use for the generallyagreed aspects of modernity: in particular the concepts of the histori-cal 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 mul-tiple, plurality and heterogeneity. Most famously, perhaps, Jean-Frangois Lyotard announces the 'end of metanarratives', includingthose of revolution, the proletariat and progress, thus denying philo-sophy any ability to totalize. More generally: 'Language games,deconstruction, weak thought, ruin of Reason, promotion of the frag-mentary, bitty discourse: all this argues in favour of a line of argu-ment which is sophistry, and leads philosophy up a blind alley' (C 76)Badiou argues that these three orientations — hermeneutic, analyticand postmodern — have two, on the whole undesirable, characteris-tics in common (IT 45—47). First, they each treat metaphysics asa thing of the past. 'In a certain sense, these three orientations main-tain that philosophy is itself situated within the end of philosophy, orthat philosophy is announcing a certain end of itself Despite theirprofound differences in many respects, both Heidegger and Carnapbelieve that the history of metaphysics is now closed and so doesLyotard, for example, in announcing the end of metanarratives,and in particular the end of the subject and of history. Another way ofputting this is that philosophy is no longer a search for truth, but asearch for the plurality of meanings. The other point that these orien-tations have in common is that they each put language centre-stage,which again implies that a contemporary quest for meaning replaces aclassical (and more valid) quest for truth.

These two characteristics — the declaration of the end of metaphy-sics and an emphasis on the importance of language — 'represent areal danger for thinking and for philosophy in particular', because


they do not allow philosophy to explore properly the realms of revolt,logic, universality and risk, as discussed above. If the notion of truth isabandoned, 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 frag-mented and incoherent nature of communication and does nothingto promote any type of universality; if it does not move away fromthis framework philosophy will be ever more an exercise in thedescription of language games.

In the initial essay of Conditions, entitled 'Le (re) tour de la philoso-phic elle-meme' ('The (re) turn of philosophy itself'}, Badiou goes alittle deeper into the argument that philosophy has lost its way.Many of today's thinkers believe that philosophy's history is comingto an end and the result is that philosophy is either grafted on to otherareas of activity — such as art, poetry, science, political action or psy-choanalysis — or philosophy is presented as being nothing but anaccount of its own history, a museum piece. So contemporary philoso-phy 'combines the destruction of its past and the empty expectation ofits future' (C 58). Philosophy must now break with historicism, withthe 'geneological imperative', and it must express itself without refer-ence to its own history. There should be an autonomous legitimationof philosophy, such as Descartes or Spinoza practised.

The modern sophists, according to Badiou, who present themselvesas 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 ofdiscourse, language games, or silent indication, pure 'showing' ofwhat is subtracted from the grip of language. Those for whom thefundamental opposition is not between truth and error or wander-ing [errance], but between word [parole] and silence, between whatcan be said and what is impossible to say. Or between pronounce-ments which have meaning and those which do not. (C 62)

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


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

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

By 'compossibility' (compossibilite] Badiou means 'possibility incommon'.

Badiou argues that events that have taken place in the realms ofscience, art, thought about love and politics allow for a much-neededrenewal of philosophy (MP 59). As far as science is concerned, theevent is the pioneering work of mathematicians who include in parti-cular Cantor and Paul Cohen, work which establishes the theory ofthe multiple. In the realm of love, the writings of Jacques Lacanhave altered this particular condition of philosophy. As far as politicsis concerned, the event is found in the historical sequence which runsroughly from 1965 to 1980. This comprises May 1968 (a crucialmoment for Badiou both personally and in terms of the way he under-stands politics), the Cultural Revolution in China, the Iranian Revo-lution against the Shah in 1980 and the workers' uprising in Poland alittle later (MP 65). By contrast with the situation when StalinistMarxism prevailed, 'philosophy is again possible precisely because itdoes not have to legislate on history or politics, but simply think thecontemporary re-opening of the possibility of politics, from the basis ofobscure events' (MP 66). Finally, in the realm of art, Badiou singlesout poetry in particular, because '[t]he poem is without mediation'and 'has nothing to communicate. It is only a saying, a declarationthat draws its authority only from itself (in Hallward 2003: 197)and is therefore of universal relevance. More specifically, the event isthe poetry of Paul Celan (MP 66). Badiou also singles out Beckett asespecially significant in the realm of prose writing (B). These are theevents which, in each of the generic procedures, should condition con-temporary philosophy and the challenge is precisely to remodel philo-sophical enquiry in terms that are faithful to these events (MP 69).


I would like to pause for a moment to comment on Badiou's over-view of the definition and practice of philosophy. One may well wishto agree with Badiou in suggesting that the three dominant schools ofphilosophy reflect the current state of the material world to suchextent that they militate against the distance philosophy needs for aproper engagement with transformative processes in the world atlarge. In other words these schools are each in their own way philoso-phies of the status quo. One might also want to welcome Badiou'sinsistence that it is the material world that conditions the develop-ment of philosophy, not the reverse. We might applaud his frontalattack on the slippery scepticism of much postmodern philosophyand its reluctance to take sides. But I would at this stage simply ques-tion the choice of the four generic procedures, which are also the con-ditions of philosophy. Badiou tells us that these are the only areas inwhich we are able to become subjects, but, short of mentioning thatphilosophical preoccupation with these areas goes back a long way,he does not explain why these and only these are the only four relevantrealms, the only realms in which individuals can become subjects. Theprecise reasons for this are not clear.

Moreover, given the lingering influence of Marx on Badiou's workand given an enduring concern to relate philosophy directly to thematerial world, it is odd that the economy plays no part in the corestructure of his scheme of things. There seems to be no residual influ-ence of Marx's political economy on the philosophical infrastructure,however much Badiou might condemn and combat the social effectsof today's all-pervasive, virtually unfettered drive for profits. He doesof course wish to avoid the pitfalls of exaggerated economic determin-ism, but allowing the economy no central place in the philosophicalscheme of things does seem to weaken his case, all else being equal.

Truth

I want to explore further this blend of ambition and modesty onbehalf of philosophy by looking at Badiou's conception of truth, theaspect of his system where this blend is perhaps best expressed:'the only question that philosophy is concerned with is that of truth,


not because it produces any, but because it offers a way of accessingthe unity of a moment of truths, a conceptual site where the genericprocedures are reflected as being compossible' (MP 18). Certainly,according to Badiou the notion of truth is under attack in contempor-ary philosophy (EB 10) and 'the idea of the End of philosophy is alsothe idea of the end of the category of Truth' (C 75).

It will be clear that Badiou's conception of truth is very far froma positivist one; he is emphatic that knowledge does not in itselfconstitute truth (e.g. MP 18). Neither is it Stalinist-Marxist, nor is itpostmodern, as postmodernism sets out to promote multiplicity andnon-universality of truth. We might add that it is not Foucauldianeither, as Foucault sought to explore the relationship between powerand truth in a framework where in any society there are many sorts ofpower relations and institutional arrangements which are associ-ated with multiple 'discourses of truth' (Foucault 1980: 92-108). ForFoucault the category of truth is often in a position of subordinationto power and has negative connotations, whereas for Badiou it isboth positive in nature and universal in its significance; by contrastwith Foucault's conception of truth, Badiou's cannot possibly be con-fused with ideology.

Truth in this schema is certainly universal, in keeping with classicalmetaphysics and central to Plato's concerns, by whom Badiou is influ-enced in this respect. On the other hand, for Badiou truth only occursin particular circumstances where there are three indissociable com-ponents of one process: an event, a subject of the event and fidelity tothe event on the part of the subject. A truth emerges thanks to thesubject or subjects who declare fidelity to an event and it is only indoing this that they become subjects. Truth, then, is not waiting outthere in the world to be revealed by learning, or by any other processfor that matter, but is created by individuals, either singly or ingroups, regardless of whether philosophy or any other branch of intel-lectual activity is taking any notice. The coincidence of truth and theevent (itself exceptional and rare [MP 17]) is perhaps the most con-troversial element of this approach, which Badiou expresses as fol-lows: '[A]ny truth has its origin in an event . . . Let us say that it isfutile to imagine that one can invent anything (and all truths areinventions) if nothing happens, if "nothing takes place but the


place" ' (PM 24). Put slightly differently: 'Something must happen,in order for there to be something new. Even in our personal lives,there must be an encounter, there must be something which cannotbe calculated, predicted or managed, there must be a break basedonly on chance . . .'(PH 124).

Bearing in mind that truth can only occur in the domains of politics,love, art and science, perhaps the most straightforward example wecan give is indeed in the realm of love between two individuals. Twopeople meet by chance and fall in love, they commit to each other onthe basis of this encounter (the event) and remain faithful to it. Theseindividuals may not be able to understand fully their mutual attrac-tion and commitment or be able to explain it to others. They mightnot have been able to predict such a development given what theyknew of themselves and each other before it happened. The faithful-ness to the event of their coming together might last for the rest of theirlives, or far less long. But having met each other and fallen in love, theindividuals embark upon a process of truth and self-realization as sub-jects in the only way possible, that is in fidelity to an event.

It is not possible to prove (in an empirical, positivist sense) that anevent has taken place, as the truth process associated with the eventonly exists through the active commitment of those who declare itsexistence and importance. It even eludes definition. Truth is thus pri-marily a matter of conviction, intervention and action, a processwhich allows us in the only way possible to enjoy self-realization assubjects. It occurs rarely and each manifestation of it is unique, butits significance is universal. Badiou's distance from positivism andempiricism is emphasized by frequent assertions that truth contrastsstarkly with knowledge, which is 'what transmits, what repeats'(IT 61, EE 269, C 201). In the normal course of things, if'nothinghappens', there can be knowledge and there can be facts, but truthcannot occur (MP 16—17). Drawing inspiration from Lacan (C 201),he describes the relationship between knowledge and truth thus:

[A] truth is always that which makes a hole in knowledge.This means that all is played out in the thought of the duo

truth/knowledge. This amounts, in fact, to thought about the rela-tion — which is actually a non-relation — between, on the one hand


post-evental fidelity, and on the other hand a fixed state of knowl-edge . . . The key to the problem is the way in which a procedure offidelity traverses existing knowledge, starting at this supernumerypoint which is the name of the event' (EE 361, italics in original)

So subjective is this conception of truth that it is not possible tosay exactly where a truth begins. An individual or individuals haveto make a 'wager' on the happening and a truth begins with an'axiom of truth', and a 'groundless decision' regarding the questionof whether the happening is in fact an event or not (IT 62). Therole of philosophy is to be a tool by which to access truths as theyoccur in the world at large. Badiou describes the relationship betweenphilosophy and truths in the realms of science, politics, art and love asone of 'saisie', meaning 'capture, taking, and also seizing, astonish-ment'; philosophy seizes these truths and philosophers are seized bythem (C 68).

One of Badiou's most enthusiastic and effective illustrations ofhis philosophy is found in his Saint Paul. Lafondation de I'universalisme.In this short book he argues that the road to Damascus experience ofthe apostle Saint Paul, when he comes to believe in the resurrectionof Christ and in its universal significance, is an excellent example of anindividual becoming a subject through a life-changing faithfulness toand belief in an event (in this case the resurrection): 'at the heart ofChristianity there is this event, situated and exemplary, which is thedeath of the son of God on the cross . . . All the parameters of thedoctrine of the event are found in Christianity' (EE 235). Badiou'sinterest in Saint Paul and his insistence that all the elements of thephilosophy of the event are contained in Christianity have led SlavojZizek to suggest that the barely hidden logic of his philosophy is areligious one (Zizek 1999: 127-70; also Bensaid 2001: 143-71). Zizekalso points out that religion is not one of the truth procedures, but isnevertheless the site for Badiou's most developed example of an event.This criticism would seem rather inappropriate, as the religiouscomparison is only one example among many, and Badiou makes itclear that the example of Saint Paul and Christianity is particularlypowerful because of the subsequent success of the Christian religionwhich is so crucially based on the universal significance of the event


of the resurrection generated by people acting in fidelity to it. If thereis an unexplained leap between the non-material and the material Iwould suggest that it is between Badiou's ontology and the materialworld, a point to which I return below.

Another, more worldly example of a process of event-subject-truthis found in relation to the May 1968 uprising, where those involved inMay and who subsequently remained faithful to it were also embark-ing on a process of truth which has universal significance. Badiou is inprofound opposition to the postmodern, anti-Platonic standpoint thatwe can no longer construct views about political action on timeless oruniversal truths of any kind, that the world can only be explainedor changed in far smaller chunks and far less radically than was oncethought possible. According to the ultimately highly conservativepostmodern line of argument, a project which has such 'metanarra-tives' as a key reference point is bound to lead to totalitarianism ofsome kind, as happened on both left- and right-wing versions of suchideologies in the twentieth century. The theoretical consequence ofthis argument is that relativity abounds, the political implicationsare that change must be minimal and driven by a clinging to thesafety of what is, as any grander schemes are both methodologicallyunsound and profoundly dangerous. Badiou's philosophy is in part abold, elaborate and elegant rebuttal of this view, and an expression ofthe counter-view that a substantially better world inspired by radi-cally novel events in various domains is possible, and depends for itsrealization on the energy and commitment of forward-looking people.

The event, movement and change

From the point of view of emancipatory politics, the general idea ofthe event is inspiring because it suggests that the unexpected canhappen, that change is possible, even that tout estpossible. On a perso-nal, intuitive level the notion of the event is perhaps one of the mostappealing aspects of Badiou's system, partly because it addresses andintegrates as a central part of an explanatory framework the sheerwonder we might feel if we commit to something momentous: roman-tic love, an exciting political development, a work of art, philosophy


or literature, a baby . . . One can sometimes be at a loss to explain ahappening in terms that others will understand; one is lost for words.'It will therefore always be doubtful that an event has taken place,except for the one who intervenes, who decides on its belonging tothe situation' (EE 229). Highlighting the importance of subjectivecommitment to an event, perhaps with the elements of doubt, risk,surprise and inability to explain properly one's commitment, andmaking it central to a theory of transformative processes is appealingfor this and other reasons. But in my view this sort of feeling probablycannot be made part of the way we develop theories of transforma-tion, and more generally the notion of the event is the most proble-matic aspect of Badiou's thought.

Taking the example of the French Revolution, for Badiou this eventand all others must be seen as a happening which owed a large part tochance and contingency. The circumstances of French society at theend of the eighteenth century can be described using the knowledgewe have of it. We can understand the nature of land ownership, distri-bution of wealth, relations between classes, institutional arrange-ments for ruling the country, foreign relations, and so on, and we canexamine the intellectual debates of the time. But no amount of knowl-edge of the circumstances of the ancien regime, according to Badiou, willallow us properly to understand or explain the event of 1789 and whatfollowed (e.g. EE 201, EB 9). Rather, the revolution must be seen as asupplement to the 'situation' (a concept whose usage is informed byWittgenstein) in which it occurred and as an event whose truth wascreated by the commitment of men and women to the event, notonly while it was taking place but also in its aftermath. Not only wasthe French Revolution far more than the sum of its causal parts, but itcannot be properly explained through scrutiny of these parts. Badioumakes the same point about the May 1968 uprising, when the partici-pants were:

seized by what was happening to them, as if by something extraor-dinary, something properly incalculable . . . well beyond what anyone person might have thought possible — that's what I call aneventmental dimension. None of the little processes that led to theevent was equal to what actually took place . . . I simply think that


none of the calculations internal to the situation can account for itsinterruption, and cannot, in particular, elucidate this kind of breakin scale that happens at a certain moment, such that the actorsthemselves are seized by something of which they no longer knowif they are its actors or its vehicle [supports], or what carries itaway. . . (PH 124)

The strong element of surprise in the emergence of the event, andour inability to explain it in retrospect in terms of what alreadyexisted, is - although a familiar feeling to historians of May 1968in particular — perhaps the most difficult aspect of the event toaccept. (An event is 'purely chance, uninferable from the situation'[EE 215].) The event moves away from the repetition of the situa-tion and in Saint Paul Badiou stresses that 'it is the essence of the eventnot to be preceded by any sign, and to surprise us by its grace, howevervigilant we may be .. ."The day of the Lord will come like a thief inthe night" [Paul]' (SP 119). Put in more abstract terms, which hedescribes as 'the rock of my entire edifice', Badiou comments that'[i]f there is an event, its belonging to the situation of its site is undecidable

from the point of view of the situation itself (EE 202, italics in original).I will now raise some further questions regarding the nature of the

event. First, it is not clear how significant an event needs to be to qua-lify as an event. The examples Badiou gives tend, apart from in thedomain of love, to be generally agreed as being momentous (at leastin retrospect): the resurrection of Christ, the French Revolution of1789, May 1968, paradigm shifts in music, art, mathematics and soon. Badiou might reply that whether or not an occurrence becomesan event depends upon the response of individuals who might becomefaithful to it, but he also suggests, as we have seen, that an event is rareand exceptional. This raises the question of whether someone who fre-quently and fleetingly falls in love, for example, in what others mightconsider to be a superficial way, is responding to (or rather creating) a

genuine event and is therefore more (or more frequently) a subjectthan someone who does not do this. Can one practice fidelity andtherefore become a subject in relation to a 'trivial' event? An eventmust be of universal significance, but what exactly does this meanwhen it is defined so subjectively? Also, do the French enjoy more


'subjecthood' than the English because they are faithful to more revo-lutions than the British, say, who have arguably arrived at a compar-able socio-economic and political place without so many instances ofsudden, momentous change?

Next, it is still not clear to me why fidelity (generating subjecthoodand truth) must always be to an event, rather than to a state of affairs.Is not love something that can emerge gradually, without an obviousstarting point, rather than as a coup defoudre? (Badiou is emphatic thatlove is not just sex, incidentally.) Is not an expression of fidelity to the1917 revolution as much shorthand for a commitment to a muchbroader process, a particular view of the world and set of emancipa-tory aspirations, which need not be expressed in terms of fidelity to anevent at all, but can be put in terms of, say, fidelty to the aspirationsand processes of socialism or communism, however they might bedefined? Could we not in fact one day be faithful, in theory at least,to a (far more egalitarian and socially just) status quo, rather than toa dramatic point of change? Why must fidelity necessarily be to a per-haps disputed and/or somewhat arbitrarily defined point of departurefor what might become the status quo?

Some of Badiou's responses to these questions would no doubtemphasize the mathematical nature of his ontology, which again hederives in part from Lacan and which is a major focus of UEtre et Veve-nement. He is in search of the highest possible level of purity, which is asremoved as possible from the material, and for him this level ofabstraction is achieved by multiplicity as articulated by set theory.Philosophy has excluded maths for too long, he argues, in partbecause of its profound preoccupation with language, and must nowbecome re-involved with maths, not as a philosophy of mathematicsbut as philosophy which depends on and is conditioned by maths,which is accountable only to itself - it is axiomatic and does not inter-pret or represent - and is thus sovereign in an absolute sense. In par-ticular, Badiou's ontology is based on set theory as elaborated byGeorg Cantor, who radically redefined the relationship between thefinite and the infinite, and the relationship between the parts andthe whole. Being in these terms is pure multiplicity, and in set theorymultiplicity is multiples of multiples and nothing more. We candescribe Badiou's concept of the 'situation' as being the same as a set,


that is 'presented multiplicity' ('toute multiplicite presentee' [EE32]). The event, by stark contrast, does not belong to any existing setand belongs only to itself. It is a 'breakdown of the count' (PH 129).In Logiques des mondes Badiou uses the mathematics of category theoryto explain the nature of appearance (LM 419-47). I can accept thatall of this makes sense in terms of pure mathematics — which is whyBadiou believes maths is ontologically valid, because maths representsnothing but itself - and that set theory is used here as a paradigm. Butthere does not seem to be any convincing bridge from his mathemati-cal ontology to the emergence and operation of events (and subjects)in the various material realms in which they take place. In otherwords there seems to be little evidence that set theory actually worksas a paradigm for significant developments in the material world.Badiou asserts that set theory works, but fails ultimately to showhow; maths remains on one plane and eventmental developments onanother, parallel and apparently disconnected one. A subtractiveaccount of change might work in set theory, but is not convincing inthe real world, or at least not as the dominant explanation of generalchange. Instead, we need an account of change which explores con-stant movement and explains radical change as springing from — aswell as adding to - this process of constant movement. Badiou'ssystem is better at exploring the additional element in the form ofevent but fails to explain adequately the event's genesis because of anun-dynamic view of the status quo.

I would argue therefore that Badiou's explanatory framework is infact rather a static one which is not able to explain transformation atall. According to him, in the realm of the real the situation constantlyrepeats, and into this repetition bursts the event, which we cannotproperly explain in terms of the nature of the situation. Put slightlydifferently, knowledge is wholly disconnected from truth. Certainly,Badiou's account of the genesis of the event emphasizes the impor-tance of subjective commitment, of getting involved, but Badiou is sohostile to the idea that we might be able to understand the world withthe help of empirical evidence that the nature of 'what is' (facts,knowledge, the situation) seems to be taken out of the equation ofchange altogether. In his eagerness to assert the importance of post-eventmental, subjective intervention and the poverty of empiricism,


he throws out any proper explanation of the emergence of the event interms of the nature of the situation. The logic of this would seem to bethat we should not attempt to understand the world properly butshould wait until events happen and then act in fidelity to them. Cer-tainly, Badiou insists that we should not in fact wait for the event, andthat there are plenty of events in the past we can remain faithful to:'If everything depends on an event, should one wait? Certainly not.Many events, even very distant ones, still require that one acts in fide-lity towards them ... ' (SP 119). But the logic of his philosophy doesindeed seem to be that we are playing a waiting, reactive game.There seems almost to be an inverted teleology taking place here:instead of 'final cause' explanations, or history leading inexorablytowards one certain outcome, we seem on the contrary to be requiredto wait for the (inevitable) event which will push us forwards as longas we are faithful to it and work in favour of its consequences.

I would like for a moment to compare Badiou with two great the-ories of change, namely those of Darwin and Marx. Darwin's theoryof evolution through natural selection cannot be transferred directlyto human societies, but it is exemplary in its ability to explain meta-morphosis. It takes as its premise the idea that both the world of ani-mals and plants on the one hand and their environment on the otherare in a constant state of flux. Darwin goes on to make three general-izations in order to explain his theory. First, individual members of aspecies differ to an extent from one another. Second, these differencesbetween members of a species are to some degree hereditary. Third,animals and plants multiply at a rate which is faster than the environ-ment can cope with, which means many must die at an early stage(Darwin 1968 [1859]: 71-129). Putting these three generalizationstogether, Darwin puts forward the following model of change:

If during the long course of ages and under varying conditions oflife, organic beings vary at all in the several parts of their organisa-tion . . . if there be, owing to the high geometrical powers of increaseof each species . . . a severe struggle for life; then . . . I think it wouldbe a most extraordinary fact if no variation of life ever had occurreduseful to each being's own welfare . . . But if variations useful to anyorganic being do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised


will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life;and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to pro-duce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preserva-tion, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.(Darwin 1968 [1859]: 169-70)

I evoke Darwin's theory of evolution not because it is transferrableas a general theory of change to human societies, as I have said. But itdoes provide an excellent example - perhaps the example - of howorganisms in a constant state of flux can, precisely because of this cea-seless mobility, both evolve slowly and undergo substantial change.(What is missing in Darwin's account — a lacuna he fully acknowl-edges — is the process by which characteristics are inherited and bywhich organisms are eventually generated which are incompatiblewith other individuals with common ancestors; the answer to thiswas later provided by the science of genetics.) The seed of a particularchange, whilst not predictable in any precise sense, and not inevitablein its detail, is entirely contained in the logic of what is already inexistence (the 'situation' in Badiouian terms). Darwinism explainschange in terms which fully integrate an interpretation of the condi-tions of'what was' into 'what is now'.

Marx, meanwhile, uses a theory of political economy to inform anexplanation of historical movement and change, involving most cen-trally a contradiction between forces of production and relations ofproduction. The forces of production comprise all components of themeans of production and labour power, including such diverse ele-ments as machinery, the labour process and education of the workingclass. The relations of production, meanwhile, are the way in whichthe productive forces are owned (from an economic point of view), asystem of ownership investigated by Marx most fully, of course, undercapitalism, where the bourgeoisie owns the means of production andthe proletariat only its ability to work, or labour power. For Marx, theproductive forces in particular are constantly changing and tend tobecome decreasingly compatible with the relations of production of agiven time, which means social relations become more unstable. Thisis the core of his approach to the political economy of historicalchange, which he famously expresses thus:


In the social production of their life, men enter into definite rela-tions that are indispensible and independent of their will, relationsof production which correspond to a definite stage of developmentof their material productive forces. The sum total of these relationsof production constitutes the economic structure of society, the realfoundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure andto which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. Themode of production of material life conditions the social, politicaland intellectual life process in general . . . At a certain stage intheir development, the material productive forces of society comein conflict with the existing relations of production, or — whatis just a legal expression for the same thing - with the propertyrelations within which they have been at work hitherto. Fromforms of development of the productive forces these relationsturn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. (Marx1968b [1859]: 181-2)

For both Darwin and Marx the theories of the status quo (to theextent that there can be a status quo where there is constant move-ment) incorporate a theory of change within them. For both writers,the 'event' — for Darwin adaptation and for Marx social revolu-tion — takes place as a result of aspects of the 'situation' explained inlarge part by their more general theories of this ever-changing statusquo. For Badiou it is the other way round; something happens whichcannot properly be explained by reference to the already-existingcircumstances - 'the idea of massive change whose origin is a state oftotality is imaginary' (EE 197) — and becomes an event of significantproportions because someone or some people commit themselves towhat has happened. (Thus for Badiou an event cannot possibly bea natural event because there are no subjects in nature [EE 194].)In the case of Marx, the subject is certainly important to the extentthat without agents of revolution there can be no revolution, butrevolution in France for Marx, for example, was absolutely explic-able with reference to, in particular, the socio-economic contradi-tions under the ancien regime^ in conjunction with an understandingof, for example, political developments. Badiou might in both casesrespond by saying that the subject is absent from the cores of both


these theories of change. In the case of Darwin's theory regarding bio-logical change, this is of course the case and is not directly applicableto social change. As far as Marx is concerned, I would interpret histheory as allowing a substantial role for agency whilst insisting ondefinite tendencies in the development of human societies. Evenmore famously, Marx suggests that people make their own history,but within given circumstances.

In Logiques des mondes Badiou responds to criticism for having notheory of change beyond the event, no explanation of what happensin the normal, 'non-evental' order of things. He devotes many pagesto developing a more general explanation of change and takes usthrough the idea that there can be 'weak singularities' which areimportant instances of change which are less significant than 'strongsingularities', also called events. What he calls 'materialist dialectics'(la dialectique materialiste) is clearly intended to respond to those whoalleged his theory was, paradoxically, rather static and to thosewho accuse him of ignoring dialectics and not placing enough empha-sis on the material; the proximity of the term materialist dialecticsto Marx's dialectical materialism is entirely intentional, as is the dis-tancing transposition of the words. But there is still, apparently, nofully explained connection between the emergence of smaller changesand the emergence of the event, not, at least, in terms of the overalltheory of the emergence of the subject through fidelity to the event.

Concluding remarks

I will firstly summarize some important aspects of Badiou's philoso-phy. He sets out to challenge the fundamental assumptions of anumber of established schools of thought and individual thinkersand, by asserting a blend of universalism, intervention of the subjectand an argument in favour of the importance of the event, offers aradical, praxis-driven alternative to much contemporary Westernthought. In particular, Badiou takes postmodern philosophy to task,arguing that its declaration of the end of metanarratives, its relati-vism, its marginalizing of the role of philosophy itself and by implica-tion certain forms of political activism are all leading philosophy into


a blind alley from which it must now remove itself. But he has littletime either for any of the schools of philosophy which espouse formsof liberalism. I have suggested that Badiou succeeds in exposingmuch contemporary philosophy — postmodern and otherwise — asessentially a series of areas of intellectual activity which are unwillingor unable to engage with the material world in a way that offers amanner of thinking about changing the material world in anythingmore than the most modest and unthreatening ways. I have also sug-gested that his assertion of the importance of intervention in order toachieve understanding which in turn leads to further intervention is apersuasive line of argument.

I have also suggested, however, that the theory of the event, at thevery heart of Badiou's scheme of things, is problematic for a number ofreasons. Among these are, first, that Badiou is not able to explain thegenesis of the event from the status quo from which it springs. Second,I fail to see why we cannot act in fidelity to the status quo, or a process,or a series of aspirations, for example, rather than to an event. Third,and perhaps most importantly, sophisticated though Badiou's mathe-matical ontology may be, he does not seem to show convincingly thatset theory explains the world as it actually is, and more importantlyhow the world changes. I have suggested that in order to understandradical transformations — events — we need to have a theory of thestatus quo which describes an already-existing state of flux, whereasBadiou's status quo is rather static.

I hope to have prepared the ground for a more detailed examina-tion of Badiou's political thought in the next chapter.

Chapter 3

The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou'sTheory of Politics

Despite a strong conviction about the usefulness of philosophy qua phi-losophy and despite scepticism with regard to much of what todaypasses as political philosophy, the work of Alain Badiou is in impor-tant ways profoundly political. We have seen that, drawing on classi-cal philosophy, he explores at great length the question of truth,which according to him can only come about via the commitment —or fidelity — of a subject or subjects to an event which has taken place inone of the crucial realms of science, art, love or emancipatory politics.Indeed the realm of politics occupies a special place among the fourrealms where truth procedures can take place, as truth activity in thisdomain is necessarily collective — therefore universal — in its practiceas well as universal in its orientation, as are all truth procedures (AM155-6). Moreover, Badiou's core philosophy, involving the interplayof event, subject and truth, is in certain respects reminiscent of Marxand other revolutionary writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries, in that substantial change takes place where something seems atone stage to be of little importance and then in a process of revolutioncomes to matter a great deal; subjects act in ways which promote theimportance of the event and ways which run counter to the logic andthe spirit of the status quo. Using the language of historical changethrough struggle, then, the role of the activist or activists is crucial tothe process of radical transformation and in particular to the creationof a new status quo built on new bases; in more Badiouian, philosophi-cal terms, a subject's or subjects' fidelity to an event generates truth,which transforms the situation along egalitarian lines (whether it bein the domain of science, art, love or politics) for ever. Thirdly,Badiou's thought is profoundly political because it is influenced bymany years of his own political activism, discussed in Chapter 2.


In this chapter I concentrate on Badiou's theory of politics, whichin many ways contrasts greatly with the dominant intellectual trendsin contemporary France. He is in fundamental disagreement with andsystematically opposes intellectuals who have discovered or rediscov-ered Kant, Tocqueville and Rawls in order to lend authority to adefence of liberalism and the status quo and attacks on left politics.Indeed, he defends in uncompromising fashion the legacy and thespirit of combativity of May 1968, without any hint of the apology,mocking or irony that has permeated much discussion of the eventsof that year, both within France and beyond. He also strongly defendsthe validity of the notion of universalism and criticizes those who, inembracing the linguistic turn and promoting the importance of theOther, also often promote a cynicism towards left militancy. Badiounot only insists that a true event has universal significance andincludes in his totalizing system of thought phenomena as diverse asthe 1789 French Revolution, Cantor's set theory, Mallarme's poetryand Lacan's writings on psychoanalysis, perhaps making his theorythe ultimate metanarrative and the antithesis of any postmodernapproach to contemporary thought. He also argues that a true eventin any of the four realms is also necessarily egalitarian: 'the generic isegalitarian^ and all subjects are ultimately defined by the egalitarian'(EE 447). He is tireless in his condemnation of neoliberal economicsand the injustices which are so integral to it, frequently speaking outon national and international politics and social issues.

In what follows I examine Badiou's thought from a point of viewwhich seeks ultimately to come to conclusions regarding the transfor-mational potential of a theory which attempts both to explain and tohelp change the material world via an ambitious new philosophicalsystem. There is a claim in other words both of philosophy's useful-ness to the material world and of top-to-bottom coherence. My gen-eral argument is that whilst there is a lot to recommend individualaspects of Badiou's thought, in particular his emphasis on politicalcommitment and the importance of the human subject, there is alack of coherence between two major influences on his writings:the Platonic and idealist on the one hand and the materialist and acti-vist on the other. In keeping with this disjunction between the differ-ent aspects of his thought, it is perhaps his reflections on the less

The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics 49

philosophical areas — democracy, parliamentary politics, electionsand trade unions — that are the most problematic.

I begin with a more detailed examination of Badiou's notion of pol-itics as truth procedure. I then move on to consider his relationshipwith historical materialism and Marxism, followed by an examina-tion of his notion of democracy. I then explore his approach to someof the more conventional preoccupations of empirical social scientists,especially parliamentary politics. Finally, I address the question ofBadiou's political activism and suggest ways in which his conceptionof activism relates to his thought. Despite Badiou flying in the face ofthe conservatism of much contemporary French thought, his philoso-phy also bears the scars of the difficulty of maintaining a position onthe left with contemporary relevance in what has been for many yearsa hostile climate.

Politics, the event and truth procedures

As we have seen, Badiou's belief in the usefulness of philosophy andthe need to defend it against frontal attacks, marginalization or gra-dual erosion can hardly be overstated. However, he is highly scepticalabout the idea of political philosophy because philosophy is condi-tioned by politics (and by developments in the realms of love, art andscience) and so-called political philosophy cannot rise above politicsin order to understand it in the way contemporary liberal analystswould have us believe. What passes as political philosophy tends,then, not to question the status quo, but simply to reflect 'publicopinion', and entirely to miss the point that the only way in whichpolitics and thought can be linked is through examining the agita-tional nature of politics. Conventional political philosophy is there toencourage the watching of things political from the sidelines and isonly tenuously related to activist participation in politics. HannahArendt, for example, explores this form of political philosophy, put-ting discussion rather than action at the heart of her thought, thuspromoting parliamentary debate as the essence of politics. ForBadiou, by contrast, politics is primarily decision and intervention(AM 19—26). Badiou advocates what he calls 'metapolitics', which is


representation in thought of actual political acts, and for him this isthe valid way of exploring politics in the intellectual domain. Thisis not and should not be confused with subsuming philosophy as awhole to politics, where philosophy becomes simply a way of thinkingpolitics, which is quite wrong according to Badiou. He admits regret-fully that he did at one time indulge in this practice himself, in a clearreference to his orthodox Maoist phase (MP 57).

For Badiou true politics is something quite specific, short-lived andmomentous, which often involves a revolution or revolt of a collective,egalitarian and emancipatory nature, an irruption of positive politi-cal energy which may well take the form of an uprising or at least somesort of revolt against the established order (EB 19). '[P] critical truthalways begins in trial and trouble . . . in rupture and disorder' (AM114) and '[p] critical thinking always ruptures with the dominantstate of things' (IT 82). It is not only both rare and momentous, butalso, often ephemeral: 'What I call politics is something that can bediscerned only in a few, brief sequences, often quickly overturned,crushed or diluted by the return of business as usual' (BF 121).

The possibility of the impossible is the basis of politics. It is mas-sively opposed to everything we are taught today, which is that pol-itics is the management of the necessary. Politics begins with thesame gesture by which Rousseau reveals the basis of inequality:leave all facts to one side. (PP 78)

In short, true politics takes the form of an event. It seems to come fromnowhere, depends for its existence on the militant activity of peoplewho become subjects in the process of acting in fidelity towards theevent, and has universal significance.

Following his long-term activist and theorist friend SylvainLazarus, Badiou identifies four historical 'modes' as far as politics isconcerned: the revolutionary mode, from 1792 to 1794 in France andrepresented on an individual level by Robespierre and Saint Just; theclassist mode, from the publication of Marx and Engels' CommunistManifesto in 1848 to the Paris Commune in 1871; the Bolshevikmode, identified in particular with Lenin, running from the publica-tion of Lenin's What is to be Done? in 1902 to 1917; and finally the

The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou7 s Theory of Politics 51

dialectical mode, associated with Mao Zedong, which stretches from

the publication of Why is it that Red Political Power can Exist in China?

in 1928 to the end of the 1950s (AM 49; Lazarus 1996: 88-95). Each

mode contains proper political events and for example the revolution

of 1789 - and even more so the period between 1792 and 1794 -

constitutes a political event, true politics, as do many other revolu-

tions or revolts which are emancipatory and egalitarian in nature.

Included among these is the May 1968 uprising, which is a classic

example when activists were 'seized by what was happening to them,

as by something extraordinary, something properly incalculable'

(PH 125), and May 1968 is a revolt which 'transformed from top to

bottom the content and forms of ideological struggle and theoretical

investigation' (TC8).

When Badiou describes the political event as collective, he does not

simply mean that there are many people involved who share the same

goals; the term collective is a political and not a mathematical one.

The political event is necessarily collective precisely because it is poli-

tical and therefore has universal significance, by contrast with events

within the three other truth procedures: the mathematician needs

only one other person to agree with the validity of a mathematical

breakthrough; love only needs two people to act in fidelity to the

event of their falling in love; the artist needs no-one besides him-

self or herself (as a minimum) to act in fidelity to an artistic event

(AM 155-6). The political truth procedure, then, occupies a special

place among truth procedures because it is the 'only truth procedure

which is generic, not only in its result, but also in the local composition

of its subject' (AM 156).

In some respects the political event is appealing and convinc-

ing as an explanatory device, precisely because it tries to incorporate

more enigmatic and inexplicable developments into the grander

scheme of explaining change, making the political event much more

than the sum of its parts. After years of political argument and divi-

sion, a watershed political happening can unite former opponents,

make previous differences seem irrelevant, and inspire activists and

former non-activists alike to pursue the logic of the event. The fact

that for Badiou the event cannot be predicted adds to this inspira-

tional quality.


Badiou's system is thus very much a philosophy of praxis and assuch flies in the face of much contemporary political thought, inparticular political liberalism. His entire philosophical edifice restsupon the idea that transformations take place via the commitment ofindividuals and groups to a particular happening and that they some-times maintain this commitment through thick and thin, often in theface of criticism, derision, marginalization and sometimes punish-ment. Through their commitment to a particular cause, or in thejargon 'fidelity to the event', individuals and groups can changethe domain into which they are putting their energies for ever, creat-ing the possibility and legitimacy of something that had previouslybeen impossible and illegitimate. Badiou not only encourages usto believe in the legitimacy of loyalty to a revolutionary break -of uprising worked through to a thoroughly new state of affairs, ofbelieving in the lasting potential of an amorous 'coup de foudre',of committing to a radical new paradigm in art or to scientific break-through — he puts it at the very heart of his thought. Activism andcommitment are thus key elements of Badiou's system, not just desir-able, practical add-ons if time permits beyond intellectual pursuits;this is not the liberal model where the philosopher with a social con-science is impartial intellectual during the day and activist intellec-tual at night, working around one or two worthy causes. On thecontrary, in the tradition of Sartre and Althusser, Badiou's philosophyis a philosophy that invites an understanding of the world via thetaking of sides and defending a highly controversial view to the hilt;it is an elaborate exploration of practical partiality. In order to under-stand, one simply must intervene, both as activist and intellectual.

Perhaps the most striking difference between Badiou's philosophyand that of many other French theorists of the late twentieth centuryis his treatment of the human subject. For Badiou the subject plays acrucial role in the process of major change, because major changetakes place when and only when there is an event, a subject acting infidelity to an event and a truth process, all of which emerge as part andonly as part of the three-way process: event-subject-truth. Subject-hood, then, does not exist in relation to something as general as 'his-tory', or 'thought', for example; one is not a subject simply by virtue ofbeing part of a general historical process (and being a subject is thus


very different from most notions of agency) or because one is a think-ing being. Subjecthood comes only with being part of the truth processinvolved in acting in fidelity towards a new art form, a person withwhom the subject has fallen in love, scientific innovation or a momen-tous political happening. The subject, then, is as central as the eventitself to Badiou's philosophical system (and is indeed always foundalongside the event), and is by definition, to put it simply, committedto a cause of some description; this is the subject as activist, althoughnot necessarily political activist. Subjecthood is exceptional andextraordinary and certainly not the rule, or part of the normal wayof things. The subject is certainly not any and every individual, anordinary human being, any more than a truth is an empirically verifi-able representation of what is, what exists. However, any individualcan become a subject in the process of committing to a particularcause as part of a truth procedure, where subjects, truths and eventscreate each other.

Badiou's strong emphasis on the role of the subject thus very muchsets him apart from structuralist and much poststructuralist thoughtwhich has been so prevalent in France since it largely eclipsed Sartrein the early 1960s, and Badiou indeed conceives of disputes withinFrench philosophy in the late twentieth century primarily as conflictover the nature and importance of the human subject (Badiou 2005b).In his own work he brings the subject back to the very centre of thestage, as we have seen, and in a respectful but critical essay on Althus-ser, Badiou accuses his sometime mentor of failing to develop anytheory of the subject because Althusser deals only with processes,removing the subject entirely from his philosophy of Marxism andinstead ascribing the subject with a role only in relation to the capital-ist state; the Althusserian subject can only, according to Badiou, be abourgeois subject (MP 68). For Badiou the subject is quite the oppo-site; individuals and groups of individuals become subjects when theyare, in the broadest of senses, revolutionaries, when they commit to anextraordinary event and defend it to the hilt, altering the status quosubstantially and for ever.

To put it slightly differently, by contrast with deconstructionistphilosophers (and arguably Althusser as well), Badiou is greatly pre-occupied with a form of agency, but agency — in the form of radical


action on the part of someone (or some people) who becomes a sub-ject — is for him not part of the normal course of things. Instead, itcomes about as part of a chance encounter with an event towardswhich individuals decide to act with fidelity and which radicallychanges the situation in which they exist.

One problem with Badiou's conception of the subject is that, even ifone accepts subjecthood emerging amongst individuals who committo an event, the subject is only partially a subject in that s/he reacts toevents which Badiou tells us simply happen; the subject plays no partin causing the event. Badiou is thus still quite a long way from Sartre'sinterpretation of the subject where each individual is at liberty toshape their own destiny and bear the consequences of this course ofaction, and indeed in some senses compared with Sartre, Badioucomes closer to Althusser's notion of history as 'process without a sub-ject', precisely because for Badiou subjecthood is so uncompromis-ingly retrospective. A thorough theory of the subject lying betweenSartre's arguably excessively free individual and Badiou's after-the-event activist is, it would seem, still to be written, influenced more clo-sely perhaps by Marx's notion of human beings creating their ownhistory but within particular circumstances.

As with the event in relation to the subject in the other domainswhere truth procedures take place, there is in Badiou's reflections onthe political event a peculiar mix of the highly passive and highlyactive on the part of the subject of the event, whose own perspectiveis the only one which is of real note:

A political process is a chance fidelity, militant and only partiallyshared, to a singular event, which is legitimised only by itself. Theuniversality of the political truth which results from this processis itself only recognisable, like any truth, retrospectively, in theform of knowledge . . . the point from which a political process canbe thought, from where its truth can be recognised, is the actors'and not the spectators' . . . It is via Saint-Just and Robespierrethat one enters the singular truth of the French Revolution, fromwhere you can gain knowledge of it, and not via Kant or FrangoisFuret. (AM 33)


Thus before the event the subject-to-be does not yet exist as a subject,to the extent that he or she, or more accurately in the case of politicsthey, only create the event (and themselves as subjects) after it hastaken place. Once the event has happened the subject becomes crucialto the event's (retrospective) existence and significance: 'It willalways remain doubtful that an event has taken place, except for theone who intervenes' (EE 229). For a committed view of politics, andone which is arguably highly influenced by the notion of praxis, it israther odd that the role of the activist is so retrospective in relation tothe event and a matter of faith, rather than being one of planning acourse of (perhaps revolutionary) action and changing the world.For example, the Bolsheviks surely did not wait for the 1917 revolu-tion before behaving in a revolutionary manner and becoming agentsof change, and one does not necessarily fall into a teleological trap ifone believes otherwise. Even the May 1968 uprising in France, whichis famous for not having been predicted, is surely explicable only if onetakes into account such factors as: prolonged struggles against coloni-alism in the 1950s and 1960s; both the strength of the PCF and its par-tial discrediting during this same period, thus generating manyactivists to the left of the PCF; the immediate international contextof the anti-Vietnam war movement; years of resistance to de Gaulle'sauthoritarian regime; and finally, decades of work on the part ofthe PCF itself and sympathetic trade union organizations such as theCGT, which (albeit somewhat belatedly) contributed to buildingthe general strike in May-June 1968, and helped to give the uprisingthe historic, eventmental significance which Badiou identifies. This isnot to deny that when the trade unions negotiated with the employersat the end of May and beginning of June in the Crenelle negotiations,this had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of the workers'protests. Moreover, the Crenelle negotiations certainly resulted inchanges which were meagre compared to the strength of the Maymovement (see Capdevielle and Mouriaux 1988).

In short, history suggests that the role of activists resisting aspects ofthe status quo was crucial in terms of preparing the ground for andsustaining the momentum of May 1968, which is not to say by anymeans that the uprising was inevitable. If, on the other hand, events,


including political events, are mysterious, completely unpredictableand random, then why organize, if only to make a marginal differ-ence, to make very small changes which can be eroded and in particu-lar can be adapted to suit the needs of capitalism? There is a dangerthat in Badiou's scheme of things political activism remains entirelydefensive and local, highly limited in its impact, and in relation tothe overall course of history, ironically rather minimal. This is oneof the costs of Badiou making subjecthood retrospective and indissoci-ably and solely linked with an event in the past. Badiou might respondthat one must grasp the mathematical nature of his ontology, but as Iargued in Chapter 2, his mathematical ontology does not convin-cingly translate into the world of material politics.

A discussion of the more political aspects of Badiou's thought alsoraises an important question regarding the truth procedures,namely: can they really all be described in broadly the same way,within the same general explanatory framework? A revolution suchas 1789 or 1917 banishes (or at least plays a decisive part in banishing)a whole social, political, economic and ideological system and helpsreplace it with another, thanks to the commitment of many revolu-tionaries and countless other people through subsequent generations.Arguably the 1789 revolution played a key role in France's and to anextent much of Europe's passage to modernity, with all the economic,social, political and cultural ramifications that this notion implies.By the same token, 1917 arguably revolutionized economic, social,political and cultural aspects of modernity, whatever one mightthink of the development of these aspects in the USSR and the rest ofthe Eastern Bloc in the longer term. Can these revolutions and theirvast social, economic, political and cultural consequences really beexplained largely in the same terms as two individuals falling in loveand deciding to commit to each other in the long term, perhaps to livetogether and have children? Moreover, do social and political revolu-tions proceed with the same logic as scientific or artistic ones? Is therelationship between events in different domains (for example politicsand art) sometimes more important than Badiou suggests by explain-ing events' importance in terms of retrospective fidelity within the(political or artistic) domain? What is the relationship for examplebetween the 1917 revolution and Russian Constructivism? To pose it


in terms which Badiou might not acknowledge as being valid: cancause, effect and logic of history apply in similar ways across the fourdomains and if not, can these notions (cause, effect and logic ofhistory) really be relegated in the way Badiou's system suggests?My own, very brief, answer would be that Badiou's portrayal of thesubject coming out of the blue, his almost exclusive concentrationon the event to explain the way in which movement takes place and onthe exclusively retrospective relationship between subject and event,contributes to an unconvincing or at best partial description of theprocess of change, in politics and in other domains as well. Certainly,what Badiou describes as events are vital, but they cannot be under-stood without recourse to a thorough examination of what goes beforethem — the context of their genesis —jus t as much as what followsthem. This in turn helps understand the relationship between events.

Returning to broader definitions of politics, Badiou's notion of hownot to define politics is just as enlightening. According to Badiou, thestudy of politics is not a way of understanding the general nature ofpower in society and the way in which individuals and groups strugglefor that power in organized or less organized ways. Still less is it theway in which the contemporary state relates to civil society, and it iscertainly not an examination of the operation of government. Indeed,the governmental 'management of the affairs of the state' has nothingto do with politics and is instead an attempt to neutralize politics andcreate an artificial and harmful consensus (EB 19). In fact, anythingto do with established political practices which are closely associatedwith the status quo (including not only parliamentary politics but alsotrade unions, for example) cannot be counted as true politics in thesense that he understands it. I return to these sorts of question below.

My response to Badiou's theory of politics as described so far can besummarized as follows. Certainly, the academic examination of poli-tics in its various forms is often dominated by empiricism and descrip-tion to such an extent that, taken as a general approach rather thanas individual studies, it has virtually no distance from the presentorder of things and is therefore unquestioning of the status quo;on the contrary, it has a tendency to reinforce and legitimize thestatus quo. However, Badiou's conception of politics goes so far in theopposite direction that in a sense it is almost as powerless to enable


and explain change as the approach of conventional empirical politi-cal science. If true politics only begins with the rare and the extraor-dinary, with an event whose genesis is impossible to explain properlyor to predict even partially, it also leaves the political analyst in apassive, rather ineffectual position. The idea of having to engage inorder to understand is perfectly acceptable. But for Badiou engage-ment — fidelity — apparently only allows one to understand properlya particular event, and not the world more generally. In fact, truthresulting from achieving subjecthood in fidelity to an event is argu-ably not understanding at all, but something far more subjective,akin perhaps to quasi-inexplicable belief, or faith; consistent with thisapproach, Badiou is emphatic that truth is not the same as knowledge(EE361,MP18).

I would suggest that if, on the contrary, we conceive of politics asthe interplay of various forms of power, some more progressive andegalitarian, others more reactionary and elitist, then it becomes possi-ble to understand political developments in an ongoing, more organicway. For Gramsci, for example, politics in a capitalist society must beunderstood as competing entities attempting to achieve hegemony,which the bourgeois class is on the whole most successful in doing.By extension, progressive politics are in part about attempting toestablish a counter-hegemony. This is an ongoing process, which innormal, non-revolutionary times is a constant 'war of position',rather than a sudden and revolutionary 'war of manoeuvre'. When aserious challenge to the status quo takes place in the form of an upris-ing, it is in part the work by activists during the period of war of posi-tion that allows the passage to war of manoeuvre. For Badiou, on thecontrary, politics is only politics when it is egalitarian and emancipa-tory and takes the form of a sudden rupture with the status quo;slow, ongoing struggles to convince others in the ideological realm, orto make small material gains apparently do not count as politics.Certainly, this approach which puts emphasis on the big break ispositive, optimistic and provocative, a broadside attack on bothliberal and revisionist trends currently so prevalent in France, whichof course seek greatly to play down the importance of revolt andrevolution. But it also largely avoids many political issues, includ-ing the questions of what the state does when it rules, the nature


of exploitation, the relationship between the capitalist mode of pro-duction and liberal democracy, why revolutions happen when theydo, and so on. If we do not take a more holistic view of politicsthen our analysis is bound to be left wanting and be less useful interms of explaining how to counter the status quo as necessary andmove onwards.

Badiou as political activist takes far more notice of the differentinstances of political power than his theory might suggest, as I showlater in this chapter.

Against and beyond the postmodern

Given Badiou's hostility towards postmodern philosophy and decon-struction, it is perhaps surprising to find that his attitude towardsGilles Deleuze is not one of unmitigated condemnation but one ofambivalence. In his orthodox Maoist days, Badiou was indeed vitrio-lic in his denunciation of Deleuze, dismissing him as a loathsomecounter-revolutionary. But in Gilles Deleuze: La clameur de I'etre, pub-lished in 1997, Badiou not only engages with him seriously butalmost attempts to rescue Deleuze from postmodern philosophy alto-gether, suggesting that Deleuze is far more influenced by Plato andthe classical tradition than most readers (including Deleuze himself)would wish to allow (D 42). Although Badiou does present Deleuze'sphilosophy as being the opposite of his own in many ways, instead ofexploring the ambiguities and multiple interpretations for whichDeleuze is well known, Badiou argues that Deleuze's work is in factcharacterized by univocity and that one of its most important aspectsis a philosophy of the One (e.g. D 94).

An insightful and ongoing engagement with Badiou has come fromSlavoj Zizek, who praises Badiou's notion of a singular truth with uni-versal relevance in relation to a particular event, which contrastsstarkly with the postmodernist notion of multiple truths and the endof universal and eternal narratives. Moreover, Badiou's event con-fronts the postmodern notion of politics where 'nothing really hap-pens' and asserts, on the contrary, that political events are real,crucial and determine the shape of things to come for many years.


Zizek points out that this approach also confronts head-on the histor-ian Francois Furet's revisionist approach to the French Revolution,where Furet attempts to remove the evental-revolutionary signifi-cance of 1789 and instead presents it as a series of individual historicalfacts (Zizek 1999: 131-2, 135-6). But Zizek goes on to questionBadiou's elaboration of the place of the subject in his system, arguingthat the subject plays a far more ideological role than Badiou is pre-pared to admit, and that Badiou's Truth-Event is in fact close toAlthusser's notion of ideological interpellation. Zizek also argues con-vincingly that Badiou's most compelling example of the event and theemergence of subjects via fidelity to the event is the Christian religionas explored in his book on Saint Paul, and that this religious eventdoes not fit within the four generic procedures, namely love, art,science and politics. There is, then, an unacknowledged ideologicaland religious logic at the heart of Badiou's thought (141). (See alsoDaniel Bensaid's chapter, 'Alain Badiou et le miracle de 1'evenement',inBensaid2001: 143-70.)

I have argued above that in the broader context of much Frenchphilosophy of the final third of the twentieth century, Badiou is nota-ble in particular for his assertion of the importance of the role of thesubject. We should no doubt add that Badiou is in this context alsonotable for the emphasis he places on the notion of equality and onthe political more generally. In light of this it is worth anticipatingsomewhat the next chapter and pausing to compare Badiou's workwith that of Jacques Ranciere, who has a substantial amount incommon with Badiou, and who might also be deemed to be exploringphilosophy beyond the postmodern. (See especially Ranciere 1992,1995, 2001 and Robson 2005a.) Ranciere's conception of politicsrelies on a notion of the gap between the established order on the onehand and on the other hand political interventions on the part of mar-ginalized individuals or groups who disrupt the injustice of the statusquo. By intervening in this way the excluded assert their right to beunderstood in a way that the discourse of received wisdom does notallow; the rebels' statements cannot be understood by the rulingorder (or 'police' as Ranciere describes it) and the conditions of com-prehension are created in the process of rebellion and its aftermath,through the rebels seizing the opportunity to assert themselves and,


in linguistic terms, to assert the comprehensibility of their utterances.In this sense Ranciere's theory is a theory of the subject similarto some extent to Badiou's, in that subjects must believe in theiractions and statements and make them true by creating the revolutio-nizing criteria by which they are judged. (Before this their statementsare, according to Ranciere, meaningless utterances.) In Ranciere,however, it seems there is far more premeditation on the part of thesubject than in Badiou, so people are implicitly at least subjectsbefore the event as well as after. Rather like Badiou, Ranciere empha-sizes the subject so much that the circumstances of the occurrence ofthe event are somewhat overlooked.

As Badiou himself suggests, some aspects of Ranciere's work areborrowed from his own (AM 129—38), an influence which Ranciere(1995: 32) acknowledges to a certain extent. First, Ranciere's notionof police appears to draw on Badiou's 'state of the situation', which ispure multiplicity, or metastructure. Second, Ranciere, like Badiou,believes that politics comes about when individuals and/or groupsact (in Badiou's language) in fidelity towards an event, in effect creat-ing this event by naming it. It is only when this process of creation ofsubjecthood takes place that political activity also takes place. Third,both agree that politics comes about when there is an assertion ofequality and Badiou reminds us that, like Ranciere, he believes thatdeclarations can be an important manifestation of the political.Finally, they both agree that politics is in part a process whereby theinvisible elements of a situation become visible, so that from a situa-tion where the most important characteristics of the political event arenot recognized, the actions of individuals - and only these actions -assert the legitimacy and indeed the existence of the event. Summingup their similarities, or more precisely his influence on Ranciere,Badiou points out (AM 134—5) that for Ranciere politics 'is not theexercise of power' and that politics is 'a specific rupture in the logic ofthe arkh~e\ that politics is rare and subjective and that politics is 'theaction of supplementary subjects who act in such a way that they aresurplus to any counting of parts of a society'.

Badiou suggests however that Ranciere is not only anti-Platonistbut also anti-philosophical, particularly in his Le philosophe et sespauvres (1983), where Ranciere accuses Plato, Marx and Bourdieu of


inventing a proletariat with particular characteristics in order tosuit their own philosophical needs. Ranciere allegedly misses the pointthat any political process is an organized process and that whereas hetends to pit fictitious masses against a nameless state (Etatinomme], thereality is one of a few isolated activists up against a highly dominantparliamentary state. The key political figure for Badiou, then, is thepolitical activist, whereas for Ranciere, Badiou claims, the activist istotally absent (AM 137).

Marxism and historical materialism

Badiou has not systematically explored his relationship with Marxismsince he distanced himself from orthodox Maoism in the early 1980s.He was, as we have seen, very much formed in the Marxist mould andstill retains a combativeness on behalf of oppressed groups as an inte-gral part of both his philosophy and his political practice, with a sort ofrevolution in the form of the event at the heart of his political thought.So a phrase such as 'the essence of the political is the emancipation ofthe collective' (DO 54), which is anathema to so much liberal politicaltheory, is entirely typical of Badiou's approach. Moreover, in a gen-eral sense he is still keen to invoke and to praise the thought of indivi-duals whose practice was revolutionary, and among the politicalthinkers singled out for special praise are Robespierre, Saint-Just,Lenin, Che Guevara and Mao (IT 79). Marx too is praised in a gen-eral way, and Badiou asserts for example that the Communist Manifestois 'the great political text of the nineteenth century' (BF 123).

However, despite Badiou's praise and admiration for revolution-aries and despite the fact that he integrates the notions of engagement,emancipation and revolution into the very core of his thought, there isa profound ambivalence on his part with regard to Marx and to his-torical materialism. Certainly, he asserts that his own philosophy isprofoundly materialist and that '[f]rom the point of view of whatcomposes us, there is nothing except matter. Even a procedure oftruth is never anything other than the seizing of materiality.' But hequickly qualifies this, commenting that '[hjaving said that, I do thinkthat, by grace, this particular [human] animal is sometimes seized by


something that thought cannot manage to reduce strictly to thethought of animality as such' (PH 127—8, 129). Grace, or 'laicizedgrace', is a concept Badiou explores in Saint Paul, using the term todescribe the leap of faith required by a subject in order to act in fidelityto an event, flying in the face of the logic or the rules of the circum-stances, or 'situation', in which the event arises (e.g. SP 80-1). More-over, '[fundamentally, and this is why I always declare myself aPlatonist, Platonism says that there is something other than bodiesand language. There are truths ... ' (BF 129, also LM 9). This is theBadiou who believes in the power of mathematics because it is able tounite thought and being, which are one and the same (EE 49). Thiscould hardly be further from Marx's conception of the relationshipbetween the material world and thought, which Engels (1968[1883]: 429) describes as follows:

. . . Marx discovered the law of development of human history: thesimple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, thatmankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing,before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that there-fore the production of the immediate means of subsistence and con-sequently the degree of economic development attained by a givenpeople or during a given epoch forms the foundation upon whichthe state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even ideas onreligion, of the people concerned have been evolved . . .

There are various other key aspects of Marx's thought that areabsent or only found in very weak forms in Badiou's work. Mostobviously, we have seen how Badiou almost entirely rules out anyrole for the economy and when referring to the economy, perhaps tell-ingly, appears happy not to contest what Marx says (commentingthat 'global trends have essentially confirmed some of Marx's funda-mental intuitions' [PH 117]), but simply to endorse it without how-ever integrating it into his own work. For Marx, of course, howevermuch one might wish to interpret his thought as 'non-reductionist',an understanding of the emergence and development of the capitalisteconomy is key to understanding the emergence of the bourgeoisie asthe dominant exploiting class, the emergence of the proletariat as a


revolutionary class, the potential for socialist revolution and com-munism, and the concept of alienated labour, to mention only someof the most obvious consequences. But such an understanding is alsoimportant in any attempt to understand less clearly political domains,including intellectual history, culture, personal relations and thefamily. So important was the economy to Marx, of course, that hespent much of his mature intellectual life in the pursuit of an under-standing of the capitalist economy. If anything, Badiou seems to havedone the opposite to Marx in this respect and the central place of theeconomy has been replaced by the event, which arguably has forBadiou become the motor of history, but in a retrospective way,where things change with the emergence of truth as a subtractionfrom history, as opposed to being a logical outcome of, for example,the growing contradiction between forces of production and relationsof production at the heart of the historical process, as Marx (1968b[1859]: 181-2) argues. By the same token, the notion of class alsoplays no role in Badiou's overall explanation of the scheme of things,at least in his work since and including UEtre et Vevenement (1988); heindulges in little or no social or socio-economic analysis in his latertheoretical work. This stands in stark contrast with, and arguably incontradiction to, Badiou's and his activist comrades' insistence on theimportance of directly supporting proletarian struggles in the work-place, which I discuss below.

It seems in fact that Badiou is in search of a complete alternative tothe historical and dialectical method of Marx, of a theory whichbreaks with the idea of any logic of history, but where engagementwith the circumstances of the time is nevertheless crucial to any pro-cess of profound change and any understanding of this process, whichfor Badiou is arguably one and the same thing. Badiou comments thathe is keen to 'refute the vulgar Marxist concept of the logic of historyand the idea that radical and sudden change could have as its origin a"state of totality" ' (EE 196-7). Rather, radical transformation origi-nates at one point, in an eventmental site (EE 197).

One of Marx's key overall contributions is indeed to explain thenature of historical change, which involves an exploration of the dia-lectical relationship between various aspects of society, and the placeof social revolutions within the context of this dialectical relationship.


Marx thus carefully explains how events (especially revolutions)happen within the circumstances of the particular period. Badiou, onthe other hand, argues precisely that an event cannot be explainedfully from 'within' the situation surrounding it; indeed if it canit is not an event at all (this is part of the definition of the event).Badiou, then, appears particularly static (or at least stop-go) com-pared with Marx, precisely because of the key place of the eventin his philosophy. (See Bosteels 2004 for a contrary view.) Badiouhimself has commented that he needs a more detailed theory ofchange, adding that 'I distinguish between four types of change: mod-ifications (which are consistent with the existing transcendentalregime), weak singularities (or novelties with no existential conse-quences), strong singularities (which imply an important existentialchange but whose consequences remain measurable) and, finally,events (strong singularities whose consequences are virtually infinite)'(BF 132; also see Badiou 2004 ['Afterword ...]: 236). It is not yetclear how these new categories regarding change relate to Badiou'sgeneral theory.

Badiou's notion of subtraction, which he defines as 'that which,from within the previous sequence itself, as early as the start of thetwentieth century, presents itself as a possible alternative path thatdiffers from the dominant one' (BF 115), is very different from dialec-tics and does not work on the assumption that there is constant move-ment. This contrasts with what he describes as an antagonistic(Marxist) approach to politics, which he believes is no longer useful.

Badiou seems, then, to have abandoned almost all of Marx's base-superstructure model. In order to understand history, including poli-tical history, one does not turn to and examine changes in modes ofproduction and relations of production. When discussing the 1789revolution, for example, Badiou is emphatic that we can know agreat deal about the circumstances prevailing in France before therevolution took place and still not be able to explain it properly(PH 124), and the same could be said of the Paris Commune of 1871.Badiou's treatment of art is also revealing in this respect, becauseartistic change is explained in terms of what went before it in therealm of art, where events, subjects, fidelity and truth operatewithin the realm of art rather than within a broader context, where


according to Marx the development of the economy ultimately has adetermining influence on other domains, including the artistic one.Badiou's account contrasts, then, with the fairly orthodox — but noless inspired for that — Marxist versions of artistic and culturalchange put forward by Marcel Berman in All that is Solid Melts in Air(1983) and by David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)^where the modernizing and 'postmodernizing' economic base bringswith it radically new forms of art and culture which are fascinatingin themselves, but whose proper understanding must include anunderstanding of the socio-economic circumstances of their emer-gence. To put it slightly differently, the relationship between (orrather apparent absence of relationship between) events in differentdomains in Badiou's scheme of things is quite different from the rela-tionship between events in different domains in a more orthodoxMarxist framework; for example for Berman the relationship betweenthe emergence of modern art and the rise of the city, or for Harvey theemergence of postmodern architecture and the development of post-Fordism in the economic domain.

For Badiou, by contrast, there is no such organic connectionbetween developments in the different domains. He is emphatic thathe is 'not a historicist, in that I don't think events are linked in a globalsystem. That would deny their essentially random character, whichI absolutely maintain' (Being by Numbers 1994: 118, in Hallward2003a:240).

There are certainly lingering influences of Maoism in Badiou's laterwork. As Jason Barker reminds us, in Mao's theory of knowledgeintellectuals are guided by the masses instead of the more classicallyLeninist, vanguardist conception of the role of intellectuals. ForMao, the masses are far more spontaneously inclined to be revolution-ary than intellectuals (Barker 2002: 32; also see Bosteels 2005). As weshall see below, this is very much in keeping with Badiou's approachto political activism, which emphasizes the need to work locally andon particular issues rather than in a national vanguard organizationwith a view to countering the power of established structures; as wehave seen, he is not attempting to create what Gramsci might havedescribed as a national or international 'counter-hegemony' by work-ing within existing or by setting up new national or international


trade unions to counter the power of capital. One might for exampleexpect an activist left intellectual to work with a trade union likeSUD, which was formed in 1989 and attempts to rediscover the tradi-tional radicalism of French trade unionism, declaring in its charterthat a transformation of society is necessary and that this will involvea 'profound break with the logic of capitalism' (in Blakey 2001). SUDis also at pains to be innovative and open to influences which are notpart of the traditional core of trade union preoccupations, such asthose of the homeless and illegal immigrants. But Badiou is insistentthat it is wrong to attempt to take on one's adversaries on their ownterritory, including in the context of trade unions. By the same token,the antiglobal movements, whose supporters have demonstrated atinternational meetings of global capital in Genoa and elsewhere, 'ded-icate themselves to a systematic and economist identification of theadversary, which is already utterly misguided' (BF 120).

Badiou also emphasizes the importance of the concept of 'twocounted as one' in any attempt to understand political processes, in away that is also strongly influenced by Maoism (e.g. PP 106). Hisnotion of the two is highly complex and varied, but taking the case ofthe event, when an event takes place the situation is divided into twobecause the subjects of the event act in fidelity to certain aspects of thesituation which relate to the event and not to those which do not relateto the event. Once the event has taken place, there is no relationshipbetween these two groups of aspects (or these two sets of elements)(EE 229; C 290; S 89-102). Again, the theory of the two reinforcesthe perception of Badiou as a discontinuous philosopher, rather thanone who can explain history in continuous or evolutionary terms.

Rather than approaching Badiou as a Marxist thinker, then, it ismore helpful to see his thought as being influenced in a general wayby the emancipatory spirit of Marx, without what might be describedas Marx's scientific method. In spite of Badiou's elaborate mathema-tical discussions, his thought does not share what Marx and Engelsdescribed as a scientific approach to socialism, which dissects themechanisms of capitalist society and in light of this dissection explainsthe transformational potential these mechanisms offer. Writing in theearly 1980s, Badiou suggests that Marxism is far less able than it oncewas to help understand the nature of reality. 'We are thus brought


back to the figure of the beginning . . . We proceed from the "there is"of a break, and . . . we are putting forward, like Marx in the Manifestoînaugural political hypotheses. More particularly, we are (re)formu-lating the hypothesis of a politics determined by non-domination . . .We must re-write the Manifesto' (PP 59—60). He goes on to say that the'previous Marxism — of the completed cycle of Marxisation — servesas a whole body of thought as a "Hegelian-type" reference: bothnecessary and not prescribing anything particular. Marxism hasbecome in relation to itself its own Hegelianism' (PP 61). Marx isthus a source for 'the beginning of a different way of thinking polities'but the destruction of Marxism-Leninism at the same time highlightsthe necessity for, as well as creating the possibility of, 'an entirely newpractice of polities' (PP63-4).

With only a little exaggeration, one might suggest that in relationto Marx, Badiou's work represents a reinvertion of the dialectic,putting Hegel's dialectic on its head again. Badiou certainly shareswith Hegel a belief in the generative power of abstract and absoluteuniversals, which for Hegel takes the form of Geist and which forBadiou takes the form of the logic of mathematics. In both cases thematerial world is a sort of local manifestation of the abstract and thespiritual (or the mathematical) rather than the other way round.In fact Badiou goes far in this direction and defines a subject as a moreconcrete manifestation of the abstract, as 'any local configurationof a generic procedure where a truth is sustained' (EE 429), a 'finiteinstance of a truth' (EE 447).

To conclude this brief discussion of Badiou's relationship withMarx, it is worth quoting Marx's discussion of Hegel, by way of high-lighting Badiou's very different position:

My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but isits direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain,i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of'the Idea',he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgosof the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenom-enal form of'the Idea'. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is noth-ing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, andtranslated into forms of thought. (Marx 1954 [1873]: 29)


Democracy

Badiou has a profound ambivalence towards the notion of democracy.On the one hand, he comes close to equating democracy with com-munism, almost in the way Lenin did, or at least with an ongoing,anti-establishment, anti-capitalist struggle; communism is 'the pas-sion for equality', 'intolerance towards oppression, the desire for theend of the State' and the ontological concept of democracy and com-munism are 'one and the same' (DO 13-14). For Badiou democracyin this sense has manifested itself in rare instances, for example in theSoviets during and after the Russian Revolution and in the liberatedzones in Mao's China, but it is highly praised. More recently andcloser to home, he suggests that the groupings of sans papiers fromimmigrant hostels and from Organisation politique are democratic(AM 167). But Badiou's positive view of democracy is restricted to avery small number of actual political phenomena, and beyond thesethe positive approach often becomes a mainly subjective way of order-ing his view of the event, rather than a way of describing an ongoingand potentially widespread form of political organization, which is, itwould appear, impossible now that communism is a thing of the past;it seems democracy is now barely possible in a material sense, andexists only as an abstract notion with little relation to political acti-vism on a day-to-day basis.

Indeed, Badiou at his most polemical and vigorous asserts thatdemocracy in an organizational sense is nothing other than parlia-mentary, liberal democracy, in France and elsewhere, and is some-thing to be combated, condemned and boycotted. Commenting onhis lectures on thinking the present philosophically, he remarks thatone of the two main ideas by which he is guided is 'that, in order tothink the contemporary world in any fundamental way, it's necessaryto take as your point of departure not the critique of capitalism but thecritique of democracy . . . no one is ready to criticize democracy. Thisis a real taboo, a genuine consensual fetish. Everywhere in the world,democracy is the true subjective principle — the rallying point — ofliberal capitalism' (BF 127). At times Badiou is apparently notsimply talking about liberal democracy as promoted by defenders ofcontemporary capitalism, and he goes a long way towards a critique


any notion of democracy, in part because he believes that any repre-sentation of political opinion is impossible. Invoking Rousseau, heargues that politics comes about as a result of a (non-historically-based) event, in the form of a social contract. Politics is the same asequality, which is in turn the main point of reference of the generalwill (EE 380—2). Now, as 'a procedure with fidelity to the contract-event, politics can neither be delegated not represented. It is to befound entirely in the "collective being" of its militant-citizens' and'Rousseau's genius was to define politics abstractly as a generic proce-dure' (EE 383, 389). Here Badiou is once again expressing the ideathat politics is intimately bound up with the notions of event andtruth, where it is perhaps less important to share one's ideas withlarge numbers of people (let alone a majority), or try to convincethem that you are correct, than to be right in an abstract sense.'What supports the procedure is solely the zeal of citizen-militants,whose fidelity engenders an infinite truth which no constitutional ororganizational form can express adequately' (EE 389).

In one sense revolutionaries through the ages have been in this posi-tion, which lies at the heart of Badiou's account of transformation;radical change takes place via fidelity on the part of an often smallnumber of people to an event (although arguably they have oftenbeen faithful to an event which has not yet happened). Most revolu-tionaries have in the longer term, however, sought as a priority to winover the majority to their point of view. Badiou insists that the ques-tion of number is not important (PP 68), but it is hard to see how anysort of deeper socialist system of organization and government couldbe realized (or 'correct' positions achieved) without having won overlarge numbers of people to the idea of transformation. Indeed largenumbers of people would need to be convinced of the need for activeparticipation by large numbers of people; the idea of democracy(including the numerical idea of majority participation and deci-sion making) becomes very important in the transformational pro-cess. So attitude towards and critical support for the more democraticaspects of liberal democracy are also important; in addition to uni-versal suffrage, freedom of expression, equality before the law, andother established aspects of liberal democracy, a discussion which,for example, extends the notion of rule by the people to the economy,


including economic equality, is surely a more fruitful way forwardthan to appeal for a boycotting of elections and other trappings ofliberal democracy, as does Badiou. Holding a 'correct' political posi-tion in extreme isolation seems to have stronger moral than politicalconnotations.

Badiou mentions that as part of his approach to democracy he hasincorporated 'a careful re-reading of Plato's critique of democracy'(BF 127). Plato is of course well known for his condemnation ofdemocracy in the Republic, based on direct knowledge of Atheniandemocracy, and he argues that such an approach to political organi-zation promotes an unhealthy egalitarianism, whereas a more elitistform of political organization works far better. By contrast, Rousseau,Marx, Engels and Lenin (all of whom Badiou admires) all condemnpartial, representative democracy but insist on the importance ofa more direct form of democracy. Lenin (1969 [1917]: 237) goes asfar as arguing that 'in capitalist society we have a democracy that iscurtailed, wretched, false, a democracy only for the rich, for the min-ority . . . Communism alone is capable of providing really completedemocracy ...'.

Badiou's approach to democracy is closely connected with his viewson contemporary parliamentary politics in France, in which substan-tial change has taken place since the early to mid-1980s. The SocialistParty, which has moved towards the centre-right, has formed manygovernments and has been the pioneer of centre-oriented policieswhich differ far less from those of the mainstream right than was thecase before about 1983. The Communist Party, meanwhile, has goneinto rapid decline, partly as a result of participating in coalition gov-ernments with the Socialists which implemented austerity measures inthe early 1980s. On the right, the Gaullist party has become far lessdistinctive than it was during de Gaulle's lifetime or the decade fol-lowing his death (the 1970s) and has, for example, embraced neo-liberal economic policy and adapted a less grandiose foreign policy,falling far more into line with the rest of the right. In short, main-stream parliamentary politics in France has become more consensual,with far less difference between the various mainstream parties thanthere once was (Hewlett 1998: 60—91). (The important exception tothis general rule is of course the rise of the National Front.)


For Badiou, this 'democratico-nihilist consensus' (BF 128) whichvery much works against a more just form of politics, draws its legiti-macy from the word democracy. In mainstream discourse, then, toevoke democracy is to evoke a form of politics which above all pro-motes the reign of capital, with all the injustices this implies. Badiouchooses not to enter into a more detailed debate regarding the natureof democracy as it could be experienced; he could, for example,address the question of whether there might be an alternative, moreproperly democratic and socialist version of democracy than thevery superficial democracy practised by many systems of nationalgovernment in the West (Hewlett 2003: 1— 27). On the whole ignoringthe concrete practice of politics in his discussions of democracy has theeffect of making Badiou seem anti-democratic rather than being infavour of a deeper form of democracy. Rather than reappropriatethe term to its full political potential and insist in a more traditionallysocialist way that it is powerful, revolutionary and transformative,Badiou, on the contrary, chooses almost to embrace the idea that inpractical terms liberal parliamentary democracy is the only possiblewidespread version of democracy, and that democracy is therefore tobe condemned.

Parliamentary politics

In light of the above discussion it will come as no surprise that Badiouis often particularly critical about other people's commentary on par-liamentary politics. Much of what passes as political analysis, heargues, is simple and unhelpful quantification and, he adds, '[pjoliticswill only become thinkable once it is delivered from the tyranny ofnumber, number of voters as well as number of demonstrators or stri-kers' (PP68).

He is reacting in part to a tremendous preoccupation with allaspects of elections amongst political scientists and journalists, parti-cularly in France. There is also at times almost obsessive attentiongiven to opinion polls regarding political parties, policy and votingintentions, closely followed by seemingly endless poring over theactual election results. The ubiquity of quantification can take on


such a dynamic of its own that studies sometimes have little or nothingto say, for example, about what election results can tell us about poli-tics more generally, in these studies' eagerness to quantify to the nthdegree. This is not to deny the usefulness of some empirical and quan-titative studies and some commentary on election results can be veryuseful in that it throws light on politics in a deeper sense. To take oneexample, Collette Ysmal (2004) provides a fascinating, detailed ana-lysis of the French elections of 2002 which also has a lot to say aboutFrench politics and society more generally. But the general effect ofwidespread quantification is indeed to detract from debates regardinghow parliamentary politics might be made more democratic, forexample, or what the alternatives might be. However, Badiou doesseem to miss the point that although elections in liberal democracyare a very poor substitute for profounder democracy, they do never-theless have a real relationship with a deeper democracy. They area form of politics which is to an extent influenced by a deeper andmore valid notion of democracy than Badiou would give credit for,which means that — without neglecting other spheres of politicalactivity and activism — this is an arena with which progressive thin-kers ought also to engage and at times intervene in. Badiou appears tobelieve that once one is tainted with participation in such a processone is bound to capitulate to the mainstream view of everything.This view of partial participation in more mainstream political activ-ity such as the elections or trade union work reflects in part a view thatradical, innovative movements such as feminism and green politicscan and have been adapted, de-radicalized and adopted, ultimately,to suit the needs of capital. In the language of activists of the decadesfollowing May 1968, during which time this type of development wascommon (and arguably has been perhaps even more so since thebeginning of the 1980s), this is recuperation.

Badiou discusses developments in parliamentary politics at somelength in an article entitled 'On the Presidential Election of April-May 2002' (Cl 13—43), commenting that'the election result certainlyseemed to me to be important, because politically — and I have beensaying this for many years — this country is very ill' (Cl 15). In thepresidential elections of that year, the National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen went through to the second round in a run-off with the


Gaullist (and eventual victor) Jacques Chirac, after winning 16.9 percent of the vote in the first round. Badiou argues that popular reac-tions to the relative success of Le Pen in the first round — huge protestdemonstrations, meetings, mass distribution of leaflets, and so on —were yet another way of showing that elections serve mainly to rein-force the politics of moderate consensus which is so characteristic ofFrance today (Cl 18—19). Elections do not reflect free expression, heargues, and in the same way the right would have demonstrated mas-sively if a Trotskyist candidate had gone through to the second round,reminiscent of right-wing backlash demonstrations on 30 May 1968and in 1982 in defence of private schools and against moves to bringthem more in line with state schools. 'The only reasonable conclusionone can draw is that nothing ever happens with regard to decisivetransformations in the politics of a country if one relies on elections,because the principle of homogeneity hangs over them . .. makingsure that things continue as before' (Cl 20, italics in original). Badiouargues that instead of simply protesting against Le Pen, demonstra-tors should have denounced elections and he reminds us of the sloganfrom May 1968: 'elections, trahison' (Cl 22). Reminiscent of the anar-chist slogan, 'whoever you vote for the government will get in', thiscomment also echoes other instances when Badiou insists that for himthe guiding principles in this domain are 'don't stand for election, don'tvote, don't expect anything from any political party' (PH 115). Forhim there is no real difference between Le Pen and recent French gov-ernments which have persecuted sans papier s (Cl 25). He argues thatthe word democracy 'crystallises consensual subjectivity' (Cl 28)and that the huge number of abstentions recorded in the elections of2002 show that 'democracy is becoming a minority interest' (C 33).One might ask if a dwindling vote is not what Badiou is advocating,given that 'voting is the only known political procedure of whichimmobilism is the more or less inevitable consequence' (Cl 34).

Badiou goes further than one might expect in this direction, arguingthat 'voting is by principle a contradiction of principles, and of anyidea of protest or emancipation' (Cl 35). He again asks why numberis so dominant when scientific and artistic innovation has alwaystaken place against the flow of dominant opinion, and reminds us ofthe minority nature of Resistance, anti-colonial activists, and so on.


As I commented above, this point about minority views and innova-tion is indisputable, but the medium- to long-term goal of any aspir-ing democratic politics is surely to convince a majority that one's (forthe time being minority) views are correct, as indeed happened in thecases of both the Resistance and the anti-colonial movements ofthe 1950s in France, amongst many others. Discussing the 2002 elec-tions, then, Badiou appears either as an authoritarian voice or as ananalyst who is in a rather ultra-left realm of abstraction when hereminds us that Hitler was elected and that Petain was approved ashead of state by an elected parliament, that Rousseau is against repre-sentative democracy ('the [general] will cannot be represented'), thatRousseau according to Badiou correctly allows a 'symbolic majority'to be expressed in one person, and that both Rousseau and Marx (in areference to the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat) agreethat number is the wrong method for making really important deci-sions (Cl 39—41). Elsewhere, Badiou suggests that 'the essence of pol-itics is to exclude . . . Its essence is found entirely in fidelity to the eventas it materializes in the context of activist interventions' (PP 82).

Badiou's political activism

For Badiou it is as important to understand and participate in grass-roots activism as it is to engage intellectually with a variety of schoolsof philosophy and with other areas of thought. Indeed, there are fewphilosophers either living or dead whose work moves so readilybetween the realm of philosophical abstraction on the one hand anddetails of the militant activities of political groups and campaignson the other; the theoretical and the material are interwoven in anunusual and highly developed way. Throughout Badiou's writings,then, there are frequent references to actual political struggles and,explicitly or more obliquely, to his own activism.

In many ways Badiou's activist politics are, like his political theory,a politics of purity, perhaps in keeping with his belief that there is littleto distinguish political thought from political action. His energies arenow mainly channelled into the very small, 'post-party' VOrganisationpolitique (OP), which intervenes at grass-roots level on such questions


as immigrant hostels, sans papiers and equality in education andhealth, taking stands on a limited number of issues but insisting thatit has no programme. It publishes a regular bulletin, La Distance poli-tique (LDP), which contains a mixture of commentary on currentaffairs and more theoretical writing, and although the articles areanonymous many of them are apparently written by Badiou himselfand his close associates, Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel (seeLDP online at http://www.organisationpolitique.com/index.php?page=distance). Reminiscent in important ways of French Maoistorganizations of the 1970s, OP is highly oriented towards workers,especially factory workers, and sets up its own groups in factorieswhilst shunning established trade unions and trade union activities.Much of OP's work in factories is an attempt to promote what itdescribes as 'a new figure of the worker' (PH 115), which is anabstract - arguably idealized - notion, distinct from a more empiri-cal approach to the working class and any deference that might per-haps be expected from a left intellectual towards grass-roots tradeunionism, for example. 'By figure of the worker we mean a politicalsubjectivity constituted in the factory, in an ability to make declara-tions about the factory and the worker that are different from those ofmanagement, the unions . . . and the state. This intrication is essential.It alone puts an end to the classist figure which founded trade union-ism ... ' (LDP, 26-7.02.98, p. 8, in Hallward 2003: 7). (Badiou and hisactivist friends almost invariably use the word ouvrier, meaning blue-collar worker, rather than travailleur, which means worker in a moregeneral sense, and encompasses both blue- and white-collar workers.)The view that trade union activity does no good is often asserted and isperhaps rather odd for someone so inspired by May 1968, an uprisingwhose historical (and eventmental) significance is surely found largelyin the three-week-long general strike. Badiou argues that strikes 'onlymodify salaries' (PH46).

His fascination with Saint Paul is explained partly because Paul isseen as the ultimate model of the modern, post-Bolshevik activist, ashe explains at the beginning of his book on Paul:

If I wish now to outline in a few pages the singularity of this con-nection as far as Paul is concerned, it is certainly because there is


everywhere a search — including in the denial of its possibility — fora new figure of the activist, destined to succeed the one put in placeat the beginning of the century by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, whichcan be described as the party activist. (SP 2)

This contemporary version of the political activist must have anunmediated presence - in particular with no parliamentary or tradeunion affiliation - at the sites of popular struggles, including in parti-cular amongst sans papiers and of course in factories (SP 83). In prac-tice, OP's orientation towards workplace-based politics takes the formof intervention on specific issues via small groups of OP supporters.For example, in the run-up to the historic closure of Renault Billan-court in 1991 — a factory which had become an important, eveniconic, symbol of working class resistance and a magnet for post-1968militant activity — OP encouraged a campaign in support of morefavourable redundancy packages, criticizing the trade unions forbeing too conciliatory (Hallward 2003b: 10-11).

Badiou and OP are and have long been active in defence of sanspapiers, arguing their cause in LDP, in articles in mainstream newspa-pers, in books and speeches, where he and his comrades demand fullrights for all immigrants. They also help organize rallies to supportthem, for example. Badiou believes that the hostility and racismexperienced by immigrants is intimately linked with the consensusassociated in particular with the Mitterrand era and which hashelped create the rise of the National Front. This climate is stronglylinked, according to Badiou, with the decline of the figure of theworker and a reassertion of the figure of the worker is needed inorder to combat this (AM 133).

However, Badiou is highly sceptical with regard to political move-ments which are based around ethnic or gender oppression, askingwhat is meant by 'black' or 'woman'. Capitalism, he believes, caneasily absorb demands for increased rights for oppressed groups with-out threatening capitalism itself, which means such movements arenot properly political (PH 118—19). Badiou's position is reminiscentto an extent of French Republicanism, which is reluctant to promotespecial conditions for the flourishing of particular ethnic, religious orgendered groups and cultures, by contrast with the positions of many


progressive intellectuals and activists in the United States and Britain,for example. This view also extends to ethnic and religious groupswithin disputed territories, where Badiou argues that the way forwardis to 'count all people as one', rather than create small states alongethnic lines.

It is perhaps instructive to contrast the activities of OP withthe views and activities of the French Trotskyist movement. Since theearly 1970s, French Trotskyists, and especially the Ligue communisterevolutionnaire (LCR) and Lutte ouvriere (LO), have had a small butongoing impact on national politics and trade unionism, in part viatactical alliances with more moderate left political forces which haveincluded, for example, critical support for the PS-PCF Union of theLeft in the 1970s on the part of the LCR. In the trade union movement,these organizations are very active at grass-roots level, and LO in par-ticular has also won positions of considerable national influence, espe-cially in the trade union confederation Force ouvriere. In local andnational elections it is the same case, with the combined LO and LCRvote in the 2002 presidential elections totalling 10 per cent of votes cast.

This system of tactical alliances in the form of the united front wasadvocated by Trotsky, who argued that activists could retain theirideological and practical allegiance to revolutionary politics bybelonging to the party, thus helping to resist the temptation of adapt-ing to the reformist attitude of the organizations with which they wereallying, in particular trade unions. As we have seen, OP by contrastshuns any ongoing work with reformist organizations, retaining apurist approach which promotes the importance of a correct political(but emphatically not politically correct) stance over any considera-tion of weight of numbers influenced. In fact, as we have also seen,Badiou states quite explicitly that there is too much emphasis on num-bers and majorities, reminding us that revolutions and uprisings invarious domains have taken place because of the actions of a minority.As I comment above, it would be hard to argue that Badiou is entirelywrong here, given that, almost by definition, opinions that end upbeing dominant and influential begin as minority views. But sooneror later weight of number must surely begin to matter, unless wedecide that — as sometimes seems to be the case with Badiou — it ismore important to be a small number of people with entirely correct


theoretical positions than a large number of people who can make areal impact with even a small degree of perhaps temporary compro-mise. (This relates back to Badiou's position on democracy and to hisinterpretation of Rousseau's theory of democracy and the generalwill.) Badiou's approach to political activism would seem to springmore from his philosophical abstraction and an activist residue ofMaoism than from a real adherence to the notion of deeper democ-racy and influence on things political. Arguably, in order to have apolitically appropriate position you need widespread contact withordinary activists, not to mention non-activists, in part thereforestarting where people are, rather than from a position of isolationistpurism where activist intellectuals are likely to be quite out of touchand come up with unrealistic positions, which in turn compound theirisolation. This has been a dilemma for far-left organizations in Franceand elsewhere for many years and in part explains their fissiparousnature.

If we compare the attitude of the LCR with OP on the question ofthe French Communist Party (PCF), we see that the LCR — at leastuntil the PCF participated in government in the early 1980s —regarded the PCF as the party where the French working class (albeitmistakenly) placed its faith and was therefore worth having anongoing orientation towards, as was the old Labour party for the Brit-ish working class. Badiou and OP, by contrast, believed that it wasnecessary to attempt to destroy the PCF.

Badiou's position regarding activist politics is indeed, in essence, aparticular position within the long-running debate within the far leftregarding the nature of revolutionary politics as opposed to reformistpolitics, that is, acceptance that benign capitalism is as good as thingsare likely to get. This is a discussion which has been ongoing since the1930s in France, when the PCF supported (but did not participate in)the Popular Front government led by Leon Blum and made up ofcentre-left and centrist ministers. It was heightened by debates sur-rounding the PCF's participation in the postwar government inFrance in 1944—47, the PCF's attitude towards the events of May1968, its programmatic alliance with the Socialist Party during the1970s and most recently and most conclusively, perhaps, participa-tion in various predominantly Socialist governments since 1981


which have seen the implementation of some policies which wouldhave been previously associated only with the right.

The core of the debate, although not always articulated in preciselythis way, has always regarded how to juggle participating in grass-roots activities where working-class and progressive-minded peopleare actually found, on the one hand, and retaining a revolutionarypath ahead; too far in either direction and groups either get swallowedinto purely reformist practices which have no relation with the strug-gle for socialism, or into a position of total isolation. This balancingact has been an ongoing and overriding concern for the far left inFrance and elsewhere since the early 1970s. Lenin's view was thatthe revolutionary party, made up largely of petit bourgeois intellec-tuals in the years when the advent of communism remains fairlyremote, should keep the flame of revolutionary purity burning whilstits members are active in other areas as well, hopefully recruiting acti-vists to the revolutionary cause. There are indeed many elements ofengagement and positioning within this sort of debate in bothBadiou's political practice and in his activist writings, engagementand positioning which many intellectuals and activists alike have leftlong behind them. But, as in his philosophical system, Badiou seems tohave a dual — but not coherent — approach to activist politics. On theone hand, he is in search of revolutionary purity in a way that is akinto the practices of French Maoist groups in the 1970s. On the otherhand, OP engages in campaigns which would certainly be seen as pro-gressive by most left-leaning individuals and organizations, buthardly revolutionary, or even in many respects particularly challen-ging to the centre-left—centre-right consensual mainstream in France.

In what is perhaps LDP's oddest and least-expected intervention, itpublished an article in 1995 on constitutional reform which recom-mends: the abolition of the President of the Republic as an electedposition, replacing the President by one who has merely a role as fig-urehead; reforms which ensure that the leader of the party with themost votes becomes Prime Minister; and electoral reform whichmakes sure that there is one leading party (LDP 12, Feb. 1995: 5-6).As Peter Hallward (2003: 239) comments, c[t]he once Maoist Orga-nisation Politique now recommends something very like the BritishConstitution!'


Concluding remarks

A key chapter of Badiou's Abrege de Metapolitique is entitled 'Politics asThought' (AM 35-66). He explains: 'Politics is thought. This state-ment excludes any recourse to the doublet theory/practice. There iscertainly a "doing" associated with politics, but it is in an immediatesense the pure and simple testing of thought, its localization. There isno distinction' (AM 56). The chapter as a whole is a glowing reviewand endorsement of Sylvain Lazarus's book, Anthropologie du nom, inwhich Lazarus himself insists that 'my fundamental thesis on politicsis that it should be approached as a form of thought' (Lazarus 1996:11). The fact that Alain Badiou's point of departure is in the realm ofthe ideal means that, despite a keen interest in politics as lived reality,he is unable to unite the two aspects of his theory — the metaphysicaland the material — in a coherent system. By contrast with Marx, whostrove to bring theory far closer to material reality than it had pre-viously been and who argued that the abstract was determined bythe material, Badiou does the opposite, insisting that in order tounderstand the material one must understand the nature of truth viaa highly abstract, mathematical ontology. Certainly, he argues thatphilosophy is conditioned by developments in the material world,but his theory of the event relies on essentialism in order to achieveinternal coherence.

I have argued that this fundamental problem with Badiou's systemof thought has serious consequences for his theory of politics. Forexample, the role of the subjects of a political event is, paradoxically,a highly passive one until the event has taken place, at which point therole of the subjects becomes crucial. Also, what is the relationship, ifany, between events in the different domains? Is there any hierarchyof causation (a term Badiou would certainly shun) between events inthe different domains, between say a social revolution and an artisticrevolution? Badiou has retained Marx's commitment to the notion ofemancipation and egalitarianism (although in a far less material andmore abstract way), but has relinquished Marx's scientific, or histor-ical materialist, approach to change. For Badiou true politics is aboutsudden and serious change in the form of an event, and not aboutongoing power struggles which sometimes erupt into emancipatory


events and sometimes into momentous setbacks for egalitarian politicssuch as coups d'etat, dictatorship, invasion or some combination ofthese. The event not only springs from nowhere, but it is also alwaysegalitarian and emancipatory. This conception of the nature of poli-tics means that Badiou on the whole refuses to engage with politicswhere the mass of politically active ordinary people are — in tradeunions, political parties and pressure groups and local campaigns, forexample - except in a negative sense, to wholly criticize establishedstructures. As far as democracy is concerned, Badiou is often so scep-tical about the idea of majority rule or any form of representation thathe condemns the idea of democracy altogether, invoking both Platoand Rousseau, rather than pursuing the idea of an extension ofdemocracy in a practical sense. In other words he does not believethat it is possible to encourage some aspects of liberal democracy andto discourage others, to identify those features of liberal democracythat are preferable and closer to socialist democracy than others, andsee them as progress compared with what went before.

On the other hand, by contrast with either deconstruction or liberalapproaches to the philosophy of politics, Badiou places commitmentto radical and progressive change at the heart of his system. He putsstruggle by ordinary people at the centre and argues that it is above allthis which has universal meaning. This revolutionary and praxis-driven approach makes discussion of and engagement with histhought both fruitful and necessary.

To conclude, I would like to suggest that both the nature of, anddebates regarding, the May 1968 uprising in France could be seen aspivotal to Badiou's approach to the political. We know that, as for somany French intellectuals, May 1968 was a watershed for Badiou,after which nothing was ever to be the same. It was also doubtless themajor political event (in the Badiouian as well as the more widespreadmeaning of the word) in France between 1945 and the present. Mayarguably shares more of the characteristics of Badiou's general con-ception of the event than do many other political phenomena. First,it took place in a country which had one of the most advanced andapparently stable capitalist economies in the world and the uprisingwas kindled neither by the Communist Party nor by the more radicaltrade unions, but by middle-class students. In this sense it seemed to


come out of the blue and did not seem to fit with the circumstances ofits genesis (the 'situation' in Badiouian language). From President deGaulle to the activists taking part, via analysts who had the benefit ofhindsight, many have struggled to explain convincingly the causesand nature of the movement but few have succeeded and no widelyrespected view has emerged. During May, activists quickly becamepassionate about revolt in favour of greater justice in many and pro-found ways, keeping this idea going for many years after the uprisingitself had ended; Badiou would describe this as subjects acting in fide-lity towards May. In a way, to examine rationally the causes of May isto spoil the specialness, the excitement and the 'inexplicability' ofMay, and it might be argued that Badiou extends this reluctance tohis approach to all events. But it is necessary to continue to attemptto examine the reasons for the May uprising, just as it is for all upris-ings and other phenomena which Badiou would describe as events.May did spring out of the circumstances of the time and historiansmust continue to examine the revolt in that way, however difficult itmight be to imagine such an uprising today.

Chapter 4

Jacques Ranciere:Politics is Equality is Democracy

In 1973 Jacques Ranciere attempted to withdraw his chapter onMarx's political economy from the new edition of Reading Capital andby so doing firmly distance himself from the theory of Louis Althusser.The attempted withdrawal failed, but it was preceded, in 1969, by thepublication of a highly critical essay and followed in 1974 by a full-length book, La Leôn d'Althusser. The May 1968 uprising had inter-vened since the publication of the original edition of Reading Capitalin 1965, obliging Marxist intellectuals, according to Ranciere, totake notice of real revolt and to become less dependent on the sup-posed rigours of abstraction (LA 228). May had indeed dramaticallychanged Ranciere's views, persuading him, as he put it in the prefaceto La Leqon d'Althusser, that Althusser's school was a 'philosophy oforder' whose main tenets set its followers apart from the struggleagainst the bourgeoisie (LA 9). Not only was Althusser's interpreta-tion of Marx incapable of enabling an understanding of the May 1968uprising, it was being used by the PCF as an analytical tool in an ideo-logical offensive against the far left. Ranciere explained that his ownmost important difference with Althusser concerned the role of thesubject in human history, which he believed his former mentor greatlyunderestimated. He also accused Althusser of elitism, because ofAlthusser's claim that there was a firm distinction between Marxismas science on the one hand and ideology on the other. In a much lateressay, Ranciere argues that Althusserian Marxism, 'with its notion ofthe subject-free process and its radical opposition to all humanism',had to fly completely in the face of what Marx actually wrotein order to achieve compatibility between this pseudo-Marxismand structuralism. In fact, he argued, Althusser was not simplyinfluenced by the structuralism that was so prevalent in Parisian

Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy 85

intellectual circles at the time, but by drawing on Levi-Strauss inanthropology, Lacan's interpretation of Freud, and Foucault onknowledge-power, Althusser was a foremost pioneer of structuralism

and 'more than any other, made structuralism a philosophical para-digm' (AL 532-3) (also CD 157-77).

This strong reaction against Althusser was to have a determining

influence on Ranciere's work for many years and has arguablyshaped both its considerable strengths and its various weaknesses.By the late 1970s he was deeply engaged in what became a decade ofhistorical research in nineteenth-century worker archives, which

resulted in several books whose purpose was to allow working peopleto speak for themselves instead of, as he saw it, being spoken for and inmost cases mis-represented by historians and philosophers alike.

Ranciere's mature work is often difficult to place according toconventional disciplines and he consciously seeks to challenge tradi-tional disciplinary divisions and boundaries. His historical work isfound for example in Les Noms de rhistoire. Essai de poetique du savoir

(1992), and his political thought, perhaps best described as thepoint at which politics and philosophy meet, is found in particular inAux Bords dupolitique (1992 and 1998), La Mesentente. Politique etPhilo-sophie (1995), Ten Theses on Politics (2001), Chronique des temps consensuels(2005), and La Haine de la democratic (2005). In addition to historyand politics, his work spans aesthetics (e.g. Esthetiques dupeuple [1985];LePartagedusensisble: Esthetique et politique [2QQQ]',L'Inconscientesthetique[2001]; Malaise dans I'esthetique [2004]), literary criticism (La Parolemuette: Essai sur les contradictions de la la litterature [1998]) and filmtheory (La Fable cinematographique [2001]). The two most obviousstrands linking all these works across the disciplines are a strong inter-est in language and a commitment to egalitarian politics.

In this chapter I begin with a brief look at Ranciere's earlier, butnonetheless firmly post-Althusserian works, and move on to an analy-sis of his treatment of democracy, consensus and dissensus, and a com-parison of his work with that of Alain Badiou. I thus follow his pathfrom his parting with Althusser to history and historiography, thento political thought. I argue that in some important respects Ran-ciere's approach to politics is effective, relevant and timely, particu-larly in the way it offers a powerful expose and critique of liberalism


and liberal democracy, and there are key elements of his discussionsof democracy, consensus and dissensus that are useful and insightful.It is a powerful and substantial intervention which is in some waysuseful as a tool to understand politics in advanced capitalist countriesin the early twenty-first century. But I also argue that Ranciere's con-ception of politics is too narrow to be useful as a general method inapproaching the political, and that his definition of politics seemsto contain elements of self-destruction where progressive, egalitarianpolitics can only fail and revert to the unjust status quo.

Listening to the unheard

With only a little exaggeration, one can sum up Ranciere's entireproject since his break with Althusser as an assertion of the impor-tance of the human subject. It is a statement both of the right of theordinary person to be listened to and a celebration of the profoundusefulness of learning from what the ordinary person has to say, unme-diated as far as possible by the intervention of the more powerful.In this respect his work is intended to fly in the face of many acceptedwisdoms regarding the division of labour between expert and ama-teur, teacher and student, wise and unwise. It is in itself a bold state-ment — and an intended exemplar — of the possibility of a differenttype of politics, and he consciously mixes analysis and interventionwhich begins with the premise of equality instead of viewing equalityas a distant goal to be achieved at a far later date (a point to which Ireturn below). Between his close association with Althusser and hisreturn to political theory in the 1990s, Ranciere wrote and edited anumber of historical works which are particularly clear expressionsof this approach, which also underpins the more theoretical of hisrecent writings.

In precisely this spirit of allowing ordinary people to speak forthemselves, Ranciere edited (with Alain Faure) La Parole ouvriere,1830—1851 (1976), a collection of long-neglected texts by workers writ-ing in this period of intense popular political activity. It was a projectreflecting Ranciere's more general attempt at the time to, as he


put it, 'establish what working class tradition was, and to study howMarxism interpreted and distorted it ... I posited the existence of aspecifically working-class discourse' (Ranciere 1997b). Searching fora 'real' history unmediated by historians with a particular paradigmor school of historiography to defend, La Parole ouvriere reflected a viewthat in order to understand the true nature of working-class valuesand their expression one should turn to this period and in particularto the socialism of the French artisans.

Embarked on a quest for the authentic and essential voice of theprogressive, nineteenth-century working class, Ranciere was at thispoint wide open to the allegation of populism, to the accusation thathe and his collaborators had a naive faith in the forward-looking andegalitarian outlook of this particular section of the French work-ing class. But a new, if no less controversial, twist was to make suchcriticisms less relevant. As a result of his intense archival activity,Ranciere came to believe that the nineteenth-century working classbehaved less autonomously and with far less pride in itself than hehad previously thought, and was 'a working class which was moremobile, less attached to its tools and less sunk in its poverty and drun-kenness than the various traditions usually represent it' (Ranciere1988:51). He now argued that, contrary to the belief of many his-torians of the nineteenth-century working class, many ordinaryworking people did not take pride in their work and in their way oflife. Quite the contrary; many - including the most significant andmilitant artisans - were primarily preoccupied with planning or atleast dreaming about an escape from their own trades and ways oflife and were hankering after the lifestyles and cultures of the bour-geoisie. The aspirant, self-taught and articulate amongst these indivi-duals, who imitated the more privileged, were the most impor-tant object of study for the socialist historian: 'A worker who hadnever learned how to write and yet tried to compose verses to suitthe taste of his times was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailingideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs'(Ranciere 1988:50).

This approach of course constituted a substantial shift away fromMarxist historiography. For Marx, the future was likely to be shapedby the collective might of the proletariat, of wage labourers and their


allies, who would work for the cause of socialism because it was theywho suffered most from the process and consequences of the IndustrialRevolution. It was they who were most likely to organize resistanceand revolt, in part because they had the least to lose. Aspirant arti-sans, Marx had argued, had far more to lose than the proletariat andin fact benefited from the status quo, compared with proletarians atleast. Whatever one might make of Ranciere's new approach, it wasindeed this particular shift, which was arguably as significant as hisearlier strong reaction against Althusser, that led to some unique posi-tions and placed his thought in a far less identifiable place in a disci-plinary sense than had previously been the case. He was now workingon the boundaries between history, aesthetics and critical theory, andlater political theory as well. Ranciere was now looking at workingclass history as culture, as writing, rather than social or political his-tory in the more conventional sense.

His work was certainly intended to be provocative and to challengemuch accepted wisdom, including orthodox historical materialism.The Nights of Labour: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France(1989 [1981]) follows in great detail intellectual expressions of work-ing class life of the 1830s and 1840s such as workers' debates with theFourierists and St Simonians, views expressed in popular newspapers,diaries, letters and poetry. Many of the individuals and groups whoproduced this material were affected by the July 1830 uprising in away Ranciere and his generation were by the events of May 1968.Via an examination of these documents Ranciere attempts to demon-strate how working-class thought in the nineteenth century, far fromidentifying proudly with a culture of the working class, on the con-trary strived to effect a rupture with any such culture and insteadsought to take on the mantle of writers and poets. 'At the birth of the"workers' movement", there was thus neither the "importation" ofscientific thought into the world of the worker nor the affirmation ofa worker culture. There was instead the transgressive will to appro-priate the "night" of poets and thinkers, to appropriate the lan-guage and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality wereindeed real and effectual' (Ranciere 2003 [Afterword]: 219). In otherwords, these worker-intellectuals, far from writing in order to con-solidate a popular culture with pride in its honest simplicity and


worker solidarity, were in fact trying to be other people; they wereaspirational. As we shall see, this also anticipated Ranciere's theorywhereby politics and democracy both consist of a radical affirmationof the claim to legitimate activity of individuals or a group whose actsare deemed illegitimate by the rules of the status quo. DiscussingThe Nights of Labour Ranciere comments:

[t]he idea of a 'poetics of knowledge' that would cut across all dis-ciplines thus expresses a very close relationship between subject andmethod. The Nights of Labours as a 'political' book in that it ignoredthe division between 'scientific' and 'literary' or between 'social'and 'ideological', in order to take into account the struggle bywhich the proletariat sought to reappropriate for themselves acommon language that had been appropriated by others, and toaffirm transgressively the assumption of equality. (LP 5)

The Nights of Labour was also the beginning of what would becomea more developed critique of historicism (in NH), exemplified inparticular by the histoire des mentalites approach of the Annales school,and Ranciere later argued that to interpret a historical phenom-enon by reference to its time was to lend such an interpretation awholly spurious authority. The view that many historians were prac-tising a 'discourse of propriety' and serving to consolidate a receivedwisdom about past and present was to push Ranciere even furtherinto a studied a-disciplinarity and an ever stronger opposition toanything remotely or partially relying on positivism or empiricism(DW121-2).

There is, it would seem, an irony with this shift away from a view ofthe working class as a progressive force because of its pride in working-class traditions and practices, to a view of ordinary people as beingmost challenging to the status quo in a progressive sense when theyseek to imitate other (more privileged) groups and classes. Howeverproblematic Marx's claim might be in its empirical detail that theworking class, by acting in a way which is true to itself, can be thevehicle of its own emancipation, Ranciere's determination to shedany remnants of claims to scientific references — including 'scientificsocialism' — is at least equally problematic. If Ranciere viewed other


historians as being unchallenging to the status quo by describing andattempting to explain generalities, he now seemed to have shiftedfrom a populist stance to an approach where he was highly selectiveregarding whom he studied in order to support a view of the worldwhich relied more on its own internal logic than on a thoroughexploration of the world as it is. Ironically, by abandoning all notionsof generalization and testability in an empirical way he was puttingthe intellectual in a position of authority because it was now the scho-lar who decided who was worthy of study and who was not, appar-ently without reference to broader criteria. By adopting an approachthat was arguably in part at least a form of critical theory, he wasallowing the interpreter of history full reign to pick and choose atwill, influenced largely by the logic of the historian's own abstrac-tions - Ranciere's own story - rather than more generalizable cri-teria, be they historical or sociological or both.

Ranciere however reached the opposite conclusion, namely that itwas established philosophy and sociology that were intrinsically eli-tist, including not only and most obviously the work of Plato, butalso the writings of Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu, which he explores inThe Philosopher and His Poor (2003 [1983]). These and other thinkers,he argues, all of whom wrote major texts where the poor (or otherswhose role in society was not to think) play an important part, para-doxically reinforce the separation that exists between the mass ofordinary people on the one hand, and thought and art on the other.In what turned out to be a contributing factor to his passage back totheory, Ranciere attempts to show that the foundations of philosophy(and in Bourdieu's case sociology) are built on the exclusion of thepoor rather than their integration, where the poor are firmly placedin one position in society and the philosopher (or sociologist) inanother. The thinker examines the poor, who do not think for them-selves; they are intellectual objects, not subjects. Philosophy, includ-ing Marxist and neo-Marxist philosophy, seeks to explain why there isa particular distribution of social roles and serves to reinforce theinjustices and inequalitites of the status quo. Philosophy is thus a jus-tification of domination.

He points out that Plato is quite clear that there is and should be astrict division of labour between people whose social role is to do one


thing or another, in particular to be either artisan or philosopher,

doer or thinker, but never both. From a fairly uncontentious review

of Plato's comments on social roles, Ranciere moves more controver-

sially to Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu. According to Ranciere, Marx

views the poor - the proletariat - in a similar fashion to the way

Plato views the poor, to the extent that for Marx the historic role of

the working class is to rise up, to revolt and to overthrow capitalism.

It does this not because of what it has to contribute in a positive sense,

socially, politically or culturally, but because of what it is not, because

it is emptied by the capitalist mode of production of all positive

attributes: 'The proletarian has only one role, to make revolution, and

s/he cannot not make revolution, given who s/he is. For the proletarian is

the pure loss of any attribute, the identity of being and non-being'

(PP 122, italics in original). Once again, then, according to Ranciere,

Marx the philosopher, like Plato before him, treats the poor as a cog in

the philosopher's explanatory machine and not as a group of indivi-

duals who take any initiatives, or pursue creative activities.

Sartre also takes the function and potential freedom of ordinary

working people to be crucial in any proper understanding of the

world. But like Marx, Sartre as interpreted by Ranciere only treats

them as rounded and intrinsically interesting people who think for

themselves in a distant and imaginary future, not in the present,

when by contrast the philosopher has depth and a great deal of under-

standing and the poor have neither. Finally, Bourdieu is a particularly

important object of criticism in The Philosopher and his Poor, partly

because, whilst Ranciere was finishing his book, Bourdieu's sociology

of education in The Inheritors (1979 [1964]), Reproduction in Education

(1977 [1970]) and Distinction (1984 [1979]) was being taken seriously

by the new Socialist government in France, after the election of

President Mitterrand in 1981. For Ranciere, Bourdieu's description

of education as being designed almost exclusively for the educated

classes, as culture for the already cultured, does not challenge the ini-

quities of the status quo any more than Plato had. Certainly, Bourdieu

defends the dispossessed against the privileged, but this popular align-

ment still leaves no room for individuals to do any of the social shifting

that had become so crucial to Ranciere's view of any real struggle

for emancipation:


[TJhis 'taking sides' consists in explaining backwards the same thingas the philosopher. But this reversed order is not indifferent. Thephilosopher started from the arbitrary in order to reach necessity.The sociologist reaches necessity starting from the illusion of free-dom. He proclaims that it is the illusion of their freedom that bindsartisans to their places. The declared arbitrariness thus becomes ascientific necessity, and the redistribution of cards an absolute illu-sion . . . [Bourdieu] doubled Marxist necessity with the Parmeni-dian necessity of its eternity. (PP: 179)

Ranciere's critique of Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu in The Philosopherand his Poor would seem to stem from a broader position regarding the-ories of socialist emancipation. For socialist theorists, the mostoppressed and excluded members of society are also, by definition,those who are the most marginal with regard to advanced formal edu-cation and participation in theoretical discussions. The theoreticalagenda tends very much to be set and explored by the highly educatedwho are often also part of other social elites. The poor (in Ranciere'sparlance) are therefore likely to seem at times like objects rather thansubjects of socialist theories. Having sprung from the Althusserian foldwhere this tendency was arguably pronounced — and Althusser washimself, after all, professor at an elite grande ecole — Ranciere's reactionwas to go far in the opposite direction, to a position that could easilybe described, once again, as populist, where theory was shunnedalmost entirely in order to record and then disseminate the wordsand thoughts of workers. This approach and the pursuit of theory arenot wholly incompatible, although Ranciere might have at leastseemed to think so at the time. A corrective to the idea that one mustchoose between accepting uncritically the views of worker intellec-tuals and rejecting theory by intellectuals deemed part of a socialelite might lie in the notion of Marx's 'revolutionizing practice', sug-gesting that ideas (including theory) are bound to change as practicalstruggles take place and reflect back on and inform ideas which influ-enced the struggles in the first place.

Ranciere's response to his conclusions regarding philosophy andthe poor was to distance himself from the practice of many radicalintellectuals who, it seemed to him, suggested to the oppressed and


exploited what they should be doing and thinking, how they shouldremain in their respectives roles and places.

If The Philosopher and his Poor was one transitional work on Ran-ciere's way back to theory, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in

Intellectual Emancipation (1991 [1987]) was the other. In this slightlylater book he challenges the dominant notions of the nature ofteaching and learning by exploring the emancipatory pedagogy of theeccentric Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840). Jacotot was a multi-skilledemigre teacher at the University of Louvain who took as a startingpoint the belief that all human beings have equal intelligence andthat differences in educational attainment stem almost exclusivelyfrom differential opportunities and experiences. This relatively un-contentious starting point, which is indeed found in many liberal andleft-leaning approaches to pedagogy, leads Jacotot to a far more radi-cal assertion that the position of the teacher is not one of authoritywhere she or he imparts to students what s/he knows and what thestudents do not know. Quite the contrary; the best learning takesplace along the same lines as infant language learning, where experi-ment, exploration and imitation are far more important and effec-tive than the conventional pedagogic process which involves receivingand absorbing knowledge passively from one's teacher and thenreproducing it. Perhaps more reminiscent of supervision of disser-tations or theses in higher education than of conventional schoolteaching or even some undergaduate teaching, Jacotot's challengeto conventional pedagogy is so extreme that, as Ranciere puts it:'[t]he duty of Joseph Jacotot's disciples is thus simple. They mustannounce to everyone, in all places and all circumstances, the news,the practice: one can teach what one does not know' (IS 101). Thishighly unorthodox approach to pedagogy could hardly be furtherremoved from that of Althusser, whom Ranciere quotes in La Lecyond'Althusser as follows: 'The object of pedagogy is to transmit a particu-lar body of knowledge to subjects who do not possess this knowledge.The pedagogical situation therefore relies on the absolute conditionof inequality between knowledge and absence of knowledge' (LA 17, italicsin original). Jacotot apparently did teach languages to studentsfrom a position of having no knowledge of the languages himselfand according to Ranciere this de-mystified form of teaching which


takes as its starting point an assumption of equality is the essence ofemancipatory practice.

From a pedagogical point of view, many questions can be raisedregarding this approach. For example, for learners to pursue an inde-pendent line of enquiry implies a high level of motivation or a highlevel of understanding of the process of learning, or both. Moreover,particularly at more elementary stages, the student arguably benefitsgreatly from the more extensive knowledge of the teacher in a fairlyconventional way, especially with regard to the technical skills of lan-guage learning or the basics of chemistry, for example. Leaving suchpractical objections aside for the moment, I would suggest that thisview of pedagogy and in particular the social analysis that underpinsit is a partial challenge to Enlightenment notions of progress andemancipation. Instead of the idea that human beings can striveto improve their lot by working towards equality and freedom,Ranciere, like Jacotot, takes equality to be a starting point for all poli-tical analysis and not a medium- or long-term goal to be striven forwith the help of an approach located within the Enlightenment tradi-tion of social progress. As we shall see, this has considerable conse-quences for Ranciere's more fully-fledged political thought, inparticular in Au Bords dupolitique (1992), La Mesentente (1995) and TenTheses on Politics (2001), all of which are influenced by Jacotot's views.

In the meantime, one of Arthur Rimbaud's poems provided thetitle for the journal of which Ranciere was one of the founding editorsin 1975 and with which he remained involved until its demise in 1981(see SP and Ross 2002: 124-37). The name Les Revokes logiques wastaken from Rimbaud's poem 'Democracy', written after the defeat ofthe Paris Commune and which describes how the bourgeois class was'destroying all logical revolt'; the parallel with the period after May1968 is clear and the title was also a reference to the slogan 'On araison de se revolter' ('We're right to revolt') adopted by the Maoistgroup the Gauche proletarienne of which some of the editors had beenmembers. The journal was concerned with the social history oflabour, working from the premise discussed above that there wasoften a considerable difference between what workers said and wroteabout themselves on the one hand and what professional intellectualssaid about them on the other.


In the first issue of the journal, the mainly philosophy-trained edi-torial collective stated that they intended to write a different sort ofhistory from any of the established French schools of historiography,and most importantly to 'resituate . . . thought from below' (in Ross2002: 128). Contributors would be concerned with searching archivesfor examples of primary speech and text in particular, thus allowingworker-intellectuals to speak for themselves. Highly reminiscent ofRanciere's approach in The Nights of Labour, the journal's inauguralstatement expressed particular interest in workers who emulatedpeople from other cultures and classes, including those who adopteda language more associated with the bourgeoise.

Ranciere's return to theory thus emerged against a background ofstrong reaction against the scientific structuralism of Louis Althusser,a Maoist and populist influence, much meticulous research in histor-ical archives, and some highly unorthodox and original conclusionsregarding both the historiography of the working class and actualconclusions drawn from an archive-based study of its history.

Liberal democracy and language

During the many years he spent arguing in favour of listening tounheard voices and promoting unsung heroes, Ranciere was attempt-ing to assert the importance of the experiences and views of ordinarypeople who were, he believed, overlooked by liberals and by left phi-losophers alike; both groups contributed to keeping the poor in theirplace. So Ranciere's project during what might be termed his histor-ical period, discussed above, confronted the notion that modernityand the liberal order allowed all individuals equal opportunity andallowed them to interact with each other as equals. But it also con-fronted analysts working in the socialist tradition who highlightedfrom afar (as Ranciere saw it) the historic, progressive role of theoppressed, but who knew little of their real lives. Since his returnto political thought, Ranciere has taken these themes as a point ofdeparture and, seen as a whole, his thought can be interpreted as apowerful critique of the very bases upon which liberal democracy isbuilt and the consequences of liberal-democratic assumptions for the


day-to-day reality of both politics and people's lives more generally.(I discuss the consequences for socialist theory below.) I will arguethat he identifies some crucial ways in which liberalism is flawed as aprogressive and supposedly egalitarian doctrine and that, broadlyspeaking, highlighting the notion of democracy linked to a radicallyegalitarian notion of politics is a useful way to pursue a criticalexploration of liberal democracy.

Language, which Ranciere explores partly as a metaphor andpartly in a more literal way, is at the heart of his approach and as Imention above it is one of the unifying factors in his entire political,historical, aesthetic and literary oeuvre. However, if some of themost important detail of his theoretical writing investigates the natureand results of speech acts, he is by no means part of the mainstreamstructuralist or poststructuralist 'linguistic turn', and is far more con-vinced of the theoretical centrality of popular revolt than eitherDerrida or even Foucault, for example. But the importance of whatcan broadly be termed 'discourse' certainly borrows from the post-structuralist tradition.

Before examining Ranciere's exploration of language more fully,let us pause in order to remind ourselves of the major tenets of a liberaldemocratic approach to politics. Liberal democracy promotes theimportance of freedom to vote, regular elections and eligibility of vir-tually all adults for public office. Instead of emphasizing the impor-tance of collective interests and popular rule, it defends the rights ofthe individual. John Rawls (1971: 61), for example, argues that thereare certain fundamental liberties that should take precedence overpopular rule in order to ensure that individuals are free and equal,including freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience andfreedom of thought, the right to hold personal property, and freedomfrom arbitrary arrest and seizure as defined by the concept of the ruleof law. Rawls and many other liberals argue that defence of theseaspects of personal freedom helps protect the individual's privatesphere against what he sees as often counterposing interests of thepublic sphere. Liberalism thus stresses individual rights, equalitybefore the law and formal equality of opportunity, often beforeeven minimal electoral concerns. It relies upon notions of equalityof opportunity and equality before the law, equalities which are

Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy 9 7

achieved in part via a defence of the rights of the individual. This,according to liberals, enables equality of rights and equality of com-petition between individuals playing by the same rules.

For Ranciere, any such approach to the notion of equality anddemocracy is profoundly misleading. Liberal approaches to equalitytake as read the idea that the fundamentals of political equality can beupheld despite inequalities of wealth, status and influence. But forRanciere there are profound structural ways in which the poor arekept in their traditional place. The way he puts this is that in normaltimes not only is the speech of ordinary people ignored, but theirwords are not recognized as speech at all; rather, they are taken to bemere noise, a type of Aristotelian blaberon of meaningless utterances.One can think of daily, minor but actual examples of this. From chil-dren in the company of adults to discussions in a cafe or pub or atdinner parties, in trade union and political meetings, to intellectualdebates in many arenas, there are instances where words uttered bysome seem to count so much more than words uttered by others,at times regardless of the substance of the words themselves. Wordsare not simply words with inherent, context-free meaning, but arereceived very differently according to who is uttering them andwhere they are uttered.

Thus when the powerless rise up and assert their legitimacy andtheir right to be taken notice of, it is a legitimacy to be heard. Ran-ciere argues that radical, and in particular insurrectional, assertionscannot be recognized as speech by those in harmony with the statusquo and this is where deliberation politics (and consensus politics)are particularly wrong: they assume people are talking in a contextwhere they fully understand each other, and assume that they arecommunicating on the same wavelength. In this respect, Ranciere isexplicit in his critique of Jiirgen Habermas' theories of communica-tive action and deliberative democracy which also have a linguisticorientation, but which rely on the notion that human speech acts canand indeed do tend to enable mutual understanding, agreement andconsensus:

. . . what radically distinguishes my thinking from a communicativerationality model is that I do not accept the premise that there is a


specific form of political rationality that may be directly deducedfrom the essence of language or from the activity of communica-tion. The Habermasian schema presupposes, in the very logic ofargumentative exchange, the existence of a priori pragmatic con-straints that compel interlocutors to enter into a relation of inter-comprehension, if they wish to be self-coherent. This presupposesfurther that both the interlocutors and the objects about whichthey speak are preconstituted; whereas, from my perspective,there can be political exchange only when there isn't such a pre-established agreement - not only, that is, regarding the objects ofdebate but also regarding the status of the speakers themselves.It is this pheonomenon that I call disagreement...' (DW 116)

Political discussion, then, 'is never a simple dialogue' (M 77), never arational debate between competing but equally represented andequally representable interests, but is a battle to make one's voicecount as one that is recognized as legitimate. As is so often the casewith Ranciere, this characteristic of all politics is best understood byreference to classical antiquity, and in this case the secession at Aven-tin in Rome. For Ranciere the patricians at Mount Aventin did notrecognize the noises the plebeians were making as speech and tooktheir utterances to be meaningless. The plebeians were thereforeobliged not only to argue their case, but also to frame what they weresaying in such a way that the patricians recognized their words asbeing endowed with meaning in the first place. 'The principal of poli-tical interlocution', Ranciere concludes from this, 'is thus disagree-ment; that is, it is the discordant understanding of both the objects ofreference and the speaking subjects' (DW 116).

In the spirit of the slogan 'We are all German Jews', chanted inMay 1968 in response to xenophobic remarks about Daniel Cohn-Bendit, he thus considers words not as mere superstructural manifes-tations of something deeper and more significant, but items of signifi-cance in themselves, real political acts; speaking of The Nights ofLabour, he explains that he 'treated these texts not as documents thateither expressed or concealed the "real" conditions of the workers andthe forms of domination they had endured but rather as evidenceof the controversial polemical configurations resulting in that form of


political subjectivity known as "the worker'" (M 172, DW 114).

He goes on to explain that, beginning from

a different reading of Plato's critique of writing . . . the central ques-

tion for me rests upon the politically fertile potential of the opposi-

tion between two differing accounts of how words circulate. The

'silent word of writing', according to Plato, is that which will sway

no matter what - making itself equally available both to those

entitled to use it and to those who are not. (DW 115)

Human beings are political, then, precisely because they are

literary, because the meanings of words are contested and struggled

over in disputes between the powerful and the powerless, those who

have to date determined the meaning of words and those who have

not. Applying this approach in The Names of History: On the Poetics

of Knowledge (1999 [1992]), Ranciere attempts to demonstrate the

way in which it can recognize the power of speech acts. Indeed,

when Ranciere comes to lay down systematically his views on a

theory of politics, a notion as central to his thought as equality is

itself a speech event.

I would suggest that Ranciere's political thought can be read in

part as an exploration of the notion of power in a general sense.

Power is the generally accepted logic of what Ranciere describes as

the orderly domination of the arkKe, which is the logic of liberalism

and the denial of the voice of ordinary people, the sans-part. In fact,

Ranciere's approach is in some ways reminscent of Steven Lukes'

thesis in Power: A Radical View (1974). Lukes argues that a proper,

'three-dimensional' view of power must certainly take into account

more conventional and restricted views of power which emphasize

overt instances of people preventing other people from doing what

they would otherwise have done, or compelling them to do what

they do not want to do. But a more complete theory of power

should also include the idea that those who are more powerful set

the agenda in the first place and thus prevent the emergence of

other views or desires on the part of the less powerful. When Ranciere

describes the way in which the language of the sans-part is unitelligi-

ble to those who only speak the language of the status quo, he


appears to be making a similar point. The powerful not only con-sciously and obviously override the less powerful in terms of whatdoes and does not get done, and what people are and are not allowedto do, but they also set the terms of debates in such a way that theviews and demands of the less powerful cannot be understood, orsometimes even formulated.

Having said that, Ranciere's belief that normal politics is charac-terized by absence of understanding contributes to a very limitedview of what politics is, a position which, I believe, weakens his case.

Before moving on, it is worth saying that Ranciere himself uses lan-guage in a way that is often open to different interpretations, which attimes makes it both intriguing and difficult to understand. Of course,punning and wordplay more generally are characteristic of poststruc-turalist thought and have to an extent become part of Ranciere's phi-losophy as well. This is of course familiar territory to students ofDerrida in particular, who goes out of his way to include in his writingelements of ambiguity and performativity via the manipulation of theform of the language itself; punning, hyphenation and mis-spellingsbecome part of the philosophy and the distinction between form andcontent is blurred. Ranciere practises linguistic games in a relativelyminor way compared to Derrida and other major figures in posts truc-turalist thought, but playful linguistic devices are certainly present.This is in part informed by Ranciere's belief that there is no strictdemarcation between aesthetics and politics in particular andbetween other traditional disciplines such as literature and philoso-phy; elements more traditionally associated with one discipline thusinfuse others, most commonly, aspects of linguistic or discourse analy-sis infusing political thought. We have already seen that for Ranciere,writing itself is a form of political intervention, a form of performance,not a type of detached analysis.

Defining the political

It will now be clear that the heart of Ranciere's political thought is abelief in the right of the mass of ordinary people to play a different rolein society from the one they have been playing, and more generally to


lead different lives from the ones they have been leading. True politicsexists when there is a popular uprising of a particular type, when thesans-part revolt and disrupt the status quo by asserting their right to beequal with all others. This direct challenge to the unjust status quoitself takes the form of a declaration of radical equality on the part ofthe excluded and is necessarily just:

[PJolitics exists where the count of parts of society is disturbed bythe assertion of a part of those who have no part \l'inscription d'unepart des sans-part]. It begins when the equality of anyone withanyone else is declared as being liberty of the people . . . those whoare nothing assert that they are collectively identical to the whole ofthe community. (M 169)

Highly reminiscent of the powerful phrase in the original French ver-sion of the Internationale^ 'nous sommes rien, soyons tout (we are nothing,let us be everything), Ranciere places emphasis on the importance ofinsurrection and rare, radical disruption of the status quo which canbe altered in positive fashion only by the determined, subjectiveactions of the dominated. Influenced by classical reflections on poli-tics, real politics appeared for the first time in Ancient Greece whenparts of the demos insisted they should be listened to and their viewsand demands regarded as legitimate and equal with those who werein positions of power, and these members of the demos insisted thisshould happen in the public sphere. Even more importantly, thiscrucial group, whose individual members were insignificant in theprevious order of things, put themselves forward as representatives ofsociety as a whole. Those who had counted for nothing audaciouslypresented themselves as having universal significance.

Central to Ranciere's theory of politics is his notion of police.He splits the conventional notion of the political into police on the onehand, which he describes as 'a certain manner of partitioning the sen-sible . . . [e] very thing in its place' (TT 7) and where inequality andinjustice abound. On the other hand, politics — in the true, Rancier-ian sense disrupts and overturns the order of the police in an interven-tion which explores radical equality. The essence of politics is thusdisagreement (la mesentente] between orderly inequality and disorderly


equality (M 17, 28—9). It is this disorderly — one is tempted to sayanarchic — equality which Ranciere champions.

A proper understanding of the emergence of politics, Ranciereargues, needs to take account of an aesthetic of the political, wherethe process of political interrruption enables that which was previouslyinvisible or inaudible to become seen or heard. In the normal state ofaffairs, the police determines what is perceptible and audible and whatis not, people's and groups' places and functions, the social and politi-cal hierarchy and more generally the social and political system. As wehave seen, in Ranciere's jargon the very essence of politics is the disrup-tion of the partition of the sensible by supplementing it with a part ofthose who have no part; in this way the perception of what is visible andaudible is altered. Despite his strong reaction against Althusser, onecannot help but see aspects of Althusser's theory of ideology here,where the status quo is maintained in important ways by IdeologicalState Apparatuses and where moving beyond the status quo dependsin part at least on tackling these apparatuses.

Much of Ranciere's political theory was written during FrangoisMitterrand's 14-year presidency, beginning in 1981. Mitterrandcame to power with a neo-Keynesian programme of reform, whichincluded nationalizations, job creation, higher public sector wages,social security reform and a more progressive foreign policy thanFrance had known before. All of this was wholly out of step withwhat key governments were doing elsewhere in the world, whenMargaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the USA andHelmut Kohl in West Germany were pursuing vigorous programmesof neoliberal economic policy and regressive social agendas. By the endof 1982, Mitterrand and his Socialist-Communist government hadembarked upon a U-turn which was to set the tenor for successive gov-ernments for the next decade and beyond; austerity measures in eco-nomic policy to attempt to stem the rising tide of unemployment, onlythe mildest social reform, highly pragmatic, conformist foreign policy,and 'cohabitation' between left and right when for two periods oftwo years (1986-88 and 1993-95) there were right-wing govern-ments working with the Socialist President Mitterrand. As Rancierepoints out (AB 5), when Mitterrand was re-elected in 1988 he madenot a single promise of reform, compared with 110 proposals for


significant change in 1981. The Mitterrand era came to be known asone which was characterized by consensus-oriented politics, whendivisions of left and right were supposedly far less relevant than in thepast and when private enterprise was championed more than it hadbeen by any other French government since 1945. Many intellectualsapplauded the new governmental pragmatism and joined the searchfor the ultimate form of managerial, centre-oriented government.In institutional terms this notably found expression in the FondationSaint Simon think-tank, where intellectuals, professional politiciansand business people met to discuss the intersection between business,politics and the world of ideas.

Although those schooled in the ideas of May 1968 were under noillusions that profound change would follow the elections of 1981,neither did they have the direct experience of adaptive social democ-racy that those on the left in many other countries of Western Europehad, for example in West Germany, Britain and Sweden. Whenthe Socialist—Communist government performed its economic policyU-turn of 1982—83, implementing austerity measures and embracingthe market, many intellectuals and activists alike were genuinelytaken by surprise. Ranciere himself certainly had few illusions regard-ing either the Socialist Party or the Communist Party, and would nothave seen the 1981 Mitterrand victory as the beginning of a socialistnew dawn. But his thought does seem to contain elements of impas-sioned reaction to the rapid move to the right on the part of thetraditional parties of the left. As we have seen, the only way that pol-itics comes about in his theory of politics is via the disruption of thelogic of the police and through disagreement; Ranciere is emphaticnot only that politics is anomalous and 'exists as a deviation from thisnormal order of things' (TT: 8) but also that the essence of politics isindeed dissensus (TT: 8).

Against the precepts of liberal democracy and centre-oriented con-sensus politics, against a celebration of the alleged demise of theFrench revolutionary spirit, and against the managerial claims of pro-fessional politicians who have long forgotten what more participativepolitics might be like, we have seen that Ranciere suggests that a radi-cal assertion on the part of the dispossessed that they have legitimatedemands (demands that are not even recognized as such in the


language of the arkKe) can transform a situation dramatically towardsthe achievement of greater justice. The sans-part must rise up in orderto assert the legitimacy of their demands and without such an uprisingthey will be permanently overlooked, no matter how much dialogueand deliberation takes place along liberal lines. Read in the con-text of the Socialist U-turn and its aftemath, Ranciere's theory is astrong reminder that another type of politics is possible, more organi-cally connected with ordinary people, and his theory suggests that theabandoning of more traditional left politics is not inevitable. Histheory of politics is in this sense an antidote to the depoliticizationof governmental and party politics which has been so pronounced inFrance, contributing both to a rise in the level of abstentions atnational elections and indirectly, no doubt, to the rise of the extremeright National Front.

It is perhaps not suprising, then, that in Ranciere's work the politi-cal is ephemeral and fleeting. It emerges only at points of tension andpolemic between two or more areas, at boundaries and divisions andpoints of flux, and never in areas or times of stablity and calm. Thepolitical subject is 'defined by its participation in contrarities' and pol-itics itself is a 'type of paradoxical action' (TT 2). He explains that hechose the particular title for his book The Nights of Labour preciselybecause it suggests these worker-intellectuals were exploring emanci-pation by transgressing the normally assigned division between dayand night, which usually implied work and sleep respectively, butwhich they replaced with work and emancipatory writing (LP 4—5).This particular type of exploration of emancipation is exactly the sortof exceptional, temporary and illegitimate (according to prevailingnorms) form that politics takes in his theory, and indeed at times ithas almost dream-like overtones.

It would be hard to imagine a more extreme theoretical challengeto the politics of Frangois Mitterrand after 1982, or to the politics ofmany other centrist politians who have embraced a pragmaticapproach to government, once labelled Third Way, whether in Brit-ain, Germany or a host of other industrialized countries. Ranciere,by stark contrast with this sort of governmental pragmatism, sug-gests that a substantial departure from the unjust status quo is possi-ble, a departure which had previously seemed impossible to many.


He does this by placing emphasis on the subject and on politicalactivism, and his theory is to an extent reminiscent of what Marxdescribes as 'revolutionizing practice'. He advocates progress viapolitical experimentation informing theory and belief in the insightand soundness of ordinary people - 'the paradox of "the competenceof incompetents" that is the basis of politics in general' (LP 21) -and he suggests, contrary to the tendency for professionalization ofmuch politics, that the ordinary person is best - in fact is alone -equipped to partake in politics. His theory offers hope and promotesbelief in the possibility of radical change in a situation where normallythe large numbers of people whose voices are not heard suffer hugedis-advantages, which according to police logic is part of the naturalorder of things.

Ranciere's ideas are, however, problematic in a number of furtherrespects. First, given his highly restricted definition of politics, he doesnot offer any way of interpreting ongoing characteristics of andchanges in what we would normally call politics, whether this be amore restricted, party and parliamentary politics, or a broader defini-tion which takes on board a large number of manifestations of power,including many lower-level power struggles which need to be under-stood in order to make sense of and encourage more radical change.For Ranciere much of what political and social analysts do when theyanalyse power is to analyse the police order and not politics at all. He isemphatic (in the very first sentence of his Ten Theses] that '[pjolitics isnot the exercise of power'. But if politics is defined so narrowly, as raremoments of disruption, how are we to understand what happens inbetween these moments? Ranciere might answer that we also have tounderstand the police order. But how do we distinguish and analysemore positive, progressive political acts short of uprising in thisschema and how do we understand 'bad polities'? Moreover, is thereany hope for a more stable, ongoing form of social and political orga-nization which is not unjust? According to Ranciere, politics 'existswhen the natural order of domination is interrupted by a part ofthose who have no part. Without this interruption there is no polities'(M 31). Real politics is thus defined against an enduring and stableorder and apparently cannot itself be enduring or stable. Because ofRanciere's highly specific definition of politics, his theory does not


seem to equip us to examine what happens outside the extraordinaryevent of politics, nor to properly understand how one situation leadsto the other.

As Bob Jessop (2003: 17) suggests, there seems to be a 'recurrentcycle' whereby when political insurrection takes place, it is bound tofail and is 'doomed to re-institutionalization'. It is not at all clear thatthere is a possibility of ongoing democratic and egalitarian politicsbecause the interruption of the police seems bound to be temporaryand fleeting, because it is defined as an exception to the status quorather than as a potentially normal and ongoing state of things (orslowly evolving situation) in its own right. Failure of radical politicsseems to be built into radical polities' very definition.

This seems again to break with an Enlightenment concept ofprogress, without convincingly replacing it with another. Indeed,Ranciere's notion of politics is ahistorical to the extent that politicstakes much the same form in Ancient Greece as today; it is not, forexample, class-specific in a historical sense except to say that it is thepoor, the oppressed, the (in Bourdieu's language) 'dispossessed' thatbring it about. In the quotation his theory does not seem to toembrace any notion that one type of police politics represents progresscompared with another, although in his polical commentary he doessuggest distinct advantages of liberal democracy over other forms ofgovernment (e.g. LH 81).

Finally, the notion of equality breaks with more conventionalnotions of it, to the extent that, as we have seen, it is a theoreticalstarting point rather than an objective: 'Equality is not a goal thatgovernments and societies could succeed in reaching. To pose equal-ity as a goal is to hand it over to the pedagogues of progress, whowiden endlessly the distance they promise that they will abolish.Equality is a presupposition, an intial axiom, or it is nothing'(Ranciere 2003 [Afterword]: 223). Once again, this approach seemsto be a direct challenge to Enlightenment notions of progress andequality. Since human beings clearly do not live equal lives in somany ways, should not material and other forms of equality thereforeremain a goal to be striven for? Ranciere's theory of politics seemsdeliberately to break with the idea that material equality is in fact amajor goal of egalitarian politics. Moreover, it seems to suggest a sort


of political passivity, by stark contrast with what some other aspects ofhis theory suggest. What are the sans-part rising up in favour of if notgreater equality? If equality is taken as given and as a starting point —not a goal - then it seems the struggle for a better life is not a practicalone but a state of mind, a particular consciousness, which is ironicallyrather unthreatening to the police state of affairs and possibly ratherunmotivating for people wanting to get involved in a struggle for afairer world.

At times it is not clear if Ranciere is in fact developing a praxis-informed, progress-oriented, emancipatory theory or if he is thinkingmore in aesthetic terms of the Utopian and an impractical ideal,which might ultimately inspire the practical but is itself quiteremoved from it; in Le Maitre ignorant^ talking about the self-educationof artisans in the early nineteenth century, he comments:

Thus one can dream of a society of emancipated individuals thatwould be a society of artists. Such a society would repudiate thedivide between those who know and those who do not know,between those who possess or who do not possess the property ofintelligence. It would recognize only active minds . . . (MI 120—1)

Ranciere's notion of politics Apolitical - and not politico-economic,and sometimes not materialist for that matter, and certainly not his-torical materialist - in that it relies on a notion of the gap between theestablished order - the police - and political interventions as speechacts on the part of individuals or groups who disrupt the injustice ofthe status quo; by doing this the sans-part assert their right to be under-stood in a way that the discourse of received wisdom does not allow;the rebels' statements cannot be understood by the ruling police andthe conditions of comprehension are created in the process of rebellionand its aftermath, through the rebels seizing the opportunity to assertthemselves and, in linguistic terms, asserting the comprehensibility oftheir utterances. In this sense Ranciere's theory is a theory of the sub-ject similar to Badiou's, in that subjects must believe in their actionsand statements and make them true by creating the revolutionizingcriteria by which they are judged. In Ranciere, however, it seemsthere is far more premeditation on the part of the dominated than in


Badiou (people are subjects before the event as well as afterwards).In this particular respect Ranciere's theory is not unlike Marx's ideathat people make their own history, but what is missing is the idea thatpeople make their history in very particular circumstances, so theimportance of the subject is there but not the importance of specificmaterial circumstances, it seems.

To sum up my views on Ranciere's definition of politics, despite mygenerally favourable comments above regarding his approach to therole of ordinary people in politics and conclusions we might drawabout his approach to power generally, on closer inspection his defini-tion of politics is more limited.

Democracy and post-democracy

We are now in a position to analyse Ranciere's conception of democ-racy, which we can do fairly briefly, because true democracy is synon-ymous with true politics. Thus democracy has nothing to do withgovernment or any institution, or any ongoing, stable organizationof society at all, but is on the contrary sudden confrontation with theestablished police order. Democracy is a transforming force wherethe demos, defined as 'those who have nothing, who do not have spe-cific properties allowing them to exercise power' (DW 124), crea-tively disrupts the status quo where everything has its place in orderto create space for polemic and dissensus, where the place of things issubject to intense debate and dispute. Highly activist and concernedwith creating political subjects, Ranciere's conception of democracy isdisruptive and exceptional.

Democracy thus defined is to an extent effective as a tool in a leftcritique of the lived reality of liberal democracy and a number ofcontemporary discussions of democracy. Ranciere's emphasis on theactive and activist role of ordinary people contrasts sharply withthe minimally political versions of liberal democracy which havebecome prevalent, where political structures do as much to shelterthe individual from politics as encourage participation, and he insistson a discussion of important areas which many versions of democracyleave untouched. Ranciere uses this approach to great effect in his


writings on the conventional domain of politics and society andis particularly effective in countering more mainstream interpreta-tions of the supposed 'end of exceptionalism' in French politics,society and intellectual life, as I have already argued. In On the Shoresof Politics (2007), he argues convincingly that the superficially con-sensual characteristics of the Mitterrand era and post-Mitterrand eraare certainly not the characteristics of democracy but are, with theincreasing professionalization of governmental politics, the decline ofinterest in party politics and government on the part of ordinarypeople and the convergence of centre-left and centre-right, quite theopposite of democracy; real democracy allows the demos to undoarrangements and alliances as much as create them and is certainlynot there simply to rubber-stamp what the political elite is doing.

In La Haine de la democratic (2005) he continues his analysis both ofvarious aspects of the established order and of its intellectual advo-cates, such as the historian Frangois Furet and the neo-Tocquevilliansocial analyst Gilles Lipovetsky. Ranciere argues that these writersamongst many others promote a highly superficial and simplified ver-sion of democracy, where the person in the street is reduced to anoccasional, reluctant and uninterested voter, which is precisely onereason why there is in fact no democracy. Proper democracy, by con-trast, sends liberal democracy into disarray:

[DJemocracy is the name of a singular interruption of this order ofthe distribution of bodies in a community that I have suggestedshould be conceptualized as police. It is the name of that whichinterrupts the smooth functioning of this order through a singularprocess of subjectivization. (M 139)

By contrast, many forms of what is called 'representative democracy',he argues, are in fact a type of functioning of the state based on anunhappy compromise between the privileges of supposedly naturalelites, on the one hand, and on the other the results of long strugglesfor more genuine democracy. The best example of this is found inBritain, with its tradition of liberalism combined with a history ofstruggles for electoral reform. The goal of liberal and representativedemocracy today, he argues, is in fact to govern without the people,


or at least with an undivided people, and thus to govern withoutpolitics (LH61,88).

Thus Ranciere's discussion of democracy is put to use in uncompro-mising fashion to expose the severe democratic shortcomings of liberaldemocracy, especially in the form it has taken in the late twentiethand early twenty-first century. It is once again a bold assertion of thepolitical legitimacy of ordinary people and is a theory which serves asan effective critique of aspects of the status quo. In Chronique des tempsconsensuels (2005), a series of short pieces formerly published as news-paper articles, he sets out an alternative vision of a variety of phenom-ena, ranging from international political developments to new films,from the bicentenary of Victor Hugo's birth to the philosophy ofAdorno and Horkheimer. He explains at the beginning of the bookthat he is attempting in this writing to contribute to creating thespace for proper politics (CT 10).

Most of what passes for democratic politics in the West today, then,is post-democracy (M 135), which promotes supposed consensuspolitics, which is in fact a depoliticized form of government wherethe people disappears, and one of whose major goals is to keepeveryone in their place and not to allow the eruption of real politics(M 142~3). Consensual democracy is in fact a contradiction in termsbecause democracy is about disagreement. One characteristic of post-democracy is that what is supposed to be democratic opinion is in factopinion polls. Another is the apparent submission of politics, in theform of the state, to the judiciary, which is the submission of politicsto the state (M 151). The modest state, which is supposedly not over-bearing, in fact puts politics into abeyance, sidelines the demos and invarious ways strengthens its position; it does this notably by claimingnot to have any choice or room for manoeuvre regarding econ-omic policy, because of international constraints. Ranciere points outthat when today's governments claim to be nothing but the simpleservants of international capital, they have taken on board Marx'sonce-ridiculed views in this respect and use them to legitimize theirbehaviour (M 156).

Ranciere's theory of democracy is thus a rare and forceful anti-dote to the prevailing views on democracy and politics more widely.He argues that we need to rethink how we create politics by thinking


differently about disagreement in such a way that this process con-fronts the supposed consensus of the status quo, without howevercreating a new form of police society and politics.

Ranciere's theory of democracy is, however, problematic in theways described above in relation to his definition of politics. It isfor example always defined in terms of what it is against and seemsnecessarily fleeting. Crucially, there is no hint at how a democraticsociety would be organized, nothing approaching a model of sus-tained democracy. If the demos is defined as 'those who have nothing,who do not have specific properties allowing them to exercise power'(DW 124), how would the demos play an active role in a more demo-cratic society if, as it seems, an upturn in the demos' political (and pre-sumably material) fortunes automatically disqualifies them frompolitical influence? If democracy comes about when 'those who haveno business speaking, speak, and those who have no business takingpart, take part' (LP 19), how could democracy ever be sustained?How could the sans-part, whom Ranciere promotes so effectively inhis theory, ever play a full and positive role in a democratically orga-nized society if the very existence of democracy depends on their play-ing a marginal role and being in an apparently constant state ofrevolt? It seems the demos is defined in terms that only allow it toplay a part which is against the prevailing, unjust order of things,and is therefore condemned for ever to a marginal role. Rancieresays as much when he comments:

Democracy means firstly that an anarchic 'government' foundedon nothing but the absence of any entitlement to govern (LH 48).

Concluding remarks

Jacques Ranciere has developed a radical and emancipatoryapproach both to popular history and to political theory which assertsthe importance of an engaged — as opposed to managerial — form ofpolitics and which poses sound theoretical challenges to liberal-ism and liberal democracy in particular. In a body of work whichchallenges many fundamental aspects of the status quo, he puts the


ordinary person at the heart of his system and suggests that a form ofself-realization, or political subjectivity, comes about via an asser-tion of equality in a process by which the views and interests of thesans-part assume universal significance. Taken as a whole, Ranciere'sapproach is an innovative and uncompromising defence of the politi-cal legitimacy of the demos and the importance of self-organizationof non-experts. I would suggest that this interpretation of politics isparticularly effective when seen as a critique of the professionaliza-tion, cynicism, elitism and depoliticization which often characterizeparliamentary politics in advanced capitalist societies in the earlytwenty-first century, which is often accompanied by rising levels ofabstentions at elections, profound disillusionment with professionalpoliticians, and the rise of extreme right political parties. Ranciere'stheory is also useful in terms of exploring the nature of power moregenerally and the ways in which many people fail to assume anymeasure of self-realization because of the structures and practices ofwhat Ranciere describes as police practice.

By contrast with what is often described as democracy in liberaltheory and more general parlance, democracy for Ranciere is bothan active and activist term, where the demos intervenes directly not toendorse the legitimacy of the political elite, to smoothe over differ-ences or to achieve consensus, but, on the contrary, to assert the legiti-macy of a different type of politics and systematically underminecomplacent practices of the existing order. Extraparliamentary activ-ity is thus crucial (e.g. LH 84) and all true political activity takesplace in the name of equality. Ranciere's project is thus, implicitly atleast, also a challenge to large areas of debate and research in thesocial sciences, especially political science, sociology and economics,whose starting point is often to take as read the legitimacy of theestablished order and whose conclusions therefore reinforce its pur-ported legitimacy.

I have argued that in these ways Ranciere's work is sound anduseful. I have also argued, however, that his work suffers fromvarious shortcomings. The nature of Ranciere's reaction againstAlthusser means that there is a reluctance to identify a class or subsec-tion of a class as a progressive force in a historic sense. This is


particularly clear both in his writings on the nineteenth century andin his discussion of the work of Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu. Oneapparent consequence of this for Ranciere's political theory is that hedoes not suggest how a radical, egalitarian politics can be sustained;his socialist uprising is to an extent one without an empirically definedagent. Next, his definition of politics is so narrow that politics canonly, it seems, be fleeting and any progressive uprising will soonrevert to the status quo. Roughly the same applies to Ranciere'stheory of democracy, given that politics and democracy are virtuallysynonymous.

Ranciere uses a notion of speech as a political act, aesthetics and the'poetics of polities' in order to illustrate the need for radical emancipa-tion. But his discussion of disagreement (mesentente) in these respects isstrongly reminiscent of ideology, and even Althusser's notion of inter-pellation. Could it be that a virtual equating of revolution on the onehand and the assertion of ideological change on the other explains theextremely fragile nature of Ranciere's real politics? If uprising is infact ideological rather than a process where material circumstancesare substantially changed, then uprising is bound to be vulnerable toswift reversion to the status quo.

Finally, and more generally, we have seen in the opening para-graph of this chapter that Ranciere criticized Althusser for construct-ing a 'philosophy of order', a philosophy that left too much intact anddid not sufficiently challenge the status quo, and that Ranciere pro-ceeded to react strongly against his former mentor. I would suggestthat the degree and the nature of reaction is such that when onelooks at the detail of his definition of politics, appealing as an ideathough this ephemeral disorder of egalitarian revolt may be, Ran-ciere's own system often becomes a philosophy of exception or even aphilosophy of disorder.

Let us for a moment compare Ranciere and Badiou, both of whomhave a commitment to the idea of emancipation via activist and ega-litarian politics. Badiou suggests (in AM 129—38) that the followingaspects of Ranciere's work are borrowed from his own, an influencewhich Ranciere acknowledges to some extent (e.g. AB 32). First,Ranciere's notion of police appears to draw on Badiou's 'state of the


situation', which is pure multiplicity, or metastructure. The state (orfor Ranciere the police) attempts to prevent the event taking place,and denies its possibility (AM 134). Next, Ranciere, like Badiou,believes that politics comes about when individuals and/or groupsact (in Badiou's language) in fidelity towards an event, in effect creat-ing this event by naming it. It is only when this process of creation ofsubjecthood takes place that political activity takes place. Third, bothagree that politics is a linguistic expression of radical equality andBadiou reminds us that, like Ranciere, he believes that declarationscan be an important manifestation of the political. Finally, they bothbelieve that politics renders visible formerly invisible aspects of asituation, so that from a situation where the terms of the event arenot recognized, the actions of individuals - and only these actions -assert the legitimacy and indeed the existence of the event. Summingup their similarities, or more precisely his own influence on Ranciere,Badiou points out (AM 134-5) that for Ranciere politics 'is not theexercise of power' and that politics is 'a specific rupture in the logic ofthe arkh~e\ that politics is rare and subjective and that politics is 'theaction of supplementary subjects who assert themselves as super-numerary by conventional methods of counting parts of society'.

I would suggest that Badiou's advantage over Ranciere in his over-all scheme of things is that human beings are able to sustain tremen-dous and positive change in the long term through their commitmentto the event. Badiou's philosophy is in this way a philosophy whichlooks to the future in its concentration on after-the-event change,which to an extent offers a way out of existing injustices. Ranciere,by contrast, does not include any real hints as to how to movebeyond police rule, as we have seen. One of Badiou's overall weak-nesses, on the other hand, is that he is unable to explain properly thepre-evental genesis of change, or movement more generally andindeed is adamant that the emergence of the event is not explicableby reference to the circumstances in which it came about. Ranciere,on the other hand, places emphasis on explaining the genesis of hisevent-equivalent, which is the disagreement which leads to ruptureand which allows the emergence of politics.

Both writers conceive of politics proper as a process where thehuman subject is of crucial importance. Without the political activism


of individuals or groups there is no (in Badiouian language) politicalevent. For Ranciere, a rupture in the logic of the arkKe generatespolitical subjectivity, that is proper politics. For both, then, peoplebecome subjects when they rise up and create or act in fidelity towardsnew rules and circumstances.

Chapter 5

Etienne Balibar: Emancipation, Equalibertyand the Dilemmas of Modernity

Like Badiou and like Ranciere, Etienne Balibar has resisted any temp-tation to adopt a wholesale liberal approach in his interpretationof politics, or to succumb in a major fashion to poststructuralism.At the heart of his definition of the political is the notion of emancipa-tion, with the defiant actions of ordinary people taking centre-stage.Taken as a whole, Balibar's preoccupations are often reminiscent ofthose of Althusser — both are interested in Spinoza, Marxism as philo-sophy, ideology, and conjuncture, to mention but the most obvious —although the conclusions Balibar draws diverge increasingly withthose of his former mentor as time goes by. Balibar worked closelywith Althusser and wrote important parts of Reading Capital (1970[1965]), in which he explores the role of modes of production in theprocess of historical change. He continued to write from within aMarxist perspective and remained engaged with some of the centralquestions of Marxism until the late 1970s, examining in particu-lar the nature and role of ideology, the scientific and philosophicalclaims of historical materialism, the meaning and relevance of thenotion of class struggle, and the capitalist state. By the early 1980she was moving away from a strictly Marxist approach, although hecontinued to make a significant contribution to the study of Marx'swritings and continued to work broadly within a materialist andhistorical framework.

Again like Badiou and Ranciere, much of Balibar's work since theearly 1980s relates in one way or another to the question of the humansubject. In his general theory of politics and emancipation, it is theemergence and role of the subject in relation to politics and societythat one must understand first and foremost. In his reading of

Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity 117

Spinoza, he develops a theory of'transindividual subjectivity' whichpromotes the importance of the imaginary and of ideology, and in hiswork on citizenship, borders and racism he also discusses theories ofsubjectivation (SP, WP, RNC). Unlike Badiou and Ranciere, how-ever, Balibar's major later writings are characterized by growingattention to the lived reality of politics, in particular internationalpolitics as it relates to borders, citizenship and racism.

In this chapter I discuss some of the important contributionsBalibar makes to debates concerning both the general nature anddetail of emancipatory politics at the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury. I argue that the rather fragmented and uneven character ofBalibar's work and some of the consequent weaknesses are an integralaspect of it, which can be explained in part by the political and histor-ical context in which his writing career developed and by his ownposition within this context. Born in 1942, Balibar joined the FrenchCommunist Party in 1961, studied at the Ecole Normale Superieureand became one of Althusser's closest intellectual allies. He remainedactive within the PCF throughout the 1960s and 1970s and was one ofthe party's most prominent public intellectuals. This was the decadeduring which the party was making the first serious bid for manyyears to participate in the national government of France, to suchan extent that the PCF was in a formal electoral pact with the re-emerging Socialist Party: both parties had signed the Union of theLeft Common Programme of Government in 1972 and both hoped -vainly as it turned out - jointly to win a majority at the 1978 parlia-mentary elections. For any intellectual steeped in the Marxist tradi-tion, this Euro-communist venture, accompanied by the growingcrisis of Marxism among intellectuals in France, raised certain funda-mental questions in a particularly acute way. For example: can thecapitalist state be reformed in order to serve the interests of the work-ing class properly, or does it have to be dismantled in order to do this?What is the nature of bourgeois versus proletarian democracy? Andwhat are the consequences for communist parties themselves of alli-ances with social-democratic parties such as the French SocialistParty? Balibar's voice became increasingly one of dissent within thePCF and his On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (1977 [1976]) openlycriticizes the leadership of the PCF for its concessions to liberal


democracy and its pursuit of short-term electoral gains. He con-demned the party's abandonment of the principle of the dictatorshipof the proletariat, and he asserted the continued importance of work-ing to destroy the capitalist state rather than attempting to reform itfrom within. Despite these and other serious differences with theparty leadership, Balibar remained within the PCF until he wasexpelled for his open and forceful criticism of the party's position onimmigration in 1981, the same year the PCF finally joined the Socia-lists in government.

Balibar's uneasy position as both Marxist intellectual and PCFactivist during this crucial period has, it would seem, manifesteditself in his writings. His mature work is characterized by an ambiva-lence towards some crucial questions in modern politics and philoso-phy and this ambivalence appears to leave a defining mark in someareas. These include some of the central questions of Marxism, andindeed arguably some of the central questions regarding the natureof political modernity. For example, what is the role of the state inmodern emancipatory politics, and to what extent can liberal democ-racy and the structures that accompany it be harnessed for more pro-gressive ends? Many of Balibar's arguments are important andinsightful as individual positions, and some are brilliant, but they donot, when put together, amount to a unified system or worldview.As Balibar himself comments regarding a collection of essays pub-lished in English, he '[does] not claim to present a systematic doctrineof political philosophy' (MCI vii), and this is a remark which mightbe extended to his work as a whole.

In what follows I examine some of the areas where Balibar has hadsignificant insights regarding the analysis of politics and human socie-ties in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I begin by examininghis overall approach to the question of politics, where he embracesand explores the notion of emancipation and links it with a termwhich he has himself coined, namely 'equaliberty'. Next, I examinehis use of the Althusserian term 'conjuncture', his conception of citi-zenship and the formation and role of the subject in politics. I thenreturn to the question of Balibar's ambivalence in some areas of histhought, before looking at his approach to political violence, civil dis-obedience, Lenin and Gandhi.


The political

In Balibar's discussions of what constitutes the political, the influenceof traditional Marxism is clear. He emphasizes the emancipatory andrevolutionary potential of modernity, with apparent glimpses of whatmight lie beyond the era born of bourgeois revolutions. In a landmarkessay entitled 'Trois concepts de la politique: Emancipation, transfor-mation, civilite', he argues that emancipation, transformation andcivility are the key notions for understanding modern politics. Theyoccur all together, or not at all (LC 19-53).

Emancipation is closely bound to the notion of equaliberty (which Idiscuss in more detail below), meaning the inseparability of equalityand freedom. Politics thus defined, as politics of emancipation, is apractical exploration of the self-determination of the people; all obsta-cles to greater equality and freedom are illegitimate and must be abol-ished. A precondition for collective self-government is freedom fromall reference to a supposedly natural order, in a clear allusion to thewatershed and progressive nature of Enlightenment thought. Collec-tive politics can only exist in the form of self-government, whether thiscollective politics concerns society, the nation, the state, the peoplemore broadly or even humanity as a whole, and in the process of col-lective self-determination the political sphere becomes autonomous(LC 22). This type of government must also be free from institutiona-lized and systematic discrimination and constraints.

Still in the spirit of popular self-determination, Balibar empha-sizes the importance of a universal right to inclusion in the politicalsphere, and argues that no-one can 'be emancipated' by an externalentity; they cannot be granted political freedom by an outside agency.He argues that although rights won in the process of emancipation areindividual rights of equaliberty, they not only have to be struggledfor and won (they will not be simply granted to the deserving in thefullness of time), but the process must be a collective one (LC 22).Balibar's subject as citizen and collective subject as demos is thushighly active and he comments on democratic politics as follows:

. . . the continuous process in which a minimal recognition of thebelonging of human beings to the 'common' sphere of existence


(and therefore also work, culture, public and private speech) alreadyinvolves — and makes possible — a totality of rights. I call this the'insurrectional' element of democracy, which plays a determinantrole in every constitution of a democratic or republican state. Sucha state, by definition, cannot consist (or cannot only consist) of sta-tutes and rights ascribed from above; it requires the direct partici-pation of the demos. (WP 119)

Defined in this way, political subjects embody the universal in thesense that they represent themselves. Reminiscent in this respect ofRanciere and indeed of Marx, for Balibar the emancipation of thosewho are dominated is conceived by them as the emancipation of all;the dominated beome the universal class. Balibar does however allowfor political representation, as long as delegation is controlled andrecallable (LC 23).

For Balibar any process of progressive political transformation is,like or perhaps even more so than emancipation, bound up with theprocess of subjectivation, which is indeed intimately part of all poli-tics. It is in the struggle for emancipation and transformation thatparticipants become autonomous subjects. Arguing again on thewhole with Marx, he suggests that particular historical conditions lar-gely determine the nature of the process of transformation and subjec-tivation, during which these historical conditions themselves change.These are what Balibar, with direct reference to Althusser, calls 'con-juncture'. For both Althusser and Balibar, all writing, including phi-losophy, must be interpreted in the context of the historical andpolitical conditions in which it is written. This is what both these phi-losophers practise in their writings on Marx, Spinoza, Machiavelliand others. Balibar's insistence that 'philosophy is never independentfrom specific conjunctures' (1C 44) is reminiscent of Althusser'sdescription of the new practice of philosophy which he argued Marxhad pioneered: 'The measure of Marx's materialism is less the materi-alist content of his theory than the acute, practical consciousness of theconditions, forms and limits within which these ideas can becomeactive' (Althusser 1990: 275). For Althusser and Balibar the notion ofconjuncture must also be understood in terms of the contradictory


elements that make up a historical and political context. Althusserinterprets Lenin's writings between the 1905 and 1917 revolutions asan analysis of the uneven and contradictory relations within the Rus-sian political economy of the time, which offered the preconditions forsocialist revolution. In an approach similar to Trotsky's theory ofuneven and combined development (a likeness not mentioned byAlthusser), Lenin points to an explosive mixture of industrial devel-opment characteristic of advanced capitalism, alongside rural socio-economic conditions containing elements of feudalism, all faced withthe challenges and demands of a world war (Althusser 1969: 178-80).

Perhaps Balibar's most tangible application of analysis using con-juncture is found in We, the People of Europe? Reflections on TransnationalCitizenship (2004 [2001]), as Jason Read has argued in comprehensiveand convincing fashion (Read 2004). In this book Balibar argues thatthe expansion and consolidation of the European Union offers in the

same broad gesture both opportunities and substantial threats to largenumbers of ordinary people. On the one hand, enlargement offersthe possibility of deeper democracy on an international scale. On theother, it threatens to bring a form of European apartheid accompa-nied by the further rise of the extreme right in many countries. It isthis contradiction, or at least this situation which he argues has bothprogressive and reactionary elements, that must be explored.

The question of the border must be addressed in order to democra-tize Europe, for at present the border acts as a means of discrimi-nating between 'legitimate' Europeans on the one hand, who aremainly white, indigenous inhabitants, and on the other hand 'illegiti-mate' Europeans, who are mainly non-white and non-indigenous toEurope. This latter group is an important and integral part of the suc-cessful economy of Europe, but its members are politically excludedusing many means, including violence. Balibar's proposed solution isa form of 'transnational citizenship', where the Rights of Man areapplied in a radical way to all residents, including all immigrantworkers and asylum seekers. As long as one lived in the EU, onewould have full voting rights and full rights to draw on state-providedsocial protection.

This is an example of Balibar applying the notion of conjuncture —where economic and political aspects of a situation are pulling in


different directions — in order to explore the construction, or poten-tial construction, of the political subject. The economic benefitwhich immigrant workers bring to Europe combined with politicalexclusion, and any resolution or partial resolution of this contradic-tion, is an important part of this particular process of subjectivation.We might comment at this point that the practical political solutionproposed by Balibar is far less radical than his complex theoreti-cal framework might suggest. This particular argument for practicalexploration of political subjectivization and emancipation seems tolead to a somewhat less discriminatory approach (compared with thestatus quo) to relations between individuals on the one hand andthe national and emerging international state on the other, but littlemore. The practical conclusions of this sophisticated theory wouldappear to leave many unjust structures and practices untouched,including, incidentally, routine exploitation of non-immigrants,which seems to be overlooked.

Civility, meanwhile, Balibar defines as

the speculative idea of a politics of politics, or a politics in the seconddegree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set ofconditions within which politics as a collective participation inpublic affairs is possible, or at least is not made absolutely impossi-ble . . . In particular, 'civility' does not necessarily involve the ideaof a suppression of'conflicts' and 'antagonisms' in society, as if theywere always the harbingers of violence and not the opposite. Much,if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss in factresults from a blind political preference for 'consensus' and 'peace'. . . (WP 115-16)

Civility thus creates the space in which politics takes place and elim-inates the extremes of violence without suppressing all violence andrevolt (LC 47).

If Balibar's discussion of politics becomes less threatening to thestatus quo and indeed less emancipatory the nearer it gets to reality,his discussion of his term equaliberty (egaliberte) is often radical andinspiring. By equaliberty he means, in the broadest of terms, thatfreedom can only be fully realized if equality is also fully realized,


and vice versa. The historical conditions where liberty and equalityarise are the same, and therefore the one cannot exist without theother, and this is a truth that is discovered through revolutionarystruggle. Moreover, if liberty is maximized then equality is as well.By the same token, any circumstances that limit or suppress freedomalso limit or suppress equality; increased social inequality alwaysaccompanies limits to freedom and vice versa. Thus there are bothpolitical and ethical obligations to eradicate exploitation and domi-nation (MCI 48).

Balibar's starting point for this radical notion, the logic of whoseadoption is a form of politics dedicated to a struggle against all typesof exploitation and domination, is a critical attitude towards contem-porary liberalism. In liberalism freedom and equality cannot possiblyoccur alongside each other, apart from within the narrow confines ofthe juridical, where equality before the law is strongly defended. But abelief in the mutual exclusivity of the two concepts, he argues, is alsofound among some socialists and in West European anti-racist move-ments, for example (MCI 39). This mistaken approach, Balibarargues, relies on three fundamental misconceptions. The first is themistaken belief that equality is mainly economic and social, whereasfreedom is mainly legal and political. The second is the belief thatequality can only be realized via actions by the state, above allthrough material distribution, whereas freedom implies limited stateintervention. Finally, there is a misconception that whilst equality is acollective goal, freedom is above all an individual one. It is these pre-cepts, Balibar argues, that lead to a gulf between contemporary dis-cussion on the 'rights of man' on the one hand and the 'rights ofcitizen' on the other. By contrast with the 1789 Declaration of theRights of Man and the Citizen, modern liberalism and other ideologiesuphold a strict non-identity between man and citizen, with the viewthat an equation between man and citizen means everything is politi-cal, which in turn leads to totalitarianism.

Balibar's other starting point for the discussion of equaliberty isthus the Declaration itself, which he argues — controversially — doesnot take the pre-existing ideology of human nature, or natural rights,as the basis for law and politics, but is a bold assertion of whollymodern democratic principles (MCI 43—4). The core and indeed the


major goal of the text, he contends, is precisely the identity of man andcitizen. Moreover, the upholding of the right to resist oppressionasserted in article two of the Declaration is effectively an assertion ofthe right to collective freedom, whose corollary is indeed the right toresist oppression: 'to be free is to be able to resist any compulsion thatdestroys freedom' (MCI 45). Equality, meanwhile, is implicitly atleast the notion that links all others together, although this is notspelled out in the Declaration in so many words.

Balibar continues his argument for a re-reading of the Declarationas a statement of the principles of equaliberty by suggesting thatMarx was quite wrong to invoke (in On the Jewish Question) the textas an expression of the separation of public and private spheres ofhuman existence, characteristic of bourgeois notions of modern poli-tics. On the contrary, according to Balibar the Declaration puts for-ward a new idea regarding the relationship between equality andfreedom, expressed as a universal:

What is this idea? Nothing less than the identification of the twoconcepts. If one is willing to read it literally, the Declaration in factsays that equality is identical to freedom, is equal to freedom, and viceversa. Each is the exact measure of the other. This is ... the proposi-tion of equaliberty. a portmanteau word that is 'impossible' in French(and English) but that alone expresses the central proposition. Forit gives both the conditions under which man is a citizen throughand through, and the reason for this assimilation. Underneath theequation of man and citizen, or rather within it, as the very reason ofits universality - as its presupposition - lies the proposition of equal-iberty. (MCI 46—7, italics in original)

It would seem that the most important part of Balibar's argument is aview that political aspects of modernity offer the immediate possibi-lity of a more radical form of emancipation than humanity as awhole or any part of it has experienced to date. It was in the logicof some aspects of the revolution of 1789 to establish the precondi-tions for overcoming all exploitation and domination. Indeed inBalibar's The Philosophy of Marx ^ he comments that for Marx commun-ism is 'a social movement with demands that were merely a coherent


application of the principle of [the 1789] Revolution — gauging howmuch liberty had been achieved by the degree of equality and viceversa, with fraternity as the end result' (PM 20). As a general ideathis is satisfyingly optimistic with regard to the revolutionary and pro-foundly just potential of modernity. But I would argue that it is alsocharacteristic of Balibar's over-optimistic interpretation of the directlegacy of 1789 and an underestimation of the depth of transformationnecessary to enable profound democracy and justice.

Indeed, one certainly should take issue with Balibar's exaggerat-edly radical reading of the Declaration, a text which does in fact makeexplicit reference to natural rights (articles ii and iv). Moreover, asKouvelakis has argued, Balibar ignores certain aspects of the Declara-tion and in certain respects misinterprets Marx's discussion of the dis-tinction between citizen and man in order to argue the case for theDeclaration containing important elements of equaliberty. Marxmakes the distinction in relation to the Declaration precisely becausehe interprets the document as one building block for bourgeois — andtherefore restrictive — politics, which will serve the interests of thebourgeoisie more than others (Kouvelak's 2004: 15—22). This doesnot, however, invalidate what seems to be Balibar's more generalthesis, namely that 1789 and other bourgeois revolutions helpedcreate the social, economic and ideological circumstances whereemancipatory politics consonant with such a notion as equalibertycould be played out. This is also one of the powerful messages ofMarx and Engels' Communist Manifesto.

In order to explore Balibar's approach to the citizen and modernityfurther, let us return for a moment to the question of the human sub-ject. As we have seen, in one way or another, Balibar's discussion ofpolitics is always concerned with the emergence of political subjects.His reading of Spinoza seeks to interpret Spinoza's Theologico -PoliticalTreatise in part as a study of the construction of the subject. Marx,meanwhile, is a 'philosopher of the subject in the most classical sense'(1C 151), whose view of the subject as achieving self-realization andfreedom through revolutionary activity is most clearly expressed inthe Theses on Feuerbach, although the naming and fuller exploration ofthe role of'subject of history' in the form of the proletariat comes onlywith Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness. Balibar even suggests,


many years after his collaboration with Althusser had ended, that hisown contribution to Reading Capital in the shape of an exploration offorms of historical individuality and also his denial of the importanceof the subject to structural Marxism was in some sense laying theground for subsequent studies of its importance (1C 149). WhenBalibar comes to address the question of the human subject in his ownphilosophy, he comes up with what is perhaps a surprising position.In response to Jean-Luc Nancy's question, 'Who comes after thesubject?', Balibar answers:

. . . after the subject comes the citizen. For the 'subject', which hashaunted the whole problematic of liberty and of the individual[personne] for fifteen centuries, is not an ontological figure, that ofan objectum or hypokeimenon, but a legal, political, theological andmoral figure .. .

What — or rather who — comes after the subject (first around1789—93), is the universal, national, and cosmopolitical citizenwho is indissociably both a political and philosophical figure . . .there is no doubt that with the revolutionary event the subjectus irre-versibly cedes his place to the citizen. (1C 152, italics in original; alsosee Cadava^fl/1991)

Thus for Balibar the modern subject is necessarily political; modernityoffers for the first time the possibility of both citizenship and subjectiv-ity, and he talks of his 'research on the revolutionary relieving andreplacing of the subject by the citizen, and on the becoming-citizenof the subject' (1C 156). Balibar disagrees with what he sees asMarx's belief that man is private and part of civil society and thatthe citizen is the political entity with political rights and politicalinvolvement.

Whatever one might think of this comment on Marx, Balibar is not,it would seem, particularly ambitious for his subject, who is an indivi-dual who becomes subject via rather minimal political rights affordedby the Declaration and the modern state, albeit with much participa-tion by the citizen-subject. Rather than emancipation and transfor-mation leading to the formation of a more self-realized human beingwho could at last determine his or her own fate free from the fetters ofsocio-economic and political exploitation and all that goes with it, as


Marx suggested, for Balibar the emancipated human subject appearsabove all to enjoy a series of political rights determined by and relat-ing to the state.

Ambivalence, universality, ideology

I suggest that Balibar's ambivalence towards certain key aspects ofmodern politics has resulted in an often incomplete and inconclusiveaspect to his work. In an essay perhaps tellingly entitled 'The InfiniteContradiction' which offers an overview of his own work, he sayshimself that his writing is 'governed by disparity and abounds inpalinodes' (1C 142). He frequently writes of'aporia', suggesting asense of wonder but also preoccupation with paradoxes and confu-sion. He comments that 'aporia does not mean error of course butdouble bind of a simple discovery or simply of a revolutionary theore-tical question, posed in the very terms of its denial or in the impossi-bility of its solution' (1C 159). Indeed, he talks of 'incompleteness\inachev emenf\ proper to philosophical texts — an incompleteness thatmy readings constantly illustrate, and that has led me to use the verbto incomplete [inachever] in the active form' (1C 147, italics in original).He goes on to suggest that Marx 'incompleted' Capital, Heidegger'incompleted' Being and Time and Spinoza 'incompleted' his PoliticalTreatise, and that the nature of great philosophy is both to incompleteitself and to incomplete others. Balibar is influenced by Derrida's closeattention to the text and does not always impose his own (that is Bali-bar's) conclusions on the text, allowing the text to serve as its own con-clusion, with the reader of Balibar's own text feeling left, again, with asense of ambiguity and absence of conclusion. We have already seenthat Balibar is emphatic that he does not have a complete politicalphilosophy, what one might call a worldview, and both the structureof his work and its frequent asides add to an already unfinished qual-ity; he often comments that what he is saying is a briefer or more par-tial account than he might wish, or that he has run out of time.Moreover, one is reminded of the postmodern rejection of grand nar-ratives when he comments that 'I am not proposing here a generaltheory that is nowhere to be found in my essays' (1C 147).


I wish to dwell briefly on the manner in which Balibar, in an articleentitled 'Sub species universitatis' (2006), reflects on the way philoso-phy addresses the question of universality, for this discussion mightgive us further indicators as to the nature of his overall approach tophilosophy and politics. Balibar discusses what he describes as the'Hegelian-Marxist strategy' regarding universality, and more specifi-cally the notions of consciousness and antagonism in the early Hegel,and in Marx the notions of ideology and ideological domination(SS 8-12). In a nutshell, universality of either ideas or actions alwaystakes the form of domination over other ideas or actions. 'Therefore,universality and hegemony become equivalents, and conversely noideology (system of representation, figure of consciousness) canbecome 'universal' unless it becomes also dominant, more preciselyworks as a process of domination, a 'dominant ideology' (henschendeIdeologic)' (SS8).

In what Balibar describes as 'Hegel's paradox', he reminds us ofHegel's thesis in the Phenomenology of Spirit that when one speaks of uni-versality it becomes a particular discourse or representation. Thisconscious representation of the world in general thus in fact becomesnot the world in general but the world according to the point of viewof the individuals or groups expressing the view. This has a clear influ-ence on Marx's notion of ideology, which draws on Hegel's idea thatdomination is achieved via the triumph of a particular view of theworld and which puts other views into a position of relative inferiority.For Marx, the challenge for communists is to achieve hegemony for acommunist worldview against one that privileges private propertyand all that goes with it. Up to a point, opposition to the dominantideology serves to reinforce the authority of the dominant ideology,or dominant view of universality, although this process is not, ofcourse, insurmountable.

I have summarized this particular discussion because it would seemto help us understand the course which Balibar's work has taken overthe past few decades. First, and most obviously, it suggests a continuedand major preoccupation with the question of ideology, a central con-cern of the whole Althusserian project. Second, choosing to highlightthe way in which some philosophy deals with the universal suggestsan ambivalence regarding the capacity of philosophy to deal with


universality; universality itself is intrinsically and necessarily bothrelative (and relativity is a quality which characterizes much ofBalibar's work) and evolving over time. Finally, and leading on fromthis, it perhaps helps explain the somewhat fragmentary and incon-clusive nature of Balibar's work.

Balibar's belief in the importance of ideology is such that he rejectsAlthusser's view of philosophy as 'theory of theoretical practice' andinstead locates philosophy within ideology. He is insistent that whathe calls (after Althusser) the 'imaginary' is not, in traditional Marxistparlance, simply a superstructural manifestation of the economicbase, but is a determining influence in its own right. There are in facttwo bases:

[T]he mode of subjection and the mode of production (or, more generally,the ideological mode and the generalized economic mode . . . ) Bothare material, although in opposite senses. To name these differentsenses of the materiality of subjection and production, the tradi-tional terms imaginary and reality suggest themselves. One canadopt them, provided that one keep in mind that in any historicalconjuncture, the effects of the imaginary can only appear throughand by means of the real, and the effects of the real through and bymeans of the imaginary . . . (1C 160, italics in original)

For Balibar, then, ideology is very much part of the base and isno less determined by economics than economics is determined byideology. This is the theoretical starting point of Race, Nation, Class,where imaginary communities are as real or more real than moretangible entities.

Thus, Balibar's theory leaves little room for any ongoing influenceof the economy and one wonders if there is really anything left ofMarx's political economy.

Political violence

If Balibar's overall approach to the political has certain seriousdrawbacks, he has made a significant contribution to a general theory


of political violence, an area which has, I would argue, taken onincreased significance — or has at least become more complex — inthe last part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first century. This is for at least four reasons. First, since the break-up ofthe USSR and the more general disintegration of communism, histor-ians and political theorists have been preoccupied with the questionof whether Marxist-inspired politics are inevitably violent, as therepression in the Soviet Union and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia(to give just two examples) might suggest. Second, professional politi-cians in advanced capitalist countries with centre-oriented govern-ments often suggest that their apparently highly consensual regimesand political parties do not in the least rely on political violence andindeed that these sorts of politics have helped achieve the end of poli-tical violence in the advanced capitalist world; this is a question whichcan only be addressed within a developed theoretical frameworkregarding the nature of political violence. Next, in the post-ColdWar reality of global politics, political violence often takes a formwhich is different to that of the political violence which was prevalentbefore the break-up of the Eastern bloc. Where advanced capitalistcountries intervene in less developed regions, the huge imbalancebetween the two sides in terms of weaponry, intelligence and technicalback-up is often presented by the more powerful country or countiesas a non-war — or at least some sort of'smart' war — and bloodshed isgreatly played down, especially as far as enemy casualties are con-cerned. Finally, questions of political violence, revolution, uprisingand cruelty now have renewed urgency both given the renewal of con-flict in, and as a result of conflict in, the Middle East, including ofcourse recourse to terrorism and various forms of counter-terrorismon an increased, international scale.

Balibar addresses aspects of political violence relating to the realityof international politics in a variety of works, in a way which I will dis-cuss below. But first I will turn to his valuable discussion of the theory ofpolitical violence and Gewalt (a term which combines the notions ofboth violence and power and for which there is no direct equivalent inFrench or English) in the Historisch-Kritisches Worterbuch des Marxismus(HW). Balibar's general thesis is that Marx's thought has a paradoxi-cal relationship with the question of violence. Certainly, it makes a


major contribution to understanding the role of violence in history,in particular with reference to the relationship between forms of dom-ination and exploitation under capitalism, the inevitability of classstruggle, and revolution, thus contributing to defining the conditionsand nature of modern politics. But Marxism has been incapable ofproperly addressing the tragic association between politics and vio-lence. The reasons for this include in particular an absolute emphasisin Marxist theory on one form of domination, namely the exploitationof labour, of which the others are mere 'epiphenomena'. The result ofthis is that other forms of exploitation are ignored or at least playeddown in discussions of violence.

The second reason for Marx's failure properly to address the ques-tion of the relationship between politics and violence is the 'anthropo-logical optimism' at the heart of his concept of progress, contained inthe notion of the development of human productive forces whichis central to his theory of the history of social formations. Finally,Balibar blames the Marxist metaphysics of history, which, via thealienation and reconciliation of the human essence, incorporates atheological and philosophical conversion of violence into justice.According to Balibar, this recognition of the social role of violenceand misunderstanding of the specifically political role of violence hashad considerable consequences for socio-political struggles and revo-lutionary movements inspired by Marxism. A thorough discussion ofthe relationship between Marxist theory and violence, he argues, iscrucial to the search for political alternatives during the currentphase of capitalist globalization (HW 1~2).

Via a reconsideration of the work of Engels, Lenin, Fanon and Lux-emburg, as well as Marx's own work, and distinguishing historicallybetween periods of intense class struggle and anti-capitalist revolutionson the one hand, and anti-imperialist, anti-colonial and post-colonialstruggles on the other, Balibar examines the strengths and weaknessesof Marxism in relation to the theory of political violence more gener-ally. Given, in particular, the multiple catastrophes of the twentiethcentury, of which Marxism was both perpetrator and victim, it isnecessary to rethink Marxism, he argues, in terms of a 'civilisingof revolution' (îvilisierung der Revolution), on which depends a 'civil-ising of polities' more generally. A discussion of political violence, of


Gewalt more broadly and at the same time a reappraisal of thenotion of revolution is thus 'not just one question amongst others butthe fundamental question for polities' and one which allows a theore-tical and ethical reappraisal of Marxism overall, enabling its contin-ued usefulness (HW 7). Balibar's contribution to this particularlyimportant area of reappraisal is to detect a dual approach to thematter of political violence, an ambivalence which lies at the heartof Balibar's belief in Marx's contemporary relevance to understand-ing the question:

[W]e believe . . . one can detect, each time, a very strong tension inMarx's thought between two ways of thinking about the status andthe effects of extreme violence: one which undertakes, if not to 'nat-uralise' then at least to incorporate it in a chain of causes andeffects, to make it a process or a dialectical moment of the processof social transformation whose actors are the antagonistic classes, ina way which makes intelligible the conditions of real politics (wirk-lichePolitik) (as opposed to moral or ideal politics); and another wayof thinking which finds in certain extreme or excessive forms of vio-lence — at once structural and conjunctural, ancient and modern,spontaneous and organised — what one might call the real of poli-tics (das Reale in der Politik?), that is to say the unpredictable or theincalculable which confers on it a tragic character, which it feeds offand which also threatens to destroy i t . . . (HW 10—11)

Despite Marx's oscillation between different perspectives on violence,including an 'ultra-Jacobin' one, which tends virtually to glorify pop-ular violence in times of revolutionary change, and despite Lenin'ssubsequent development of this particular perspective into a fully-fledged 'politics of violence', including a new conception of thedictatorship of the proletariat, Balibar insists on the contemporaryrelevance of Marx's other, more open-ended view of political violenceand argues that this other approach is the more useful one. Certainly,Balibar agrees that intense exploitation which includes extreme vio-lence is inherent in the capitalist mode of production, and capitalistmodernization involving the abolition of pre-capitalist modes of lifeand culture at times takes on extremely violent forms which today


we might call ethnocide or genocide (HW 13). But Balibar also con-tends that in Capital itself Marx argues that a violent and final confon-tation with the bourgeoisie is not the only possible outcome forstruggles between capital and labour. According to Balibar:

. . . the work [i.e. Capital] had opened up other possibilities, which itwill always be possible to turn to without abandoning the 'Marxist'reference: namely a process of reforms imposed on society by thestate under pressure from increasingly powerful and organisedworkers' struggles, which would oblige capital to 'civilise' its meth-ods of exploitation, or to innovate constantly in order to overcomeresistance from 'variable capital'; also the exporting of overexploi-tation to the 'periphery' of the capitalist mode of production, insuch a way that the effects of 'primitive accumulation' are pro-longed . . . In these scenarios the proletariat no longer appearsas the predetermined subject of history, and the Gewalt which iteither suffers or wields does not lead 'naturally' to the final goal.The subjectivization of the working class, that is its transformationinto revolutionary proletariat, then appears as an indefinitely dis-tant horizon, an improbable counter-tendency, or even a miracu-lous exception to the course of history. (HW 17)

Balibar is insistent that debates between Marxists regarding reformand revolution have been posed in the wrong way and at any ratethat the really important question is how to 'civilize revolution', asdiscussed above. But it seems that Balibar's reflections in this respectare at least influenced by long-running (and at one time often bitter)debates and disputes within the European left around the themeof'reform or revolution'. These debates have evolved over time butcertainly have not disappeared completely and indeed are likely tointensify if the left continues to gather strength again. As a dissidentwithin the French Communist Party, and as an intellectual deeplyimmersed in Marxist theory, Balibar was intensely involved withsuch questions for many years. Balibar's position certainly seems attimes to under-estimate the extent to which, for example, govern-ments and other political or quasi-political entities are prepared touse violence against even the most 'civilized' revolution in order toprevent it from taking place.


However, Balibar is no doubt correct to point out that advancedcapitalist societies 'export' violence in part in order to continue toensure that rates of profit remain high whilst the domestic (and rela-tively comfortably off) labour force remains fairly docile, a processwhich Marxists have long referred to as involving the creation of anaristocracy of labour in the imperialist heartlands. Examples of theexporting of violence at the end of the twentieth century and begin-ning of the twenty-first century might include the wars which are atleast in part informed by a desire to protect oil interests in the MiddleEast. Another is the political economy of global production in this era,which involves paying barely subsistence wages, offering extremelybackward conditions (by Western standards) and in some cases childlabour in less developed countries in order to maintain a flow of cheapgoods to Western outlets; this aspect of the political economy ofadvanced capitalism depends on forms of what should be construedas political violence. However, it is likely that at some point in themedium-term future such conditions will evolve further, either as aresult of revolt in developing countries or as a result of rapid industria-lization of countries such as China and India, making exploitation ofcheap labour in developing countries less possible, or a combination ofboth. In other words, the question of revolutionary violence may wellreturn to the political agenda in the West as exploitation intensifiesagain in countries which were the first to industrialize.

Balibar's writings on the reality of global politics and violence re-flect some of the themes of his more theoretical writings on violenceand here again he offers some real insights. His general contentionwith regard to what he describes as the present 'era of global violence'is that the level of actual violence or the threat of violence is such thatthe very existence of politics is at risk. This he contrasts with thenotion of civility, which he defines in this context as the 'circumstanceswhere the practice of politics is made possible' (WP 115). On a globalscale, he argues, extreme violence and mass insecurity is used as a formof 'preventative counterrevolution or counterinsurrection' againstemancipatory movements but it also stems from a predilection in thedeveloped world for supposedly consensual and conflict-shy forms ofgovernance (WP 116). This approach to governance, which treatspolitics as a mere superstructure where conflict and antagonism are


avoided wherever possible, denies the essential 'insurrectionary ele-ment' of politics and direct, popular participation (WP 119).

Drawing on the work of international relations specialist Pierre deSenarclens, Balibar argues that since the end of the Cold War, theboundaries on some forms of political violence imposed by the twoblocs have collapsed and the distinction between war and peace hasbecome blurred. Since 1989, there has been a proliferation of armedconflict, in particular civil war, enabled in part by the transformationof international power structures. Balibar suggests that mass andextreme violence is replacing politics, or that the fields of politics andviolence have now merged (WP 125).

For Balibar, this global culture of political violence is part of aglobal system of socio-political control, dividing the world into 'lifezones' and 'death zones'. The death zones suffer a variety of mortalproblems ranging from civil war and inter-state wars, to communalrioting, famine and extreme poverty. Apparently natural phenomenasuch as Aids are made far worse by material hardship. Although thecauses of these disasters may be numerous, the overall effect is tocreate a large, international population of very insecure, and in somecases re-proletarianized, people, who have little or no influence onnational or international politics. There is, then, a sort of plannedobsolescence of human beings on a global scale, which is, in clinicallycapitalist terms, economically wasteful but has a perverse and tragicpolitical logic, sometimes involving self-destruction through civilwar, for example. Concluding this discussion, Balibar again suggeststhat theorists and activists must develop the idea of'counter-counter-revolution', or simply revolution. But unless the future is to become, inthe words of Hobsbawm, another age of extremes, revolutionariesmust civilize the notion and practice of revolution.

In Balibar's discussion both of theoretical and more factual aspectsof violence, Gewalt^ cruelty and global politics, he thus puts forward aremarkable case for placing these matters centre-stage in any seriousanalysis of contemporary politics and any discussions of the politics ofemancipation. As Zizek suggests, Balibar's theory of political violencecan be positioned in a place which is distinct from the other two majortheories which seek to account for the appalling bloodshed of themajor catastrophes of the twentieth century. Habermas argues that


the Enlightenment and modernity are inherently emancipatory andcontain no grain of totalitarianism. The mass violence of the twentiethcentury suggest that the Enlightenment project is unfinished and themajor political task is to complete the project. Meanwhile, for Adornoand Horkheimer (and now Agamden), the dictatorships and massdestruction of twentieth-century Europe are part of the Enlighten-ment's totalitarian potential and mass murder part of the logic of therationalism of modernity. For Balibar, modernity has very positiveconsequences but also new risks and it is the task of politics to ensurethat the long-term outcome is humane and democratic and that suf-fering is minimized (Zizek 2006: 337—8).

Rather like in his broader discussion of the theory of politics,Balibar combines what we might term elements of radical, deeplytransformational politics which offer hope for a better world, withelements of far more moderate, reformist politics which appear toleave many important injustices untouched.

Lenin and Gandhi

Such dilemmas are also explored in a thought-provoking paper onthe question of transformational practice and violence in relationto Lenin and Gandhi. Balibar argues that these two 'revolutionaryactivist-theorists' are the most important such figures of the first halfof the twentieth century (LG). Not only did their theories, actionsand movements have a profound effect on the course of the twentiethcentury, but in the longer term the results are still being felt and arestill the subject of profound controversy. In the case of Lenin, oneprincipal alleged result was the horrors of Stalinism, and in the caseof Gandhi the partition of India along ethnic and religious lines.These assertions already make substantial assumptions, of course,which are partially acknowledged by Balibar; most importantly,they assume that these outcomes (Stalinism and partition) aredirectly attributable to Lenin's and Gandhi's actions, theories andinfluence, rather than being attributable to quite other phonomena.

Balibar argues that there are certain important areas of commonground between Leninism and Gandhi's theory and practice. First,


both place centre-stage popular mass movements, which in the courseof their development go through more active and less active periods,and whose engagement with the appropriate issues of the time must inboth cases be sustained over a long time. The second shared charac-teristic is a confrontational attitude towards the state and thus theyboth advocate systematically breaking the law; for Lenin the interestsof the working class override the supposed legitimacy of the law,taking in extremis the form of dictatorship of the proletariat in orderto overthrow the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. For Gandhi, civil dis-obedience is used as a tactic in order to attempt to force the state to actagainst its own constitutional principles, and thus to push it towardsreform.

In Lenin's theory of revolution, both institutional and anti-institutional organized violence plays a central role, in his conceptionof state power as class dictatorship, in his directive issued frequentlyfrom 1914 onwards to 'turn the imperialist war into a revolutionarycivil war', and indeed in the whole concept of dictatorship of the pro-letariat (LG 6). Balibar suggests that the extreme violence againstthe Soviet people after the 1917 revolution might have been linked inpart to the pre-1917 practice of revolutionary violence against theTsarist regime and its allies, as well as being partly attributable tothe siege mentality of the Soviet Union as revolution failed to spreadto other countries.

Gandhi, by stark contrast, emphasized what he saw as the need toovercome a hatred of the enemy and to organize 'aggressive' but 'con-structive' non-violent, illegal acts. One important aspect of thisapproach is the underlying idea that the nature of the struggle affectsthe nature of the outcome, an idea which might be described as theopposite of the notion of ends justifying the means (or perhaps a con-sequence of this approach), which it might be argued underpinnedLenin's theory and practice of violence. Gandhi's theory of 'dialo-gism' holds that mass movements must engage in tactical concessionsto the adversary, a tactic which helps control the process of transfor-mation, and in limiting the actions of the masses in terms of degree ofviolence, for example.

In this thought-provoking but inconclusive — at times even indeci-sive — discussion, Balibar does not suggest how elements of Lenin's


and Gandhi's thought might be reconciled. He suggests briefly, how-ever, that an attempt to answer this question might be approached byexamining whether the era of revolutionary mass movements is nowover, a question which he also leaves unanswered. As far as the ques-tion of means and ends is concerned, I would suggest that there aresituations where violence in the form of resistance becomes not only atactic but also a matter of survival, if not in the short term then cer-tainly in the longer term; examples of this include French resistanceagainst Nazi occupation, wars of national liberation (including thosein French Indochina and Algeria, for example), and the Vietnamesestruggle against the USA in the 1960s and 1970s. The possibility andtactical efficacy of non-violence certainly depend on the circum-stances of the struggle, including the degree of violence in which theadversary is prepared to indulge.

Balibar's distant but at times approving stance towards the modernstate is demonstrated in an article published in Le Monde newspaper inFebruary 1997 on the question of civil disobedience, as part of adebate regarding a bill on immigration known as the Debre bill(projet de loiDebre}. This proposed legislation was legally to oblige allthose sheltering non-French nationals to inform the police of boththeir arrival in and departure from France. Originally publishedunder the title 'Democratic State of Emergency' (and reproduced inthe book Droit de cite as 'Sur la desobeissance civique' (DC 17—22),Balibar argues in this essay that by stark contrast with what the thenPrime Minister Alain Juppe had declared, citizens must sometimes re-create their citizenship by disobeying the state. Writing in response toa petition launched by film makers who declared that they had andwould again give shelter to illegal immigrants, Balibar argues that agovernment is only legitimate as long as it does not contradict certainhigher laws of humanity which, whilst perhaps unwritten, take prece-dence over written legislation. These higher laws include basic respectfor human beings alive or dead, hospitality, the inviolability of humanbeings, and the sanctity of truth. When the two groups of laws -higher and written - are in contradiction, citizens have a duty toobey the higher laws and thus bring themselves into conflict with thelaw of the land, and in the process defend legality in an expression ofthe 'general will'.


This type of action, Balibar argues, is inevitably necessary fromtime to time, as governments are not perfect. In modern French his-tory civil disobedience has been crucial, he argues, for example duringthe Dreyfus affair, during resistance against Nazi occupation and atthe abortion trial in Bobigny, France in 1972 when 121 well-knownwomen signed a petition claiming to have had illegal abortions.Putting the debate on immigration in this broader context and in thecontext of the rise of the extreme right in Europe, Balibar suggeststhat citizenship at times involves (in the words of article two of theDeclaration of the Rights of Man) 'resistance against oppression'. Impli-citly, this includes resistance against the oppression of others. Hereagain, then, the conclusions Balibar draws from an important andinsightful discussion are rather timid. His support for civil disobe-dience is not put in the context of a greater project for change, whichmight perhaps relate to his own interpretations of emancipation andtransformation. On the contrary, he seems to be arguing ultimatelythat civil disobedience is necessary in order to reinforce the legitimacyof the law as devised and upheld by the modern state, rather than tocontribute to a practical and theoretical critique of the very nature ofthe modern state.

Concluding remarks

In his substantial and complex oeuvre, Balibar raises some crucial ques-tions for our time and discusses them in a way that contibutes to agreater understanding of these questions. For example, many whotake his work seriously will recognize the relevance of the notion ofhuman emancipation which contrasts with the preoccupation withmild reform which is so prevalent in parliamentary and party politicsin the West. The same could be said for his discussion of universality, anotion that is seldom taken seriously except in a religious context in aworld which is often so preoccupied with surfaces and transience.Meanwhile, his own term equaliberty is a constructively provocativeblending of equality and liberty which insists on their mutual depen-dence in a way which also flies in the face of much contemporaryreceived wisdom. More specifically, Balibar is an insightful theorist


of political violence, exploring a complex relationship between meansand ends in any political struggle involving violence. Moreover, he isemphatic that the extreme preoccupation with superficially consen-sual politics in the West has a direct relationship with the extreme vio-lence that has become more prevalent elsewhere, and which threatensthe very existence of politics.

My major reservation with regard to Balibar's position is, how-ever, that he has too much faith in the capacity of the modern stateand its structures in bringing about radical transformation, whereasthe evidence - often in fact referred to by Balibar himself - is sooften to the contrary. Both Badiou and Ranciere, I have argued, goto the other extreme and virtually ignore the liberal democratic statein their discussions of politics. Balibar, by contrast, for example in hisvirtual equation of modern man, citizen and subject as enabled by the1789 revolution and its consequences, appears to believe that thenecessary political as well as socio-economic upheavals have beenachieved to bring about the flowering of a profoundly democraticand just society. This combination of positions in support of emanci-patory investigations on the one hand and political positions whichwould effect relatively little change on the other is, I suggest, sympto-matic of his position as philosopher schooled in classical Marxismwhilst at the same time having been an activist in an increasinglyreformist and pragmatic Communist Party.

Balibar's undue faith in what the modern state can deliver is alsoinformed by his relative disregard for the political economy of capit-alism as opposed to its purely political structures. Whilst it is relativelystraightforward to argue that liberal republican politics can be radi-calized to such an extent that profound injustices can be addressed, itis far more difficult to do so in the economic domain, where vastlypowerful interests defend the extreme exploitation and violence ofwhich Balibar is so aware but which in terms of economic underpin-ning feature far less in his writings. Marx's base-superstructure model,which in its most vulgar forms is unhelpful, speaks volumes in its morethoughtful versions as to the nature of politics, economics and interna-tional relations in the present period. Balibar's overemphasis on ideol-ogy and the 'imaginary' detracts from this.


Alongside some important insights, then, Balibar's uneasy blend ofliberal republicanism, radical republicanism and residual Marxism,together with influences of poststructuralisnl, fails to draw satisfactoryconclusions. While some of the individual parts of his work are highlystimulating and useful, the whole fails to deliver a convincing emanci-patory political theory.

Chapter 6

With and Beyond Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere

In this book I have attempted to assess the contribution of AlainBadiou, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranciere to political thoughtand reflect on how their work is relevant to the lived reality of politicsat the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this concluding chap-ter, I wish to reiterate in succinct form some of my views regardingtheir strengths and weaknesses and highlight the differences and simi-larities between them. I will then go on to make some broader obser-vations and comments regarding the renewal of thought which is inthe emancipatory tradition. Both the most obvious and the mostimportant point to make is that each of these writers begins from thepremise that, compared with the world we live in, other, far more ega-litarian and just forms of human society are possible. A major goal ofeach of them in their work is therefore to help understand the natureof the world as we know it and explore the potential for change. Oneof their collective strengths is to contribute to reopening properly thedebate on the left regarding the viability of profound socio-politicaltransformation, precisely because they are not overly preoccupiedwith, or influenced by, the political or politico-intellectual develop-ments which have contributed to weakening the debate about a socia-list emancipatory project over the past few decades.

Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere each retain at the heart of their sys-tems a radical break with the status quo, a position which is at oddswith various forms of political thought which deny the possibility of aprofoundly different future. None are prepared to add their voices tothose who condemn Marxism wholesale or condemn as being inher-ently totalitarian other revolutionary thinkers and leaders, such asLenin. None are influenced in their core work by Eurocommunistnotions of pragmatic compromise, involving electoral pacts with

With and beyond Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere 143

social democratic parties, for example, although I have argued that ifone looks at some details of Balibar's thought, there is ambivalence inthis respect. None take the end of Stalinist communism in the Easternbloc as proof that all societies that seek to follow an egalitarian path arebound to suffer dictatorship and failure. None are persuaded by thevarious forms of French or Anglo-American liberalism which havebecome so prevalent. One is in fact reminded of the rebellious spirit ofMay 1968, a spirit which has so often been mocked or dismissed overthe past few decades and which is unapologetically integrated intotheir thought. Is not Badiou's notion of the event as sudden, life-changing rupture precisely the explosion of desire for change againstthe odds which characterizes May 1968? Is not Ranciere's radicalassertion by the sons-part^ which profoundly challenges the terms ofdebate, also reminscent of the out-of-the-blue May uprising which deGaulle and the ruling arkKe found so incomprehensible? Finally, is notBalibar's notion of equaliberty, which holds that the conditions ofthe realization of freedom are also the conditions of the realizationof equality (the two concepts being indissociable), again reminiscentof the spirit of the 1968 movement, which voiced apparently outland-ish demands and said insistently and provocatively: 'why not?'

These core ideas all seek to restore a belief in the notion of radicaltransformation. Perhaps even more importantly, they reassert a beliefin the political and theoretical usefulness of listening to and learningfrom the enormous wealth of the ideas of ordinary people, anapproach that flies in the face of much contemporary mainstream pol-itics which promotes above all the legitimacy of professional expertisein organizing societies and systems of governance, and whose logic isan increasing distance between political elites and ordinary people.For each of these thinkers, politics is about the emergence of thehuman subject as collective and activist subject and it is the ordinaryperson — as opposed to professional politicians, specialist intellectualsor consultants of some kind — who have the most to offer in terms ofideas for transformation. In this sense each of their systems is a wayof enabling politics to take place, or detecting it and encouraging itwhere it does, rather than devising some sort of model for change.

I have also suggested that although Badiou, Balibar and Ranciereare each influenced to a certain extent by poststructuralism, they


might play an important part in offering a long-term alternative tothe aspects of poststructuralist and postmodern theory which empha-size difference and the relative rather than the general and theabsolute, the partial and fragmentary rather than the whole. Ran-ciere and in particular Badiou have devised totalizing theories whosespirit, and often whose detail, runs counter to what I have argued isthe depoliticizing logic of postmodernism. Ranciere uses as a spring-board to the development of his own theory a critique of the way inwhich Plato, Marx, Sartre and Bourdieu approached the role of theoppressed and exploited in their thought. His later political thoughtthen becomes, I have argued, in part an exploration of power in gen-eral and politics proper is an abstracted, universalized form of popularrevolt. Balibar, whilst constructing a totalizing theory around theidea that both freedom and equality must be maximized, and arguingthe importance of universals, is arguably more affected than eitherBadiou or Ranciere by the fragmentary and the inconclusive, whichare characteristics of a postmodern approach. Badiou emphasizesthe crucial nature of universals and constructs a philosophy which isarguably the ultimate metanarrative. By stark contrast with the post-modern insistence that it is now impossible to base thought or politicson timeless truths — a path which leads inexorably to totalitariandestruction — Badiou insists on the power and importance of universaland eternal truth. Moreover, truth exists when people act with pro-found, unflinching belief, an idea which again flies in the face of post-modern cynicism towards commitment to a cause. Finally, Badiou'sevent is of profound and enduring significance, which challengesthe postmodern emphasis on surfaces, illusion, simulacra and contin-gency. For Badiou, earth-shattering events do happen and theyassume universal significance through belief on the part of the event'sfollowers; they follow a cause. What could smack more of Enlighten-ment thought and modernity?

However, I have argued that in some respects Badiou's philosophyis uncharacteristic of thought which is in the tradition of the Enlight-enment. He is insistent that the event cannot be explained in terms ofthe situation from within whose context it emerges, thus challengingimportant aspects of modern rationalism, and insisting instead on atheory of subtraction from given circumstances in order to explain


the event. This, I argue, means that Badiou is unable to construct ageneral theory of movement and change. Ranciere does not appearto incorporate a modern view of progress into his thought, and theessence of the political is the same in Ancient Greece as it is today.Moreover, for both Badiou and Ranciere, enquiry based closely onempirically testable fact appears to be of little value - in a waywhich is a clear and deliberate departure from Marx and Engels''scientific socialist' method - and seems to lead to what might bedescribed as an assertive mode, where assertions are made withoutsystematic reference to empirical evidence.

In the introductory chapter of this book, I suggested that, in addi-tion to the emergence and increasing influence of structuralism andpoststructuralism in France since the 1970s, in order to understandthe nature of these thinkers it is necessary to take into account otherintellectual developments. In general, the intellectual and politicalclimate in both France and beyond has not been favourable forthought which embraces the idea that emancipation is both possibleand necessary. Although Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere avoid many ofthe major intellectual concessions I referred to above, this climate, Isuggest, has nevertheless contributed to weakening each of their phi-losophies in certain respects. Badiou's system is certainly the mostoptimistic and detailed; human beings are described as having tre-mendous, albeit often unrealized, potential, capable of wonderfulthings in the domains of love, art, science and politics. The humansubject is a convincingly profound subject. But what I have justcalled the assertive mode - often characterized by a certain detach-ment from lived reality - is perhaps a reflection of the less hopefultimes in which we have been living and offers no clear argument totake us from lived reality to the abstract and then back again to livedreality. In other words, it lacks this particular form of dialectics. Simi-larly, and in some respects more so, Ranciere adopts a position whichis remote from the dialectics of change and his system sees real politicsas the ephemeral moment of uprising with little exploration of theevolution of circumstances leading to change or the perhaps less dra-matic sequel to uprising. Balibar is caught between the radical con-ception of politics as emancipation, transformation and equalibertyon the one hand, and far more pragmatic conclusions drawn from an


analysis of, for example, the European Union, and finally an unhap-pily over-optimistic interpretation of the legacy of 1789, which seemsto suggest that, after all, no further dramatic emancipatory transfor-mation is necessary. In Badiou and Ranciere, then, there are margin-alist tendencies, whereas in Balibar there are weakening concessionsto more conventional, mainstream politics.

Each of these thinkers offers important insights into the nature ofthe supposedly consensual and centre-oriented governmental politicsso prevalent in the past few decades in Western Europe and the USA,politics which serve to disguise and leave un-debated many forms ofinjustice and exploitation. Balibar suggests convincingly that thissort of consensus politics goes hand in hand with the extreme violencefound in less developed countries. Ranciere's On the Shores of Politics(2007 [1998]) is one of the most insightful and trenchant analyses tohave appeared of France's superficially consensual form of govern-ment since the early 1980s. However, such is both Badiou's andRanciere's position regarding the political and intellectual climateand practice of the period, they offer little purchase in their core the-ories on the nature of politics outside the exceptional occurrence ofthe event (for Badiou) and popular uprising by the sans-part (forRanciere). In other words, in their theories proper they leave us littlethe wiser regarding the nature of politics beyond the extraordinary;nothing else really counts as politics so cannot be analysed withintheir core framework. Indeed Ranciere insists in the opening line ofhis Ten Theses on Politics that '[pjolitics is not the exercise of power'.

In the introductory chapter of this book I also referred to PerryAnderson's suggestion that Western Marxism moved increasinglyinto the realm of philosophy and into the academy from the 1920sonwards and that in some respects Western Marxism had suffered asa result. Whilst agreeing with Anderson's view in general terms, I alsosuggested that Western Marxism had benefited from this move in thatit had managed to maintain a certain distance from some of the prag-matic and damaging adaptations made by some Marxists in and closeto communist parties in particular and others who became persuadedof the merits of embracing liberal democracy and the values of theWest more generally. I hope to have shown that the exploration ofthe philosophical on the part of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere has,


despite some associated shortcomings, enabled a distance from adap-tations and political pragmatism so prevalent in both party politicsand thought. In this way their relative intellectual distance from thematerial world has been a strength as well as a weakness. I have sug-gested that some of Balibar's weaknesses are attributable to his posi-tion as a communist activist (albeit leaving the party in 1981) closelysubjected to the Eurocommunist arguments of the 1970s and 1980s.

Given the generally conservative nature of the current era, it is nosurprise that in the academy any renewal of radical thought aboutpolitics is less likely to be found in politics, economics and sociologydepartments, which tend (with some exceptions) to stick fairly closeto the mainstream political agenda, a practice which is encouragedand reinforced by availability of selectively allocated governmentfunding. Radical, egalitarian thinking is more likely to be found inphilosophy departments, but also English literature, French andGerman departments. If we take Hardt, Harvey, Jameson, Negriand Zizek as some of the foremost international representatives ofcontemporary radical thought, only David Harvey has had a long-term career in a social science (geography) department; MichaelHardt and Frederic Jameson are in comparative literature, SlavojZizek is in philosophy and Antonio Negri is an independent re-searcher, although he did at one time teach political science. If weadd the three thinkers studied in this book to this list, who are all pro-fessional philosophers, it is small wonder that the role of the economyand the state has been rather overlooked.

The above remarks and the more detailed critique expressed in thepreceding chapters suggest the need for additional lines of intellectualenquiry which both complement the thought of Badiou, Balibar andRanciere, and compensate for and move beyond their weaknesses.I have made the point several times in the course of this book thatin particular neither Badiou nor Ranciere pay enough attention tothe economic sphere, which perhaps significantly is the reverse of theway in which we in the West experience the world; on a daily basis,the reign of commodities seems to make itself felt ever more intenselyand influence ever more spheres of our lives, including of course partsof our private lives. One of Marx's most significant contributions was


to argue that a proper understanding of virtually any aspect of humanexistence would take into account the (broadly speaking) economiccircumstances of the era in which they lived and this has of coursebecome a key aspect of the Marxist materialist legacy. Similarly, anychange in the nature of human existence must take into account theevolving economic circumstances which accompany it. I am notadvocating some form of vulgar economism, but any continuedrenewal of the theoretical aspects of emancipatory politics wouldneed to take far more notice of the political economy than do Badiouand Ranciere in particular, who in their core theories have margin-alized the economic virtually out of existence. Balibar has not gonequite as far, but his thought is still weakened as a result of relativelylittle emphasis on the economic.

I have already pointed out that the strong tendency towardsabstraction is due not only to these thinkers' philosophical trainingbut also to the particular trajectory which Western Marxism - andnow quasi- or post-Marxism — has taken. But this tendency mightalso be related to the legacy of Louis Althusser. Certainly, Althusserfamously spoke of the 'ultimately determining instance' of the mode ofproduction, and suggested that 'we owe to [Marx] the greatest discov-ery of human history: the discovery that opens for men the way to ascientific (materialist and dialectical) understanding of their own his-tory as a history of class struggle' (Althusser 2001: xv). The nature ofeconomic relations and other aspects of the capitalist mode of produc-tion were very much part of Althusser's materialism and 'scientificunderstanding'. We have seen, however, that Badiou, Balibar andRanciere have retained in particular elements of Althusser's work onideology. I have suggested that Badiou's philosophy is quite un-mate-rialist in parts and that this weakens it considerably. Ranciere's defi-nition of politics is essentially aesthetic in that politics involves theformerly invisible becoming visible, or else linguistic, as those whospeak a different language from the dominant language - one istempted to say from the dominant ideology - assert their right to beheard and be understood. At the centre of Ranciere's philosophy thereis also an ahistorical description of the way in which an uprising offersa 'true moment' of politics. Balibar is particularly clear in his preoccu-pation with the ideological sphere, or the 'imaginary' as he (after


Althusser) often calls it, and the ideological becomes very much adetermining influence. Part of the Althusserian legacy seems indeedto be the process of subjectivation, which as others have pointed outis close to Althusser's notion of interpellation, where forms of commit-ment mean individuals are interpellated into subjects.

It will be clear that I would wish to place greater emphasis on themajor theories of Marx as originally stated by him than do any ofthese thinkers. In particular, I would reassert the importance of hisanalysis of the political economy of capitalism in order to help under-stand the nature of the current period and the potential for changewithin and beyond it. A thorough examination of the political econ-omy of late capitalism and its integration into a more general theorycould offer a greater understanding of the current epoch, and an indi-cation of possible futures. Marxist analysis is, however, greatlyenriched by many forms of quasi-Marxist, post-Marxist and non-Marxist approaches (the distinction between these categories is oftennot in itself important), particularly when they are motivated by pro-gressive goals. Frederic Jameson makes roughly the same point whenhe says:

Marxism is not a philosophy . . . it is, like psychoanalysis and unlikeany other contemporary mode of thought, what I will call unity-of-theory-and-practice. This means that it has concepts, but that thoseconcepts are also forms of practice, so that one cannot simplydebate them in a disinterested philosophical way without theuncomfortable intervention of practical positions and commit-ments. But it also means that the various philosophical currents ofthe time have always been able to seize on those concepts and totransform them into so many distinct and seemingly autonomousphilosophies . . . Each of these 'philosophies' has in my opinionsomething to teach us, and illuminates a new aspect of that originalunity-of-theory-and-practice which is Marxism as such; but thelatter is always distinct from them. (Jameson 2001: ix)

I would also argue that a thorough exploration of the notion andpractice of democracy is necessary. Badiou is profoundly ambivalenton the question of democracy, praising it only in rare and isolated


instances. At his most extreme, he suggests that we do not need torethink and radicalize democracy but to invent a new system and setof parameters in order to replace it altogether (talk at Institute forContemporary Arts, London, 25 September 2006). For me this isquite wrong. Certainly, as I have argued elsewhere (Hewlett 2003),much of the discussion regarding democracy is concerned with veryweak forms of democracy, often infused more with liberalism thannotions of popular rule, with more reference to individual rights andmanagerial approaches to government than debate regarding what itwould be to have rule by the people in a more direct sense. There is agulf between what often passes for democracy on the one hand andgenuine, deeper democracy on the other. But elections and otheraspects of contemporary liberal democracy, which Badiou argues hasnothing to do with real politics, should not simply be dismissed. Theymight be a very poor relation of deeper democracy, but they are a sig-nificant advance on previous forms of political organization, offeringboth the opportunity of debate around the nature of democracy andan actual platform for debate, as well as political participation, how-ever much this might often consist of arrangements to select elites whooperate within highly restricted parameters. For Ranciere democracyis not an ongoing form of political practice, but an interruption of theunjust status quo. Thus he offers a version of democracy which is ageneric and appealing form of popular uprising with wholly justmotives, but he seems to have little faith in democracy being sustainedin the longer term. Its life is intense but fleeting.

This also brings us to the question of the modern state. Because of,in particular, Badiou and Ranciere's view of real politics as exception,or at least an activity that is very marginal, neither of them offer a wayof understanding the role of the state. Again, this suggests an under-estimation of the extent to which the modern state is an obstacle toradical change and as something the uprising will take care of becauseit is intrinsically correct and the state intrinisically wrong. As with theeconomy, if anything we are more likely to have a rather crude view ofthe state if we do not properly analyse it. We need to understand it as acomplex entity, which in practice for example lessens the sufferingof some of the poorest in society as well as defending mechanismsand structures which keep the poor in poverty. It also for example


protects its citizens against violence and itself perpetuates violenceagainst them, as well as against others outside its national boundaries.Balibar, in his writings on racism, violence and borders, is more com-mitted to an approach which explores this practical but also theo-retical complexity than either Badiou or Ranciere. Indeed, I haveargued that Balibar in some respects goes too far in the opposite direc-tion and has too much faith in the state's willingness to enable debatesaround crucial issues, particularly human rights.

Also virtually absent from Badiou and Ranciere's writings is a treat-ment of the oppression of women, perhaps reflecting a rather franco-republican approach to the question of ordinary people. Neither seekto explore this particular form of oppression which is an importantstructural characteristic of all contemporary societies. A continuedproject of attempting to understanding politics and society from afeminist viewpoint will also offer insights into the nature of oppres-sion, exploitation and thus emancipation in other domains.

As we know, there has been and continues to be a Maoist influenceon these thinkers. This means that there is at least a residual notion ofan idealized proletariat which is fiercely defended in a fashion that isdetached from any concept of tactical alliances which might winshort-term battles and build support along the way. On the contrary,Badiou and Ranciere in particular conceive of real politics as anexplosion of powerful emotions on the part of the oppressed in a sortof essential expression of truth, after which in the case of Badiou itdepends on converts to the cause to ensure that the world changes ina way that is faithful to the explosion, and for Ranciere things arelikely to revert to the status quo. In neither schema are we offered aview as to how we might get from where we are now to the moment ofegalitarian uprising. In an attempt to maintain a sort of revolutionarypurity and perhaps out of fear of being tainted with capitulation toeither reformist Stalinism or social democracy, Badiou and Ranciereshun virtually all aspects of what might be seen as mainstream politi-cal groups, including trade unions, which are seen as part of theproblem and bound to lead to massive concessions to the status quo.I would suggest that Trotsky's theory of the united front might serveas inspiration for a way out of this dilemma of capitulation versusmarginalism. Trotsky advocated a strategy of alliances with other,


non-revolutionary groups on particular points in order to win certainmodest demands and persuade other activists of the legitimacy ofrevolutionary politics. As a general strategy, this does open the wayfor a course of action for those who seek to follow a radically emanci-patory path and also relate to — without being part of — more main-stream politics. It avoids the dilemma of a bipolar view of politicalactivism with a stark choice between capitulation and marginalism.The British Anti-war Coalition against US and British occupation ofIraq is an example of such politics of the united front, where activistsof many persuasions unite on a single issue, without compromisingtheir own, broader politics of the longer term, and some groupswithin this coalition no doubt hope to win other activists over totheir own worldviews.

In my appraisal of the work of Balibar, I have emphasized howimportant it is to raise, as he does, the question of political violence.Such a discussion brings us to crucial questions for the present age.First, in asking whether, for example, domestic violence, or extremephysical hardship characteristic of a particular type of industrial oragricultural production should be included in a definition of politicalviolence, we also beg the question of where politics begins and where itends, in other words how to define it. Second, in analysing the rela-tionship between 'consensus' politics in the West and violence of var-ious kinds in developing countries, as does Balibar, we gain insightsinto both the nature of contemporary forms of political regimes inthe West and the nature of international productive relations andpolitical relations (or political and economic aspects of internationalrelations). Next, it raises the question of the legitimacy and effects ofthe use of violence in the struggle for a better world. Is Balibar correctto suggest that we need to 'civilize revolution' and in so doing explorean imaginary encounter between Lenin and Gandhi? Do violentmeans justify (hopefully) non-violent ends, and to what extent do vio-lent means necessarily lead to violent outcomes, as many pacifists andothers argue? It is certainly true that the contemporary world politi-cal order is one where violence abounds; to take just one example, inDecember 2006 alone the official statistics issued by the Interior Min-istry in Baghdad put the death toll among Iraqi civilians at 1,930, afigure which only hints at the physical suffering of the Iraqi people


due to political circumstances over the previous decade (SaddamHussein's regime, economic sanctions by the West, the US-led inva-sion and finally occupation and uprising).

We know that countless thousands of innocent people have diedunder regimes purporting to be communist. But to suggest that if thestruggle for emancipation involves violence the outcome is also neces-sarily violent - which is the logic of Balibar's argument - means thatone only and at all times counters the violence of the status quo withpeaceful means and when these peaceful means do not work oneaccepts the violence of the status quo. Unlike Furet, Balibar is keento emphasize the just legacy and positive effects of 1789, but his discus-sions on political violence in the modern era are nevertheless some-what reminiscent of Furet's position that revolution is inevitablyfollowed by terror. Balibar also points out, however, that (as I suggestabove) there are many terror-equivalents in today's world. Zizek sug-gests that unless one eternally resides in the margins, and for everdodges the question of the exercise of power, there may well bemoments when one must take responsibility for the 'passage a Vacte^ ofaccepting all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realiz-ing [a] political project' (Zizek 1999: 236).

The practical detail of such dilemmas is at present remote. Despitewhat I argue in the introductory chapter regarding a certain upturnin left radicalism and thought over the past decade or so, it is safeto assert that we are still living in a conservative age. Since wellbefore the break-up of the Soviet Union, even grass-roots activists,along with professional politicians and many intellectuals, haveoften argued that we must broadly speaking accept the world as it is,whilst perhaps addressing some of the worst excesses of injustice andexploitation. Outside the confines of small far-left political groups,and publications either by these small groups or by individuals whoare broadly sympathetic to them, the generally accepted view of thelast few decades has been that any radical, structural transformationof the way in which human beings relate to one another within socie-ties is not possible, and is probably not desirable either. In this sense,Anderson's argument in La Pensee tiede (2005) that France is nowcharacterized by conservative and liberal-democratic thought islargely correct.


He is not, however, entirely correct. I opened this book by suggest-ing that we might explore the work of Badiou, Balibar and Rancierein the context of thought as praxis, where the relationship betweentheory and material aspects of the world is particularly important.Certainly, one striking and uniting characteristic of these thinkers isthat in order to understand the world one must, in addition to readingand debating, actively intervene in it. At risk of exaggerating thecommon features of their thought, I will close by suggesting not onlythat theirs is the most engaged philosophy since Sartre and Althusser,but that we may be glimpsing a series of different, more politicallycommitted systems of thought that will grow in influence in the yearsto come.

References and Bibliography

Principal works by Alain Badiou

Books

1969: Le concept demodele. Paris: Maspero.

1975: Theorie de la contradiction. Paris: Maspero.

1976: Del'Ideologic. Paris: Maspero. (With F. Balmes.)1977: Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hegelienne. Paris: Maspero. (With L. Mossot

and J. Bellassen.)

1982: Theorie dusujet. Paris: Seuil.1985: Peut-onpenserlapolitique? Paris: Seuil.

1988: UEtre et I'evenement. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Oliver Feltham as Being and Event,London: Continuum, 2005.)

1989: Manifeste pour la philosophie. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Norman Madarasz as

Manifesto for Philosophy, New York: SUNY, 1999.)1990: Le Nombre etlesnombres. Paris: Seuil.

1991/1998: D'unDesastreobscur (Droit, Etat, Politique). Paris: L'Aube.

1992: Conditions. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Gabriel Riera as Philosophy Under Conditions,

New York: SUNY Press, 2005.)

1993: UEthique: Essai sur la conscience du mal. Paris: Hatier. (Trans. By Peter Hall-ward as Ethics. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, London: Verso, 2001.)

1995: Beckett. Uincrevabledesir. Paris: Hachette. (Trans, by Nina Power and Alberto

Toscano as On Beckett, Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2003.)1997: Gilles Deleuze: 'La clameur de Fetre\ Paris: Hachette. (Trans, by L. Burchill as

Deleuê: The Clamor of Being. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.)

1997:Saint-Paul. LafondationdeFuniversalisme. Paris: PUF. (Trans, by Ray Brassier asSaint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2003.)1998: Abrege de metapolitique. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Jason Barker as Metapolitics,

London: Verso, 2005.)

1998: Court traite d'ontologie transitoire. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Norman Madarasz asBriefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, Albany: State Univer-

sity of New York Press, 2006.)

1998: Petit manuel d'inesthetique. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Alberto Toscano as Handbook

oflnaesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.)

156 References and Bib liography

2003: CirConstances, 1. Kosovo, 11 septembre, Chirac/Le Pen. Paris: Editions Lignes etManifestes.

2003: Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. London: Continuum.

2004: CirConstances, 2. Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France. Paris: Editions Lignes et Mani-festes.

2004: Theoretical Writings. London: Continuum. (Edited and translated by RayBrassier and Alberto Toscano.)

2005: Cit"Constances, 3. Portees du mot cjuif3. Paris: Editions Lignes et Manifestes.

2W5:LeSiecle. Paris: Seuil.2006: Logiques des mondes. Paris: Seuil.

2006: Polemics. London: Verso. (Various essays trans, by Steven Corcoran.)

Works of literature

1964: Almagestes. Paris: Seuil (novel).1967: Portulans. Paris: Seuil (novel).

1979: L'Echarperouge. Paris: Maspero (libretto).

1994: Ahmedlesubtil. Aries: Actes Sud (play).1995: Ahmed sefache, suivi par Ahmed philosophe. Aries: Actes Sud (play).

1995: Citrouilles. Aries: Actes Sud (play).

1997: Calmeblocici-bas. Paris: P. O. L. (novel).

Selected shorter works by Alain Badiou

1966: 'L'autonomie du processus historique'. In Cahiers Marxistes-Leninistes, Paris:Ecole Normale Superieure, 12-13, pp. 761-89.

1967: 'Le (re)commencement du materialisme dialectique'. In Critique 240 (May),

pp. 438-67.

1981: Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris: Potemkine (Pamphlet).1985: 'Six proprietes de la verite'. In Ornicar? 32 (Jan.), pp. 39-67; and Ornicar?

33 (April), pp. 120-49.

1986: Est-il exact que toute pensee emet un coup de des? Paris: Conferences du Peroquet(Pamphlet).

1988: Une Soireephilosophique. Paris: Potemkine/Seuil. With Christian Jambet, Jean-Claude Milner and Francois Regnault (Pamphlet).

1989: 'D'unsujetenfinsans objet'. In Cahiers Confrontations 20, pp. 13-22. (Trans, by

Bruce Fink as 'On a Finally Objectless Subject' in Who Comes after the Subject?,

Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean-Luc Nancy [eds], London: Routledge,

pp. 24-32.)1990: 'L'Entretiende Bruxelles'. InLes Temps Modernes, May, no. 526, pp. 1-26.

1991: 'L'Etre, 1'evenement et la militance'. In Futur anterieur 8, pp. 13-23. (Inter-view with Nicole-Edith Thevenin.)

1992: 'L'Age des poetes'. In Jacques Ranciere (ed.), LaPolitique des poetes: Pourquoi

poetes en temps de detresse? Paris: Albin Michel, pp. 21—38.

References and Bib liography 157

1993a: 'Nous pouvons redeployer la philosophic'. In LeMonde, 31 Aug., p. 2. (Inter-

view with Rober-Pol Droit.)1993b: 'Qu'est-ce que Louis Althusser entend par "philosophic"?'. In Sylvain

Lazarus (ed.), Politique et Philosophie dans Foeuvre de Louis Althusser, Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France, pp. 29-45.

1994: 'Being by Numbers' (interview with Lauren Sedajsky). Artforum 33: 2 (Oct.),

pp. 84-7.1998: 'Politics and Philosophy'. Interview with Peter Hallward in Angelaki: Journal

of the Theoretical Humanities, 3:3, pp. 113-33.

1998: Tenser le surgissementdel'evenement'. In CahiersduCinema (May), pp. 53-8.(Interview with E. Burdeau and F. Ramone.)

2000: 'Metaphysics and the Critique of Metaphysics'. In PH. Warwick Journal of

Philosophy 10, pp. 174-90. (Trans. Alberto Toscano.)

2000: 'Huit theses sur 1'universel.' In Sumic, Jelica (ed.), Universel, singulier, sujet.

Paris: Kime, pp. 11—20. Viewable at: http://ciepfc.rhapsodyk.net/article. php3?id_article=44.

2001: 'The Political as a Procedure of Truth'. In lacanian ink 19 (fall), pp. 70-81.

(Trans. Barbara P. Fulks.)2001: 'Who is Nietzsche?' In PH. Warwick Journal of Philosophy 11, pp. 1-11. (Trans.

Alberto Toscano.)2002: La Revolution culturelle: la derniere revolution? Paris: Les Conferences du Rouge-

Gorge, Feb. (Pamphlet).

2002: 'Que penser? Que faire?' Le Monde, 28 April. (With Sylvain Lazarus andNatacha Michel.)

2003: 'One Divides into Two', Culture Machine^ http://culturemachine.tees.ac.uk/Cmach/Backissues/j004/Articles/Badiou.htm.

2003: 'Beyond Formalisation: An Interview' with Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hall-

ward. In Angelaki 8:2, August (special issue: The One or the Other? French Philosophy

Today), pp. 111-36.

2004: 'Afterword. Some Replies to a Demanding Friend'. In Peter Hallward (ed.),

Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. London: Continuum Press,pp. 232-7.

2005a: 'Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectics'. In Radical Philoso-

phy \W.2005b: 'The Adventure of French Philosophy'. In New Left Review 35, Sept.-Oct.,

pp. 67-77.2006: 'The War on Terror', Institute for Contemporary Arts, London, 25 Septem-

ber (Talk).

Special issues of journals on Alain Badiou

2003: Communication & Cognition 36:1-2. 'The True is Always New: The Philosophy

of Alain Badiou', ed. by Dominiek Hoens.


2005: Polygraph no. 17. 'The Philosophy of Alain Badiou', ed. by Matthew Wilkens.2005:positions: east asia cultures critique 13:3. 'Alain Badiou and Cultural Revolution',

ed. by Tani E. Barlow.

Principal works by Jacques Ranciere

Books

1965: 'Le concept critique et la critique de 1'economie politique des "Manuscrits de

1844" au "Capital" ', in Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre

Macherey and Jacques Ranciere, Lire le Capital, Paris: Maspero.1974: La Lecônd'Althusser. Paris: Gallimard.

1976: (ed., with Alain Faure) La Parole ouvriere, 1830/1851. Paris: 10/18.1981: La Nuit des Proletaires. Paris: Fayard. (Trans, by Donald Reid as The Nights of

Labour, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.)

1983: Le Philosophe et ses pauvres. Paris: Fayard. (Trans by John Drury, CorinneOster and Andrew Parker as The Philosopher and his Poor, London/Durham: Duke

University Press, 2003.)

1983: (ed.) Gabriel Gauny, Le philosophe plebeien, Paris: Presses Universitaires deVincennes.

1984: (ed.) U Empire du sociologue. Paris: La Decouverte.

1985: (ed.) Esthetiques du peuple. Paris: La Decouverte/Presses Universitaires deVincennes.

1987: Le Maitre ignorant. Cinq Legons sur l} emancipation intellectuelle, Paris: Fayard.(Trans. By Kristin Ross as The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Five Lessons in Intellectual

Emancipation, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991.)

1990: Courts Voyages au pays du peuple. Paris: Seuil. (Trans. By James B. Swenson asShort Voyages to the Land of the People, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.)

1992: Aux bords du politique. Paris: Osiris (Trans by Liz Heron as On the Shores of Poli-

tics, London and New York: Verso, 1995.)1992: Les Noms de Fhistoire. Essai de poetique du savoir. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Hassan

Melehy as The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge, Minneapolis: Univer-sity of Minnesota Press, 1999.)

1992: (ed.) La Politique des poetes: Pourquoi des poetes en temps de detresse? Paris: Albin

Michel.1993: (ed.), with Christine Buci-Glucksmann and Genevieve Fraisse) Jean Borreil,

La Raison nomade. Paris: Payot.

1995: La Mesentente. Politique et Philosophie, Paris, Galilee. (Trans, by Julie Roseas Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, Minneapolis and London: University of

Minnesota Press, 1998.)1996: Mallarme. La politique de la sir ene. Paris: Hachette.

1997a: Arretsurhistoire, Paris: Ednsdu Centre Pompidou (with Jean-Louis Comolli).


1998: La Chair des mots. Politiques de Fecriture, Paris: Galilee. (Trans, by Charlotte

Mandell as The Flesh of Words. The Politics of Writing, Stanford: Stanford Univer-sity Press, 2004.)

1998: Aux bords dupolitique. Paris: Gallimard. (2nd edn.) (Trans, by Steve Corcoranas On the Shores of Politics, London and New York: Verso, 2007.)

1998: La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la litterature. Paris: Hachette.

2000: LePartagedu sensible. Esthetiqueetpolitique. Paris: La Fabrique. (Trans, by Gab-riel Rockhill as The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London andNew York: Continuum, 2006.)

2001: Ulnconscientesthetique. Paris: Galilee.2001: La Fable cinematographique. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Emiliano Battista as Film

Fables, Oxford: Berg, 2006.)2003: Les Scenes dupeuple. (Les Revolteslogiques, 1975-1985). Lyon: Horlieu.

2003: Le Destin des images. Paris: Fabrique. (Trans, by Gregory Elliott as The Fate of

the Image, London: Verso, 2007.)2004: Malaise dans Festhetique. Paris: Galilee.

2005: La Haine de la democratie. Paris: Seuil. (Trans, by Steve Corcoran as Hatred of

Democracy, London: Verso, 2007.)2005: Chroniques des temps consensuels. Paris: La Fabrique.

2005: La Parole muette: Essai sur les contradictions de la litterature. Paris: Hachette.2006: Mallarme: lapolitique delasirene. Paris: Hachette.

2007: La P olitique de la litter ature. Paris: Galilee.

Selected shorter works by Jacques Ranciere

1973: 'Mode d'emploi pour une re-edition de Lire le Capital'. In Les Temps modernes,November.

1974: 'On the Theory of Ideology - Althusser's Polities', Radical Philosophy 1. (Rep-

rinted in Roy Edgely and Richard Osborne, The Radical Philosophy Reader,


1988: 'Good Times or Pleasure at the Barricades', in Voices of the People: The Politics

and Life of'La Sociale' at the End of the Second Empire, ed. by Adrian Rifkin and Roger

Thomas, trans, by John Moore, London: Routledge, 1988, pp. 45-94.

1991: 'After What?'. In E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes

After the Subject? New York: Routledge, pp. 246-52.1994: 'Post-democracy, Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Jacques Ran-

ciere', Angelaki 1:3, pp. 171-8.

1997b: 'Democracy Means Equality.' Interview with Andrew Parker and Jean-Philippe Deranty in Radical Philosophy no. 82, March-April 1997, pp. 29-36.

(Trans. David Macey.)1998: 'Althusser'. In Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (eds), A Companion

to Continental Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 530-6.

160 References and Bibliography

2000: 'Jacques Ranciere: Literature, Politics, Aesthetics: Approaches to Demo-cratic Disagreement' (interview with Solange Guenoun and James H. Kava-

nagh), trans. R. Lapidus, SubStance, no. 92, pp. 3-24.

2000: 'Dissenting Words: A Conversation with Jacques Ranciere' (interview with

Davide Panagia), diacritics 30:2, pp. 113-26.

2001: 'Ten Theses on Polities'. Theory and Event 5:3, n.p.2002: 'Eclipse de la politique'. L'Humanite, 29 May. http://www.humanite.presse.fr/

journal/2002-05-29/2002-05-29-34588.

2002: 'Guantanamo, Justice and Bushspeak: Prisoners of the Infinite'. Counterpunch,30 April.

2003: 'Politics and Aesthetics' (interview with Peter Hallward, trans. Forbes

Mor\ock),AngelakzQ:2, pp. 191-212.2003 : 'The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics'. Paper presented at the

conference 'Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Ranciere and the Political',Goldsmiths College, University of London, 16-17 September.

2003: 'Afterword to the English-Language Edition (2002)', The Philosopher and his

Poor, pp. 219-227.2003: 'Comments and Responses'. Theory and Event 6:4.

2004: 'The Politics of Literature'. Substance, 33:1, pp. 10-24.

2004: 'Aesthetics, Inaesthetics, Anti-Aesthetics' (trans. Ray Brassier). In PeterHallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy. London:Continuum, pp. 218—31.

2005: 'From Politics to Aesthetics?' In Robson 2005a (ed.), pp. 13-25.

Special issues of journals on Jacques Ranciere

1997: Critique 601 /'2. 'Autour de Jacques Ranciere', ed. by Philippe Roger.2003: Theory and Event 6:4.

2004: Substance 33:1. 'Contemporary Thinker: Jacques Ranciere', ed. by EricMechoulan.

2004: Racques Ranciere, I'indiscipline, Special issue ofLabyrinthe, winter 2004.

Principal works by Etienne Balibar

Books

1965: Lire le Capital (With Louis Althusser, Etienne Balibar, Roger Establet, Pierre

Macherey, and Jacques Ranciere). Paris: Maspero.1974: Cinq Etude:s dumaterialisme historique. Paris: Maspero.

1976: Sur la Dictature du proletariat. Paris: Maspero. (Trans, by Grahame Lock as

On the Dictator ship of the Proletariat, London: NLB, 1977.)


1979: Ouvronslafenetre, camarades! (With Guy Bois, Georges Labica and Jean-Pierre

Lefebvre.) Paris: Maspero.1979: Marx et sa Critique de la politique. (With Cesare Lupotini and Andre Tosel.)

Paris: Maspero.1985: Spinoza et la politique. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. (Trans, by Peter

Snowdon as Spinoza and Politics, London and New York: Verso, 1998.)

1988: Race, nation, classe: les identites ambigues. (With Immanuel Wallerstein.) Paris:La Decouverte (Trans, by Chris Turner as Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities,


1991: Ecritspour Althusser. Paris: La Decouverte.1992: LesFrontieres delademocratie. Paris: La Decouverte.

1993: La Philosophie de Marx. Paris: La Decouverte. (Trans, by Chris Turner as The

Philosophy of Marx, London: Verso, 1995.)

1994: Lieux etnoms de la verite. Paris: Ed. de 1'Aube.

1997: La Crainte des masses: politique etphilosophie avant et apres Marx. Paris: Galilee.(Trans, partially by James Swenson as Masses, Classes, Ideas, London: Routledge,

1994 and partially as Politics and the Other Scene, London: Verso, 2002.)

1999: Sans-papiers: Farchaisme fatal. (With J. Costa-Lascoux, M. Chemillier-Gendreau, E. Terray.) Paris: Editions La Decouverte.

2001: Nous, citoyens d'Europe: Les Frontieres, I'Etat, le peuple. Paris: La Decouverte.(Trans, in modified form by James Swenson as We, the People of Europe? Reflections

on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,2004.)

2002: Droitdecite. Paris: PUF. (Trans, partially by James Swenson as We, the People of

Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship, Princeton and Oxford: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004.)

2003: U Europe, I'Amerique, la guerre: reflexions sur la mediation europeenne. Paris:

La Decouverte.2005: Europeconstitutionfrontiere. Paris: Editions du Passant.

Selected shorter works by Etienne Balibar

1985: Entries in Gerard Bensussan and Georges Labica (eds), Dictionnaire critique du

marxisme, Paris, PUF (2nd edn, revised and enlarged): 'Appareil', 'Bakounisme','Classes', 'Critique de 1'economie politique', 'Contre-revolution', 'Deperisse-

ment de 1'Etat', 'Dictature du proletariat', 'Division du travail manuel et intel-

lectuel', 'Economique politique (critique de 1')', 'Droit de tendances', 'Lutte declasses', 'Pouvoir'.

1991: 'Citizen Subject'. In E. Cadava, P. Connor and J.-L. Nancy (eds), Who Comes

After the Subject? New York: Routledge, pp. 33-57.

1993: 'Some Questions on Politics and Violence'. In Assemblage: A Critical Journal of

Architecture and Design Culture. April, 20:12.


1993: 'The Non-Contemporaneity of Althusser'. In E. Anne Kaplan, and MichaelSprinker (eds), The Althusser Legacy, London: Verso.

1994: 'Subjection and Subjectivation'. InJ. Copjec (ed.), Supposing the Subject, New

York: Verso, pp. 1-15.1995: 'La violence des intellectuels'. In Etienne Balibar and Bertand Ogilvie (eds),

Violence etpolitique. Special issue ofLignes, 25, May.1995: 'The Infinite Contradiction'. In Tale French Studies 88 (special issue: Deposi-

tions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labor of Reading), pp. 142—64.

1996: Ts European Citizenship Possible?' Public Culture: Society for Transnational

Cultural Studies 8:2, pp. 355—76. (Trans, by Christine Jones of'Une citoyennete

europeene est-il possible?'

1996: 'On Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions'. (WithPierre Macherey.) In Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (eds), Marxist Literary

Theory: A Reader, pp. 275-6. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.1996: 'What is "Man" in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy?' In Janet Coleman

(ed.), The Individual in Political Theory and Practice. Oxford and New York: Oxford

University Press.1996: 'On Literature as an Ideological Form: Some Marxist Propositions'.

(With Pierre Macherey.) In Terry Eagleton and Drew Milne (eds), Marxist

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Index

abortion trial, Bobigny, France 139Abrege de Metapolitique (Badiou) 81

activism 6, 17,52,73Adorno, Theodor 1 4, 1 1 0, 1 36aesthetics 4,88, 100, 113AIDS 135Algeria 138

struggle for national liberation 26Althusser, Louis 5, 6, 11, 14, 17-22,

24, 52, 53, 54, 60, 84, 85, 86, 88, 92,93,95,102,112,113,116,117,120,121, 126, 129, 148, 154

For Marx 18,19

Reading Capital 1 8ambivalence 1 2 7-9American Revolution 1Anderson, Perry 146, 153antagonism 128anthropology 85anti-capitalism 8anti-nuclear movement 16anti-semitism 1 1anti- Vietnam war movement 55aporia 127appearance 41archaeology 13Arendt, Hannah 49Aron, Raymond 11,12art 35, 36, 39, 47, 49, 60, 66, 90, 145artists 51asylum seekers 121AuBorddupolitique (Ranciere) 94

Baudrillard, Jean 16Beckett, Samuel 32Bensaced, Daniel 9Berman, Marcel 66

Bidet, Jacques 9Billancourt, Renault 76Blum, Leon 12,79Bolsheviks 55Boltanski, Luc 9borders 117,151Bourdieu, Pierre 9bourgeoisie 43, 58, 63, 84, 87, 95, 125,

133, 137Britain 5,78, 103, 109

Cahierspour F analyse group 26Callinicos, Alex 17Cambodia 130Camus, Albert 12Cantor, Georg 25, 32, 40

set theory 48capital 73, 110, 133Capital (Marx) 7, 19, 127,133capitalism 7, 8, 15, 20, 43, 56, 64, 67,

69,76,79,91, 121, 131, 134, 149Carnap, Rudolf 30Celan, Paul 32Chiapello, Eve 9child labour 134China 69

Cultural Revolution 32industrialization 134

Chirac, Jacques 74Chomsky, Noam 8Christ, resurrection 39Christianity 36, 60Chronique des temps consensuels

(Ranciere) 110citizenship 6, 117, 126, 139civil disobedience 138,139civil servants 15

174 Index

civil war 135civility 119,134Cixous, Helene 16class 64class struggle 1 1 6, 1 3 1 , 1 48-9Cohen, Paul 32Cohn-Bendit, Daniel 98Cold War 8,14,135Colletti, Lucio 14colonialism 55Commune see Paris Communecommunism 8, 15, 27, 40, 64, 69, 71,

80, 143disintegration of 130

Communist Manifesto 50,62,68Communist Party (France) 6, 11, 13,

71, 79, 82, 103, 117, 133, 140 see alsoParti Communiste Frangais

Communist Party (USSR) 21compos sibilite 32Conditions (Badiou) 31conjuncture 120, 121consciousness 128consensus 85,86, 110, 112consensus politics 97, 103, 146, 152Constant, Benjamin 1 1constructivism 56contingency 38counter- terrorism 130critical theory 88, 90Cultural Revolution (China) 21, 32Cultural Studies 21

Darwin, Charles 44, 45theory of evolution 423

de Gaulle, Charles 55, 71, 83, 143Declaration of the Rights of Man and the

Citizen (178-9) 123-4, 125, 126,139

deconstruction 17,59Deleuze, Gilles 16, 17Delia Volpe, Galvano 1 4democracy 69-72, 74, 82, 85, 89,

108-11, 112, 117, 125, 149-50see also liberal democracy

Ranciere's theory of 113

demos 101, 110, 111, 112, 119, 120Derrida, Jacques 9, 12, 16, 17, 24, 27,

96, 100, 127Spectres of Marx 9

Descartes, Rene 28,31developing countries 134,152dialectics 145dictatorship 137discourse analysis 100dissensus 85, 86division of labour 90domestic violence 152Dreyfus affair 139Dumenil, Gerard 9

Eastern bloc 8, 14,56, 143break up of 130

Ecole Normale Superieure 26ecology 15economic determinism 33economic policy 7economics 112, 140economy 33, 63, 64, 66, 70, 150education 92egaliberte see equalibertyegalitarianism 71,81elections 73, 150electoral reform (Britain) 109elite, political 112elitism 84,112emancipation 1 0, 8 1 , 1 1 9, 1 20, 1 24,

126, 140, 145, 153emancipatory politics 117,125,148empire 7empiricism 35,41,57,89Engels, Friedrich 63, 7 1 , 1 3 1 , 1 45

Communist Manifesto 50, 125Enlightenment 1, 16, 136, 144equaliberty (egaliberte) 118, 119,

122-3, 124, 125, 140, 143, 145equality 2, 86, 94, 97, 106-7, 1 12, 1 14:

123, 124, 144equality of opportunity 96Establet, Roger 5ethnocide 133

Index 175

Eire et Fevenement, L3 (Badiou) 4, 26,27,40,64

EU see European UnionEuropean Union (EU) 146

expansion 121exploitation 59, 123

famine 135Fanon, Frantz 131fascism 14feminism 73Ferry, Luc 12feudalism 121fidelity 40Fondation Saint Simon (think tank) 1 03Force ouvriere 78foreign policy (France) 102Foucault, Michel 1 2, 1 6, 34, 85, 96France 9, 10, 11, 19,69,74,79

foreign policy 102Nazi occupation 1 0, 1 38, 1 39parliamentary politics 71,72-5presidential elections 2002 9, 78social security reform 102

freedom 122-3, 124, 144freedom of expression 70French (language) 12French Revolution of 1789 1,10,12,

38, 39, 48, 51, 54, 56, 60, 65, 124,125, 140, 146

Freud, Sigmund 85Furet, Francois 12, 13, 54, 60, 109

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 30Galileo Galieli 19Gandhi, Mahatma 118,1 36-9, 1 52Gauche proletarienne (journal) 945gay movement 16genetics 43genocide 133Germany, West 103Gewalt 130, 132, 133, 135Gilles Deleuze (Badiou) 59globalization 15, 27, 131Glucksmann, Andre 1 1Goldmann, Lucien 14

Gramsci, Antonio 18, 58, 66Greece, Ancient 1 0 1 , 1 06, 1 45green politics 73Guevara, Che 62

Habermas, Jiirgen 97, 135Haine de la democratic, La

(Ranciere) 109Hardt, Michael 7, 16, 147Harvey, David 7, 16, 66, 147Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 1,12,

14,19,68,128hegemony 128Heidegger, Martin 30

Being and Time 127historical materialism 9,11,18historicism 31historiography 85, 95

Marxist 87history 12, 64-6, 67, 85, 88, 108, 131Hitler, Adolf 75Hobsbawm, Eric 135Horkheimer, Max 110Hugo, Victor 110

Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs)20, 102

ideology 127-9, 140illegal immigrants 138immigrant workers 121,122immigrants 76immigration, bill on (France) 138India

industrialization 134partition 136

Indochina 138Industrial Revolution 88Infinite Contradiction, The (Balibar) 127international relations 140Internationale 101Iran, revolution of 1 980 32Iraq

US and British invasion of 8US and British occupation of 1 52

Irigaray, Luce 16ISAs see Ideological State Apparatuses

176 Index

Jacotot Joseph 93,94Jambert, Christian 1 1Jameson, Fredric 8, 16, 147, 149job creation 102Judt, Tony 12Julliard, Jacques 13July 1830 uprising 88Juppe, Alain 138justice 125

Kant, Immanuel 1,14, 48, 54Khilnani, Sunil 12Kohl, Helmut 102Kojeve, Alexandre 12Korsch, Karl 14Kristeva, Julia 16

La Distance politique (LDP) 76Labour Party (Britain) 79labour power 43Lacan, Jacques 8, 13, 20, 24, 32, 35,

40,85writings on psychoanalysis 48

language 95-100Lazarus, Sylvain 50, 76, 81LCR see Ligue communiste revolutionnaireLa Distance politique (LDP) 76, 80LDP see La Distance politiqueLe Monde (newspaper) 138Le Pen, Jean-Marie 9, 73-4learning 94Leqon d'Althusser, La (Ranciere) 93Lefebvre, Henri 14Lenin 62,69,71,80, 118, 121, 131,

132, 136-9, 142, 152theory of revolution 1 37What is to be Done? 50

Leninism 136Levinas, Emmanuel 29Levi-Strauss, Claude 21,85

structuralist anthropology 21Levy, Bernard-Henri 1 1Levy, Dominique 9liberal democracy 59, 69, 70, 7 1 , 73,

82, 86, 95-100, 103, 106, 108, 109,110, 111, 1 1 7-1 8 see also daemocracy

liberal republicanism 141liberalism 1 0, 1 5, 46, 48, 52, 85, 99,

109, 123, 143, 150Ligue communiste revolutionnaire (LCR)

78,79Lilla, Mark 12Lipovetsky, Gilles 109LO see Lutte ouvriereLocke, John 3logic 31logical positivism 30Logiques des mondes (Badiou) 4, 27, 41

45love 35, 36, 40, 47, 49, 51, 60, 145Lukacs, Gyorgy 14, 18, 125Lukes, Steven 99Lutte ouvriere (LO) 78Luxembourg 131Lyotard, Francois 1 6, 24, 27, 30

Macharey, Pierre 5, 9Machiavelh, Niccolo 1 20Maitre ignorant, Le (Ranciere) 107Mallarme, Stephane 24, 48Mandel, Ernest 8Mao Zedong 51,62,69Maoism 6, 21, 26, 62, 66, 67, 79Marcuse, Herbert 14Marx, Karl Hemrich 1, 3, 6, 8, 9, 1 1,

14, 19, 24, 33, 42, 43-5, 47, 50, 61,71, 75, 81, 84, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92;

105, 108, 110, 113, 120, 124, 125,126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 144,145, 147, 148, 149

Capital 7, 19, 127, 133Communist Manifesto 1 2 5German Ideology, The 1 9Paris Manuscripts of 1844 14Theses on Feurerbach 1 9

Marxism 2, 14, 15, 21, 23, 27, 49, 53,62-72,84,87, 116, 117, 118, 119,126, 131, 132, 140, 141, 142, 148,149

Stalinist 32Western 13, 14, 146

Index 111

Marxism-Leninism 18Marxists 133, 134mass murder 136Masses, Classes, Ideas (Bahbar) 4materialism 8mathematical ontology 46mathematicians 51mathematics 26, 39, 41, 63, 68May 1968 uprising (France) 5,6,

10, 13, 26, 27, 37, 38-9, 48, 51, 55,74, 76, 79, 82, 83, 84, 88, 94, 98,103, 143

Mesentente, La (Ranciere) 4, 94metanarratives 30, 45metaphysics 25, 30, 34, 49Michel, Natacha 76Middle East

conflict 130oil 134

Mitterand, Francois 13, 76, 102-3,104, 109

election of 1981 91modernity 119, 126, 136music 39

Names of History, The (Ranciere) 99Nancy, Jean-Luc 126National Front (France) 9, 71, 73, 76,

104

nationalism 6nationalization 102natural selection 423Negri, Antonio 7, 16, 147Nights of Labour, The (Ranciere) 88,

89,95,98, 104

On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat(Balibar) 117

On the Shores of Politics (Ranciere) 1 09,146

ontology 25,37,40,56,81OP see Organisation politiqueopinion polls 72Organisation politique (OP) 5, 26, 69,

75,76,77,78,79,80

Paris Commune of 1871 10, 50, 65, 94Paris, University of Paris VIII 26Parole ouvriere, La (Ranciere) 87Parti Communiste Frangais (PCF) 21,22,

55, 84, 1 1 7, 1 1 8 see also CommunistParty (France)

Parti Socialist Unifie (PSI) 25party politics 140,147PCF see Parti Communiste FrangaisPensee 68, La 12Petain, Philippe 75Philosopher and his Poor ', The

(Ranciere) 90,91,92,93Philosophy of Marx, The (Balibar) 1 24Plato 24, 34, 59, 61, 71, 82, 91, 99, 144

Republic 1 1poetry 32Pol Pot 130Poland

workers' uprising 32police 101-3, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109,

111, 112, 113, 114political activism 66,114political science 112political theory 88political violence 129—36politics 2, 35, 36, 47, 49-59, 60, 61, 70,

72,82,85,86,89,96,97,98,100-108, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108,113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119-27,140, 143, 145

emancipatory 117France 109green politics 73left politics 48

Politics and the Other Scene (Balibar) 4popular culture 25populism 87positivism 35, 89post-Cold War 130post-democracy 1 08- 1 1post-Fordism 66postmodernism 17, 27, 34, 144postmodernity 30poststructuralism 4, 13, 16, 17, 24, 27,

116, 141, 143, 145

178 Index

poverty 135pragmatism 147praxis 3, 55proletariat 63,87,88, 118, 125, 137PS I see Parti Socialist Unifiepsychoanalysis 48punning 100

race 6Race, Nation, Class (Balibar) 1 29racism 76,117,151radical republicanism 141radicalism 1 1rationalism 144Rawlsjohn 24,29,48Reading Capital (Ranciere) 5, 6, 84Reagan, Ronald 102Renaut, Alain 12Repressive State Apparatuses

(RSAs) 20republicanism (France) 76, 141Resistance 74, 75, 138revisionism 13Revolteslogiques (journal) 6revolution 2, 44Revolution of 1 789 (France) 1,10,12,

38, 39, 48, 51, 54, 56, 60, 65, 124,125, 140, 146

Revolution of 1 830 (France) 1 0Revolution of 1 848 (France) 1 0Revolutionof 1917 (Russia) 14-15,

40,55,56,69, 121, 137Revolution of 1 980 (Iran) 32Rimbaud, Arthur 94Robespierre, Maximilien 50, 54, 62Rosanvallon, Pierre 13Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 1, 14,24,50,

70,71,75,82theory of democracy 79RSAs see Repressive State Apparatuses

Saint Paul 36, 60, 76Saint Paul (Badiou) 36, 39, 63Saint-Just, Louis de 50, 54, 62sanspapiers 74, 77sans-parts 107, 111, 112, 143, 146

Sartre, Jean-Paul 2, 11, 12, 17, 18,24,52, 53, 54, 90, 91, 92, 113, 144, 154

science 35,36,47,49,60, 145self-determination 119self-realization 35, 125Senarcles, Pierre de 135set theory 25, 26, 40, 41, 46, 48social democracy 10,151social exclusion 6social inequality 123social sciences 112social security reform (France) 102socialism 14,40,67,88Socialist Party (France) 7 1 , 79, 1 03,

117

sociology 90,112Solidarite, Unite, Democratie (SUD)

9,67sovereignty 7Soviet Union see USSRspeech acts 96,97,99Spinoza and Politics (Balibar) 4Spinoza, Benedictus de 1, 4, 7, 14, 31,

116, 117, 120, 125Theologico -Political Treatise 125, 127

Stalinism 15, 21, 136, 151Stalinist communism 143structuralism 13, 16, 84, 85, 95, 145subjectivation 117,120,1 22subjectivity 126subtraction 65SUD see Solidarite, Unite, DemocratieSweden 103

teaching 93Ten Theses on Politics (Ranciere) 4, 94,

146

terror 1 2terrorism 130Thatcher, Margaret 1 02Theorie du sujet (Badiou) 26Third Way 104Tocqeville, Alexis de 1 1 , 48totalitarianism 37, 123, 136trade unionists 15

Index 179

trade unions 9, 13, 55, 57, 67, 76, 78,82, 151

transformation 1 1 9, 1 20, 1 26, 1 43, 1 45Trotsky, Leon 78, 121, 151truth 33-7truth procedures 56Twentieth Congress of the Communist

Party of the Soviet Union 2 1

UCFML see Union des communistes deFrance marxistes-leninistes

unemployment 102Union des communistes de France marxistes-

leninistes (UCFML) 5, 26universal suffrage 70universalism 48universality 29,31, 1279, 140uprising of May 1968 see May 1968

uprisingUSA 5, 7, 78, 146

overseas policy 8

USSR 14,15,21,56break-up 8, 130, 153

Vietnam 138violence 151

We, the People of Europe? (Balibar)4, 121

Wittgenstein, Ludwig 30, 31, 38women, oppression of 151women's movement 16wordplay 100workers' uprising (Poland) 32working class 43, 76, 79, 80, 87, 88, 9 1

95, 117, 137emancipation 89

World War II 11,14

Zizek, Slavoj 8, 16, 36, 59-60, 135,147, 153

Documents

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