Alain Badiou: Another Take on Revolutionary Theory

By John Steele

What about Alain Badiou, the contemporary philosopher? Like Zizek, he has attracted much attention among people looking for new avenues both intellectually and politically. A friend in Latin American studies has told me his name is everywhere in Latin American intellectual circles.

Badiou’s background is within Marxism and Maoism. He was a student of the French communist philosopher Louis Althusser in the early sixties, an activist within the French uprisings of May 1968, and a Maoist activist and theorist in the 1970s. He has concluded, beginning in the 1980s and for a nest of reasons both political and philosophical, that this tradition of political practice (that is, basically, the international communist movement as it had emerged that far), has reached a point of “saturation,” as he terms it, and that a new beginning – a new truth-process, as he calls it – is necessary. He has gone on since then to outline a new approach in some very basic fields of philosophy.

In a February 2006 interview at University of Washington, he summed up:

“Since the mid-80s, more and more, there has been something like a saturation of revolutionary politics in its conventional framework: class struggle, party, dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. So we have to find something like a fidelity to the fidelity. Not a simple fidelity…. Today we have an experimental sequence from the point of view of political practice. We have to accept the multiplicity of experiences. We lack a unified field — not only in something like the Third International, but also in concepts there is no unified field. So you have to accept something like local experiments; we have to do collective work about all that. We have to find — with help of philosophical concepts, economic concepts, historical concepts — the new synthesis.”

So, does he have worth for us, for our moment, our project, our need to “reconceive as we regroup”? Speaking for myself here, I believe we have, very much, something to learn from him.

Alain Badiou has developed a distinctive philosophical system over the last decades – one sharply focused on understanding the way in which something new, a radical rupture, can jump out of nowhere, changing how we understand ourselves and the situation, and profoundly changing the status quo. His view of ethics revolves around understanding how to have “fidelity” to powerful breaks with conventional thinking, and militantly pursue those breaks as far as they can go – in theory and practice.

His philosophy covers many wide areas, but what relates most closely to concerns on this site is his thinking around the question of how to understand the emergence – the eruption — of deep breaks in the social and political world that challenge (or even demolish) the status quo (which Badiou calls “the situation” and “the state” of affairs).

Such a rupture – Badiou calls it an event, which becomes a special term in his philosophy – such a rupture or event is the start of a process which changes both the world and the people involved in it, and creates and synthesizes new truths. The event is the starting point for both a truth-process and a subject, in Badiou’s terminology. (The subject is not the particular person, but all who participate in the truth-process.)

He gives as examples of “events” such things as the upheaval in France of May 1968 – or equally the birth of modern physics in the time of Galileo. I think it’s easy to see how we could say that out of these was born both a new subject (socially collective, not merely individual), and a truth-process. Neither subject nor truth-process is possible without the other, and they construct each other.

Studying Militancy, Examining Paul

Like most philosophers, Badiou writes very systematically, and to grasp a particular point or passage, some grasp of his overall argument is needed.

I think we can get a better sense of what Badiou is saying by looking a just one of his works – the influential book he wrote on Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.

Paul is generally viewed as a deeply reactionary character by Marxists and even by many progressive Christians. One could say that Paul took an early egalitarian Jewish sect, and played a pivotal role in transforming it into an established Church with a novel, codified doctrine, and the ability to “take over” the Roman empire, Europe and beyond.

So why does a revolutionary like Badiou write about Paul? Well – we don’t need to just examine an historical figure like this from the point of view of “was his doctrine correct?” or “do we see him as reactionary?”

Badiou is examining Paul as an archetype of militancy – as a person with “fidelity” to a world historic “event” and the “truth-process” emerging from it (in this case, a resurrection [undocumented to be sure] and a certain universal set of messages that were unprecedented for their times.)

On the second page of this book, Badiou characterizes Paul as someone who “practices and states the invariant features of what can be called the militant figure.”

Badiou goes on to say, “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure¼called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant.”

He thinks that now, when such a step forward is needed, a look back at the distant and apparently very dissimilar case of Paul is highly illuminating.

Badiou says he wants to trace the connection, embodied in Paul, “between the general idea of a rupture, an overturning, and that of a thought-process which is this rupture’s subjective materiality.” It’s the connection, in other words, between an event and the truth-process and the subject which are both born out of it. The “militant figure” is the militant of a truth-process and part of a new subjectivity. (Subjectivity in this philosophical sense does not mean, as in Maoist usage, being un-objective or anti-scientific. It means in this case, being a new subject (or part of a new social subject), a newly defined and awakened actor on the social stage and within the new process of truth-formation.)

To rephrase slightly, Badiou’s quest is for a new way to be a revolutionary in our present circumstances. He approaches Paul in this light, for those reasons, and interprets Paul’s life and practice in terms of his own (Badiou’s) philosophy of event, subject, truth-process, and fidelity. A “new militant figure” would be the militant of a new truth process.

That’s the background of his concern with Paul. He goes on to say that what he’s going to focus on in Paul’s work is “a singular connection, which it is formally possible to disjoin from the fable [that is, Christianity] and of which Paul is…the inventor: the connection that establishes a passage between a proposition concerning a subject and an interrogation concerning the law.”

What Paul contributed, Badiou believes, is the insight and practice of separating truths (and truth-processes) from their particular historical context. Badiou opposes this to the contemporary practices of dissolving truths into forms of cultural, linguistic or historical relativisms.

A Universal Singularity

In the world today, Badiou says, on the one hand there is a vast “extension of the automatisms of capital,” which imposes “the rule of an abstract homogenization,” while “on the other side there is a process of fragmentation into closed identities, and the culturalist and relativist ideology that accompanies this fragmentation.” Both of these processes, and their ideological expressions, are inimical and deadly to the creation of new truth today. Moreover, the two processes are complementary:

“Capital demands a permanent creation of subjective and territorial identities in order for its principle of movement to homogenize its space of action….”

A new truth-procedure, Badiou believes, will on the one hand interrupt and disrupt the repetition of the same which is the logic imposed by capital. On the other hand: although the eruption of new truth is a singular process, “its singularity is immediately universalizable.” In other words: a truth-process originates in a particular event, breaking out at a particular time and place; but the process is one which brings into being new truths which are universal, or which can be universalized. So the truth-process also breaks with particular identities and relativist logic.

Badiou concludes in this line of thought:

“Breaking with all this (neither monetary homogeneity nor identitarian protest; neither the abstract universality of capital nor the particularity of interests proper to a subset), our question can be clearly formulated: What are the conditions for a universal singularity?” (All quotes in the last few paragraphs are from the first chapter of Badiou’s Saint Paul.)

It is precisely on this question that he thinks it’s helpful to look at Paul, because this is his (Paul’s) question. A dispute arose between Paul and the historic apostles in Jerusalem (Peter and some others), apparently concerning whether all Christians need be circumcised, that is, whether they needed to take on the traditional marks of belonging to the Jewish community. The position in Jerusalem was yes, because they saw Jesus as fulfilling the process of Judaism. Paul said no:

“In his eyes, the event renders prior markings obsolete, and the new universality bears no privileged relation to the Jewish community.” (Badiou, 23)

Badiou sides with Paul on the general issue involved. The question, rephrased in Badiou’s terms, is this:

“What is the relation between the supposed universality of the postevental truth (that is, what is inferred from Christ’s resurrection) and the evental site, which is, indubitably, the nation bound together by the Old Testament?” (22)

This becomes for Badiou a general question about the relation between the old and the new, after the occurrence of an event: Does the new truth incorporate the old within it, or is there a decisive break? Badiou believes there is a break.

This relates to what Badiou is getting at in talking of “universal singularity.”An event is singular and unique: it breaks with the boundaries and categories of the situation out of which it erupts. But the event marks the beginning of a truth-process, which is a process of creating universal truths.

So you could say that the break-out represented by an event, and its initiation of a truth-process, is how singular –> universal works. But Badiou also wants to stress what is something like the reverse process: how the truth which is essentially universal, traverses the differences and particularities of the world: “With regard to the world in which truth proceeds, universality must expose itself to all differences and show, through the ordeal of their division, that they are capable of welcoming the truth that traverses them.” (106)

Mass Line

This becomes one of Badiou’s chief themes in this book: the way in which new universal truths “traverse” or travel through and incorporate the differences and particularities of the world. “It is in fact the search for new differences,” he says,

“New particularities to which the universal might be exposed, that leads Paul beyond the evental site properly speaking (the Jewish site) and encourages him to displace the experience historically, geographically, ontologically. Whence a highly characteristic militant tonality, combining the appropriation of particularities with the immutability of principles, the empirical existence of differences with the essential nonexistence, according to a succession of problems requiring resolution, rather than through an amorphous synthesis.”

Badiou then quotes Paul from Corinthians I (First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, in the New Testament):

“For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the law, I became as one under the law—though not being myself under the law—that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law—not being without law toward God but under the law of Christ—that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men. “(Cor. I.9.19-22)

Badiou says:

“This is not an opportunist text, but an instance of what Chinese communists will call ‘the mass line,’ pushed to its ultimate expression in ‘serving the people.’ It consists in supposing that, whatever people’s opinions and customs, once gripped by a truth’s postevental work, their thought becomes capable of traversing and transcending those opinions and customs without having to give up the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.” [St. Paul, page 99]

What to think? Well, let’s take a more familiar political example. Suppose you are a revolutionary militant or cadre. You have been grasped in your life and activated by a great eruption in the world, and the experience has completely up-ended the conventional system of facts and categories and hierarchies – all that you thought you knew. You have entered into a process of synthesizing and recognizing and establishing new truths in the world, a process which is not just yours, but yours along with many others. I am sure many of us on this site have experienced this, and have entered into such processes, and have had this shape our lives.

Let’s say that these new truths are universal (in the sense of being “addressed to all” as Badiou often puts it). These truths demand to be made real in the world, which means changing the world. Wrong ways of approaching this demand: either preaching to people (“here’s the truth; accept it, believe it”), or enforcing it as truth, if you have the power to do that (“here’s the truth; you must accept it or else”). Rather, the truth has to be made real in the world, not by opposing itself abstractly to the differences and particularities of people and groups, but through them. This would be what the mass line is about, as Badiou is interpreting it here. “From the masses, to the masses” – taking “the ideas of the masses,” synthesizing them through the universal truth in a way that does not dissolve their particularity, and bringing them “back to the masses.”

And this is what Badiou sees in this text of Paul: an expression of how a truth, universal in character and sweep, can come to “seize the masses” in a way which does not obliterate or abolish “the differences that allow them to recognize themselves in the world.”

Mao’s “mass line” has often been understood as addressing questions of methods of leadership (“learning while leading, leading while learning”) or political work (concentrating and sifting out correct from incorrect in the ideas of the masses, then “returning” them in the form of line and policy). As such, it remains on the level of means and policy. Badiou, however, is seeing it as a way in which the universal becomes particular, and how a new truth becomes materially expressive within and through individual people and groups. It is a profound philosophical question, as well as profoundly political.

There’s much more to his thinking, which is very rich and variegated. There’s a lot in Badiou that one can argue with, and I am still grappling with his thought. But he’s one of the very few really original, deep, and path-breaking philosophers of the present – and someone who’s seriously trying to think or rethink the questions of revolution (or of a truly emancipatory politics, as he prefers to say). These ideas are not repackagings of our own familiar Marxisms… they are often strange to us, as if the same world and problems are suddenly seen from a new angle with fresh eyes. It is provocative and thought-provoking. And for those reasons alone, there’s a lot of value in his work (we need it, in fact) and he needs to be seriously engaged — irrespective of whether we adopt his philosophical system as a whole, or any particular aspects of it.