An interview with Alain Badiou, Critical Inquiry, 645, 2008
Q We would like to begin by asking you to clarify the
relation between philosophy and politics. What do you mean when you
speak, for example, of a "militant philosophy"?
AB Since its beginnings, philosophy's relationship to
the political has been fundamental. It's not something invented by
modernity. Plato's central work is called The Republic, and it
is entirely devoted to the questions of the "city" or polis. This link
has remained fundamental throughout the history of philosophy. But I
think there are two basic ways of structuring this relationship.
The first way assigns philosophy the responsibility for finding a
foundation for the political. Philosophy is called upon to reconstruct
the political on the basis of this foundation. This current argues that
it is possible to locate, for every politics, an ethical norm, and that
philosophy should first have the task of reconstructing or naming this
norm and then of judging the relation between this norm and the
multiplicity of political practices. In this sense, then, what opens the
relation between philosophy and politics is both the idea of a
foundation as well as an ethical conception of the political. But there
is a second orientation that is completely different. This current
maintains that in a certain sense politics is primary, and that the
political exists without, before and differently than philosophy. The
political would be what I call a "condition" of philosophy. In this
case, the relation between philosophy and politics would be, in a
certain sense, "retroactive." That is, it would be a relation in which
philosophy would situate itself within political conflicts in view of
clarifying them. Today, in the extremely obscure situation that is the
general system of contemporary politics, philosophy can attempt to
clarify the situation without having any pretense to "creating"
situations. Philosophy has as its condition and horizon the concrete
situation of different political practices, and it will try, within
these conditions, to find instruments of clarification, legitimation and
so on. This current takes seriously the idea that politics is itself an
autonomy of thought, that it is a collective practice with an
intelligence all its own.
It is quite clear that today the question is particularly difficult,
because we are no longer in a situation in which there is a clear
distinction between two opposed political orientations - as was the case
in the 20th century. Not everyone agreed on what the exact nature of
these opposed politics were, but everyone agreed there was an opposition
between a classical democratic bourgeois politics and another,
revolutionary, option. Among the revolutionaries, we debated spiritedly
and even violently what, exactly, the "true way" was, but not the
existence itself of this global opposition. Today there is no agreement
concerning the existence of a fundamental opposition of this sort, and
as a result the link between philosophy and politics has become more
complex and more obscure. But, fundamentally, it's the same task:
philosophy tries to clarify the multiple situation of concrete politics,
and to legitimate the choices made in this space.
Q So you see your own philosophical interventions as
taking place with this new situation that you describe as "more complex
and more obscure" than the classical confrontation between two opposed
political orientations?
AB Definitely. As a result, I see my philosophy as an
inheritor of the great contestatory movements of the sixties. In fact,
my philosophy emerged out of these movements. It is a philosophy of
commitment, of engagement, in a certain fidelity to Sartre if you like,
or to Marxism: what counts is that the intellectual is engaged in
politics and commits to or takes the side of the people and the workers.
I move in that tradition. My philosophy tries to keep alive, as best it
can (it is not always easy), the idea that there is a real alternative
to the dominant politics and that we are not obliged to rally around the
consensus that ultimately consists in the unity of global capitalism
and the representative, democratic State. I would say, then, that I work
under the condition of the situation of political actuality, with the
goal of keeping alive, philosophically, the idea of the possibility or
opening of a politics I would call a politics of emancipation - but that
could also be called a radical or revolutionary politics, terms that
today are debatable but that represent all the same a possibility other
than the dominant one.
Q You mention Sartre in this context where the name
Althusser might have been expected. What is your relation to the
Althusserian tradition?
AB The Althusserian tradition is extremely important,
and I've devoted several texts to Althusser. If I mention Sartre, it is
simply because my philosophical youth was Sartrean, before my encounter
with Althusser. I think the Althusserian current is a particularly
important one because it gave a new life and force to the link between
philosophy and politics, in a less idealist mode - that is, a form that
no longer passed through the form of consciousness. In Sartre, of
course, we still find the classical model of the intellectual understood
primarily in terms of consciousness, an intellectual who must make
contact with the struggle and the workers' organizations, be it the
unions or the communist parties. Althusser's greatness is found in the
fact that he proposed a new schema in which the relation between
philosophy and politics, then, no longer passed through the psychology
of the form of consciousness as it still did with Sartre. Althusser
begins with the conviction that philosophy intervenes in the
intellectual space of politics. When he proposes the formula "philosophy
is the organization of the class struggle in theory," what does he
mean? That class struggle exists and that philosophy certainly didn't
invent it. It exists and cuts across intellectual choices. Within the
struggle between these choices, philosophy has a special role. It is to
intervene and therefore to name, norm, classify and finally to choose in
the field of intellectual or theoretical class struggle. Sartre and
Althusser are very different, and even opposed. But you can reconcile
them on one point, namely that philosophy is nothing if it is not linked
to political commitment.
Q You have called yourself a "communist in the generic
sense." But you have also constantly underlined the inability of
classical Marxist theory to produce a truly communist politics. How can
"communism" today be the "common name" that opens the future?
AB I think it is necessary to distinguish Marxism from
Communism. I don't think it is absolutely necessary to keep the word
"communism." But I like this word a lot. I like it because it designates
the general idea of a society and of a world in which the principle of
equality is dominant, a world no longer structured by classical social
relations - those of wealth, the division of labor, segregation,
persecution by the State, sexual difference and so on. That is, for me,
what "communism" is. Communism in the "generic sense" simply means that
everyone is equal to everyone else within the multiplicity and diversity
of social functions. I am still absolutely convinced in the necessity
of a radical critique of the division of labor. I believe this is what
is rational, and what is just. There is no reason why a street sweeper
should be hounded by the State and poorly paid while intellectuals in
their libraries are honored and at peace - and generally well paid. It's
absurd. What I call communism is the end of this absurdity. It's the
idea of a society that will find a principle of existence that would be
entirely "subtracted" from the crushing weight of the relations of power
and wealth, and therefore another distribution of human activity. It's
in this sense that I am a communist. And I struggle against all those
who tell me this is impossible, that inequality is the nature of things
and men as well. Sartre says somewhere that if this communist idea did
not exist, humanity would not be much better apes, not much better than a
pile of ants.
Marxism, however, is something else. Above all when it is a question of
the Marxist practices of organization and concrete politics. These
practices have given us astounding results, like the possibility of a
victorious popular insurrection in 1917 or the possibility of an
entirely new organization between workers and peasants in the form of
the Chinese popular army. But if we take what Lenin called the "ABCs of
Communism," namely that the masses are divided into classes, the classes
are represented by parties and the parties directed by leaders - well,
this is still a great idea, but today it is not useful at all. The
organization of the masses is still the fundamental issue. But if you
take the disorganized masses of global capitalism as a starting point,
you cannot assume that the masses are divided into classes.
Q You argue for a "politics without party" and a new
model of "organization." How do you distinguish them, and why? And what
is the relation between politics and the State today?
AB The question of organization is still a question of
fundamental importance, even for those who maintain that politics
shouldn't be organized at all, as is the case for the great anarchist
tradition. The name "organization" designated the collective dimension
of political action. We know that organization can take the form of
"movement," "party," "union" or what have you. It's a great tradition.
Today, however, we're in a situation in which the long-dominant model of
the class party, of the Leninist avant-garde party (in an aesthetic
sense as well) is saturated. It's exhausted. My evaluation of the
Leninist party is that it was a model whose function was to make a
victorious insurrection possible. Lenin was obsessed by the bloody
failures of the worker insurrections of the 19th century - especially
the Paris Commune. This was the first experience of the dictatorship of
the proletariat, to use Lenin's language, and it was a bloody failure.
It failed because the movement was undisciplined, divided and powerless.
Lenin therefore advised that there be a high degree of centralization
of worker power in a party that would be able to lead and organize the
class. And he proved, on the question of organization at least, that it
was a good idea. The revolution of 1917 was the first victorious
insurrection in the history of humanity. This is why it has such an
enormous historical importance - a step had been taken. After the many
worker revolts of the previous century, all of which had been crushed
with an extraordinary and bloody brutality, the Leninist model finally
made possible a victorious revolution.
This model, however, didn't offer much more. With regard to the question
of the State and power, of the duration of the power of the State, the
model of the Party-State ended up showing serious limitations, whether
it be what the Trotskyists called the tendency to bureaucratization,
what the anarchists identified with State terrorism or the Maoists with
revisionism. None of that is important here. It's clear that the
Party-State was a failure. From the point of view of taking power, the
Party was victorious. But not from the perspective of exercising power.
So we are in a phase that is or should be beyond the question of the
party as a model of organization. That model solved the problems of the
19th century, but we have to solve those of the 20th.
The form of organization today should be, in my opinion, less directly
articulated with or by the question of the State and power. The model of
the centralized party made possible a new form of power that was
nothing less than the power of the Party itself. We are now at what I
call a "distance from the State." This is first of all because the
question of power is no longer "immediate": nowhere does a "taking
power" in the insurrectional sense seem possible today. We should search
for a new form. My friends and I in "L'organisation politique" call
this a "politics without party." This is a completely descriptive,
negative, characterization of the situation. It simply means that we do
not want to enter into a form of organization that is entirely
articulated with the State. Both the insurrectional form of the Party
and today's electoral form are articulations by State power. In both
cases, the party is subordinated to the question of power and the State.
I think we have to break with this subordination and, ultimately,
engage political organization (whatever form it may take) in political
processes that are independent of - "subtracted" from - the power of the
State. Unlike the insurrectional form of the Party, this politics of
subtraction is no longer immediately destructive, antagonistic or
militarized.
I think the Leninist party was at bottom a military model. And for good
reason. This is not a criticism. Lenin was obsessed with one question:
how to win the war? The question of discipline is therefore fundamental,
just as it is for an army. You cannot win the war if people do whatever
they like, if there is no unity and so on. The problem for emancipatory
politics today, however, is to invent a non-military model of
discipline. We need a popular discipline. I would even say, as I have
many times, that "those who have nothing have only their discipline."
The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power
- all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together.
This discipline is already a form of organization. The question is
whether all discipline can be reduced to a military model, the model
that dominated the first part of the 20th century. How can we find,
invent, exercise or experiment with - today, after all, is an age of
experimentation - a non-military discipline?
Q Can you explain a bit more what you mean by "distance from the State"?
AB "At a distance from the State" signifies that a
politics is not structured or polarized along the agenda and timelines
fixed by the State. Those dates, for example, when the State decides to
call an election, or to intervene in some conflict, declare war on
another state. Or when the State claims that an economic crisis makes
this or that course of action impossible. These are all examples of what
I call "convocations by the State," where the State sets the agenda and
controls the timing of political events. Distance from the State means
you act with a sufficient independence from the State and what it deems
to be important or not, who it decides should be addressed or not. This
distance protects political practices from being oriented, structured
and polarized by the State. This is why, moreover, I do not think it is
particularly important to participate in the electoral process. It has
nothing to with what Lenin called "left-wing" communism. This process is
simply not interesting. First of all because it represents, for now at
least, no veritable perspective on the future - there is no way, in this
framework and by these means, that fundamental orientations can be
modified. But more importantly, this process organizes a reorientation
toward the State and its decisions. It constrains political
independence. Distance from the State therefore means that the political
process and its decisions should be undertaken in full independence
from the State and what it deems important, what it decides to impose as
the framework of the political. I understand "State" here in the large
sense, including the government, the media and even those who make
economic decisions. When you allow the political process to be dominated
by the State, you've already lost the game, because you've abdicated in
advance your own political independence.
Q The electoral timeline seems, nevertheless, to play a
certain role in your conception of politics. After all, you wrote a
text specifically addressing the recent French referendum on the
proposed European constitution.
AB You're right. My position is not a dogmatic one. But
in general, the electoral horizon has no real interest. The example you
mention is particularly striking. The "no" to the referendum, in fact,
had no importance at all. The majority of the French declared themselves
to be against the Constitution. What happened? The government didn't
fall, the president didn't resign, the Socialists ended up nominating a
candidate who was in favor of the "yes," and so on. Little by little,
the influence of this vote, seemingly so spectacular, was next to
nothing. And the reason is because the referendum was called for by the
State, the voters were "convoked" by the State. The politicians on both
the Left and the Right had already, and for various reasons, agreed on
the "yes," despite the opposition of the majority (this opposition, in
turn, had multiple reasons, and brought together the extreme Left and
the extreme Right). This is a good example, in fact, of what I would
call not so much the "inexistent" but rather the "inactive" nature of
this type of political intervention. That said, non-participation in
elections is not an important political principle for me. More important
is succeeding in creating an organization independent of the State.
Q In your recent book, Le siècle, you seem to
indicate the necessity to make a transition from what you call a
politics of "destruction" (which you identify with "fraternal violence"
and "Terrorist nihilism") to a politics of "subtraction." Can you
explain the nature of this distinction in your work?
AB Here again, the question is at once philosophical
and political, strictly linked to the problem of critique and negation.
From a philosophical point of view, the symbol for all this was for a
long time the relation between Hegel and Marx. For Marx, the dialectical
conception of negation defined the relation between philosophy and
politics - what used to be called the problem of dialectical
materialism. Just as the party, which was once the victorious form of
insurrection, is today outdated, so too is the dialectical theory of
negation. It can no longer articulate a living link between philosophy
and politics. In trying to clarify the political situation, we also need
to search for a new formulation of the problem of critique and
negation. I think that it is necessary, above all in the field of
political action, to surpass the concept of a negation taken solely in
its destructive and properly negative aspect. Contrary to Hegel, for
whom the negation of the negation produces a new affirmation, I think we
must assert that today negativity, properly speaking, does not create
anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but does not give rise to a
new creation.
Q It seems, though, the "big Other" of Hegelian
dialectics is Spinoza's ontology. How do you use Spinoza in the context
of this critique of Hegelian dialectical logic?
AB The distinction between negation and affirmation in
my discourse can, in a certain sense, be traced back to Spinoza. The
encounter with Spinoza takes places because of our contemporary need to
produce a non-Hegelian category of negation. But my problem with Spinoza
is with the ontological foundation of his thought, in which there is
still an excessive potency of the One. He is an author whose magnificent
propositions I often cite: for example, that a free man thinks of
nothing less than death, or that the wisest man is the one most
recognizant of others. These are magnificent formulations. But at the
ontological level - Spinoza's ontology is one of the great non-Hegelian
constructions - think the play between the multiple and the One leans a
bit too much to the side of the One. The schema of the infinite
plurality of attributes and the expressivity of the multiplicity of
modes is, as far as I am concerned, not enough to account for
contemporary multiplicity.
Q You've spoken about the philosophical implications of
this distinction between destruction and subtraction. But how do these
articulations function at the political level, in terms of political
practice?
AB On the political side, every revolutionary or
emancipatory politics will have to be a certain adjustment or
calibration between the properly negative part of negation and the part I
call "subtractive." A subtraction that is no longer dependent on the
dominant laws of the political reality of a situation. It is
irreducible, however, to the destruction of these laws as well. A
subtraction might leave the laws of the situation still being in place.
What subtraction does is bring about a point of autonomy. It's a
negation, but it cannot be identified with the properly destructive part
of negation. Throughout the Marxist and Leninist revolutionary
tradition of the 20th century, the prevailing idea was that destruction
alone was capable of opening a new history, founding a new man and so
on. Mao himself said: "No construction without destruction." Our problem
today is that the destructive part of negation is no longer, in and of
itself, capable of producing the new. We need an "originary subtraction"
capable of creating a new space of independence and autonomy from the
dominant laws of the situation. A subtraction, therefore, is neither
derived from nor a consequence of destruction as such. If we are to
propose a new articulation between destruction and subtraction, we have
to develop a new type of negation or critique, one that differs from the
dialectical model of class struggle in its historical signification.
I think it is possible to observe important symptoms of this crisis of
negation today. What I call a "weak negation," the reduction of politics
to democratic opposition, can be understood as a subtraction that has
become so detached from destructive negation that it can no longer be
distinguished from what Habermas calls "consensus." On the other hand,
we are also witnessing a desperate attempt to maintain destruction as a
pure figure of creation and the new. This symptom often has a religious
and nihilistic dimension. In fact, the internal disjunction of negation -
the severing of destruction from subtraction - has resulted in a war
that in the West is referred to as the "war on terrorism" and, on the
side of the terrorists themselves, a war on the West, the "infidels" and
so on.
Q If today you disqualify any emancipatory dimension
for a politics of destruction, what then is the place reserved for
violence in politics?
AB Here again, we touch upon the link between
philosophy and politics. I maintain that today it is a question of
creating independent spaces in such a way that the question of violence
takes a defensive turn. In this sense, all the possible forms and
experiences become interesting. The first phase of the Zapatista
movement is a concrete example of this "defensive" dimension of
violence. But there are many other examples. Perhaps the first figure of
this type is found in the initial sequence of the anti-Soviet movement
in Poland, at the beginning of the 1980s. It was a workers' movement and
it was not, in fact, non-violent - they used the strike, for example,
as a weapon to pressure the government in negotiations. This was a
situation in which the workers had complete control of the factories.
This phase didn't last very long. In part due to external factors, like
the influence of the Church and Jaruzelski's coup d'état. But this was a
moment in which it was possible to glimpse, however briefly, a new
dialectic between the means of actions that were classically understood
to be negative - the strike, demonstrations and so on - and something
like the creation of a space of autonomy in the factories. The objective
was not to take power, to replace an existing power, but to force the
State to invent a new relation with the workers. However brief it may
have been, this experiment was very interesting. Interesting because it
did not follow the classical model of a brutal confrontation between the
figures of the movement and the State. It was the organization of a
differentiated space - immanent, but differentiated - in view of
constituting a political "site" whose collective rule was one of
political debate rather than subordination to the questions and agenda
of State power.
It is impossible, then, to say that we can exclude all recourse to
violence. Take, for example, the phenomenon of Hezbollah and the most
recent war in Lebanon. The pretextual nature of Israel's aggression was
clear: they set out to destroy an entire country because one soldier was
taken prisoner. Without wanting a frontal war, Hezbollah was
fortunately able to exercise an effective, consistent resistance that
turned the Israeli aggression into a fiasco. What is striking about this
movement, however, is its difficult relation with the State. Here, we
come back to the question of organization. Hezbollah is competing for
State power, while nevertheless not reproducing a military or
insurrectional model. They remain in a state of semi-dissidence and
conflictual alliance with the State. In any case, it is clear that every
form of negation, including its most extreme, violent forms, can be
mobilized in the defense or protection of a new singularity. It is
necessary, then, to have a new articulation of the destructive and
subtractive parts of negation, so that the destruction or violence
appears in the form of a protective force, capable of defending
something created through a movement of subtraction. This idea was
probably already present in the figure of the revolutionary "base"
during the Chinese revolution. Mao wrote things like this concerning the
role of the army, even if he also developed a strategy that was still
oriented toward the seizure of State power. But the relation between
armed force - the force of destruction - and popular organization was
already complex at this moment, where the role of the army was assigned
political tasks in addition to its task of protecting the popular
organization.
Q In your recent Logiques des Mondes, you
speak of "political islamism" in terms that associate it with the
category of "fascism." This formulation is classical enough, and can be
found as often on the Right as on the Left. But is it possible to
understand the successes of Hezbollah and the Iraqi armed resistance in
terms of a merely "local" dispute? In the case of Hezbollah in
particular, is it possible to see a novel form of political organization
taking place under the sign of - but not reducible to - a theological
articulation of the political?
AB When I speak of "islamisme," "islamist terrorism,"
"fascist groups of a religious character" and so on, I am not referring
to large popular organizations like Hezbollah or Hamas, or even the many
groups that support the current Iranian state. We are speaking of an
extremely complex world, composed of figures that are at the same time
national and popular. This is not how I define al-Qaeda, which is
partially a production of the West itself. The groups I am referring to
represent a pure and separate figure of destruction, and practice a
terrorism that is "non-situated" or "non-situable," in which there is
absolutely no possibility of glimpsing any constructive figure. The
attacks of September 11, for example, were not accompanied by any
political discourse addressed to the entire world, nor with any
declaration of war - such declarations are the condition for politics.
What we have instead is a violent destabilization whose concept is
ungraspable. The only declarations that followed the event were
completely rooted in a religious particularism that I read as exclusive
negative. I won't have anything to do with this type of practice.
I don't confuse this phenomenon with the theological character of
certain mass organizations in the Middle East. But I do think that the
fact that the organizations that are the most active and most rooted in
the "people" are of this type is part of what I have been calling the
contemporary crisis of negation. In this case, religion presents itself
as the surrogate for something else that has not been found, something
that should be universalizable, should be able to uproot itself from the
particularity of religious limits. It is for this reason, I think, that
Marx still seems so current. Communism, according to Marx, is
essentially internationalist in character. With religious dogmatism, in
this case with Shia Islam, we are confronted with a collective
messianism that I know and recognize is quite powerful but which is,
finally, intrinsically limited. We need to consider these phenomena on
their own terms, but also understand their limitations. I think these
movements represent a passage that bears witness, in a very vivid way,
to the limits of our thought on the problems of the negative, critique
and political organization.
We have to assume this passage, both saluting its vigor (I am quite
happy that the organized and popular force of Hezbollah was able to
successfully block the Israeli aggression) as well as understanding that
if these "solutions" function within local contexts, there are
fundamental limitations with respect to the possibility of
universalizing these experiences. This is difficult, but necessary. And I
maintain that the current situation is a result of the interruption or
breaking down of the revolutionary movement in general in the 1980s,
with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absence of any renewal of
Marxism. The examples of popular organization we know today are,
therefore, either extremely experimental and localized (like the
Zapatista movement), or theologico-political (like Hezbollah). The
contemporary diversity of orientations, with all their sectarianism and
particularism, were already present in Marx's time as well, in the least
revolutionary periods of the first half of the 19th century. And it is
probably typical of periods in which it becomes necessary to open a new
history, as is our own situation. All these experiences and experiments,
then, including those that might seem a little "strange" or foreign,
strong but limited as they are, must be taken into consideration.
Q Unlike many of your colleagues, you felt it necessary to make an intervention in Le Monde
on the subject of the revolt of the French banlieues. Your verdict:
"You have the riots you deserve." What today, on the eve of the
presidential election, is the "post-colonial" situation of the French
banlieues? More generally, how do you see the relationship between
politics and violence in the "banlieue-monde" - what Mike Davis has
recently called a "planet of slums" - that is in the process of
globalizing itself in the 21st century?
AB Here we encounter a problem that we might call, in
the Leninist tradition, the problem of the masses. That is, how can the
political come to really organize or be present among the great masses
of the planet? The fundamental problem is how we might enter into
relations with this gigantic mass, with a population that is
disorganized and chaotic, poor and deprived of everything, and often
prey to criminal organizations, religious messianisms and unchecked
destructive violence. This is the calling and task of every contemporary
emancipatory politics. After all, we are speaking of billions of
people: either address this problem, or our horizon will remain too
narrow. In the 19th century, the problem was the arrival of the new
proletarian masses on the political scene; in the 20th century, it was
the political emancipation of colonized peoples. In the first case we
have the workers' movement, the Paris Commune and, finally, the
revolution of 1917; in the second, the wars of national liberation,
Algeria, Vietnam and the Chinese popular war. But today we can no longer
speak either of the working masses, forged in the discipline of the
factory, or of the peasant masses, localized and organized on the basis
of agrarian relations. The masses we speak of are profoundly atomized by
capitalism. They are, for the most part, delivered over to conditions
of existence that are precarious and chaotic. They are a collective
figure that still has no name. The category of the "subproletariat"
doesn't work in this case, since that category still presupposes the
existence of an organized proletariat - which, in this case, does not
exist. These masses are not organized according to the traditional
categories of class, and so for the moment they are more or less
entirely abandoned to the nihilism of capitalism.
Here the link with the French banlieue becomes clear. The distinction
between the third world and the developed countries is increasingly less
important. We have our third world "within" the developed States. This
is why so-called the question of immigration has become so important for
us. The United States, for example, this nation of immigrants, is today
constructing a wall and reinforcing its border security system against
immigration, an action largely agreed upon by the Democrats - not
necessarily concerning the Wall, but on the need for a substantial
increase in the border patrol. In France, this rhetoric has poisoned
political life for some time now. It feeds the extreme Right but,
ultimately, the Left always aligns itself with this rhetoric. It's a
very interesting phenomenon because it shows that these destructured
masses, poor and deprived of everything, situated in a
non-proletarianized urban environment, constitute one of the principal
horizons of the politics to come. These masses, therefore, are an
important factor in the phenomenon of globalization. The true
globalization, today, would be found in the organization of these masses
- on a worldwide scale, if possible - whose conditions of existence are
essentially the same. Whoever lives in the banlieues of Bamako or
Shanghai is not essentially different from someone who lives in the
banlieue of Paris or the ghettos of Chicago. He or she might be poorer
and in worse conditions, but they are not "essentially" different. Their
political existence is characterized by a distance from the State. From
the State and its clients, the dominant classes but also the middle
classes, all of whom strive to maintain this distance. On this political
problem, I have only fragmentary ideas. It's a question that is as
difficult as the problem of organizing workers in the 19th century. I am
convinced it is the fundamental problem today.
There have been important political experiments in this field - with the sans-papiers
in France, for example. But this is only a part of a problem that is
extremely vast. We have no relations with the young people in revolt in
the banlieue. It is once again a dimension of the crisis of negation. We
should absolutely be able to think a "subtractive" form, however
minimal, for this type of population. The sans-papiers, for example,
should have some form of minimal workers' organization, since they often
work in restaurants or in construction. This is why it is possible to
make some progress in their struggle. Another path that is open and
important is the problem of gender, with the women of the banlieue, who
have very specific responsibilities in the social structures of these
neighborhoods. Some progress has been made there. But for the most part
the problem is still extremely difficult. The efforts of the
"altermondialiste" movement, for example, have been undertaken on an
extremely narrow social base - they never touched upon the broad,
popular masses of the entire world. It is, really, a petit-bourgeois
movement, even if I salute them in their activity. But its
organizational capacity at the most fundamental level of the global
situation is extremely limited.
Q Staying with the idea of "subtraction" and the global
character of the situation it represents, is it possible to conceive of
the gesture of migration itself as a subtractive or political one,
insofar as it implies putting one's own life at risk in order to imagine
and construct a new possibility of life?
AB Yes, without a doubt a subtractive gesture. But I
would definite it as "pre-political." This is made clear by the
difficulty immigrants have articulating a political voice in the
countries to which they immigrate. The gesture no doubt implies a
predisposition to politics: it has elements of risk, displacement and
departure. It's a gesture similar to that of the workers of the 19th
century who come to the North and its factories from the countryside,
though today it is from Africa rather than the south of Italy. It is,
therefore, a gesture of subtraction from conditions of poverty, local
but diffused on a planetary scale. Those who take this kind of risk can
be politicized. What's different and even more complicated is the case
of the young people who are born in the country their parents immigrated
to, for example in France. They have a divided subjectivity. On the one
hand, these people are excluded from political life. But on the other
hand, they themselves have not made this "gesture," with all the risks
it implies. A part of the population is ready to do what it takes to
remain there, even if this means exposing themselves to submission,
corruption and so on. The revolts of November 2005, therefore, are very
significant, but nothing came from them. They remain a bitter and
negative experience, an experience of abandon: the young people of the
banlieue were left to themselves, with no opening to anyone else. This
cannot be political. To return to Spinoza, the situation is no doubt one
in which the masses - or a multitude - has sunken into what he calls
"sadness," in which the negative aspect prevails. The political,
instead, is always a trajectory towards someone different. And it is an
essential condition. In both directions at once. After May '68, I myself
set out to engage workers in an exchange that required both of us to
assume this type of trajectory toward someone else. This is missing with
the youths of the banlieue, closed into a collective isolation. Things
will probably change, but for the moment this is the reason why nothing
came of these revolts. And for the moment, all they can do is revolt.
The repetition of these revolts - as was the case in the large cities of
the US in the 1960s - cannot be creative of any politics.
Q You mentioned the banlieues of Bamako, Shanghai and
Paris. But there are two other banlieues that, for various reasons and
with specific characteristics, are today in flames: Hezbollah's southern
suburbs of Beirut and the Sadr movement's east Baghdad. In both cases,
we find a massive Shiite population, often having arrived through a
process of internal migration from the south of Lebanon or Iraq, that is
experimenting with new forms of social and political organization as
well as a specifically "armed" dimension. Is it possible to include
these two suburbs in the global phenomenon you've been discussing?
AB Absolutely. It's even possible to say that the young
people living in these banlieues have worked out a solution for
themselves. But these are not young people that have been abandoned to
themselves. They have leaders. And they have found, in a certain sense,
one "form" of solution to the problems we have been discussing. Namely,
how can the young and the poor, those who live in the suburbs and
ghettoes of large cities, become politically organized. To do that, they
had to open a dialogue and accept the organization of certain
intellectuals, certain "wise" men - the Shiite leaders, after all, are a
bit like philosophers who have become activists. But there is an
internal limitation to these movements, bound as they are to religious
particularity. It is not even a matter of religion in general, since
Robespierre, after all, was the proponent of an abstract god. The
problem is particularity. To return to your question, then, I would say
that across the globe we can recognize a common situation, in which
gigantic masses of humans are abandoned to the banlieues and ghettoes of
large cities, and where the old principles of proletarian organization
are no longer effective. All the experiments must be examined close up,
including those practiced by Hezbollah in the south of Beirut or by
Moqtada al-Sadr in east Baghdad. The problem, in each case, is this:
what will their relation to the State be? We don't yet know what
decisions they will make.
