Bruno Bosteels, Politics & Culture
In “Politics in the Wake
of Actually Existing Zeal,” after trying to explain some of the reasons for the
urgency and necessity of Alain Badiou’s interventions in the current debate
over philosophy and politics, Andrew Pendakis in his inimitable style—just look
at the devastating sarcasm of the title alone—raises a set of “irritating
questions” with which my book Badiou and Politics left him flush and unsettled.
Though I may have provoked them, these questions seem less aimed at my work
than at the thought of Badiou, so that it may seem presumptuous and out of
place for me to try to answer them here. Badiou is certainly capable of
speaking for himself, and I am less and less inclined to accept to be put in
the position of having to defend or represent him. Nevertheless, insofar as
several of the questions before us expand on doubts, criticisms, and polemical
objections that I myself raise in Badiou and Politics, perhaps this is a good
moment to reflect and comment on where I stand now and what I would do or am doing
differently today.
First of all, as should
have been clear from the book, I am in agreement that there is an idealist
temptation lurking in Badiou’s treatment of the discourse of philosophy. For
all his avowedly materialist insistence on the fact that philosophy cannot
produce any truths of its own, only the empty category of truth with which to
seize on and be seized by the truths of politics, love, science, or art, there
is indeed a sense in which the category of philosophy itself is a timeless, universal
and transhistorical invariant. This is why in Badiou and Politics and even more
so in Marx and Freud in Latin America, I plead in favor of theory, or critical
theory, as an inherently unstable and historically pliable category to describe
the production of thought or intellectuality from within concrete practices.
Second, the difference in
tone or orientation between philosophy and theory is linked to the difference
in style or the mode of investigation and exposition between dialectical
materialism (or what Badiou after Althusser prefers to call the materialist
dialectic) and historical materialism (or what with Walter Benjamin I would
prefer to call materialist historiography). While I would not follow Pendakis
in labeling the former a “worldview,”–a term we all know to be a disparagement
ever since Freud and Heidegger resisted seeing psychoanalysis or phenomenology
as a philosophical Weltanschauung or Weltbild–I see greater urgency and use for
the latter, at least in my own work.
Third, I still hold on to
the thesis that Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, because of its experimental
nature and its being still so closely tied to the sequence of French Maoism
(not to be confused by the way with Maoist China) is an indispensable stepping
stone for anyone who wants to grasp the persistence of the dialectic, including
the question of the relation between theory or philosophy and history, in Being
and Event and its follow-up Logics of Worlds. However, I would go a step
further by arguing for the plural theories of the subject. This is not meant as
a liberal-tolerant corrective to the axiomatic dogmatism of the singular. The
point is not to multiply various theories into an eclectic rainbow coalition,
but to invest the theory of the subject with the rigor and depth of its
historical becoming.
To give but one example
of the problems at issue in this regard: when Badiou, in his hypertranslation
of Plato’s Republic decides to translate the Greek psychè not as soul but as
Subject; or when he translates logos not as speech or reason but as discourse,
he is in fact erasing the historicity of these concepts. This obviously has the
advantage of making Socrates into an exhilarating contemporary of Jacques Lacan
or Judith Butler, but the drawback is also a loss of critical leverage in the
sense that we no longer even feel the need to understand how Platonism became
Christian, or how language acquired a density and an autonomy all of its own
that for the so-called linguistic turn ran counter to the logocentrism of
speech or self-consciousness.
Fourth, while I would not
be so quick to oppose the profane level of run-of-the-mill operations to the
stellar heights of axiomatic formalizations, given that for Badiou mathematics
is something anyone anywhere can do with pencil and paper in hand, I would take
the argument about historicity, too, one step further by arguing that the
possibility of abstraction itself is of course linked to material and
historical processes. Absolutely crucial here would be Marx’s descriptions in
the notebooks for the Grundrisse, especially, of how capital is capable of
positing its historic presuppositions as though they were its own products, and
not its conditions; and how, as a result, capital can erase its own past and
present itself as a natural and eternal being in the name of production, labor,
circulation etc. in general, rather than as the result of violent, historic
processes of becoming. Even more convoluted is the process—hinted at but not
thematized by Marx—by which capitalist ideology then begins to entail a
celebration of becoming, contingency, chance, and so on, except of course when
it comes to the material necessity of this generalized logic of contingency
itself. Just think of the belated rebirth of interest in ancient atomism, the
clinamen, and so on—all phenomena that Badiou already discussed and criticized
in Theory of the Subject, long before the posthumous publication of Althusser’s
manuscripts on aleatory materialism would drive a whole generation of students
back to Marx’s doctoral dissertation on the difference between Democritean and
Epicurean philosophies of nature.
Fifth, a further
complication arises when we begin to intimate that the fundamental moves or
operations that we associate today with the subject, that is, a certain turning
back upon itself, a conversion or torsion of the subject upon its own
conditioning, corresponds rather ominously with the circuitous paths by which
capital posits its own presuppositions and, so to speak, wills itself into
existence. When Marx, in the third of his “Theses on Feuerbach,” defines praxis
as the simultaneous changing of one’s circumstances and the self-activity of
changing oneself, is he too not using this same figure which we see repeated
over and over again, not just among Young Hegelians but today as well, from
Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection to Michel
Foucault posthumously published lectures at the Collège de France on The
Hermeneutics of the Subject? Currently, this is one of the directions in which
in a series of seminars I am continuing the work begun in Badiou and Politics,
namely, as an effort to expand and supplement what I would call the structural
or formal theory of the subject (shared by Badiou, Butler, but also Zizek) with
a historical or genealogical theory of the coming-into-being of this formal
theory of the subject (a historical or genealogical account for which elements
can be found not only in Marx or Foucault but also in Freud or in the work of
León Rozitchner that I started analyzing in Marx and Freud in Latin America).
Sixth, where I begin to
be in greater disagreement is with regard to the otherwise seductive
formulation of the affective mood or tone of our times. Here Pendakis raises a
timely question about the feasibility of what he calls the whole subjective
infrastructure of militancy, which he feels threatens to work against its own
chances for success and for which he proposes to substitute something like a
subdued worker bee’s ethic fusing a Kantian sense of duty with the inertia and
boredom of habit. While in this case the objection against Badiou’s idée fixe
of militancy seems meant to promote a communism without all the religious zeal,
I cannot help but wonder, if what we want is less red and more grey, then why
turn to Badiou? A strange psychic but also political investment—in the sense of
the Freudian Besetzung which we probably ought to consider translating as
“occupation” rather than as “cathexis”—is at work in this common attack upon
the excesses of militant fidelity, something like a rebound effect whereby what
otherwise might seem a grey and drab plea for political moderation, through the
process of attacking excessive radicalism, nonetheless enjoys letting some of
this radicalism rub off on it. Thus, over the past two decades or so, Badiou
has enabled a whole slew of critics—Pendakis may not be one of them but his
arguments echo those of numerous others—to produce something like an
artificially enhanced reformism: reformism, because we would settle for the
lesser evil or the smaller good; but also artificially enhanced because the
blind utopianism of the dogmatic opponent—the overzealous militant—nevertheless
has been affectively reabsorbed and mobilized, that is, occupied, in the same
gesture with which Badiou-the-closet-Sartrean is unmasked and pilloried. In
fact, since I wrote Badiou and Politics this trend has not declined but only
become more common: more common and more banal. And so here I decided to turn
the tables: not so as to pay much attention to the latter-day Derrideans or
Levinasians, who merely jumped on the bandwagon of lambasting the dangerously
totalitarian, mystical or voluntaristic Badiou and his acolytes so that by a
strange rebound effect they could augment their own credentials as good
democrats or even leftists who at least stay clear of the worst; but in order
directly to tackle the best of post-Heideggerian and Derridean thought, in the
work of Jacques Derrida himself as well as Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc
Nancy, Giorgio Agamben and so on. For the philosophical and affective
functioning of this argument does seem to me to be an essential component part
of the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves today and, in this
sense, certainly worth unraveling. And so, as I will argue in the book
Philosophies of Defeat: The Jargon of Finitude, concepts such as difference,
retreat, inoperativity, affect, or community can be read not only as
philosophical responses to the defeat of 1960s radicalism but also as active,
even if unwitting, participants in the perpetuation of the situation that led
to this defeat.
Incidentally, and going
back to my first point, I believe that the actual passage from theory to the
return of philosophy that we have witnessed since the mid-1980s, aside from
entailing a decidedly Eurocentric regression, is also a symptomatic expression
of the same historical trend toward the restoration of the institutional status
quo, at least at the level of thought’s philosophical self-image, as opposed to
the inherent instability and increasing globality of the category of theory.
Consider, for example, how Althusser’s different “groups of theoretical
reflection” from the 1960s were succeeded two decades later by entities such as
the “Center for Philosophical Research into the Political” that Jean-Luc Nancy
and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe founded in the same elite space of the Ecole
Normale Supérieure in rue d’Ulm; or how even Badiou moved on from his
Maoist-inspired books, significantly titled Theory of Contradiction and Theory
of the Subject, to writing a Manifesto for Philosophy in the name of a
neoclassical return to Platonism. And when I say that there is something
decidedly Eurocentrist in this move, this also means that philosophy today has
not just become a culturally peripheral practice alongside stenography or
bowling. No matter how exquisitely funny this description is, such an image of
philosophy is also oblivious to the geopolitical unevenness of the status of
this discipline. Just think of how any course or handbook about philosophy in
Latin America begins—and often ends—with a question that no French or German
philosopher ever needs to ask: Is there such a thing as a Latin American
(Mexican, Argentinean, Brazilian, etc.) philosophy?
