“Badiou and Beyond: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation” by Bruno Bosteels

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.

Poetry and Communism

Alain Badiou

translated by Bruno Bosteels, Lana Turner

[from the forthcoming book by Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, edited and translated by Bruno Bosteels with an introduction by Emily Apter and Bruno Bosteels (London-New York: Verso, 2014).]

In the last century, some truly great poets, in almost all languages on earth, have been communists. In an explicit or formal way, for example, the following poets were committed to communism: in Turkey, Nâzim Hikmet; in Chile, Pablo Neruda; in Spain, Rafael Alberti; in Italy, Eduardo Sanguinetti; in Greece, Yannis Ritsos; in China, Ai Qing; in Palestine, Mahmoud Darwish; in Peru, César Vallejo; and in Germany, the shining example is above all Bertolt Brecht. But we could cite a very large number of other names in other languages, throughout the world.

The Speculative Left

by Bruno Bosteels, 2005

For Badiou, there emerges a speculative type of leftism whenever communismis disjoined, and nowadays supposedly set free, from the historicity intrinsic to the various stages of Marxism. The critique of speculative leftism in this sense is actually a constant throughout Badiou’s work. At the same time, though, a common objection among readers of this work holds that Badiou himself, by sovereignly divorcing the theoretical fidelity to an event fromany concrete genealogical inscription of the event, over the years increasingly would have painted himself into a similar corner as a dogmatic, absolutist, or even downright mystical thinker. According to this objection, Badiou himself would be yet another example of ‘‘left-wing communism’’ as the ‘‘infantile disorder’’ of Marxism, to use Lenin’s well-known words, even if we might have to turn these words around today, following the example set not so long ago by Gabriel and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in terms of Marxism as the ‘‘senile disorder’’ of an eternally youthful and invariant ‘‘leftism.’’ Once we grasp the logic behind Badiou’s critique of speculative leftism, however, we will also be better equipped to address this objection, according to which he himself, if not earlier then evermore clearly so in recent years, falls prey to precisely such a leftist temptation of wanting to be a communist without also being a Marxist.

Beyond Formalization: An interview with Alain Badiou. Conduted by Peter Hallward & Bruno Bosteels, Paris, 2 July 2002

Peter Hallward: We’d like to start with some questions about the book you’ve just finished on the twentieth century, then talk about your current lecture series on aspects of the present historical moment, before finishing with a few points relating to your major work in progress, Logiques des mondes [forthcoming]. Starting then with The Century what is your basic thesis in this book? In particular, can you explain the relationship between the “passion for the real” [passion du réel] you describe as characteristic of the truly inventive or innovative sequences of the last century, and the various programmes of radical formalisation that this passion inspired?

The Actuality of Communism

The Actuality of Communism

by Bruno Bosteels

One of the rising stars of contemporary critical theory, Bruno Bosteels discusses the new currents of thought generated by figures such as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Slavoj Žižek, who are spearheading the revival of interest in communism. Bosteels examines this resurgence of communist thought through the prism of “speculative leftism”—an incapacity to move beyond lofty abstractions and thoroughly rethink the categories of masses, classes and state. Debating those questions with writers including Roberto Esposito and Alberto Moreiras, Bosteels also provides a vital account of the work of the Bolivian Vice President and thinker Alvaro García Linera.

Marx and Latin America Revisited - Bruno Bosteels