badiou and emancipatory politics-tutt-2013

Brev Spread Issue 12 October 2013 1

Badiou’s Affirmation: Emancipatory Politics Today

Daniel Tutt PhD Candidate, European Graduate School

Published by Brev Spread

Issue 12 October 2013 http://brevspread.com/Brev_Spread_Issue_12_Final.pdf

Since Alain Badiou’s first great work of philosophy, Theory of the Subject (1981), and on through his more recent major text, Logics of Worlds (2009), the context of radical politics has always served as a reference point to his philosophical ideas. As the last great Platonic thinker, Badiou’s work is compelling in that it maintains fidelity to resurrecting the names of truth, universality, justice, eternity, courage, and love in the midst of our postmodern discourses that remain tethered to theoretical jargon. In Badiou, the discourse of politics always falls under the name of equality, a word that has become almost meaningless in our times. Liberalism develops a “rights-based” approach to justice and equality, under the assumption that justice and equality can be distributed amongst the diverse and multicultural populations. The false assumption inherent to liberalism for Badiou, and for perhaps every thinker in allegiance to Marx is that the notion that the State under capitalism can dispense with such justice remains a hallucination at best. Indeed, Badiou maintains that equality is always as an exception to the law, a working of politics in fidelity to an Idea. In these brief remarks and reflections, I want to create some linkages between Badiou’s writings on emancipatory politics in the context of the global insurrections from Occupy Wall Street to Taqsim Square. Ever since the May 68’ protests against the then-emerging global capitalist order, Badiou opened his core notions of politics. May 68’ was Badiou’s “Road to Damascus”—a conversionary point both philosophically and experientially. Badiou grounds his experiences as a young philosopher caught up in the May 68 protests as an experience that the revolutionary Left in France had never successfully seen in the twentieth century: a larger unification of the students and workers under a new figure of radical equality. While Badiou certainly represents the last of the great philosophes of the May 68’ generation in France, for whose likes we can name Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze and Sartre—we should also be wary of the fetishizing potential that incurs when even invoking the name of May 68’. The discourse on emancipatory potential on the left in France and across the world is most certainly in decline, despite the rise of these riots the world over. We find in Badiou’s recent work on politics that he has taken a new turn in relation to the Marxist project, and that he identifies the form of these riots with an epochal opening akin to the early 1848 riots that were brutally repressed by the state, but that opened up a new epoch of emancipatory potential under the name of equality. In many ways, we are experiencing an opportune moment for the resurgence of Badiou’s thought with the rise of the protests from Occupy to Taqsim Square insofar as his work in


Theory of the Subject details the ways in which fidelity to radical ideas can garner greater discipline. One argument that I want to make, apropos Adrian Johnston’s work on Badiou and Zizek, is that the question of discipline prior to the event is one way to look at the future of Occupy Wall Street. We are also discovering each day that identity politics, both in the halls of academe and in most critical and deconstructive theory, has largely failed to expose the deeper class conflicts as an underlying antagonism. This failure of identity politics can be understood for Badiou as given by the state of the situation itself. For Badiou, the difference between myself and my brother, and the migrant worker next door is both immeasurable (infinitely other) and insignificant (in-different) for our inclusion together in the world. Unlike Levinas who took this absolute difference and formed it as the basis of ontology, Badiou sees it as merely a part of inclusion in a world, and there is only one world. We perform our inclusion in this one world when we insist that those excluded from our world are our own brothers and sisters, despite the fact that we share no metaphysical essence of commonality between them and amongst us (brothers). What matters most is that we agree on what makes us human, and here, cultural identity is left to the multiple—to the reign of infinite differences that color our world already. What matters in this world is simply your existence. Ones belonging to the set (world) is always implied merely by your existing in it. As Badiou says in Ethics:

"Differences are as obvious between me and my cousin from Lyon as they are between the Shi’ite community of Iraq and the fat cowboy of Texas.1”

We don’t need to return to any sense of one’s appearance or identity to qualify their belonging to the world, and as such, the entire tradition in philosophy from Hegel onward that looks to recognition and communication as a moment of the realization of the world or community—becomes superfluous. Differences are given as such even though a human in this world can appear in other worlds. But politics, as a condition of truth, is about the affirmation of one world, a world that is expressed through the fidelity to an Event that ruptures the multiples in each world and creates the affirmation of one world. You affirm your existence when you affirm the set (group that is excluded) this brings about an Event in a world. The point is that identity politics fails insofar as it relies on an affirmation of difference on the basis of culture, and not on the affirmation of those excluded to a world, which is never exclusion on the basis of their culture. In fact, does not multicultural capitalism do rather well with providing the full inclusion of others based on culture and identity? Yet the problem remains what of a world that is devoid of Events, especially in our world, which is too often a world that lacks any fidelity to those excluded. What in this world has to be re-created completely anew? Badiou names this figure the unnamable of the situation. Where might the unnamable be located? Badiou has provided some indication in a recent lecture on art and politics that in the case of the Tahrir uprising of 2011 that the unnamable occurred in the unification of Christians and Muslims—a unity he compared to that experienced in May 68’ between workers and students. 1 Badiou, Alain, Ethics, 25


The protests over the last three years also constitute a shift in how we must think models of resistance that came out of the anti-globalization movement that started in the early 1990’s. Badiou’s thought on our current moment, and its potential for emancipatory political discourse recognizes a shift in capitalist relations at a macro level. Capitalism has “regressed to a stage that resembles its early 1848 period,” what Badiou calls “gangster capitalism.2” Instead of deploying resistance along the model of what Badiou refers to as “Negriism”—Badiou’s conception of emancipatory politics insists that the site of revolutionary activity occur as a critique and a challenge to democracy, and not as a critique of political economy. What are we to make of this seemingly strange proposition? Does it resemble a Nietzschean anti-democratic spirit? Does Badiou’s critique of democracy actually maintain democracy as a viable mode of governance following the revolution, as it were? Badiou identifies the problem at the level of ideology, what he refers to as the prevailing ideology today, “democratic materialism.” Democratic materialism is the capitalist logic that situates our symbolic life coordinates in if you like an ultra-transcendental manner. As we will examine, Badiou’s democratic materialism is thought along the oldest philosophical line of difference available: that between Plato and Aristotle. Badiou’s “prescriptive approach” to politics seeks to apply "the direct and divisive application of a universal principle or axiom”3 by removing political activity from the space of the state entirely. Most critics of Badiou, including many of his own disciples such as Peter Hallward, have raised important concerns over his subtractive approach to politics and its potential of being utterly apolitical or stoical in its insistence on working outside of the state. With the rise of protests, riots, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street, to name but a few emancipatory political movements over the last two years, many have turned to Badiou’s system and asked if these events constitute “events” in the Badiouian sense of the term? This question is flawed from the perspective of Badiouian philosophy insofar as an event is measured in the future anterior, and is not empirically identifiable as such. More practically, today’s problem is not so much the problem of determining the event; it is in following the consequences of the potential event. In order to activate a form of resistance that beyond the occasional outbursts of revolutionary enthusiasm and begins to harness and “discipline time,” as Badiou would say, we should begin by understanding Badiou’s dialectical framework of affirmation. Democracy and Affirmative Negation After the failure of the state form of socialism of the twentieth century, Badiou claims that today’s problem is one of understanding the role of negativity—that is, of negating the existing order. More precisely, the theoretical problem is built around whether our trust in the power of negativity is still possible. In the classical form of Marxist and

2 Alain Badiou. The Rebirth of History (London: Verso, 2012), 24 3 Hallward, Peter The Politics of Prescription South Atlantic Quarterly, Fall 2005. Pg. 238


Hegelian dialectics, negation presents emancipatory politics with an immediate negation in the form of "revolt against" and “protest” i.e. it revolves around a direct negation, of action to bring down the existing order. The Hegelian notion here is that the subsequent negation coming after the original negation results in the creation of something new out of the second negation. In the latter half of the twentieth century, we witnessed a wholesale turning against this classical form of negation of negation. For example, in Adorno's project of negative dialectics, we find a system that sought to reform this classical Hegelian dialectical framework away from the totality and the one. A second attempt to reform this framework is found in Negri's Spinozist invention of a philosophy that is completely without negation. The problem with both of these reformist attempts, according to Badiou, is that in both models, capitalism has engulfed the effort to overcome negation. In Adorno's negative dialectics, we are left with nothing but a subjectivist version of dialectics where the hero agent of revolutionary activity remains merely the “suffering human victim,” which aligns almost unintentionally so with the matrices of the liberal human rights morality that fully subsumes the suffering victim into the liberal capitalist order. Negri's dialectics fails for Badiou because in it we lose all basis for clear revolt against capitalism or the state, and revolutionary activity becomes subsumed in the flow of capital itself. In Badiou's dialectical project, which is not a return to Marx, nor a return to the affirmative construction of Negri, the dialectic is reversed inside itself. Subjectivity comes first in the form of an affirmation, not in the form of a negation. In this new dialectic, a primitive affirmation in the form of a subjective body starts before the negative creativity of classical negation. So we still find a negation of negation, but the only way by which we can truly experience concrete negation, or a negation that undermines the current state is by beginning with affirmation. It is St. Paul that presents this logic of “primitive affirmation” in the way that he linked Christ's resurrection as an event to a new subjective body. This framework of affirmative negation can be applied to today’s emancipatory democracy movements, in four stages of democracy4.

1. Democracy as the state. In this mode, democracy exists through liberal parliamentary and representative processes.

2. Democracy as a revolutionary event, for which we experience the birth of something new. It is in this category that we can provisionally place the Arab Spring. This form of democracy is most akin to Jacques Ranciere’s idea of democracy as the internal law of a collective event.

3. Democracy as politics. Badiou's third sense of democracy is one that goes beyond the first two by remaining in fidelity to the "consequences" of the event and not only in the event as such.

4. The return to the state. This return represents a return to the state in its communist version, which is really a vanishing of the state as such.

4 The four stages of democracy were developed in a recent lecture at the European Graduate School, entitled “From Logic to Anthropology” August, 2012.


What is crucial in this framework is that Badiou’s affirmative revision is made by adding a third term after the second one that is tied not to the event but to the subjective body and to the consequences of the event. For all that we make of Badiou’s evental politics, it is the subject that in many ways serves as the privileged position, but the subject is what remains difficult to discern. The second observation to make in this model of the four types of democracy is that “direct democracy” is rendered impossible based on today’s stage of capitalist development and the failure of theoretical modes of resistance to late capitalism, mainly Deleuze, Foucault and Negri. The state has emerged as a totality whereby no event or positive affirmation is at all possible, which is why Badiou brings affirmation at the beginning of his new dialectic. Badiou’s proposal for an affirmative negation that goes beyond the conservative negation of the twentieth century seeks a different type of break with repetition, what Badiou refers to as an “ecstatic break” rather than the twentieth century’s effort to overcome a contradiction in the creation of the new, or the event.5 Hegel's immanent negation is no longer functional in this world, argues Badiou, precisely because the state does not produce a reality that can produce any affirmation. This is why real becoming starts with the revolt, and is not immanent to the group (revolutionaries, workers, students, etc.). Why does Badiou privilege the subject in the context of politics? To answer this question, it helps to revisit a debate that Badiou had with Jacques Alain-Miller over suture in 1967, a year before the event that would forever modify Badiou’s life and philosophy. If as Bergson claims, each philosopher builds his or her entire system of thought around a great moment or insight, then what is Badiou’s great moment, or more precisely, what is Badiou’s great wager? One way to view Badiou's wager is in his development of the subject in his first great work of philosophy, Theory of the Subject. Badiou’s wager in Theory of the Subject is significant for the topic of emancipatory politics precisely because his entire project is still sutured onto politics in the text and because in this work the subject is given a certain level of prominence, a viability that was never fully articulated adequately in the text. Through the wager laid down in Theory of the Subject, Badiou has gone backward, as it were, in developing his most comprehensive ontology of being qua being and the event that alters the situation in Being and Event, to the logic of appearing of truth in a world, along with clearly defined subject positions in Logics of Worlds. While the intricate and complex debate is beyond the scope of this particular paper, its outcomes are important for understanding the way in which Badiou conceives of a subject, and by extension the event that is so bold and original. The concept of suture is central in Badiou's work; for example, it is the bases of how generic truth conditions suture philosophy under the four generic procedures, (love, art, science, and politics). Zizek, in his latest tome, Less Than Nothing, captures Badiou’s early debate with Miller and points out how the debate was seminal to the direction Badiou took in his theory of the subject. Badiou’s debate with Miller resulted in a theory of the subject that was not a universal figure, coextensive with structure, but the subject became rather an exceptional

5 Bosteels, Bruno Badiou and Politics “The Speculative Left” Duke University Press Durham and London, 2011 Pg. 287


emergence that is spurned on by a truth event6. One way to understand what Badiou would later develop as the “truth event,” in Lacanese, is by saying that the big Other requires the fidelity of the subject who recognizes itself in it. Another way of thinking the truth event is as the point de capiton that leads to a naming, whereby the signifier falls into the signified. The signifier has to intervene into the signified in order to enact its meaning because when one abandons the name, one flushes out the meaning of it. This point is also helpful in understanding why Badiou has insisted upon remaining true to the name “communism.” The Split in Emancipatory Politics When Badiou claims that emancipatory politics must be fought at the site of democracy, he means that we are resisting at the site of a void. The void of democracy exists precisely because the state, and its handmaiden democracy, is both tied to today’s predominant ideology, what Badiou calls “democratic materialism” in Logics of Worlds. In an interview with Peter Hallward and Bruno Bosteels7, Badiou identifies this logic of the Two that constitutes democratic materialism in the heart of emancipatory politics itself. On one end there are the Aristotelian democratic materialists who provide the theoretical fodder for identity politics, the multitude approach to emancipatory politics, i.e. “Negriism” in their insistence that “there are only bodies and language” and that we can persist without an idea. This is the camp of Aristotle, where conceptual approaches envelop revolutionary momentum into a flat ontology of descriptions devoid of any axioms. In an interview with Bruno Bosteels and Peter Hallward, Badiou refers to these Aristotelians as “third generation Foucauldians” and “movementists” that are obsessed with continually adapting to the ruptures that the state-capitalist system produces, and in their revolts against capitalism, they remain trapped to a capitalist system that has entered a new dialectical position. This is why in part the direct democracy model is no longer possible for Badiou. The other split in emancipatory politics is the one that Badiou himself has identified and marks the territory of thinking, that is, the one that stakes out an Idea. This is the camp of Plato. In this camp, there is a desire to “localize the break” of the topology of situations around a single point, that is, around statements that usher in a new metapolitical sequence. The challenge that seems to arise in adopting Badiou’s subtractive position is one of purity to the point of being apolitical and a certain type of messianism, of waiting for the big Evental moment for emancipatory action. Another way we can look at this break in emancipatory politics is via Badiou’s conception of presentation over representation, a split that Badiou’s now former protégé, Mehdi Belhaj Kacem has identified as the age-old Marxist struggle. Kacem writes:

6 Zizek, Slavoj, Less Than Nothing Verso Books, London 2012. Pg. 621 – 622 7 Bosteels, Bruno and Hallward, Peter in “Beyond Formalism” in Badiou’s Politics.


Starting from the French Revolution and running through [Karl] Marx up to Badiou, all revolutionary imagination defends presentation against representation.8

Indeed, Kacem is correct, since Being and Event, it is the regime of representation that falls under atonalism. Our atonal world lacks a point by which a master signifier can situate it, which is why the very rules of the situation must be changed to get out of atonality. The question for Badiou, whose very axiomatic choice is one that is grounded in the modern epoch, how do we historically locate the event? While the question elicits a type of evental hysteria, many commentators, including Kacem have been puzzled by Badiou’s relatively conservative reaction to the Arab Spring and other emancipatory protests against capitalism over the last three years, rendering these riots and protests as "weak singularities" in his philosophical taxonomy of evental politics. Despite Badiou’s conservative reading of the Arab Spring, he would identify in their movements a preparing the ground and the development of a node of precarity. Badiou has commented about our time:

We are in a period of the constitution of a possible evental site. There are not yet events in the philosophical sense of the word, but it is at least the constitution of zones of precariousness, of partial movement that one can interpret as announcing that something will happen.9

Is Badiou’s Subtractive Politics Apolitical? There have been as many criticisms of Badiou’s approach to politics as there has been praises. Most common amongst these is that his approach to politics consists of an apolitical distancing from the state that weakens revolutionary potential and leaves programs directionless. This has led thinkers such as John Caputo to declare Badiou’s politics a form of messianism, whereby the method of subtraction is made into a metaphor for the waiting for the messiah of the event to arrive. A different and more constructive argument is presented in Peter Hallward’s essay “The Politics of Prescription,” a work that has both re-defined Badiou’s method of subtraction from his political activist colleague Sylvian Lazarus and one that has given Badiou’s method greater coherence for political organization and mobilization. Although his distilling of Badiou’s politics is constructive, Hallward points out important weak points to Badiou’s politics. He claims that Badiou’s subtractive method, “forever risks its restriction to the empty realm of prescription pure and simple.”10 The risk for emancipatory politics in Badiou’s model pays a price at the political level out of the purity and distance it takes from the state, which by state, Badiou refers both to the state as the nation-state and to the state as the given situation / regime of representation. The question apropos the subtractive method is whether it remains so removed from the state

8 Belhaj Kacem, Pop Philosophie, 299. 9 Badiou, Alain Handbook of Inaesthetics Translated by Alberto Toscano. Stanford University Press, 2005. Pg. 120 10 Hallward, Peter Badiou: A Subject To Truth The Regents of the University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pg. XXXi


to the point of being a politics-without-politics. Badiou has declared: “progressive politics must operate at a level that can rival that of capitalism and ensure that this rivalry unfolds on a plane other than that dominated by capital.”11 This is perhaps the main reason that Badiou claims, “there can be no economic battle against the economy, it can only be political.”12 Because emancipatory politics must wage its evental politics at the site of politics and democracy, the central objective of emancipatory politics today is to resurrect the dignity of the name of equality from both the class politics that controls it as well as the economism that surrounds it. Badiou’s model of thinking politics consists then in an effort to think politics’ “intrinsic relation to truth” and in order to do so, he has had to forego economic and social critiques in favor of subjective conceptions of egalitarianism, leading Peter Hallward to suggest that Badiou’s political thought is reminiscent of Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness,” which Hallward comments is “the stoical affirmation of a worthy ideal or subjective principle, but divorced from any substantial relation to the material organization of the situation.”13 Despite these criticisms, Hallward presents a helpful argument for how we might go beyond what appears at the surface to be an apolitical system of philosophy. Emancipatory Politics in the Atonal Key While Badiou’s prescriptive politics relies on a clear-sighted and ultimately simple calculation, one obvious question remains: How might we engage in a Badiouian form of prescriptive politics in the context of our atonal world? In other words, the democratic materialism of today clouds the scene of potential emancipatory political action, by enveloping the social with a latent violence. But the violence is actually a mask for the prevention of any singularity in the field of the social, or the domain of politics writ large. The effect of this atonality is that true political change must operate in a political climate that is caught in a deadlock where one side must strike blindly merely to demonstrate one's strike capacity. Badiou says, “What is at stake are bloody and nihilistic games of power without purpose and without truth."14 Zizek expresses this sense of the ubiquity of atonality nicely in a comment in his short text Violence:

a basic feature of our postmodern world is that it tries to dispense with this agency of the ordering Master-Signifier: the complexity of the world needs to be asserted unconditionally. Every Master-Signifier meant to impose some order on it must be deconstructed, dispersed: the modern apology for the ‘complexity’ of the world…is really nothing but a generalized desire for atonality.15

11 Hallward, Peter The Politics of Prescription South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2005. Pg. 237 12 Ibid Pg. 237 13 Ibid Pg. 242 14 Johnston, Adrian Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change Northwestern University Press 2009. Pg. 3 15 Zizek, Slavoj Violence Verso Books, 2008. Pg. 98.


The task for pre-evental subjects is thus to establish axioms that are removed from the realm of the atonal social world entirely. Subjects must develop a certain distance from the atonal environment to ultimately undo social relationships and to de-socialize thought before a prescription is laid down.16 We find this same confrontation with the difficulty of political action in the face of atonality (albeit in a different name) in the work of Tiqqun, the anonymous political collective out of France in their text, Introduction to Civil War. Atonality is that which exerts an invisible violence onto subjects that occurs in the domain of life, what they refer to as Empire, a sort of Deleuzian machine that is designed to maintain the free flow of “forms-of-life.” The civil war present in Empire is defined as “the free play of forms-of-life; it is the principle of their coexistence.” Forms-of-life is what gives Empire its plasticity, its whatever being, and it is why the archetype they choose to encompass this free flow is “Bloom” from James Joyce’s Ulysses, an apathetic nihilist who relies on a shape shifting existence to thrive in the anonymous capitalist order. A close reading of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War will find that their entire theory of the body and its strategy for escape of the control that forms-of-life holds over it is grounded in a Badiouian political orientation. For Badiou, a body is an agent in a world operating on behalf of an event. A body is that which concretely materializes within the world the post-evental subject-truth trajectory bisecting this same world. This is quite similar to Tiqqun’s suggestion that a body can be freed from the shackles of forms-of-life only by following a line of flight to the source of power that overwhelms the body. This makes all thought orient towards the event and towards the affects. Tiqqun frequently refers to Empire’s ability to de-intensify all social relations, to pacify bodies, which renders politics completely impotent. This pacification of the social is homologous to Badiou’s “atonal” environment of pure representation, hovering over a void of pure multiplicity and nothingness – putting emancipatory change in the impossible third category we saw above in relation to the state and democracy. In the second part of their text, entitled “What is to be Done” we find a call for the participation in the Imaginary Party, the vessel of resistance that is left today. Much of this section is informed by Badiou’s evental politics. The Imaginary Party is the other side of the movement of Empire, where “the outside has moved inside.” The Outside is gone precisely because there is exteriority at every point of the biopolitical tissue. After all, biopower governs possibilities, not men. Tiqqun claims the way in which the Imaginary Party can change Empire is through an event. As Tiqqun states, “the enemy of Empire is the event that might disturb its norms and apparatuses.17” A less radical although equally creative reading of how we might operate emancipatory politics in the context of atonalism can be found in Adrian Johnston’s excellent book on Badiou and Zizek, The Cadence of Change. Johnston reads Badiou’s approach as akin to Zizek approach to emancipatory politics, which is something akin to the Rosa Luxembourg statement that argued that radical struggles have an internal split within

16 Hallward, Peter “The Politics of Prescription” South Atlantic Quarterly Fall 2005. Pg. 773 17 Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War. Semiotexte, 2009 Los Angeles, CA. Pg. 59.


themselves, and that there will never occur a perfect moment for one single struggle to serve as a totalizing option to all other struggles. Johnston reads Badiou’s subtractive model as promoting not an apoliticism, but a constant and more coordinated series of random and experimental actions against the state. He argues that political action should be encouraged and to wait for the “mature moment” is to misread Badiou, although it is unclear if Johnston’s reading of Badiou remains too informed by Zizek.18 Here is what Zizek says in response to Johnston’s text:

One cannot ever be sure in advance if what appears (within the register and the space of visibility of the ruling ideology) as “minor” measures will not set in motion a process that will lead to the radical (evental) transformation of the whole field.19

In Johnston’s reading of Badiou, the state, in our current historical moment is a delicate organization, and the more highly organized the state is, the more fragile it is. The states fragility indicates ipso facto that actions waged against it are rendered at the level of the imaginary and the network of significations that loosely holds the state together become so tenuous that a series of small acts might unleash the event that is able to fundamentally alter the situation. This pragmatic approach to Badiouian metapolitics relies upon both an axiomatic position as well as a gamble that the act/event (Johnston seems to conflate the terms), based merely on the fact that the big Other is weak, will provide a potentially seismic change in the state of the situation. Johnston points out that

In situations and worlds (i.e. contexts seemingly devoid of passages), certain pre-evental human beings might nonetheless be brave enough to wager investing their faith in an incredibly uncertain prospect for potential change that have yet actually to transpire. Sometimes this is the only source of hope that sustains those who are neither pre-evental persons wholly entangled in the relational matrices of the status quo situation / world nor post-evental subjects fully subtracted from such relational matrices.20

This very interesting application of Badiou’s politics, while it risks being co-opted to the state’s subsumption, might actually appeal to the more practical activists in movements such as Occupy. One must remain hesitant in this regard, however. The fact that Badiou has not deemed the Arab Spring and Occupy as events presents a sort of proof that such a pragmatic approach requires patience and that it must involve a certain ethics lest it fall into what Badiou calls “logical arrogance.” As Zizek declared to Occupy Wall Street’s Liberty Plaza gathering in October 2011, “after the carnival, much work remains.”21 Breaking free of this anti-globalization form of resistance to capitalism and the dialectic

18 Bosteels, Bruno Badiou and Politics “Beyond Formalization” Duke University Press Durham and London, 2011 Pg. 329 19 Johnston, Adrian “Zizek, Badiou: Notes on an ongoing project,” from the International Journal for Zizek Studies Pg. 5 20 Johnston, Adrian “Zizek, Badiou: Notes on an ongoing project,” from the International Journal for Zizek Studies Pg. 78 21 Shin, Sarah Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street: “We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare” Verso Books Blog (http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/736) October 2011.


that binds the carnival of constant displays of resistance to capitalism and the inevitable put-down by the state on the day after remains the crisis of the left for Badiou. It may sound quasi-religious, but there is a truth to the fact that for events to truly emerge, they must emerge mysteriously. As Badiou comments,

What corrupts a subject is the process of treating as a possible consequence of an event what in fact is not a consequence. In brief, it’s a matter of logical arrogance. For there’s no reason why the intensity of existence should be identical to the totality of the world.22

It is this corruption of the pre-evental subject that is perhaps even more pronounced in the context of our atonal world, precisely because the subject is faced with a world of constant change, it hovers on a void for which it has no bearing. Occupy Wall Street and the Problem of Naming While its media heyday under the sun has come and gone and its encampments are broken down, Occupy Wall Street nonetheless resembles many Badiouian tendencies in its initial movement. Occupy opened up a zone of precarity situated around the lack of the system (the dejected middle classes), yet it falls short, for Badiou, in the realm of naming. Failing to declare an axiom other than “We are the 99%,” Occupy remains caught in Lacan’s hysteric discourse, refusing to be determined by the Master, and is thus unable to think interiority. Why? The phrase “We are the 99%” is itself problematic for any Badiouian metapolitics on several levels. For starters, while it seeks to name the masses, to render them visible, the slogan itself remains limited by its faulty socioeconomic grounding of the name. We are the 99% strikes one as a frustrated middle-class rallying cry for a higher modicum of distributionist economics, not as a radical emancipatory metapolitical procedure. The naming of Occupy as the 99% is an inherently Western-centric designation of the masses that does not bode well in the context of a global economic system that is facing more extreme disparities between the global North and South. Occupy faces a contradiction of attempting to operate on a global critique of capitalism, while not recognizing the inherently local point or break in its own system, and it is this break that we will at least provisionally refer to as the unnamable. Prescriptive politics must be formed around the name of the worker, liberty, or what Badiou prefers, the term “equality.” Prescriptive politics proceeds through engagement with strategic constraints that cannot be justified in terms of unconditional duty or respect for the law. An axiom never refers to something external to itself, yet the prescription that it demands is not reducible to an axiom. The axiom merely governs the terms (points, sets, citizens, etc.) it implies without exception. This prescriptive approach depends on a certain metapolitical sequencing that is formed around political naming. 22 Badiou, Alain Logics of Worlds, Continuum, New York, 2006. Pg. 350


While its hysterical moment of refusal to identify “its demands” in the media spotlight has come and gone, Occupy Wall Street presents a metapolitical sequencing that is important to examine under a Badiouian lens. Since metapolitics is concerned with the consequences that can be drawn from real instances of politics as thought, any metapolitical sequence will arise as an authoritarian sequence by its very nature because it entails a naming of a right that does not exist within the current state of the situation. Any declaration of a state that is not possible in the current situation also entails bringing into existence something formerly inexistent, which leads us to examine the core politics of naming that Occupy is formed around, mainly, “We Are the 99%.” At the most critical end, we might argue that it presents a petit bourgeoisie, undisciplined “hallucination” in the same form as the anti-globalization movement, which Badiou has remained highly critical of, and yet again, “We Are the 99%” might offer a more promising potential for pre-evental naming, i.e. of the naming of something inexistent, and the potential emergence of a new class. Hardt and Negri have sought to identify Occupy’s unnamable in the failure of democratic representation, of corporations outstripping citizen power.23 This demand for visibility and recognition, this taking to the streets, winds up short because it lacks a name to rally around other than its own self-referentiality. Another way of looking at the phrase, “We are the 99%” however, is that it presents what Badiou would refer to as a pre-evental figure. Badiou often points out how militant subjects generate nominations posed in a future anterior, towards a situation to come. It is “the ill said words of the subjects in fidelity to an event that forms the basis of courage that forces the truth to a new situation.24” We might look at the American civil rights movement of led by Dr. Martin Luther King as still providing a certain axiom of equality that was formed in the ill said words of the protest banner “Ain’t I a man?” In his 1998 text, Handbook of Inaesthetics Badiou remarks, "We can say that every event admits of a figural preparation, that it always possesses a pre-evental figure.”25 Yet, the naming of the 99% as the western middle class is not localizing the break in as radical a manner as required because is lacks a certain universal appeal. As Badiou remarks in Metapolitics, the first condition of metapolitics is that it is collective and able to serve as a universal receptacle for all, which means that “for every X, there is thought.”26

23 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio “The Fight for Real Democracy at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street” Foreign Affairs, October 2011. 24 Badiou, Alain Handbook of Inaesthetics Translated by Alberto Toscano. Stanford University Press, 2005. Pg. 64 25 Badiou, Alain Handbook of Inaesthetics Translated by Alberto Toscano. Stanford University Press, 2005. Pg. 120 26 Badiou, Alain Metapolitics Translated by Jason Barker Verso Press, 2005. Pg. 141

badiou and emancipatory politics-tutt-2013

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