ASSI, BILLIORAY, FERRAT, BABICK, Edouard MOREAU, C. DUPONT, VARLIN, BOURSIER, MORTIER, GOUHIER, LAVALETTE, Fr. JOURDE, ROUSSEAU, Ch. LULLIER, BLANCHET, J. GROLLARD, BARROUD, H. GERESME, FABRE, POUGERET.

As a footnote to yesterday's contribution to the Being and Event Reading Group of The Weblog, a translation of a short passage from Alain Badiou's La Commune de Paris: Une déclaration politique sur la politique:

Everything depends, therefore, on the consequences. But let us note that there is no transcendental consequence more powerful than the appearance of something that did not exist. That is how the day March 18, 1871 places in the center of a political turmoil a collection of unknown workers, unrecognized even by the specialists of the revolution, by those old "forty-eighters" that will unfortunately hinder the Commune with their ineffective disputes about words. Let us return to the first proclamation of March 19 by the Central Committee, the organism directly responsible for the insurrection of the eighteenth. "May Paris and France together lay down the foundation for a republic acclaimed in all ways, the only government that will forever close the era of invasions and civil wars." Who signs this political declaration without precedent? Twenty people, three-quarters of whom belong to the proletarians defined and constituted solely by circumstance. The newspaper of the government has every reason to ask: "Who are the members of this Committee? Are they communists, bonapartists or Prussians?" Here the unshakeable motive of the "foreign agents" can already be seen. In reality the result of the event is that for the first time the inexistent workers are carried into a temporarily maximal, political existence.

Comments

[Kenneth Rufo]

This requirement of novelety/originality as the marker of one's political existence, or even of the advent of an event, seems to me to have two consequences. First, it encourages revolutionary gestures predicated on a concept or pretense of agency that comes from outside of the current political arrangement, a designation (the outside) with which I think there are some serious problems (cue Hardt and Negri, Foucault, Laclau, Derrida - different warrants, but all suspicious of this inside and outside of politics). And not to be too reductive, but doesn't this also make of Fascismo an event or a truth? Doesn't it funtionally mean that the Reichstag fire and the trial that followed were truth events? But that, simultaneously, that congressional work repealing Bush's executive orders, particularly the ones that gutted EPA enforcement measures and environmental impact assessment measures, would be unworthy of an event? I have to say I like the latter more than the first two... But perhaps I'm wrong about this, and the better question is one of threshold: how new, how much new, does an event have to be to retroactively be dubbed an event?

Second, it seems to reduce philosophy - or at least any philosophy or thinking of the event - to historical exposition. This unnerves me, for obvious reasons (history written by victors, history constantly re-written, history often combines with motifs that lead to problems, e.g. the world-historical, restorative nostalgia, etc.). But I'm assuming/hoping I'm wrong about this. Can anyone help me out here?

[David]

Kenneth - those are very good questions. I am close to a deadline right now, so I can only give you a short answer - more later - but let me just say that in Badiou's philosophy novelty is not the only defining feature for an event. First of all, the event is never something that comes from the outside, but it is already immanent to the situation it appears in. A large part of Badiou's ontology is aimed at showing how in every situation there must be things that are not 'counted', that are not a part of the 'state of things', and it is exactly there - the 'evental site' - that the event can occur. Secondly, because the event is therefore not linked to existing interests and hierarchies, it is the same for everybody and has a kind of universality. This is obviously not true for fascism or Bush's executive orders, which represent extremely narrow interests.

[Matt]

In the discernment of good and evil, the apperception of evil comes first. For evil is precisely what puts the in-common, or the share, in question. One sees here the opening of the theme dear to Revault d'Allonnes: radical evil. To judge is 'to attempt to resist impending evil in fear in trembling'. I have already said what I think of this doctrine in my little book Ethics. I believe it to be inescapably theological and, moreover, politically inoperative. For every real figure of evil is presented, not as a fanatical non-opinion undermining being-together, but on the contrary as a politics aiming to ground authentic being-together. No 'common sense' can counter it; only another politics can do so. For all that, one will recognise in the reduction of political judgement to pure negation ('resisting evil') what has always been said about parliamentary democracies: that, while admittedly not good, they were 'the least bad' alternative. (Badiou, Metapolitics, 20)

Gillian Rose launches similar barbs at Derrida/Levinas/Nancy/Blanchot. Both strike me as polemical (in Badiou's case, openly so), but also dangerously reductive. Not least of all toward the questions of 'relation' 'responsibility', and 'refusal', which would supposedly demand to be addressed and defined prior to the question of 'democracy' itself. It would seem that nothing less than the true lessons of the Shoah, as well as the authentic legacy of 'Communism', as distinctively geopolitically-inspired, were to be at stake.

So what's Badiou up to here, is he trying to trump the 'Manifesto of the 121'? In light of which, why not take on Blanchot directly? Why all these deliberate barbs, winks and evasions...(oh sure, payback for years of being snubbed, yes. But friends can snub.) Such a haughty group. Just sayin'.

The conflict between existence and essence, which lies at the heart not only of Blanchot's pre-war politics, but of Western politics as a whole, is here resolved, at least in principle: in a reversal more radical than any Sartre would ever achieve, the subject ceases absolutely to defend essential values individually, because the individual has ceased historically (with the end of history) to be commensurate with those essential values. In returning to the world, therefore, the no-longer-individual subject can exist, politically, only through participating in a collective refusal of the perversion of those values by a political system which is structured around the sovereignty of the individual (de Gaulle). In short, collective existence, expressed as refusal, becomes the sole guarantee of what is essential, but in the process defines the essential in a new and original way. (Michael Holland, 1995)

"...men who refuse and are linked by the force of refusal know that they are not yet together. It is precisely the time of the common affirmation that has been taken away from them...When we refuse, our gesture of refusal is...as far as possible, anonymous, for the power to refuse is not accomplished from within ourselves, nor in our name only, but from a beginning in what is poorest which belongs first of all to those who cannot speak." -Blanchot, 'Le Refus'

[Keith]

Well David already covered the immanent unrecognized part of situations. There might be some worthwhile explaining by Badiou here as well.

[Squibb]

Kenneth, I think, in many ways, these are THE questions to ask of Badiou. In partial fidelity to him though, a couple of things;

1. Badiou sets out to rescue an operative concept of agency from the dominant descriptions of subject formation, without falling back into the traps of a pre-heideggerian metaphysics. It is this desire that motivates the recourse to formalized, mathematical language, with its laicization or secularizing of the infite etc. etc. Thus the assertion

"This requirement of novelety/originality as the marker of one's political existence, or even of the advent of an event, seems to me to have two consequences. First, it encourages revolutionary gestures predicated on a concept or pretense of agency that comes from outside of the current political arrangement, a designation (the outside) with which I think there are some serious problems"

is, in some ways to miss the point. Badiou would say, insofar as we want to hold onto a concept of agency that defies the reduction to dominant structures of subject production, the presence of the absolutely novel; the event, must lie at the origin. However, as David points out, this novelty is always present as a possibility within any given situation, just not yet as an operative concept. Thus the 'outside' in this strategy is never truly outside at all, it is rather an apperance of discrepency between that which is present in a situation, and that which is represented by the structure of that situation, roughly speaking. Thus the conceptual impossibility of something like an outside is entirely the point, for the event is altogher impossible by the terms of any dominant vocabulary of art, politics, science or love. It is the occurance of something unacountable by these discourses, that Badiou would call the event. In this sense, legislation qua legislation already takes place within an organized poltical structure, indeed, takes place as an instance of that structures reproduction, and thus its possibility is always already represented, and its realization cannot attain the potentailly reorganizing discrepancy requiste for evental status. The same could probably be said of Facismo, that it results not from an event as such, but from a reorganization of concepts already in play to produce a mere variation and subsequent validation of already dominant politcal ideas.

However, I think your second point is altogether the case - And if I may apologize in advance for saying so, it is perfectly clear that Badiou's philosophy is a philosophy of remove, of passive reaction, that is, to put it bluntly, of the university.

Here Badiou's rescue of agency takes place already inside the university - insofar as it is only the university who testifies to the death of agency, (while neoliberalism quitely shuffles the deck.) Thus, for Badiou, agency is a potentiality for everyone, except for philisophers, who it would seem, having no acess to a truth event of their own, are either not-subjects, or subjects working out of their field, so to speak. Indeed, Badiou seems to formalize what has been the case for some time now, that it is philosophy/university's job to sit back and field submissions from the fields of politics, art, and science, to sort through the evidence, and determine if any are worthy of retroactive evental status, at which point the publishing floodgates are loosed, the lecture tours booked. (Anyone want to make a guess as to how many tenure positions expertise in Badiou will grant? No wonder his books are flying off the shelves)

Badiou thought is therefore the ultimate non-event, as it fails to think philosophy as its own sort of situation, and thus he and Heidegger end up fighting to the death with regards what is called thinking...

In other news, it was a high point of american intellectual culture when Badiou came to debate at Princeton last week, and the partner trotted out was Matrix star Cornell West... wonder what they had to say to each other.

[David]

Re: fascism, this is from the chapter on evil in Ethics.

What allows a genuine event to be at the origin of a truth - which is the only thing that can be for all, and be eternally - is precisely the fact that it relates to the particularity of a situation only from the bias of the void. The void, the multiple-of-nothing, neither excludes nor constrains anyone. It is the absolute neutrality of being - such that the fidelity that originates in an event, although it is an immanent break within a singular situation, is none the less universally addressed.

By contrast, the striking break provoked by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, although formally indistinguishable from an event - it is precisely this that led Heidegger astray - since it conceives itself as a 'German' revolution, and is faithful only to the alleged national substance of a people, is actually addressed only to those that it itself deems 'German'. It is thus - right from the moment the event is named, and despite the fact that this nomination ('revolution') functions under the condition of true universal events (for example the revolutions of 1792 and 1917) - radically incapable of any truth whatsoever.

Squibb - Badiou did publish something about The Matrix (though not about the sequels, I think).

[Matt]

Interesting. And this is MB again, from "Intellectuals under Scrutiny" (forgive me, David, and thanks for the indulgence):

...Today it is in himself that the intellectual is seeking the reasons for his decline and perhaps for his self-denial. It would seem that the universal idea is no longer what he has in view, as was once thought to be the case during the Enlightenment...

I shall not venture to decide whether it still makes sense to distinguish between the part played by the rational and the part played by the irrational in the work of Heidegger, so reductive do these words appear in relation to a way of thinking which holds them to be inadequate, or the legacy of an impoverished Cartesianism; nor even to decide whether Heidegger's fatal mistake in adhering (however briefly) to National Socialism finds its explanation in some area of his philosophy (the hegemony of the philosophical over the political, and the certainty that it is the destiny of the German people to incarnate that hegemony by repeating the demands of Greek thought), or whether we should invoke his naïveté or his astonishing blindness, that 'naïveté' which makes him write, to justify himself for having accepted the post of Rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933: 'At that time I saw in the movement that had come to power a possibility for unifying and renovating the people from within, a way towards finding its historical, Western determination.' (How could he see such a thing in a movement that had no other ambition than to identify 'people' with 'race', and no other programme than that of ensuring the domination of the so-called Aryo-Germanic race – by eliminating all those who appeared not to belong to it, starting with the Jews? The fact is that, at that time, Heidegger would occassionally have done better to be a mere intellectual.)

As this last remark implies, I am not one of those who are content to seal up the tomb of the intellectual – first and foremost because I don't know what is meant by the term...(Blanchot, 1984)

Anyway the rest is worth reading. Zizek might enjoy it too.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Alright, well, not much more to add or ask, as I think Squibb and David respond resoundingly well to my first concern, and it sounds like my second is relatively well-founded.

I am curious if perhaps a more robust definition of fidelity might be offered though? Because I'm having difficulty figuring out how the example of an event provided in the post - the workers' declaration - is predicated on a relationship to a bias of the void, "the absolute neutrality of being." Why select it? Why speak of communists at all? Why care about the event? And why believe that one event matters more than the other, but that that this difference is unrelated to the particular subject position and biases of the philosophical interpreter? The answer is, I assume, that it's all about fidelity, but I can't help but feel like there's a mystification going on with that term... I'm assuming someone can disabuse me of that notion.

Though a mystification would make the historical, post hoc detailing of events all the more sensible, as opposed to the sort of thinking of event to which Badiou seems opposed.

[Amie]

David, I have been really enjoying and appreciating your recent posts. thanks very much.
(am also still holding out hope for the return of a certain vampire squid...)

Keith's link is illuminating. I have to ask, between "respect for the other" and "openness to the other as other" is there any space for distinction, at all, for Badiou?

He's straw-manning Derrida, of course.

[John]

Maybe not quite "robust", but as close to a definition as I've encountered, from Badiou's "Eight Theses on the Universal" (in Theoretical Writings):

...(T)he univocity of the universal refers the universal singularity back to those generalities whose law holds sway over particularities...For every universal singularity can be defined as follows: it is the act to which a subject-thought becomes bound in such a way as to render that act capable of initiating a procedure which effects a radical modification of the logic of the situation [...] Obviously, the modification can never be fully accomplished. For the intial univocal act, which is always localized, inaugerates a fidelity, i.e. an invention of consequences, that will prove to be as infinite as the situation itself (p. 150, my emphasis).