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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822394471 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/10/2011 |
| Series: | Post-Contemporary Interventions |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 816 KB |
About the Author
Bruno Bosteels is Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of several books, including Alain Badiou, une trajectoire polémique and The Actuality of Communism, and the translator of Theory of the Subject and Wittgenstein’s Antiphilosophy, both by Alain Badiou.
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Badiou and Politics
By BRUNO BOSTEELS
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2011 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5058-3
Chapter One
THE ABSENT CAUSE* * *
BEHIND THE PHILOSOPHER'S BACK
In the present ideological conjuncture, our main task is to constitute the kernel of an authentic materialist philosophy and of a just philosophical strategy in order to facilitate the emergence of a progressive ideology.—ALTHUSSER, Filosofía y marxismo
All philosophers, by some kind of professional deformation, have a tendency of wanting to begin with the beginning. Whether in the name of "first causes," "originary principles," or "fundamental concepts," it is what stands at the origin or beginning that interests them first and foremost. From Hegel to Heidegger, and from Nietzsche to Foucault, there even exists a long and well-established tradition that consists in differentiating between the good and the bad uses of the beginning as principle, start, initiation, genesis, emergence, origin, or provenance. A philosophy seeking to be worthy of the name materialism, however, must begin by recalling that philosophy itself never begins anything. Instead, insofar as philosophy is preceded by different practices that are not themselves philosophical, this beginning has always already happened elsewhere. It is not something that philosophical thought can muster simply from within its own resources but something that faces it, confronts it, and sometimes even affronts it, from the outside. For example, in the case of so-called political philosophy since at least Plato, this effort of the philosopher has never been anything other than the belated response to the scandal of democracy. "It is first in relation to politics that philosophy, from the very beginning, 'comes too late,'" as Jacques Rancière writes in Disagreement: "In the form of democracy, politics is already in place, without waiting for its theoretical underpinnings or its arkhè, without waiting for the proper beginning that will give birth to it as performance of its own principle." It is only the formless multitude of the democratic masses that begins by provoking the response of the philosopher, as in the figure of the ideal republic proposed by Socrates.
This principle of the antecedence of nonphilosophical practices with regard to philosophy proper, or if we look at the question from the opposite end, this principle of the belated effect of philosophy with regard to that which is not philosophical, remains entirely valid for the modern era. This is why Badiou in Can Politics Be Thought? will postulate the following: "The canonical statement (from Rousseau to Mao), which holds that the masses make history, designates precisely in the masses this vanishing irruption of which political philosophy only tells the always belated and always torn story." The massive eruption of a (mode of doing) politics, even if its experience is often extremely short-lived and appears only in order to disappear immediately afterward, occurs well before the arrival on the scene of those professional philosophers who take it on themselves to define its essence as the political. This is why the theme of the beginning, seen purely and simply from within the realm of philosophy, provides us with a false window. Not only is there no strictly philosophical beginning, except precisely from an idealist viewpoint, but a materialist philosophy must also accept the fact that its beginning has already occurred elsewhere, in practices that lie outside of it.
A materialist philosophy is incapable of beginning anything for another reason as well, namely, because all materialisms depend on the premise of a simultaneous tradition of idealism, the dominance of which they openly seek to attack, ridicule, or destroy. Built into the essence of materialism there is thus a dimension of praise and blame, of villainy and debasement, witnessed by the endless attacks and rebuttals that make up most of the history of its struggle against idealism. This is not merely an issue of judgment or taste, whether good or bad, added onto the ideas of materialism and idealism as a moral or political afterthought. Instead, the tactical and strategic value of each term is inseparable from the definition of the concepts themselves, just as the use made out of both terms belongs to the intrinsic core of their meaning. There is thus something irreducibly practical and impure about the debate concerning materialism, a messiness that from the start defeats the purpose of a strictly speculative or philosophical elaboration. This is why in Theory of the Subject Badiou calls materialism the "black sheep" of philosophy: "The history of materialism finds the principle of its periodization in its adversary. Making a system out of nothing else than what it seeks to bring down and destroy, puffed up in latent fits of rage, this aim is barely philosophical. It gives colour, with often barbarous inflections, to the impatience of destruction." We should never forget, in other words, how the concept of materialism is part of a fierce polemical apparatus. Or at least such has been the case in modern times, most clearly after Marx. It is indeed above all the latter's unfinished conception of materialism that has given the term its strong cutting edge, even retrospectively with regard to the history of materialisms from before the nineteenth century, as one of the most effective arms of criticism in any scientific, ideological, or philosophical battle—including its use within philosophy as a weapon against ideology in the name of science.
Louis Althusser, for one, repeatedly insists on this throughout his work on the polemical function of all philosophy, as when he defines the latter as "politics in theory" or when he states that "philosophy is, in the final instance, the class struggle in theory." Marxism, he explains in his lecture "Lenin and Philosophy," from February 1968, has not founded a new philosophy so much as a new practice of philosophy, conditioned by politics. "In fact, I believe that what we owe to Lenin, something which is perhaps not completely unprecedented, but certainly invaluable, is the beginnings of the ability to talk a kind of discourse which anticipates what will one day perhaps be a non-philosophical theory of philosophy," which is something that holds true for Marxism in general as well: "What is new in Marxism's contribution to philosophy is a new practice of philosophy. Marxism is not a (new) philosophy of praxis, but a (new) practice of philosophy." To practice philosophy, then, is a matter not just of inventing concepts with demonstrative rigor but of drawing lines of demarcation and taking a stand, particularly by means of theses. A thesis, as position, can be just or deviated, but it is never exactly true or false. There are no real mistakes in philosophy because its propositions are never strictly theoretical but theoretical and practical at the same time. Between Althusser's Essays in Self-Criticism and his final interviews with the Mexican philosopher Fernanda Navarro in Philosophy and Marxism, moreover, it becomes increasingly evident how every thesis is in some way already an antithesis and every proposition already an opposition. The very nature of the philosophical art of war obliges its practitioners to include preemptive strikes against likely objections, to interiorize the conflict to better master it, or directly to occupy the enemy's own territory. As a result no position ever appears in pure form; no opposition is ever absolute but only tendential—with each tendency, or arrangement of theses, being present at the heart of its opposite.
Clearly no less indebted to Machiavelli than to Marx, this view of philosophical practice holds sway particularly in the age-old battle between idealism and materialism itself, elements of which can therefore be found tendentially in any philosophical system. "In every 'philosophy,' even when it represents as explicitly and 'coherently' as possible one of the two great antagonistic tendencies, there exist manifest or latent elements of the other tendency," Althusser observes in Essays in Self-Criticism; and in Philosophy and Marxism he makes the same point again with minor variations: "In reality, every philosophy is only the—more or less accomplished—realization of one of the two antagonistic tendencies, the idealist one and the materialist one. And in every philosophy it is not one but the antagonistic contradiction of both tendencies that is realized." Materialism and idealism are thus caught in a specular and antagonistic relation in which each one bears the other within itself, like enemy troops lying in wait inside the empty entrails of the Trojan Horse.
The opposition of materialism and idealism is not only tendential but also decisively asymmetrical. This is because only the materialist tendency in philosophy is capable of recognizing the logic of internalized conflict itself. While for idealism the history of thought offers the lofty spectacle of an uninterrupted chain of solutions to a closed set of seemingly eternal and immanent problems, only the materialist view affirms that philosophy, being articulated onto other theoretical and nontheoretical practices, has a certain outside. Here Althusser recalls how François Mauriac once confessed that as a child he believed that famous people had no behind—a confession he relates to Hegel's reference, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, to the "back," "rear," or "hidden backside" of self-consciousness. For Althusser, then, materialism shows that philosophy too has a hidden backside: "The irruption of practice attacks philosophy from behind," he tells his Mexican interviewer: "To have an outside is the same thing, it will be objected, as to have a behind. But having a 'behind' means having an outside that one doesn't expect to. And philosophy doesn't expect to." Far from constituting a self-enclosed totality, as idealism is wont to believe, philosophy is an apparatus with which to register conflicts and to act back, albeit indirectly by way of ideology, on the very same conflicts that condition it.
To the question "What does philosophy do?" Althusser answers in conversation with Navarro: "Philosophy produces a general problematic: that is, a manner of posing, and therefore resolving, any problem that may arise. Lastly, philosophy produces theoretical schemas or figures that serve as a means of overcoming contradictions, and as links for connecting and bolstering the various elements of ideology," for example, by acting at a distance "on cultural practices such as the sciences, politics, the arts, and even psychoanalysis." In a paradoxical torsion these practices constitute the outside that seizes philosophy while at the same time being seized from within by philosophy. What is more, in Althusser's examples of the kind of practices with which philosophy interacts in this way, the reader can already perceive anticipations of what will become the four procedures of truth that define the conditions of philosophy for Badiou: art, science, politics, and love (especially as treated in psychoanalysis). In fact, far from abdicating the role of philosophy in the name of these other domains of practice, Althusser will be praised years later by Badiou for having maintained the idea of philosophy together with a tentative definition of its rapport to those practices or conditions. "There are at least two such conditions: the politics of emancipation, and the sciences. Thinking that relationship is something that can only be done within philosophy, as the philosophical act is, ultimately, that very torsion," writes Badiou about his former teacher: "In that sense, he was, unlike Lacan, Foucault or Derrida, who were all anti-philosophers, a philosopher." This then raises the serious problem, to which I will return below, of defining the specific difference between Althusser's understanding of the relation of philosophy to ideology and science, on one hand, and Badiou's own concept of a materialist philosophy, on the other.
In any case, from this brief outline we can already infer not only that the materialist tendency in philosophy stands in an uneven and asymmetrical relation to idealism but also that, precisely because of this asymmetry, the impure definition of theoretical practices and their relations of internal exclusion to other practices together constitute the very substance of any materialist philosophy. Althusser, in fact, starts out in his canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital, both published in 1965, by assigning this double task to the philosophy of dialectical materialism. Though apparently out of fashion if not long-forgotten today, this discussion remains vital against all odds, especially if we seek to grasp the originality of Badiou's contribution as one of Althusser's most engaging and original students to the renewal of the materialist dialectic. On a more anecdotal level this continuity was rendered official and institutionalized when Badiou in 1999—after spending thirty years at the University of Paris at Vincennes-Saint Denis, which was founded in the wake of May '68—was invited to occupy his old mentor's post at the helm of the Philosophy Department at the École Normale Supérieure in rue d'Ulm, a position from which Badiou has since retired even though he continues to hold his seminar in the same lecture halls where he once was a student.
We thus begin to understand why the importance of Althusser's legacy for Badiou's own philosophical project remains unsurpassed perhaps even by the influence of Sartre, Lacan, or Heidegger. As though to anticipate this point, one of Badiou's first publications—part of his own contingent beginning as a philosopher that thus also marks a rebeginning—is an extensive review of Althusser's two canonical works, For Marx and Reading Capital, titled "The (Re)commencement of Dialectical Materialism." In the remainder of this chapter I will rely on this quite astonishing book review as a reader's guide, first, to a brief account of Althusser's view on the matter as seen through the eyes of Badiou and, then, to Badiou's own philosophy and theory of the subject as anticipated in this same review of the canonical Althusser.
SCIENCE AND IDEOLOGY REVISITED
Every truly contemporary philosophy must set out from the singular theses with which Althusser identifies philosophy. —BADIOU, Metapolitics
Althusser's polemical aim in For Marx and the collective Reading Capital—at least this much is unlikely to have been forgotten—is to defend the specificity and scientificity of Marx's dialectic against the threatening return of Hegel's idealism. He does so in collaboration with his students Pierre Macherey, Roger Establet, Jacques Rancière, and Étienne Balibar (not Badiou, who, as he explains ironically in the interview reproduced below, is slightly older than the rest of his generation and as a result never was "in" with the Althusserians of the first hour), by jointly arguing for a radical epistemological break in Marx's work, a rupture made evident in the Theses on Feuerbach and The German Ideology, which supposedly liquidate not only the entire Hegelian legacy but also its famous inversion after Feuerbach. Marx thus changes terrains, abandoning the empiricist and anthropological mystifications in which even this so-called reversal of Hegelianism remains caught, as he installs himself in an entirely new problematic, forsaking the humanism of the Manuscripts of 1844 in favor of a full-blown scientific theory of history as seen in Capital. Marx's doctrine, however, not only lays the groundwork for a new science; it also contains the elements for a new philosophy, or at least for a new practice of philosophy. His discovery thus entails a double theoretical foundation in a single epistemological break, or two ruptures in a unique inaugural act: "By founding the theory of history (historical materialism), Marx in one and the same movement broke with his erstwhile ideological philosophical consciousness and established a new philosophy (dialectical materialism)." Althusser's own positive aim, then, seeks in a formidable group effort to reconstruct this new philosophy, which, though never fully formulated as such by Marx, nor even by Engels or Lenin, would nevertheless already be at work, in practice, in the scientific theory of Marx himself.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Badiou and Politics by BRUNO BOSTEELS Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface ixAcknowledgments xxi
Introduction. Elements of Dialectical Materialism 1
1. The Absent Cause 45
2. Lack and Destruction 77
3. One Divides into Two 110
4. The Ontological Impasse 157
5. Forcing the Truth 174
6. Logics of Change 197
7. From Potentiality to Inexistence 226
8. For Lack of Politics 250
Conclusion. The Speculative Left 273
In Dialogue with Alain Badiou
Appendix 1. Can Change Be Thought? 289
Appendix 2. Beyond Formalism 318
Notes 351
Selected Bibliography 407
Index 423