[This is a slightly longer version of the paper I gave at UEL's recent workshop on modernism/postmodernism and also contains bits of the very short presentation I gave at the Badiou day at the Venezuelan embassy last Friday. As such, it's a bit patchy, but what are you gonna do...]



In a piece on Being and Event from 2007, Peter Osborne describes Badiou’s project as both neo-classical and, at the level of its form, an example of ‘reactionary modernism’. In his piece on Badiou and art entitled ‘Monumental Construction: Badiou and the Politics of Aesthetics’, Ben Noys raises the spectre of Badiou’s ‘paleo-modernism’, noting too Rancière’s description of Badiou’s inaesthetics as a ‘twisted modernism’. In the light of these concerns, can Badiou make a useful claim for modernism ‘after’ postmodernism, given his conceptual materials: namely, the attempt to rescue philosophy from the narratives of its supposed exhaustion and the return to a certain strand of avant-garde art and literature?



There is no doubt that Badiou is responding to the tiring repetitions regarding the supposed end of history, the danger of big ideas and the centrality of finitude as the moralistic horizon of our times, and in that sense, then, his work very much ‘comes after’ postmodernism. Yet it is not in the usual places – novelty, conceptual ambition, a certain asceticism – that we should locate Badiou’s modernism, although this is precisely the ground upon which he is attacked, elements of which critique I’ll outline briefly in a moment. Rather, I will argue that it is Badiou’s persistent defence of a notion of the subject which constitutes his modernism. In his Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), Badiou defines philosophy’s ‘modern period’ ‘by the central organisational use to which the category of the Subject is put’. Postmodernism would thus necessarily be, for Badiou, a rejection or overturning of the question of the subject. A modern conception of the subject that comes after the postmodern would have to pay attention precisely to the critiques of the subject central to postmodern and post-structuralist thought, without giving up on a notion of the subject tout court. This is exactly what Badiou does in his attempt to overturn the division between humanist and antihumanist understandings of the subject, particularly the political subject. In other words – how Badiou can be both and Althusserian and a Sartrean at the same time.

This has particularly strong consequences for Badiou’s current understanding of politics, which I’ll outline at the end of the paper. But first, a look at some of the critiques.

Osborne’s claim is that Badiou’s philosophy is a neo-classical attempt to reclaim philosophy after postmodernism and the Heideggarian critique via the use of modern conceptual forms (contemporary mathematics) to reconfigure the place and function of ontology within philosophy as a discipline:

Being and Event is a philosophical neo-classicism that is taken up into its modernity. Formulaically: modernism + classicism = neo-classicism. In fact, in historicist terms, since neo-classicism was a phenomenon of the 1920s, Badiou’s neo-classicism is a neo-neo-classicism, a return to neo-classicism, or neo-classicism squared. Badiou is to contemporary European philosophy what the Picasso of the 1920s was to the art of that day. Musically, Badiou thinks he is Schoenberg, but he is actually Stravinsky.



Ben Noys, too, notes Badiou’s unwillingness to extend his aesthetic references much beyond a kind of ‘classically modernism’ canon:

In the context of poetry we might note that although Badiou expands the range of references beyond the limits of Heideggerean and deconstructive doxa … omits possible cases of continuing innovative fidelity. I am thinking here of the strand of neo-modernist Anglo-American poetry that took its cue from Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, and which includes figures such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and the still living and still productive J H Prynne, and many others. Likewise, in music Badiou lauds the usual line of Schoenberg to the Darmstadt school but ignores, or does not consider, possible later fidelities that could lead from Kraftwerk to Detroit Techno and beyond.



Noys and Osborne have a serious point about Badiou’s abruptly curtailed modernist canon, and the odd conservatism of his genres (I blame France and Johnny Hallyday in particular). I think this is something that Owen too would agree with, and something that Militant Modernism strives to avoid as it stresses an ‘interruption, a rupture, a break with the continuum altogether (p. 6) rather than seeing modernism as ‘the uninterrupted parade of progress’ (p. 6). He stresses the collective nature of modernist projects, which alongside a politico-philosophical conception of the subject, characterises Badiou’s notion as well.



Jameson in A Singular Modernity (2002) lists a series of modernist features that were generally deemed to be non-desirable in what he calls ‘full postmodernism’: asceticism, phallocentricism, authoritarianism, repressiveness, the teleology of the new, minimalism, the cult of genius and the ‘non-pleasurable demands made on the audience or public’.

Badiou may be prey to all of the above but it is not just a concept of event or novelty that could be seen as Badiou’s modernism, not least because there are concepts of the event in postmodernism and poststructuralism too.

As Jameson points on, Lyotard, for example, was in fact a quintessential modernist, ‘passionately committed to the eruption of the genuinely, the radically, and, dare one even say, the authentically New.’ (p. 4). The separation of the modern from the postmodern cannot simply depend upon a conception of the new, as the postmodern too is characterised by its reliance on novelty: ‘postmodernity is unable to divest itself of the supreme value of innovation (despite the end of style and the death of the subject), if only because the museums and art galleries can scarcely function without it. Thus, the new fetish of Difference continues to overlap the older one of the New, even if the two are not altogether coterminous.’ (p. 5)

Badiou on the Subject

‘Does the act of proposing, for our time, a space of compossibility within thought of the truths which proliferate there, demand the maintenance and usage of the category of the Subject, even profoundly altered and subverted?’ Badiou, (Manifesto, p. 44)

Despite the patent nature of the play on words at work in the term ‘subject’, its political and philosophical connections have been severely dislocated in much philosophical usage of the term; more specifically, the dominant (phenomenological-Cartesian) tendency in contemporary thinking on the ‘subject’ begins with a specifically philosophical conception of the term and presupposes that this is the precondition for any further discussion of politics (if, indeed, any discussion of politics is ever produced by this tendency). Contemporary thinking simply assumes that the philosophical meaning takes precedence. What this means is that a certain concept of a self-reflexive, individuated subject has stifled any discussion of the subject that would treat the subjectivity of that subject as a primarily collective fact, in spite of such precedents as Feuerbach’s discussions of the immediately generic nature of consciousness, Marx’s early claims about humanity and Sartre’s notion of the shared aims of the group-in-fusion.



Following his turn to meta-ontology in Being and Event where politics is understood as one of philosophy’s four conditions (along with art, science and love), Badiou continues to take a step back from the antagonistic conception of politics formulated in the earlier Theory of the Subject. In a paper given in 1991 entitled ‘Philosophy and Politics’ (republished in 1992’s Conditions), Badiou asks whether ‘revolutionary’ politics has reached a point where it attests to nothing other than ‘philosophy’s disaster’, that is to say, whether politics as thought has culminated only in tragedy. On the surface this seems close to many of the democratic analyses that accompanied the collapse of the Berlin wall and the crumbling of Soviet-supported states in Eastern Europe. But far from triumphantly proclaiming the end of history and the inevitability of the free markets and democracy, Badiou’s conception of politics seeks to reestablish the ‘existence of politics at the point of its apparent impossibility’, as one of the sections in the ‘Philosophy and Politics’ essay has it. Badiou’s politics is never that of the ‘lesser evil’, it only ever seeks to establish what lies at the heart of every truly democratic project. It is this impulse, in the face of supposed defeat, to remain true to the founding impulses of emancipatory politics – equality, collectivity, and as he will later term it ‘the communist hypothesis’ that characterises Badiou’s later approach to politics.



Stripped of a certain kind of rather forbidding Maoist-Hegelianism that characterised the earlier work of Theory of the Subject, Badiou returns in some ways to the problematics of the critics of Hegel of the 1840s: how to adequately describe philosophy’s relation to politics, how to best understand the emergence and possibilities of communism in the face of inequality and what it means to remain true to a concept of universality in the face of ever-proliferating difference. If the category of class drops out of Badiou’s later conception of politics it does so in a complicated way: Class struggle, he argues in ‘Philosophy and Politics’, ‘is a category of History and of the State, and only under entirely singular conditions does it constitute a material for politics.’ (p. 161) Badiou comes very close to the later Sartre here on this point, particularly the Sartre of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, where class analysis is for the most part replaced by a critical description of the emergence of atypical political groupings: if politics is one of philosophy’s conditions, then the model of political action is of the order of an event: not perceptible from the standpoint of the situation, and not amenable to the kinds of economic and class analyses that form the bulk of classical Marxist readings.



It is against the backdrop of the collapse of ‘real socialism’ and the set-theoretical turn of the late 1980s and the idea of philosophy’s ‘conditions’ (an idea first formulated in Manifesto for Philosophy, published in France in 1989) that Badiou’s later conception of politics must be understood. Nevertheless, Badiou remains true to certain key elements (justice, universalism, emancipation) in the history of 20th century revolutionary politics, which he describes as ‘sequences’. These moments (typically for Badiou, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution, The Cultural Revolution, May ‘68) share certain key features: politics is collective, it exhibits the ‘infinity’ of the situation by rejecting finitude, politics invokes subjective universality. In later works, Badiou will claim that there are two communist sequences – from the French Revolution to the Paris Commune and from the 1917 Russian Revolution to 1976, and that following this latter sequence we are in a kind of ‘interval phase dominated by the enemy’ (Sarkozy, p. 113). Politics becomes a question of determining the modality by which we can begin to think through a third communist sequence.

In the Preface to the English Edition of Metapolitics (first published in France in 1998 and in English in 2005), Badiou presents four more specific, late twentieth-century periods of political concern that directly relate to his own philosophical and political development. Firstly there is the period around 1965, where the PCF and questions of colonialism (particularly Algeria) dominated the political scene, followed by the ‘red decade’ of 1966-76 which continued both the Chinese Cultural Revolution and May 68, where ‘everyday life was entirely politicised’ (p. xxxiv). Then followed a long counter-revolutionary period (1976-1995), in which the rise of ‘human rights’, ‘humanitarian’ but in practice imperialist ‘interventions’ took place and the domination of America, which Badiou describes as a ‘betrayal’ of the previous period. Finally, there is the period from 1995 onwards, which is seen as a complicated break from the previous period, still possessed of many of the same features, but with the addition of popular anti-globalisation movements. Whilst Badiou is not sympathetic to the ‘vain adventurism’ of these groups, he nevertheless sees hope in the juncture of a ‘new political thought’ and ‘organised popular detachments’ (Metapolitics, p. xxxv).



As part of his turn away from classically Marxist concerns, Badiou in his later writings on politics stresses the importance of taking what he describes as ‘distance from the state’. This includes a refusal to engage with parliamentary politics and to break with what commonly gets called ‘political philosophy’. Indeed, Badiou’s definition of the alternative, ‘metapolitics’, is described as ‘whatever consequences a philosophy is capable of drawing, both in and for itself, from real instances of politics as thought’. ‘Political philosophy’, the academic discipline that in the 1980s and 1990s concerned itself, according to Badiou, with human rights discourse and ethics above all, is in essence the denial that politics has anything to do with thought. Whilst Badiou’s claim that a politics worthy of the name should be primarily a question of thinking seems, on the face of it, to be a profoundly idealistic statement, on a continuum with Platonic and Aristotelian claims about the relationship between the polis and human nature (most centrally, the claim that man is a political animal), it should be understood in the context of the pact between academic political philosophy and what Badiou calls ‘capital-parliamentarianism’. Here politics is only a description of the realm of public opinion – of polls, statistics, ad campaigns and media portrayal. Contemporary politics, and the political philosophy taught in academia has nothing to do with a politics of truth. As Badiou acerbically puts it: ‘If our knowledge of planetary motion relied solely on suffrage as its protocol of legitimation, we would still inhabit a geocentric universe.’ (Metapolitics, p. 15).



Building on the work of his long-time associate, Sylvain Lazarus, Badiou’s later work on politics builds upon this idea of politics ‘as thought’. In an essay on Lazarus’s Anthropology of the Name, Badiou writes: ‘There is certainly a “doing” of politics, but it is immediately the pure and simple experience of a thought, its localisation. Doing politics cannot be distinguished from thinking politics.’ (Metapolitics, p. 46). Inevitably, Badiou’s complicated relationship to Marxism is implicitly invoked in his rather classical formulation: didn’t Marx break with the idealism of Feuerbach and the other ‘merely’ critical post-Hegelians by turning to the real abstractions of political economy? It is true that Badiou explicitly avoids any discussion of the role of the economy in his conception of politics as thought – politics is a rare singularity, it is predicated on the rationalist premise that ‘people think’, and that political truths are always the seizing of a collective subject by an event. Objective conditions are irrelevant, and as such, true politics for Badiou always happens at a distance from the state. It is clear that for Badiou those who ‘believe’ in the state are little more than mystics: ‘...for the patient who prays to the Virgin and gets better, all well and good; but if the patient dies it is because She willed it. Similarly, if I implore our State to be good towards workers and illegal immigrants [sans-papiers], either it does something, and it’s wonderful, or it does nothing, in which case this is put down to the merciless law of reality in crisis-ridden times. Either way, I have done my duty’ (Metapolitics, p. 71).



In the 1990s, Badiou is preoccupied by the ‘names’ associated with politics. One of the reasons for this analysis of the terms most typically associated with the history of left-wing movements (party, masses, proletariat, commune) is in order to break with the ‘suturing’ of philosophy to politics. What this means, and for Badiou it in part explains the disasters of twentieth century politics, is that particular concepts or proper names come to stand in for the whole of political thought and action: In other words, ‘the reduction of the diversity of names of politics to a single and primordial name ... But if these names get sutured to the potential eternity of a philosopheme, it then comes to be that there is only one genuine name, and this name inevitably becomes the unique name of politics ... As History has shown, such a name then becomes a sacred name’ (Conditions, p. 157). As such, Stalin and Mao are ‘creations, or creatures, of philosophy,’ because in this circumstances politics has become fused with philosophy so completely that neither has any way out, and disaster can only ensue. Badiou’s post-Soviet politics remains true to the guiding impulses of the kind of emancipated communism presented by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology. As Badiou writes, ‘[a] genuinely political organisation, or a collective system of conditions for bringing politics into being, is the least bound place of all.’ (Metapolitics, p. 76)

As a corollary to this break with historical communism, Badiou’s political writings in the 1990s and onwards are also an exploration of the question of a politics without a party. The party-form for Badiou is nothing but a state-form and as such is devoid of both thought and subjective militancy: ‘The central subjective figure is the political militant’ (Metapolitics, p. 122). Badiou’s alternative to the party form is in no way an anarchistic model but rather ‘one organised through the intellectual discipline of political processes’ (p. 122). Badiou’s own involvement during this period with L’Organisation Politique, a small group of militants primarily concerned with the struggle and status of the sans papiers (illegal immigrants) in France, attempts to put this ‘intellectual discipline’ into practice.



By turning to questions of the collective nature of politics (‘An event is political if its material is collective’, Metapolitics, p. 141) Badiou seeks to introduce a purer notion of communism than the one witnessed by the twentieth century, with its proper names and dogmatic concepts. Stripped of the obligation to defend really existing communism, Badiou, in his most recent work on politics, to defend what he calls ‘the communist hypothesis’. In his study of the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, Badiou declares that ‘communism is the right hypothesis’ (p. 97), and that ‘[w]ithout the perspective of communism, without this Idea, nothing in the historical and political future is of such a kind as to interest the philosopher’ (Sarkozy, p. 115). According to Badiou, then, The current task of philosophy vis-à-vis politics becomes the duty to help a new modality of the communist hypothesis to come into being. It is towards outlining this new modality that Badiou’s latest work on politics tends, with a frank admission that in many ways we are returning to the problems, not primarily of the twentieth century, but of the nineteenth:

We are dealing, as in the 1840s, with absolutely cynical capitalists ... All kinds of phenomena from the nineteenth century are reappearing: extraordinarily widespread zones of poverty, within the rich countries as well as in the zones that are neglected or pillaged, inequalities that constantly grow, a radical divide between working people – or those without work – and the intermediate classes, the complete dissolution of political power into the service of wealth, the disorganization of the revolutionaries, the nihilistic despair of wide sections of young people, the servility of a large majority of intellectuals, the determined but very restricted experimental activity of a few groups seeking contemporary ways to express the communist hypothesis. (Sarkozy, pp. 116-117)

Among the bleakness of the contemporary situation, Badiou sees however, a duty and a task: ‘through a combination of constructions of thought, which are always global or universal, and political experiments, which are local or singular but can be transmitted universally, we can assure the new existence of the communist hypothesis, both in consciousness and in concrete situations.’ (Sarkozy, p. 117). Badiou thus attempts to overcome the theory/practice divide in the name of a new approach to an old question: a return to the mid-nineteenth century in the name of the 21st.