Ethics, Riots and the Real
Badiou's Politics: The Real of The Century (part 1)
The Two of a Method
Two things to begin with: the real and the method of the book. And in fact the method is an effect of the real. Or in other words, what is the matter of thought – the century as what took place – realises itself in the form of its thought. The century takes place – first determination – and its thought is the inscription of that taking place or again, practice forces on thought itself the manner of its being thought. The thought of its taking place is then what insists of this taking place and is then the transmission of it. After all, what happens, happens and is gone – even if it is a century that happens. We have to find a way to think it which is faithful to its taking place. And at the end of Lesson eleven Badiou describes this as a formalisation. One of the key tropes of the century was toward formalisation against interpretation - its non-dialectal opposite. Hence, then, the need to search for a method, as we’ll see.
I know this might sound dense but it’s both necessary to get a handle on and critical also to the sort of materialism Badiou wants to insist on as necessary politically and philosophically, too. It's a variant on – or in Badiou’s own consideration of one of the things he is up to – a strengthening and clarifying of the integral link between practice and thought or theory such that theory takes its cue always from practice while at the same time, practice, which is always a taking place or a process in the here and now, realises in this way its theory.
In a way we can say that to be faithful in thought – thus in writing, speaking, analysis, transmission etc. – to what happened is the critical aspect of Badiou’s philosophy which, as he says and I’ve noted, is to think real change, to thus come up to Marx’s challenge in Thesis 11. And this means also, then, that even the most celebrated theory must yield to the ‘what happens’. Not, note carefully, as some end of theory – which is in fact a key motive of the century – but as its real change.
So this is really the method, to find the means of letting the century speak for itself. Or what is it the century said about itself, about what it was up to … Hence the recourse to a wide variety of such sayings: in poetry, in art, in sex, in politics, in science. What did the avant-gardes announce; how did we recommence to think about sex; what did psychoanalysis open up to us about the subject; how did the century treat the infinite in mathematics; what were the matter and form of its politics?
And all this is of course oriented by the idea that these procedures sought to wrest what was real in each of them. What makes the century, which is to say, what gives a coherence to it is that what was at stake in each field of its endeavour is what Badiou is calling the Real. And, as we’ll see, this commitment to the Real is manifest in various ways but these are in turn organised by what Badiou calls the ‘paradigm of war’. It is a century of wars, no doubt, but this is because, he argues, the paradigm of war orients its passion for the Real. War is the implacable determination to end opposition or antagonism and secure the Real, finally. We’ll come back to this.
As we know, in politics the ‘all’ is at stake in one way or another and I have reduced this down to a neat two: on one side, what can be done with the ‘all’ – which we can note as the process of re-presentation (and it manifests in many ways); or, what the ‘all’ can do – which presumes this all equally in the first instance, equally capable of thinking their world and putting this equality into practice as what is real here and now; working out in fact what such a world can be.
You can see here that the first version of treating the ‘all’ certainly maintains that there is an ‘all’ to be treated. But it treats the all in a finite sense – that what the all is capable of is limited to what we already know or the ways we have of knowing, to be more precise. And, as I say, this way is predicated on something being impossible for it. Or, ontologically speaking, the infinite, one of whose names is the Real, cannot be thought.
Today we can clearly see that the axiom of our west, which for Badiou is in a period of Restoration or reaction, is that real equality is impossible: that it is a utopian fantasy, and this criticism is predicated precisely on the determination that for us there is always the unthinkable, and of course the unthinkable is such a big space that we can situate there whatever we like! In other words, the unthinkable is the matter for interpretation.
And of course when we assert this ‘impossible for us’ the task is to work hard to make sure this impossibility remains. This work was once described as the ‘reproduction of the relations of production’ and we can think this in its material and ideological form. And indeed today, the latter is where the most work gets done and this includes working over the past such that no other idea is left to chance, so to speak. ‘A restoration is above all an assertion regarding the real; to wit, that it is always preferable to have no relation to it whatsoever.’ Hence the only ‘all’ really and I stress this really, is in its re-presentation given it itself cannot be thought, and thus every day we make the changes necessary to its staying as it is!
In Lesson 2, Badiou begins by saying something about our period of restoration and its fascination for number – number as a sort of empiricist utility. That is, we use it to measure our happiness and, as such, it comes in the forms of commodity prices, house prices, the rises and falls of the stock exchange. If it’s up we smile; if its down we frown.
This form of number clearly guarantees as natural and excellent the superiority of the rich and hence if that is where real happiness is found then revolution is both abominable and impossible, being immoral in the face of our happiness and so it is the impossible to be that orients the world of restoration. Of course, numbers are also used as a threat, too: communism killed a ‘100 million’, is that what you want, say our contemporary apologists? Better to have this what we have which is not impossible day after day etc. I recommend you read the first chapter of Badiou’s Number and Numbers (NN) where he shows that for the most part our use of numbers in this commercial way hides the fact that we really don't know what Number is.
Without the thought of the Real, we have the reign of number in this commercial sense and so we have only the reign, coincidently, of opinions. Restoration is a circumscribed world within which opinions flow like money or currency; the imperative, as we know, is simply ‘get rich or die trying’ to update an old maxim – ironic that this is from 50-cent. Of course, this licences all sorts of activities and war itself so long as it is not a war that ends these activities.
In NN B shows that what is integral to the mathematical form of Number is something anathema to the commercial and that is what Mallarme, the great poet, called the unique number that cannot be another – thus Number that cannot be submitted to the reign of technique or commerce or opinion or voting and thus number as such is what announces the necessity of chance and also, then, the necessity of decision. So, what cannot be reconciled, what cannot be known and decision. These are within the real concept of number and not within the reign of number that orients our restoration. Again, Lesson 11 deals in part with this formalisation of number, active and rigorous in the century and opposed to the commercial reign of numbers.
Now here, returning to the theme of the two ways of treating the all, Badiou introduces his own numbers of the restoration. I won’t list them but these are numbers which verify a massive disjunction which is also a connection between the world of the west and that of Africa. You all know these numbers which are now still worse than when Badiou sites them nearly 20 years ago
As B puts it these verify
‘a) The obscure (almost ontological) tie that binds a satisfied Europe to a crucified Africa. Africa as the secret blackness at the heart of the White man’s moral detergent
b) The question of what is once again being labelled – like in the golden age of bourgeois dictatorships – ‘the egalitarian utopia’.
All equally free before the market might be the simplest translation of our new morality – and as Alasdair Macintyre observed a couple of decades ago, ‘morality functions today only as lip-service of a barren utility.’
The numbers game is not as straight forward as the numbers men suppose. We can all cite a number and this is the point here: this use of numbers makes numbers a matter of opinion, even if they are supposed to prove it somehow – by sheer weight of numbers? Just as in the voting obscenity.
But number escapes this usage, which means there is something besides opinion: mathematics has always denoted this, and of course those who use numbers commercially are playing on this. But what if what numbers tell us in their own terms contradicts the use of numbers in the commercial sense. What does this mean for the commercial reign of opinion? That it is empty where it thinks it is most full.
Against this, the second idea of the ‘all’ – of what the all can do, which is of course unknown but not unknowable – is the affirmation of this same impossibility: that what is impossible for the knowledge of our world, for the form of its representation, is in fact thinkable, is in fact, given we can make it so, its true, real possibility. Thus this second idea of the ‘all’ affirms, politically speaking, that an indifferent equality exists here and now – as its unique number, if you like – and takes the chance on inventing its true form. The orientation is by decision; that this impossibility is possible.
So note three things here: the representative or reactionary or restorative regime tells us what is impossible for all – the Real. As such, and despite itself, it actually denotes, interior to its own form, an equality of the all: this ‘nothing’ for it. Now Badiou, via the ontology that is mathematics for him – set theory in this instance – shows that in fact this nothing or void, which inheres in every type of situation, is in fact both thinkable thus demonstrable in set theoretic terms (which Mallarme alternately poeticises), and is in fact in those terms the foundational set of all set theory as such. Set theory is built on the void. Thus when you think any situation, at the level of its being, it is oriented by what is void for it or, if you like, impossible for it. And of course given the void cannot be predicated, it is then the same for all or it is a part of all. It is thinkable or traversable by thought!
So, an equality inheres in re-presentation: here and now. For reasons that take us a little off track but that are straight forward enough, Badiou will call re-presentation ‘the state of the situation’. Thus you can see in this already that if there is the state of the situation, there is that of which it is the state – as in re/presentation. In short, what presents itself is always sort of gathered up and held within the form of the state. This void, which inheres in every state, and which is Real for it and presents only itself, cannot be known as such. Such is why the state as representation is what makes it impossible. For Badiou, the state is simply an operation not a will. Thus the Real is what an event presents as of the situation without representation. The event is the irruption of the Real, if you prefer. And an event is simply what happens, and in its happening it exposes the state’s void: that it is not-all. And what is void for the state is, in a political situation, a matter for everyone, or for the all.
Thus, the event reveals what is for all. But not in its fullness: no new world is suddenly finished. It reveals what the state cannot know, which the ‘for all’ as subject makes true of it. In other words, what the all can be and do is what the state does not know about it! So an event happens but it is the subject that really matters. The subject is not a priori always hanging about. We know from the Ethics book and from the last lesson in this book that the humanist subject is incoherent – which is not at all to give in to the nihilism which posits there being no subject at all. We know this. The subject, for Badiou, is what takes up the struggle to force this unknown into the world as what is true of it. A subject is what makes truth out of the event. And a truth is a matter for all or it’s not a truth at all.
So this is the very simplified version of what Badiou is on about vis. this ‘impossible to know’ which is the orientation of any state form and is most clearly pronounced for us today in the positing of the market as this impossibility. An impossibility to which everything must be referred. And hence this is why we have no politics, because we must refuse a relation to the Real a priori. And as condition of our state or knowledge itself.
This truth/knowledge couple is the central antagonism of Badiou’s philosophy. Another way to say it is that knowledge is the form of constant adaptation, flexibility, innovation, resilience and so platitudinally on. Indeed, all the favoured terms of our incredibly stupid knowledge industry: thus change so that nothing changes; while truth is precisely in its coming to be as for all the change to this very regime of change. Truth(s) is not so much a change in the state but the end of the state form. That such a change is thinkable is of course Badiou’s philosophical challenge: that it is thinkable is demonstrated by political sequences going back forever in human history.
But note: the second form of the ‘all’, the true form, let’s say, is not anti or opposed to the first type. In effect it is, sure, but in orientation it is not. It is affirmative in its own right – it affirms the equality of the ‘all’ announced in the event, whereas the first form rejects its possibility. So it’s not a rejection of a rejection but an affirmation upon which something must be built.
The anti-capitalist movements that exist (in deed any movement predicated on anti-) for all their worth, have the problem of taking capital as their object, they have the problem of the priority of its negation. In a way they are exhausted by capital itself, always running in its train.
For Badiou, and this is really Marxism 101 – but in some respects, the anti-capitalist movements have unfortunately learned the lessons of their enemies too well and have come to believe that Marx is dead – what you don't do is take your cue from your enemy or if you like, you do not fight on the territory they set out for you.
Badiou, (Logics of Worlds):
Let me give an example from a long time ago. There was a battle, the battle of Gaugamela between the Persian Darius and the Macedonian, Alexander, Aristotle’s pupil – though there is evidence he didn’t care much for his teacher – a Platonist, clearly. Anyway the long story short is this: Darius had way more troops and the battle was to be fought on ground he had picked out and indeed he had this ground levelled so that his chariots would be at utmost effect. Alexander found out about this move and devised a unique and unknown battle formation that would entirely by-pass the need to fight on that ground, rendering it useless to Darius and thus he essentially subverted the central plank of Darius strategy by refusing his terms. Alexander, didn't oppose Darius head on as it were, he shifted the terms of the battle such that it became his battle. He re-oriented what was at stake, and I should add he used geometry to do it …
Now if you know Plato, for example, you know that in the Republic is a section about the link between geometry and war – geometry providing Plato a form of thought which was not shackled to the ways of knowing that circulated in the state – but the point is that rather than taking your lead from what you oppose, what is really more radical, chancy to be sure but also more profoundly concerned with change, is to take up a new orientation to the situation as it presents itself. Thus a new orientation from within – there is no outside; no, if you like, ‘potential infinite’. The infinite is here and now.
Now, this is what a revolutionary situation is. It’s not a ‘lets tear down the government’. This might be an impulse, but such is limited to the act or it might be simply an effect. Real change will of course make the existing government fall but so does voting. Rather, what is at stake is a new situation entirely, one whose own orientation and procedure of operation is entirely distinct from the previous one out of which it arises. So to go back to what I said above: if for parliamentary-capitalism equality is its impossibility – the one it organises itself around – then to affirm equality as here and now, in this same situation is to begin from a point entirely foreign to parliamentary-capital. You see what I mean? It is to be for what capitalism exists as the impossible to be, and not to be against capitalism as priority.
So war is paradigmatic of the century but it is divided in two, Badiou argues, in precisely the way I just noted: there is the war of state on state, which aims either at the destruction of one by another or it aims at some form of entente, or harmonisation of order. Or there is the form of the revolutionary war which aims at the end of the state form and thus no more war. Both, Badiou says, distinctly, to be sure, aim at the end of war or more abstractly for something definitive. But in their orientation and form they remain unreconciled and indeed the theme of the unreconciled is another permeation of the century. Badiou’s conceptualisation of this passes from the Christ like theme of the irreconcilability of God and man – the violence that the effort of reconciliation obtains – to the Deleuzian concept of disjunctive synthesis.
Here is Badiou’s description:
‘The century thought itself simultaneously as end, exhaustion, decadence and as absolute commencement. Part of the century’s problem is the conjunction of these two convictions. In other words, the century conceived of itself as nihilism, but equally as Dionysian affirmation. Depending on what moment we examine, the century appears to act according to either of two maxims: One (operative today, for example) calls for renunciation, resignation, the lesser evil, together with moderation, the end of humanity as a spiritual force, and the critique of ‘grand narratives’. The other – which dominated the ‘short century’ between 1917 and the 1980s – inherits from Nietzsche the will to ‘break the history of the world in two’, and seeks a radical commencement that would bear within it the foundation of a reconciled humanity.’
So ‘disjunctive synthesis’ is the name for this entanglement of this double negativity: that it’s not dialectical is the conceptual point. Thus these two forces insist together without the possibility of synthesis, and what we see in the century, in the wars of the century or in war as paradigm is this un-reconcilable and to an extent, in the revolutionary type war, an effort to overcome this disjunctive synthesis. But then still with regard to it!
In the century, then, ‘violence is legitimated by the creation of the new man. Needless to say, this theme only makes sense within the horizon of the death of God. A godless humanity must be recreated, so as to replace the humanity that was subject to the gods. In this sense, the new man is what holds together the fragments of the disjunctive synthesis.’
Ok, we have gotten a bit ahead. So lets go back and follow the diagnoses Badiou gives because this is also in effect what orients the method of the book and it’s lessons. For Badiou, what the 20th C says about itself in all the ways it says it – art, love, politics, science and in all the ways these manifest themselves in the form of true change – is that it has a passion for the real.
It wants to make real, manifest, actual, here and now, what the great 19th Century manifests as Idea. To cut this to the quick, then, the 19th C thinks the Idea of the new in many ways – new politics, new maths, new art, the sexual relation and the 20th century makes busy putting this into effect and, as we’ll see for Badiou, forcing it so far as the idea itself is sort of lost. This passion – and this is why he calls it one – sort of loses its reason at a certain point or it assumes that the real is outside of all reason if you like or that reason is exhausted in the real.
So as I keep stressing there is a ‘two fronts’ type of thing here: Badiou will not read the century in terms of representation, which will always tell the story relative to a set of determinate norms, but he will also not surrender reason – that reason which is in revolt, as we have spoken of – to the real of this revolt. Reason and the real must be maintained in this tight dialectic; to lose one is to lose the other. This is what is expressed in that phrase I used, ‘the 20th century did take place’, which Badiou takes from his long-time colleague Natacha Michel, which is itself a claim subversive of our modern representative democrats, whose goal is to occlude this ‘revolting reason’ at all costs. And of course it does so by knowing the century for us ‘all’.
And this refusal, then, is the basis of Badiou’s own reorientation to the century, which, as you see, includes the primary question: what is a century? (and I hope you take note of the reference to Genet – a reference that would be useful in the context of the endless debates about race and gender).
So what is a century, what are its determinations as such? Numbers won’t tell us much in this instance, so what of history? But then there are histories depending on what emphasis you give – and given history is essentially in service of what happens politically, we have centuries which would follow one political determination or another and these will be of different duration – the communist century would have its own time frame, the totalitarian century another, the century of capitalist triumph another again and so on.
It's like Brillat-Savarin’s famous quip – ‘tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you who you are’ but in this case it’s ‘tell me what you think of the century and I’ll tell you who you are’.
The century in each case is an object of some sort for a thought outside it. And thus, as I said above, Badiou’s is a philosophical approach to the century, and so what is the thought of the century is what is at stake and not the linking of narratives or their negations of one another. What did the century think that had never been thought before or what was thought in it which was unthinkable hitherto… Thus reading the century for what it thought of what it was doing.
Now, I touched on this last week but it goes again to the priority of this idea of what must be thought – specifically that we cannot begin to think on the basis that something is a priori unthinkable. The example par excellence, precisely because it is in fact the example which comes to dominate the second half of the long 20th C, is the Nazis. It is the example of pure evil or radical evil. And as such is unthinkable – any attempt to think it, which is to say, to speak of it within reason, is to legitimate it in some way – so the argument goes.
Of course at the same time as it cannot be thought it is used all the time as point of comparison: so Saddam, Gadhafi, Milosevic, Hamas etc., are Hitleriean figures, running totalitarian regimes, and of course withing this ‘logic’ Nazism at a point blurs into Communism insofar as they are totalitarianisms and so any regime determined as such is comparable, equatable, to Nazism as paradigm of radical evil. So we have a weird thing whereby we cannot think this evil but we can spot what it is everywhere or we can spot that nothing can be compared to it so radical is it.
This is the basis of both the totalitarian century, as Badiou calls it, and the liberal century: thus totalitarianism is the series of events of the century which led or will lead to gulags, camps, mass deaths or what have you, which we must refuse from thought at all costs as exemplary; and the liberal century of capitalist democracy, which is of course the reasoned and only antidote to these un-thinkables.
‘This is really nothing but the promotion of a politics without an alternative, a politique unique. Politics thinks, barbarism does not, ergo no politics can be barbarous. The sole aim of this syllogism is to hide the otherwise evident barbarity of the capitalist parliamentarianism which presides over our current fate. In order to escape this obfuscation we must maintain, in and by the century's testimony, that Nazism itself is both a politics and a thought.’
Now, the point is that if you posit the unthinkable you accord whatever it is a sort of absolution – a ‘beyond our capacity’. This lets it off the hook and makes it a figure for belief; thus we engage in a watered down theology.
Instead, it must be thought in order to be condemned and more importantly in order that we can see in it what we are also capable of when we lose what orients us to equality. It’s only on the basis of the impossibility of any equality that Nazism arises after all – it's a reaction to, an obfuscation of, a making manifest at the most extreme of this impossibility. Hence the Jew becomes the paradigmatic name for what cannot at any price be admitted and the Aryan the paradigmatic name to which everything must refer.
It sounds dumb and obvious to say it but a fundamental disjunction or inequality lies at the heart of Nazism. Is this not what is made unthinkable today – that this is an evil?
Now this alone makes it absolutely unlike the communist procedure. Certainly under Stalin we have camps and surveillance and executions and so on but the point of orientation is radically opposed in that these camps are predicated on the betrayal of the orientation that the communist program effects. That's to say, those sent to the camps etc., are sent because they are somehow not in the service of equality. Of course, that these crimes are largely, though not always, manufactured means that communism in this way has taken a state form – which is really anathema to the project as such – but nevertheless, the orientation is radically opposed to the Nazis. Indeed the Nazis themselves predicate their regime on being the antithesis and the destruction of the Soviet example. But let’s also not forget Stalin’s forces defeated the Nazi’s – something not at all paradoxically the West would like us to not know: to not know equality manifest defeated it’s manifest impossibility, predicate after all of the righteous reign of parliamentary capitalism.
Now clearly, unless you are a moron and utterly in service to the contemporary forms of reaction, this critique cannot be seen to support the camps: the point clearly is that unless we can think their distinctiveness and what makes them up, the processes of their becoming what they are – a political process that is, with its own thought – we are not only doomed to repeat them but are ourselves without reason; which is of course the very means of their repetition; thus, again we are reconciled only to a feeble theology which always desires its state. Either that or like Augustine you treat the real polity as the province of God alone.
Really, though, to posit the unthinkable is really the height of totalitarian thought – if we must use that stupid word: a thought that thinks itself absolute or as the very end of history, as it says, the realisation of knowledge per se. But it’s weird that this is predicted on the absolute determination of a space of the non-thinkable, of the outside reason. But of course it does save the discourses of the end of history, liberalism, capitalism etc., from any too close comparison, which is not a coincidence.
After all, as noted, the very condition of our western freedom, property rights, denies to millions in Africa and elsewhere access to various drugs, for example – Aids drugs most cruelly but so many others – that would alleviate much suffering. Simply, the structures of capital make them free to purchase them but the same structures make it impossible for them. So our humanitarian system diligently sends millions to their slow deaths when a simple quarter turn of the screw would change this. But as we have been taught to know as knowledge, we cannot out think the unthinkable, which the market has now become for us. This, by the way, is the obscene lie of philanthropy – of your Gates or Zuckerberg or heaven forbid, Singer etc. It’s no coincidence that philanthropy is back as moral façade given we have re-entered the 19th century version of monopoly capitalism and the destruction of the concept of the public – something that the 20th C passion for the Real built.
Now, this refusal of the unthinkable is a matter of what Badiou calls the subject and thus this refusal in the first instance is what he calls, in various works, subjeticfication or subjectivisation, depending on the translation. And so here the idea is to think the century from the perspective of these subjectivisations; from where the thought of the century refuses the determinations of representation regarding what is unthinkable.
So the century, not as object – historical, temporal etc., – but as subject. He says:
‘We wish to grasp the century on the basis of its immanent prescriptions; to grasp 'the century' as a category of the century itself. Our privileged documents will be the texts (or paintings, or sequences ... ) which evoke the meaning that the century held for its own actors; documents which, while the century was still under way, or had only just begun, made' century' into one of their keywords.’
So above I noted this movement from idea or invention to making manifest – to living out these inventions in thought in some fashion. Badiou determines a periodization – as called this in Theory of Subject. Thus there is the prologue to the Century as it becomes, involving great inventions across disciplines.
Here is the list he gives:
‘In 1898, Mallarme dies, shortly after having published the manifesto of modern writing, Un coup de des jamais. In 1905, Einstein invents special relativity (unless he was anticipated by Poincare), together with the quantum theory of light. In 1900, Freud publishes The Interpretation of Dreams, providing the psychoanalytic revolution with its first systematic masterpiece. Still in Vienna, in 1908, Schoenberg establishes the possibility of an atonal music. In 1902, Lenin creates modern politics, a creation set down in What is to be Done? This period also sees the publication of the vast novels of James and Conrad, the writing of the bulk of Proust's In Search of Lost Time, and the maturation of Joyce's Ulysses. Mathematical logic, inaugurated by Frege, with the contribution, among others, of 'Russell, Hilbert and the young Wittgenstein, together with its sister discipline, the philosophy of language, takes hold both on the continent and in the United Kingdom. Now witness, around 1912, how Picasso and Braque undermine the logic of painting. Husserl, with solitary obstinacy, elucidates phenomenological description. In parallel, geniuses such as Poincare and Hilbert - heirs to Riemann, Dedekind and Cantor - give a new foundation to the very style of mathematics. Just before the war of 1914, in Portugal, Fernando Pessoa sets some Herculean tasks for poetry. Cinema itself, having been invented only recently, finds its first geniuses in Melies, Griffith and Chaplin. The list of wonders populating this brief period could go on and on.’
As he notes, these sort of sit beside and cap off the great period of colonialist expansion, exploitation and brutality that establishes this thing called the West in all its progress. This legacy too leaks into the 20th C – indeed more than leaks. After this period of the golden age of invention comes the tragedies of the wars, the fascisms, the gulags, anti-colonialist wars and so on.
The point though is that in all this there is a notion that insists – the idea of the ‘new man’. The reinvention of what is possible for us to be. In the works of those cited it is new possibilities of thought, thought out if you like, so new thought, new ideas new truths are thinkable!
The 20th century, Badiou is suggesting here, is the next stage – the creation of the new man as such; the making of man as new. It can be thought, it must be real. Thus man is thought as matter for the new, and Badiou’s thesis is to treat this invariance as such, without already moralizing over it one way or another.
Digression:
Today, maybe you have noticed there is much oxygen given to the benefits of the colonialist project such that these must necessarily render the means inconsequential … it's a new moralism of the 18th and 19th century kind … but with a weird twist. The new moralizers inhabit what they consider to be the down trodden position: they think that they are discriminated against by all the discourses pointing out the horrors of the project of colonialism, that indeed the west itself is under attack from within or has been for too long by these critical discourses.
These claims are the type aped by the vulgar everyday commentators who scream political correctness everywhere. The irony being, then, that they first need to inhabit the so called sub-altern position – metaphorically to be sure, given they are usually rich and well connected – to carry on as they do. So they hate the discourses of critique but inhabit the position it tries to re-inscribe into thought in order to do so. It's a weird me to-ism but at this level it’s propaganda. At the level of the state, it is the order of knowledge itself – the knowledge of making the true unthinkable. Our media idiots are of course simply slaves, telling the tales of their masters.
But lets return to the sequence:
In the colonial situation, European man treats the colonized as matter for his progress and happily announces this as such: then, the great creators show what thought can do; then the century puts this thought of the new to work on the matter ‘man’. This is the basis of the sequence. ‘In this sense, the project of the new man is a project of rupture and foundation that sustains – within the domain of history and the state – the same subjective tonality as the scientific, artistic and sexual ruptures of the beginning of the century. Hence it is possible to argue that the century has been faithful to its prologue. Ferociously faithful.’
Now, recall this is still about method – this is the matter of the method we might say – the strands of its construction.
This idea of the new man – the new being thinkable – must be constructed out of the material man itself. In the colonial situation, man in his primitive or essential form, has been seen as changeable matter. So this comes together: thought and matter as a political construction. All the politics of the time is oriented toward this, Badiou says: Nazism no less than Communism; the nascent democratic international; the anti-colonialists; capitalism itself etc. Make man new out of the matter he is.
It’s clearly political. It's a project. It’s declared and decided in all these projects. But today, and this is part of why we need to rethink the century, we have gone back on the political force of this. We say these type of efforts, conscious ones, if you like, lead necessarily to disaster and so we must reconfigure the humanism of man – as essence not matter or some version of this; ethics is one name, as we know. That is, not treat man as means but as old Kant said, as end in itself. This is the liberal in liberal-capitalism. But as we know, it’s not so easy to know man!
Moreover, we do this, funnily enough, at a time when various technical outcomes of the sciences allow us to precisely, fundamentally change humanity and world as such – genetics, for example, allows us to change the very basis of what we know as human, as animal, as plant etc., and we know we are also changing the very climate of the planet itself with our technology.
But note the problem here: We have eschewed the political as the means to the worst; thus the means to the worst are now not a matter of politics. See the bind? And is this not what we see played out? There is a license to technology or more generally to anything deemed a matter of technique or specific expertise – so economy, our politics itself, knowledge more generally – to play itself out without political or really collective interference. Technique supersedes politics. Referring to Greece, ironically, the German economics minister Wolfgang Schäuble said: ‘Elections cannot be allowed to change anything.’
Ours at best is a politics of submission, in the first instance, and in the second and by consequence, of adaptation or administration. We find the ways to serve the new techniques, which are off limits to politics, as fait accompli. ‘Thus, it is perfectly coherent for the condemnation of the Promethean political project (the new man of the emancipated Society) to coincide with the technical (and ultimately financial) possibility of transforming the specificity of man. This is because such a change does not correspond to any kind of project. We learn of its possibility from newspapers; that we could have five limbs, or be immortal. And all this will come to pass precisely because it is not a project. It will happen in accordance with the automatism of things.’
To put this formulaically: whereas we had the subjective determination of objects we now have the objective determination of subjects; the return of the repressed. But the difference is that in the latter, the determinations of technology, there are only problems to be solved, there is no project. We hear all the time about solving this or that problem, which of course means keeping what there already is on track. We do not hear anymore about a project, precisely because it is a political adventure and all politics as we still call it is always already subordinated to the logic of there is no project, only what there is.
‘Believe me, inane ethical committees will never provide us with an answer to the following question: 'What is to be done about this fact: that science knows how to make a new man?' And since there is no project, or as long as there is no project, everyone knows there is only one answer: profit will tell us what to do.’
Now, we need here to just notice the continuity and the discontinuity: so the century from its inception has been one concerned with the new man, of how to make it new so to speak. The thinking of the new under the various guises, Mallarme, Einstein, Freud etc., confirmed the new as a political project: that we can consciously, actively produce the new in the century as man and for man, and this making new insists right up to the capacities of contemporary science to enable technique to blindly alter and reshape what we can be and the world we inhabit. In all guises, the century has made it real, so to speak. This is the passion for the real.
But the discontinuity is critical. In one part of the century, the inventions in thought lead to a political taking up of the new as such. A conscious, willing, determined act of thought put to practice. This gives rise to a series of names; heroes and culprits alike, sometimes the same names, sometimes even marking change under the same name and so on.
But now, under the reign of technique, we have a blind automatism of making new, where there is no-one to blame – the technique of the economy is certainly even more obviously in play here than science, given its capacity to act on any type of body. We always hear that we must obey the market; the market makes no errors precisely because it is not a project but a technique – there are only corrections. Change must not be political is the axiom of this form of change.
‘…from the register of the project to that of the automatisms of profit. The project will have killed many. Automatism likewise, and it will continue to do so, but without anyone being able to name a culprit. Let's agree – so that we may then seek an explanation – that this century has served as the occasion for vast crimes. But let's immediately add that it's not over, now that criminals with names have been replaced by criminals as anonymous as joint-stock companies.’
But note, this is not an equivalence but a disjunction. We need to draw a diagonal across this disjunction to invent another orientation entirely. For example, a new coupling of science and politics. Certainly this is what we need to think what is called ‘climate change’ but it also means we revisit and thus think these sequences of the century to see what is there, animate and critical within them and that is invariant to every form of subjectivity.
Ok, one more thing on the method or rather the manner of its transmission. Badiou calls them Lessons. This is not a casual thing to call them. If you have read Badiou at all, you will have noticed the various forms of transmission. The seminar form of Theory of the Subject, which takes place over several years and is analytic in the sense of it being a series of cuts and recommencements; in Being and Event, we have meditations, after Descartes, which are divided into three kinds, like the trinity: conceptual, textual and meta-ontological meditations. Logics of Worlds for which this book, The Century, is a forerunner and means of transition, is structured by a diverse set of transmissions including demonstrations, scholium, appendixes, notes and digressions as well as discursive descriptions of conceptual schema and their logical demonstrations all accompanied by again, a diverse array of examples. Anyhow, the means of transmission are themselves each time thought through: what form of transmission serves the thought under transmission.
And again I’d say that it is the thought itself that suggests its means or manner. So, we have lessons here. And basically a lesson is a decided period of time making up part of a course: instances, then, in that which is taking its course. What is the content of these lessons? Defined instances within the course of the century that make up the century itself. A lesson is an element of a set: a poem, a tract a treatise, a militancy, works of art are an element of the set named the century. A set or a century is simply the elements that make it up.
In the time that remains to us let’s look at the first two lessons, which give us an entrée into the Century, so to speak. So you see, he begins with a poem – Mandelstam’s The Age. I am not going to reanalyse the analysis, just abstract what I think are some of the key figures from it such that they reappear as motifs of this Century, the one under production here. But first lets not pass over that he starts with a poet and with a poet living through the event of the first great 20th C revolution – one that shook the world as John Reed memorably put it – and who lived within the duplicity of its consequences. Though this poem is written in 1923, before the Stalinist turn, lets call it.
In Badiou’s own oeuvre of conditions, poetry thinks the event. Why? Because the event is what happens and not what is – it's the undecideable of a situation – not a matter of its knowledge or its being as such. The poem is sort of what traces this indiscernibility between the two, which the event announces. It writes the event, if you like and here we have the event of the Century – its announcement of itself as world, we might say. And critically, as Badiou notes, inscribed in the announcement of this Age, this beast that is the becoming century, is an ambivalence …
‘In 1923, while the fate of the USSR remained in suspense, an intense intellectual activity still reigned. Mandelstam was poetically conscious that something fundamental was at stake in the chaotic developments affecting his country. He attempted to elucidate for his own sake the enigma represented by this moment of uncertainty and oscillation, which caused him great disquiet.’
Of course, an event ushers in, given it is taken up, incredible disquiet, to put it mildly. It is the modality of real change, after all and this at the level of or very knowledge of life and world. Eventality, if I can say this, is what Mandelstam is therefore addressing: the rupture and what it will have opened up in the world of Russia and beyond. And it is of course this rupture and reconfiguration that is the core of the century’s oscillation. That the new is real is something undeniable: what to do, as consequence, is where all the divergences, all the antagonism etc., come into play. At base: to say yes to this new real or no … and then how. You can see this motif recurs.
Badiou’s reading, however, situates the poem via the metaphor of the beast in what philosophically we’d call the vitalist register. It’s an organic, living thing, a life force. Hence the references here to Nietzsche and to Bergson – no prizes for guessing in whom these coincide and thus return in another part of the centuries thought – indeed, Badiou notes, ‘we still in part belong to this vital century’.
But anyway, the idea here is that the century is a life coming to live, so to speak or given life is a force in itself, what form this life will take. ‘The main ontological question that dominates the first years of the 20th century is: What is life? Knowledge must become the intuition of the organic value of things. This is why the typology of an animal can serve as the metaphor for the century’s knowledge.’ And the subsequent question or the consequent problem, if you prefer, is what is the true life – so what form of life is adequate to life as such… or what must we make of this organic force such that it is a true representation of it. In Badiou’s words: ‘The thinking of life interrogates the force of the will-to-live.’
This movement is the poem itself – or the poem performs this movement in its own terms; both of looking at itself as the century and as the century looking back at itself – so looking at its becoming and this becoming looking at itself. Something like that but note – for philosophers – here Badiou connects this vitalism with an historicism; the looking back at itself. This is a motif of Badiou, that, essentially, the concept of history – history as progression in time and thus away from what trails us, death essentially – is another name for vitlalism; or life and history name the same thing, the affirmation of becoming over being.
So from the get go, two motifs of the century – history and life inextricable in the poetic announcement of its coming, of what it will be. We can say, Hegel and Nietzsche if you like, but as long as we register that it is not in the names per se but in the procedures as such which the century undertakes. And we need also to note in this that we have not only the force of history or of life but a type of will too. In Hegel, it might be the absolute such that we know the history of what is as such; in Nietzsche, it is will to power: that is, to will what life makes possible for us. So you see, this adequation of life or pure animality and man such that he is not merely animal – such is what Mandlestam’s beast announces as one of the forms of the century.
Again, it is this second effect that matters for thinking the 20th C. History and life are conceptions of the 19th C, considered in terms of their ontological status. But in the twentieth century these ontologies are confronted, as the poem announces. We will life, we make history – thus we don't submit to it but confront what is at stake in it. This is the idea. ‘The project of the new man imposes the idea that History will be compelled, that it will be forced. The 20th century is a voluntaristic century. We could even say that it is the paradoxical century of a historicist voluntarism. History is a huge and powerful beast – it surmounts us – and yet we must endure its leaden gaze, forcing it to serve us.’
So, as I say, the problem announced in the poem played out in the 20th C as one of its ‘variants’ is this link between vitalism and voluntarism or in Nietzschean terms, life and will. We know that for Nietzsche the proper orientation is this will to life, this affirmation of all that there is, which leads soon enough to a splitting: that is, ultimately, between the will to life and its negation; history itself is this division for Nietzsche.
Badiou argues here that this heroism of the affirmation, which is then a willful discontinuity with the status quo, is the basis of a certain acceptance of the necessity of terror such that to affirm life as highest order is in a real way to make death into nothing, dying into a matter of will and killing into a matter of the process.
As principle, then, affirmation must be the right orientation to life, which itself cannot be questioned. ‘The underlying question is that of the relationship between life and terror. The century unflinchingly maintained that life can only accomplish its positive destiny (and design) through terror. Whence a sort of reversal between life and death, as if death were nothing but the instrument of life. Mandelstam’s poem is haunted by this undecidability between life and death.’
This undecidability is carried Badiou says, in the body of the century: born in blood and bone it is progress as such, its self construction carries this within itself, so that it is always ‘broken’, in a way. It proceeds broken. Referring to the way the first world war was spoken of at the time and for the period until the next – and thus unlike the weird celebration of it we enjoy today – Badiou says, ‘Butchery’ means slaughter, the pure and simple consumption of the lives of men – by the millions. But it is equally true that the century thinks of itself as the beginning of a new age, as the infancy of true humanity, as a promise. Even the exterminators presented themselves under the sign of promise and of a new beginning.’
So this double marks the century at its inception and forms one of its vertebrae we might say, one of the ways it constructs itself and experiences itself at once – a doomed promise or a promise of doom. Broken to begin with in so much butchery but nevertheless in this the promise that from it will come something else.
Another aspect of this is the relation between the 19th and 20th C, which has just begun, as it were or is trying to. It’s possible to say that WW1 is the link between them – continuity and also a discontinuity. But there are again ways to understand this link. Badiou posits two main options: that the 20th is the realization of what the 19th pronounced – its finality, in a way, such that as we have said it makes real or really, that its actors are fascinated by the real of what the 19th C imagined or even symbolized for it.
Or: the 20th C is a discontinuity – in the sense that it is the failure of the visions of the 19th. So a collapsed or declining civilization.
We know already it is the first; not as a commitment to horror in order that the promise be fulfilled tomorrow but in these terms: ‘I am convinced that what fascinated the militants of the 20th century was the real. In this century there is a veritable exaltation of the real, even in its horror. The century’s key players were anything but a bunch of simpletons manipulated by illusions. … the fact is that for these subjects the real included that dimension. Horror was never but an aspect of the real, and death a part of it.’
This is to say, in the real as such is horror and death but this is neither what you traverse to get there nor is it something you are ignorant about … for these actors it's a fact of political militancy, that there is horror and death and it will happen to you … and nevertheless you go on. It is a matter of the present, of the making of a present not of some imagined or promised future; no one dies for a promise.
Now, we come back to the place of art in this, the lesson of the poem in fact – which insofar as it occupies the site of the indiscernibility between being and knowledge is sort of like a discourse of the threshold. Certainly, the poem has been spoken of in this way throughout the century, by itself and by the likes of Heidegger and his followers, but in another sense it is also then the discourse of waiting or of maintaining a place for this waiting, thus, in this sense, interrupting the passage that associates life and will too seamlessly. ‘Mandelstam tells us that – subjectively speaking – we stand on the threshold with a ‘senseless smile’. ‘Smile’ because we are on the threshold, ‘senseless’ because, since the threshold is impassable, why smile? We go from life, from hope (the smile), to the absence of sense in the (senseless) real. Is this not the century’s subjective maxim?’
Ok. So on the threshold: we wait for next time to see where this all goes, where this sort of doubling of the imperative to make new or the passion for the real finds the variety of its announcements and its actors.
From the River to the Sea