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Rethinking Emancipation
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
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Acknowledgements ix
Note on Translations x
Abbreviations xi
Index 173
Acknowledgements
other thought which has emerged since Sartre was the dominant force
in European philosophy. They should not be seen as forming any kind
of united philosophical school, for disagreements and differences
between them are sometimes considerable, but their common and
steadfast refusal to make concessions to a variety of more mainstream
intellectual and political currents both sets them apart from numerous
other thinkers and suggests treatment within the same book.
Each of these writers has adopted as a major aim to explore notions
of equality, and the relationship between equality and emancipation.
For Badiou, the very idea of politics is intimately related to equality
and his philosophy includes an egalitarian presumption. His philoso-
phical system is organized around the notion of the event, which is
virtually synonymous with a broad concept of revolution, and as far
as politics is concerned the event is often an actual political and social
revolution in a traditional sense. For Balibar, his term 'equaliberty' is
at the heart of his understanding of politics, meaning that there can be
no freedom without equality, and vice versa. The notions of emanci-
pation and transformation are central to his definition of what is poli-
tical. For Ranciere, a discussion of equality is so central to his thought
that in a characteristically provocative way he argues that equality
is a starting point for any definition of politics and not just a distant
goal. Politics is intimately related to uprising and insurgency on the
part of excluded groups and against the unjust status quo; a disruption
of the normal order of things via a bold intervention by those who
have no voice.
In the broadest of terms, the work of these three thinkers is influ-
enced by Marxism, the ground from whence they all sprang in the
early years of their intellectual and political development. However
complex their intellectual discourses might be, and however unex-
pected some of their points of reference, they each still return fre-
quently to a common idea that an intellectual position of any real
significance must relate to an intervention in the material world
in order to change that world in an egalitarian direction. Despite
some highly novel, unorthodox and eclectic philosophical points
of reference, each seeks to interpret the world from a position that
starts with a belief in the need to pursue the logic of defending the
interests of ordinary people. Although none are now likely to describe
Contexts and Parameters 3
these thinkers has been and will continue to be greater in Britain and
the USA than in France itself. Taking the case of Alain Badiou,
although he teaches at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and
attracts large audiences to his seminars and lectures, there has been,
to date, only one major conference on his work in France, in 1999, in
whose proceedings many contributors are from outside France
(Ramond 2002). There have by contrast been a number of confer-
ences on Badiou's work in Britain and the USA. Moreover, there are
two general works on Badiou's philosophy in English (Barker 2002
and Hallward 2003) and only one in French (Tarby 2005a), and two
collections of essays on Badiou in English (Hallward 2004 and Riera
2005) where they are absent in French. The same applies to special
issues of journals.
A brief look at the careers of these writers also helps explain why I
have decided to group them together for treatment in this book. Alain
Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937, was a student at the
Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and began to work within a
broadly Althusserian framework. He taught philosophy at the Uni-
versity of Paris VIII from 1969 to 1999 and then began teaching at
the Ecole Normale. Greatly influenced by the May 1968 uprising, he
became a leading member of the Union des communistes de France
marxistes-leninistes (UCFML). He has been politically active ever
since, in particular as one of the most prominent activists in Organisa-
tion politique, a 'post-party' grouping launched in 1985 which orga-
nizes around a small number of key issues including housing, illegal
immigrants (sans papiers] and industrial change.
Etienne Balibar was born in Avalon, France, in 1942 and also stu-
died at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He worked at the Uni-
versity of Algiers, Algeria in the mid-1960s and then taught at the
Lycee de Savigny-sur-Orge, in France, then at the University of
Paris I fSorbonne) from 1969 to 1994. He held the Chair in Political
and Moral Philosophy from 1994 to 2002 at the University of Paris X
(Nanterre) and in 2000 took a Chair as Distinguished Professor in Cri-
tical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. He was a contri-
butor, with Louis Althusser, Roger Establet, Pierre Macherey and
Jacques Ranciere, to the original edition of Reading Capital (1965 y ,
writing chapters on the concepts underlying historical materialism.
6 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
Put more simply: 'Philosophy is, in the last instance, the class struggle
in theory' (Althusser 1973:11).
Contexts and Parameters 19
Althusser was insistent that there was a substantial and crucial dif-
ference between the young Marx and the mature Marx. He argues
that in Marx's early writings, which were enjoying much positive
attention in the postwar period in France, Marx had not broken philo-
sophically with Hegel, and the thesis contained within the early writ-
ings that Man was alienated and would later achieve self realization
was pure ideology rather than rational analysis. But in Marx's work
starting from The German Ideology (with Engels, 1970 [1932]) and the
Theses on Feuerbach (1968a [ 1888]), there emerged a true science of his-
torical materialism (both these works were written in 1845 and both
remained unpublished for some time). In fact, this 'epistemological
break', as Althusser describes it, was a scientific revolution in the
realm of history just as significant as the development of mathematics
in Greek antiquity and Galileo's pioneering work in scientific physics.
Althusser's theoretical innovations are without a doubt more
nuanced than the way in which they emerged from the heated debates
of the 1960s and 1970s and his posthumous works have on the whole
served to portray a more subtle philosophical and political analysis
than those seen during his lifetime. However, at risk of simplification
for the sake of concision, some of the other main aspects of his reading
of Marx and further elaboration of historical materialism can be sum-
marized as follows.
Again in For Marx, Althusser declares his intention to 'draw a line of
demarcation between Marxist theory and the forms of philosophical
(and political) subjectivism which have compromised it or threatened
it' (Althusser 1969 [1965]: 12). By the time Marx wrote Capital, he
could no longer be regarded as a thinker who emphasized the role of
the subject in history and humanist interpretations of his later works
were highly misleading. In fact, history was a 'process without a sub-
ject or goal' and he argued that '[t]o be dialectical materialist, Marx-
ist philosophy must break with the idealist category of the "Subject"
as origin, Essence and Cause, responsible in its interiority for all the deter-
minations of the external "Object", whose internal "Subject" it is
called' (Althusser 1973: 94). The role of the individual in history,
he argued, is one where s/he embodies the process but is not a subject
of history itself. Althusser pursues this argument by suggesting that
in relation to the capitalist mode of production, individuals are its
20 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
confirmed his dissidence within the PCF with the publication of his
essay 'What Must Change in the Party', which denounced the weak-
ness of democracy and the entrenched bureaucracy within the Party.
(Elliott 2006).
The above remarks on some key aspects of Althusser's thought are
intended to help understand over the course of this book the ways in
which Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere's thought has developed, both in
terms of the influence of Althusser and reaction against him. For the
time being, suffice it to say that Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere all
share characteristics which relate them directly to Althusser. Most
obviously, they each take an approach which is informed by a back-
ground in philosophy. Next, they each have strong views on the
nature of the human subject, which become an integral part of their
systems of thought. They are also each intensely political, to the
extent that they are part of the tradition of praxis, as discussed towards
the beginning of this chapter, and, like Althusser, view thought,
including philosophy, as an activity with profoundly practical ends.
Finally, they each remain influenced by Marxism - and arguably
Althusserian Marxism - on what are sometimes important points.
Concluding remarks
readers who have little familiarity with him, together with some dis-
cussion of what I regard as overall problems, relating in particular to
Badiou's ontology and his failure properly to explain movement and
change. Chapter 3 explores Badiou's theory of politics in more depth
and covers a wider range of areas of his political thought. I then turn
in Chapter 4 to an examination of Ranciere's theory of politics, adopt-
ing this sequence mainly because of the direct comparability between
some important aspects of Badiou's and Ranciere's thought. This
sequence also allows the two thinkers with the more totalizing view
of the world and of philosophy to be examined side by side. In Chap-
ter 5 I examine what I regard as the key aspects of Balibar's thought,
arguing that it is important to understand his political positions since
the early 1980s in order to understand his thought. Both Badiou and
Ranciere ultimately position themselves at a considerable distance
from the lived reality of politics and this weakens their ability to
forge a wholly relevant theory of politics. Balibar, on the other hand,
despite profound insights in some areas, ultimately fails to reconcile a
body of theory strongly influenced by Marxism with a more terre-a-
terre orientation towards the real world of liberal democratic politics
which is in some respects highly conciliatory.
Chapter 2
Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth
There is little doubt that Alain Badiou is among the most powerful
thinkers of our time and his thought is only beginning to receive the
attention it deserves. His project is profoundly innovative, radical and
contemporary, yet he is at the same time committed to some of the
central concerns of classical philosophy. He defines philosophy in
such a way that it is intimately connected with and dependent upon
issues of our time, but argues that the Platonic concerns of truth and
being are the sine qua non of philosophical enquiry. His influences are
varied and include Plato, Lacan, Sartre, Althusser, Mallarme and
Rousseau, but in the key area of the political he is clearly just as influ-
enced by his own activism on behalf of exploited groups. Badiou is in
strong and forthright disagreement with the central figures of post-
structuralist thought such as Lyotard and Derrida and more generally
with proponents of the linguistic turn and notions of the Other. But
whilst he condemns the 'sophistry' of poststructuralism he is no more
part of either the analytic or hermeneutic folds, also criticizing con-
temporary philosophers such as John Rawls who are persuaded by
the central importance to thought of human rights and individual lib-
erties. His relationship with Marx is more difficult to categorize, and
despite - or perhaps because of - the extraordinarily broad scope of
his theoretical references, he has not yet undertaken a systematic
engagement with Marxism. Above all, Badiou seeks to explore
momentous change in the form of what he describes as evenements,
and the consequences of these events, which are both of universal rele-
vance and defined in a highly subject-oriented way. Such events only
take place in the realms of science, art, emancipatory politics and
love, and human beings can only fully become subjects when acting
in a way which is faithful to an event. Badiou's thought is political to
the core, in that it explores the commitment, orfidelite, of a subject or
Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 25
active or tacit collusion by large parts of the French left with the gov-
ernment's war against Algerian nationalists in the struggle for
national liberation. He was part of the Lacano-Althusserian Cahiers
pour ranalyse group in the 1960s and was profoundly influenced by
the student and workers' revolt in May 1968, an uprising which has
had a key influence on his thought and to which he frequently refers.
In 1968 he co-founded the Maoist splinter organization, the Union
des communistes de France marxistes-leninistes (UCFML) and con-
tinued to act and write as an orthodox Maoist during the 1970s, up to
and including his Theorie du sujet, published in 1982. In 1988 Badiou
published UEtre et Vevenement, which can be seen in part as a major
rebuttal of the postmodern idea that philosophy itself no longer had
anything to say in terms of universal values, and had become a mere
reflection of developments in other spheres. This work effectively
established Badiou's philosophy as being independent from other
major modern schools (although there were clear and acknowledged
influences of a number of other thinkers) and it is here that he elabo-
rates at length his argument that mathematics, and in particular set
theory, offers the most useful model for understanding the nature of
being. Badiou has been politically active in defence of oppressed
groups since 1968 and since 1985 has been a leading member of the
small, 'post-party' political organization, simply called Organisation
politique, which intervenes directly in a variety of campaigns around
issues such as housing, immigration and rights at work and pub-
lishes a regular bulletin, entitled La Distance politique. In addition to
his numerous philosophical works he has published novels, plays
and the libretto of an opera. In this chapter I examine what can be
described as Badiou's mature work, that is his philosophy from
UEtre et Vevenement onwards, a period which is generally thought of
as post-Maoist, although traces of Maoism are still found in the
later Badiou.
Badiou is reasonably well known in France, at least within aca-
demic and intellectual circles concerned with left philosophy or
politics; he has taught philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure
since 1999 and before that taught at the University of Paris VIII
for thirty years. Neither in France nor elsewhere, however, has
Badiou received anything like the attention enjoyed by intellectuals
Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 27
thought finds itself before the following choice: either the effects of
discourse, language games, or silent indication, pure 'showing' of
what is subtracted from the grip of language. Those for whom the
fundamental opposition is not between truth and error or wander-
ing [errance], but between word [parole] and silence, between what
can be said and what is impossible to say. Or between pronounce-
ments which have meaning and those which do not. (C 62)
Truth
place" ' (PM 24). Put slightly differently: 'Something must happen,
in order for there to be something new. Even in our personal lives,
there must be an encounter, there must be something which cannot
be calculated, predicted or managed, there must be a break based
only on chance .. .'(PH 124).
Bearing in mind that truth can only occur in the domains of politics,
love, art and science, perhaps the most straightforward example we
can give is indeed in the realm of love between two individuals. Two
people meet by chance and fall in love, they commit to each other on
the basis of this encounter (the event) and remain faithful to it. These
individuals may not be able to understand fully their mutual attrac-
tion and commitment or be able to explain it to others. They might
not have been able to predict such a development given what they
knew of themselves and each other before it happened. The faithful-
ness to the event of their coming together might last for the rest of their
lives, or far less long. But having met each other and fallen in love, the
individuals embark upon a process of truth and self-realization as sub-
jects in the only way possible, that is in fidelity to an event.
It is not possible to prove (in an empirical, positivist sense) that an
event has taken place, as the truth process associated with the event
only exists through the active commitment of those who declare its
existence and importance. It even eludes definition. Truth is thus pri-
marily a matter of conviction, intervention and action, a process
which allows us in the only way possible to enjoy self-realization as
subjects. It occurs rarely and each manifestation of it is unique, but
its significance is universal. Badiou's distance from positivism and
empiricism is emphasized by frequent assertions that truth contrasts
starkly with knowledge, which is 'what transmits, what repeats'
(IT 61, EE 269, C 201). In the normal course of things, if'nothing
happens', there can be knowledge and there can be facts, but truth
cannot occur (MP 16-17). Drawing inspiration from Lacan (C 201),
he describes the relationship between knowledge and truth thus:
none of the calculations internal to the situation can account for its
interruption, and cannot, in particular, elucidate this kind of break
in scale that happens at a certain moment, such that the actors
themselves are seized by something of which they no longer know
if they are its actors or its vehicle [supports], or what carries it
away... (PHI 24)
'subjecthood' than the English because they are faithful to more revo-
lutions than the British, say, who have arguably arrived at a compar-
able socio-economic and political place without so many instances of
sudden, momentous change?
Next, it is still not clear to me why fidelity (generating subjecthood
and truth) must always be to an event, rather than to a state of affairs.
Is not love something that can emerge gradually, without an obvious
starting point, rather than as a coup defoudre? (Badiou is emphatic that
love is not just sex, incidentally.) Is not an expression of fidelity to the
1917 revolution as much shorthand for a commitment to a much
broader process, a particular view of the world and set of emancipa-
tory aspirations, which need not be expressed in terms of fidelity to an
event at all, but can be put in terms of, say, fidelty to the aspirations
and processes of socialism or communism, however they might be
defined? Could we not in fact one day be faithful, in theory at least,
to a (far more egalitarian and socially just) status quo, rather than to
a dramatic point of change? Why must fidelity necessarily be to a per-
haps disputed and/or somewhat arbitrarily defined point of departure
for what might become the status quo?
Some of Badiou's responses to these questions would no doubt
emphasize the mathematical nature of his ontology, which again he
derives in part from Lacan and which is a major focus ofL'Etre et Veve-
nement. He is in search of the highest possible level of purity, which is as
removed as possible from the material, and for him this level of
abstraction is achieved by multiplicity as articulated by set theory.
Philosophy has excluded maths for too long, he argues, in part
because of its profound preoccupation with language, and must now
become re-involved with maths, not as a philosophy of mathematics
but as philosophy which depends on and is conditioned by maths,
which is accountable only to itself - it is axiomatic and does not inter-
pret or represent - and is thus sovereign in an absolute sense. In par-
ticular, Badiou's ontology is based on set theory as elaborated by
Georg Cantor, who radically redefined the relationship between the
finite and the infinite, and the relationship between the parts and
the whole. Being in these terms is pure multiplicity, and in set theory
multiplicity is multiples of multiples and nothing more. We can
describe Badiou's concept of the 'situation' as being the same as a set,
Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 41
will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life;
and from the strong principle of inheritance they will tend to pro-
duce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preserva-
tion, I have called, for the sake of brevity, Natural Selection.
(Darwin 1968 [1859]: 169-70)
In the social production of their life, men enter into definite rela-
tions that are indispensible and independent of their will, relations
of production which correspond to a definite stage of development
of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations
of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and
to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production of material life conditions the social, political
and intellectual life process in general ... At a certain stage in
their development, the material productive forces of society come
in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what
is just a legal expression for the same thing - with the property
relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From
forms of development of the productive forces these relations
turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. (Marx
1968b [1859]: 181-2)
For both Darwin and Marx the theories of the status quo (to the
extent that there can be a status quo where there is constant move-
ment) incorporate a theory of change within them. For both writers,
the 'event' for Darwin adaptation and for Marx social revolu-
tion - takes place as a result of aspects of the 'situation' explained in
large part by their more general theories of this ever-changing status
quo. For Badiou it is the other way round; something happens which
cannot properly be explained by reference to the already-existing
circumstances - 'the idea of massive change whose origin is a state of
totality is imaginary' (EE 197) - and becomes an event of significant
proportions because someone or some people commit themselves to
what has happened. (Thus for Badiou an event cannot possibly be
a natural event because there are no subjects in nature [EE 194].)
In the case of Marx, the subject is certainly important to the extent
that without agents of revolution there can be no revolution, but
revolution in France for Marx, for example, was absolutely explic-
able with reference to, in particular, the socio-economic contradi-
tions under the ancien regime, in conjunction with an understanding
of, for example, political developments. Badiou might in both cases
respond by saying that the subject is absent from the cores of both
Alain Badiou: Event, Subject and Truth 45
Concluding remarks
a blind alley from which it must now remove itself. But he has little
time either for any of the schools of philosophy which espouse forms
of liberalism. I have suggested that Badiou succeeds in exposing
much contemporary philosophy - postmodern and otherwise - as
essentially a series of areas of intellectual activity which are unwilling
or unable to engage with the material world in a way that offers a
manner of thinking about changing the material world in anything
more than the most modest and unthreatening ways. I have also sug-
gested that his assertion of the importance of intervention in order to
achieve understanding which in turn leads to further intervention is a
persuasive line of argument.
I have also suggested, however, that the theory of the event, at the
very heart of Badiou's scheme of things, is problematic for a number of
reasons. Among these are, first, that Badiou is not able to explain the
genesis of the event from the status quo from which it springs. Second,
I fail to see why we cannot act in fidelity to the status quo, or a process,
or a series of aspirations, for example, rather than to an event. Third,
and perhaps most importantly, sophisticated though Badiou's mathe-
matical ontology may be, he does not seem to show convincingly that
set theory explains the world as it actually is, and more importantly
how the world changes. I have suggested that in order to understand
radical transformations - events - we need to have a theory of the
status quo which describes an already-existing state of flux, whereas
Badiou's status quo is rather static.
I hope to have prepared the ground for a more detailed examina-
tion of Badiou's political thought in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
In short, true politics takes the form of an event. It seems to come from
nowhere, depends for its existence on the militant activity of people
who become subjects in the process of acting in fidelity towards the
event, and has universal significance.
Following his long-term activist and theorist friend Sylvain
Lazarus, Badiou identifies four historical 'modes' as far as politics is
concerned: the revolutionary mode, from 1792 to 1794 in France and
represented on an individual level by Robespierre and Saint Just; the
classist mode, from the publication of Marx and Engels' Communist
Manifesto in 1848 to the Paris Commune in 1871; the Bolshevik
mode, identified in particular with Lenin, running from the publica-
tion of Lenin's What is to be Done? in 1902 to 1917; and finally the
The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics 51
action on the part of someone (or some people) who becomes a sub-
ject - is for him not part of the normal course of things. Instead, it
comes about as part of a chance encounter with an event towards
which individuals decide to act with fidelity and which radically
changes the situation in which they exist.
One problem with Badiou's conception of the subject is that, even if
one accepts subjecthood emerging amongst individuals who commit
to an event, the subject is only partially a subject in that s/he reacts to
events which Badiou tells us simply happen; the subject plays no part
in causing the event. Badiou is thus still quite a long way from Sartre's
interpretation of the subject where each individual is at liberty to
shape their own destiny and bear the consequences of this course of
action, and indeed in some senses compared with Sartre, Badiou
comes closer to Althusser's notion of history as 'process without a sub-
ject', precisely because for Badiou subjecthood is so uncompromis-
ingly retrospective. A thorough theory of the subject lying between
Sartre's arguably excessively free individual and Badiou's after-the-
event activist is, it would seem, still to be written, influenced more clo-
sely perhaps by Marx's notion of human beings creating their own
history but within particular circumstances.
As with the event in relation to the subject in the other domains
where truth procedures take place, there is in Badiou's reflections on
the political event a peculiar mix of the highly passive and highly
active on the part of the subject of the event, whose own perspective
is the only one which is of real note:
Thus before the event the subject-to-be does not yet exist as a subject,
to the extent that he or she, or more accurately in the case of politics
they, only create the event (and themselves as subjects) after it has
taken place. Once the event has happened the subject becomes crucial
to the event's (retrospective) existence and significance: 'It will
always remain doubtful that an event has taken place, except for the
one who intervenes' (EE 229). For a committed view of politics, and
one which is arguably highly influenced by the notion of praxis, it is
rather odd that the role of the activist is so retrospective in relation to
the event and a matter of faith, rather than being one of planning a
course of (perhaps revolutionary) action and changing the world.
For example, the Bolsheviks surely did not wait for the 1917 revolu-
tion before behaving in a revolutionary manner and becoming agents
of change, and one does not necessarily fall into a teleological trap if
one believes otherwise. Even the May 1968 uprising in France, which
is famous for not having been predicted, is surely explicable only if one
takes into account such factors as: prolonged struggles against coloni-
alism in the 1950s and 1960s; both the strength of the PCF and its par-
tial discrediting during this same period, thus generating many
activists to the left of the PCF; the immediate international context
of the anti-Vietnam war movement; years of resistance to de Gaulle's
authoritarian regime; and finally, decades of work on the part of
the PCF itself and sympathetic trade union organizations such as the
CGT, which (albeit somewhat belatedly) contributed to building
the general strike in May-June 1968, and helped to give the uprising
the historic, eventmental significance which Badiou identifies. This is
not to deny that when the trade unions negotiated with the employers
at the end of May and beginning of June in the Crenelle negotiations,
this had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of the workers'
protests. Moreover, the Crenelle negotiations certainly resulted in
changes which were meagre compared to the strength of the May
movement (see Capdevielle and Mouriaux 1988).
In short, history suggests that the role of activists resisting aspects of
the status quo was crucial in terms of preparing the ground for and
sustaining the momentum of May 1968, which is not to say by any
means that the uprising was inevitable. If, on the other hand, events,
56 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
Zizek points out that this approach also confronts head-on the histor-
ian Francois Furet's revisionist approach to the French Revolution,
where Furet attempts to remove the evental-revolutionary signifi-
cance of 1789 and instead presents it as a series of individual historical
facts (Zizek 1999: 131-2, 135-6). But Zizek goes on to question
Badiou's elaboration of the place of the subject in his system, arguing
that the subject plays a far more ideological role than Badiou is pre-
pared to admit, and that Badiou's Truth-Event is in fact close to
Althusser's notion of ideological interpellation. Zizek also argues con-
vincingly that Badiou's most compelling example of the event and the
emergence of subjects via fidelity to the event is the Christian religion
as explored in his book on Saint Paul, and that this religious event
does not fit within the four generic procedures, namely love, art,
science and politics. There is, then, an unacknowledged ideological
and religious logic at the heart of Badiou's thought (141). (See also
Daniel Bensai'd's chapter, 'Alain Badiou et le miracle de Pevenement',
in Bensaid 2001: 143-70.)
I have argued above that in the broader context of much French
philosophy of the final third of the twentieth century, Badiou is nota-
ble in particular for his assertion of the importance of the role of the
subject. We should no doubt add that Badiou is in this context also
notable for the emphasis he places on the notion of equality and on
the political more generally. In light of this it is worth anticipating
somewhat the next chapter and pausing to compare Badiou's work
with that of Jacques Ranciere, who has a substantial amount in
common with Badiou, and who might also be deemed to be exploring
philosophy beyond the postmodern. (See especially Ranciere 1992,
1995, 2001 and Robson 2005a.) Ranciere's conception of politics
relies on a notion of the gap between the established order on the one
hand and on the other hand political interventions on the part of mar-
ginalized individuals or groups who disrupt the injustice of the status
quo. By intervening in this way the excluded assert their right to be
understood in a way that the discourse of received wisdom does not
allow; the rebels' statements cannot be understood by the ruling
order (or 'police' as Ranciere describes it) and the conditions of com-
prehension are created in the process of rebellion and its aftermath,
through the rebels seizing the opportunity to assert themselves and,
The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics 61
There are various other key aspects of Marx's thought that are
absent or only found in very weak forms in Badiou's work. Most
obviously, we have seen how Badiou almost entirely rules out any
role for the economy and when referring to the economy, perhaps tell-
ingly, appears happy not to contest what Marx says (commenting
that 'global trends have essentially confirmed some of Marx's funda-
mental intuitions' [PH 117]), but simply to endorse it without how-
ever integrating it into his own work. For Marx, of course, however
much one might wish to interpret his thought as 'non-reductionist',
an understanding of the emergence and development of the capitalist
economy is key to understanding the emergence of the bourgeoisie as
the dominant exploiting class, the emergence of the proletariat as a
64 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
trade unions to counter the power of capital. One might for example
expect an activist left intellectual to work with a trade union like
SUD, which was formed in 1989 and attempts to rediscover the tradi-
tional radicalism of French trade unionism, declaring in its charter
that a transformation of society is necessary and that this will involve
a 'profound break with the logic of capitalism' (in Blakey 2001). SUD
is also at pains to be innovative and open to influences which are not
part of the traditional core of trade union preoccupations, such as
those of the homeless and illegal immigrants. But Badiou is insistent
that it is wrong to attempt to take on one's adversaries on their own
territory, including in the context of trade unions. By the same token,
the antiglobal movements, whose supporters have demonstrated at
international meetings of global capital in Genoa and elsewhere, 'ded-
icate themselves to a systematic and economist identification of the
adversary, which is already utterly misguided' (BF 120).
Badiou also emphasizes the importance of the concept of 'two
counted as one' in any attempt to understand political processes, in a
way that is also strongly influenced by Maoism (e.g. PP 106). His
notion of the two is highly complex and varied, but taking the case of
the event, when an event takes place the situation is divided into two
because the subjects of the event act in fidelity to certain aspects of the
situation which relate to the event and not to those which do not relate
to the event. Once the event has taken place, there is no relationship
between these two groups of aspects (or these two sets of elements)
(EE 229; C 290; S 89-102). Again, the theory of the two reinforces
the perception of Badiou as a discontinuous philosopher, rather than
one who can explain history in continuous or evolutionary terms.
Rather than approaching Badiou as a Marxist thinker, then, it is
more helpful to see his thought as being influenced in a general way
by the emancipatory spirit of Marx, without what might be described
as Marx's scientific method. In spite of Badiou's elaborate mathema-
tical discussions, his thought does not share what Marx and Engels
described as a scientific approach to socialism, which dissects the
mechanisms of capitalist society and in light of this dissection explains
the transformational potential these mechanisms offer. Writing in the
early 1980s, Badiou suggests that Marxism is far less able than it once
was to help understand the nature of reality. 'We are thus brought
68 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
back to the figure of the beginning ... We proceed from the "there is"
of a break, and ... we are putting forward, like Marx in the Manifesto,
inaugural political hypotheses. More particularly, we are (re)formu-
lating the hypothesis of a politics determined by non-domination ...
We must re-write the Manifesto' (PP 59-60). He goes on to say that the
'previous Marxism - of the completed cycle of Marxisation - serves
as a whole body of thought as a "Hegelian-type" reference: both
necessary and not prescribing anything particular. Marxism has
become in relation to itself its own Hegelianism' (PP 61). Marx is
thus a source for 'the beginning of a different way of thinking polities'
but the destruction of Marxism-Leninism at the same time highlights
the necessity for, as well as creating the possibility of, 'an entirely new
practice of polities' (PP 63-4).
With only a little exaggeration, one might suggest that in relation
to Marx, Badiou's work represents a reinvertion of the dialectic,
putting Hegel's dialectic on its head again. Badiou certainly shares
with Hegel a belief in the generative power of abstract and absolute
universals, which for Hegel takes the form of Geist and which for
Badiou takes the form of the logic of mathematics. In both cases the
material world is a sort of local manifestation of the abstract and the
spiritual (or the mathematical) rather than the other way round.
In fact Badiou goes far in this direction and defines a subject as a more
concrete manifestation of the abstract, as 'any local configuration
of a generic procedure where a truth is sustained' (EE 429), a 'finite
instance of a truth' (EE 447).
To conclude this brief discussion of Badiou's relationship with
Marx, it is worth quoting Marx's discussion of Hegel, by way of high-
lighting Badiou's very different position:
Democracy
Parliamentary politics
such a dynamic of its own that studies sometimes have little or nothing
to say, for example, about what election results can tell us about poli-
tics more generally, in these studies' eagerness to quantify to the nth
degree. This is not to deny the usefulness of some empirical and quan-
titative studies and some commentary on election results can be very
useful in that it throws light on politics in a deeper sense. To take one
example, Collette Ysmal (2004) provides a fascinating, detailed ana-
lysis of the French elections of 2002 which also has a lot to say about
French politics and society more generally. But the general effect of
widespread quantification is indeed to detract from debates regarding
how parliamentary politics might be made more democratic, for
example, or what the alternatives might be. However, Badiou does
seem to miss the point that although elections in liberal democracy
are a very poor substitute for profounder democracy, they do never-
theless have a real relationship with a deeper democracy. They are
a form of politics which is to an extent influenced by a deeper and
more valid notion of democracy than Badiou would give credit for,
which means that - without neglecting other spheres of political
activity and activism - this is an arena with which progressive thin-
kers ought also to engage and at times intervene in. Badiou appears to
believe that once one is tainted with participation in such a process
one is bound to capitulate to the mainstream view of everything.
This view of partial participation in more mainstream political activ-
ity such as the elections or trade union work reflects in part a view that
radical, innovative movements such as feminism and green politics
can and have been adapted, de-radicalized and adopted, ultimately,
to suit the needs of capital. In the language of activists of the decades
following May 1968, during which time this type of development was
common (and arguably has been perhaps even more so since the
beginning of the 1980s), this is recuperation.
Badiou discusses developments in parliamentary politics at some
length in an article entitled 'On the Presidential Election of April-
May 2002' (C1 13-43), commenting that 'the election result certainly
seemed to me to be important, because politically - and I have been
saying this for many years - this country is very ill' (Cl 15). In the
presidential elections of that year, the National Front leader Jean-
Marie Le Pen went through to the second round in a run-off with the
74 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
Gaullist (and eventual victor) Jacques Chirac, after winning 16.9 per
cent of the vote in the first round. Badiou argues that popular reac-
tions to the relative success of Le Pen in the first round - huge protest
demonstrations, meetings, mass distribution of leaflets, and so on -
were yet another way of showing that elections serve mainly to rein-
force the politics of moderate consensus which is so characteristic of
France today (Cl 18-19). Elections do not reflect free expression, he
argues, and in the same way the right would have demonstrated mas-
sively if a Trotskyist candidate had gone through to the second round,
reminiscent of right-wing backlash demonstrations on 30 May 1968
and in 1982 in defence of private schools and against moves to bring
them more in line with state schools. 'The only reasonable conclusion
one can draw is that nothing ever happens with regard to decisive
transformations in the politics of a country if one relies on elections,
because the principle of homogeneity hangs over them ... making
sure that things continue as before* (Cl 20, italics in original). Badiou
argues that instead of simply protesting against Le Pen, demonstra-
tors should have denounced elections and he reminds us of the slogan
from May 1968: 'elections, trahison' (C1 22). Reminiscent of the anar-
chist slogan, 'whoever you vote for the government will get in', this
comment also echoes other instances when Badiou insists that for him
the guiding principles in this domain are 'don't stand for election, don't
vote, don't expect anything from any political party' (PH 115). For
him there is no real difference between Le Pen and recent French gov-
ernments which have persecuted sanspapiers (Cl 25). He argues that
the word democracy 'crystallises consensual subjectivity' (Cl 28)
and that the huge number of abstentions recorded in the elections of
2002 show that 'democracy is becoming a minority interest' (C 33).
One might ask if a dwindling vote is not what Badiou is advocating,
given that 'voting is the only known political procedure of which
immobilism is the more or less inevitable consequence' (Cl 34).
Badiou goes further than one might expect in this direction, arguing
that 'voting is by principle a contradiction of principles, and of any
idea of protest or emancipation' (Cl 35). He again asks why number
is so dominant when scientific and artistic innovation has always
taken place against the flow of dominant opinion, and reminds us of
the minority nature of Resistance, anti-colonial activists, and so on.
The Paradoxes of Alain Badiou's Theory of Politics 75
Concluding remarks
come out of the blue and did not seem to fit with the circumstances of
its genesis (the 'situation' in Badiouian language). From President de
Gaulle to the activists taking part, via analysts who had the benefit of
hindsight, many have struggled to explain convincingly the causes
and nature of the movement but few have succeeded and no widely
respected view has emerged. During May, activists quickly became
passionate about revolt in favour of greater justice in many and pro-
found ways, keeping this idea going for many years after the uprising
itself had ended; Badiou would describe this as subjects acting in fide-
lity towards May. In a way, to examine rationally the causes of May is
to spoil the specialness, the excitement and the 'inexplicability' of
May, and it might be argued that Badiou extends this reluctance to
his approach to all events. But it is necessary to continue to attempt
to examine the reasons for the May uprising, just as it is for all upris-
ings and other phenomena which Badiou would describe as events.
May did spring out of the circumstances of the time and historians
must continue to examine the revolt in that way, however difficult it
might be to imagine such an uprising today.
Chapter 4
Jacques Ranciere:
Politics is Equality is Democracy
and liberal democracy, and there are key elements of his discussions
of democracy, consensus and dissensus that are useful and insightful.
It is a powerful and substantial intervention which is in some ways
useful as a tool to understand politics in advanced capitalist countries
in the early twenty-first century. But I also argue that Ranciere's con-
ception of politics is too narrow to be useful as a general method in
approaching the political, and that his definition of politics seems
to contain elements of self-destruction where progressive, egalitarian
politics can only fail and revert to the unjust status quo.
put it, 'establish what working class tradition was, and to study how
Marxism interpreted and distorted it ... I posited the existence of a
specifically working-class discourse' (Ranciere 1997b). Searching for
a 'real' history unmediated by historians with a particular paradigm
or school of historiography to defend, La Parole ouvriere reflected a view
that in order to understand the true nature of working-class values
and their expression one should turn to this period and in particular
to the socialism of the French artisans.
Embarked on a quest for the authentic and essential voice of the
progressive, nineteenth-century working class, Ranciere was at this
point wide open to the allegation of populism, to the accusation that
he and his collaborators had a naive faith in the forward-looking and
egalitarian outlook of this particular section of the French work-
ing class. But a new, if no less controversial, twist was to make such
criticisms less relevant. As a result of his intense archival activity,
Ranciere came to believe that the nineteenth-century working class
behaved less autonomously and with far less pride in itself than he
had previously thought, and was 'a working class which was more
mobile, less attached to its tools and less sunk in its poverty and drun-
kenness than the various traditions usually represent it' (Ranciere
1988:51). He now argued that, contrary to the belief of many his-
torians of the nineteenth-century working class, many ordinary
working people did not take pride in their work and in their way of
life. Quite the contrary; many - including the most significant and
militant artisans - were primarily preoccupied with planning or at
least dreaming about an escape from their own trades and ways of
life and were hankering after the lifestyles and cultures of the bour-
geoisie. The aspirant, self-taught and articulate amongst these indivi-
duals, who imitated the more privileged, were the most impor-
tant object of study for the socialist historian: 'A worker who had
never learned how to write and yet tried to compose verses to suit
the taste of his times was perhaps more of a danger to the prevailing
ideological order than a worker who performed revolutionary songs'
(Ranciere 1988: 50).
This approach of course constituted a substantial shift away from
Marxist historiography. For Marx, the future was likely to be shaped
by the collective might of the proletariat, of wage labourers and their
88 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
allies, who would work for the cause of socialism because it was they
who suffered most from the process and consequences of the Industrial
Revolution. It was they who were most likely to organize resistance
and revolt, in part because they had the least to lose. Aspirant arti-
sans, Marx had argued, had far more to lose than the proletariat and
in fact benefited from the status quo, compared with proletarians at
least. Whatever one might make of Ranciere's new approach, it was
indeed this particular shift, which was arguably as significant as his
earlier strong reaction against Althusser, that led to some unique posi-
tions and placed his thought in a far less identifiable place in a disci-
plinary sense than had previously been the case. He was now working
on the boundaries between history, aesthetics and critical theory, and
later political theory as well. Ranciere was now looking at working
class history as culture, as writing, rather than social or political his-
tory in the more conventional sense.
His work was certainly intended to be provocative and to challenge
much accepted wisdom, including orthodox historical materialism.
The Nights of Labour: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France
(1989 [1981]) follows in great detail intellectual expressions of work-
ing class life of the 1830s and 1840s such as workers' debates with the
Fourierists and St Simonians, views expressed in popular newspapers,
diaries, letters and poetry. Many of the individuals and groups who
produced this material were affected by the July 1830 uprising in a
way Ranciere and his generation were by the events of May 1968.
Via an examination of these documents Ranciere attempts to demon-
strate how working-class thought in the nineteenth century, far from
identifying proudly with a culture of the working class, on the con-
trary strived to effect a rupture with any such culture and instead
sought to take on the mantle of writers and poets. 'At the birth of the
"workers' movement", there was thus neither the "importation" of
scientific thought into the world of the worker nor the affirmation of
a worker culture. There was instead the transgressive will to appro-
priate the "night" of poets and thinkers, to appropriate the lan-
guage and culture of the other, to act as if intellectual equality were
indeed real and effectual' (Ranciere 2003 [Afterword]: 219). In other
words, these worker-intellectuals, far from writing in order to con-
solidate a popular culture with pride in its honest simplicity and
Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy 89
[t]he idea of a 'poetics of knowledge' that would cut across all dis-
ciplines thus expresses a very close relationship between subject and
method. The Mights of Labour was a 'political' book in that it ignored
the division between 'scientific' and 'literary' or between 'social'
and 'ideological', in order to take into account the struggle by
which the proletariat sought to reappropriate for themselves a
common language that had been appropriated by others, and to
affirm transgressively the assumption of equality. (LP 5)
The Nights of Labour was also the beginning of what would become
a more developed critique of historicism (in NH), exemplified in
particular by the histoire des mentalites approach of the Annales school,
and Ranciere later argued that to interpret a historical phenom-
enon by reference to its time was to lend such an interpretation a
wholly spurious authority. The view that many historians were prac-
tising a 'discourse of propriety' and serving to consolidate a received
wisdom about past and present was to push Ranciere even further
into a studied a-disciplinarity and an ever stronger opposition to
anything remotely or partially relying on positivism or empiricism
(DW 121-2).
There is, it would seem, an irony with this shift away from a view of
the working class as a progressive force because of its pride in working-
class traditions and practices, to a view of ordinary people as being
most challenging to the status quo in a progressive sense when they
seek to imitate other (more privileged) groups and classes. However
problematic Marx's claim might be in its empirical detail that the
working class, by acting in a way which is true to itself, can be the
vehicle of its own emancipation, Ranciere's determination to shed
any remnants of claims to scientific references - including 'scientific
socialism' - is at least equally problematic. If Ranciere viewed other
90 BadioUy Balibar, Ranciere
exploited what they should be doing and thinking, how they should
remain in their respectives roles and places.
If The Philosopher and his Poor was one transitional work on Ran-
ciere's way back to theory, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in
Intellectual Emancipation (1991 [1987]) was the other. In this slightly
later book he challenges the dominant notions of the nature of
teaching and learning by exploring the emancipatory pedagogy of the
eccentric Joseph Jacotot (1770-1840). Jacotot was a multi-skilled
emigre teacher at the University of Louvain who took as a starting
point the belief that all human beings have equal intelligence and
that differences in educational attainment stem almost exclusively
from differential opportunities and experiences. This relatively un-
contentious starting point, which is indeed found in many liberal and
left-leaning approaches to pedagogy, leads Jacotot to a far more radi-
cal assertion that the position of the teacher is not one of authority
where she or he imparts to students what s/he knows and what the
students do not know. Quite the contrary; the best learning takes
place along the same lines as infant language learning, where experi-
ment, exploration and imitation are far more important and effec-
tive than the conventional pedagogic process which involves receiving
and absorbing knowledge passively from one's teacher and then
reproducing it. Perhaps more reminiscent of supervision of disser-
tations or theses in higher education than of conventional school
teaching or even some undergaduate teaching, Jacotot's challenge
to conventional pedagogy is so extreme that, as Ranciere puts it:
'[t]he duty of Joseph Jacotot's disciples is thus simple. They must
announce to everyone, in all places and all circumstances, the news,
the practice: one can teach what one does not know' (IS 101). This
highly unorthodox approach to pedagogy could hardly be further
removed from that of Althusser, whom Ranciere quotes in La Le$on
d'Althusser as follows: 'The object of pedagogy is to transmit a particu-
lar body of knowledge to subjects who do not possess this knowledge.
The pedagogical situation therefore relies on the absolute condition
of inequality between knowledge and absence of knowledge' (LA 17, italics
in original). Jacotot apparently did teach languages to students
from a position of having no knowledge of the languages himself
and according to Ranciere this de-mystified form of teaching which
94 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
lead different lives from the ones they have been leading. True politics
exists when there is a popular uprising of a particular type, when the
sans-part revolt and disrupt the status quo by asserting their right to be
equal with all others. This direct challenge to the unjust status quo
itself takes the form of a declaration of radical equality on the part of
the excluded and is necessarily just:
Concluding remarks
ordinary person at the heart of his system and suggests that a form of
self-realization, or political subjectivity, comes about via an asser-
tion of equality in a process by which the views and interests of the
sans-part assume universal significance. Taken as a whole, Ranciere's
approach is an innovative and uncompromising defence of the politi-
cal legitimacy of the demos and the importance of self-organization
of non-experts. I would suggest that this interpretation of politics is
particularly effective when seen as a critique of the professionaliza-
tion, cynicism, elitism and depoliticization which often characterize
parliamentary politics in advanced capitalist societies in the early
twenty-first century, which is often accompanied by rising levels of
abstentions at elections, profound disillusionment with professional
politicians, and the rise of extreme right political parties. Ranciere's
theory is also useful in terms of exploring the nature of power more
generally and the ways in which many people fail to assume any
measure of self-realization because of the structures and practices of
what Ranciere describes as police practice.
By contrast with what is often described as democracy in liberal
theory and more general parlance, democracy for Ranciere is both
an active and activist term, where the demos intervenes directly not to
endorse the legitimacy of the political elite, to smoothe over differ-
ences or to achieve consensus, but, on the contrary, to assert the legiti-
macy of a different type of politics and systematically undermine
complacent practices of the existing order. Extraparliamentary activ-
ity is thus crucial (e.g. LH 84) and all true political activity takes
place in the name of equality. Ranciere's project is thus, implicitly at
least, also a challenge to large areas of debate and research in the
social sciences, especially political science, sociology and economics,
whose starting point is often to take as read the legitimacy of the
established order and whose conclusions therefore reinforce its pur-
ported legitimacy.
I have argued that in these ways Ranciere's work is sound and
useful. I have also argued, however, that his work suffers from
various shortcomings. The nature of Ranciere's reaction against
Althusser means that there is a reluctance to identify a class or subsec-
tion of a class as a progressive force in a historic sense. This is
Jacques Ranciere: Politics is Equality is Democracy 113
Like Badiou and like Ranciere, Etienne Balibar has resisted any temp-
tation to adopt a wholesale liberal approach in his interpretation
of politics, or to succumb in a major fashion to posts true turalism.
At the heart of his definition of the political is the notion of emancipa-
tion, with the defiant actions of ordinary people taking centre-stage.
Taken as a whole, Balibar's preoccupations are often reminiscent of
those of Althusser - both are interested in Spinoza, Marxism as philo-
sophy, ideology, and conjuncture, to mention but the most obvious -
although the conclusions Balibar draws diverge increasingly with
those of his former mentor as time goes by. Balibar worked closely
with Althusser and wrote important parts of Reading Capital (1970
[1965]), in which he explores the role of modes of production in the
process of historical change. He continued to write from within a
Marxist perspective and remained engaged with some of the central
questions of Marxism until the late 1970s, examining in particu-
lar the nature and role of ideology, the scientific and philosophical
claims of historical materialism, the meaning and relevance of the
notion of class struggle, and the capitalist state. By the early 1980s
he was moving away from a strictly Marxist approach, although he
continued to make a significant contribution to the study of Marx's
writings and continued to work broadly within a materialist and
historical framework.
Again like Badiou and Ranciere, much of Balibar's work since the
early 1980s relates in one way or another to the question of the human
subject. In his general theory of politics and emancipation, it is the
emergence and role of the subject in relation to politics and society
that one must understand first and foremost. In his reading of
Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity 117
The political
(and therefore also work, culture, public and private speech) already
involves - and makes possible - a totality of rights. I call this the
'insurrectional' element of democracy, which plays a determinant
role in every constitution of a democratic or republican state. Such
a state, by definition, cannot consist (or cannot only consist) of sta-
tutes and rights ascribed from above; it requires the direct partici-
pation of the demos. (WP 119)
Civility thus creates the space in which politics takes place and elim-
inates the extremes of violence without suppressing all violence and
revolt (LC 47).
If Balibar's discussion of politics becomes less threatening to the
status quo and indeed less emancipatory the nearer it gets to reality,
his discussion of his term equaliberty (egaliberte) is often radical and
inspiring. By equaliberty he means, in the broadest of terms, that
freedom can only be fully realized if equality is also fully realized,
Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity 123
and vice versa. The historical conditions where liberty and equality
arise are the same, and therefore the one cannot exist without the
other, and this is a truth that is discovered through revolutionary
struggle. Moreover, if liberty is maximized then equality is as well.
By the same token, any circumstances that limit or suppress freedom
also limit or suppress equality; increased social inequality always
accompanies limits to freedom and vice versa. Thus there are both
political and ethical obligations to eradicate exploitation and domi-
nation (MCI 48).
Balibar's starting point for this radical notion, the logic of whose
adoption is a form of politics dedicated to a struggle against all types
of exploitation and domination, is a critical attitude towards contem-
porary liberalism. In liberalism freedom and equality cannot possibly
occur alongside each other, apart from within the narrow confines of
the juridical, where equality before the law is strongly defended. But a
belief in the mutual exclusivity of the two concepts, he argues, is also
found among some socialists and in West European anti-racist move-
ments, for example (MCI 39). This mistaken approach, Balibar
argues, relies on three fundamental misconceptions. The first is the
mistaken belief that equality is mainly economic and social, whereas
freedom is mainly legal and political. The second is the belief that
equality can only be realized via actions by the state, above all
through material distribution, whereas freedom implies limited state
intervention. Finally, there is a misconception that whilst equality is a
collective goal, freedom is above all an individual one. It is these pre-
cepts, Balibar argues, that lead to a gulf between contemporary dis-
cussion on the 'rights of man5 on the one hand and the 'rights of
citizen' on the other. By contrast with the 1789 Declaration of the
Rights of Man and the Citizen, modern liberalism and other ideologies
uphold a strict non-identity between man and citizen, with the view
that an equation between man and citizen means everything is politi-
cal, which in turn leads to totalitarianism.
Balibar's other starting point for the discussion of equaliberty is
thus the Declaration itself, which he argues - controversially - does
not take the pre-existing ideology of human nature, or natural rights,
as the basis for law and politics, but is a bold assertion of wholly
modern democratic principles (MCI 43-4). The core and indeed the
124 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
major goal of the text, he contends, is precisely the identity of man and
citizen. Moreover, the upholding of the right to resist oppression
asserted in article two of the Declaration is effectively an assertion of
the right to collective freedom, whose corollary is indeed the right to
resist oppression: 'to be free is to be able to resist any compulsion that
destroys freedom' (MCI 45). Equality, meanwhile, is implicitly at
least the notion that links all others together, although this is not
spelled out in the Declaration in so many words.
Balibar continues his argument for a re-reading of the Declaration
as a statement of the principles of equaliberty by suggesting that
Marx was quite wrong to invoke (in On the Jewish Question) the text
as an expression of the separation of public and private spheres of
human existence, characteristic of bourgeois notions of modern poli-
tics. On the contrary, according to Balibar the Declaration puts for-
ward a new idea regarding the relationship between equality and
freedom, expressed as a universal:
What is this idea? Nothing less than the identification of the two
concepts. If one is willing to read it literally, the Declaration in fact
says that equality is identical to freedom, is equal tofreedom, and vice
versa. Each is the exact measure of the other. This is ... the proposi-
tion of equaliberty: a portmanteau word that is 'impossible' in French
(and English) but that alone expresses the central proposition. For
it gives both the conditions under which man is a citizen through
and through, and the reason for this assimilation. Underneath the
equation of man and citizen, or rather within it, as the very reason of
its universality - as \\spresupposition - lies the proposition of equal-
iberty. (MCI 46-7, italics in original)
many years after his collaboration with Althusser had ended, that his
own contribution to Reading Capital in the shape of an exploration of
forms of historical individuality and also his denial of the importance
of the subject to structural Marxism was in some sense laying the
ground for subsequent studies of its importance (1C 149). When
Balibar comes to address the question of the human subject in his own
philosophy, he comes up with what is perhaps a surprising position.
In response to Jean-Luc Nancy's question, 'Who comes after the
subject?', Balibar answers:
... after the subject comes the citizen. For the 'subject', which has
haunted the whole problematic of liberty and of the individual
[personnel for fifteen centuries, is not an ontological figure, that of
an objectum or hypokeimenon, but a legal, political, theological and
moralfigure...
What - or rather who ~ comes after the subject (first around
1789-93), is the universal, national, and cosmopolitical citizen
who is indissociably both a political and philosophical figure ...
there is no doubt that with the revolutionary event the subjectus irre-
versibly cedes his place to the citizen. (1C 152, italics in original; also
see Cadava et al 1991)
Thus for Balibar the modern subject is necessarily political; modernity
offers for the first time the possibility of both citizenship and subjectiv-
ity, and he talks of his 'research on the revolutionary relieving and
replacing of the subject by the citizen, and on the becoming-citizen
of the subject' (1C 156). Balibar disagrees with what he sees as
Marx's belief that man is private and part of civil society and that
the citizen is the political entity with political rights and political
involvement.
Whatever one might think of this comment on Marx, Balibar is not,
it would seem, particularly ambitious for his subject, who is an indivi-
dual who becomes subject via rather minimal political rights afforded
by the Declaration and the modern state, albeit with much participa-
tion by the citizen-subject. Rather than emancipation and transfor-
mation leading to the formation of a more self-realized human being
who could at last determine his or her own fate free from the fetters of
socio-economic and political exploitation and all that goes with it, as
Emancipation, Equaliberty and the Dilemmas of Modernity 12 7
[Tjhe mode of subjection and the mode of production (or, more generally,
the ideological mode and the generalized economic mode ...) Both
are material, although in opposite senses. To name these different
senses of the materiality of subjection and production, the tradi-
tional terms imaginary and reality suggest themselves. One can
adopt them, provided that one keep in mind that in any historical
conjuncture, the effects of the imaginary can only appear through
and by means of the real, and the effects of the real through and by
means of the imaginary . . . fIC 160, italics in original
For Balibar, then, ideology is very much part of the base and is
no less determined by economics than economics is determined by
ideology. This is the theoretical starting point of Race, Nation, Class,
where imaginary communities are as real or more real than more
tangible entities.
Thus, Balibar's theory leaves little room for any ongoing influence
of the economy and one wonders if there is really anything left of
Marx's political economy.
Political violence
[W]e believe ... one can detect, each time, a very strong tension in
Marx's thought between two ways of thinking about the status and
the effects of extreme violence: one which undertakes, if not to 'nat-
uralise' then at least to incorporate it in a chain of causes and
effects, to make it a process or a dialectical moment of the process
of social transformation whose actors are the antagonistic classes, in
a way which makes intelligible the conditions of real politics (wirk-
lichePolitik) (as opposed to moral or ideal politics); and another way
of thinking which finds in certain extreme or excessive forms of vio-
lence - at once structural and conjunctural, ancient and modern,
spontaneous and organised what one might call the real of poli-
tics (das Reale in der Politik?), that is to say the unpredictable or the
incalculable which confers on it a tragic character, which it feeds off
and which also threatens to destroy i t . . . (HW 10-11
we might call ethnocide or genocide (HW 13). But Balibar also con-
tends that in Capital itself Marx argues that a violent and final confon-
tation with the bourgeoisie is not the only possible outcome for
struggles between capital and labour. According to Balibar:
... the work [i.e. Capital] had opened up other possibilities, which it
will always be possible to turn to without abandoning the 'Marxist'
reference: namely a process of reforms imposed on society by the
state under pressure from increasingly powerful and organised
workers' struggles, which would oblige capital to 'civilise' its meth-
ods of exploitation, or to innovate constantly in order to overcome
resistance from 'variable capital'; also the exporting of overexploi-
tation to the 'periphery' of the capitalist mode of production, in
such a way that the effects of 'primitive accumulation' are pro-
longed ... In these scenarios the proletariat no longer appears
as the predetermined subject of history, and the Gewalt which it
either suffers or wields does not lead 'naturally' to the final goal.
The subjectivization of the working class, that is its transformation
into revolutionary proletariat, then appears as an indefinitely dis-
tant horizon, an improbable counter-tendency, or even a miracu-
lous exception to the course of history. (HW 17)
Balibar is insistent that debates between Marxists regarding reform
and revolution have been posed in the wrong way and at any rate
that the really important question is how to 'civilize revolution', as
discussed above. But it seems that Balibar's reflections in this respect
are at least influenced by long-running (and at one time often bitterj
debates and disputes within the European left around the theme
of'reform or revolution'. These debates have evolved over time but
certainly have not disappeared completely and indeed are likely to
intensify if the left continues to gather strength again. As a dissident
within the French Communist Party, and as an intellectual deeply
immersed in Marxist theory, Balibar was intensely involved with
such questions for many years. Balibar's position certainly seems at
times to under-estimate the extent to which, for example, govern-
ments and other political or quasi-political entities are prepared to
use violence against even the most 'civilized' revolution in order to
prevent it from taking place.
134 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
Concluding remarks
In his substantial and complex ceuvre, Balibar raises some crucial ques-
tions for our time and discusses them in a way that contibutes to a
greater understanding of these questions. For example, many who
take his work seriously will recognize the relevance of the notion of
human emancipation which contrasts with the preoccupation with
mild reform which is so prevalent in parliamentary and party politics
in the West. The same could be said for his discussion of universality, a
notion that is seldom taken seriously except in a religious context in a
world which is often so preoccupied with surfaces and transience.
Meanwhile, his own term equaliberty is a constructively provocative
blending of equality and liberty which insists on their mutual depen-
dence in a way which also flies in the face of much contemporary
received wisdom. More specifically, Balibar is an insightful theorist
140 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
analysis of, for example, the European Union, and finally an unhap-
pily over-optimistic interpretation of the legacy of 1789, which seems
to suggest that, after all, no further dramatic emancipatory transfor-
mation is necessary. In Badiou and Ranciere, then, there are margin-
alist tendencies, whereas in Balibar there are weakening concessions
to more conventional, mainstream politics.
Each of these thinkers offers important insights into the nature of
the supposedly consensual and centre-oriented governmental politics
so prevalent in the past few decades in Western Europe and the USA,
politics which serve to disguise and leave un-debated many forms of
injustice and exploitation. Balibar suggests convincingly that this
sort of consensus politics goes hand in hand with the extreme violence
found in less developed countries. Ranciere's On the Shores of Politics
(2007 [1998]) is one of the most insightful and trenchant analyses to
have appeared of France's superficially consensual form of govern-
ment since the early 1980s. However, such is both Badiou's and
Ranciere's position regarding the political and intellectual climate
and practice of the period, they offer little purchase in their core the-
ories on the nature of politics outside the exceptional occurrence of
the event (for Badiou) and popular uprising by the sons-part (for
Ranciere). In other words, in their theories proper they leave us little
the wiser regarding the nature of politics beyond the extraordinary;
nothing else really counts as politics so cannot be analysed within
their core framework. Indeed Ranciere insists in the opening line of
his Ten Theses on Politics that '[pjolitics is not the exercise of power'.
In the introductory chapter of this book I also referred to Perry
Anderson's suggestion that Western Marxism moved increasingly
into the realm of philosophy and into the academy from the 1920s
onwards and that in some respects Western Marxism had suffered as
a result. Whilst agreeing with Anderson's view in general terms, I also
suggested that Western Marxism had benefited from this move in that
it had managed to maintain a certain distance from some of the prag-
matic and damaging adaptations made by some Marxists in and close
to communist parties in particular and others who became persuaded
of the merits of embracing liberal democracy and the values of the
West more generally. I hope to have shown that the exploration of
the philosophical on the part of Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere has,
With and beyond Badiou, Balibar and Ranciere 147
The above remarks and the more detailed critique expressed in the
preceding chapters suggest the need for additional lines of intellectual
enquiry which both complement the thought of Badiou, Balibar and
Ranciere, and compensate for and move beyond their weaknesses.
I have made the point several times in the course of this book that
in particular neither Badiou nor Ranciere pay enough attention to
the economic sphere, which perhaps significantly is the reverse of the
way in which we in the West experience the world; on a daily basis,
the reign of commodities seems to make itself felt ever more intensely
and influence ever more spheres of our lives, including of course parts
of our private lives. One of Marx's most significant contributions was
148 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
Althusser) often calls it, and the ideological becomes very much a
determining influence. Part of the Althusserian legacy seems indeed
to be the process of subjectivation, which as others have pointed out
is close to Althusser's notion of interpellation, where forms of commit-
ment mean individuals are interpellated into subjects.
It will be clear that I would wish to place greater emphasis on the
major theories of Marx as originally stated by him than do any of
these thinkers. In particular, I would reassert the importance of his
analysis of the political economy of capitalism in order to help under-
stand the nature of the current period and the potential for change
within and beyond it. A thorough examination of the political econ-
omy of late capitalism and its integration into a more general theory
could offer a greater understanding of the current epoch, and an indi-
cation of possible futures. Marxist analysis is, however, greatly
enriched by many forms of quasi-Marxist, post-Marxist and non-
Marxist approaches (the distinction between these categories is often
not in itself important), particularly when they are motivated by pro-
gressive goals. Frederic Jameson makes roughly the same point when
he says:
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Index