Badiou and the Political Condition

289 Pages·2014·0.835 MB·English

by  Marios Constantinou

Badiou and the Political Condition
Critical Connections
A series of edited collections forging new connections between
contemporary critical theorists and a wide range of research areas,
such as critical and cultural theory, gender studies, film, literature,
music, philosophy and politics.
Series Editors
Ian Buchanan, University of Wollongong
James Williams, University of Dundee
Editorial Advisory Board
Nick Hewlett
Gregg Lambert
Todd May
John Mullarkey
Paul Patton
Marc Rölli
Alison Ross
Kathrin Thiele
Frédéric Worms
Titles available in the series
Badiou and Philosophy, edited by Sean Bowden and Simon Duffy
Agamben and Colonialism, edited by Marcelo Svirsky and
Simone Bignall
Laruelle and Non-Philosophy, edited by John Mullarkey and
Anthony Paul Smith
Virilio and Visual Culture, edited by John Armitage and Ryan Bishop
Rancière and Film, edited by Paul Bowman
Stiegler and Technics, edited by Christina Howells and Gerald Moore
Badiou and the Political Condition, edited by Marios Constantinou
Forthcoming titles
Butler and Ethics, edited by Moya Lloyd
Nancy and the Political, edited by Sanja Dejanovic
Visit the Critical Connections website at
www.euppublishing.com/series/crcs
Badiou and the Political Condition
Edited by Marios Constantinou
© editorial matter and organisation Marios Constantinou, 2014
© the chapters their several authors, 2014
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
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the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Preface viii
Introduction: Forcing Politics: Badiou’s Anabasis in
the Age of Empire 1
Marios Constantinou
Part I: The Crisis of Negation and the Political Condition
1. From Logic to Anthropology: Affirmative Dialectics 45
Alain Badiou
2. Conditioning Communism: Badiou, Plato and
Philosophy as Meta-Critical Anamnesis 56
Frank Ruda
3. The Narrative Politics of Active Number 76
Ed Pluth
4. The Pascalian Wager of Politics: Remarks on Badiou
and Lacan 96
Dominiek Hoens
5. Contra Opinionem: Politics as an Anti-Imperialist
Procedure 112
Marios Constantinou
Part II: Compossibilities: Conditions of Philosophy in the
Wake of Politics
6. Reversing and Affirming the Avant-gardes: A New
Paradigm for Politics 147
Jan Voelker
viii Badiou and the Political Condition
7. Badiou on Inaesthetics and Transitory Ontology:
The Case of Political Song 164
Christopher Norris
8. Love in the Time of the Communist Hypothesis 187
Norman Madarasz
9. The Politics of Comradeship: Philosophical
Commitment and Construction in Alain Badiou and
Slavoj Žižek 212
Sean Homer
10. Not Solvable by Radicals: Lacan, Topology, Politics 232
A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
Notes on Contributors 252
Bibliography 255
Index 270
To Ellipolis, my daughter, for having realised prematurely the
distinction between politico and diplomatico. I hope one day she
with her friends will be able to resolve the crisis of witnessing so
much stupidity in their lives.
Preface
This book rethinks the singularity of the political condition in the
wake of Badiou’s philosophical rupture. By way of genealogical
investigations, expositions and reactualisations, the present col-
lection of essays retraces the intellectual strands and intensities of
thought that weave together the Badiouian political knot. These
range from Epicurean materialism and Platonic communism to
Xenophon’s philosophic warriorship as anti-imperial thought in
action; from Paulian universalism and Pascalian existentialism to
Rousseauean republicanism, Marxian anthropology and Wagner’s
aristocratic populism; from Althusser’s neo-Epicurean material-
ism and Maoist anti-imperialism to Lacanian psychoanalysis and
militant musicology; from the aesthetic vanguards to May ’68, and
from the Cultural Revolution to the politics of the love-event. This
manifold constellation of Badiou’s political thought, patiently and
incisively examined, casts new light on the singularity of the politi-
cal condition after the return of the subject as a novel philosophi-
cal concept and militant wager.
Moreover, this book assesses the political import of Badiou’s
philosophical challenge in the light of the current imperial impasse
in southern Europe and the contradictory awakening of History
in the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean. A cohort
of established scholars and rising theorists of the Badiou-effect
engage the critical question of ‘how to transmit the exception’
politically, at the intersection of contemporary anti-imperial
polemics and debates that strike at the heart of the postmod-
ern condition (Lyotard), deconstruction (Derrida), psychoanaly-
sis (Lacan–Žižek), biopolitics (Hardt and Negri) and pedagogy
(Rancière).
In terms of its general conceptualisation, the theoretical praxis
of this book adheres closely to the political knot that ties being
x
Preface xi
to thinking, that commits and obliges philosophy to think truth
under the condition of the political event, while at the same time
‘restraining’ this condition in the name of the philosophical truth
of politics: justice and equality. This mutual conditioning in terms
of a thinking praxis cum politics is never even. It remains discon-
tinuous, contingent and haphazard. In so far as the political event
appears as an exception, as the rare flash of a supplement destined
to disappear soon after, then there is no royal conceptual road
that leads to its recovery. The exceptionality and greatness of the
political event, its very rarity, make it vulnerable to the nihilistic
temptation to renominate it at any cost from the Left or, instead,
to manipulate it sophistically from the Right through the construc-
tion of a light empire of interchangeable simulations. Hence, the
restraining of Left as well as Right ‘deviations’, in their mutual
substitution, becomes the main task of a political investigation
that surveys the consequences of an egalitarian maxim in Badiou’s
sense.
However, this balancing or restraining act is speculative in its
own right. It exudes a peculiar prudence which is perhaps already
obsolete in the ordo-liberal age of ‘creative destruction’, the princi-
pal method of orgiastic capitalist experimentation with sociocidal
newness – at any cost! In fact, the ordo-liberal revolution operates
on a double register. This operation involves on the one hand the
‘reality principle’ of police, economic administration, simulated
competition-law, forcing monopolies to act as if they were subject
to ‘fair competition’, as if they did not enjoy special prerogatives
and monopoly power; and on the other hand the register of behav-
iouristic conditioning through the successive shock-effects of novel
destruction and radical economic bio-engineering.
If, as Badiou argues in his contribution to this volume, the
twenty-first century will have been the realised end of the mes-
sianic age of revolutions, if this century will have been a century
whose master name will not be that of revolution, then it is right to
wonder whether this is not yet another suture which, by virtue of
sheer necessity, subordinates philosophy to the post-revolutionary
politics of immobilisation; or whether, indeed, any egalitarian
hypothesis can be sustained at all, amid so much paralysing confu-
sion, undecidability and neutralisation of politics, coupled with a
proleptic disenactment of its revolutionary possibility. Given the
homicidal mood of imperial bio-economics and its vanguard ‘pot-
latch aesthetic’ of unrestrained creative destruction, any proleptic