Le courage du présent
by Alain Badiou
Translated by Alberto Toscano
Published in Le Monde, 13 February 2010
For almost thirty years, the present, in our coun-
try, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that
does not offer its youth, especially the youth of
the popular classes, any principle to orient exis-
tence. What is the precise character of this disori-
entation? One of its foremost operations consists
in always making illegible the previous sequence,
that sequence which was well and truly oriented.
This operation is characteristic of all reactive,
counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve
been living through ever since the end of the sev-
enties. We can for example note that the key fea-
ture of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot
of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial
of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the
previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction
to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals
impeded any political understanding. This view of
things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to
disorient the people, which was considered to be,
as it always is, potentially revolutionary.
To make a period illegible is much more than to
simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibil-
ity is to make it impossible to find in the period
in question the very principles capable of reme-
dying its impasses. If the period is declared to be
pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for
the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose
pernicious effects confront us every day, is that
one must resign oneself to disorientation as a less-
er evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a pre-
vious and visibly closed sequence of the politics of
emancipation, that it must remain legible for us,
independently of the final judgment about it.
In the debate concerning the rationality of the
French Revolution during the Third Republic,
Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The
French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is
noteworthy because it declares the integral leg-
ibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicis-
situdes of its unfolding may have been. Today,
it is clear that it is with reference to communism
that the ambient discourse transforms the previ-
ous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it
upon myself therefore to say that the communist
sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as
well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same
idea, also forms a bloc.
So what can the principle and the name of a genu-
ine orientation be today? I propose that we call it,
faithfully to the history of the politics of eman-
cipation, the communist hypothesis. Let us note
in passing that our critics want to scrap the word
‘communism’ under the pretext that an experi-
ence with state communism, which lasted seventy
years, failed tragically. What a joke! When it’s a
question of overthrowing the domination of the
rich and the inheritance of power, which have last-
ed millennia, their objections rest on seventy years
of stumbling steps, violence and impasses! Truth
be told, the communist idea has only traversed an
infinitesimal portion of the time of its verification,
of its effectuation. What is this hypothesis? It can
be summed up in three axioms.
First, the idea of equality. The prevalent pessimis-
tic idea, which once again dominates our time, is
that human nature is destined to inequality; that
it’s of course a shame that this is so, but that once
we’ve shed a few tears about this, it is crucial to
grasp this and accept it. To this view, the commu-
nist idea responds not exactly with the proposal of
equality as a programme – let us realize the deep-
seated equality immanent to human nature – but
by declaring that the egalitarian principle allows
us to distinguish, in every collective action, that
which is in keeping with the communist hypoth-
esis, and therefore possesses a real value, from that
which contradicts it, and thus throws us back to
an animal vision of humanity.
Then we have the conviction that the existence of
a separate coercive state is not necessary. This is
the thesis, shared by anarchists and communists,
of the withering-away of the state. There have ex-
isted societies without the state, and it is rational
to postulate that there may be others in the future.
But above all, it is possible to organize popular po-
litical action without subordinating it to the idea
of power, representation within the state, elec-
tions, etc. The liberating constraint of organized
action can be exercised outside the state. There are
many examples of this, including recent ones: the
unexpected power of the movement of December
1995 delayed by several years anti-popular mea-
sures on pensions. The militant action of undocu-
mented workers did not stop a host of despicable
laws, but it has made it possible for these workers
to be recognized as a part of our collective and
political life.
A final axiom: the organization of work does not
imply its division, the specialization of tasks, and
in particular the oppressive differentiation between
intellectual and manual labour. It is necessary and
possible to aim for the essential polymorphous-
ness of human labour. This is the material basis of
the disappearance of classes and social hierarchies.
These three principles do not constitute a pro-
gramme; they are maxims of orientation, which
anyone can use as a yardstick to evaluate what he
or she says and does, personally or collectively, in
its relation to the communist hypothesis.
The communist hypothesis has known two great
stages, and I propose that we’re entering into a third
phase of its existence. The communist hypothesis
established itself on a vast scale between the 1848
revolutions and the Paris Commune (1871). The
dominant themes then were those of the work-
ers’ movement and insurrection. Then there was
a long interval, lasting almost forty years (from
1871 to 1905), which corresponds to the apex of
European imperialism and the systematic plunder
of numerous regions of the planet. The sequence
that goes from 1905 to 1976 (Cultural Revolution
in China) is the second sequence of the effectua-
tion of the communist hypothesis. Its dominant
theme is the theme of the party, accompanied by
its main (and unquestionable) slogan: discipline is
the only weapon of those who have nothing. From
1976 to today, there is a second period of reactive
stabilization, a period in which we still live, dur-
ing which we have witnessed the collapse of the
single-party socialist dictatorships created in the
second sequence.
I am convinced that a third historical sequence of
the communist hypothesis will inevitably open
up, different from the two previous ones, but
paradoxically closer to the first than the second.
This sequence will share with the sequence that
prevailed in the nineteenth century that fact that
what is at stake in it is the very existence of the
communist hypothesis, which today is almost
universally denied. It is possible to define what,
along with others, I am attempting as preliminary
efforts aimed at the reestablishment of the com-
munist hypothesis and the deployment of its third
epoch.
What we need, in these early days of the third se-
quence of existence of the communist hypothesis,
is a provisional morality for a disoriented time.
It’s a matter of minimally maintaining a consis-
tent subjective figure, without being able to rely
on the communist hypothesis, which has yet to
be re-established on a grand scale. It is necessary
to find a real point to hold, whatever the cost, an
‘impossible’ point that cannot be inscribed in the
law of the situation. We must hold a real point of
this type and organize its consequences.
The living proof that our societies are obviously
in-human is today the foreign undocumented
worker: he is the sign, immanent to our situation,
that there is only one world. To treat the for-
eign proletarian as though he came from another
world, that is indeed the specific task of the ‘home
office’ (ministère de l’identité nationale), which
has its own police force (the ‘border police’). To
affirm, against this apparatus of the state, that any
undocumented worker belongs to the same world
as us, and to draw the practical, egalitarian and
militant consequences of this – that is an example
of a type of provisional morality, a local orienta-
tion in keeping with the communist hypothesis,
amid the global disorientation which only its re-
establishment will be able to counter.
The principal virtue that we need is courage. This
is not always the case: in other circumstances,
other virtues may have priority. For instance,
during the revolutionary war in China, Mao pro-
moted patience as the cardinal virtue. But today, it
is undeniably courage. Courage is the virtue that
manifests itself, without regard for the laws of the
world, by the endurance of the impossible. It’s a
question of holding the impossible point without
needing to account for the whole of the situation:
courage, to the extent that it’s a matter of treating
the point as such, is a local virtue. It partakes of a
morality of the place, and its horizon is the slow
reestablishment of the communist hypothesis.