Shannee Marks

Infinite Coup - Notes on the Egyptian Revolution

1. Unknowing (Non-Savoir)
2. The Tao of Deception
3. Power of Degeneracy
4. Time of Tyrants
5. Badiou’s Infinite State
6. Bonapartism or Pétainist Transcendental?

1. Unknowing (Non-Savoir)

There are many forms of unknowing – as many if not more than those of un-
being. One state of not knowing is that of never knowing – that which
‘induces’ this never knowing is unknowable (dare one say ‘object’), but
perhaps only from the state of a particular unknowing. The state of
unknowing may also conceivably be one preceding all (any) knowing.
The “cloud of unknowing” is a semi-permanent darkness which merely
borrows the ‘relation of no relation’ of unknowing to mark a state in which
knowledge is unattainable – even undesirable. This state cannot be
transcended or altered in any way. It is permanent unknowing. Mystical
states of beatitude or relations not based on knowledge are typical examples of
such unknowing. Knowledge is used to hold back knowledge similar to
instances of will used to hinder will – as an intra-monadic action.

Unknowing in the sublunary literary cosmogony of relations refers to the

strange but very common occurrence – when something known becomes
unknown. It is the reverse of mystical unknowing – yet potentially more
disturbing – because accompanied by unspecific loss. One had been familiar
with something or someone – a person, a place, a thing – that person, place or
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thing becomes unfamiliar, strange. One had been connected by knowing,

perhaps without even noticing it - if this knowing was habit or ‘second nature’
– but suddenly one is disconnected. Knowing reverts back to unknowing. The
‘present’ unknowing could be a kind of temporary lapse, an amnesia, or a
second new kind of unknowing. When you don’t recognize someone you
know, you’ve forgotten that you know them, this is the ordinary experience of
unknowing. An old woman at the wake of her husband wonders if she ever
‘knew’ him – knew in the biblical sense – “Did I have sexual intercourse with
him?”.

The second type of unknowing is similar to second innocence – harder to lose

than the first innocence. One knows nothing – one is unknowing – this
unknowing is agitated by a first knowing – one leaves the state of naiveté – the
step from the first unknowing to knowing is irreversible. One is astonished at
how everything is changed and one cannot even imagine how it was to have
been so unknowing. From the point of knowing - unknowing becomes the
“first fine careless rapture, which can never be recaptured”. This first
unknowing casts that of which one is unknowing as the unknown – once this
shell of the unknown is cracked or perforated it can never be repaired – it is
irreparable – knowledge or knowing is a kind of damage done to unknowing.
The perfection of unknowing has been forever marred by the imperfection
(and incompleteness) of knowing – this imperfection could also be called the
‘original sin’ of unknowing – the source of all insincerity.
Although this kind of irreparable move from unknowing to knowing seems to
hold only of other knowing or unknowing subjects – the inorganic unknown
or animal unknown do not radiate (emanate) this fatal irreversibility. Only
when the unknowing is of another unknowing subject whose move to knowing
may or may not emulate (mimic) one’s own can any sort of irreversibility
(irreparability) of this move be contemplated.

But sometimes the first knowing can be undone – when one ‘unknows’
someone – they become unfamiliar. One sees them again with the eyes of a
stranger, although they themselves see nothing different. You the second
unknower or unknower to the second degree have become the stranger. This

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means you look again with unknowing eyes on what you had previously looked
with knowing eyes. In the sense that knowledge is a kind of servility of
consciousness - exercising its power of knowing for the purposes of serving
some kind of recognition – unknowing is sovereignty – or the ‘miraculous’
subject. “I define unalloyed sovereignty as the miraculous reign of
unknowing.” (Georges Bataille, “Sovereignty”, The Bataille Reader, edited by
Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Oxford, 1997, p. 312 note 3)

You unknow yourself in the new body of drill – the new body of the ballerina,
the soldier, the terrorist, the castrato. You sacrifice yourself to the Other who
is you – like Odin – I to myself. “Zucht und smart-sein” (drill and being-
smart). In the accident “nothing gives place to the unknowable of the
moment” (Bataille, op. cit., p. 312) – but one anticipates the value of drill for
the accident – just as drill or discipline are not dissociable from Wittgenstein’s
‘random’ method of philosophical investigation. To be ‘smart’ is not just a
question of the uniform, but especially of what is underneath it. Does one
have to have heard anything about Sparta to conduct oneself as a Spartan?
Would it not be better to know nothing of Sparta. Discipline is an unknowing
of the absence of discipline. Self-preservation of knowing is at the heart of the
Enlightenment – sacrifice of knowing is at the root of the ‘community’
(without community). How does the one become the other? You unknow
yourself in the community or community is an active non-knowledge (non-
savoir) of yourself. As Bataille warns: “Il n’est loisible à quiconque de ne pas
appartenir à mon absence de communauté.” [“No one is free not to participate
in my absence of community.” From “Prendre ou Laissez” 1946 (?) quoted in
“Georges Bataille: incarnation, destruction, et absence de la communauté”,
Lyon, Horlieu, 1999 (supplement au n°9 de la Lettre Horlieu) Note: Thanks
to Greg Yudin (Moscow School of Higher Economics) who brought this
principal thought of Bataille to my attention.]

The second unknowing is much more permanent – it can neither go back to a

first knowing nor forward to a second knowing. This is a state one wants to
achieve. Hence it is innocence, which cannot be lost. All of this could have
some implications for the Heideggerian notion of the “unthought” in or of a

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philosophy. The unthought of a philosopher. Unthinking can mean without

thought – or prior to thought. Like in unknowing. A kind of innocence of
thought. Thought before it is thought is unthinking. Heidegger seems to
mean – the part of a philosophy, which is permanently unthought – the dark
unpresentable side of thought – the formless ground in which thought is
ungrounded. But unthinking can also mean the reversing of thinking. A
thought, which had been thought, unravels (itself) into unthought. This would
be the second unthinking. Such unravelling is more of the nature of entropy
than innocence. Given that philosophy (in a Heideggerian sense) ‘originates’
in the formless ungrounded ground of unthought – every thought
(philosophy) could be said to have an innate ‘death drive’ of its own – to
return to this state of total equilibrium of the unthought. It would be the aim
of a critique of philosophy to unthink its thought – to reflect on the question
“what is unthinking” – to propel its thinking into unthinking or to show how
its thinking is already an unthinking. (Unfortunately this already sounds like
a kind of counter ‘Destruktion’ or deconstruction – but one has to resist the
automatic sirens of unthinking.)

Axiom: Every thought, which has been thought, can be equally unthought.

If what Ernst Bloch says is true – that every philosopher has one thought –
(and why shouldn’t it be true being the paraphrase or imitation of all those
other onenesses – every writer has one story, every composer one song etc.) –
then potentially by unthinking that one thought one could unthink that
philosopher too.

One is also unknowing when one thinks one knows but doesn’t. This is
particularly dangerous – the state of thinking one knows when one doesn’t is
typical of a person with a sense of false security. The philosophical stance – to
know that one knows nothing is to be in a perpetual state of being on guard, to
resist any quietude imposed by a sense of security. To shun such knowing. To
always strive for the aporetic.

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Oddly those in power although perhaps obsessed with their security or with
the uninterrupted prolongation of their power – are not immune to such a
sense of false security. The paranoia of the tyrant (Gewaltherrscher) is the
other side of his ostentatious representation and colossal ‘public’ works. The
infamous tyrant Giangaleazzo in 14th century Milan undertook massive dam
constructions costing 300,000 Goldgulden on the Mincio of Mantua, the
Brenta of Padua, so as to be able to divert these rivers at will, leaving those
cities without a defence.

An odd analogy exists between the philosophical stance of unknowing and the
permanent watchfulness and distrust of the absolute ruler – the ruler of the
state of exception. As Burckhardt remarks about the tyrants of Renaissance
Italy – their states (lo stato) were founded on illegitimacy rather than on a
“mystic foundation” (Montaigne) of law. Although Montaigne qualifies this
“mystic foundation” as being a necessary “fiction” of authority and
devoid of justice. “Now laws remain in credit not because they are just, but
because they are laws.” (Montaigne, “Of Experience”, Book III, 13, The
Complete Essays of Montaigne, Stanford, 1965, p. 821) The laws are also
“grossly and widely and ordinarily faulty” (ibid.) making them into sacred
things. Sacred things tend to be defective, badly made, because the sacred is
not useful, it is not work. The proof of the mystic foundation of the authority
of law is their faultiness – if they were just or equitable in themselves, men
would obey them for their own sake and not for their mystic foundation. So
“in spite of everything, the sacred thing ends up having utility.” (Bataille, op.
cit., p. 314)

In the tyrant state all relations within the entourage and family (often the
same) are equally illegitimate – or based on unknowing of the fidelity of such
a relation. In a state of illegitimacy no loyalty could be nor was expected. The
only ‘rational’ behavior was one of constant distrust and elaborate precaution
against betrayal and assassination. Any act of loyalty to the ruler on the other
hand could be seen as a microcosmic legitimation of the state. The briefly
serving vice-president of Egypt Omar Soleiman is portrayed as someone who
once saved the life of the then President Mubarak – this is especially

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remarkable not just as an act of personal fidelity – but in the sense of the “two
bodies of the king” – by ‘saving the life’ of the president he had also
legitimated this specific rule or state of exception. The act itself was the
logistical decision to ship Mubarak’s armoured Mercedes with him on a state
visit to Addis Ababa during which an attempt on his life occurred – not a
personal act of bravery or sacrifice on the part of Soleiman. But in the history
of the reign of Mubarak – similar to the absolute states in the past – even such
a bureaucratic decision was coated in glory – being itself an exceptional act of
fidelity in a state based on infidelity and illegitimacy.

2. The Tao of Deception

No organized retreat. Just organized remaining. Unchanged. Sometimes one

can retreat into a more rather than less dangerous terrain. Especially if the
enemy is scattered all over and the theatre of war is circular. The inevitable
distance sets in, what seemed to draw close was actually a pulling away.

How much does the rule – ‘war is the Tao of deception’ apply to the afterlife
(of war). The afterlife does not remove the constraints of life; it increases
them and gives them a new tensility. The old rules about when to lie and
when to tell the truth assumed that one knew the world outside and one knew
one’s own mind accurately. But if one operates under a premise of
unknowability and unpredictability this ceases to be the case. Believing, the
other side of lying and truth telling is similarly indeterminate. One can
believe to be telling the truth. Error is another state. One can be in error but
truthful. Better believe oneself to be telling a lie – but in terms of the universe
to be telling the truth. Truth can be an obstruction to real knowledge. Truth
of revelation is not provable, so it can be dismissed at any time as a lie. A lie is
more universal than a mere fact, which might be considered by ordinary
judges to be true. Facts are what people usually mean when they say truth. As
if a fact were so easy to obtain. The secrets Ciceron, a Turkish spy for Nazi
Germany, sold were not facts, they were threats – even if they described real
invasion plans of the Allies. He was the untruthful simpleton who served to

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deepen the German phantasy of being beyond defeat – already a sign of the
euphoria of defeat. Speer uses the words “euphoric ideas” in his book about
his “conflicts with the SS” - “Der Sklaven-Staat” (The Slave State). The SS
was a ‘euphoria engine’.

When one is happy together with someone else, does this mean that each
person possesses his own happiness or that x parts of happiness (in the case of
x number of people) formed one whole happiness? The same question could
be asked about the “will of the people” – “la volonté générale” (Rousseau) –
out of which one whole state is reputedly formed?

In a remark in the Encyclopaedia expounding upon the notion of the one and
the many in atomistic philosophy, Hegel fractures Rousseau’s idea of
“la volonté générale”. Each one is a one and one of many, so the one and the
many are one and the same. Each one though is also a negative relation to
itself – one of exclusion or repulsion. It repels itself from itself, which is
another way of saying it is attracted to the other ones – all like itself. So the
excluding relation of the one to itself – its ‘for-itself’ sublates itself (hebt sich
auf). Hence Hegel can conclude, following an atomistic view of “the political”,
“more important lately than the atomistic view of the physical”, that “the will
of the singular as such is the principle of the state” – here seeming to allude to
‘lo stato’ of the tyrant – yet the “general, the state itself, is the external relation
of the contract.” (Enzyclopedia der philosophischen Wissenschaften I, G.W.F.
Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden 8, Frankfurt, 1970, p. 207) He has dissected
Rousseau’s “general will” into the “will of the singular” (the one of the many
ones) and “the general” which is the state itself, the contract exterior to the
will of the one. Hegel’s state is a hybrid of the absolute state of the tyrant and
the Enlightenment concept of the state as social contract.

But as the principle “überhaupt” (above all) of atomistic philosophy is “the

for-itself in the figure (Gestalt) of the many” – the many or the people are
inherent in the “will of the singular”. (ibid.)

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The undecidability of the one or the many as the foundation of the state
appears to be resolved in this essential principle of atomistic philosophy.

3. The Power of Degeneracy

Heidegger considers Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to be the ‘teacher of the

overcoming of the spirit of revenge’ – by way of the eternal return of the same.
But isn’t it quite the opposite? The spirit of revenge is the aversion of the will
(being of Being is will) to time – or the ‘it was’ of time. The return of the same
overcomes ‘it was’. Could Nietzsche mean though the return of the same in
the world or history or the cosmos – or in thought itself – which in its
recurrence ‘materializes’ itself in world, history, cosmos? The Egyptian
revolution of today is haunted by many recurrences of the same collective
thought – on “The Friday of Farewell”, itself a repetition of the “Friday of
Departure” – protestors in Alexandria are marching to the (presidential) Ras
Al Tin palace where King Farouk stepped his final steps as king before being
ousted by the 1952 officer’s coup led by Nasser. They obviously hope for a
recurrence of such a coup. Note: A few hours later Mubarak stepped down
and the military took charge. Did the march to the scene of the first toppling
conjure up the ‘return of the same’ finally? A revolution is the apotheosis of
the return of the same – at least it manifests a circular logic – of revenge.
Something which was the ‘state’ ceases to be so abruptly – as if a circle has
completed itself at a strict point.

Soleiman delivered the final speech of the regime, in which Mubarak’s

resignation was announced and power transferred to the army, in
approximately 20 seconds. This was the exact point or moment of the
revolution and at the same time a ‘silent coup’. Tariq Ali named it a “coup
against the dictator” – but was it really that? An abbreviated sort of
revolutionary dialectic seems to be at work - the Egyptian revolution erupted
simultaneously with its own counter-revolution. (Interestingly, the
disappeared police are now back on the streets in uniform – but as
“protestors” in their own right, claiming they are also victims of the regime.)

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Counter-revolution is not just the reverse or mirror image of the revolution. It

is a movement in itself – positivity without negativity. In this case, counter-
revolution is the positivity of martial law, which is not a state of exception. Or
can the object ruled by martial law be considered a state or sovereign?
In the Egyptian Revolution/Coup one can detect at least two versions of the
‘one and the many’. The One of the People who united almost physically in
their masses to transfer (convey) their will to the state (perhaps not quite
willingly) and the Many of the multitude who cannot be One and resist this
transfer of will. By seemingly acceding to the “will of the people” unified in
that one artificial construct of a “general will” (“Communiqué 1: all the
people’s demands will be met”), the army for the moment seems to have been
able to decapitate the revolution with one ‘coup’. The “will of the people” has
become the army’s effigy.

The One of the “will of the people” and the amorphous multitude form a “zone
of indistinction” between them – where neither people nor multitude prevails.
Virno in his “Grammar of the Multitude” cites the medieval jus resistentiae –
as characteristic of the pre-state multitude associated in a variety of
corporations – who resist encroachments of the law of the realm on their
particular ‘bodies’. A tragedy of such an idée fixe of jus resistentiae is
unfolded in Kleist’s “Michael Kolhhaas”. Virno sees the contemporary
multitude (following Spinoza and not Hobbes) as preserving and reviving a
certain non-state concept of freedom found in those earlier multitudes –
although in great contradistinction to the 17th century multitude, the
contemporary multitude considers itself more rather than less universal than
the state. (see Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multiude, Los Angeles, 2004, pp.
42-43) The universality of the multitude transcends the ‘nation-state’,
corresponding, in Virno’s estimation, to the “general intellect” – a concept he
derives from the chapter “Fragment on Machines” in Marx’s “Grundrisse”.

Virno identifies the multitude in the discourse of the seventeenth century in

particular in Hobbes as the anti-state – this anti-state is in contrast to the
people who are the necessary and proper complement of the state. The
Egyptian protest was conducted by a multitude in the process of becoming a

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people of the ‘coming’ unknown state. The concept of ‘will of the people’ is
already in Hobbes – it represents that which the people has (as its natural
right) so as to transfer it to the sovereign. The multitude has no unified will –
hence it is in essence ungovernable. Spinoza as Virno notes sees in the
multitude the true “architrave” (armature) of civil liberties and civil society.
(Virno, op. cit., pp. 22-23) The multitude is the many, the people becomes the
one.

The other binary of the “One and the Many” – is the One of the Ruler/Dictator
and the Many of the subjects, individuals. For Badiou, though there are no
individuals in the state, they are only ‘present’ and ‘represented’ as countable
singularities or singletons. The multitude or anti-state might correspond to
what Badiou calls the “void”.

The eternal recurrence of the same sounds less romantic or implausible when
one sees it in light of the principles of ‘accident theory’ – the accumulation of
chance occurrences can lead over a period of time to amazing recurrent
patterns. Conversely – one minute flaw in a regular sequence can result in a
catastrophic accident.
The recurrence of the same thought or thoughts is another way of overcoming
one’s own time - this is not the same as memory, but the persistence for
unknown reasons of certain irreducible and permanent thoughts – which keep
returning without volition – such as the ‘power of degeneracy’. Thinking of
Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker I had thought I had discovered something
‘new’ – that it was a fable of degeneracy from the perspective of a scepticism
towards all human economies. His images radiate a great ‘power of
degeneracy’ using an old telephone which surprisingly rings, decaying railroad
tracks, decrepit industrial barracks beyond all modernity, swampy caves in a
depopulated rural hinterland and a lumpy crowded bed. But already some
years ago I had been observing phenomena in the ‘valley’ – which I compared
with the Zone in Stalker – “not just the characters (degeneracy) but the
physical surroundings with their outré sense of the ordinary: “We saw an
utterly bright immobile light in the eastern sky over the river. Then it
disappeared and came again. It could have been an extraterrestrial visitor –

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all things are possible in our valley.” The only ‘new’ thought is that the power
of degeneracy is also the “will to power”.

Over the years the same thought faded only to reappear with slight revisions
and deflections – first as degeneracy, then power of degeneracy then will to
power – of degeneracy. One could ask if every power is a ‘will to power’ – as
in the power of degeneracy. There is a fact of power– the power of degeneracy
to promote degeneration – Verfall. But is it a will to power? Perhaps it is.
Bloch speaks of a “Rausch des Unglücks” (drunkenness of unhappiness).
Benjamin says in Einbahnstraße (One-Way Street) decline, degeneration is no
more astonishing or less stable than ascendance (progress). The groundless
presumption, once one is settled in the stability of decline – is to imagine a
rescue from this solid well-established degeneracy. The anticipated
miraculous rescue is often the ripening catastrophe. In this sense – stability is
inertia (entropy) – it can only be interrupted or altered or transformed by
something extraordinary (not change as incremental progress) – this is the
rescue. (Hölderlin – “wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch” –
“where danger is, the rescue also grows”) Only in the stability of decline does
that extraordinary other grow – the catastrophe. Nazism was both for the
Germans – rescue and catastrophe. One can see Benjamin’s writings about
messianism or the messianic, as writing in anticipation of a
catastrophe-rescue from the stability of a degenerate progression.

4. Time of Tyrants

The time of the tyrant is dead time – even for the tyrant. Or it is suspended
time – the suspension of the law in the form of emergency laws. For the
people it is a time of waiting – for the end of the tyrant and his tyranny. In a
note in Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcade Project) Benjamin asks himself –
how to remove the blemish of waiting from the ‘messianic’. In the case of the
tyrant – the ending of tyranny is the messianic anticipation (expectation), for
the people, who wait for it every day. Just as in the case of all messianic
expectations – it could potentially come at any minute and through any door.

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This is the excitement of the uncertain arrival of the end. Such excitement is
the only true ‘frisson’ one can experience in the time of tyranny. In a life
without pleasure (which is the state of tyranny) the end of the tyranny is the
only pleasure of pleasure.
One knows that there will be a violent end – because just as the tyrant begins
his rule illegitimately – he cannot end it other than illegitimately – in other
words he has no succession. Mubarak when resigning did not observe the
constitutional procedure of a written submission to parliament, after which
power should be transferred to the Speaker of parliament – so even his
resignation itself is technically illegal. In tyrannies succession was always
rare, even in antiquity – the passing on of the rule of Syria from the father
Hafez-al-Assad to his son Bashar-al-Assad – could be seen as the exception in
this present generation of absolute rulers. Perhaps for the tyrant – the most
difficult aspect of his tyranny is its ending – the period of tyranny has no
natural conclusion – it has an indefinite mythical duration – as in the 1000
year Reich. From the moment it begins it must search for its mode of retreat
– this absence weighs not only on the people, it weighs equally on the tyrant.
For although it may be true – that the sovereign is the one who decides on the
state of exception – or rather when it begins – he is not the one who decides
when it ends. That decision is always beyond the limit of the tyrant’s time – it
is a decision, which approaches him from a time beyond himself – as if he
were seeing life from the perspective of his own demise or afterlife. The time
of the tyrant is an exceptional time, which cannot initiate or conceive its own
ending.

An Egyptian human rights activist in London scoffed, in an interview on Al

Jazeera, at the planes flying over Tahrir Square. “Does he want to establish an
occupation of Egypt?” The activist also said the ruling class when it loses
power goes mad – it is living in a parallel reality. But this parallel reality is
exactly the state of exception. It is for the tyrant and his entourage, his
retainers a time without end – hence they can only live in its endless reality.
The time of the Führer-Bunker was a similar endless, never-ending time. The
protestors want to end the state of exception – they want a ‘normal’ state –
but they have occupied a ‘state of madness’ – Mubarak’s state – so long (thirty

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years) that he cannot be convinced that this state can no longer hold them.
The protestors impose their own state of non-exception as the antinomy of the
tyrant’s state of exception. Their state of non-exception though appears to be
a non-state of exception in relation to the tyrant’s state of exception. Hence
for him his state of exception represents stability – whereas their non-state of
exception is chaos. Quite logically – for the protestors the reverse is the case.
One of the protestors frequent chants is simply “Hosni Mubarak – batal” –
“Hosni Mubarak – invalid”.

A placard presents the demand – what you did not do in thirty years, you
won’t manage in three months – leave. The placard’s text reminds the tyrant
– he has lost track of time. His reign must end like the Faustian bargain –
eventually but right on time Mephistopheles (the army? the army’s backers?)
appears and tells Faust “time’s up” (game over). The time of tyranny is always
endless – but it must always end abruptly. Or rather it begins to end – the
moment it begins its illegitimate visitation upon a population. The actual
ending is often counted in days – such as the “ten days that shook the world”.
Each moment of these days of ending – has a temporal density far higher than
the preceding years of tyranny. This is a law of revolution – time is not
suspended as in the state of exception – time is raised to a higher power – a
kind of temporal escape velocity – to rush an immobile presence, the
paralyzed unrest embodied in the tyrant and his ‘mob’ of beneficiaries
(security forces and business – local and global) off the historical stage. The
brevity of the time of collapse of such a regime is also a kind of law. It
represents an acceleration of events driven forward doubly by the protestors’
actions and the usual and extraordinary acts of suppression by a power itself
already in a negative depleted mode. The aggregate of power has been
subsisting in an ‘afterlife’ for a long period before the ‘final push’ begins – the
remnant of power at the end of a state must cannibalize itself to continue to
project a phantasmagorical vitality. Or – the power remaining in the state is
only sufficient to accelerate the obliteration (disappearance) of its own
phantasmal substance.

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A man amongst the crowd of Egyptian protestors said – “Thirty goddamned

years he ruled.” But one wonders if at the beginning of the thirty years one
would have spoken like that. “One year he ruled.” does not convey the same
kind of burden or pharaonic yoke. The thirty years weigh most heavily at the
end – it is the end weight (critical mass) which counts. Or the first year of the
thirty years (from the point of view of the end) seems as tiresome and
oppressive as the thirtieth year – the time of overflowing rejection. All years
seem like the thirtieth year at the end. Benjamin’s observation about the
clocks during the time of the July Revolution (1830) seems to refute this
principle of revolutionary time – he notes that on the first day of the battle
revolutionaries in various parts of Paris independently of one another shot at
the clock towers so as to freeze the time of the revolt. It is rather the time of
tyranny which is frozen – time unthaws, becomes a living time again only
during the revolt against the dead time of the tyrant.

Besides the years of the tyrant, the days of the revolution, there is also another
time, which echoes incessantly in the demands of the protestors – now.
Mubarak – leave now, step down now. Even Obama could not resist using the
‘messianic’ word – now. The orderly transition to democracy should start
now. One hears in that ‘now’ what Benjamin calls – “Jetztzeit” – Now-Time.
In the bipolar ‘algebra of revolution’ though the sign (symbol) ‘now’ also
stands for ‘never’.

Omar Soleiman threatened the protestors with “dialogue or coup” (like the
lady or the tiger?) – but how could a coup have a coup?

5. Badiou’s Infinite State

Contemporary philosophy is hypnotized by the power of the state – although

this fascination tends to veil itself in a preoccupation with militancy and
revolution. Agamben makes this most explicit in his introduction to Homo
Sacer - “Today, now that the great State structures have entered into a
process of dissolution and the emergency has, as Walter Benjamin foresaw,

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become the rule, the time is ripe to place the originary structure and limits of
the form of the state in a new perspective. The weakness of anarchist and
Marxian critiques of the State was precisely to have not caught sight of this
structure and thus to have quickly left the arcanum imperii, as if it had no
substance outside of the simulacra and the ideologies invoked to justify it. But
one ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not
understand, and the theory of the State (and in particular the state of
exception (…) ) is the reef on which the revolutions of our century have been
shipwrecked.” (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford, 1998, p. 12)

Axiom: Communiqués are like axioms, Badiou’s favored mode of thought.

‘Proving’ Deleuze’s and Guattari’s own axiom - “the great axiomaticians are
men of State (…)” (A Thousand Plateaus).

Rather than considering the moribund state as a ‘negative power’, Badiou sees
the power of what he calls the rioters in Tunisia to bring a regime to its
collapse as itself the “negative power”. “Its negative power is recognized, a
lamentable power that vanishes fully into its own image.” (see Daniel Fischer’s
transcription of Badiou’s seminar “What does “change the world” mean?”,
from January 19th 2011, online at wrong+arithmetic, Alain Badiou on Tunisia,
riots and revolution, February 2, 2o11) Still, one must regard this vanishing
power with sympathy (empathy) – because it shows that what appears
“unfailing stable” can collapse (“all that is solid melts into air”). That is its
“minimal lesson”. The paradox implicit in his analysis – what Badiou cannot
explain is why that lamentable vanishing negative power is precisely that,
which can cause that whose appearance is “unfailing stable” to collapse – thus
“changing the world”. Why is changing the world then ‘minimal’? Badiou
seems unable to conceive of a revolution in the time of its occurrence – he
describes our time as “intervallic” – between distinctive historical epochs.
Now is a time of riots. He diminishes the status of the Tunisian protestor to a
“rioter” – because the rioter does not present himself as an “alternative to the
State” – which the revolutionary organized in his Party invariably does. As if a
revolution were merely the orderly transition from one state and party to the
next – and not (in principle) the total destruction or at least interruption and

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as such change of what is. The state of which he speaks is always the
“ontological” state – in itself a non-volatile count. A revolution, for Badiou, is
only that which can immediately ‘substitute’ a ready-formed immobile set of
subsets for the existing defunct one. He sees the revolutionary overthrow of a
state as analogous to following a mathematical rule or series.
Here Badiou lapses into a fallacy Wittgenstein criticized as a myth of
continuity, a sort of utopia of the infinite and seamless following of a rule –
reflected in everyday practices as well as in the application of mathematical
rules.

Badiou cannot help judge the events in Tunisia as “illegal” – from the point of
view of the situation of the state, his major ontological category. “A vague
uneasiness makes itself felt in the requisitely contented character, let’s call it
consensual character, that must be displayed in spite of the inherent illegality
of the events concerned.” (ibid.) (“(…)en dépit d’illegalité fonciere des
événements concernés.”)

Perhaps the “unfailing stable” which has collapsed – is not just the empirical
regime in Tunisia or Egypt – but the ‘western’ paradigm of the “mafia-esque
dictatorship” (see Toni Negri: Letter to a Tunisian Friend, February 14, 2011,
http://multitudes.samizdat.net/) as a katechon – ostensibly “the bulwark”
against the threat of Islamism. Although this katechonic legitimacy of tyrant
states (proxy despots) – is itself dependent upon the veracity of such a threat
– the sheer unbearability of these katechonic states unleashed another sort of
Antichrist (rather than holding back its dominion) – the popular uprisings
leading to their own collapse. When the U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, in a
kind of autosuggestive stupor, urges the governments of the region facing the
revolts, for instance the government in Bahrain (home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet)
or in Libya to use “restraint” – she unconsciously summons the figure of the
katechon, the restrainer of chaos and lawless ones – the failing golem of U.S.
and ‘western’ foreign and military policy in the Middle East.

Paraphrasing Marx’s distinction in the 1844 Manuscripts –it is only necessary

to think the thought of communism to overthrow the thought of capitalism–

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though of course not enough for the same in reality. In Badiou’s thought it is
impossible to even think a revolution. His ontology of the state precludes the
thought of revolution or any other kind of ‘interruption’ of the state. How
could the negativity of the evental rupture be ‘recognized’ by the positive
state? First of all, the event has no structure and by definition “lacks being” –
meaning it does not exist in the “situation”. An event must undergo a
torturous examination by a lethargic secretive “state” bureaucracy with no
certainty of ever qualifying for the status of event. (Typically, he asks of the
Tunisian ‘rioters’ – what do they affirm?) The event stands ‘before the law’
with little hope of ever entering.
Badiou’s philosophy is predestined to be part of what Jacques Ranciere names
“the intellectual counter-revolution” (in the public discussion: “Importance of
Critical Theory for Social Movements Today, February 1, 2011, YouTube),
because his ontological premise is that of the state – the historical-political
‘nation-state’, the “figure of being” he finds admittedly indispensable to insure
the “count”.

He is a statist in ontology – the state is simply “what is”. “In the ontology of
historical multiplicities I have proposed, the State, qua the state of a situation,
is what ensures the structural count of a situation’s parts, a count of the
situation that generally bears the proper name of a particular ‘nation’. To call
such a state, that is such an operation of counting, a State ‘of right’, basically
means (…)the rule of counting (…)” (Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics”
in Conditions, London, 2008, p. 167)
Badiou criticized Althusser for “suturing” philosophy directly to politics – as
“class struggle in theory”. (see “Philosophy and Politics” op. cit., p. 160) But
hasn’t Badiou also sutured ontology to politics by designating the historical
state as identical with the ontological state – the bracket, frame he uses to
decide or leave undecided the nature of an ‘event’, its discernibility or
indiscernibility? Badiou can seem to leave politics as it is by surreptitiously
ontologizing it – not as politics itself but as a quasi ‘non-political’ state.
Politics though means state – not anti-state movement – or if a movement
then only the movement of the state, bringing politics very close to fascism.

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As Agamben says, echoing Adorno – we are still under the sign of

fascism/Nazism.

In any situation the state determines the three sorts of “one-terms”, meaning
the degree of inclusion or belonging in the state. If something is presented but
not included in the state it is singular, if both presented (belongs) and
represented (included) it is normal, if represented and not presented it is
deemed excrescent. These three one-terms depend solely upon the state for
their recognition or existence (the state confers the seal of the one) – besides
“they are the most primitive concepts of any experience whatsoever.” (Alain
Badiou, Being and Event, London, 2007, p. 100) In other words, the state is
all there is.
What state will ever decide to include its own destruction? Badiou’s
‘ontological state’ immunizes itself against resistance, it is a state of immunity.
The state is the presentation of fullness or plenitude. The anti-state
interruptions are invisible, inexistent, indiscernible. Dialectic has been
discarded – as Badiou says, there is no becoming, hence no negativity. The
‘romantic’ distance is the irreparable breach between singleton and state. The
state is tautological, the contract between self and self – the Ich=Ich of
German idealism. The state is the state because it excludes the presentation of
the void – this is also what makes it necessary. “The state secures and
completes the plenitude of the situation.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 522)

Badiou prescribes impossible conditions for ‘deciding’ if an “intervention” will

have been an event – always only in the future anterior tense. For an event to
have taken place (or to become established as such in the state or situation of
the state) – a sort of phantom prior-event must have already taken place – a
deferred pre-condition. But as an event is only something, which is new and
undecided, its pre-event disqualifies it permanently from ever having been an
event. “It is evental recurrence which founds intervention. In other words,
there is no interventional capacity, constitutive for the belonging of an evental
multiple to a situation, save within the network of consequences of a
previously decided belonging. An intervention is what presents an event for
the occurrence of another.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 209)

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Despite his often-repeated slogan “The truth is first of all something new” –
an event can never be new – there is only as Badiou says “evental recurrence”
– sounding almost Nietzschean. Any idea of a “radical beginning” or a “primal
event” he dismisses as “speculative leftism”. A radical beginning would be in
Badiou’s system something wild and ‘unsubmitted’ to the order of the
situation alias state – it is a false and violent thought of an “ultra-one of the
event, Revolution or Apocalypse”. But the event shrinks still further towards
insignificance/unreality – even as recurrence its occurrence is negligible – it
must have already been to be at all – it is existent only “after the fact” in its
“consequences”, a mode of being Badiou calls “being-faithful”.
(see chapter on “The Intervention” in Alain Badiou, Being and Event, London,
2007, p. 210)

Just as Badiou refers to the Tunisian events as “illegal” – so the intervention

whose status vis-à-vis the state must remain undecided – is first of all also
“illegal”.

Badiou admits that this is a “circle”, part of the “long critical trial of the reality
of action” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 209). These are almost magical
conditions – such as those presaged by the witches to Macbeth. Macbeth will
fall only when Birnam Woods moves to Dunsinane Hill, though none of
woman born can harm him and beware of Macduff. Perhaps the contagion of
uprisings in our time – does follow this logic: the moving of Birnam Woods is
like Badiou’s ‘roaming void’ of the ‘rioters’, unborn but lurking in the ontology
of the state. Macduffs seem to be plentiful.

The undecidable event of the Tunisian ‘riots’ was the impossible unexpected
pre-event for the fall of Mubarak in the Egyptian Revolution.

One wonders why Badiou, who casts himself as a thinker of the revolution,
should so require the state for the securing of his ontology. Why is the state so
indispensable a category? Peter Hallward hints at this dilemma at the end of a
review of the second volume of “Being and Event” – “Logics of Worlds”.

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“In Being and Event he developed an ontology which accepted the state as an
irreducible dimension of being itself: consistency is imposed at both the
structural and ‘meta-structural’ levels of a situation, and a truth evades but
cannot eliminate the authority of the state.” (Peter Hallward, “Order and
Event” On Badiou’s Logics of Worlds, New Left Review 53, Sept Oct 2008 p.
121, pdf, online at wrong+arithmetic, Alain Badiou on Tunisia, riots and
revolution, February 2, 2011)
Hallward notes this complicity of state and being for Badiou’s ontology – but
he does not give any reason for it. Badiou himself is quite frank about the
function and necessity of the state: “It is by means of the state that structured
presentation is furnished with a fictional being; the latter banishes, or so it
appears, the peril of the void, and establishes the reign, since completeness is
numbered, of the universal security of the one.” (Being and Event, op. cit.,
p. 98) Quite clearly, Badiou’s ontological state is also a security state, one in
which coercion is a quasi-natural action of structure.

The state is so construed by Badiou – his whole artifice – as he says – to

determine and act the criteria for inclusion and belonging in the set of
multiples which count as one. But such a multiple of multiples is haunted by
something, which constantly endangers its consistency, but is equally
unavoidable. This something is as potently dangerous and constitutive for
Badiou’s state as is anxiety (Angst) for Heidegger’s ontology of Dasein. The
void in Badiou’s construction is the equivalent of Heidegger’s Sorge, “the care
of Being”. “What Heidegger names the care of being, which is the ecstasy of
beings, could also be termed the situational anxiety of the void, or the
necessity of warding off the void.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 93)

The unpresented and unrepresented of the state – is its fatal (congenital) flaw.
The quasi-unborn of the state is the void. (Note: The idea of the “unborn” is
from Arthur Bradley, “Politics of the Unborn: Unbearable Life from Augustine
to Schmitt” paper presented in “Force and the Worst” series, Inc, Goldsmiths,
15th February 2011) At the same time – the state is a guarantee of the void –
for where could it exist if not within the state. If it were elsewhere immanence
of the state would be even more severely threatened. The state is necessary to

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contain the void, just as the void is an inevitable breach or gap haunting the
multiplicity of the state. The state is quite simply Being – and that must be
preserved at all costs. But the state is even more ensnared and precarious – as
the Being of being is the void. The utmost danger is that the void become
fixated or fix itself. To prevent that happening - above structure is another
structure or meta-structure (the state) whose sole function is the un-localizing
of the void. The void is an inner limit of being within the meta-structure of
the state – its own infernal region which Badiou calls “subjacent to chaos” or a
“spectre to be exorcised”. When one considers that precisely this void is
where if anywhere a revolutionary event would be likely to arise – one can
hardly imagine that Badiou’s thought edifice can conceive of the fragility of
state-power. The void qua event of revolution not only ruins the historical-
political state in Badiou’s thought – it is the ruin of being itself.
“Evidently the guarantee of consistency (the ‘there is Oneness’) cannot rely on
structure or the count-as-one alone to circumscribe and prohibit the errancy
of the void from fixing itself, and being, on the basis of this very fact, as
presentation of the unpresentable, the ruin of every donation of being and the
figure subjacent to Chaos.” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 93)

Agamben seizes upon Badiou’s absolutist ontology of the state – using its
arguments about the event to reveal them as a precise illumination of what
Agamben following Carl Schmitt calls the exception. The State (as per
Badiou) or the Sovereign (more or less synonymous for Agamben) is the
exception and the event – the interruption or intervention in itself. “Badiou’s
thought is, from this perspective, a rigorous thought of the exception. His
central category of the event corresponds to the structure of the exception.”
(Homo Sacer, op. cit., p. 25) If the State is the state of the situation – the
exception/event in excess of it – is the Sovereign. One sees where Agamben
perhaps simplifies or vulgarizes Badiou’s idea of the event – by seeing it as
“excrescent” – meaning included but not presented in the state (or
represented but not presented), whereas the event for Badiou is certainly not
included/represented – even if its membership is undecideable. It is neither
included (not at all) nor is it a member – definitely not. But Agamben is eager
to draw out a potentiality from Badiou’s scheme – one that configures the

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event and the Sovereign as one – under the sign of the decision (in the sense
of Carl Schmitt). “This is why sovereignty presents itself in Schmitt in the
form of a decision on the exception.” (ibid.) The actions of the Egyptian
Military council within or as a counter movement to the Revolution – is a
prototype of the Event as the Decision on the Exception. The Event according
to this logic is not the Revolution, but the ‘temporary’ counter-revolution. By
fixing the sovereign as the event/exception of the State – Agamben’s
interpretation of Badiou’s ontology of the state as a “logic of sovereignty” is
the counter-revolution in theory. Any position of subtraction of or in the State
(count), is ‘always already’ occupied by the sovereign exception – a counter-
revolution in permanence – to prevent the worst.

6. Bonapartism or “Pétainist Transcendental”?

There is a One and the Many within the state – Badiou’s vision of the absolute
state towering from the austere heights of power over its subsets of singletons
is a fiction or myth. Here Badiou seems blinded by the political-theological
model of Hobbes’ Leviathan – a hierarchic monolith firmly in the grip of an
absolute sovereign whose legitimacy derives from the “divine right of kings”
and whose cosmic imperative is to inhibit the unbinding of itself into chaos.
The State (always capitalized) in Badiou’s system is basically infallible and
non-political. He sees it, citing a ‘despairing Lenin, ready to die’ – as
‘obscenely permanent’: “(…) for the State is precisely non-political, insofar as
it cannot change, save hands (…)” (Being and Event, op. cit., p. 110)

Hobbes’ Leviathan itself was composed in the midst of the English Civil War
and regicide; his system is based on fear, especially of the ever-present danger
of the imminent dissolution of authority. The acid stringency of his rule of
commonwealth reflects the deep knowledge inherited from antiquity – that all
power could end abruptly. For what is any state but the temporary
coalescence of power? As Seneca wrote in answer to Serenus in his treatise
entitled “From the Tranquillity of the Soul”: “What kingdom is not threatened
by collapse, shattering, takeover and execution? And that without any long

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intervals. An hour’s work: sitting on the throne and kneeling in front of it.
Take note: every position is changeable (…)” (Seneca, Von der Seelenruhe,
Leipzig, 1980, p. 154)
Marx has shown, in 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, his classical study of the
collapse of state or the coup d’état of a post-revolutionary nation-state, how
the action of the ‘One’ took 36,000,000 French citizens by surprise. Louis
Napoleon, president of the French Republic at the time of his coup, could use
the state to capture the state – he manipulated the inconsistencies or
loopholes in the constitution regarding the exceptional role of the president,
elevating it to that of emperor for himself thus bypassing those rancorous
elements of the national assembly and the system of official representation.
The State or the count reverted to Oneness of an absolute ruler by way of the
coup. The assertion of the one-of-the-count, the presidency, over the sub-sets
of parliamentary representation exploited the vestige of absolute monarchy
embodied in the office of the presidency. The constitutional aporia was the
basis for the coup – the coup of the One over the many within the meta-
structure of the state. By an odd twist, the errancy of the void reappears in the
meta-structure itself, fixing itself as a coup d’état. The coup qua void ‘restores’
or secures the One or Oneness of the state.
Non-being and Being (of the State) coincide in the coup d’état.

Varying the theme of the one and the many, the Egyptian military council,
after the forced resignation of Mubarak, have taken over the One of the
presidency as a collective leadership. Similar to Louis Napoleon’s
circumventing of parliament – though in apparent cooperation with the
demands of the people’s revolution – the supreme military council has
suspended the constitution and parliament, those tainted parts perpetuating
the fiction of the representation of the many. Since both constitution and
parliament – as well as the cabinet which is still in power – are seen as corrupt
relics of the old regime, the military rulers could appear to be acting in the
name of the revolution whilst de facto carrying out what appears to be a
‘temporary’ coup.

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The coup and the revolt are two opposing forms of interruption of the state,
antithetical mirror images of each other. As a kind of historical symmetry,
following upon the reign of Louis Napoleon begun in a coup d’état and ended
in ignominious defeat in the Franco-Prussian War, came the outbreak of the
popular insurrection of the Paris Commune. The coup d’état secured the one-
ness of the state thus preserving being from within the meta-structure – the
reign of Louis Napoleon lasted 18 years. The “non-place of the place” created
by the “fixated void” (those rebellious members of Paris national guard
militias and army units who refused to return their weapons and cannons)
attempted to realize a communist society for the three months of the Paris
Commune.
They had the aim, as Marx writes, of destroying state power and its pretence
of national unity: “The unity of the nation should have become real through
the destruction of that state-power, which pretended to be the embodiment of
unity, but wanted to remain independent and superior to the nation, on whose
body it was only a parasitic growth.” (“Die Einheit der Nation sollte (…)eine
Wirklichkeit werden durch die Vernichtung jener Staatsmacht, welche sich für
die Verkörperung dieser Einheit ausgab, aber unabhängig und überlegen sein
wollte gegenüber der Nation, an deren Körper sie doch nur ein
Schmarotzerauswuchs war.” Karl Marx, Der Bürgerkrieg in Frankreich (The
Civil War in France), in K. Marx und F. Engels, Ausgewählte Werke, Moskau,
1972, p. 303)

Which historical interruption of French state-power would Badiou’s system

consider an Event – the ‘positive’ coup or the ‘negative’ revolt? Either, neither
or both? Is the Event for or against Being?

In his more immediately political work – The Meaning of Sarkozy – Badiou

has analyzed an enduring unconscious pattern within French political and
social history of the state – which he calls France’s “Pétainist transcendental”.
“I propose to say that ‘Pétainism’ is the transcendental, in France, of
catastrophic forms of disorientation taken by the state. We have a major
disorientation, this is presented as a turning point in the situation, and is

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solemnly active at the head of the state.” (Alain Badiou, The Meaning of
Sarkozy, London, 2008, p. 78)
He depicts it as a process of legitimacy of the state, whereby the state aligns
itself with history. Although he names it Pétainism, Badiou traces this pattern
back to the time of the Restoration of 1815 in France. The state is the
historical actor, the rescuer of the people from a moral crisis and decline
originating in a disastrous event. The state of the restoration rescued the
people from revolution, beheading of the king, etc; later for Pétain himself –
the Nazi puppet state at Vichy was the “national revolution” against the
disaster of the Popular Front; for Sarkozy, the disastrous event for which the
state is the only medication was May 1968. As Badiou explains:
“There is a historical element in Pétainism that consists in linking two events:
a negative event, generally with a working class and popular structure, and a
positive event, with a state, electoral and/or military structure. (…) This is a
source of legitimacy for the new government, since all legitimacy of this kind
is a link between the state and history. The government represents itself, and
has itself represented, as historical actor of the first importance, since it is this
government that has finally embarked on the correction needed in the wake of
the inaugural damaging event.” (Alain Badiou, op. cit., p. 84)

One can recognize in Badiou’s typology of the “Pétainist transcendental” the

‘unconscious’ model of Badiou’s own ontology of the state, his positive state of
legitimacy of Being. The government or meta-structure represents itself as the
One or historical actor, whose function it is to safeguard and correct Being
against any intrusions of the “unpresentable”. The state/head of state is
outside of the count –in Badiou’s terminology the equivalent for the ancient
“rex solutus est a legibus” (the king is released from the laws). Most notably,
the name of the collaborateur state installed in Vichy under Pétain was
changed from French Third Republic to simply the French State.
The two events in the Pétainist transcendental – corresponding to a “negative
event” of social revolution and a “positive event” of state or head of state
resulting in a despotic ‘correction’ of the negative event – bear great structural
resemblance to the two apparently irreconcilable elements of Badiou’s

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ontology - Being (positive-state) and Event (negative-revolution) – more

universally, state and history.

In essence, the only manner in which the infinite state could exist (or inexist),
securing Oneness of Being infinitely, is as an infinite coup in permanence.

In a time though of uprisings and insurrections against the state and even the
idea of the state, some of which have been able to shake the “unfailing stable”
as Badiou has conceded – one might ask if an ontology such as his presuming
the infinitude of the state – might itself be in need of a coup/rescue.

The incurable melancholy of the system (Baudrillard) will have been the
infinite unthinking of this thought.

© Shannee Marks, December 2010

All rights reserved

Published in Faust Series Opus 9: 22nd February 2011

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