Professional Documents
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Badiou Balibar Ranciere Re
Badiou Balibar Ranciere Re
Rethinking Emancipation
Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy
Series Editor: james Fieser, U niversity ofTennessee at Martin, USA
Nick Hewlett
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Acknowledgements IX
Note on Translations X
Abbreviations Xl
Index 1 73
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 ofhis 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 ofexcluded groups and against the unj ust 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 1 999, 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 ofjournals.
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 1 937, was a student at the
Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and began to work within a
broadly Althusserian framework. He taught philosophy at the U ni
versity of Paris VIII from 1 969 to 1 999 and then began teaching at
the Ecole Normale. Greatly influenced by the May 1 968 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 1 985 which orga
nizes around a small number of key issues including housing, illegal
immigrants lsans papiers) and industrial change.
Etienne Balibar was born in Avalon, France, in 1 942 and also stu
died at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. He worked at the Uni
versity of Algiers, Algeria in the mid- 1 960s and then taught at the
Lycee de Savigny-sur-Orge, in France, then at the University of
Paris I (Sorbonne) from 1 969 to 1 994. He held the Chair in Political
and Moral Philosophy from 1 994 to 2002 at the University of Paris X
(N anterre) 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 ( 1 965),
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 1 973: 1 1 ) .
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, 1 9 70 [ 1 932] ) and the
Theses on Feuerbach ( 1 968a [ 1 888] ) , there emerged a true science ofhis
torical materialism (both these works were written in 1 845 and both
remained unpublished for some time ) . I n 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 1 960s and 1 970s 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 1 969 [ 1 965] : 1 2 ) . 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 1 9 73: 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 ofpraxis, 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 ofRanciere'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 1 980s 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-ii
terre orientation towards the real world of liberal democratic politics
which is in some respects highly conciliatory.
Chapter 2
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 ivinements,
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, or fi diliti, 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 l'analyse group in the 1 960s and was profoundly influenced by
the student and workers' revolt in May 1 968, an uprising which has
had a key influence on his thought and to which he frequently refers.
In 1 968 he co-founded the Maoist splinter organization, the U nion
des communistes de France marxistes-leninistes (UCFML) and con
tinued to act and write as an orthodox Maoist during the 1 9 70s, up to
and including his Theorie du sujet, published in 1 982. I n 1 988 Badiou
published DEtre et l'ivinement, 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 1 968 and since 1 985 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. I n addition to
his numerous philosophical works he has published novels, plays
and the libretto of an opera. I n this chapter I examine what can be
described as Badiou's mature work, that is his philosophy from
L'Etre et l'ivinement 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 1 999 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)
The fact that philosophy does not itself produce truth is directly
linked to regimes of truth which are precisely the conditions of it
. . . philosophy is conditioned by truths. I would therefore say: there
must be truths in order for there to be philosophy because philoso
phy must examine and think the regime of compossibility of the
truth events which condition it. (EB 9)
Truth
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 . . . (PH 1 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?
�ext, 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 deJoudre? (Badiou is emphatic that
love is not just sex, incidentally.) Is not an expression of fidelity to the
1 9 1 7 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 ofdeparture
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 I'eve
nement. He is in search of the highest possible level ofpurity, 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 rif 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. I n 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 1 968 [ 1 859] : 1 69-70)
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
1 968b [ 1 859] : 1 8 1-2)
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 1 94] . )
In the case of Marx, the subject i s certainly important t o 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 ofBad iou'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 Bad iou's political thought in the next chapter.
Chapter 3
In short, true politics takes the form ofan 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 1 792 to 1 794 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 1 848 to the Paris Commune in 1 87 1 ; the Bolshevik
mode, identified in particular with Lenin, running from the publica
tion of Lenin's What is to be Done? in 1 902 to 1 9 1 7; and finally the
The Paradoxes ofAlain Badiou's Theory ofPolitics 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 slhe 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 1 9 1 7 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 1 968 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 1 960s; 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 1 968, 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 ofJune in the Grenelle negotiations,
this had the effect of taking the wind out of the sails of the workers'
protests. Moreover, the Grenelle negotiations certainly resulted in
changes which were meagre compared to the strength of the May
movement (see Capdevielle and Mouriaux 1 988) .
I n 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 1 968, 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 Fran�ois Furet's revisionist approach to the French Revolution,
where Furet attempts to remove the evental-revolutionary signifi
cance of 1 789 and instead presents it as a series of individual historical
facts C Zizek 1 999: 1 3 1-2, 1 35-6) . 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 ofideological 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 ( 1 4 1 ) . (See also
Daniel Bensai:d's chapter, 'Alain Badiou et Ie miracle de l'evenement',
in Bensai:d 200 1 : 1 43-70.)
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 1 992,
1 995, 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 ofmar
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 ofAlain Badiou's Theory ojPolitics 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 1 1 7] ) , 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 1 989 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 200 1 ) . 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 ofglobal capital in Genoa and elsewhere, 'ded
icate themselves to a systematic and economist identification of the
adversary, which is already utterly misguided' (BF 1 20) .
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 l O6) . 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-l O2) . Again, the theory of the two reinforces
the perception ofBadiou 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. I n 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 1 980s, 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 6 1 ) . Marx is
thus a source for 'the beginning of a different way of thinking politics'
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 politics' ( 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 ofa 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 ofits 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
itv 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 1 968, during which time this type of development was
common (and arguably has been perhaps even more so since the
beginning of the 1 980s ) , this is recuperation.
Badiou discusses developments in parliamentary politics at some
length in an article entitled 'On the Presidential Election of April
May 2002' (C l 1 3-43), 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' (C l 1 5) . 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) J acques Chirac, after winning 1 6.9 per
cent of the vote in the first round. Badiou argues that popular reac
tions to the relative success ofLe 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 (C 1 1 8- 1 9 ) . 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 1 968
and in 1 982 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' ( C l 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 1 968: 'elections, trahison' (C 1 22) . Reminiscent ofthe 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 1 1 5) . For
him there is no real difference between Le Pen and recent French gov
ernments which have persecuted sans papiers ( C l 25) . He argues that
the word democracy 'crystallises consensual subjectivity' ( C l 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' (C 1 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' ( C l 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 ofAlain Badiou's Theory ofPolitics 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
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
.
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 r:if Labour: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France
( 1 989 [ 1 98 1 ] ) follows in great detail intellectual expressions of work
ing class life of the 1 830s and 1 840s such as workers' debates with the
F ourierists 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 1 830 uprising in a
way Ranciere and his generation were by the events of May 1 968.
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 [Mterword] : 2 19 ) . 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 Nights ofLabour 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 mentalitis 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
rDW 1 2 1 -2 ) .
There is, i t would seem, an irony with this shift away from a view of
the working class as a progressive force because ofits 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 Badiou, 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 ( 1 99 1 [ 1 987]) 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 ( 1 770-1 840) . 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, leadsJacotot 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 slhe 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 1 0 1 ) . This
highly unorthodox approach to pedagogy could hardly be further
removed from that of Althusser, whom Ranciere quotes in La Lefon
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 1 7, 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 j ust:
acts on the part of individuals or groups who disrupt the inj ustice of
the status quo; by doing this the sans-part assert their right to be under
stood in a way that the discourse of received wisdom does not allow;
the rebels' statements cannot be understood by the ruling police and
the conditions ofcomprehension are created in the process of rebellion
and its aftermath, through the rebels seizing the opportunity to assert
themselves and, in linguistic terms, asserting the comprehensibility of
their utterances. In this sense Ranciere's theory is a theory of the sub
ject similar to Badiou's, in that subjects must believe in their actions
and statements and make them true by creating the revolutionizing
criteria by which they are judged. In Ranciere, however, it seems
there is far more premeditation on the part of the dominated than in
1 08 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
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 Democra�r 1 13
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 maj or fashion to poststructuralism.
At the heart ofhis definition of the political is the notion ofemancipa
tion, with the defiant actions of ordinary people taking centre-stage.
Taken as a whole, Balibar's preoccupations are often reminiscent of
those ofAlthusser - 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 ( 1 970
[ 1 965] ) , 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 1 970s, 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 1 980s
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 I980s 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 ofModernity 1 1;
(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 1 1 9)
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 (igalibertej 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 ofModernity 1 23
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 ( Mel 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 (Mel 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 man' on the one hand and the 'rights of
citizen' on the other. By contrast with the 1 789 Declaration if the
Rights if 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 ( Mel 43-4) . The core and indeed the
1 24 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
major goal of the text, he contends, is precisely the identity ofman 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 Q,uestion) 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 ofequaliberty: 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 its presupposition lies the proposition of equal
-
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 (IC 1 49) . 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
[ personne] for fifteen centuries, is not an ontological figure, that of
an objectum or hypokeimenon, but a legal, political, theological and
moral figure . . .
What - or rather who - comes after the subject (first around
1 789-93) , 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. (IC 1 52, italics in original; also
see Cadava et al l 99 l )
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' (IC l 56 ) . 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 ofModernity 127
[T] he mode ofsubjection and the mode ofproduction (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 . . . ( I C 1 60, 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 ofvio
lence - at once structural and conj unctural, 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 it . . . (HW 1 0-1 1 .
Concluding remarks
In his substantial and complex (Euvre, 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
1 40 Badiou, Balibar, Ranciere
analysis of, for example, the European Union, and finally an unhap
pily over-optimistic interpretation of the legacy of 1 789, 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 [ 1 998] ) is one of the most insightful and trenchant analyses to
have appeared of France's superficially consensual form of govern
ment since the early 1 980s. 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 sans-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 ' [p] olitics 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 1 920s
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 1 47
The above remarks and the more detailed critique expressed in the
preceding chapters suggest the need for additional lines ofintellectual
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
1 48 Badiou. Balibar, Rancure
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