The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, First Edition. Edited by Michael Gibbons. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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Badiou, Alain (1937–)
Keith Woodward
French radical philosopher, novelist, playwright, and activist, Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco and studied under Jean Hyppolite and Georges Canguilhem at the École Normale Supérieure in the late 1950s. His philosophical project brings speculative thought – articulated by the decision that “mathematics = ontology” – to bear upon four “conditions” (art, science, love, and politics) that reveal situated-yet-universal truths for which philosophy must account. In the context of politics, Badiou employs philosophy as a form of “metapolitics” that can describe situated (rather than “historic”) processes of militant subjectivization and political change.
Badiou was radicalized by the student/worker revolts of May and June 1968, during which he embraced Marxist-Leninist Maoism. Although many among the French academic Left eventu-ally distanced themselves from Maoist philos-ophy, it continued to be Badiou’s driving analytic for nearly two decades and arguably remains a strong influence in his recent work. In 1969, he was invited by Michel Foucault to join the faculty of the philosophy department at the turbulent Experimental University of Vincennes, an institution newly established as a concession
to the revolutionary soixante-huitards. There, Badiou was a member of one of several Maoist factions on campus who would frequently protest against colleagues, such as Gilles Deleuze, whom they considered to be politically reac-tionary or “anarcho-desirers.” “Once,” he recalls in his book on Deleuze, “I even commanded a ‘brigade’ of intervention in his course” (Badiou 2000: 2).
During the 1960s, Badiou was associated with the influential theory collective Cahiers pour l’analyse and, prior to 1968, was a member of Louis Althusser”s secretive Groupe Spinoza, which had attempted to construct a new ideo-logical structure for the French Communist Party (PCF). Shortly thereafter, he turned to nonparliamentarian forms of political organi-zation and struggle. In response to the dissolu-tion of the Union des jeunesse communistes marxiste-léniniste – the Maoist branch of the PCF that was famously ineffectual during the events of 1968 – Badiou cofounded the Union des communistes français marxiste-léniniste (UCF-ml) in 1969. One of many French “orthodox” Maoist groups to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the UCF-ml’s member-ship was largely anti-electoral intellectuals who embraced Mao”s notion of “investigation” into the conditions of the exploited and focused on assisting “immigrant workers who
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were still locked into the shantytowns known as bidonvilles” (Fields 1988: 98).
During the 1980s, Badiou moved beyond Maoism to embrace a broader range of situ-ated politics. He cocresitu-ated the Organization Politique (OP) with a small group of former members of the recently disbanded UCF-ml. Identifying as a “party without a party,” OP mobilized against the political “inexistence” experienced by marginalized groups who lack representation in statist politics. OP also orga-nized with immigrant laborers in France, known as the “sans papiers,” whose lack of identification papers leaves them politically unrecognizable by state institutions (citizenship, healthcare, etc.) Other areas of political erasure recognized by OP included work – in “the campaign for workers” compensation during the closure of the Renault factory at Billancourt in 1992” – and housing – in “the campaign against the demolition of the foyers ouvriers (workers’ hostels) in the Paris suburb of Montreuil (1996 through 1998)” (Hallward 2003: 234). Not coincidentally, the political shift from the more orthodox Maoism of UCF-ml to the broad-based, localized politics of OP closely mirrors a similar transition within Badiou’s philosophy.
Badiou’s mature philosophical contributions to political theory explore the relationship bet-ween ontology and politics. He insists that it is not the job of philosophy or philosophers to dictate politics. Rather, “philosophy depends upon certain nonphilosophical domains” for its development (Badiou 2012a: 2). Four domains (science, art, love, and politics) serve as the sites of “generic procedures” that undergo occasional transformations – “events,” such as the discovery of new scientific paradigms or the emergence of new forms of militant politics – and give rise to new truths. These constitute new “conditions” for philosophy that its ontology must subsequently incorporate and address. Philosophy always comes after the occurrence of a nonphilosophical event (and thus, “after” politics), and addresses itself to those new truth conditions as universal com-ponents of a changing world.
From the beginning, the question of change and its relation to politics drives Badiou’s philosophical project. The Maoist period that opened his career is represented by a trilogy of books devoted to materialist “science” of dialectics, contradiction, and ideology. This influence remains, but by the 1980s the first elements of a changing, “mature” philosophy appeared with the major work, Theory of the Subject. This text rejects one of the most famous tropes of his early “master”: Althusser”s espousal of “history without a subject.” Instead, borrowing heavily upon Lacan, Badiou (2009) argues that a certain kind of subject does exist, though its occurence is rare. Badiou”s subject is the product of an event and the new truths it reveals: one becomes a subject by maintaining a fidelity to those new truths. Thus, the subject is both that which recognizes the event and that which is constituted by it, through a fidelity to its truth. As a militant subject, Badiou, for example, remains faithful to his fellow soix-ante-huitards and the lessons of 1968. With the arrival of this relation between events, truths, and subjects, Bosteels (2005) identifies a transition in Badiou’s politics from “serving the people” to “serving the truth.”
By boldly declaring that “mathe-matics = ontology,” Badiou’s mature philosophy offers a novel ontological system and an alternative to the notion of the “end of philos-ophy” in Heideggerian poetics. In Being and Event (2005 [1988]) and Logics of Worlds (2009 [2006]), his magnum opera, Badiou employs the analytics of Cantorian set theory to illus-trate that being is multiple (rather than one) and that existence is subject to change through the production of new truths. The crucial rela-tion between being and event thus differs from accounts by Heidegger – where being “‘gives itself ’ as event” – and Sartre – for whom the terms are irresistibly separated as two distinct realms. Instead, Badiou understands the rela-tion as “articulated through a grip or dead-lock”: it is this “impasse of being” that “a subject, in the event of truth that induces it, retroactively enables to ‘pass’ into existence” (Bosteels 2011: 7).
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Truths “exist as exceptions to what there is” (Badiou 2009: 4). Generic procedures carry a universalism – truth – existing in addition to contemporary worlds. Politically, Badiou’s target is “democratic materialism,” where opinion or doxa (rather than truth) reigns amidst bodies (individual singularities) and languages (cultural constructions). He asso-ciates democratic materialism with the liberal ideology of the popular French philosophers and political establishment of the 1980s and 1990s, who celebrated neoliberal capitalism and identitarian relativism while declaring the death of the ideas of May 1968. Truths, according to Badiou, unify worlds and thus, “introduce, within the play of established opinions, a sudden change of scale” (2011: 24; emphasis original). Whereas languages and bodies belong to a specific world, truths belong to all worlds (they are “indifferent” to the world) and thus “affirm” the unity of worlds, despite the apparent frag-mentariness of the view of democratic materi-alism. The guideline for philosophy (that is, establishing what thought is or how to think), is therefore to begin with the “restrictive exception of truths and not the freedom of opinion” (2011: 25; emphasis original). Thus, Badiou considers thought to be a kind of labor involving “process, production, constraint, and discipline” (25):
When I speak of political truth, this does not involve a judgement but a process…A truth is
something that exists in its active process, which
manifests this process. Truths are not prior to political processes; there is no question of confirming or applying them. Truths are reality itself, as a process of production of political novelties, political sequences, political revolutions, and so forth. (2012b: 87)
SEE ALSO: Althusser, Louis (1918–90);
Communism; Deleuze, Gilles (1925–95); Foucault, Michel (1925–95); Heidegger, Martin (1889–1976); Maoism; Marxism–Leninism; Metaphysics and Postmetaphysics; Radicalism; Revolution; State, The; Universalism/Universalization
References
Badiou, A. (2000) Deleuze: The Clamor of Being,
trans. L. Burchill. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Badiou, A. (2005 [1988]) Being and Event, trans.
O. Feltham. New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2009 [2006]) Logics of Worlds: Being
and Event, 2, trans. A. Toscano. New York:
Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2009) Theory of the Subject, trans.
B. Bosteels. New York: Continuum.
Badiou, A. (2011) Second Manifesto for Philosophy,
trans. L. Burchill. Cambridge: Polity.
Badiou, A. (2012a) Philosophy for Militants, trans.
B. Bosteels. New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2012b) The Rebirth of History, trans.
G. Elliot. New York: Verso.
Bosteels, B. (2005) “Post-Maoism: Badiou and
Politics,” Positions, 13, 575–634.
Bosteels, B. (2011) Badiou and Politics. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Fields, A. B. (1988) Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory
and Practice in France and the United States.
New York: Praeger.
Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Further Reading
Badiou, A. (2001) Ethics, trans. P. Hallward. New
York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2003) Saint Paul: The Foundation of
Universalism, trans. R. Brassier. Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Badiou, A. (2005) Metapolitics, trans. J. Barker.
New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2006) Polemics, trans. S. Corcoran.
New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2008) The Meaning of Sarkozy, trans.
D. Fernbach. New York: Verso.
Badiou, A. (2010) The Communist Hypothesis,
trans. D. Macey and S. Corcoran. New York: Verso.
Baring, E. (2011) The Young Derrida and French
Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University
Press.
Bosteels, B. (2011) The Actuality of Communism.
New York: Verso.
