Badiou's Spectator-Subject and Fireworks Politics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹ The French Treasury's Grand Livre is the book kept in the French Treasury within which are inscribed the names and accounts of all those who hold government securities. (Lissagaray 1976: unpaginated)

² Peter Hallward defines the clinamen as the force that ‘relates static atoms and the fixity of place to the void.… Were it not for the clinamen, the atoms would remain forever suspended in absolute stasis, forever in their place.… Self-constituent, self-propelling, the clinamen is the sole condition of change and innovation … aspecific, beyond necessity, absolutely out of place [hors-lieu], unplaceable [inesplaçable], unfigurable: chance [le hasard].’ (2003: 33)

³ Badiou argues that theatre could gather a representative section of the crowd by becoming free and compulsory: citizens would have to go to the theatre a minimum of four times a year to attend ‘three plays from the repertoire and one new creation’, and would enclose their stamped theatre card with their tax declaration (2008: 231).

⁴ Badiou's conception of the Mallarméan crowd is not too dissimilar from Derrida's notion of the ‘innumerable’, defined in Dissemination as ‘a force that cannot be numbered, classed, represented, ruled, a force that always surpasses the speculation or the order of the ruling class, and even exceeds its own representation’ (Derrida 2000: 363).

⁵ See Badiou's meditation on Mallarmé in Being and Event (2006: 191-9).

⁶ The notion of the collective as a vanishing term of politics is in direct connection with Marxism. Peter Hallward points out that for Badiou, Marxism ‘calls not simply for the establishment of a society without classes or a destruction of the state, but for the destruction of the agent of this first destruction, the consummation of the organised proletariat itself in its own ongoing “fading away [évanouissement]”’ (Hallward 2003: 31).

⁷ For a description of Balla's futurist designs, see Matthew Causey (2006: 87).