Resurrection and Reaction in Alain Badiou: Towards an Evental Historiography

Abstract

Alain Badiou’s theory of the event has often been characterised as ahistorical in its focus on the punctual irruption of radical novelty. Not only does the event break completely with the past, but its aleatory character means that historical discourse cannot account for its occurrence, even retrospectively. This article complicates this putative opposition between the event and history in Badiou’s thought in four interrelated ways. Firstly, it situates the question of history in the broader context of his early Maoist period, where a crucial distinction between ideological history and dialectical historicity is already discernible. Secondly, it emphasises the way in which, even in the work that divorces the event from history most violently (Being and Event), the event remains absolutely conditioned by this historicity. Thirdly, it draws upon Badiou’s latest major work, Logiques des mondes, where the question of history returns in the form of a new concept, ‘evental resurrection’. Fourthly and most speculatively, the article then extrapolates from this concept of ‘resurrection’ and from Badiou’s own mode of philosophical exposition in order to adumbrate a form of evental historiography which, in contrast to the pacifying effects of ‘statist’ or official history, is faithful to the radical implications of a truth.

Notes

¹ Daniel Bensaïd, for example, complains that ‘detached from its historical conditions, pure diamond of truth, the event […] is akin to a miracle’ and that this ‘preoccupation with purity reduces politics to a grand refusal and prevents it from producing lasting effects’ (Hallward 2004: 101). Peter Osborne has argued that the ‘self‐proclaimed “return” of philosophy in Being and Event is a return to a classical conception of philosophy’ (Osborne 2007: 20) which neglects the Marxist critique of the self‐sufficiency of philosophy, that is its putative elevation above historical determination by dint of a transcendent rationality. Peter Hallward further points out that, without a theory of relationality with which to locate the event in an empirical ‘situation’, Badiou’s work fails the challenge of Karl Marx’s 11^th thesis on Feuerbach: ‘Though it will have long since ceased merely to describe the world, its promise to change this world will always remain unduly abstract’ (Hallward 2003: 322).

² Where Badiou absolutely departs from Hegel in relation to History is in a statement like the following: ‘The State is the Idea of Spirit in the external manifestation of human Will and its Freedom. It is to the State, therefore, that change in the aspect of History indissolubly attaches itself’ (Hegel 1956: 47). For Badiou, it is constitutively against the state that true change must be directed.

³ Much of Théorie du sujet revolves around the idea that if there are two classes, it is only in the non‐antagonistic sense that Lacan says there are two sexes: this twoness is precisely a force of scission, and not the fusion (or confrontation) of two identical entities. The proletariat are thus to the bourgeoisie as feminine structure is to the masculine in the Lacan of Seminar XX: a pas tout or non‐all that disrupts masculine (bourgeois) universality from the ‘inside’ without being reducible to the exteriorising logic of exception by which that universality attempts to domesticate excessive difference.

⁴ For Badiou, disaster occurs when philosophy takes its operative void for some kind of substance, and thus imagines itself capable of producing rather than gathering truths. He writes: ‘philosophy, renouncing the operational singularity of truths, is itself presented as being a truth procedure. Which also means that it is presented as an art, a science, a passion or a policy’ (Badiou 1999: 128–29).

⁵ As we shall see, the beginning and end of such an evental sequence is not an objective property of the incident concerned, but the product of a subjective intervention. Indeed, where (or when) one chooses to designate the end of a sequence in particular illustrates one’s faithful or reactive disposition vis‐à‐vis its truth. For example, the truth of the Paris Commune is by no means contaminated by its ultimate failure (hence Lenin’s dance in the snow outside the Kremlin when his revolution outlasted that of the Communards) (Badiou 1982: 38). Similarly, if one ends the tumultuous sequence known as the Chinese Cultural Revolution before Mao recoiled from the radical implications of his own experiment in radical mass democracy by reasserting the military might of the state and the party, one concentrates the evental implications of that sequence for the ongoing question of political organisation (Badiou 2006b). And the whole Twentieth Century can be characterised as long or short, totalitarian or revolutionary, modernist or postmodernist, depending on the length and location of the sequence chosen to define it (Badiou 2005a).

⁶ As Badiou’s own activism with the Organisation politique he helped found demonstrates, one of the most incendiary ‘evental sites’ in contemporary France is the sans papiers or undocumented workers.

⁷ In fact, Badiou points out that there has been a debate internal to mathematics about the subjective dimension of decision since the turn of the Twentieth Century, around the ‘axiom of choice’ (see Meditation 22 in Badiou 2005b).

⁸ In Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégélienne, Badiou reprimands Sartre for forcing Marxism back towards German idealism through his existentialist insistence on the Cartesian cogito (Badiou et al. 1978).

⁹ There is significant equivocation around this in Théorie du sujet. In an early seminar, Badiou suggests that the bourgeoisie occasionally acts as a subject, actively ‘interrupting the interruption’ pursued by the proletariat. However, under the influence of the Lacanian topology of the pas‐tout, he later corrects himself: in fact, there is only one ‘real’ subject, in a fully destructive‐creative sense, the proletariat. In this sense, Logiques des mondes ‘resurrects’ the former position in the form of the ‘reactive’ and ‘obscure’ subjective figures.

¹⁰ Truths are infinite in the sense that they index that which is constitutively uncountable or without number for the situation to which they pertain. While a particular truth‐enquiry may be finite to the extent that it is time‐bound and the number of multiples it can test is limited, the totality of its project ‘result’ is infinite insofar as it incessantly evades the veridical categories of knowledge. See Meditation 31 in Badiou (2005b).

¹¹ ‘Forcing’ is a term Badiou adapts from the mathematician Paul Cohen. It refers to the process whereby a situation is made to adjust its entire encyclopaedia in order to verify a previously indiscernible truth which a truth‐procedure has demonstrated nonetheless belongs to it.

¹² The conclusion to Logiques des mondes openly restates Badiou’s hostility to history, this time under the rubric of a critique of ‘democratic materialism’:

Democratic materialism proposes to call ‘thought’ the pure algebra of appearance. The result of this lifeless conception of the present is a fetishisation of the past as separable ‘culture’. Democratic materialism has a passion for history, it is, truly, the only authentic historical materialism. (Badiou 2006a: 531)

¹³ It is tempting to imagine that the concept of ‘emergent causality’ developed within systems theory and complexity theory might prove a fruitful model for grasping the movement of evental consequences, particularly as it emphasises self‐generating, auto‐amplifying consistency. Often used to model spontaneous natural phenomena like hurricanes or tidal waves, however, emergent causality tends to theorise such phenomena on the basis of a kind of ‘tipping point’ logic whereby mundane interactions (say, the usual wave patterns on the surface of an ocean) achieve an intensity and frequency that results in a qualitatively different phenomenon (such as a tsunami). Badiou, however, has generally criticised this Hegelian fantasy of quality emerging from quantity (see Badiou et al. 1978: 51; Badiou 2005b: 161–70; 2006a: 153–61).