True Requirements or the Requirements of Truth? The Nietzschean Communism of Alain Badiou

Abstract

The main purpose of the essay is to claim that Badiou has developed a distinctive understanding of “communism” which is very different from the Marxist one. Several scholars have noticed the differences between Badiou and Marx, sometimes striking ones, but have generally failed to go beyond describing them. Here an attempt is made to trace these differences back to the—largely—Nietzschean footing of Badiou's philosophy. I claim that we are dealing in fact not with different tactics, but with two different projects, envisioning distinct strategic goals. Marxist communism is about a dialectical overcoming of the capitalist present, in a way which transcends capitalism but which is predicated on the social, political and cultural transformation brought about by capitalism. Badiou's project, by contrast, aims at achieving a clean break with history. Nietzsche is useful for Badiou inasmuch as he provides a critique of mass society and aims to create a new man, the Overman. The essay discusses the differences between these two projects, focusing on a number of topics, among them the nature of capitalism, the meaning of revolutionary subjectivity, and the attitude to history and to historical possibilities. Marx's political project is vindicated vis-à-vis the elitism and anti-humanism, which vitiate Badiou's alternative approach. A dialogue with Badiou's position, however, is not foreclosed.

Keywords:

• Badiou
• Marx
• political theory
• capitalism
• communism

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for useful comments on a previous draft of this paper, and especially Harrison Fluss for a meticulous reading and highly incisive suggestions. The mistakes that remain are the author's alone.

Notes on Contributor

Ishay Landa is senior lecturer of History at the Israeli Open University, in Ra'anana (since 2009). His research interests include Nietzscheanism, Marxism, political theory and popular culture. He has written two books: The Overman in the Marketplace (Lexington, 2007) and The Apprentice's Sorcerer: Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Brill, 2010).

Notes

¹ For example, Callinicos (2006), Hewlett (2010), Sotiris (2011).

² Meiksins Wood, I believe, has not since addressed Badiou's work. If so, it is a pity, because her view on Badiou and on Badiouan-ism as a larger phenomenon would have been highly interesting.

³ For my understanding of Marxism as a humanist proposition, challenged by a Nietzschean de-humanization, see Landa (2005).

⁴ For example Badiou (2012, 55), where the desire of Egyptian protesters “to build a welfare state” is interpreted as a rejection of Western values.

⁵ For example, Mäder (2010).

⁶ Classical examples of genuine events would be communism (before its Stalinist ossification), the Paris Commune, May 1968; fascism and National Socialism, by contrast, are diagnosed as pseudo-events, simulating a break.

⁷ For a critique of this elitism, defending the value of everyday experiences, see Eagleton (2001) and Eagleton (2009, 261–62).

⁸ This instructively reproduces the historical dilemmas which former left-Nietzscheans had to grapple with, facing the exasperating last human. Recall the pessimism of G. B. Shaw's John Tanner in Man and Superman: “Man will return to his idols and his cupidities, in spite of all ‘movements’ and all revolutions until his nature is changed. … The only fundamental and possible Socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man: in other terms, of human evolution. We must eliminate the Yahoo, or his vote will wreck the commonwealth” (Shaw 2000, 234, 245).

⁹ A proposition criticized by many, for example, Bensaïd (2004).

¹⁰ See, for example, Marx (1993, 705), Marx (1990, 617–18), Marx (1991, 959).

¹¹ This is the usual English translation. In the original German no gender is specified: Nietzsche speaks simply about der letzte Mensch, the last human. “The last man” isn't just technically wrong, it is also misleading inasmuch as the last human, if anything, is characterized by declining masculinity and the ascendancy of traits stereotypically feminine.

¹² See the illuminating discussion in Badiou (2012, 71–84).

¹³ “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal” is the title of a Rand book.

¹⁴ For a useful survey of the 1968 movement and its ramifications, including Badiou's position, see Wolin (2010).

¹⁵ Ernest Mandel's defense of Rosa Luxemburg from charges of “economism” is equally useful in describing the abandonment of Marxism signified by Badiou's exclusive emphasis on politics: “While it is true that the contemporary history of capitalism … cannot be satisfactorily explained if the class struggle … is not treated as a partially autonomous factor, it is likewise true that the whole meaning of Marxism disappears if this partial autonomy is transformed into an absolute one” (Mandel 1991, 82; emphases added).

¹⁶ I have changed R. J. Hollingdale's translation of Vernichtung from “destruction” to “extermination.”

¹⁷ For example, Badiou (2009b, xi).

¹⁸ Still more ominously, especially coming from a writer usually very protective of Badiou, is the conclusion of the essay, where Bosteels draws attention to the illusive political character of antiphilosophy: “since the break it announces is purely formal … the question of its left or right-wing nature becomes moot” (2014, 30).

¹⁹ I occasionally depart from the translation, in agreement with the original German.

²⁰ I slightly departed from Hollingdale's translation.

²¹ Consider the following example, where Marx is showered with praise which reads in fact like Badiou's oblique way of recommending his own distinctive theories: “The ‘communism’ instead experience the antinomy—pointed out by Marx with his customary genius—between the finitude of the state and the infinite immanent to every truth, including and above all political truth” (Badiou 2007, 103). There is clearly little of Marx, and much of Badiou, in this statement. Reference to the place where Marx supposedly said this is at any rate missing. Elsewhere it is ambiguously claimed that, “the century was more deeply Marxist than it imagined, faithful to a Marx related to Nietzsche” (93).

²² See the informative discussion in Ball (2003), especially part I.