Badiou's Recommencement of the Young-Hegelian Purification of Politics: A Response to Ishay Landa

Abstract

In my response to Ishay Landa's article “The Nietzschean Communism of Alain Badiou,” I develop an analysis of Landa's opposition between Marx(ism)'s communism and Badiou's Nietzschean communism through interrogating Badiou's relationship to Marx via his engagement with Althusser and Maoism, his explicit return to the young Marx in the formulation of his “Idea of Communism” and the paradoxes that are to be found in Marx's own oeuvre in relation to the concept of humanity, the social individual and the ground for political change. By exposing Badiou's conceptions of a materialist dialectical without historical materialism and of history that is based on its representation in thought, I show in contrast to Landa that it is not through a comparison with the utopian socialists or Nietzsche, but with the young Hegelian Bruno Bauer that we can grasp the conceptual weaknesses of Badiou's “communist invariant” as anchored on the plane of ideology. I similarly go on to evaluate Badiou's and Marx's conceptions of the relationship between a material transformation of the world and the transformation of humanity or social relations, which brings me to conclude a certain closeness between the Marx of the Einleitung, Badiou and Nietzsche that raises the question of how productive Landa's opposition of a supposedly unified Marx and a Nietzschean Badiou is. Finally, Badiou's conception of generic humanity and its claims towards instituting universal equality at a distance to the state is shown to be problematic not so much because of its Nietzschean pure radicality of the philosophical act that would break the world in Two while bearing the danger of preventing the new One to emerge, but through its closeness to Bruno Bauer's limited concept of “political emancipation.”

Keywords:

• Badiou
• Marxist Philosophy
• Nietzsche
• equality
• human emancipation

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and the Rosa-Luxemburg Stiftung for funding my PhD research upon which this article draws. I would also like to thank my supervisors Alberto Toscano and John Hutnyk for their continuous careful readership, advice and support, and thank Moritz Altenried for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes on Contributor

Svenja Bromberg is a PhD student in sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. She works on the problem of emancipation in Marx and post-Althusserian thought, focussing on questions around the materialist dialectic, the role of the state and philosophical anthropology. She is the author of the article “The Anti-political Aesthetics of Objects and Worlds Beyond” in Mute Magazine and a co-editor of the forthcoming anthology Eurotrash at Merve Verlag.

Notes

¹Indeed very much in opposition to his own article from 2005 on Marx and Nietzsche on religion, where his critique of Nietzsche is entirely grounded on his fidelity to the early Marxian conceptions.

²There are further in-depth critiques of Althusser's post-68 writings in D'idéologie (Badiou and Balmès 1976, 21), where Althusser's and Pecheux's theories of ideology are presented as revisionist in a rather polemical fashion, and for a discussion of Althusser's mis-reading of Lenin's dialectics see Theorie de la Contradiction (Badiou 1975, 55).

³Its problems become visible already within Althusser's own oeuvre, which has at least three more or less distinct conceptual stages between 1960–80 that all propose a slightly different treatment and definition of the concepts at stake.

⁴See also Balibar's emphasis on Marx's identification of the “real conditions” of philosophy (in the productive activity of man in his struggle with nature, The German Ideology) as opposed to an un-conditional philosophy (voraussetzungslose Philosophie) (Balibar 2013, 69).

⁵Unfortunately, the confines of this paper do not allow me to enter into the unpacking and a critical assessment of Badiou's charges against Althusser from 1967. But I will aim to discuss the controversial role Althusser played for this French Post-Marxist moment on another occasion.

⁶Those historical events are for Badiou defined by the very history of Marxism: e.g., the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, the Cultural Revolution, May ’68. It is important to see these events, however, not as ideal-types as Badiou subjects each to a particular criticism.

⁷Marx himself admitted he did not resolve this problem in an uncontradictory way in On the Jewish Question (Marx 1975, 211), but that the relation between subjection and emancipation becomes for him a more rather than less important question throughout his life, shows we ought to take it seriously already at this early point.

⁸Even though I am utilising here Landa's terminology of the “goal” of communism, it seems important that we precisely do not think it is a goal, but a process that stands in relation to our hopes and desires as communists, but of which we do not know the outcome (Marx 1975, 358; see also Balibar 2012).

⁹See for a more nuanced discussion of the complexities of Althusser's anti-humanism, which I am unfortunately unable to go into within the confines of this paper, Warren Montag's discussion of his notion of the subject in relation to Phenomenology, Lacan and Foucault (see Montag 2013, 103).

¹⁰As opposed to the situation in France, where a political emancipation as the step in between religious and universal human emancipation has taken place with the French Revolution (see Marx 1975, 253).

¹¹See Žižek (1999, 163), The Ticklish Subject for a critique of the concept of eternity vs. death in Badiou.

¹²Which we should, however, not reduce to an understanding of communism as “procur[ing] material gain” (Landa 2013, 437).