Pluth, Ed. Signifiers and Acts: Freedom in Lacan’s Theory of the Subject. Albany: SUNY Press, 2007.
Between November 1983 and February 1984, an automobile factory in talbot, France, was occupied by striking workers. Clashes occurred among the strikers themselves, as well as with the police. An attack happened on one of the shop floors by what the press called “non-strikers” — a group composed of predominantly North African migrant laborers, in fact. The attack was condemned by one of the largest unions in France, which, under some pressure, soon decided to encourage the acceptance of one of management’s earlier offers. Another major union called for an end to the occupation of the factory shortly thereafter.
As Badiou points out, the objective fact surrounding this event are quite simple and not all that unusual or unimaginable. What makes it an event in Badiou’s particular sense is what he calls the subjective break that followed from it. In the next elections, the Socialist Party, which was in power at the time, plummeted in the polls, the Communist Party became a nonentity, and the extreme Right of Le Pen gained ground. Badiou attributes these post-Talbot election results to several factors. The socialist government’s policy of industrial “restructuring” had been a manifest failure. The other left-wing parties had no ability to control the migrant workers, as Talbot showed. And finally, the Right was successfully able to rally the French public against the migrant workers at Talbot. The right wing was in fact doubly successful, because it did not only win votes with its racist appeals. Its attractiveness to the electorate even forced the Socialist Party to start talking about toughening up on immmigration (1985, 72). In other words, after Talbot the right wing was controlling the political debate within France, with everyone focusing on the “immigrant problem.”
These are some of the repercussions Talbot had in the political domain in France, but they do not tell us why Talbot was something that could be the source of a contemporary politics. What Badiou focuses on is anapparently straightforward statement the migrant workers were making at the time: “We want our rights” (1985, 73).
Yet this statement, Badiou claims, had no resonance at all in the French electorate, and he argues that structurally it could hot have any resonance within France. This is what makes Talbot so interesting for Badiou. “This statement, which does however bear on rights, is intrinsically unrepresentable, and it is in this unrepresentability that the politics of this statement consists.” (1985, 74).
Why this should be the case is not so clear. The statement had no place in the political discourse in France, according to Badiou, since a parliamentary democracy is about obtaining representation for different constituent groups in the state. One of the things at stake in the claims made by the Talbot workers is precisely which groups are officially in the state and which are not. While many of the workers had been living and working in France for over twenty years, they were still not citizens and had illegal status. The problem, then, was that “as the government and unions said in chorus: the rights in question do not exist” (1985, 75).
… the status of the statement in this particular example, and this particular context — “We want our rights” — can be compared to a Lacanian act. (152-153).
… The rights in question simply did not exist, and there was thus no political basis on which the workers could make such claims within France (153).
In other words, Talbot brought out the structural inability of “the political” to take into account demands from non-French workers in France (154).