Badiou, A. (2003) After the Event: Rationality and the Politics of Invention, an interview with Alain Badiou conducted by the Radical Politics group at the University of Essex. pp. 180-197.
What needs to be said, to be more precise on this point, is that an event creates the conditions of intelligibility of its situation, and these new conditions of intelligibility are applied, in particular, to itself. Hence, the intelligibility of the event is neither prospective nor calculative; it is rather retroactive. Therefore, even if I sometimes compare the event to a miracle, a grace, etc., these are only metaphors. Undoubtedly, I remain rationalist in my appreciation of the event, and convinced that it is intelligible. Yet, precisely because it is an event, it is only intelligible afterwards, its conditions of intelligibility can never be anticipated.
Consequently, one cannot say that an event is religious, because “religious” always means that something remains unintelligible, that something is definitely mysterious: there is something in God’s design that remains forever inaccessible. This is not the case of the event. There is an intelligibility of the event, but one that is created, and in many ways this constitutes one of the definitions of fidelity: fidelity is the creation in the future tense of the intelligibility of the event. This is the reason why thinking the intelligibility of the event understanding of the Revolution of 1917 took much time – perhaps it is still not complete – but this does not imply that it is a mystery. In sum, when events are constituted, they were not calculable, predictable, and were not part of the previous rationality. One must understand that an event is also the creation of new instruments of rationality what experience are you committing yourselves to? What is your experience? This leads to a new form of the creation of rationality.
Foucault is a very complicated thinker, especially in politics, where very few risks were taken. But it is possible to interpret Foucault as someone who says: finally, power and resistance are the same thing. I think this is not the case at all. I think that we only have resistance to the State when it is constituted elsewhere, when it is heterogeneous to the nature of the power. I really believe in the “power of the two”, in the power of difference, but a true difference, not false difference, such as thinking that we have a single twisted space, as if resistance was the torsion of power. I am not favourable to this idea.
[…] But it is not the case that if we have movements, we also have politics. This is a very important point. There are innumerable movements that constantly occur; some movements are renewals of political thought, but this is not the same as simply being a movement and nothing more. Negri always speaks of the great creativity of the multitudes (multitude is the new name for masses, let us admit to this), but where have we seen this creativity? It is not because you’re protesting at Genoa that there is a creativity of the multitude. I have seen hundreds of these type of protests over the years and can honestly say that there isn’t an ounce of creativity in all of this.
Hence, the problem of creativity at this stage is a problem of knowing what creates a political heterogeneity. But to create a political heterogeneity supposes very complicated and very novel principles of rupture. I am not saying that all this is easy, on the contrary. But at least we have this idea: we have this experimental idea of seeing how, on a certain number of issues, in a certain number of spaces, we can finally create political heterogeneity. Here, there is an empirical rule: I think that we can finally create political heterogeneity in continuity only with popular components that are themselves heterogeneous, and that the little civil bourgeoisie is not the one that will create by itself such political heterogeneity.
The anti-globalisation movement is also a movement that is – in old Marxist terms – bourgeois. Let us put aside this old vocabulary, but let us also admit that anti-globalisation is not a popular movement. This at least is clear! It is perhaps an ideological movement, which is interesting, but all in all, I think that it remains confined within the categories that are not those of the heterogeneous.
My difference with Negri on this point is almost ontological; it is truly fundamental. It is really the attempt to create from scratch a substantialist, vitalist, and political – homogenous, finally – vision, whose practical form is in fact the movement itself. There is no other practical form than the movement. But the movement does not resolve by itself the questions of politics. Politics is first and foremost the creation of spaces: you must create your space.