First published in French as La philosophie et l’evenement
Editions Germina, 2010. This English edition Polity Press, 2013
The political field today: the Left/Right opposition and consensus
Alain Badiou, politics has an essential place in your life and work. You view it, moreover, as one of what you call philosophy’s conditions. It is, then, a good place for us to begin tackling your philosophy. First, hasn’t it become difficult today to be involved in politics? I’d also like to hear how you define it. What is politics, the truth of politics?
– We really have to take into account the system of constraints in which people find themselves today. What is their margin of manoeuvre? What freedom do they have? For there to be true politics, the framework within
which things take place has to be both clear and held in common. For example, if society is a society of classes with conflicting interests, then politics will lie within this framework. If the established order rests upon
a collective organization totally at odds with equality, politics will have to deal, locally and globally, with this issue. Politics always has to do with what one knows, and experiences, regarding the nature of contradictions.
I think that in the great political tradition we’ve inherited – a heritage that, moreover, disconcerts us and puts us ill at ease – the fundamental point is that there are enemies. There are not just adversaries, but enemies. There are people whose worldview and what they inflict upon, and expect of, us is something we deem completely unacceptable. Bringing the notion of the enemy into focus like this has always been the perspective of the great tradition of politics, particularly its revolutionary tradition – with ‘revolutionary’ understood in a fairly vague sense, extending from the French Revolution up to the 1980s. The problem is that this notion is absolutely confused today. This is the case for two reasons. First, on a worldwide scale, the collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to a duality that had furnished a very clear, objective framework: there were two camps, two orientations, two models. Then, on an intra-State level, the facts of class have been erased in favour of the idea that our societies are ones in which there is an uninterrupted expansion of the middle class. The prevailing idea everywhere is that the middle class is the veritable basis of democratic politics: an immense middle class that pushes to its margins, on the one side, a small kernel of the very rich who, while unfortunately ‘inevitable’, are nevertheless very few, and, on the other side, a small number of very poor and very exploited people. This is the idea, presented as a consensual one, that there are debates, discussions and divergences, but not enemies in the strict sense.
-Would you say that the main problem today is less an absence of political consciousness than a difficulty or refusal to become involved, a loss of militant spirit?
– I’d say that the difficulty today is to extricate oneself from consensus. This is a real difficulty. It’s not enough to want to escape from it, to decide you are going to escape from it. It’s much more complicated than that. You are faced with a constitutive given of our societies. Our societies no longer really recognize any enemies except external ones, such as Al Qaeda, Islamic terrorism and so on. We’ve gone back to the idea that the
main contradiction is between the civilized and the barbarians. But when the main contradiction is between the civilized and the barbarians, as at the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, politics no longer exists. There is the police, there is possibly war, but there isn’t politics. We have to rid ourselves of the idea that the main contradiction is that between civilized and barbarians. We have to escape, as a result, from consensus. This maintains that everyone agrees, minor reservations aside, with the evaluation that society is not going to change. Capitalism in the economy and parliamentary democracy in politics is, basically, a really good combination – that’s what consensus maintains. The crisis made this particularly clear: everyone agreed on saving the ship and, in particular, on saving the banks, even though these were directly responsible for the financial seism.
Under these conditions, it is hard to be involved or to be militant because this requires you to have a minimal sense of rupture or a non-consensual state of mind. You have to have the conviction that something needs to be done that escapes the law of the world. This difficulty of becoming involved is also linked to the difficulty of knowing from where you would start from today in order to criticize the prevailing state of things, how this would get off the ground and how it would be organized. The general frameworks that held previously aren’t valid any more. You can’t refer
any longer to the battle between the imperialist and socialist camps or, in any clear way, to the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. You can’t have the slightest confidence any more in the last remaining soft contradiction, namely that between the Left and the Right.
When all is said and done, where is the enemy? Where is the friend? These questions have become extraordinarily confused. If you’re pessimistic, you’ll conclude that we are in a period in which politics, strictly speaking,
has purely and simply disappeared. It’s not because there are debates about the State or the economy that there is politics. Politics is a strong subjective activity, capable of producing new truths. Can it, in this sense,
survive under the present conditions? This is an open question. Under the reign of Louis XIV, there was no, or very little, politics, just like at the end of the Roman Empire. There are, then, historical sequences practically
empty of politics. The difficulty of which you speak is, as a result, crucial; it bears on the possibility, or the real, of politics today.
– Would you say, similarly, that being on the Left maintains a relation to truth whereas taking up a position on the Right has strictly no meaning other than a structural one, where it’s a matter of seeking satisfaction
in the world as it is, in the sense of everyone’s animal appetites being satisfied: the acceptance of the real, in short?
-If you say that, you’re taking ‘Left’ in a different sense from the one prevailing today, where to be on the Left means taking up a certain place within the prevailing political system called ‘democracy’. Left and Right are integral givens of all the great democracies that, succinctly put, are qualified as ‘Western’. You’re on the Left when – everything else being, in other respects, the same – you propose to distribute a little bit more of the existing profit to the disinherited social strata. I don’t see anything else in the Left today. In this sense, it is simply a category forming part of the consensus – a category that the system absolutely needs. The system vitally depends on a falsified contradiction, on a game consisting in fictitiously designating enemies on the basis of subtle differences, which are, in fact, what drives the game of pseudo-politics. But I fully see that you take ‘Left’ in a different sense.
:.. Yes, not the ‘Left’ in a structural sense but in what might be called an ‘evental’ one. In the structural sense, the Left is taken up in the system of consensus you’re talking about and which it, ultimately, doesn’t question
either politically or even economically. Whereas the Left in an evental sense never relinquishes the notion of a veritable rupture taking place. This is its goal. And it’s in these terms that you think of the political event: something has to happen that changes what’s given, changes the structure.
– I don’t know if the word ‘Left’ can be held onto in this case. If it is, then ‘Left’ will indeed refer to a politics that both aims and works at bringing out the truth of the collectivity, the truth of what this is really capable
of in terms of creation, innovation and even values. Politics is, then, all the processes by means of which human collectivity becomes active or proves capable of new possibilities as regards its own destiny. In this case,
I accept your definition. The Left is the process of a truth, the Right merely the management of things, of what there is. This is why, moreover, as is the case in almost all representative democracies, the Right is usually in power: it is homogeneous with what there is. The Left comes to power from time to time when somewhat unusual problems crop up which the Right finds hard to resolve.
I will define, then, the parliamentary Left as an adjustment variable of the system as a whole. It’s possible to show that it comes to power in periods when public opinion has to be readjusted to capitalism. One of the tasks of Mitterrand’s presidency was precisely to set into motion financial liberalization, which was very largely carried out while Beregovoy was prime minister. This liberalization was necessary to adjust opinion to the
variables of contemporary global capitalism. It wasn’t the Right that carried out this adjustment but the Left; the Right simply continued the movement. Blair, for his part, pursued the path that Thatcher had brutally
opened up. When my English friends say that Blair was ‘Thatcher with a human face’, their definition is spot on.
– You show a mistrust, or an incredulity perhaps, towards organizations placed on the far Left or qualified as ‘radical Left’. I’m thinking in particular of your positions concerning the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste. Yet isn’t their strategy compatible with yours? Can’t one fight the system from inside and at the same time appeal to the event? The logic of the NPA isn’t necessarily contradictory to yours, while, on the other hand, yours
seems to be contradictory to theirs.
– I’d like to say, first of all, that it’s not up to the philosopher to define a political strategy. What interests me is philosophy’s being consistently positioned with regard to political innovation and not to politics’ old or repetitive forms, of which the NPA is a very particular example. My problem is that I can barely see any difference between what the NPA does and what the Communist Party at the height of its glory did: namely,
combine two flanks in an ordered and systematic way. On the one side, we find an intra-parliamentary activity, consisting of standing for elections, vying for the greatest possible number of votes and refusing compromising alliances. On the other side, there are social struggles, in which the party participates actively, with non-negligible attempts at infiltrating union bureaucracies. The Communist Party carried all this out to perfection. It had an electoral force of enormous amplitude, up to 20 to 25 per cent in its best periods. Moreover, it had hold over the main union, the CGT.3 It combined a hefty presence in workers’ and popular struggles with the conquest of electoral bastions, mainly municipal ones like the ‘red banlieues’ . The NPA hasn’t created anything new in respect to this. Ultimately, the NPA is the typical far Left, with one eye on the State and elections and the other on ‘civil society’ and social struggles. The
philosopher doesn’t judge this kind of initiative with militant categories of the type ‘you’re right-wing’ or ‘you’re betraying the revolution’. He simply notes that it’s a matter of repetition and that whatsoever has the
force of a political condition of philosophy cannot be of the order of repetition.
Media and propaganda
-The NPA, in your view, is then barking up the wrong tree because it believes that it’s possible for an event to come about within the framework of consensual democracy. The media system makes up a large part of this framework. How do you see this system as functioning?
-I think that the ruling apparatus and the power of the State have always, historically, made use of extremely powerful propaganda apparatuses. I often give an example that I find striking. Sure, people are in front of their TV night after night. But in France, before the eighteenth century, even the tiniest village had a church with its priest- an immense building that ruled over the daily routines of ordinary people, the chiming of its bells
regulating everyday life. The priest would hear confessions and take the pulpit every Sunday to declare what people had to do and think. It was an absolutely remarkable propaganda apparatus, glorifying the King before
a congregation of the faithful who were, for the most part, illiterate. It was the only structured speech people heard. Today, we’ve forgotten all that. The churches are deserted. In the villages, they are nothing more than monuments in a state of semi-ruin. Yet, when all that was living, it constituted an unbelievably wide-ranging and powerful propaganda apparatus that both structured people’s lives internally and organized the transmission of traditions. Today, with the media, we have a technological, differentiated apparatus. Are we to consider that this has a greater, more obvious influence than the propaganda apparatus I’ve just mentioned? This is not at all evident. The present-day propaganda apparatus is like society as a whole. On one hand, it is the organ of consensus – and all the more so given that it’s in the hands of the great financial powers. On the other, it is probably more diversified and less crudely ideological than the archaic propaganda of the Church or monarchistic State was. Sure, it organizes opinion just as all mass propaganda does. Yet, in parliamentary democratic countries, opinion is summoned to obey only very broadly, not in detail. Today’s propaganda, as indubitable, massive and dominant as it is in my eyes, leaves a fair amount of slack on the level of individual behaviours, whereas the previous forms of propaganda left very little. The true nature of the media system seems to me to lie in consensus itself, in the sense that it’s because consensus rules that the media is what they are. I don’t think that the media construct consensus. Rather, it’s consensus that makes people put up with the media’s repetitive mediocrity and paucity of information. People thrive on this moreover, they revel in it; they chip in their contribution and go play their part. You have to see the way the media summon people and how people adore this. They are thrilled to go and announce that they are part of the process. They’re ready to do all it
takes to keep the media show going. Basically, the media are to opinion what elections are to the State: a voluntary indoctrination.
The event
– We’ve just spoken about the structures of our time. You oppose to these the possibility of the event. What, though, is, in fact, a political event?
– For me, an event is something that brings to light a possibility that was invisible or even unthinkable. An event is not by itself the creation of a reality; it is the creation of a possibility, it opens up a possibility. It indicates to us that a possibility exists that has been ignored. The event is, in a certain way, merely a proposition. It proposes something to us. Everything will depend on the way in which the possibility proposed
by the event is grasped, elaborated, incorporated and set out in the world. This is what I name a ‘truth procedure’. The event creates a possibility but there, then, has to be an effort – a group effort in the political context, an individual one in the case of artistic creation – for this possibility to become real; that is, for it to be inscribed, step by step, in the world. It’s a matter, here, of the consequences in the real world of the rupture that the event is. I speak of truth because something is created that sets down, not simply the law of the world, but its truth.
Events are the creation in the world of the possibility of a truth procedure and not that which create this procedure itself. Examples can be given in all domains, extra-political as well as political ones. The simplest example is love. It’s said that you ‘fall in love’. You meet someone. It so happens that between you and he or she, between he or she and you, an unexpected and unforeseeable possibility opens up in your personal, empirical existence. This doesn’t mean that love is formed by the encounter on its own. It will be necessary to live something; there will have to be consequences. The encounter is the opening in my own life of a possibility that wasn’t calculable in advance. A political event, like the assault on the Tuileries palace in 1792 or like March 1871, when one tried to take the Parisians’ canons away from them- an incident which sparked off the Paris Commune -is, similarly, the apparition of a possibility (the Republic, workers’ power … ) that was previously unperceived. A political event today, whatever its scale, is a local opening up of political possibilities.
– But there is always, of course, a dominant structure that is opposed to the event and to what this proffers of an unprecedented nature: that the impossible become possible.
– Yes, and that’s precisely what power, the State, the state of things, is; it’s what claims to have the monopoly of possibilities. It’s not simply what governs the real. It’s what pronounces that which is possible and impossible. This is very important as regards the contemporary period. The power in place doesn’t ask us to be convinced that it does everything very well – moreover, there is always an opposition to say that it does everything very badly – but to be convinced that it’s the only thing possible. With a political event, a possibility emerges that escapes the prevailing power’s control over possibles. All of a sudden people, sometimes masses of people, start to think there is another possibility. They gather together to discuss it, they form new organizations. They may make some immense errors but that’s not the important point. They make the possibility opened up by the event come alive.
I think that this is the way things happen in all types of creation. At a given moment, something comes about that unsettles the control of possibilities and the most general definition of the State. The idea that the State is real oppression has been enormously emphasized but it is, more fundamentally, that which distributes the idea of what is possible and impossible. The event, for its part, will transform what has been declared impossible into a possibility. The possible will be wrested from the impossible. Whence the rallying cry of ’68: ‘Demand the impossible!’ As with all slogans of this type, this was partly excessive and superficial but also extremely profound. ‘Demand the impossible’ means ‘Hold fast to new possibilities, don’t force us to return to what has been declared possible or impossible within the established order.’ Coming back to your question on political involvement, seizing such possibilities is precisely
what it means to be involved in circumstances like these – to accept taking hold of, or, for that matter, being taken hold of, since activity and passivity come to more or less the same thing here. To seize or to be seized by this new possibility, this impossible that is to become real.
-Some say that expecting events alone to yield political truths is a sort of old-fashioned romanticism.
– This view of my philosophy, which tends purely and simply to identify truth and event, is merely a circumvention. In every situation, there are processes faithful to an event that has previously taken place. It’s not a
matter, then, of desperately awaiting a miraculous event but, rather, of following through to the very end, to the utmost degree, what you’ve been able to extract from the previous event and of being as prepared as possible, therefore, to take in subjectively what will inevitably
come about. For me, truth is an undertaking; it is a process made possible by the event. The event is only there as a source of possibilities. The possibilities opened up by an event are still present within a situation
throughout an entire sequential period. Little by little, they peter out but they are present. As a result, I still consider myself today as an heir to
May ’68. May ’68 is far behind us, it’s forgotten and its traces have almost disappeared. Yet, insofar as I do something, or that I have principles of action, these are in line with what took place then – or more broadly,
with what took place in the first half of the 1970s, before the counter-revolution clearly won out.
– If we mustn’t wait for the event like an act of grace, how can we prepare for it?
–‘To be prepared for an event’ means being subjectively disposed to recognizing new possibilities. Since the event is necessarily unforeseeable given that it doesn’t fall under the law of prevailing possibilities, preparing for the event consists in being disposed to welcome it. It’s
being convinced that the state of things does not set down the most important possibilities, those that open onto the construction of new truths. Being prepared for an event consists in being in a state of mind where one is aware that the order of the world or the prevailing powers don’t have absolute control of the possibilities. How, then, should you prepare yourself? In two ways. First, by remaining faithful to a past event, to the lessons given to the world by that event. This is why the prevailing order fights tooth and nail on this point. It tries to show that past events haven’t created any new possibility – hence the discredit cast on all evental episodes. For the last thirty years, one of propaganda’s major ploys has consisted in stating that nothing really happened, or, better yet, that what happened, far from creating a new possibility, caused a new horror, a new order or a new regression. The first way to be prepared,
then, is to avoid being influenced as far as possible by this kind of propaganda and to seek, instead, what can still sustain a fidelity to past events. It’s for this reason that I maintain that political subjects are always between two events. They are never simply confronted with the opposition between the event and the situation but are in a situation upon which events of the recent or distant past still have an impact. The political subject is, then, the interval between the past event and the
coming event. The other way of being prepared, related to the first,
is criticism of the established order. Even supposing that the established order is master of the possibilities, it’s a matter of showing that these possibilities are, in our view, insufficient. This is a critical task, in a traditional sense, consisting in showing that the system of possibilities
offered us is, on a whole series of points, ultimately inhuman. ‘Inhuman’ in a strict sense: this system does not propose to the social collectivity, to living humanity, possibilities that do justice to that of which it is capable.
This criticism will always boil down to showing that the possibilities proposed by the established order do not really mobilize the collectivity’s capacities. Of course, this criticism is not an intellectual exercise. It’s in practical procedures and in organizations, in the taking-up of positions and in an activism that conserves the memory of things, that fidelity to past events is often found. This criticism tests within society itself the
insufficient character of possibilities.
Event and Idea
– What would be, in your view, the new possibilities that could be proposed as preparation for the event?
-Let’s start a bit further back. I name ‘Idea’ that which, regarding a given question, proposes the perspective of a new possibility. The Idea, in politics, is not directly political praxis nor is it a programme; it is not something that is going to be achieved by concrete means. It is rather the possibility in the name of which you act, you transform and you have a programme. It is, then, fairly close to ‘principle’ – ‘act in the name of principles’ – but it is more precise. The Idea is really the conviction that a possibility, other than what there is, can come about. The ‘event’, in the sense we’ve stated this to involve the creation of a possibility, can very
well be said to create an Idea. An Idea is associated with an event because the event is the creation of a possibility and the Idea is the general name of this new possibility. For example, the French Revolution had three major ideas, which are, moreover, often called the ‘ideals of the French Republic’: namely, liberty, equality and fraternity. The Bolshevik revolution had as Idea communism in power: the proletarian Party-State. From this point of view, the Idea of communism that I talk about today has a different meaning, in terms of which action can be driven by the conviction that another political, collective and social world is possible: a world in no way founded on private property and profit.
-The ideals of the French Revolution are, in sum, very different from the Idea of communism. How are Ideas organized with respect to one another or how do very different events, which are nonetheless all political truths, communicate between themselves?
-Regarding this question, I think in terms of sequences. I think that the Idea forming the vector of insurrections or political innovations changes. During the classical period, which is to say, during the maturation of the
French Revolution, the pivotal category is that of liberty. It sets down the norm for equality and property. Liberty, yes, but on condition that it can include the freedom of property or private property. In its turn, property sets down the norm for equality. Equality, yes, but on condition that it does not call into question the rights to private property, which would, in their turn, call into question what is understood by the principles of liberty. A progressive adjustment will, then, give rise to ‘formal liberty’, which is a juridical framework that is no longer absolute subjection or slavery, in the sense that equality will, from then on, be in keeping with the norm set by this principle of liberty, in the sense that there will no longer be castes or formalized hereditary inequalities – no longer any difference, for example, between nobles and commoners. This adjustment is symbolized by the execution of the king but equally by the fact that property was made sacred. We have here a first configuration.
But there is a second configuration that has not as yet stabilized, in which equality becomes the primordial concept that sets the norm, in its turn, for liberty and property. Equality sets the norm for liberty in the sense that it maintains that liberty must not seriously infringe upon equality. In terms of the norm set by equality, property itself becomes a basis of monstrous injustices, with this leading, as a result, to a priority of collective property over private property. We are in a political sequence that started, in fact, from the end of the French Revolution, from the compromise between equality, liberty and property, which had no sooner become stable than it was contested. This was the case with the extremists of the French Revolution and with Babeuf and utopian communism. ‘Democracy’ or ‘republic’ – even if the two things are not identical- can be said to be the political names adjusted to the first sequence. ‘Communism’ has to be declared the political name adapted to the second sequence.
Communism
-You are, then, a communist?
– In the sense just mentioned, yes. The communist sequence, in which equality is the key concept that sets the norm for the two others, has a history. My thesis is that we’re familiar with two of the stages of this history and that we are in the third. And the problem is, precisely, that we are at the very beginning of the third and don’t, therefore, know very much about it yet! The communist Idea in its modern form- for it is already present with Plato- emerged in the nineteenth century. It signified a historical outcome of class struggle in terms of the disappearance of private property. This is the chief idea of communism for Marx’s Manifesto: the abolition of private property, which amounts to the triumph of equality over the historical connection between property
and liberty. The French Revolution, for its part, said ‘yes’ to liberty but on condition that equality be subordinated to the liberty of property.
The Marxist thematic makes communism, then, an ideology of equality – with class struggle being that which the real consists of- that comes into play around the question of the property of the means of production. With regard to the first stage of communism set down by Marx, communism is a historical category. Marx subordinated politics to history, communism
being the Idea that was going to be accomplished, historically, when class struggle came to an end. He was profoundly convinced that the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat would be the last
such struggle, after those between patricians and plebeians and between nobles and bourgeois. ‘Communism’ became for him the result of that ultimate historical confrontation. It was in no way the ideal programme,
replete with details and all, of a society freed from all past obstructions. That, for him, was ‘utopian communism’.
In fact, rather than an opposition of scientific communism and utopian communism, Marx contra Fourier, we have historical communism contra communism as a pure ideal. Marx’s big idea was that communism would come about in a relatively short period, when the proletariat was sufficiently organized to smash the machine of the bourgeois State. A vast movement was going to carry it. It is very interesting to note that Marx defines the communist party as a simple party of the workers’ movement in general. He wasn’t thinking of a separate organization. The workers’ movement had within it people who had communist ideas, those who knew where the movement was headed as a whole. From this point of view, the test of Paris Commune was to be crucial. It was to show that this vision in terms of insurrectional movements runs up against resistances that Marx had neither thematized nor envisaged: capitalism’s defensive sturdiness was, indeed, decidedly more forceful than foreseen, and imperialism was to develop totally new means of corrupting the working class.
We enter progressively, then, into the second stage, which is completely centred on the question of organization. ‘Communism’ is no longer the name of the general Idea of emancipation but the goal of particular organizations responsible for ensuring that the popular insurrection really and truly triumphs. Everything becomes subordinated to the efficiency of these organizations. They are still named communist because they fit within the schema we’ve described -the primacy of equality over liberty and property – but they are, above all, instrumental. The idea of Lenin was to dispel forever the spectre of the failure of the Paris Commune. Never again a seizure of power paid ultimately by the complete triumph of the adversaries, the annihilation of our forces and the massacre of twenty thousand workers in our streets! We have to win. The fundamental category of the second stage is ‘victory’ and this is what was to fill millions of people with enthusiasm: the victory of the October Revolution. For the seizure of power was to take place. Interestingly, ‘communism’ is expressed from then on largely in the form of adjectives, as with ‘communist parties’, ‘socialist States’ and ‘communist militants’.
The organization found itself, as a result, fetishized, being attributed a transcendence as the absolute instrument of victory, with which it had become one. Think back to a declaration of the period like ‘The Party is always right.’ The Party was historical reason. For Marx, historical reason was considerably broader, being the historical movement that bore communism, whereas that which was to bear communism henceforth was the communist organization. There is, then, an extremely violent fetishization and statization of the Idea that was to dominate the communist undertaking of the twentieth century. This was to consist in taking power and it would be identified with forms of power.