December 2, 2012
Question: If today you disqualify any emancipatory dimension for a politics of destruction, what then is the place reserved for violence in politics?
BADIOU: Here, again, we touch upon the link between philosophy and
politics. I maintain that today it is a question of creating independent
spaces in such a way that the question of violence takes a defensive turn.
In this sense, all the possible forms and experiences become interesting.
The first phase of the Zapatista movement is a concrete example of this
defensive dimension of violence. But there are many other examples.
Perhaps the first figure of this type is found in the initial sequence of the
anti-Soviet movement in Poland, at the beginning of the 1980s. It was a
workers’ movement, and it was not, in fact, nonviolent; they used the
strike, for example, as a weapon to pressure the government in negoti-ations. This was a situation in which the workers had complete control
of the factories. This phase didn’t last very long, in part due to external
factors, like the influence of the church and Jaruzelski’s coup d’etat.
But this was a moment in which it was possible to glimpse, however briefly, a new dialectic between the means of actions that were classically un-derstood to be negative—the strike, demonstrations, and so on—and something like the creation of a space of autonomy in the factories.
The objective was not to take power, to replace an existing power, but to
force the state to invent a new relation with the workers. However brief
it may have been, this experiment was very interesting. Interesting be-cause it did not follow the classical model of a brutal confrontation
between the movement and the state. It was the organization of a differentiated space—immanent, but differentiated—in view of constituting a political site whose collective rule was one of political debate rather than subordination to the questions and agenda of state power.
It is impossible, then, to say that we can exclude all recourse to violence. Take, for example, the phenomenon of Hezbollah and the July 2006 war in Lebanon. The pretextual nature of Israel’s aggression was clear; they set out to destroy an entire country because one soldier was taken prisoner.
Without wanting a frontal war, Hezbollah was fortunately able to exercise an effective, consistent resistance that turned the Israeli aggression into a fiasco. What is striking about this movement, however, is its difficult relation with the state. Here, we come back to the question of organization. Hezbollah is competing for state power, while nevertheless not reproducing an insurrectional model. They remain in a state of semi-dissidence and conflictual alliance with the state. In any case, it is clear that every form of negation, including its most extreme, violent forms, can be mobilized in the defense or protection of a new singularity.
It is necessary, then, to have a new articulation of the destructive and subtractive parts of negation so that destruction or violence appears in the form of a protective force, capable of defending something created through a movement of subtraction.
This idea was probably already present in the figure of the revolutionary base during the Chinese revolution. Mao wrote things like this concerning the role of the army, even if he also developed a strategy that was still oriented toward the seizure of state power. But the relation between armed force—the force of destruction—and popular organization was already complex at this moment, where the role of the army was assigned political tasks in addition to its task of protecting the popular organization.
The groups I am referring to represent a pure and separate figure of destruction and practice a terrorism that is non-situated, in which there is absolutely no possibility of glimpsing any constructive figure.
The attacks of September 11, for example, were not accompanied by any political discourse addressed to the entire world or with any declaration of war; such declarations are the condition for politics. What we have instead is a violent destabilization whose concept is ungraspable. The only declarations that followed the event were completely rooted in a religious particularism that I read as exclusively negative. I won’t have anything to do with this type of practice.
I don’t confuse this phenomenon with the theological character of certain mass organizations like Hezbollah in the Middle East. But I do think that the fact that the organizations that are the most active and most rooted in the “people” are of this type is part of what I have been calling the contemporary crisis of negation.
In this case, religion presents itself as the surrogate for something else that has not been found, something that should be universalizable, should be able to uproot itself from the particularity of the religious.
It is for this reason, I think, that Marx still seems so current. Communism, according to Marx, is essentially internationalist in character. With religious dogmatism, in this case with Shia Islam, we are confronted with a collective messianism that I know and recognize is quite powerful but that is, finally, intrinsically limited. We need to consider these phenomena on their own terms but also understand their limitations. I think these movements represent a passage that bears witness, in a very vivid way, to the limits of our thought on the problems of the negative, critique, and political organization. We have to assume this passage, saluting its vigor (I am quite happy that the organized and popular force of Hezbollah was able to successfully block the Israeli aggression) as well as understanding that, if these “solutions” function within local contexts, there are fundamental
limitations with respect to the possibility of universalizing these expe-riences.
This is difficult, but necessary. And I maintain that the currentsituation is a result of the interruption or breaking down of the revolutionary movement in general in the 1980s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the absence of any renewal of Marxism. The examples of popular organization we know today are, therefore, either extremely experimental and localized (like the Zapatista movement) or theologico-political (like Hezbollah).
The contemporary diversity of orientations, with all their sectarianism and particularism, was already present in Marx’s time as well, in the least revolutionary periods of the first half of the nineteenth century. And it is probably typical of periods in which it becomes necessary to open a new history, as is our own situation. All these experiences and experiments, then, including those that might seem a little strange or foreign, strong but limited as they are, must be taken into consideration.