bosteels post maoism

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positions13:3 Winter 2005 576

in the present tense.Pour le maoste que je suis, Badiou thus writes, literally,For the Maoist that I am.2 Of course, the French usage merely representsa sudden shift to the narrative present; technically speaking, we are still inthe past, and, in this sense, the English translation is by no means incorrect.

Nevertheless, something of the heightened ambiguity attached to the use ofthe narrative present is lost in the passage from one language to the other, asthe overall image of a potentially discomforting past replaces the suggestionof an ongoing loyalty, or at the very least a lingering debt, to Maoism.

By way of framing my translation of Badious talk The Cultural Revolu-tion: The Last Revolution? I want to argue that Badious relation to Mao-ism, which amounts to a form of post-Maoism, can in fact be summarizedin the ambiguous use of the narrative present. If we were to spell out thisambiguity, we could say that Badiou was and still is a Maoist, even thoughhe no longer is the same Maoist that he once was. Badiou himself says at the

beginning of his talk, quoting Rimbaud to refer to his red years: Jy suis,jy suis toujours (I am there, I am still there, sometimes translated as Iam here, I am still here). And yet we also sense that an impression of past-ness undeniably overshadows the pasts continuing presence in the present.What seems so near is also exceedingly far; and what is there is perhaps notquite here. By the same token, we should not overlook the possibility thata certain inner distancing may already dene the original rapport to Mao-ism itself. In fact, Maos own role for Badiou will largely have consisted inintroducing an interior divide into the legacy of Marxism-Leninism. Fromthe Jinggang Mountains to the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedongs thoughtis formulated against the current, as the work of division, Badiou sum-marizes in his Thorie de la contradiction (), before identifying Maoslogic of scission as a prime example of dialectical thinking: Rebel thinkingif there ever was one, revolted thinking of the revolt: dialectical thinking.3Maoism, then, in more strictly philosophical terms will come to mark anunderstanding of the dialectic as precisely such a thinking through innersplits and divided recompositions. As Badiou would write several years laterin an article forLe Perroquet, one of the periodicals of his Maoist group: Atstake are the criteria of dialectical thinkinggeneral thinking of scission,

of rupture, of the event and of recomposition.4


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Bosteels Post-Maoism 577

Working Hypothesis

We could begin by pondering some of the more unfortunate consequencesof the fact that Badious vast body of work, standing nearly as tall as itsauthor, has only recently begun to attract serious critical attention. This is

true not only in English-speaking parts of the world, where several bookshave now been translated or are being translated, but even in his homecountry of France. In fact, to nd a long-standing tradition of critical com-mentary and concrete analysis informed by this thinkers work, I often insistthat we should turn to Latin America, especially to Argentina, where thejournalAcontecimiento: Revista para pensar la poltica for over a decade hasmade specic interventions inspired by Badiou about such situations as theMothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina or the Zapatistas in Mexico.Most of Badious publications, together with a considerable number of docu-ments still unedited even in French, have also long been available in Spanishand Portuguese. By contrast, not even the two major texts, Thorie du sujet() andLEtre et l vnement (), are published as of today in English.Many Anglo-American readers thus almost by default limit themselves tothe later and shorter books, starting with the edition ofManifesto forPhilosophy () all the way to the deceptively simple edition ofEth-ics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (), while others have come toBadious philosophy only from neighboring traditions, by focusing on hisDeleuze or on the event of Christianity as addressed in Saint Paul: TheFoundation of Universalism ().

What is often lost along the way in these readings are precisely Badiouslong-standing debts to Maoism and to the political sequence ofciallyknown as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Badiou explains inhis Ethics that this Maoist period actually involved a double allegiance, adelity not to one but to two events, referring to the politics of the FrenchMaoists between and , which tried to think and practise a delityto two entangled events: the Cultural Revolution in China, and May inFrance.5 Many readers are of course aware that during those tumultuousyears, while never being strictly speaking pro-China, the author was astaunch defender of the ideas of Chairman Mao. Badiou himself makes suf-cient references throughout his work to suggest how formative this expe-


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rience was, and still continues to be, for his thinking. But knowledge ofthis fact rarely leads to a sustained inquiry into the substance of BadiousMaoism.

Furthermore, the commonly accepted wisdom among Badious readersnow holds that, by the mid- to late eighties, we are witness to a clean breakaway from all dialectical forms of thinkingincluding a break away, there-fore, from the thought of Mao Zedong. At least Peter Hallward has thevirtue of outlining the possibility of a much more painstaking investigationinto the continuing legacy of Badious Maoism. This legacy involves not justan uninching delity to forms of political commitment but also a wholeseries of theoretical and philosophical invariants.6 If this is indeed the case,though, should we not at the very least be wary of drawing too quick a linein the sand between the early and the later Badiou?

The Maoist Investigation

Even today Badious concept of politics as a procedure of truth remains to alarge extent inseparable, despite the apparent self-criticisms, from the theoryand practice of his vision of Maoism. To give but one symptomatic indica-tion of this continuity, all procedures of truth, and not just the politicalone, involve a sustained inquiry or investigation into the possible con-nection or disconnection between the various aspects of a given situationand that which will have taken place in this situation under the sign ofan event. As Badiou writes inLEtre et lvnement: In the end, therefore,we can legitimately treat the inquiry, nite series of minimal observations[constats], as the truly basic unity of the procedure ofdelity and, thus,through the subtle dialectic between knowledges and postevental delitythat is at stake in such procedures, as part of the very kernel of the dialecticbetween knowledge and truth.7 Badiou certainly must not have forgottenthat the task of undertaking such inquiries or investigations (enqutes)in many parts of the world was one of the most important lessons drawnfrom Maoism.

A whole chapter in The Little Red Book is dedicated to this very ques-

tion under the title Investigation and Study.8 And one of the earliest con-crete examples of this method of study can be found in Maos own


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Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, the main topicof whichthe revolutionary role of the peasantry that already sounded astrong note of dissonance in comparison with orthodox Marxism and Lenin-ismhe would later revisit among other places in his Rural Surveys(again, in the French editions, the same term, enqute, is used to translatethe concepts that appear as investigation and survey in English). In thepreface to this last text, Mao reiterates the principle of the investigation as aform of concrete analysis of a concrete situation, so to speak, going againstthe abstraction of pure and unconditioned theory:

Everyone engaged in practical work must investigate conditions at thelower levels. Such investigation is especially necessary for those who knowtheory but do not know the actual conditions, for otherwise they will notbe able to link theory with practice. Although my assertion, No investi-gation, no right to speak, has been ridiculed as narrow empiricism, tothis day I do not regret having made it; far from regretting it, I still insistthat without investigation there cannot be any right to speak.9

Serge July, a leading member of the soon-to-become exGauche Prol-tarienne, by far the most famous French Maoist group, and a subsequentcofounder of the daily Libration, would later go on to observe that theinvestigation is the theoretical key to French Maoism.10 In fact, the prin-ciple of the investigation, orenqute, together with the so-called assessmentof experience, orbilan dexprience, was a fundamental feature of Badiousown Maoist organization, the UCFML, or Union of Communists of FranceMarxist-Leninist.

The investigation is precisely that which enables any given militant pro-cess to continue moving along in the spiral between the various politicalexperiences and their effective theoretical concentration. Thus, in a collec-tion of texts summarizing the achievements of the UCFMLs rst year ofexistence, we read: The Maoist investigation is not a simple observation offacts [un simple constat], not even the enthusiastic observation of the conse-quences of our interventions. It solves a problem. Which problem? That ofthe takeover of the effects of the intervention by the workers, and later on,

in another document: The investigation must not only bear on the searchfor a new objective in the struggle, it must propose the putting into place of


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lasting practices, set off the ideological struggle. Before and after the strug-gle, something has changed, we must know how to make this live on.11Following Mao, moreover, the UCFML sees an urgent task in carrying outinvestigations not just in the urban working class but also among the poorpeasants: In particular, it is of prime importance to lead militant investiga-tions on the great revolts of poor peasants, especially in West and CentralFrance.12 To a large extent, this last task is taken up in the UCFMLs Lelivre des paysans pauvres, a collective and local equivalent to MaosRural Sur-veys, that sums up the organizations militant activity in the countryside inthe seventies in France. Finally, we may also mention the even more recentsurvey performed in China, in March and April , by Badious closefriend and collaborator Sylvain Lazarus together with his Italian comradesSandro Russo, Valerio Romitelli, and Claudia Pozzana, part of whose jointfollow-up discussion was subsequently published in the UCFMLs newsletter

Le Perroquet.13If I have gone into this much detail on the question of the investigation,

raised anew in the context ofLEtre et l vnement, my reason for doing so ismerely to showcase the pivotal role of certain Maoist concepts and principlesincluding in the so-called later works by Badiou. However, the point is notjust to underscore the mere fact that these concepts and principles persist butalso and above all to grasp how, where, and to what purpose they are put towork. InLEtre et l vnement, I would argue that they tend to come into thepicture precisely where truth and knowledge are articulated in what is stillcalled a dialecticeven though the books introduction seems to supposethat we are to leave behind the stillborn tradition of dialectical material-ism with the decisive turn to mathematics. As Badiou explains:

This is to say that everything revolves around thinking the couple truth/knowledge. This means to think the rapportwhich is rather a disrap-portbetween a postevental delity, on the one hand, and, on the other,a xed state of knowledge, or what I will call the encyclopedia of a situ-ation. The key of the problem lies in the way in which a procedure ofdelitytraverses the existing knowledge, starting from the supernumerarypoint that is the name of the event.14


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We can see at which point in the overall theory concepts such as theinvestigation are operative: there where a truth traverses knowledge andsubsequently opens the way to force the available encyclopedia of a givensituation, so as to change the old into the new. Without any explicit mentionof its Chinese sources, even for Badious later work the investigation is thatwhich ensures the possible connection of certain elements in the existingsituation to the break introduced by a rare event.

Thus the dialectical rapport between truth and knowledge is preciselythe place of inscription of most of Badious debts to Maoism. At the sametime, the process of delity and the sequence of investigations in whichsuch delity nds its most basic organized expression also keep the dialec-tic of truth and knowledge from turning into an inoperative, quasi-mysti-cal or miraculous duality of the kind that so many critics seem to want tostick on Badious own work. This would seem to conrm the fundamental

hypothesis that I wish to lay out in the following pages, namely, that onlyan understanding of Badious ongoing debts to Maoism can give us insightinto his proposed renewal of the materialist dialectic while, conversely, amiraculous and antidialectical understanding of the relation between truthand knowledge is often the result of a failure to come to terms with the Maoin his work.

Rather than having become a self-confessed post-Marxist, following acareer path parallel to that of authors such as Ernesto Laclau, Badiou isindeed better described as a post-Maoist. This can be said to be the case,however, only if we are able, despite so much backlash in the wake of thepostmodernism debate, to retain the active, almost psychoanalytic meaningof the prex so as to signal a critical attempt to work through the lastingtruths as well as the no less undeniable blind spots of Maoism. Post-Mao-ism, in other words, not as that which comes simply after the end of Mao-ism, or even more simplistically after the death of Mao Zedong, the trialof the Gang of Four, and the coming into power of Deng Xiaoping, but asthe name for a peculiar historical conguration in which critical thoughtreturns, even if subreptitiously so, to the half-forgotten and half-repressedlessons of Maoism. Needless to say, this conguration is largely international,

with contemporary varieties of post-Maoism existing not only in France but


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also in Argentina, Chile, the Basque country, or even the United Statestoname but a few cases beyond the more obvious instances of Peru, Nepal, orthe Philippines.

Finally, in some ways the current conjuncture in political philosophy canbe said to suffer the consequences of a failed or incomplete passage throughMaoism. Indeed, some of the best-known political thinkers of our time,including those who otherwise consider themselves loyal to a certain Marx,become caught in the trappings of a conceptual framework that might havebeneted from a more sustained confrontation with some of the Maoist les-sons taken up by Badiou. I am thinking, for instance, of the pivotal roleattributed to antagonism in the writings on radical democracy by Laclauand Chantal Mouffe, or even in the collaborative work by Antonio Negriand Michael Hardtwith the latter duo swearing off any pretense to adialectical interpretation of the concept, which they otherwise wield with

surprising ease, and the former more generally showing little or no theoreti-cal appreciation at all for the author of On Contradiction.15 As a result,these political philosophers seem to call for a recognition of the structuralor even ontological fact of antagonism in general as being constitutive of thesocial eld, rather than working through the peculiar nature of antagonisticcontradictions, or their blurring, in the global situation today. The painfulirony, however, is that in so doing, these political thinkers may very wellgive themselves an irrefutable air of radicalism while foreclosing the pos-sibility of actually changing a particular situationof changing the old intothe new, which is precisely what always was to have been thought accordingto Badiou. The true dialectical question is never in the rst place: whathappens that is important? he writes in Thorie de la contradiction: Thetrue question is always: what happens that is new?16 Or, in a more recentversion: My unique philosophical question, I would say, is the following:Can we think that there is something new in the situation, not the newoutside the situation nor the new somewhere else, but can we really thinkthrough novelty and treat it in the situation? Badiou says in an interview:But, of course, to think the new in the situation, we also have to thinkthe situation, and thus we have to think what is repetition, what is the old,

what is not new, and after that we have to think the new.17 This strugglebetween the old and the new, as the effect of lasting contradictions among



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the people, was precisely one of the more famous universal lessons of theCultural Revolution.

Serving Truths

Even a quick survey of Badious work supports the thesis of an ongoingand sustained debt to Maoism. Not only do his rst publications, the shortbooks Thorie de la contradiction () and De lidologie (), togetherwith his running commentary on Zhang Shiyings interpretation of Hegelin Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hglienne (), offer a systematicaccount of Maos thought inected by French theory and philosophy, buthis recently published lecture series, Le Sicle (), also includes a longlecture, One Divides into Two, in which Badiou returns to some of themost violent events and debates of the late sixties, at the height of the Cul-

tural Revolution, especially over the formal distinction between antagonisticand nonantagonistic contradictions, in an attempt to think through theirpossible relevance today. Between these two moments, Badious relation toMaoism may seem to have been mostly critical, as can be gleaned from hisbrief remarks, both in conferences from Conditions () and in hisEthics(), about the disaster provoked by the Red Guards. Finally, in his lec-ture on the Cultural Revolution, Badiou once more confronts Maos legacy,this time by linking the sequence of events in China between and (or, in its most reduced version, between May and September ) tohis own concept of politics without a party as practiced by an offshoot ofthe UCFML, the Organisation Politique (OP).18

The different steps in this evaluation of Maoism immediately raise aseries of questions. A rst question obviously concerns the precise extent towhich Badiou would have abandoned the principles of his youthful Mao-ism. After his seminar on Thorie du sujet, which was still strongly over-determined by his Maoist experience, has he perhaps fallen in line withthe contemporary trend that, whether euphoric or melancholy, declares thehistorical end, if not also the utter doctrinal demise, of Marxism and cer-tainly of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism? A second question regards the extent

to which Badious logical and ontological inquiries, principally in LEtre etlvnement and in the new bookLogiques des mondes, would obliterate the


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role of dialectical materialism. Has he all but abandoned this last tradition,which was the starting point of his work with, and soon afterward against,Louis Althusser? Third, we might want to ask ourselves how innovativeand far-reaching Badious recent criticisms of the Cultural Revolution andof the disastrous role of the Red Guards really are. In particular, do thesecriticisms actually amount to an attempt at self-criticism of the excesses inhis earlier works? Finally, the question also remains to what extent the ideaof a politics without a party, which Badiou now nds to be already partiallyat work in the Cultural Revolution, would really undermine his earlier,strongly party-oriented, accounts of Maoism. In other words, how muchchange has really taken place in his conceptnot to mention his actualpracticeof the organization of politics?

Learn from the masses and investigate conditions at the lower levels,Mao had said, and more famously: Serve the people.19 For Badiou, once

he seems to abandon the Maoist vocabulary, the aim is to learn from truthsproduced outside philosophy, in the actual conditions of art or politics or sci-ence, so as to investigate what would be needed, in terms of conceptual tools,to register and concentrate the effects of certain events within philosophy.Painful though it may be to admit that philosophy itself does not produceany truth, the philosophers task thus consists in serving the truths that areoccasionally produced elsewhere. Badiou concludes:

A philosophy worthy of this namethat which begins with Parmen-idesis nonetheless antinomical to the service of goods, insofar as it

strives to be at the service of truths, because it is always possible to striveto be at the service of that which one does not constitute oneself. Philoso-phy is thus at the service of art, of science, and of politics. Whether it isalso capable of being at the service of love is more doubtful (art, on theother hand, as a mixed procedure, upholds the truths of love).20

From serving the people to serving the truths thus could sum up thetrajectory behind Badious post-Maoism. In both cases, a materialist philoso-pher is one who begins by listening to, and in thinking ultimately serves,that which conditions thought from the outside.


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Maoism as Post-Leninism

As I mentioned before, Badious openly Maoist years are specically tiedup with a group of militants gathered under the banner of the UCFML,sometimes referred to simply as the UCF, or (Group for the Foundation

of) the Union of Communists of France Marxist-Leninist. The futurity ofthis small organization, oriented toward a unication of communists yet tocome, as well as their loyalty to a Mallarman principle of restricted action,is perhaps not foreign to the ambiguity that surrounds the main politicalobjective of its participants, namely, to found a party of a new type.21 Theambiguity lies in the fact that the party of a new type is also already a typeof organization that no longer seems to be much of a formal party at all: forexample, there are no strict rules of afliation, no membership cards, andno party secretaries. Maoism, in this sense, is foremost an effort to come toterms with the party-form, that is, with the form of the party as the van-guard of class-consciousness in the strict Leninist sense: What is calledMaoism has developed for our time a deepening of the Leninist concep-tion of the party.22 Badious Maoism, despite its apparent synonymy withMarxism-Leninism, is thus already a post-Leninism: both a step away fromand a renewed inquiry into the party-form of emancipatory politics. Thisis summed up in a retrospective statement of the UCFML, published in: Our conviction that Maoism is a stage of Marxismits post-Leniniststagedates back to our foundation. It is rooted in the experience, the uni-versal bearing and the assessment of the Cultural Revolution.23

In Badiou had attempted an innovation from within as a dissidentfounding member of the Unied Socialist Party (PSU), by coauthoring thepamphlet Contribution au problme de la construction dun parti marxiste-lniniste de type nouveau together with Emmanuel Terray, Harry Jancovici,and D. Mntrey. This proposal eventually would be rejected by the end ofthe same year, at the PSUs national convention held in Dijon. In the mean-time, however, Badiou joined with his fellow militants Natacha Michel andSylvain Lazarus, among a few others, to give birth to the UCFML. Despitesharing many ideological interests, not to mention an almost identical name,this group should not be confused with the UJCML, or UJC(ML), the Unionof the Communist Youths (Marxist-Leninist), which likewise drew many


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members from the student body of the cole Normale Suprieure at ruedUlmincluding many fellow Althusserians such as Jacques Rancire andJacques-Alain Miller, the latter of whom would soon move over to Lacanscamp. Formed in February and led most famously by Robert Lin-hart until the latters total personal breakdown two years later, at the exacttime when barricades were everywhere going up in the streets of Paris, theUJC(ML) was ofcially dissolved in the wake of the May uprising andas a result of the perceived failure to establish any lasting alliance betweenthe student movement and the struggles of the working class. The UCFML,by contrast, reaches the peak of its activism in the early to mid-seventiesprecisely as a result of the self-imposed task to continue interrogating theevents of MayJune , in terms of both their unintended backlash andtheir belated consequences for the political situation in France.

As Badiou and Lazarus indicate in the editorial comment included in

almost each volume of their Ynan series, published in the seventies bythe same editing house owned by Franois Maspero that also supportedAlthussers famous Thories series, there is only one vital question: Whatis, here and now, the road to follow so that Marxism and the real workersmovement fuse?24 Even several years later, while openly acknowledgingthe crisis of Marxism, Badiou continues to view Maoism as an unnishedtask, rather than as a lost cause or a past accomplishment to be savored withhistoriographical nostalgia. To defend Marxism today means to defend aweakness. We have todo Marxism, Badiou proposes in his Thorie du sujet,and on the same page he continues: That which we name Maoism is lessa nal result than a task, a historical guideline. It is a question of thinkingand practicing post-Leninism. To measure the old, to clarify the destruc-tion, to recompose politics from the scarcity of its independent anchorings,and all this while history continues to run its course under the darkest ofbanners.25

If there is a shift in this regard in Badious ongoing work, it is the slightbut signicant displacement from the idea ofpoliticizing history, which stillassumes a relatively external anchoring of politics in history understoodat the level of social and economical being, to that ofhistoricizing politics,

which remits a purely sequential understanding of politics to its own intrin-sic history. For Badiou, it is precisely the Maoist experience that runs up


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against the impossibility of fully accomplishing the rst idea, whereas hisrecent talk on the Cultural Revolution, together with the talk on the ParisCommune from the same cycle, offers a good example of the second: Thiscycle of talks, proposed by the Organisation Politique, is meant to clarify thelinks between history and politics at the start of the new century. Here, inlight of this question, we will examine various fundamental episodes in thehistoricity of politics. For example, the Russian Revolution, the Resistance,the Cultural Revolution, May , and so on.26 In other words, it is not justby chance that this debate, over the historicity of politics, happens to serve asa backdrop against which we can hear or read Badious talk on the CulturalRevolution. But Maoism and the Cultural Revolution, to which the UCFMLpledges half of its allegiance in the aftermath of May in France, alsoconstitute key events themselves in the shifting articulation between politicsand history that calls for such readings or investigations in the rst place.

Politics, Culture, Ideology

Accounts of French Maoism, caught up as they are in an effort to explainthe contradictory alignment, or lack thereof, with the events of May and their aftermath, typically draw a clear distinction between ideologyand politics, or between culture and politics, whereby the perceived inef-fectiveness of the overall movement as apolitical phenomenon paradoxicallyreceives a positive twist insofar as it would open up a much wider space forcultural and ideological freedom.

Christophe Bourseiller, inLes maostes: La folle histoire des gardes rougesfranais (), completely limits the impact of his subjects to the realm ofculture, where they indeed played the role of an important trigger for femi-nist and gay rights struggles in France. Politically, however, the many FrenchMaoist groups would have entailed little more than a poorly thought-outcombination of left-wing populism and kneejerk third worldism, foreveroscillating between authoritarianism and anarchy in terms of their owninternal organization, and bound to disappear for good with the death ofChairman Mao. In Bourseillers eyes, nally, the UCFML appears as little

more than a sect caught somewhere in between the spaces of culture,which would be a fantasy screen worthy of further projections, and that of


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politics, which according to him ends up having been completely misguided.Thus the group continues to rely on random and seemingly absurd acts ofviolence, such as the raiding of supermarkets or the interruption of moviescreenings perceived to be reactionary or fascist, aside from suffering fromthe cult of personality surrounding a small number of university intellectu-als, foremost among them Badiou himself.

For A. Belden Fields, in his much more scholarly analysis in Trotsky-ism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (),French Maoism likewise can be divided into two tendencies, which he callsnot so much political and cultural but rather hierarchical and anti-hierarchical: At least from to the mid-s the major characteristic ofFrench Maoism was indeed a clear-cut dualistic cleavage, with the groups oneach side of the cleavage having virtually nothing to do with one another.27At one extreme of the divide we thus nd the strict discipline and austerity

of the PCMLF, the Marxist-Leninist Communist Party of France, while atthe other extreme a much more favorable light is shed on the spontaneousand slightly anarchistic acts undertaken by the GP, or Gauche Proltari-enne, which arose sphinxlike out of the ashes of the UJC(ML) in October, only to become the most renowned and media oriented of all groupsof French Maoism. In Fieldss account, too, the UCFML appears as a groupthat somehow sits astride the opposition between hierarchical and anti-hierarchical Maoismtwo adjectives that in the end are little more thancode words to describe two opposing attitudes toward the Leninist party.Like the PCMLF, Badious organization thus continues to stress the needfor an organized form of politics, albeit a future one, while intervening inthe situation of illegal immigrants, for example, with exible tactics and ini-tiatives comparable to those much more publicized ones used by GP mem-bers and sympathizers.

Fields in part derives the split in his account of French Maoism from acomparable, this time tripartite, division proposed by Rmi Hess in his muchearlier work, Les maostes franais: Une drive institutionnelle (). Hess,who in an explicit attempt at sociological self-reexivity explains how herst became interested in Maoism in thanks to Badious philosophy

course Marx, Nietzsche, Freud in Reims, would later become active in thesame city in a Maoist splinter group inspired by Badious thought. Eventually,


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however, he comes to favor a kind of Maoist cultural politics, closely relatedto the critique of everyday life that was being formulated around the sametime by Henri Lefebvre and by the Situationist International. Thus, whenhe draws a line of demarcation between three moments in French Maoismthat he calls organizational, ideological, and libinidal, it should comeas no surprise that to the blind discipline and bureaucratic dogmatism of therst, epitomized by the PCMLF, Hess clearly prefers the libertarian spirit ofthe third, embodied by groups such as those gathered around the journalsTout and Vive la Rvolution, groups that effectively were among the drivingforces behind the MLF, or Movement for the Liberation of Women, andthe FHAR, or Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action. In this over-view, the UCFML appears, together with the UJC(ML) and its successorthe (ex-)GP of La Cause du Peuple, as an intermediate group between theorganizational and the libidinal, on the level of ideological struggles outside

the framework of strict party bureaucracy.28 For Hess, what is particularlyinteresting and even uncanny about this development of French Maoism,from hard-line party discipline through open ideological struggle to libidi-nal drift, is that it occurs in a chronological order that seems to be the exactopposite of the intuitive ABC of Leninist party-organization.

The Party and Political Autonomy

Even from this quick survey of some of the existing literature on FrenchMaoism, two recurrent issues stand out that are directly relevant for ourunderstanding of the role of Maoism in Badious work. I am referring tothe autonomy of politics and to the status of the party. As for the rst issue,few commentators fail to recognize the astonishing expansion to which thepolitical playing eld is subject in the late sixties and early seventies, with theresult that cultural revolution becomes a generic term to a large extent cutloose from its concrete moorings in the sequence of events in China. Nowit is a question of investing culture as much as politics, Bourseiller observes:Maoism, then, becomes more and more uid, less and less ideological, moreand more everyday-ist: it is a question of struggling on a day-by-day basis

and of opening up new fronts everywhere, even in everyday life.29 Badiou,


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however, has always been unwavering in his insistence on the autonomy ofpolitics as a practice that would be irreducible to purely cultural questions.Thus, in his lecture Politics and Philosophy from Conditions, he concludes:The thing itself, in politics, is a-cultural, as are all thinking and all truth.Comical, purely comical, is the idea of a cultural politics, as much as thatof a political culture.30 Nothing could of course seem more contradictory,coming from someone with such openly declared loyalty to the events of theCultural Revolution!

In fact, the UCFML insists in the nal pages of its founding document:One of the great lessons of the revolutionary storm of May is that the classstruggle is not limited to the factory. Capitalist oppression touches on alldomains of social life, and the same text goes on to conclude: The front ofculture and art is also very important. The historical experience of the GreatProletarian Cultural Revolution teaches us that, in certain circumstances,

it can even become a decisive front of the class struggle.31 The UCFMLeven formed a special section, the Groupe Foudre starting in and ledprimarily by Natacha Michel, to intervene precisely in art and culture atthe level of what were to be specic contradictions in propagandathatis, contradictions in forms of consciousness between the old and the new.Ultimately, then, Badiou and his comrades were not so far removed fromthe idea of a revolution of everyday life, as the UCFMLs founding docu-ment had already suggested: The revolution is in life and transforms life.32In fact, in a retrospective assessment, the organizations central journal,LeMarxiste-Lniniste, openly rejects the opposition between politics and every-day life that constitutes such a common assumption in most readings of thepost- period: Our politics is new because it refers to the everyday. After, the will to change everyday life is seen in opposition to spectacular andpoliticist politics. But what thenoyaux express through everyday politics inthe factory is the afrmation that there is no outcome other than political.33Understood in this way, no culture is ever truly apolitical, just as there canbe no political truth that somehow would not touch on culture as well.

Even at the start of the Cultural Revolution, as Badiou is quick to pointout in his talk, the Sixteen Points were exceedingly vague, even waxing

metaphysical, when it came to explaining the signicance of the concepttranslated as cultural.34 On the other hand, following Maos notion that


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there can be no art above the class struggle, the UCFMLs Groupe Foudrealso by no means accepted art or culture as sociologically dened spheresor domains that would somehow be separate from politics, even whileupholding its condence in the specicity of art.35 Badiou himself, nally,in recent years has come to admit that a full understanding of the sequenceof events from the late sixties and early seventies of course cannot leave theconditions ofpolitics, art, science, and love utterly and completely disjoinedaccording to a typically modernist bias of their self-declared autonomy.Thus, after seeing how the four conditions of truth are to be separated asclear and distinct ideas, most notably inManifesto for Philosophy, he invitesus to reconsider how historically they are most often intertwined, formingmixed combinations such as proletarian art or courtly love.

When pressured on this topic in the interview already quoted above,Badiou even went so far as to accept the notion that culture, rather than

merely being a version of art emptied out of all truth, as he claims in theintroduction to his Saint Paul, might actually be an appropriate name forthe networking (rseau) or knotting (nouage) among the various truthconditions that could be newly theorized as culture, if we can considerculture to be the network of various forcings, that is, at a given momentin time, the manner in which the encyclopedic knowledge of the situationis modied under the constraints of various operations of forcing whichdepend on procedures that are different from one another.36 In my eyes,what matters in this proposal is the suggestion that once again, with thedifferent operations that force the available knowledge of a given situationafter its investigation from the point of view of the event, we are sent backto a dialectic between knowledge and truthnow including a networkamong multiple truths that eventually might serve to formalize the con-cept of culture itselfthrough a notion taken from the Maoist legacy andinspired by the Cultural Revolution.

The second issue, on the role of the party, is potentially even more polem-ical. We know that for the openly Maoist Badiou, as late as in his Thorie dusujet, subject means political subject and that the party is the only mate-rial embodiment of such a subject. Every subject is political. Which is why

there are few subjects, and little politics, Badiou writes, and further on:The party is the body of politics, in the strict sense.37 From this point


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of view, very little seems to have changed since the concept of the partywas rst reformulated by the UCFMLs founding document to adapt to ourtimes. And yet, we would be wrong to ignore the distance that separates theUCFML itself from the party of the new type. The opening text is quickto remark:

The UCFML is not, in turn, the party. It does not pretend to know inadvance and to propagate what will be the living reality of the party. Itis thenoyau that promotes and carries the question of the party into themidst of the masses, it centralizes experiences in light of this project, itformulates directives, it veries them, and it recties them, in the practiceof the masses.38

Badious organization considers it unilateral and premature to pretend thatthere could be an authentic communist party of a new type at this time in

France and, in fact, rejected the claims of the ex-PCMLF to be this partyeven after it was forced to become clandestine: the UCFML insists that atthe present moment, it is groupuscular and un-proletarian to want to cre-ate, purely and simply, the party.39 These statements should not be brushedaside as being supercial cautionary tales that would hide an unshakeablecondence in the vanguard party. Rather, what is at stake is already to someextent the form of the party itself.

Clearly, the momentary postponement of the partys actual foundation,as well as the repeated insistence on merely being the harbinger, or noyaupromoteur, of a future organization that is yet to come, highlights a crisis inthe traditional party-form. They are the signs of an unsolved problemofa question that becomes a problem and an open task precisely as a result ofthe Cultural Revolution: An open problem, therefore, in the two senses ofthe expression: rst, as something that is not solved, and second, as some-thing of which the masses must take hold.40 Badious Thorie du sujet, sup-posedly dominated by a classical Marxist-Leninist type of politics, could notbe clearer in this regard. Marx, Lenin, and Mao appear in the periodizationof this book as three stagesthree episodes according to the intrinsic his-toricity of politicsin the progressive putting into question of the party as

an open task. The subjective question (how did the Cultural Revolution,mass uprising against the new bourgeoisie of the state bureaucracy, come up


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against the rebuilding of the party?) remains in suspense as the key questionfor all Marxist politics today.41 I would argue that this kind of critical sus-pension of the party-form of political organization introduces an irreducibleinner distance, or a dialectical scission, into the latter, making it at the sametime a form of post-Maoism.

Whereas Marx would have subordinated politics to the course of historyas class struggle, and Lenin would propose the party to absorb the widen-ing gap between history and politics, Badiou and Lazarus claim that withMao the concept of history (or History) as an external referent is absentedaltogether, in favor of a strictly conjunctural grasp of the laws of politics andtheir changing situations. Thinking no longer takes the form of thinkingthe adequation between politics and History. No hope of fusion is ever pres-ent, we read, and further on: The dialectical mode dehistoricizes.42 AfterMao, politics can no longer be transitive to an overarching sense of history,

and not even the party can overcome this gap. In other words, the breakwith the transitivity of politics is not a break away from the tradition ofMarxism-Leninism that would include Maoism as well but a break internalto the Maoist mode of politics itself.

To use Badious words from Thorie du sujet that apply to the third stageof his periodization of Marx, Lenin, and Mao: The working class is notable ever to resorb the scission, which gives it its being, between its socialimmediacy and its political project. Of such a political subjectnallyrestricted to the action of its placeholder, the party, a body made up of anopaque and multiple soulwe will never say that it constitutes history, noteven that it makes history.43 Clearly, we are several steps removed froman orthodox understanding of the dialectic between history and politics,between social being and consciousness, or between masses and classes, withthe party as vanishing mediator or third term. The opposite almost seemsto be true: only when the rapport between history and politics is denitivelybroken, or gives way to the rapport of a nonrapport, only then do Badiouand Lazarus in these texts speak of a dialectical mode of politics.

If dialectical thinking still involves a third term, it is only the process ofthe scission of the rst two that constitutes the tenuous unity of the third.

We should not be totally surprised, then, to be confronted with a similardenition of the dialectic in the preface to Badious Logiques des mondes:


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Let us agree that by dialectic, following Hegel, we should understand thatthe essence of all difference is the third term that marks the gap between thetwo others.44 Badious vacillations in this regardnow calling for a renewalof the dialectic and then arguing that the age of the dialectic is overareno doubt symptomatic of precisely the type of problems left unsolved by theCultural Revolution.

Finally, on a more empirical note, if we compare the two political orga-nizations in which Badiou has been active, the UCFML and the OP, onecalling for a party of a new type and the other for a politics without aparty, should we not conclude by saying that they propose forms of militan-tism that on the whole and in actual practice are nearly identical? Whetherthis is then seen as a practical shortcoming of the earlier organization or asa theoretical inconsistency of the later one, the fact of the matter is that theorganizational form of politics remains fairly constant for Badiou. This may

very well be a key lesson to be drawn from the suspension of the party-formaccomplished during the Cultural Revolution: not the anarchist or adventur-ist response of jettisoning all forms of organization, but the need for politicsto be organized at allinnoyaux, committees, communes, or a genericallycalled political organization.45

It is also in this regard that we should consider Badious commentary, inhis talk on the Cultural Revolution, about point from the Sixteen Pointsdecision. Indeed, if politics is to be more than a short-lived mass uprising ormanifestation, what the idea of the party is meant to add, even if its namedisappears, is precisely the question of material consistency and durability,that is, the question of organization. Without organized application, thereis no testing ground, no verication, no truth, as we already read in Thoriede la contradiction: Theory can then engender only idealist absurdities.46Or, as Badiou concludes inPeut-on penser la politique? (), a book writtenafter the supposed break away from his earlier Maoism: Political organiza-tion is necessary in order for the interventions wager to make a process outof the distance that reaches from an interruption to a delity, even if noorganized practice will ever be able completely to close the gap torn open bythe event in the rst place: In its propagating delity, as a stacked-up series

of interventions by way of wagers, the organization leaves open the pointwhere the suture of the One fails to seal the Two.47


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Maoism and the Logic of Deviations

If now, before interrogating the consequences of Badious Maoism for hisoverall philosophy, we take a closer look at how the UCFML positions itselfin the particular context of French Maoism, what should immediately strike

the reader is the overwhelming abundance of materials available, even thoughthey are rarely ever taken into account. Nine books, close to two dozen pam-phlets totaling over six hundred pages, two periodicals running for over adecade, and countless yers, tracts, and circulars: many of them signed col-lectively, under a pseudonym, or not signed at all, these materials in termsof quantity of course far exceed the individual production of Badious entireoeuvre as a philosopher. Broadly speaking, these publications cover fourmajor areas: the groups own history and assessment of its militant activity;the theory and philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism; the concept andcrisis of so-called monopoly state capitalism, criticized as a revisionist notionin light of the Marxian critique of political economy; and international pro-letarianism. In addition, the groups two periodicals: Le Marxiste-Lniniste() andLe Perroquet (), are comparable in function and styletoLa Distance Politique (today), which constitutes the newsletter of theUCFMLs successor, the Organisation Politique.

Far more important than the sheer quantity of Badious contributions tothis mass of information is the question of conceptual rigor in relation toactual experience. By this I mean to draw attention to an often-calumniatedprinciple of the dialectical method, that is, the identity or at the very least

the cobelonging between concept and experience, between the logical (oronto-logical) and the historical (or phenomenological). Against commontextbook variations on the theme of the real and the rational, Lenin wasafter all fond of underscoring the importance of this principle for his ownreading of Hegels Science of Logic, writing in shorthand notation in hisPhilosophical Notebooks: Hegel as a geniusguessed the dialectics of things,phenomena, the world (nature), in the dialectic of notions.48 Theodor W.Adorno, many years later, would reiterate this basic principle in his ownHegel: Three Studies by arguing painstakingly for the need to recapture theconcrete experiential content, particularly in terms of human labor, behindHegels most abstract logical formalism: Hegel has to be read against the


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grain, and in such a way that every logical operation, however formal itseems to be, is reduced to its experiential core.49 This is also how we shouldstrain to read Badiou. Every logical and ontological operation, however for-mal it may well seem to be, must thus be related against the grain to theexperiential core that conditions it, and vice versa. One particularly usefulway of doing so involves an analysis of the exact content behind the notionof leftist and rightist ideological deviations, as they are typically beingredened under the inuence of Chairman Mao.

In keeping with some of Maos own assertions, most notably in On Prac-tice and On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People,about the alternating risks of left-wing adventurism and right-wing dogma-tism, the UCFMLs argument about twin ideological deviations begins tofunction as a means to formalize a certain logic of revolt at a distance fromthe specic cases of both the (ex-)GPs antirevisionist violence and the ex-

PCMLFs blind defense of established doctrines.50 Ultimately, the measureof success for avoiding these two extremes depends on the specic links thatin any situation tie a given political organization not just to the masses ingeneral but to their most advanced sectors: Without a mass alliance, thereis no mass line. Without a mass line, the only alternative is between practicesthat are either dogmatic and opportunistic on the right, or else putschist andadventurist.51 Time and again, this is how the argument over deviationsfrom the just line will be reiterated. Beyond strictly organizational matters,however, the important point not to be missed in this context is how thisargument at the same time can help us better understand the place andforce of Maoism in Badious philosophy as a whole.

In the following pages, I cannot recount in detail every twist and turnto which the logic of leftist and rightist ideological deviations becomessubject both in the many publications of the UCFML and in Badious ownwork. Sufce it to track a few representative steps in the forceful conceptualelaboration that turns this logic from a primarily tactical and political ques-tion into an issue with profound philosophical consequences. In his shortdidactic books on Maoism, Thorie de la contradiction and De lidologie,books to which a third volume, planned under the titleAntagonisme et non-

antagonisme: Les diffrents types de contradiction, unfortunately would nevercome to be added, Badiou concentrates his critique of ideological deviations


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on the alternative between Deleuzian anarchism and Althusserian structur-alismwith the (ex-)GP enthusiast Andr Glucksmann, now turned NewPhilosopher and anti-Marxist critic of the gulag, undialectically combiningboth extremes in living proof of their deep-seated complicity.

Badiou rst of all reproaches his former teacher for reducing the logicof Marxs Capital to a combinatory of places and instances in the mode ofproduction. Althussers later theory of ideology likewise denes an invariantmechanism by which individuals come to be interpellated and function inany given social system, whether class based or not. Even if the dominantrole is allowed to shift from one structural instance to another, there is noplace in this overall picture for a contradictory transformation of the struc-ture itself: The displacement of the terms from one place to another leavesintact the underlying structure of exchange. The mobility of appearancesrefers to a closed system. The essential conservatism of all structural think-

ing risks on this point to change dialectics into its opposite: metaphysics.52This risk of a metaphysical outlook is especially poignant in the use madeout of the concept of the mode of production, the radical scienticity ofwhich lies at the core of the original Althusserian project: The conceptof mode of production is an inexhaustible goldmine for deviations of thestructuralist type. Taken in isolation, it is only all too easy to give a purelycombinatory version of it and to expulse from it the dialectic of forces infavor of the articulation of places.53 Althussers scienticist deviation wouldthus have consisted in limiting the dialectic, which was famously said to becritical and revolutionary in principle, to a conservative and even metaphysi-cal articulation of instances and hierarchies.

Whether this is a fair assessment of Althussers writings inFor Marx andReading Capital should not concern us here. There are certainly elements inthe concepts of over- and underdetermination, if not in structural causalityitself, that would bring Althusser much closer to Badiou than the latter ingeneral, except for a few occasions, seems willing to admit. But what shouldbe clear is the fact that this former student seeks to take the work of his oldteacher still one step further in the direction of articulating structure andhistory, as well as being and existence, from the point of view of loss and

destruction that unhinges the structure from within: The structure has itsbeing in a hierarchical combination, but its existence, that is to say its his-


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tory, fuses with that of its destruction. The structure has no other existencebesides the movement of its own loss, and each term of the contradictionreects this transitory mode of existence by its division in its being-for-the-structure and its being-for-the-dissolution-of-the-structure.54 In Badiouslater work, this tendency toward loss, impasse, and dissolution inherent inthe structurethis dialectic of lack and excess between a structure and itsimpossible metastructurewill come to mark the site of the immanentbreak within the structure that is then called an event.

If an overemphasis on the structural logic of places marks a right-wingdeviation, then conversely an exclusive emphasis on the logic of forces willquickly push us into the wide-open arms of left-wing anarchists. Or at leastthis is how Badiou in his Maoist years responds to the anarcho-desirerswho ock to Deleuzes courses in Vincennes. What becomes evident in thisharsh response, however, is the fact that anarchism and structuralism make

for surprisingly good bedfellows. In truth, anarchism is merely the ipsideof conservative structuralism. The drift is the shadow of the combinatory,Badiou asserts: Structuralism and the ideologies of desire are profoundlycoupled to one another. Far from being opposed, they are confused, in theircommon contradiction of the dialectic.55 The difcult task of a properlymaterialist dialectical mode of thinking would thus consist in thinking asplit correlation of structure and history, of states and tendencies, of combi-natories and differentialswithout allowing either side of the articulationto deviate and lapse back into a unilateral hypostasis. The dialectic bringsto life the contradiction of the structural and the qualitative, of the combi-natory and the differential evaluation of forces, Badiou proposes in a seriesof variations on the same theme: The complete dialectical intelligibilityof what is principal must thus apprehend not only the state of things buttheir tendency.56 Most important, as Marx already hinted when he spokeof the essentially revolutionary nature of dialectical reason, it is a ques-tion of grasping the tendency, whether toward blockage and loss or towardtransformation and change, within the present state of affairs: In order toenvisage things from the point of view of the future within the present itself,we must seize hold of this present as tendency, as increase or decrease, as

accumulation of forces, as rupture, and not only as state, or as gure.57This combination cannot take rest in a quiet complementarity between two


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symmetrical poles. Instead, the resulting articulation should give way to thedivided unity of a process of scission, which is to be applied to every term inthe analysis: Each term, precisely because it has no existence except as partof a process of scission, is itself torn apart between its qualitative subordina-tion to the scission taken as process, that is, as unity, and the movement oftransformation of this very quality itself, the source of which is the uninter-rupted struggle between the two terms and the incessant modication oftheir rapport.58 Such is, nally, the logic of scission that would dene thecomplete trajectory behind the proposal for a renewed understanding of thematerialist dialectic as the torn articulation between structure and history,between being and existence, or between gure and tendency.

Using the terms put forth in Thorie de la contradiction andDe l idologie,we can now resummarize how Badious Maoist recasting of the material-ist dialectic also allows us to dene the problem of ideological deviations.

All such deviations ultimately slip into a form of idealism insofar as theydisavow what Badiou describes as the dialecticity of the dialectic: The dia-lectic, if I can say so, is itself dialectical, insofar as its conceptual operators,which reect reality, are all equally split.59 In their mirroring relationship,the two types of ideological deviation, in other words, neglect the extentto which structure and tendency, or place and force, must be articulatedthrough the scission of each one of the two terms.

In the case of leftism, it is the structural element inherent in every ten-dency that is neglected in favor of a viewpoint of pure, unlimited, and afr-mative becoming. Here, as a typical example, Badiou mentions the adventur-ist tendencies fostered by May : If, indeed, one neglects the structuralelement, one takes the tendency for an accomplished state of affairs.60 Every-thing then fuses into the being of pure becoming.

In the case of rightism, it is the possibility of radical change that isforeclosed in the name of a purely objective analysis of the structure. Here,Badiou unsurprisingly mentions the economism of the Second Interna-tional: If one neglects the tendential element, one inevitably represses thenew in the name of the old, one supports the established order. One becomesinstalled in an opportunistic attitude of waiting.61 Everything then is made

to depend on the pure state of the existing situation.In each case, whether by precipitously jumping over ones own shadow or


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by pusillanimously staying put until the crisis has matured, the unilateralhypostasis of one side of the divided articulation to the exclusion of the otheris what prevents the unfolding of a properly dialectical investigation.

It is of course true that every instance or contradiction in society must beseen as part of a structure in dominance, complete with its nally determin-ing instance. In this regard, Badiou argues that reason is certainly on theside of Althusser. In fact, everything comes down to the following: seizedin a given state of things, or all along a particular sequence in its develop-ment, every contradiction assigns a determinate place to its terms, a placewhich is itself dened by its relation to the place of the other term, Badiousums up in Thorie de la contradiction: In this sense the dialectic is a logicof places.62 On the other hand, it is no less true that every structure ofassigned places is constantly being transformed as a result of inner splits,breaks, and changes. In this regard, he holds, reason is also on the side of

Deleuze. Seized in its uninterrupted movement in stages, by contrast, everycontradiction confrontsforces whose nature is differential: what matters inthe evaluation of force from the viewpoint of the movement of the contra-diction is no longer its transitory state of subordination or domination butits increase or decrease, Badiou continues: In its tendential or properlyhistorical aspect, the dialectic is a logic of forces.63 Even if both these viewshave reason partially on their side, however, each one taken in isolation isclearly insufcient. For Badiou, the real difculty lies rather in nding away to overcome the apparent complementarity between the two, withouthaving recourse to the mediation of a synthesis: The central dialectical prob-lem is thus the following: how can the logic of places and the logic of forces be

articulatedwithout fusion?64In Badious reading, the case of Deleuze furthermore may give us an

idea of how place and force can even become combinedas in fact theyusually arewithin a leftist deviation. In moral terms, this traditionallycomes down to the presupposition of a stark dualism of necessity and free-dom. In The Party and the Flux, a contribution to La situation actuellesur le front philosophique () published by the Ynan-Philosophy Groupof the UCFML, Badiou thus cites an extensive passage from Gilles Deleuze

and Flix Guattaris Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia in whichall the books well-known dualisms, from the molar versus the molecular


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all the way to subjugated-groups versus subject-groups, against all expec-tations seem to nd their driving principle in a thinly disguised versionof Kants autonomy versus determinism argument. Deleuze and Guattarido not hide this much: return to Kant, here is what they came up with toexorcise the Hegelian ghost, Badiou charges: It is pure, unbound, genericenergy, energy as such. That which is law unto itself, or absence of law. Theold freedom of autonomy, hastily repainted in the colors of what the youthin revolt legitimately demands: some spit on the bourgeois family.65 Overand against the sheer energy of this unconditional freedom, there is onlythe blind necessity of a paranoid order that like a vampire feeds on the sheerenergy and creativity of freedom, which is then but another name for lifeitself.

Of this radical dualism of pure force and pure place within leftism wecan also formulate a political variant, in addition to the moral one. This

typically comes in the guise of a direct and unmediated opposition betweenthe masses and the state, or between the plebes and the statedualities towhich today I would add the explicitly undialectical or even antidialecti-cal antagonism between the multitude and Empire. Power and resistancethen perennially seem to oppose the same vitally creative masses to the samedeadly repressive system. In this regard, the massist ideology that cameout of excels in attening out the dialectical analysis, Badiou remarks:Always the same exalted masses against the identical power, the invariablesystem.66 Not only does this view of politics fail to take into account howconcretely no movement proceeds as a whole except by the inner splits thatdislocate and revoke the totality: It is never the masses, nor the movementthat as a whole carry the principle of engenderment of the new, but thatwhich in them divides itself from the old.67 But, what is more, far fromsignaling a radically new and untimely discovery, all this fascination withmassism or movementismand again today I would add multitudi-nismwas already a prime target of urgent attacks, more than a centuryago, in the eyes of Marx and Engels:

That the movement would be a desiring push, a owing ux; thatevery institution would be paranoid and in principle heterogeneous tothe movement; that nothing is doneagainst the existing order but only


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according to the afrmative schizze that withdraws from this order; thattherefore it is necessary to replace all organization, all hideous militantism,with self-managementor with association, there are quarrels going onabout this in certain cottagesof pure movement: All these daring revi-sions, which are supposed to raise the striking novelty of the marginaland dissident masses up against totalitarian Marxism-Leninismare word for word that which Marx and Engels, in The German Ideology,had to tear to piecesaround !in order to clear the terrain fora nally coherent systematization of the revolutionary practices of theirtime.68

Cutting diagonally across the inoperative dualisms of masses and power,movement and organization, or dissidence and totalitarianism, one shouldthus think politics through the complete arsenal of concepts implied in thelogic of scission, which is still most succinctly encapsulated in the Maoistformula: One divides into two. Badiou explains:

We are in favor of one divides into two. We are in favor of the increaseby scission of the new. We want neither the sanctied and obscure, inop-erative and repetitive, ultraleftist masses nor the revisionist union, whichis but the facade of a sinister dictatorship. What is proletarian, especiallytoday, divides and combats the smallest fractures that are internal to themovement and makes them grow to the point where they become whatis principal.69

The collectively signed introduction to La situation actuelle sur le frontphilosophique actually charges that all revisionist tendencies in Frenchthought of the seventies, not only in the trend of New Philosophers suchas Glucksmann but also among Deleuzians, Althusserians, and Lacanians,can be seen, politically speaking, as presupposing categorical oppositionsthat seek to stamp out any possible diagonal termwhether class, party,or organizationbetween the masses and the state. Everywhere to sub-stitute the couple masses/state for the class struggle: thats all there is to it,the introduction reads: The political essence of these philosophies is cap-tured in the following principle, a principle of bitter resentment against theentire history of the twentieth century: In order for the revolt of the masses


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against the state to be good, it is necessary to reject the class direction of theproletariat, to stamp out Marxism, to hate the very idea of the class party. 70The result of such arguments is then either the complete denial of antago-nistic contradictions altogether or else the jubilatory recognition of a meresemblance of antagonism. They dream of a formal antagonism, of a worldbroken in two, with no sword other than ideology, whereas a completeunderstanding of emancipatory politics would involve not just the joy andpassion of short-lived revolt but the disciplined labor of a lasting transfor-mation of the particular situation at hand: They love revolt, proclaimed inits universality, but they are secondary in terms of politics, which is the realtransformation of the world in its historical particularity.71 One urgent taskfor the authors of this polemic therefore involves precisely the need to strug-gle against such revisionist tendencies on the philosophical front. Everyone,including the Maoists, is after all called upon today, after the Cultural Revo-

lution and May , to take a stance, to discern the new with regard to themeaning of politics in its complex articulation, its constitutive trilogy: massmovement, class perspective, and state, the introduction continues: Suchis clearly the question of any possible philosophy today, wherein we can readthe primacy of politics (of antagonism) in its actuality.72

In the compact series of footnotes toLe noyau rationnel de la dialectiquehglienne Badiou makes explicit the need to develop a full-blown philo-sophical concept of deviation. Signicantly, such a concept cannot be foundin Hegels idealist dialectical system: Hegels idealism also manifests itselfby the absence of all positive theory of deviation.73 Hegels Science of Logicin fact remains caught in the false problematic of an absolute beginning, orto be more precisebut this is already symptomatic of a disavowed splitthat hints at a rational core within the idealist dialecticin the searchingalternative between two absolute beginnings: Being and Nothing. Badiou,by contrast, may seem to be in tacit agreement with Adorno when the latterargues that a truly materialist dialectic must always start from somethingrather than from either Being or Nothing. Somethingas a cogitativelyindispensable substrate of any concept, including the concept of Beingisthe utmost abstraction of the subject-matter that is not identical with think-

ing, an abstraction not to be abolished by any further thought process,Adorno tells us, and in a footnote of his own he adds: Yet even the minimal


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trace of nonidentity in the approach to logic, of which the word somethingreminds us, is unbearable to Hegel.74 For the Maoist in Badiou, however,every something must always be splitsplit between itself and somethingelse, namely, the system in which something stands asthis something ratherthan as an other.

While the logic of scission borrows heavily from other early segments inthe Science of Logic, especially from Something and Other and Deter-mination, Constitution, and Limit, Badiou systematically reformulates thebasic principles of this logic in his own, now familiar, vocabulary; insistingthat every entity be split between that part of it that can be understoodaccording to the logic of places and that part that cannot be accounted forwithout resorting to a logic of forces. The whole aim of this detailed andsometimes hermetic discussion is not to put forces and places in an orderlyrapport of complementarity that would leave each pole unaffected in its

purity, but to push forward in the search for a divided correlation betweenthe two as spliteach one being determined and exceeded from within bythe other. Every force, then, is necessarily determined by a space of assignedplaces, but conversely no system of places is complete without some forcebeing excluded out at the limit.

Determination, by which a force is placed, and limit, by which a place isexceeded by a force capable of acting back on its own determination, arethe fundamental operators that in their absence or disavowal allow us tograsp the logic of deviations as well. The deviations, the backlashes, andso on, are fully thinkable only in dialectical correlation with the determina-tion and the limit of a movement, insofar as both right-wing opportun-ism and left-wing opportunism merely reconvoke one of the terms of theoriginal contradiction in its isolated purity, that is to say, the rst one onlyrepeats the dominant term, whereas the second, by arguing from a stateof original purity prior to all determination, will assign to itself the task ofnding the other.75

Already during his Maoist years, however, Badiou is acutely aware ofthe fact that the most advanced theoretical and philosophical developmentsin the late sixties and seventies, for instance in Lacanian psychoanalysis,

if not already in Althusser and Deleuze as well, cannot be reduced to theslight caricatures of structuralist and leftist deviations. Thus we must


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trace the line of demarcation elsewhere, or in the same place but withgreater precision. One way to do so is by recognizing the extent to whichan accomplished form of structuralism not only posits the divided nature ofboth structure and subject but also reconceives of their relationship in theuncanny terms of an internal exclusion. As we have come to expect in morerecent years thanks to the work of Laclau or Slavoj iek, this doctrine alsoentails a complete reworking of the topology of inside and outsidewithevery idealist or humanist inside being dened in the paradoxical terms ofits constitutive outside.

In Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hglienne, Badiou still seems toreproach structuralism as much as leftism precisely for ignoring the topol-ogy of the constitutive outside:

The root of the failure of all Marxist structuralism, as well as of the left-ist current, lies in claiming to organize thought and action from an abso-lute understanding of oppressive society as System, and then to launchthe guideline of dissidence, of exteriority. However, there is no exterior,which by no means implies an insurmountable constraint of the interior(recuperation), because there is no interior either.76

Badiou knows of course that Lacan, especially in his later seminars, was tobecome a veritable master of these inside/outside topologies. And, I mightadd, a comparable logic of internal exclusion, based on the notion of an absentcause, can be found not only in Althussers canonical writings but also inDeleuzesLogic of Sense, no doubt his most structuralist book. Would thisnot satisfy the requirements for a materialist dialectic according to Badiousown strongly Maoist version?

One answer to this last question, which will not be fully developed untilThorie du sujet, is anticipated inLe noyau rationnel de la dialectique hgli-enne. Lacan, like Mallarm before him, Badiou argues, ultimately reducesthe topology of the constitutive outside to the mere recognition of a struc-tural given. Mallarm and Lacan, in this sense, certainly can be considereddialecticians. But insofar as all their virtuosity in displaying the vanishingcause of the real, of the drive, or of a sunken ship, and so on, nevertheless

remains bound by the constraint of an overarching order of places, such asan ocean or a eld, Mallarm and Lacans work would nonetheless give us


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the clues only for a structural, as opposed to a properly materialist, dialectic.This is why the topology of the constitutive outside, which is the culminat-ing point of the articulation between place and force as well as betweenstructure and subject, must in turn be divided into a structural and a ten-

dential understanding:The historical fate of this topology is its inevitable division. We canindeed conceive of this topology in a purely structural fashion: exteriorand interior then are discernible on every point, but indiscernible in theWhole, which is supposed as given. This is the path followed by Lacan(but already by Mallarm) in the way he uses nonorientable surfaces, suchas the Mbius ring. . . . But, in fact, we can and we must conceive of thesplit exterior/interior correlation as a process, whereby the fact that thereal is simultaneously at its place and in excess over this place, both insideand outside, is due to its unfolding as a qualitative force.77

In the end, then, what is proposed is a symptomatic torsion that cannotremain merely on the structural level of recognizing an outside within, asin a traumatic kernel of the real, but that must pass over into the destructionor disqualication of the old inside the new.

Based on this more precise demarcation from structuralism, BadiousThorie du sujet can then once again lay out the logic of twin ideologicaldeviations. He thus conrms how the dialectical process in a typical back-lash risks to provoke two extreme types of fallout, or Rckfall in Hegelsown terms: the rst, drawn to the right of the political spectrum, remitsus to the established order and thus obscures the torsion in which somethingnew actually takes place, while the second, pulling to the left instead, vin-dicates the untouched purity of the original force and thus denies the per-sistence of the old in the new. What is thus blocked or denied is either thepower of determination or the process of its torsion in which there occursa conjunctural change: But the true terms of all historicity are rather thedetermination and the limit, terms by which the whole afrms itself with-out closure, and the element is included without abolishing itself.78

The complete deployment of this dialectic also provides us with a key

to understand the perceptions of failure and success that put such a heavystamp on the aftermath of May . In fact, both the provocative accusations


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by outside observers such as Lacan and the contrite turnabouts by ex-Mao-ists such as Glucksmann remain caught as if spellbound in the inert duelbetween the established order of places and the radical force of untaintedadventurism. The world-famous picture of Daniel Cohn-Bendit during oneof the protests of May , with the student leader smiling deantly in theface of an anonymous member of the French riot police who remains hid-den behind his helmeta picture that Miller eventually will pick for thecover of Lacans seminarLenvers de la psychanalyse given during the follow-ing yearmight serve to illustrate this point. Indeed, the contagious appealof this image depends entirely on a limited structural scheme in which thereappears no scission in the camp of the ironic and free-spirited students orany torsion of the existing order of things beyond a necessary yet one-sidedprotest against the repressive state. Althussers much-discussed example ofthe police ofcer hailing a passerby in the street remains bound to this dual

structure, as might likewise be the case of the denition of politics in oppo-sition to the police in the later work of Rancire. For Badiou, however, thisview hardly captures any specic political sequence in its actual process.There is not only the law of Capital, or only the cops. To miss this pointmeans not to see the unity of the order of assigned places, its consistency. Itmeans falling back into objectivism, the inverted ransom of which consistsby the way in making the state into the only subject, whence the antirepres-sive logorrhea, Badiou warns in Thorie du sujet: It is the idea that theworld knows only the necessary rightist backlash and the powerless suicidalleftism.79 Lacans accusation that the students in revolt are but a hystericbunch in search of a master thus merely reproduces a face-off between theextreme outcomes of the dialectical process, without acknowledging thetrue torsion of that which possibly takes place in between the two.

Finally, inLEtre et l vnement, long after the author is supposed to haveoutgrown his Maoist fury, Badiou almost seems to preempt those criticismsthat will nd in his work only a rigid, if not miraculous, opposition betweenbeing and event, knowledge and truth, the human animal and the immortalsubject. Badious most systematic work to date in fact includes a staunchcritique of leftism and statism, equivalent to what in his youthful days

he would have called left-wing adventurism and right-wing dogmatism.Thus, in a pivotal meditation fromLEtre et l vnement on The Interven-


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tion, Badiou warns against the temptation to put the event in a set all byitself, as a singleton utterly disjoined from the situation at hand. Such wouldbe the temptation of what he now proposes to call speculative leftism,which is still nothing but a mirror image of statism, that is, the way inwhich the state systematically tries to reduce the erratic novelty of a politicalevent, for instance, to the rabble-rousing discontent of the mob, of foreignagitators, and so on. The terms that are registered by the state, guaranteeof the count-for-one of the parts, are nally the site and the putting-into-oneof the name of the event, Badiou claims: This is certainly a Two (the siteas such counted as one, and a multiple put into one), but the problem is thatbetween these two termsthere is no relation whatsoever.80 The connectionsbetween an event and its site remain an enigma from the point of view ofthe state, with the result that both are merely juxtaposed as being essentiallyunrelated in their duality. However, we do not fare much better at the other

end of the ideological spectrum when the event, rather than being foreclosedby the state, is hypostasized into a radical beginning. Speculative leftismimagines that the intervention is authorized only by itself, and breaks withthe situation with no other support than its own negative will, Badiou con-cludes: Speculative leftism is fascinated by the ultra-one of the event, andthinks it is possible in its name to deny all immanence to the structuredregime of the count-for-one. And since the ultra-one has the structure of theTwo, the imaginary of a radical beginning inevitably leads, in every range ofthought, to a Manichaean hypostasis.81 If Badious philosophy indeed fallsprey to either or both of these two positions, then the least his critics shouldrecognize is the fact that his entire work seems to have included a prolongedstruggle against such deviations.

Mao as Vanishing Mediator

The role of Maoism for Badious overall philosophy, as I have tried to showthrough the logic of twin ideological deviations, ultimately consists in allow-ing him without separation or fusion toarticulate place and force, state andtendency, structure and subject, or being and event. Of course, the diagonal

crossing of dualisms that operate in a metaphysical system can be seen asa constant throughout the history of philosophy. As Badiou writes in one


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of his most recent texts: The notion that thought should always establishitself beyond categorical oppositions, thereby delineating an unprecedenteddiagonal, is constitutive of philosophy itself, so that, to capture the singu-larity of this or that philosophy, we have to see what species the concep-tual recourse to one diagonal as opposed to another: The whole questionconsists in knowing what value to ascribe to the operators of this diagonaltrajectory, and in identifying the unknown resource to which they sum-mon thought.82 Maoism is certainly one such resource, which even todayis still fairly unknown or underappreciated, in Badious own trajectory as aphilosopher.

Badious Thorie de la contradiction could not be clearer about the philo-sophical implications of the materialist dialectic as a traversing of oppo-sitesabove all, in this case, the opposites of subject and object. The prob-lem is to reect both and at the same time the scission and the reciprocal

action of the two categories (subject and object) in the general movement ofa process, without excluding that the subjective factor may be the key to thismovement, Badiou sums up with a reference to Hegel by way of LeninsPhilosophical Notebooks: For Lenin, it is a question of nding support inHegel so as to put an end to the unilateralism of the categories of subject andobject, whether one separates them (metaphysical operation) or one annulsone of them (absolute idealism or mechanicist materialism).83 What Badiouadds to Lenins argument then in a way consists in suggesting that Mao isthe spitting image of this materialist Hegel whose praise is so loudly sungon every page of the notebooks by Lenin. But then this suggestion also hasprofound consequences for Badious personal genealogy in relation to theprincipal philosophical schools or trends in existence at the time in France.

InPeut-on penser la politique? Badiou remembers how ercely the Frenchphilosophical scene was divided in the sixties and seventies by the last battleof the giants, the polemic between Sartre and Althusser: When the media-tions of politics are clear, it is the philosophers imperative to subsume themin the direction of a foundation. The last debate in this matter opposedthe defenders of liberty, as founding reective transparency, to the defend-ers of the structure, as prescription of a regime of causality. Sartre against

Althusser: this meant, at bottom, the Cause against the cause.84Hegel, whose shadow hangs over this debate at least as much as Marxs,


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is often little more than a code name in this context to denounce the per-sistence of humanist and idealist elements in the early Marx, even if theantihumanist trend is not wholly incompatible with a return to Hegel of itsown, provided that we abandon thePhenomenology of the Spirit in favor ofthe Science of Logic.

Sartre, on one hand, found inspiration for his critique of Stalinist dogmaby turning to the arch-Hegelian topics of alienation and the struggle forself-consciousness whose inuence can be felt so strongly in the Marx of theEconomic and Philosophic Manuscripts of. For Badiou, however, Sartreseffort, though heroic in many regards, in the end betrays both Hegel andMarx:

In the Critique of Dialectical Reason (but after the young Lukcs, afterKorsch), Sartre in a single movement greeted Marxism as the insurmount-able horizon of our culture and undertook to dismantle this Marxism byforcing it to realign itself with the original idea that is most foreign toit: the transparency of the cogito. . . . Both this Marx and this Hegel areequally false, the rst for being reduced to the second, and the second forbeing separated from that part of himself that precisely cleared the pathfor the rst: the Great Logic.85

Althusser, on the other hand, wanted to reclaim Marxs radical discovery ofan unheard-of type of structural causality, as the basis for a new dialecticalready implied in the analysis of Capital, by stripping it of all Hegelianelements: Althusser restituted a kind of brutal cutting edge to Marxism,isolating it from the subjectivist tradition and putting it back in the saddleas positive knowledge. At the same time, Marx and Hegel, even thoughin opposite terms, found themselves as much foreclosed as in the previ-ous moment: the materialist Hegel of the Great Logic is equally mute forAlthusser and for Sartre.86

It is this grandiose but also debilitating alternative between Sartre andAlthusser that Badiou seeks to cross by way of a divided recomposition, allthe while remaining loyal to the two major referents of his Maoism: Whatthe Cultural Revolution and May made clear on a massive scale was the

need for something entirely different from an oscillation of national intel-lectual traditions (between the Descartes of the cogito, Sartre, and the Des-


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cartes of the machines, Althusser), in order to reinvest Marxism in the realrevolutionary movement. . . . The Maoist aim was to break with this alter-nation, with this avoidance.87 But Maoism, as the primary resource to tracea diagonal across the Sartre/Althusser debate, also means a return to theconict of interpretations surrounding Hegel.

Hegels division seems to Badiou to be the only remedy against the temp-tation to submit his work to either a positivist or an idealist reductionism:Hegel remains the stake of an endless conict, because the belaboredunderstanding of his division alone is what prohibits, in thinking the rela-tionship

bosteels post maoism

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