negation and politics: on alain badiou, by jonathon collerson

8/8/2019 Negation and Politics: On Alain Badiou, by Jonathon Collerson

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Negation and Politics

A reply to Matthew Sharpe on Alain Badiou

Jonathon Collerson

Alias: Mans consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but

creates it,

Lenin, 1914

I

Underlying Matthew Sharpes Resurrecting (Meta-)Political

Theology, or the Abstract Passion of Alain Badiou is the

intersection of philosophy and the Left.1 If the Left is not to repeat

those moments of its history that today provide such

ammunition for the there is no alternative chorus from the Right,

Sharpe says, Badiou cannot save us.2 He proposes instead a

critical theory addressed [to] those subjects most historically

capable of and most directly interested in progressive political

change.3 But the impasse of the Left is exactly the absence of the

subject. Whom, therefore, to address?

The powerful vote that elected Labor in 2007 does not count

today, given the very law that Your Rights at Work campaigned

against has been retained. In Badious jargon, this was a campaign

ARENA journal no. 32, 2009

201

1 M. Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, or the Abstract Passion of AlainBadiou, in Arena Journal, New Series, no. 29/30, 2008, pp. 273303.

2 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 299.3 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 300.


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Badiou argues that to break its impasse, to reassert the political subject

today, the Left must develop a discipline of thought subtracted

exactly from what is generally taken to be political, or what is.9

This makes politics unpalatably indiscernible for Sharpe.10 At

the centre of his article is an insistence on what is generally taken

to be political against Badious insistence on politics as something

going beyond this.11 So he suggests an immediate question: What is

politics? But in Sharpes discussion, where the central claim is that

Badious thought is a pristine example of Hegels unhappy

consciousness,12 this question settles on a more specific problem

for philosophy: What is negation? If politics is a renunciation of what

is generally taken to be political, what is the nature of this negation?

II

Hegel describes the unhappy consciousness as being aware of its

own preference for an abstract freedom of thought; but, in this,

being aware that its preference is for something one-sided. In fact,

it experiences it as a violent denial of self-realization.13 Hegel draws

on this idea to account for The Terror during the French Revolution,

but the significance here is the example of Christianity. For Sharpe,

the best way to understand Badiou is to locate Christianity as the

hidden condition of his thought something Badiou unwittingly

invites with his 1997 book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.14

Badiou is a (Meta-)Political Theologian because his notions of

event, truth and subject exactly deflect verifiability from the

standpoint of their situation.

This is particularly the case with Badious notions of equality


Negation and Politics 203

9 Politics puts the State at a distance, in the distance of its measure. A. Badiou, Metapolitics,trans. J. Barker, London, Verso, 2006, p. 145. See also Del Lucchese and Smith, We Need aNew Popular Discipline.

10 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, pp. 290, 292.11 the point here concerns how Badiou talks about the vast majority of events, processes

and actions that the rest of the world describe as political: Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 293.

12 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p 277. Peter Hallward makes the samesuggestion in the standard English-language reference for Badiou: P. Hallward, Badiou: ASubject to Truth, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2003, pp. 2412. Daniel Bensaid,Slavoj Zizek and Alex Callinicos have drawn similar conclusions. See D. Bensaid, AlainBadiou and the Miracle of the Event, in P. Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and theFuture of Philosophy, London, Continuum, 2004, chapter 7; S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The

Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London, Verso, 1999, chapter 3; and A. Callinicos, TheResources of Critique, chapter 3.

13 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. J. B. Baillie, New York, Harper &Row, 1967, pp. 24267.

14 For Badious rebuttal of these claims, including a comment on Slavoj Zizeks contributionto this reading of his work, see A. S. Miller, An Interview with Alain Badiou Universal

Truths and the Question of Religion, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, vol. 3, issue 1, Fall2005, pp. 3842.


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and justice. Politics is entirely subjective; not simply a necessity in any

given situation, but something directed upon it. For instance, sexual

equality should not be investigated, it should be affirmed as a

political axiom. Any politics that is not immediately egalitarian is

not a politics.15 Justice is that by which the subjects nodal link to the

place, to the law, takes on the divisible figure of its transformation,

Badiou says. More radically, justice names the possibility from the

point of view of what it brings in to being as subject-effect that

what is non-law may serve as law.16 This strong subjective quality

captures Saint Pauls invocation: you are not under law, but under

grace.17 This is why, Sharpe argues, Badiou separates and valorizes

a new elect (the subject) from those left behind the affirmation of

a truth. As for Martin Luther, the problem of bridging HigherTruth and this worldly politics then emerges.18

Sharpe goes on to draw on Luthers political writing to suggest

the consequences of Saint Pauls distinction between law and grace.

For Luther, responsibilities to God are incommensurable with those

to any human community.19 Sharpe finds appropriately shocking

passages in Luther to demonstrate this: Christian government is

impossible because the wicked always outnumber the good and

therefore, in order to compel the wicked to law, the secular sword

should and must be red and bloodthirsty.20

This is the rub.Political thought must negotiate the relationship between a

transcendent Truth and the situation it transcends. But Luthers

Christian appeal to the freedom of thought from secular


Jonathon Collerson204

15 Only politics is required to declare that the thought it is, is the thought of all. Badiou hasbeen celebrated for securing universal truth against the grain of postmodern thought. ForBadiou, any truth is truth for everyone in a definite situation; politics as a truth procedure,the production of a political truth, must therefore address itself to everyone; equality isaxiomatic for politics. Politics is impossible without the statement that people, taken

indistinctly, are capable of the thought that constitutes the thought of the post-eventalpolitical subject. By contrast with Badious other truth procedures, the scientist only needsone other scientists to recognise a truth; two lovers are a truth; and the artist has their truthalone. See Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 142.

16 A. Badiou, Thorie du sujet, Paris, Seuil, 1982; quoted in B. Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory ofthe Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism (PartII), in Pli, no. 13, 2002, p.185.SeeA. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels, London, Continuum, 2009 (forthcoming).

17 Romans 6:24. See Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, pp. 275 and 2789.18 Higher Truth is of course contradictory with Badious philosophy, where truths only exist

within real historical practices; truth is concrete, as the maxim goes. Sharpe, Resurrecting(Meta-)Political Theology, p. 291.

19 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 279.20 Quoted in Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, pp. 292, 301.21 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, pp. 280, 279. Badiou does not disagree

with this point; below we will see that he does not think that anything is created indestruction, but only in subtraction from a situation.


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tyrannies does not itself legislate any political consequences.21

Indeed, for Hegel, the only political consequence it can have is the

fanaticism of destruction.22

III

What is missing here is that the unhappy consciousness is an

expression of what Hegel calls negative infinity.23 Hegels

criticism of traditional Christianity is exactly that its God is

transcendental. For this Christianity, the death of Christ means

that God has withdrawn from the world, and that there are no

longer any mediators between individual and God.24 The vogue

for Epicurus and Spinoza during Hegels youth subsequently led

him to pursue the redemption of the Christian God under the

notion that an absolute God must by definition be immanent in theworld: if God is not in the world there is a place where God is not

God is not absolute.25 Accounting for the infinite within the

finite (God in the world) then becomes a dominant motif in Hegel.

This culminates in the Absolute Idea that closes his logic.

In the early paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right, quoted by

Sharpe, Hegel sets out the basic movement of his dialectic of will.

First, the will denies all limits; negating determination and naming

itself infinite. Second, the will cancels this denial, and determines

itself within the (finite) world. But this denial is a determinationwithout the universality given (negatively) in the first moment. And

so we finally have, third, the unity of both these moments.26 He

describes this final moment as the self-determination of the ego and

it is at this point that negative infinity, or the unhappy consciousness,

gives way to the substantial being that he calls true or good infinity.

With the simple denial of limits all that is achieved is an infinite

repetition of negation. Everything appears as a limit from the one-

sided standpoint of the abstractly infinite will. This is a bad negation,

a repetition compulsion. The location of the infinite within the



22 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, Oxford UniversityPress, 1967, p. 22. See also Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 599610: All thesedeterminate elements disappear with the disaster and ruin that over take the self in the stateof absolute freedom [abstract autonomy]; its negation is meaningless death, sheer horror atthe negative which has nothing positive in it, nothing that gives a filling, p. 608.

23 G. W. F. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830),trans. W. Wallace, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 137. Sharpe does not mentionit directly, but he directs us to Hegels notion of negative infinity. The passage he quotesfrom, the remark for paragraph five of Hegels Philosophy of Right, is exactly where Hegelintroduces the concept of infinity in this book. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 21.

24 F. Beiser, Hegel, New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 137.25 See Beiser, Hegel, chapters 1 and 2.

26 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, pp. 213.


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finite, the unity of both these moments, breaks this logic. What

previously appeared as a limit is now a determination of the will

itself. It is the will whose potentialities have become fully explicit

which is truly infinite, Hegel says, because its object is itself and

so is not in its eyes an other or a barrier; on the contrary, in its

object this will has simply turned backward into itself.27

IV

Badiou retains negative infinity as a problem to be solved. An

event, for Badiou, interrupts a situation and demonstrates a

dysfunction in its structuring principle; the count-as-one, in his

jargon.28 A truth process involves an activist intervention that

traces the consequences of an event through a situation. He insists

that this intervention happens under the condition of the state and,therefore, criticizes attempts to name the event a radical break:

Speculative leftism imagines that intervention authorizes itself on

the basis of itself alone; that it breaks with the situation without any

other support than its own negative will, he says. This thought is

unaware that the event only exists insofar as it is submitted ... to the

ruled structure of the situation.29

During the twentieth century this negative will took the form of

an absolute attempt to purify the real. Badiou argues that the

century was motivated by a passion for the real, expressed in thedestruction of the state but equally in a subtraction from it. Kasimir

Malevichs 1918 painting White on White is either the destruction of

painting (nothing is presented) or, in Badious view, a subtraction

from the law of painting that is active in the minimal difference

between white and white, the difference between place and taking-

place.30 Badiou concludes, however, that it is was the century of

destruction: Stalinism, Fascism, et cetera.31 Like the denial of limits

in Hegels dialectic of will, destruction aims to strip the inauthentic

away from the real but finds it infinitely laden. It is a processdoomed to incompletion, a figure of the bad infinite, he says.32

Badiou draws together the categories destruction and

subtraction in the concept of true negation. He argues that any

novelty is a negation and that any negation involves both

destruction and subtraction. But it is in a subtraction from the law



27 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 30.28 See A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham, London, Continuum, 2007, pp. 2330.29 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 210 (emphasis in original).30 A. Badiou, The Century, trans. A Toscano, Cambridge, Polity, 2007, pp. 557.

31 Badiou, The Century, p. 54.32 Badiou, The Century, p. 56.


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of a situation, not destruction, that novelty is created: destruction is

never creation. Arnold Schoenbergs invention of serialism in music

is an example of this unity. The new musical axioms which structure,

for Schoenberg, the admissible succession of notes in a musical

work, outside the tonal system, are in no way deducible from the

destruction of this system, says Badiou. The musical discourse

avoids the laws of tonality, or, more precisely, becomes indifferent

to these laws. He continues: we can say that the musical discourse

is subtracted from its tonal legislation. Clearly, this subtraction is in

the horizon of negation, but it exists apart from the purely negative

part of negation. It exists apart from destruction.33 As for Hegel,

where the final moment in the dialectic of will is the unity of both

these moments, for Badiou true negation is the unity ofdestruction and subtraction. Serialism is irreducible to either

destruction or subtraction, but involves both: tonality must be

destroyed for the Second Viennese School to create a-tonal music.

What is essential to this process is the (re)definition of the act of

composition against what is generally taken to be composition.

This (re)definition, a formalization of composition, is indifferent to,

is subtracted from, the law of composition: tonality. The production

of novelty is not reduced to the destructive act, the absolute break

of a speculative leftism, but neither is destruction cast aside. Thisrenders Sharpes claim that Badiou is interested in a radical new

beginning implausible.34 It is not the stoicism of an unhappy

consciousness, but a (re)definition en acte of what will count as legal

for a definite situation.V

Sharpe insists that the benefit of immanent critique is its

negotiation of the descent of the philosopher back into the polis.35

The difficulty emerges as he repeatedly conflates this negotiation

with Badious assumption that thought and practice form a

tautology. For instance, Badious ... philosophy seems to sail very



33 Badiou, Destruction, Negation and Subtraction, public open video lecture for the facultyand students of the European Graduate School, Media Studies Department Program, EGS,Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007. A transcription of a version delivered in Los Angelesis available at, .

34 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 275. If Badiou is interested in a newbeginning, he agrees with Deleuze that, One begins again through the middle. Quoted inJ. Marks, Gilles Delezue: Vitalism and Multiplicity, London, Pluto Press, 1998, p. 33.

35 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 300. I do not agree that Sharpe has at allproduced an immanent critique of Badiou; the quotation marks here are important: I amone who thinks that there is a priceless contribution to thought in dialectical thinking.

36 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 289. Also, Badious numericaldefinition of politics at least demands an enquiry as to whether Badious metapolitics


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close to recasting politics in its own elevated image.36 What Sharpe

misses is, first, that politics is thought and, second, that

philosophy is the thought of thought for Badiou.37 It is therefore

quite straightforward that Badious philosophy would deal with

the question of politics in terms of what is required for thought to

continue.

If we are to restate some old principles, lets say that Sharpes

assumption captures what Lenin referred to as economism: the

attribution of philistinism to practice, or the separation of thought

from politics.38 In a deliberately ironic passage, Sharpe suggests

that whether democracy is thought or not, is not a question many

militants, or any other political agents, can be expected to have

reflected upon.39 The problem is that Sharpes irony ispresupposing a role for philosophy within militant politics after he

has noted that Badiou holds the opposite view.40 This conflation

discloses the limit of his own critical theory in relation to practice:

he wants a transcendental synthesis of philosophy and politics;

thus the language of ascent and descent. The pertinent question

is: Can we think thought outside some practical activity? If we can,

it is only as a distinction of reason, as Hume suggests we can think

whiteness and sphericality separately to a white marble globe.41

Adorno insists that a materialist philosophy must acknowledgean outside. Philosophical content must be grasped solely where

philosophy does not mandate it, he says.42 This is why Badiou says

political thought is a condition on philosophy, rather than a sub-

genre. Adorno presupposes Marxs view that capitalist society

hypostatizes an irreconcilable split between value and use-value; it

stops at book two of Hegels Science of Logic. The task of capital is to

deny that values have an outside, viz. use-values, or to say that



does not rest on a fundamentally mistaken prioritization of theoretical knowledge over thecategories and considerations generic to political practice, p. 285.37 Badiou, Metapolitics, pp. 2257.38 Lenins argument in What is to be Done? (1902) is that the working class is spontaneously

validating the view that communism is their self-emancipation, but that his fellowintellectuals see workers as very limited, only being able to engage in economic struggles,hip pocket issues, and not political struggle, which should be left to the enlightenedmiddle classes. He repeatedly accuses his contemporaries of attributing their ownphilistinism to workers. See Lenin, What is to be Done? (1902), Moscow, Progress, 1978, pp63-4.

39 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 287.40 Badiou is a student of Althusser, who always maintained the relative autonomy of

different disciplines and their theoretical objects. Badiou is accordingly careful to delimitthe scope of his ... philosophy. Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-) Political Theology, p 280.

41 See D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, London, Penguin, 1985, p. 72.42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Infinity, Introduction.


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money is simply a differential measure. The circle of identification,

which ultimately always identifies only itself, Adorno says, was

drawn by the thinking which tolerates nothing outside; its

imprisonment is its own handiwork.43 It is the task of dialectical

thought to think against this. To think is, in itself and above all

particular content, negation, resistance against what is imposed on

it, he says. The primacy of the principle of contradiction in

dialectics measures what is heterogeneous in unitary thought.44

VI

The primacy of contradiction becomes a motif in Badious thought

after 1968.45 By 1975 a core group of May activists had moved from

the speculative leftism of Gauche proltarienne to the Thermidor of

Nouvelle philosophie. At the same time, the communist and socialistparties joined in the Programme commun under the leadership of

Franois Mitterrand in a bid for political clout; indeed the

communists were good enough to announce that the dictatorship

of the proletariat did not apply to modern French conditions. In

philosophy, Althusser and Lacan dismissed the May events.

Althusser rejected the possibility of the subject, claiming rather that

ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as

subjects.46 Bruno Bosteels notes that Lacans comment to a meeting

of young radicals, that the only chance of the revolutionaryaspiration is always to lead to the discourse of the master, was

exactly the argument made later by the Nouveaux philosophes in

their denunciations of May.47

The apparently bi-polar shift from Gauche proltarienne to

Nouvelle Philosophie was supposed otherwise by Badiou. It simply



43 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Part II, Mediation Through Objectivity. The circle in questionis Hegels journey through otherness back to oneself. Throughout Negative DialecticsAdorno mocks Hegel with the recurrent phrase, the magic circle.

44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Dialectics Not a Standpoint, Introduction. Compare withBadiou: Thus, at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic we should disentangle two processes,two concepts of movement. (a) A dialectical matrix covered by the term alienation; the ideaof a simple term that unfolds in its becoming-other, in order to come back into its own as anaccomplished concept. (b) A dialectical matrix whose operator is scission, under the theme:there is no unity other than split. With out the least return to self, nor any connection

between the final and the inaugural. Badiou, Theorie du sujet, quoted in Bosteels, TheSubject of the Dialectic in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy , London,Continuum, 2004, p. 156.

45 Thebest account of Badious Maoist period, andits influence on his later work is B. Bosteels,Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics, Positions, vol. 13, no. 3, winter, 2005, pp. 575634.

46 L. Althusser, Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses, in Lenin and Philosophy andOther Essays, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 175. Bosteels suggests thatAlthussers references to schools and police in this essay are references to May 1968; but this

can only be speculated. See Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject (Part II), p. 133.47 Quoted in Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject (Part II), p. 135.


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reflected a sort of thinking that can only grasp opposing forces in

their alterity.48 Badiou rejects this. There is not just the law of

Capital, or the cops, he says. To miss this is to stop seeing the unity

of the space of placement [esplace], its consistency. It is to fall back

into objectivism, whose inverted ransom by the way is to make the

state the only subject whence the antirepressive logorrhea.49 The

fall back into objectivism was also what Althusser and Lacan

achieved in the doctrine of structural causality, where the key

moment of the dialectic is the location of a structures absent cause:

the economy or the traumatic real.50

Keep in mind that Badiou is doing philosophy here, and not

political analysis.51 What he is trying to work out is what is required

for thought not to deteriorate in the midst of a general abandoningof the May events so dear to him.52 It is in this connection that he

says, those who gave up on revolution, whether they talk about the

gulags or the retreat of the masses, show that, if they were part of the

movement, of 68 and its consequences, they never seriously partook

in the subject whose evanescent cause they beheld in those

occurrences. These people belong to the structure.53 What is

required, of course, is (anachronistically) true negation. The logic

that must supplement structural causality is dialectical scission. There

is A, and there is Ap (read: Aas such and Ain an other place, theplace distributed by the space of placement, or P), Badiou says. We

thus have to posit a constitutive scission: A = (AAp).54 Any force, A,

is split between itself and its indexation to the regime of places that



48 Indeed, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, two ex-militants of Gauche proltarienne,produced a book called LAnge (1976) where they identified their 68 selves positively withHegels notion of the Beautiful Soul. See Bosteels, Post-Maoism, pp. 61217.

49 Badiou, Selections from Thorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution, trans. A. Toscano,Positions, vol. 13, no. 3, winter 2005, p. 637 (translation altered).

50 The most substantial study of Badious thought during this period is B. Bosteels, AlanBadious Theory of the Subject Part I: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?,

Pli, vol. 12, 2001, pp. 20029; and Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject (Part II),pp. 173208. See also B. Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, Durham, Duke University Press(forthcoming).

51 Alex Callinicos makes this error by asking Badiou to provide an account of how we canidentify a genuine event from a false event. Badious entire point is that we cannot know inadvance what is going to happen; we therefore have faith in the event of a situation. Lenincould not have known the proletariat would really overturn tsarism; and yet he was faithfulto the working class as event. See Callinicos, The Resources of Critique, p. 110.

52 I admit without reticence that May 68 has been for me, in the order of philosophy as wellas in all the rest, an authentic road to Damascus: A. Badiou, Thorie de la contradiction, Paris,Maspero, 1975, p. 9, quoted in B. Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject (Part II),p. 173.

53 Badiou, Further Selections from Thorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution, trans. L.Chiesa, Positions, vol. 13, no. 3, winter 2005, p. 652.

54 Badiou, Thorie du sujet; quoted in Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject (Part II),pp. 1757.


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structure a situation, P. As we saw earlier with Malevichs White on

White, there is both place and taking-place. The unhappy

consciousness thinks there is only the stark alternation of P and A,

the idea that the world knows only the necessary rightist backlash

and the powerless suicidal leftism.55 What the formula A = (AAp) is

decomposed to here is Ap(Ap), where there is nothing but the regime

of places, and A(A), where the force is entirely abstract.56

What Badiou is moving towards is an account of the subject as

something more than the affirmation of the situations absent

cause. Badiou takes from Lacan the idea that the alternation of

anxiety and the superego can be positively supplemented with the

figures of courage and justice.57 The first two terms alternate over

the abyss of the absent cause; recognition of the absent causeundermines the structure, giving either the anxiety of placelessness

or a punitive superego that reinforces the unhealthy situation itself.

Badiou supplements this with an account of how the impasse

might not only lead to indefinite anxiety or the superego, but let the

absent cause extend the situation, creating a new truth. While anxiety

and the superego are subordinated to the space of placement,

Ap(A), courage and justice actively limit this determination, A(Ap).

The latter actively exacerbate the situation. Anxiety is given courage

to affirm the destruction of placement, while justice sublates thesuperego as the subject reconstructs the situation. Everything that

belongs to a place returns to that part of the itself which is

determined by it in order to displace the place, Badiou says, to

determine the determination, to cross the limit. The dialectical

matrix that Badiou affirms contains the structural determination

given in a situation, Ap(A), but also the limit put on this, A(Ap).

VII

If this dialectical scission is left aside, or if the Hegelian matrix of

synthesis is presupposed, we miss what is at stake in Badiousthought. An example of this is Sharpes argument that the thesis of

Badious 1988 book Being and Event is a category error of the first



55 Badiou, Thorie du sujet; quoted in Bosteels, Alain Badious Theory of the Subject (Part II),p. 177.

56 From Badious Maoist perspective, at the time, these are the rightist and leftist deviations.See B. Bosteels, Post-Maoism, pp. 575634, esp. 595608.

57 Should we not push the analytical intervention all the way to the fundamental dialogueson justice and courage, in the great dialectical tradition? J. Lacan, Le Sminaire I, Les critstechniques de Freud, Paris, Seuil, 1975, pp. 164165. Quoted in Bosteels, Alain Badious

Theory of the Subject (Part II), p. 18458 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 284.


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order.58 Sharpes concern is that, If the power of the state is

postulated as infinite, it follows directly that there is no immanent

space, process or potentials within the world as it is that the Left

might look to with a view to progressively transforming the existing

order.59 What Badiou maintains in Being and Event is that, if God is

dead, we have to affirm that being is not one but many, or infinitely

multiple; the language of ontology is, therefore, mathematics.60 The

notion that state power is errant says that an excess of included parts

is counted over belonging elements when we try to grasp infinity.

What does that mean?

If our situation is the infinite set of all natural numbers, we can

count out a supplementary set of its squares. The elements 1, 2,

3, 4 et cetera belong to the situation, the part 1, 4, 9, 16 et cetera is included. The state of the situation duplicates the situation by

including every conceivable part in order to delimit the situations

void, viz. the underlying and indifferent multiplicity that testifies

that the structure might be otherwise what we have just been

calling the absent cause. If we consider the national situation,

individuals are presented as elements but are re-presented as parts:

citizens and non-citizens, tax payers, trade unionists and bosses,

ethnic and sexual minorities, et cetera, in order to fix them to a set of

structural places; to hold together an inconsistent multiplicity in aconsistent one nation.61 What is important is that these included

determinations have a quantitative power (number) in errant

excess of the presented situation as such; an individual relates to

this errant infinity as having alienating and repressive powers of

indeterminacy, what we have just been writing Ap(A).62

Badiou refers to the fixity that the state gives its situation as literally

the fictionalising of the count.63 That the state is a fictionalization of

what it duplicates means that parts do not necessarily rely on elements



59 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 296.60 Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 416, 2330.61 Badiou comments that the void is a spectre haunting the state, in a very oblique allusion

to The Communist Manifesto (1848). Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 95, 94. A chapter called TheFactory as Event Site was removed from the final version of Being and Event, but printed inthe journal of his political group, LOrganisation Politique. Here Badiou considers the greatdiscovery of Marxs Paris Manuscripts (1844) to be the void, directly subsumed by thegeneric being of workers, since the latter possess nothing but a saleable abstraction it is

because they are nothing that they are capable of organising everything. This rendersSharpes view that with Badiou we lose Marxs early humanism implausible. See TheFactory as Event Site, trans. A Toscano, in Prelom, no. 8, 2005, pp. 1712. See also A. Toscano,Marxism Expatriated, in Prelom, no. 8, 2005, pp. 15269.

62 This is the closest Badiou comes to stating the Marxist notion of alienation: Badiou,Metapolitics,p. 147. He stakes his dialectic against any reconciliation of Hegelian alienation by affirming the

single law of the dialectic as scission, or in Maos inescapable axiom: one divides into two.63 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 95.


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for their existence. This creates opacity. A situation can include

absolute fictions: for instance, race is an entirely fictional part of the

human situation. By allowing fictions to exist in the situation, the state

itself creates the possibility of a breakdown of the structure, that it

might have missed or included something it should not have. What it

risks including is its void, that is, its not-being, demonstrating that the

structure might be otherwise. We only need to note the onset of the

financial crisis to see the problem that indeterminate excess, the

valuation of various derivatives, creates when it encounters its void,

the not-being of these values.

This dialectic of void and excess is exactly what Sharpe misses.64

He takes us as far as the infinite excess of state power and stops.

Badiou goes on to say, the resignation that characterises a timewithout politics feeds on the fact that the State is not at a distance,

because the measure of its power is errant.65 The question that

Sharpe does not ask is: What is a time with politics? The purpose of

Badious insistence on the errancy of state power is that politics is

entirely subjective. However exact the quantitative knowledge of a

situation may be, he says, one cannot, other than by an arbitrary

decision, estimate by how much the state exceeds it.66 In other

words, it is necessary to act to determine the state. Sharpes account

leaves us amidst an infinity of determinations without truth, anegative infinity; but it is exactly the affirmation of what is generic

in the situation, the collectives truth, that can, in turn, determine

that infinity: The real characteristic of the political event and the

truth procedure that it sets off is that a political event fixes the

errancy and assigns a measure to the superpower of the state.67

Bruno Bosteels notes that this creates the immediate reversal of

an objective impasse into its subjective determination.68 Lenin says,

the human mind should grasp ... opposites not as dead, rigid but

as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one

another.69 In other words, there is no relationship of descent nor

ascent between subject and object (philosopher and polis). By

presupposing that there is, Sharpe misses what Badious ontology

achieves. The infinite power of the state does not limit possibilities

for the Left but creates them; in the last instance the subject is the



64 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 110.65 Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 145.66 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 278. See also Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 93103.67 Badiou, Metapolitics, pp. 145, 148.68 Bosteels, The Subject of the Dialectic, p. 161.69 Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, Moscow, Progress, 1972, p. 109.


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product of its own impasse, or A = (AAp).

VIII

But why does Sharpe miss this? The best point about his article isthat it makes negation a problem to be solved. We can relate his

view that the philosopher ascends from the polis before

descending, a fortiori, to Hegels conception of determinate being

travelling through otherness back into itself.70 This is a simple

treatment of the movement of the Absolute Idea, the negation of the

negation, and is the form Hegel finally attributes to the state: the

state is the transcendental synthesis of contradictory elements. The

matrix it works within is the reconciliation of alienation within the

absolute moment, when the idea and the real are

indistinguishable: the unity of both these moments. Sharpesrepeated defence of the state seems to demonstrate a belief in

something of this sort. His comment about Badious renunciation

of the institutions and power relations constitutive of political life

misses Badious opposite view of the state; Badiou does not view

the state as constitutive of political life, but exactly as its death. This

polarity finally draws out Sharpes inability to see why Badious

thought tends to be perceived as progressive at all.71

The problem Badious thought rests on is how we can think

against the state under the condition of the state: to think the new inthe situation ... we have to think what is repetition, what is the old,

what is not new, and after that we have to think the new.72 If thought

is put under the weight of the state it is stopped, as Sartre said, in the

exigent pragmatism of practical politics, just as practice is made the

junior partner to normative thought. Is this not what leads to

Sharpes defence of discursive democratic will-formation?73 This

pessimism is a problem of the subject. The absence of a coherent

subject leaves radical thought homeless, or a couch-surfer in

antithetical rooms. But the fact that we can locate and talk about thisgap is cause for optimism. I agree with Badiou that it is in making

this gap a force within our situation that the subject of a new politics

can emerge. Philosophy is simply charged with what it is always

charged: to set out the possibility of thinking against the state under

the condition of the state; for Adorno, not to play along.

October 2008



70 See Hegel, Logic, pp. 13341.71 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 297.72 B. Bosteels, Can Change be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou, in Alain Badiou:

Philosophy and its Conditions, Albany, SUNY, 2005, p. 253.73 Sharpe, Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, p. 297.

negation and politics: on alain badiou, by jonathon collerson

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