[D66] The Unfinished Twentieth Century

[Oto]

The Unfinished Twentieth Century. 

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http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html


    Alain Badiou, /The Century/


      Review by Don Callen

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Alain Badiou, /The Century/. (Cambridge: /Polity Press/, 2007)

[1] In /The Phenomenology of Spirit/ Hegel invented the notion that
philosophy should be conceived in the first instance as consciousness
coming to knowledge of itself through its engagement with the events of
history. We should look to a history of the idea in action to
understand, at a given time, both the current highest development of the
truth of consciousness's effort to embody human freedom within the
social world /and/ the current problematic of unfreedom and the
possibility for an overcoming. In the twentieth century, philosophy
regularly recovered Hegel's notion as essential to its vitality; [1]
<http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_edn1> once again,
in the twenty-first century, some of the most important philosophical
debates about /our/ present social and political situation have come
through a narration—after Nietzsche often "genealogical"—of the life of
basic ideas, God, humanity, work, freedom, etc., as they both shaped and
led to the impasses of the twentieth century. [2]
<http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_edn2> Alain
Badiou's /The Century /is such a narrative, and it serves as perhaps the
best available introduction to his philosophy and the most compelling
argument for its importance. Hegel's dialectic must, of course, itself
be surpassed, and here we have an extraordinary and innovative synthesis
of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Mao, Lacan, Sartre and Deleuze as Badiou
seeks to offer a new and radically liberating conception of the
significance of the landmark events of the twentieth century for our
present situation. Above all, the book seeks to free thought and thereby
action from the prevalent and enervating humanism which is unable to see
beyond liberal "democracy," corporate capitalism, abstract human rights,
"Islamic terrorism," and a pathetic humanitarianism.

[2] The twentieth century was the century of the inception, deployment
and collapse of the 'communist' enterprise, the century of horrific mass
crimes, Stalinism, Nazism, the holocaust, and the century of the triumph
of global capitalism, liberal economy and politics, a triumph of
mediocrity and miniscule ideas, beginning after the 1970s. For
philosophy, according to Badiou, the key question is: What was thought
in this century that was previously unthought—or even unthinkable? For
from the beginning, the century was preoccupied with thinking itself. An
underlying theme unites the extraordinary inventiveness of the early
years of the century, inventiveness in the arts, music (Schoenberg),
painting (Picasso), film (Griffiths, Chaplin), poetry, the novel (James,
Joyce), science (Einstein), mathematics, logic and philosophy of
language, etc., and the ensuing disastrous political projects of the
twentieth century, Leninism and Nazism. All concerned making a new man,
humanity, but also prepared to consider individual persons as simply
material to be twisted, manipulated, and if need be sacrificed to the
revolutionary project. We are not done with such crime, however, even if
we have officially given up on the project of remaking man. For the
remaking goes on in the form of the mindless elaborations of technics,
of sciences that are, to be sure, remaking man, but in the absence of a
project of thought, leaving themselves open thereby to exploitation for
the sake of profit (2007, Chapter 1).

[3] Early in the century, in "The Age," the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam
meditates on the violent and unprecedented happenings taking place in
his country. He likens the age to a beast. The beast looks back on
itself. The century does. It seeks to grasp its own history. Its history
is the quality of its life. The century seeks to understand the
ontological and narrative quality of its life, and it does not conceive
of this in terms of a philosophy of acquiring individual wisdom. The
individual is not what counts for this self-reflecting beast. The
individual may be sacrificed. And this will be the century's
self-conception until the 1980s. The measure of the century is to be
made in terms of categories of revolutionary class, proletariat, or
party instead. For other self-conceptions of the century, the relevant
term for qualifying its life will be race, though Mandelstam does not
project this kind of transcendence for man (15). The life of this
history is to be mastered (a lesson from Nietzsche), not merely
surrendered to. There is no given progress to history; its
self-transcendence, the birth of the 'new man,' must be heroically
forced. The beast must be forced to serve us. Of course there was still
the language of a continuous historical progress that life was subject
to. But in practice the dynamic was Nietzschean, a recognition that
transcendence would only be won through an act of will, and an act that
would not be continuous but an absolute rupture. And this forced
discontinuity means that transcendence can only be won through terror.
The century's horrors are thus the work of its thought. Death will thus
become the instrument of life: horrible, unmediated, unbeautiful death.
Though he is never very explicit about this, it is clear that for Badiou
this idea of the necessity of terror is one that we must hold on to. The
impotence of contemporary humanism can be traced to a moralizing reading
of the twentieth century that shrinks from the idea of terror even as we
mindlessly embrace it in new forms of imperialism: "I am convinced that
what fascinated the militants of the twentieth century was the real. In
this century there is a veritable exaltation of the real, even in its
horror. The century's key players were anything but a bunch of
simpletons manipulated by illusions" (19). These agents are not acting
in the name of the 'promise of better days'—some undetermined future.
Thus, Badiou argues that the revolutionaries of the twentieth century
accept the horror as an unrelieved, unredeemable part of their
historical action. The horror of the real is co-present with a necessary
part of the action, the rupture with the past. It does not signify
historical failure or collapse (the moralizing humanistic reading of the
century), but something essential.

[4] The century (in its most authentic moment) is represented in/moved
by a paradoxical subjectivity, non-dialectical, at once "end,
exhaustion, decadence /and/ as absolute commencement. . .nihilism, but
equally as Dionysian affirmation" (31). Two maxims are at work:

    [O]ne (operative today, for example) calls for renunciation,
    resignation, the lesser evil, together with moderation, the end of
    humanity as a spiritual force, and the critique of 'grand
    narratives.' The other—which dominated the 'short century' between
    1917 and the 1980s—inherits from Nietzsche the will to 'break the
    history of the world in two,' and seeks a radical commencement that
    would bear within it the foundation of a reconciled humanity (31). 

Though there is no dialectical synthesis or resolution here, the new man
must hold these conflicting moments at once. The sense of nihilism
bespeaks the death of God. It is for man to begin anew: to violently
destroy the old, decadent world and in an ongoing revolution build the
new, revolutionary man. Revolutionary man is governed by /a passion for
the real,/ a key to understanding the century (32). The real is "the
source of both horror and enthusiasm, simultaneously lethal and
creative" (32). Part of this passion is an indifference to the cost. The
most violent means are essential for the creation. Today's
'well-tempered moralism' judges the century as barbarous. This passion
for the real placed it beyond good and evil. But from the inside the
century is lived as epic and heroic. As with the action of the Iliad,
"the force of the action overrides in its intensity any moral
squeamishness" (33), for this action is seen as one's destiny. Destiny
trumps morality and human destiny at the beginning of the twentieth
century could only be fulfilled under the paradigm of total war, a war
to exterminate the old, decadent world: man. Such is the only way to
uproot nihilism: put an end to bad war and the pointless conflicts of
bourgeois powers that gave us WWI; such is the only way to establish a
new order of man and peace (36-7).

[5] The significance and force of thought upon the action of the century
cannot be appreciated, however, unless we take into account the effects
of representation in a play of masking and revealing the situation. If
there is to be a new beginning, the masks which hide and operate the
mechanisms of corruption and nihilism in the old society must be
destroyed. Thus, the century gives great importance to the notion of
ideology: "Ideology stages figures of representation that mask the
primordial violence of social relations ..." (48). The nineteenth
century affirmed the power of knowledge. By contrast, the twentieth
century "deploys the theme of the efficacy of misrecognition" (49). It
falls to art to work out the proper distance between the semblance and
the real. This is why Brecht is so important to the thought of the
century. He understood that the violence of the real only operates
through the power of semblance. It is present everywhere. Working out
the proper relationship between semblance and the real involves
purifying the forms of semblance. We see this in Brecht's emphasis upon
maintaining the appropriate sense of distance in the audience for the
play. But it is no less present in the show trials that Stalin mounted
as a kind of ritual for purifying and enforcing party consciousness. The
purge is intrinsically necessary. In this respect, whether or not those
purged were guilty of deviant forms of consciousness was irrelevant. The
force of the real is always subject to suspicion. The work of
purification of the forms of semblance was crucial to the reflexivity of
the century's thought (52-53). Badiou credits Hegel's analysis of the
reign of terror in terms of this logic of suspicion:

    We are in the realm of suspicion when a formal criterion is lacking
    to distinguish the real from semblance. In the absence of such a
    criterion, the logic that imposes itself is that the more a
    subjective conviction presents itself as a real, the more it must be
    suspected. [...] It is at the summit of the revolutionary state,
    where the ardent desire of freedom is incessantly declared, that the
    greatest number of traitors is to be found. [...] This is why our
    century, aroused by the passion for the real, has in all sorts of
    ways—and not just in politics—been the century of destruction (54). 

So the passion for the real that marks the century involves an obsession
with identity, unmasking copies, discrediting fakes, and identifying the
authentic. The logic of suspicion and destruction is part of this. But
along with destruction, the passion for the real involves a moment of
subtraction: destroying fakes on the one hand and purifying the forms of
semblance on the other by reducing semblance to its pure elements.
Badiou speaks of Malevitch's "White on White" as a paradigmatic
illustration of this subtractive dimension of the passion for the real:
"So this century is in no way the century of 'ideologies,' in the sense
of the imaginary and the utopian. Its major subjective trait is the
passion for the real, for what is immediately practicable, here and now.
. . the importance of semblance is simply a consequence of this passion"
(56-7).

[6] So the century is not bred of promise or portent; it is the century
of the act, of realization. It is the century of victory, and
'revolution' is one of the names of victory. There is the October
Revolution of 1917, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the victories of
the Algerians and the Vietnamese in wars of national liberation (58).
The victory is to be won through antagonism, through war. This means
that a Two will become One, not through a dialectical synthesis but
through the suppression of one of the two terms. The right formula for
the century is not 'Two fuse into One,' but 'One divides into Two.' The
issue is a matter of how one identifies revolutionary subjectivity, its
constituent desire. Badiou derives his distinction from a debate in
China during the mid-60s within philosophy concerning how to conceive of
revolution. The first formula was considered right wing, the second,
leftist. And the first formula is premature; the One that it covets is
not yet thinkable: "Under the cover of synthesis, this desire is calling
for the old One" (63). A revolutionary activist in the present must
desire division:

    The Cultural Revolution pits the partisans of these two versions of
    the dialectical schema against one another. Conservatives like Deng
    Xiaoping see economic management of the status quo as the crucial
    concern. The educated youth represent the left wing Maoist position.
    This debate became central to the politics of emancipation at the
    time of the Paris student uprising in 1968 which was inspired by
    French Maoism (63). 

Badiou argues vigorously that it is a mistake to see the Cultural
Revolution as a mere power struggle. Yes it was a power struggle but one
in which genuine divisions of political thought were operative. Yes
there was great violence, hundreds of thousands dead. But:

    The theme of total emancipation, practiced in the present, in the
    enthusiasm of the absolute present, is always situated beyond good
    and evil. This is because in the circumstances of action, the only
    known good is the one that the status quo turns into the precious
    name for its own subsistence. Extreme violence is therefore the
    corollary of extreme enthusiasm, because it is in effect a question
    of the transvaluation of all values" (63). 

Badiou goes on: "the passion for the real is devoid of morality.
Morality's status, as Nietzsche observed, is merely genealogical.
Morality is a residue of the old world" (63). Yes there was a great deal
of barbarity in all of this. But it is unjust to isolate this dimension
of the passion for the real. The twentieth century is not programmatic
like the nineteenth. It is not a century of promise; movement alone is
the source of greatness: "Man is realized not as a fulfillment or as an
outcome, but as absent to himself, torn away from what he is, and that
it is this tearing away which is the basis of every adventurous
greatness" (92). There is an alliance here between Marx and Nietzsche,
the former as the critic of the alienating effects of capital which
breaks all bonds in the egotistical calculation of capital. Beyond that,
the century sought to destroy this purely negative power and to restore
creativity, but without a sense of promise or finality. Movement,
wandering, is valid in itself (93). Having surrendered promise and
finality, the logic of this form of thought demands that we turn our
back on an obsession with happiness. The desire for happiness prohibits
greatness.

[7] Badiou admits that the passion for the real is accompanied by a
great deal of semblance. The purification in and laying bare of the real
is an ongoing challenge. It is the semblance-of-reality that must be
identified and destroyed. The real that is exposed is the nothing.
Terroristic nihilism is the creative substance within the subjective
motivation of the passion for the real (64). Today we make no room for
this active nihilism as a reasonable action. We attempt to avoid any
contact with the real. Terrorism is the desire to purify the real. As we
suppress it, we deactivate nihilism. We are left with a reactive
nihilism, "a nihilism hostile to every action as well as every thought"
(65). There is the subtractive path to consider, however, as well. This
attempts to hold onto the passion for the real without falling into
terror. This involves purifying reality by detecting a vanishing
difference that opens up a place to begin anew, creation which begins in
the cracks, gradually modifying the terms of social life. Badiou speaks
of it as an immanent exception. An older set of terms would have named
this reformism, but we must have reform /and/ revolution. In the new
beginning is the re-commencement of man (65). Unlike Heidegger, the new
beginning is not thought as a return to a vanished origin.
Re-commencement as return is what purification meant for the Nazis as
well, of course. In the case of communism, the new man lies beyond
classes and beyond the state. The new man is seen in opposition to all
forms and all predicates, in particular family, property, and the
nation-state. This negative conception of the new man traverses the
century: "A very important point in this respect is the hostility
towards the family as the primordial nucleus of Egoism, rooted
particularity, tradition and origin" (66). As the century draws to a
close we see a return to family as a fundamental, almost unassailable
value:

    In the real presence of the century, the new man primarily stood—if
    one was progressive—for the escape from family, property and state
    despotism. Today, it seems that 'modernization,' as our masters like
    to call it, amounts to being a good little dad, a good little mom, a
    good little son, to becoming an efficient employee, and enriching
    oneself as much as possible, and playing at the responsible citizen.
    This is the new motto: 'money, family, elections'" (66).

The century ends on the motif of the impossibility of subjective novelty
and the comfort of repetition. Another way of putting it is that there
is an obsession of security, a readiness to accept the status quo as not
that bad. After all, there has been worse. If the century ends in
obsession, it began under the sign of a devastating hysteria.

[8] Whatever one may think about psychoanalysis, Freud is one of the
heroes of the century. With Freud, there is a readiness to confront the
real of sex face-to-face. This is not merely a matter of confronting sex
as objective fact, though this provides a defensive mask for a more
radical intervention of thought. What is at stake is a subversive
de-subjectivation. This means dispatching the forms of subjectivation
that hide sexuality. Thereby, it becomes possible to reveal the real
polymorphous play of desire upon its object that belongs to the
universal substance of human desire. (This polymorphous quality of
desire may be seen in children despite our continuing obsession with
denying the sexuality of children. These days we are quick to defend the
rights of children against sexual abuse, but at the same time our quick
moralizing tends to support the illusion of the child without
sexuality.) Freud's subversive de-subjectivation of the sexed human
being is the effort to separate the truth of the real from cultural
meaning. Culture has perennially tried to inscribe sex within a given
meaning thereby to manipulate and control desire. This is not a battle
that has been decisively won by any means, and the effort to inscribe
sex with a fixed meaning is not the exclusive domain of religion, even
if that is one of its principal sites. The effort to inscribe sex with
meaning comes also in the many forms and uses of the imperative 'enjoy!'
This is the imperative of the official hedonism that defines the
advertising that commands us to see enjoyment in terms of purchasing and
consumption.

[9] Today we are dominated by an artificial individualism. Only the
relations to money, economic and social success, and sex are considered
to be worthy of interest. The rest is most likely totalitarian. The
Modern, so-called, is the generalization of these three relations into
ego-ideals. This is wholesale propaganda and "the extraordinarily brutal
inversion of everything that the century desired and invented" (98). The
century that comes to a close in the 80s "maintained that every
authentic subjectivation is collective, and that every vigorous
intellectuality implies the construction of a 'we'" (98). What is at
stake are two different visions of the limits of human will and power to
alter the world in view of un-heard of possibilities, possibilities that
spring from the singularity of an event. Opposed to that is the
contemporary conviction that the will is subject to the reality
principle of the economy and must behave with great caution: "If you
think the world can and must change absolutely, that there is neither a
nature of things to be respected nor preformed subjects to be
maintained, you thereby admit that the individual may be sacrificable.
Meaning that the individual is not independently endowed with any
intrinsic nature that would deserve our striving to perpetuate it" (99).

[10] From the 30s to the 60s, within philosophy, thinkers developed the
view that there is no nature to the human subject, that the ego is
something constructed (Sartre) or imaginary (Lacan): "Adopting Sartre's
terminology, we will say that the subject has no essence (this is the
meaning of the notorious formula 'existence precedes essence'). Adopting
Lacan's, we will say that a subject is only identified at the point of
lack, as void or lack-of-being" (100). That being so, the real remains
open, since it is neither an essence nor a nature. It follows then that
the subject comes to be under certain determinate conditions in the
place where it is lacking. Not yet being a subject, there must be a
decision to become one. Hence a subject is not an individual by nature:

    The individual can be sacrificed to a historical cause that exceeds
    him. [...] It is only by dissolving itself into a project that
    exceeds him [that a subjective reality can be created]. The "we"
    constructed in and by this project is the only thing that is truly
    real—subjectively real for the individual who supports it. The
    individual, truth be told, is nothing. The subject is the new man,
    emerging at the point of self-lack. The individual is thus, in its
    very essence, the nothing that must be dissolved into a we-subject"
    (100-101).

Collective and universalizable transcendence takes place as truth
procedures such as political invention and artistic creation actively
construct them. It must be recalled here that for Badiou truth must be
understood ontologically as appearance through an event. So a truth
procedure is a way of articulating an eruption in being. Fascism tried
to replace these truth procedures with what are supposed to be natural
collectives: the nation, the race, the West. Badiou distinguishes
Stalinism, for which the working class and the party are declared, to be
the basis of state power from Lenin and Mao, who he takes to be genuine
thinkers seeking to articulate such truth procedures. Stalinism is not
to be confused with Nazism. The latter is based in processes of
naturalization. The former reifies real political processes. In Leninism
and later in Maoism, the state:

    has never been anything but the obstacle that the brutal finitude of
    the operations of power opposes to the infinite mobility of
    politics. [...] Fascisms seek to oppose the infinite of emancipation
    with a bloody barrier of a predictable finitude, the denumerable
    properties of a supposed substance (the Aryan, the Jew, the German
    ... ). [...] Communism, in its different manifestations during the
    century, felt the antinomy between the finitude of the state and the
    infinite dynamic inherent within the unfolding of political truth
    (103). 

Still, the imaginary macroscopic entities with "hyperbolic names"
produced by communism are not the "we-subject" which is the stake of
political truth procedures. "Their devotees see them as necessary
conditions of any subjectivation, as an objective material that the
we-subject either reflects or enacts in practice" (103). Badiou calls
such entities "the passive body of subjectivation" (/Ibid./). The name
of such a passive body "allows singularity to assert its worth beyond
itself" (104). This process shows the regard the century had for
science, or rather nineteenth century scientism. Historical processes
were thought to necessarily be objective processes. Even Nazism felt the
obligation to present itself as scientific, though this maneuver was
entirely contrived (105).

[11] The political projects of the twentieth century were conceived as
long-term historical projects. How different things are now, where
everything is a matter of today, the instant. This sense of long-term
political projects "implies the staging of a voluntary construction of
time" (105).

    Today .[...] [o]n the one hand, propaganda declares that everything
    changes by the minute, that we have no time, that we must modernize
    at top speed, that we're going to "miss the boat" (the boat of the
    Internet and the new economy, the boats of mobile phones for
    everyone, the boat of countless stockholders, the boat of
    stock-options, the boat of pension funds...). On the other hand, all
    this hubbub cannot conceal a kind of passive immobility or
    indifference, the perpetuation of the status quo. [...] We live in a
    time of stagnant feverishness. We need to recover the twentieth
    century's sense of time, "if we wish to attain the real of time we
    must construct it [...] this construction depends entirely on the
    care with which we strive to become the agents of truth procedures
    (106).

Badiou's attitude toward violence and cruelty seems ambigous. On the one
hand, as essential to the passion for the real, it is essential to the
inventive work of creating an authentic collective subject. It is
essential even as one cannot be in a position to calculate its
acceptability in relation to some ideal end. He leaves no room for a
moralistic criticism of violence and cruelty. Still, he appears to leave
himself open to the legitimacy of the wish to be done with such
violence: "Cruelty is the moment when the integral dissolution of the
'I' must be decided. [...] Cruelty is necessary so that the 'we' and the
idea become one, so that nothing comes to restrict the self affirmation
of the 'we'" (115). Cruelty is accepted as a figure of the real. A truth
is a suffering body and the impassive body of an idea. It is the pairing
of a mortal and suffering subject with an impassive and immortal
subject. The latter imposes an ordeal upon the former so that the idea
can be made incarnate. The discipline is an inversion of the Platonic
dialectic whereby one discards the sensible and finite world for eternal
and only intelligible ideas. Once again we see the century's debt to
Nietzsche: "It remains to be seen whether from the legitimate wish that
the hangmen die we must infer the following imperative: 'Live without
ideas'" (117). To illustrate and further articulate the ambiguity of
cruelty, Badiou gives a reading of the Brecht's so-called didactic poem,
"The Decision." The poem considers the status of a comrade who decides
to act against the party in the name of the people who are suffering
terribly. The party, which is the active agent in the construction of a
collective subject, cannot accept this opposition, this determination to
act separately. The comrade must be eliminated. The poet's point, it is
argued, is that the "I" must abide within the "we" in an /inseparate/
form. The real cannot be constructed in a separation between the "I" and
the "we." Even if, in a sense, the comrade is right, he should say: "I
am right, but my rightness only becomes real by yielding, be it
provisionally, to the 'we' which alone grants its political existence"
(122). To insist upon separation amounts "to replacing politics with
morality, thus precisely eliminating the real of the situation. The
essence of the 'we' is not agreement or fusion; it is the maintenance of
the inseparate" (122). This logic of cruelty must be carefully
distinguished from a more ecstatic logic, one in which the "I" allows
itself to be dissolved in a "we" of orgiastic cruelty: "The sexual
element is often present in this figure, alongside drugs, alcohol and
idiocy. Or the poem, music and dance" (123). So we are dealing with two
distinct logics of cruelty, two distinct maxims: one of ecstatic fusion
and the other of inseparate articulation, the first to be rejected, the
second embraced.

[12] Standing opposite to both of these, however, is cowardice, one of
the central concerns of the century. Ordinary cowardice is a
conservatism obsessed with security. This is the kind of life that is
glorified today. Nothing is worth tearing ourselves away from our
cowardice, certainly not an idea or a collective subject, fantasies of
totalitarianism. "As Voltaire, that consummate thinker of humanitarian
mediocrity and venomous enemy of Rousseau (the man of courage), once
wrote: 'Let us cultivate our garden'" (125). To cease being a coward one
must consent to be calming. This is not a matter of will, but
abandonment to the event of truth, to a nomadic departure. Our author
invokes his own experience of transgression and submission beginning in
May 1968:

    I felt that the uprooting of my prior existence (that of a minor
    provincial civil servant, a married father, with no other vision of
    Salvation besides the one provided by the writing of books), the
    departure towards a life submitted, ardently submitted, to the
    obligations of militancy in hitherto unknown places... the clashes
    with the police, the early-morning arrests, the trials—that all of
    this originated, not from a lucid decision, but from a special form
    of passivity, from a total abandonment to what was taking place
    (125-6). 

Passivity is not resignation; it is feminine: "The feminine is that
which, when it ceases to be the domestic organization of security and
fear, goes furthest in the termination of all cowardice" (/ibid/). This
kind of active passivity, however, can end in mere acceptance or
tolerance. Tolerance is the opposite of abandonment. It is the basic
ingredient in bourgeois humanism. This is just another form of
cowardice. It is a "corrupt fraternity which is made up of nothing but
pious humanism and whose formula is that of tolerance for everything,
the acceptance of differences and 'human feelings'" (127).

[13] It is the party that sustains the substance not of fusion but of
the inseparate. The party is discipline; it is what makes possible the
construction of time as the substance of an idea. This discipline of the
inseparate was Lenin's idea; it distinguishes the October Revolution
from the insurrections, always crushed, of the nineteenth century
(128-129). The party is a sharing without knowing in advance what it is
that is shared. The party conceived of itself as something
indestructible, as distinct from a single individual. Between 1917 and
1980 the century tried to create something indestructible, not an
abstract idea, but an indestructible real.

[14] Art in relation to politics is a truth procedure, as that which
brings the real to appearance as a potentiality for emancipatory
transcendence. The connection between art and politics couldn't be
closer. This is the primary significance of artistic avant gardes in the
century. "The word 'politics' names the desire of beginning, the desire
that some fragment of the real will finally be exhibited without either
fear or law through the sole effect of human invention—artistic or even
erotic invention for example or the invention of the sciences" (151).
However, this sometimes for art as for others implies obedience to the
political directives which come from the party as the primary force of
creation of fraternity. The desire for revolt and invention must be
subject to the imperative to dissolve the "I" into a "we". The real
takes its revenge on excessively unified movements, however. The truth
procedures of art and the revolutionary politics are distinct
confrontations between thought and the indistinctness of the real (a
caution against a regime of artistic subservience to political
articulations of the event of truth) (152).

[15] Invoking Nietzsche once again, our author identifies the art of the
century as inhuman, as over-human. It is a somber art which condemns all
particularity, individual pleasure and satisfaction as well as all
comfortable and familiar forms (160-161). The art of the century seeks
universality, a univocity of form rather than an open multiplicity of
interpretation, which privileges particularity. This search for a
univocity of form is non-completable, as Goedel showed. The lesson to be
drawn from that, however, is not that the real is open to an infinity of
incommensurable interpretations. Rather, the lesson is that we face an
endless challenge to seek out ever new and better formalizations to
encompass more of the infinitely extensive real. There are more familiar
names for this struggle, names for wars to win: idea against reality,
freedom against nature, rebellion against tolerance, eternity against
history, science against technics, and art against culture (164).

[16] So where does the century leave us now? First of all we need to
repudiate the pathetic "grand narrative" advanced by so many
intellectuals that the century was about totalitarian domination and
genocide, and that the lesson to be drawn that the new century must be
about the Defense of democracy and human rights against the religious
barbarism of Islamic fundamentalism (165-166). There is no hope for a
Democratic resurrection of this humanism which is a mask for the
promotion of essentially racial and colonial policies and signifiers.
This mask hides another drama, "the painful, dispersed, confused and
slow replacement of the defunct communisms with another rational path
towards the political emancipation of the large human masses currently
consigned to chaos" (168). Nietzsche's famous formula, God is dead!
"means that man is dead too. Man, the last man, the dead man, is what
must be overcome for the sake of the over man" (/ibid/). If God is dead,
man is undecidable. Nietzsche makes man into a program. The current
"grand narrative" is an effort to return the religion of man with an
implied resignation to the status quo. The century gave us two answers
to the question of how to decide about man in this void of
undecidability. Sartre's answer is that we must make man arrive in place
of the absolute; the project is what counts, not some ideal end point.
The project of deciding about man is a radical humanism which makes
revolutionary politics the absolute. "Man as program is this: the
existential comprehension of the surmounting of the alienation of man,
in view of an emancipation whose stages always constitute new forms of
alienation" (170). The century's other answer to Nietzsche was given by
Foucault. It is a radical anti-humanism, the notion that we are living
"the void left by man's disappearance" (171). We can only laugh at those
who go on talking about man. So within the century, during the 50s and
60s, there is a confrontation of a radical humanism with a radical
anti-humanism. There is in this confrontation, however, a unity on the
theme of godless man "as opening, possibility, program of thought"
(171). These two orientations intersect in a number of situations or
revolutionary episodes—for example, May 1968. So now we must choose
between the Marxist-Nietzschean formula "humanism and terror" and the
sterile restoration formula "humanism or terror." The latter is "a
disjunction which is deprived not only of any radicality but also of any
universalizable hope" (172-173). In his later work, Sartre sought to
revive an anthropological history, a renewed Marxist dialectic of
historical purpose, sense. By contrast, Foucault saw history only as
discontinuous singularities without sense. Yet, by the same token, such
a history would also be a history of a succession of beginnings: "The
program of the godless man has therefore had two stances at its
disposal. Either man is the historical creator of his own absolute
essence or he is the man of inhuman beginning, who installs his thought
in what happens and abides in the discontinuity of this arrival" (174).
Today both propositions have been abandoned. We are left with man as
merely an animal species, worried only for its own survival: "Ecology
and bioethics will provide for our 'correct' development as pigs or
ants" (175). We are left with a projectless humanism whose only concern
is with the suffering body. Contemporary so-called democracies seek to
impose upon the planet an animal humanism, man as worthy of pity.
Nietzsche and Sartre would have agreed that such a man deserves to
disappear.

[17] There is much to admire and to want to accept in Badiou's defense
of a humanism that would transcend an empty faith in human rights and
hypocritical denunciations of terrorism as the original sin of others.
As Badiou in an earlier text around the events of 9/11 reminds us,
"terrorism" does not analyze automatically into something demonic or
unconditionally evil done by others. [3]
<http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_edn3> Saint-Just
entered into a war of terror as an essential if morally outrageous
practical corollary of revolution. It is simply bad faith to suppose
that one can defend freedom innocently. To grasp this is to open a
window to seeing that others may defend their freedom against us in a
way that knowingly involves the killing of innocents and to begin to be
aware of our role in their oppression. There is, however, in Badiou's
argument an indifference to the lives of human individual persons and to
human happiness that is troubling. It should be admitted that
individuals are nothing apart from belonging to a collective and that
building the right "we" may involve the sacrifice of individuals.
However, it does not follow that, ontologically, individuals are nothing
or that their happiness is a matter of indifference. What is the point
of freedom or of acts of liberation unless it is to enhance the
possibilities for the happiness of individual human beings? Collectives
are not sentient. They can't suffer or be happy. As De Beauvoir makes
clear, there is no such thing as humanity /tout court/. There are
individual human beings. Some of the greatest moral outrages have been
committed in the name of an idea of humanity in utter disregard for
individual human beings. There is too much in Badiou's argument that
rings of this. Hence his distinction between a radical humanism and the
weak humanism proclaimed by present-day intellectuals is drawn
ultimately in such a black and white way as to be rejected if not
rigorously qualified.

------------------------------------------------------------------------


      Notes

[1] <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_ednref1> For
example, Hannah Arendt, /Between Past and Future/ (Penguin 2006),
Richard Kearney, /The Waken of Imagination /(Routledge 1998) and Richard
Rorty, /Contingency Irony and Solidarity/ (Cambridge 1989)

[2] <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_ednref2> E.g.,
Alain Finkielkraut, /In the Name of Humanity/ (Columbia 2000), Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri, /Empire/ (Harvard 2001), Gilles Lipovetsky,
/The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy/ (Princeton 2002).

[3] <http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_ednref3>
/Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy/ (Continuum
International 2005).


 
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