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The Unfinished Twentieth Century. <br>
<br>
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<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html">http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html</a><br>
<h2>Alain Badiou, <em>The Century</em></h2>
<h3>Review by Don Callen</h3>
<hr>
<p>Alain Badiou, <em>The Century</em>. (Cambridge: <em>Polity
Press</em>, 2007)</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[1]</span> In <em>The Phenomenology of
Spirit</em> 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 <em>and</em> 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; <a
href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_edn1"
name="_ednref1" title="">[1]</a> once again, in the twenty-first
century, some of the most important philosophical debates about <em>our</em>
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. <a
href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_edn2"
name="_ednref2" title="">[2]</a> Alain Badiou's <em>The Century
</em>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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[2]</span> 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). </p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[3]</span> 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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[4]</span> The century (in its most
authentic moment) is represented in/moved by a paradoxical
subjectivity, non-dialectical, at once "end, exhaustion, decadence
<em>and</em> as absolute commencement. . .nihilism, but equally as
Dionysian affirmation" (31). Two maxims are at work: </p>
<blockquote>[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). </blockquote>
<p>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 <em>a passion for the real,</em> 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).</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[5]</span> 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: </p>
<blockquote>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). </blockquote>
<p>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).</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[6]</span> 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: </p>
<blockquote>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). </blockquote>
<p>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: </p>
<blockquote>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). </blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[7]</span> 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
<em>and</em> 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: </p>
<blockquote>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).</blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[8]</span> 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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[9]</span> 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).</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[10]</span> 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: </p>
<blockquote>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).</blockquote>
<p>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: </p>
<blockquote>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). </blockquote>
<p>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" (<em>Ibid.</em>). 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).</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[11]</span> 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). </p>
<blockquote>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).</blockquote>
<p>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 <em>inseparate</em> 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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[12]</span> 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: </p>
<blockquote>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). </blockquote>
<p>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" (<em>ibid</em>). 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).</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[13]</span> 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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[14]</span> 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). </p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[15]</span> 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).</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[16]</span> 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" (<em>ibid</em>). 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.</p>
<p><span class="paragraph">[17]</span> 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. <a
href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_edn3"
name="_ednref3" title="">[3]</a> 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 <em>tout
court</em>. 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.</p>
<hr>
<h3>Notes</h3>
<p><a
href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_ednref1"
name="_edn1" title="">[1]</a> For example, Hannah Arendt, <em>Between
Past
and Future</em> (Penguin 2006), Richard Kearney, <em>The Waken
of Imagination </em>(Routledge 1998) and Richard Rorty, <em>Contingency
Irony and Solidarity</em> (Cambridge 1989)</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_ednref2"
name="_edn2" title="">[2]</a> E.g., Alain Finkielkraut, <em>In
the Name of Humanity</em> (Columbia 2000), Michael Hardt and
Antonio Negri, <em>Empire</em> (Harvard 2001), Gilles Lipovetsky,
<em>The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy</em>
(Princeton 2002).</p>
<p><a
href="http://www.rhizomes.net/issue17/reviews/callen.html#_ednref3"
name="_edn3" title="">[3]</a> <em>Infinite Thought: Truth and
the Return to Philosophy</em> (Continuum International 2005).</p>
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