Philosophy and the Idea of Communism

Alain Badiou in conversation with Peter Engelmann

Alain Badiou, Peter Engelmann, Susan Spitzer, Susan Spitzer

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745688398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie moderne

In a well-known text called 'The Communist Hypothesis', first published in 2007, the renowned philosopher Alain Badiou breathed fresh life into the idea of communism as an intellectual representation that provides a critical perspective on existing politics and offers a systemic alternative to capitalism.

Now, in the course of this wide-ranging conversation with Peter Engelmann, Alain Badiou explains why he continues to value the idea of communism against the background of current social crises and despite negative historical experiences. From the anticipation of a communism without a state to the problem of the concept of democracy and an analysis of capitalism as a system, the two thinkers discuss the key political issues of our time. Whilst explaining his political philosophy, Badiou also reflects on current socio-political developments such as the turmoil in the Middle East and the situation in China.

This compelling dialogue is both a highly topical contribution to the question of how we might organize our societies differently and an accessible introduction to Badiou's philosophical thinking.

1
23 March 2012

Peter Engelmann Before we turn to the specific topic of our discussion, “the Idea of communism” in your philosophical work, I’d like to contextualize these questions in terms of both philosophy and politics. In your philosophy you develop a concept of the subject different from that of capitalist society, which views the subject reductively as a consumer and an economic competitor. The concept of the subject has a long history in philosophy, and in France there has been, as well, a theory of the death of the subject. What I’m interested in is how your concept of the subject has been inscribed in the French philosophical context since the 1960s to 1970s.

Alain Badiou I’d like to make two comments about this. First of all, my first great philosophical influence was Sartre, in the 1950s. During all my early years of studying philosophy I considered the category of the subject to be fundamental, and it was, in particular in the form of the free consciousness, as Sartre was developing it at the time. I can therefore say that, philosophically, I come from, or come out of, a philosophy dominated by the theory of the subject, with a phenomenological vocabulary. So it was the subject in Sartre’s sense, but also in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, or even in Husserl’s sense. Starting in the late 1950s, when I arrived at the École Normale, met Althusser, read Derrida’s first books, and encountered Lacan’s teaching, I became involved in what was called structuralism at the time, that is, a philosophy in which the subject is problematic. In Althusser’s view, the subject was an ideological concept, a bourgeois concept. In the view of Lévi-Strauss and the structuralist tradition, it was structures that mattered, and, in the Heideggerian tradition, the subject was a concept from metaphysics that needed to be deconstructed. So I came into contact with all these things at that time, but with a sort of instinctive resistance that had a philosophical origin – the teaching of Sartre and of the great phenomenology of the period – as well as more personal or practical roots, which were that I couldn’t see how you could do without the category of the subject in politics.

PE Why wasn’t it possible to give up the subject in politics?

AB In politics in particular, because it was very clear to me that politics was a matter of orientation, action, decisions, and principles, a matter that demanded a subject or a subjective dimension. I observed, moreover, that the attempt to reduce politics – and Marxism – to a purely objective, purely structural, context, without the figure of a subject, led to nothing but a sort of pure economism, in which it wasn’t even clear what political action properly speaking, as decisive, voluntary, and constructive action, was. For all these reasons, I got involved in structuralism nonetheless, along with my friends at the time, but with the idea that it ought to be possible to reconcile the teachings of structuralism and/or deconstruction with a renewal of the concept of the subject, by transforming and retaining the category of the subject. Ultimately, I think the most important teaching for me back then was Lacan’s, because Lacan was someone who, on the one hand, attached great importance to structures and particularly to the structures of language – the unconscious is structured like a language, etc. – but who, on the other hand, as heir to the psychoanalytic tradition, naturally retained the category of the subject. He not only retained it but even transformed it, making it into something absolutely central. So I regarded this teaching as a chance to find a way in which some of the lessons of speculative modernity could be accepted while at the same time the category of the subject could still be retained, in exchange, of course, for an important transformation of that theory. I think this has remained my project to this day.

PE I have long wondered how you define your position in this connection. You said that it was impossible to act without the concept of the subject, particularly with regard to politics. But I’d like to go back to philosophy. You alluded to some philosophers who developed a critique of the concept of the subject, but then you switched abruptly to politics.

AB No, I simply gave politics as one example of a field of creativity and activity in which the whole problem is precisely the construction of a subject.

PE Would you agree if I said that a concept of the subject is needed in every field of human endeavor?

AB We’d have to make a detour, in that case, because the concept of the subject in my work is closely linked to two other concepts – that of event and that of truth. A subject is always a subject of truth. It is always the subject for or in a process of constructing a truth. My way of critiquing the metaphysical concept of the subject is to say that the subject is a creation or a construction, and that it’s not a given. What is given is in the form of the individual, for example. But “individual” and “subject” are not one and the same for me. Ultimately, they’re even in a completely fundamental opposition to each other, even though individuals are always called to become subjects or to be incorporated into a subject. It’s a summons, not a constant, natural movement. And this summons occurs via a real process, which might be political but might also be something else. It might be a political process, or an artistic process, or an amorous process. In all these cases there is a subjective summons.

PE Would you agree that a critique of the concept of the subject is warranted, but, at the same time, a critique of the individual isn’t possible, since the individual is a given?

AB Absolutely.

PE I think that’s very important because it helps solve some of the problems with deconstruction.

AB I think the important thing, as far as the critique of the concept of the subject is concerned, is to understand that it’s a critique targeting a particular philosophical construction, which has a history. I accept the idea that the concept of the subject, as it has been construed from Descartes to Sartre, is in some respects a metaphysical concept or construction. When I say I’m reviving the category of the subject, it’s in a completely different context. I naturally agree that there’s a sort of fusion of individual and subject in the metaphysical tradition. Take the subject of the Cartesian cogito, for example: it’s a construction that ultimately refers to an individual experience. Even Sartrean consciousness is an individual consciousness. Sartre himself identified the individual in terms of his/her subjective figure, that is, on the basis of his/her conscious figure. So what I retain from the deconstruction of the metaphysical category of the subject is that the ubiquitous construction tacking the subject onto the individual has to be dismantled. On the one hand, there will be the subjective construction linked to truth procedures, and, on the other, as its irreducible support, the individual, which I sometimes also call the “human animal” and is a given, a given I’d simply call natural or, in other words, ordinary. Individuals exist in the figure of the world, but it’s not because they exist that they should be called subjects.

PE If I understand correctly, your last comment suggests that the individual, as an existing individual, is not deconstructible. But we also know, for example, that Hegel begins The Phenomenology of Spirit with the demonstration that there is no here and now apart from language. This is the exact opposite position, on the basis of which he constructs his metaphysical system. Hegel’s system assumes that the given is right from the start a given of language. He holds that the here and now is only accessible to us in and through language, and he reconstructs the world through the system of philosophical science. But the given thereby loses its immediacy. Thus, the individual is no longer the felt or willed individual but is always already linguistic. This poses a real problem for philosophical discourse but also for the representation of the “true” interests of “real” individuals. I myself have always instinctively resisted the dethroning of the individual or stressed the fact that there is indeed an undeconstructible or inescapable individuality, and in my critique of Hegel I’ve always been on the individual’s side against the domination by the language process. But I can also see the criticism that could be directed at me, and I direct it at myself as well: In light of the Hegelian critique, how can one insist on the immediacy of the individual? What does this imply now for philosophical resistance? Is there a philosophical argument that can be opposed to that resistance?

AB I agree with pointing out the individual’s instinctive resistance to deconstruction, but only provided that it’s clearly understood that this individual is nothing but a “there is.” S/he is the “there is” of humanity as animality, nothing more. So the individual as such is irreducible, but that doesn’t give him/her any particular value other than that of his/her life. In other words, I agree with the idea of the irreducibility of the individual, but only on condition that the individual’s value is not opposed to the metaphysical subject’s value, as if they were on a par with each other. I don’t, for example, agree with Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel. Kierkegaard says the individual’s life is ultimately irreducible. I agree with that, but not so as to prepare the ground, as is the case with Kierkegaard, for a sanctification of the individual in an ultimately religious figure. In other words, human life, in its irreducibility, is nothing but the life of human animality as such. So you could say that it’s the irreducibility of a body, of a living body. A living body is in effect irreducible; it’s not deconstructible.

PE Of course, you can’t emphasize the individual’s irreducibility and then turn around and give him/her additional value.

AB That’s the whole point. That’s why I said that Kierkegaard’s strategy was to deconstruct the Hegelian system in order to bring out the individual’s subjective irreducibility, but ultimately in a theological context, a religious context. In my view, there’s nothing in the individual other than the existing animality, the principle of life. Life is individuated; it presents itself in a context of both species and individuation, and for that reason it is not deconstructible. But the fact that it’s not deconstructible doesn’t give it any value other than that of bare life. Then, the question as to what value bare life has is something that will only take on its meaning from the perspective of a subjectivated truth.

PE Don’t we have to use another approach if we want to add values to that existing individuality?

AB No, not exactly. It’s only from the perspective of the possible emergence of the category of the subject that the question of the individual’s value even arises, because the individual, as such, constitutes no value other than the perseverance of his/her life. “To strive to persevere in being,” as Spinoza said.

PE So the concept of the subject is the medium through which all values are thought?

AB Yes, absolutely. All valorizations take place within the subject. But that shouldn’t be confused with the idea that the individual, all on his/her own, as in Hegel, triggers the process that will eventually arrive at the Absolute. And if there’s nothing but the perseverance of life, the individual doesn’t constitute any space of valorization, nor does s/he by him/herself set the subjective process going. Something else is required, which I call an event.

PE In Hegel, the starting point of phenomenology is something from which we have to free ourselves.

AB That’s because, in Hegel, there’s the work of negativity, so individuality, insofar as it is worked from within as negativity, tends to overcome i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• 1 23 March 2012
• 2 24 March 2012
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