Post-Maoism: Badiou and politics

Positions

Volumn 13, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 575-634

  Bosteels, Bruno ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845250551     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-13-3-575     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 2
2. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: "La clameur de l'Etre" (Paris: Hachette, 1997), 8. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations in the following pages are my own
3. Alain Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction (Theory of Contradiction) (Paris: Maspero, 1975), 50-51
4. Alain Badiou, "Les 4 dialecticiens français: Pascal, Rousseau, Mallarmé, Lacan," Le Perroquet: Quinzomadaire d'opinion 22 (March-April 1983): 11
5. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 42
6. See also "Les deux sources du maoïsme en France," in Le maoïsme, marxisme de notre temps (Maoism, Marxism of Our Time) (Marseille: Potemkine, 1976), 7-8. An English translation of this pamphlet published originally by the Groupe pour la Fondation de l'Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Léniniste is included in this special issue. Incidentally, this double allegiance brings up the problem of how two events can become entangled in the first place, when Badiou does not even entertain this as a possibility in L'Etre et l'événement (Being and the Event). Mao's legacy thus time and again will bring us face to face with problems of articulation as entanglement or mixture, in stark contrast with the more miraculous and absolutist interpretations of Badiou's major concepts
7. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). "What should be stressed is that Badiou's properly decisive concepts - concepts of the pure, the singular, and the generic - are themselves at least relatively constant," Hallward writes, and he continues: "Certainly, for every disclaimer of 'early excesses' there have been many suggestive symptoms of a global continuity, at least from May '68 to the present" (30)
8. Jason Barker, even while recognizing the persistence of Maoist themes in Badiou's more recent ontological inquiries, seems to reduce the lasting impact of Maoism to little more than a form of "militant vitality." See his Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2002), 25. "Today the legacy of Maoism has all but disappeared," Barker writes, but later on he adds: "Badiou's avowed aim in Being and the Event is to leave behind the 'stillborn' legacy of dialectical materialism. However, the traces of Marxism - and Maoism - arguably persist, here and there, despite the introduction of this radical, 'post-Cantorian' variety of what Badiou names 'subtractive ontology'" (84)
9. Alain Badiou, L'Etre et l'événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 365
10. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), 230-36
11. See also François Marmor, "Les livres et les enquêtes: Pour un 'marxisme concret,'" in Le maoïsme: Philosophie et politique (Maoism: Philosophy and Politics) (Paris: PUF, 1976), 47-51
12. Quoted in Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes, 161
13. Groupe pour la Fondation de l'Union des Communistes Français (marxiste-léniniste), Première année d'existence d'une organisation maoïste, printemps 1970/printemps 1971 (First Year of Existence of a Maoist Organization, Spring 1970/Spring 1971) (Paris: Maspero, 1972), 100, 169
14. Groupe pour la Fondation de l'Union des Communistes Français (marxiste-léniniste), La révolution prolétarienne en France et comment construire le Parti de l'époque de la pensée de Mao Tsé-toung (The Proletarian Revolution in France and How to Build the Party of the Era of Mao Zedong) (Paris: Maspero, 1970), 46
15. See Dialogue autour de Tien An Men (Dialogue on Tienanmen), a special issue of Le Perroquet: Quinzomadaire d'opinion 86-87 (March 1990)
16. Parts of the survey in Guanzhou have also been published in Sylvain Lazarus, L'anthropologie du nom (Anthropology of the Name) (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 233-49
17. and in Lazarus, Chercher ailleurs et autrement: Sur la doctrine des lieux, l'économie, l'effondrement du socialisme (Looking Elsewhere and Differently: On the Doctrine of Places, the Economy, the Collapse of Socialism) (Paris: Les Conférences du Perroquet, 1992)
18. Badiou, L'Etre et l'événement, 361
19. On the "still-born" legacy of dialectical materialism, see the introduction (10). For a more detailed commentary, see my contribution "On the Subject of the Dialectic," in Thinks Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), 150-64
20. See, for example, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 95
21. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 63-64
22. Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction, 109-10
23. See Bruno Bosteels, "Can Change Be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou," in Alain Badiou: Philosophy and Its Conditions, ed. Gabriel Riera (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 252-53
24. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung, 170-74
25. La révolution prolétarienne en France, 107-28
26. "Maoïsme et question du Parti," in Le Maoïsme, special issue of Le Marxiste-Léniniste: Journal Central du Groupe pour la Fondation de l'Union des Communistes de France Marxistes Léninistes 12 (fall 1976): 20
27. "Le maoïsme: Une étape du marxisme" ("Maoism: A Stage of Marxism"), in 10 ans de maoïsme: Une histoire, un bilan, une politique (Ten Years of Maoism: A History, A Balance Sheet, A Politics), special double issue of Le Marxiste-Léniniste: Journal Central du Groupe pour la Fondation de l'Union des Communistes de France Marxistes Léninistes 50-51 (spring 1981): 7
28. The complete text of this article is translated in this special issue. See also Paul Sandevince [Sylvain Lazarus], Notes de travail sur le post-léninisme (Working Notes on Post-Leninism) (Paris: Potemkine, 1980)
29. Alain Badiou, Théorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 198
30. Alain Badiou, La Révolution Culturelle: La dernière révolution? (Paris: Les Conférences du Rouge-Gorge, 2002), 31
31. A. Belden Fields, Trotskyism and Maoism: Theory and Practice in France and the United States (New York: Praeger, 1988), available online at www.maoism.org
32. Rémi Hess, Les maoïstes français: Une dérive institutionnelle (The French Maoists: An Institutional Drift) (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), 207-12
33. Bourseiller, Les Maoïstes, 130, 150
34. Alain Badiou, Conditions (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 250
35. Le Marxiste-Léniniste 50-51 (spring 1981): 17
36. The noyaux, or noyaux communistes ouvriers, were "kernels" or "cells" of communist workers and militants that for some time constituted the model of the "party of the new type" according to the UCFML. For a discussion, see Les noyaux communistes ouvriers: Forme actuelle de l'avant-garde, piliers de l'édification du Parti de type nouveau (The Communist Workers' Cells: Current Form of the Vanguard, Pillars of the Construction of a New Type of Party) (Marseille: Potemkine, 1978)
37. Badiou, Révolution Culturelle, 11
38. For an excellent philological interpretation of the four Chinese characters that are translated as "Cultural Revolution" in most Western languages, including French and English, see Guy Brossollet, "Ce que veut dire 'Révolution culturelle,'" in "Mao: Culture et révolution," special issue, Magazine Littéraire 30 (1969): 7-13
39. "L'art et la culture: Un groupe maoïste, le groupe FOUDRE," Le Marxiste-Léniniste 50-51 (1981): 20-21
40. Bosteels, "Can Change Be Thought?" 259-60
41. Badiou, Théorie du sujet, 46, 306
42. Badiou, Théorie du sujet, 65. For the full periodization, see the fragments from Théorie du sujet translated in this special issue
43. "Le mode dialectique," La Distance Politique 3 (1992): 5. A complete English translation of this text is also included in this special issue
44. Badiou, Théorie du sujet, 205
45. Alain Badiou, "Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic," trans. Alberto Toscano, Radical Philosophy 130 (2005): 21. This text reproduces the first half of the preface to Badiou's Logiques des mondes. I am thankful to Peter Hallward for reminding me of this definition
46. Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 112
47. Lenin, Philosophical Notebooks, vol. 38 of Collected Works, trans. Clemence Dutt (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 180, 196
48. Theodor W. Adorno, "Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel," in Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 139
49. Alain Badiou and François Balmès, De l'idéologie (Of Ideology) (Paris: Maspero, 1976), 29 n. 20
50. Alain Badiou, "Le flux et le parti (dans les marges de l'Anti-Oedipe)," in La situation actuelle sur le front philosophique (The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front) (Paris: Maspero, 1977), 31-32
51. For an English translation of this text, see "The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus," trans. Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl, Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics 15/16 (2004): 75-92
52. I have tried to extend this argument to include the work of Hardt, Negri, and Žižek in my contribution "Logics of Antagonism: In the Margins of Alain Badiou's 'The Flux and the Party,'" included in the same special issue of Polygraph (93-107)
53. The mention of Nietzsche's archpolitical attempt "to break the history of the world in two" anticipates a future version of this same polemic, in which Badiou will once again reject the radical-anarchic figure of antagonism, or the two as such, as part of Nietzsche's problematic legacy. See Alain Badiou, Casser en deux l'histoire du monde? (Paris: Les Conférences du Perroquet, 1992)
54. Groupe Yénan-Philosophie, "Etat de front," 12-13
55. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1990), 135. Paradoxically, then, nonidentity, or the presupposition that something must precede the process of pure thought, is not an obstacle but a precondition for the identity between being and thinking, between logic and history
56. Le noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégélienne, 73-74
57. Badiou, Theoretical Writings, ed. and trans. Alberto Toscano and Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2004), 69
58. See Bosteels, "Can Change Be Thought?" 243
59. Guy Lardreau and Christian Jambet, Lange (The Angel), vol. 1 of Ontologie de la revolution: Pour une cynégétique du semblant (Ontology of Revolution: For a Cynegetics of Semblance) (Paris: Grasset, 1976), 96
60. Georges Peyrol [Alain Badiou], "Un ange est passé," in La situation actuelle sur le front philosophique, 69
61. Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction, 53, 55
62. Badiou, Ethics, 118-19
63. For a more detailed discussion, see Bosteels, "Badiou without Žižek," in "The Philosophy of Alain Badiou," ed. Matthew Wilkens, special issue, Polygraph: An International Journal of Culture and Politics 17 (2005): 221-44
64. "Circulaire sur quelques problèmes idéologiques" (September 1970), republished in Première année d'existence, 20
65. Le Marxiste-Léniniste 12 (fall 1976): 21
66. UCFML, Sur le maoïsme et la situation en Chine après la mort de Mao Tsé-Toung, 1-2
67. Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? 56
68. UCFML, Questions du maoïsme: De la Chine de la Révolution Culturelle à la Chine des Procès de Pékin, 10
69. UCFML, Sur le maoïsme et la situation en Chine, 16-17
70. Sandevince, Notes de travail sur le post-léninisme, 9