The speculative left

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 104, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 751-767

  Bosteels, Bruno ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 53849139015     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-104-4-751     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Alain Badiou, D'un désastre obscur: Sur la fin de la vérité d'Etat (La Tour d'Aiguës: L'Aube, 1998), 14;
2. in English, "Philosophy and the 'Death of Communism,'" in Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans./ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 131.
3. Félix Guattari and Antonio Negri, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, trans. Michael Ryan (New York: Semiotext[e], 1990), 7, 19.
4. Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Christophe Bailly, La Comparution (politique à venir) (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991), 62.
5. In English, "La Comparution/The Compearance: From the Existence of 'Communism' to the Community of 'Existence,'" trans. Tracy B. Strong, Political Theory 20:3 (1992): 377.
6. Nancy, La Communauté désœuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1986), 177.
7. In English, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 71 (translation modified).
8. Nancy and Bailly, La Comparution, 100/393 (translation modified).
9. Badiou, Théorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 115
10. qtd. in La Comparution, 63 n. 5/394 n. 5 (translation corrected).
11. Compare Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, Le gauchisme, remède à la maladie sénile du communisme (Paris: Seuil, 1968)
12. and Lenin's classic Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, trans. Julius Katzer, in Lenin's Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966), 17-118.
13. Alain Badiou and François Balmès, De l'idéologie (Paris: François Maspero, 1976), 67.
14. Ernesto Laclau early on discusses the hypothesis of communist invariants, which according to him are actually neither communist nor invariant, in Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Populism (London: New Left Books, 1977), 167-72. If Laclau finds Badiou and Balmès's argument wanting, though, this can also be explained at least in part by the fact that he seeks to produce an opposition similar to the masses/state opposition, this time in the Gramscian terms of people/power bloc.
15. Badiou and Balmès, De l'idéologie, 67.
16. Paul Sandevince (pseudonym for Sylvain Lazarus), Qu'est-ce qu'une politique marxiste? (Marseille: Potemkine, 1978), 6. For a more detailed account of Badiou's Maoist organization, UCFML (Union des Communistes de France marxiste-léniniste), see my article "Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics," positions: east asia cultures critique (forthcoming).
17. Badiou, Théorie du sujet, 62.
18. UCFML, Sur le maoīsme et la situation en Chine après la mort de Mao Tsé-Toung (Marseille: Potemkine, 1976), 3.
19. UCFML, Questions du maoīsme: De la Chine de la Révolution Culturelle à la Chine des Procès de Pékin (Paris: Potemkine, 1981), 10.
20. UCFML, Sur le maoīsme et la situation en Chine après la mort de Mao Tsé-Toung, 1-2.
21. Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 56.
22. UCFML/Groupe Yénan-Philosophie, "Etat de front," La situation actuelle sur le front philosophique (Paris: François Maspero, 1977), 12.
23. Badiou, "Le flux et le parti (dans les marges de l'Anti-Œdipe)," La situation actuelle sur le front philosophique, 31-32.
24. In English, "The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus," trans. Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl, Polygraph 15-16 (2004): 75-92.
25. Badiou, Théorie du sujet, 60, 30. In Logics of Failed Revolt: French Theory after May '68 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), Peter Starr devotes much of his argument to the paralyzing effects of this kind of dualism and the search for "third way" solutions among members or fellow travelers of Tel Quel. Unfortunately, he does not deal with a single text by Badiou. Kristin Ross, in her more recent May '68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), also fails to study the long and complex prehistory behind Badiou's notion of the "event," mentioned in her introduction, which otherwise is one of the most loyal thoughts transmitted to us from May 1968.
26. Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique? 11.
27. Daniel Bensaïd, "Alain Badiou and the Miracle of the Event," in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward (London: Continuum, 2004), 101.
28. Badiou, L'Etre et l'événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 232-33.
29. A much earlier use of the expression speculative leftism can be found in Jacques Rancière, La leçon d'Althusser (Paris: Gallimard, 1974): "The double Althusserian truth after May 1968 finds itself shattered between two poles: the speculative leftism of the all-powerful ideological apparatuses and the speculative zdanovism of the class struggle in theory, which interrogates each word in order to make it confess its class" (146; see also no n. 1 regarding the search for an "absolute beginning" as the sign of an ultraleftist interpretation of the link between Althusserianism and Maoism).