The philosophy of restoration: Alain Badiou and the enemies of may

Boundary 2

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 27-46

  Power, Nina ^a   Toscano, Alberto ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 65849456578     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2008-022     Document Type: Article

References (23)

1. For Sarkozy's statements and their intellectual precursors, see Serge Audier, La pensée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d'une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), 5-16.
2. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 69.
3. See Stathis Kouvélakis, La France en révolte (Paris: Textuel, 2007).
4. This section was composed during the French elections and prior to the publication of Badiou's De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, the fourth volume in his Circonstances series. In that text, Badiou, drawing on a different aspect of his Logiques des mondes, presents Sarkozy as the latest incarnation of a "Pétainist" transcendental. As is clear from the following quote, taken from an excerpt recently published in the New Left Review, the Pétainist transcendental is a peculiar amalgam of reaction and obscurantism: "the unconscious national-historical roots of that which goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Pétainist configuration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the Restoration of 1815 when a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly supported by émigrés and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners' baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a worn-out population, that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the 'nation,' yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Pétain himself, an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment of national rebirth." This politics of restoration under the simulacrum of rebirth is one in which "capitulation and servility" (to foreign occupiers or Capital) "are presented as invention and regeneration" (Alain Badiou, "The Communist Hypothesis," New Left Review 49 [January-February 2008]: 32-33).
5. See also Peter Hallward's perspicuous comments and criticisms in "L'hypothèse communiste," Le revue internationale des livres et des idées 5 (2008): 28-30,
6. a longer version of his review of Badiou's Sarkozy book in Radical Philosophy 149 (2008): 50-52.
7. For the diagnosis of an emblematic case in this regard, see Daniel Bensaïd, Un nouveau théologien: Bernard-Henri Lévy (Paris: Lignes, 2007).
8. Alain Badiou, "À bas la société existante!" Le Perroquet 69 (March 23,1987), 2.
9. Badiou, "À bas la société existante!" 2.
10. See Alberto Toscano, "The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of Politics," Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 2, no. 1-2 (2006): 15-38.
11. Alain Badiou, "Philosophy and the 'War against Terrorism,'" in Infinite Thought, trans. and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 141-64.
12. See Alain Badiou, "Édification du parti et question syndicale," Théorie et politique 3/4 (1975): 114-18;
13. "Syndicalisme et révisionnisme moderne," Théorie et politique 5 (1975): 58-87;
14. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie (Paris: F. Maspéro, 1977).
15. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 11.
16. See, among several important articles he has devoted to Badiou's politics, Bruno Bosteels, "Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics," positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 575-634.
17. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005).
18. Badiou, Metapolitics, 128.
19. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 4.
20. See Alain Badiou, "Selections from Théorie du sujeton the Cultural Revolution," trans. Alberto Toscano with Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power, positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 3 (2005): 635-48.
21. Alain Badiou, "Philosophy and Politics," Radical Philosophy 96 (1999): 29.
22. Alain Badiou, "Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic," Radical Philosophy 130 (2005): 20.
23. Badiou, "Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic," 20.