Anti-Badiou, Part 2

If I had been in an organization large enough to admit of extensive specialization, rather than one in which specializations were necessarily multiple, relative and contingent (and thus hardly specializations at all), it's at least probable that I would have had to track developments in Marxist philosophy, and with that the extensive literary output of István Mészáros over the last 16 years. Instead, I'm catching up by working backwards, beginning with the two volumes (to date) of his Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness. Critical notes thereon will be forthcoming, and frankly, more interesting than anything that can be said about Badiou. In fact, much of what remains to be said about Badiou has already been said by Mészáros about more interesting thinkers (e.g. Sartre).

Ideas without History

Having elided a conjecture, misnamed as a hypothesis, into the hoary Platonism of the Idea, it remains for Badiou to articulate what he means by "Idea"--since despite the acknowledged debt to Plato the underlying metaphysics are plainly not identical--what he means by "communism," and what these have to do with one another. On page 235, we finally find a definition of "Idea," and even though it is incomprehensible without the full text of the six pages preceding (and barely comprehensible with), I will give it to you anyway:

"A formal definition of the Idea can immediately be given: an Idea is the subjectivation of an interplay between the singularity of a truth procedure and a representation of history.

"In the case that concerns us here, we will say that an Idea is the possibility for an individual to understand that his or her participation in a singular political process ... is also, in a certain way, a historical decision. Thanks to the Idea, the individual, as an element of the new Subject, realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History."

Now, I could unpack that for you by referring to his earlier definitions of "Subject", "subjectivation", and "truth procedure", or I could sum it up by giving a humorous example of exactly the kind of paradox this embodies:

"I'm not," indeed. For like the reluctant false prophet Brian, Badiou takes the grounding assumption of bourgeois ideology, the primacy of the individual, and projects it into a natural (or, more true to his rhetoric, ontological) law. On the preceding page, he provides a very revealing parenthesis. In describing the decision "to become ... a militant of this truth," he states, "This is the moment when an individual declares that he or she can go beyond the bounds (of selfishness, competition, finitude...) set by individualism (or animality - they're one and the same thing)."

To presume that individuality and animality are one and the same is to immediately give ground to the capitalist presumption that the way things are is grounded in the very nature of the human being as a sentient animal. From such an individualist standpoint, the Pythons satirize the very possibility of political militancy, under cover of a rationalist critique of religion. (Case in point: Splitter!) Badiou, from the same starting point, retreats to the Christian view of an ascetic overcoming of the sinful, animal, material shell of the human body in this world to join as spirit in the transcendent Subject with a capital-S.

(Yes, I keep making Monty Python references throughout this post. No one who refers, without detectable irony, to "my friend Slavoj Žižek" [237] could have a good faith objection to a philosophical argument that uses vulgar jokes from silly movies to make its points.)

Part of what makes The Life of Brian funny, funnier perhaps than its creators even realized, is its recurrent anachronism, and the same anachronism takes on a much graver mien in Badiou's work. The very notion of universal individualism would have been impossible to conceive in a society based on slavery and tax farming. The hermeneutic attempts of Protestant theologians to read it backward into the Gospels are themselves a comic-apologetic instance of the anachronism that in Python is reduced to a purely comic residue. The notion that the decision of an "individual" to join with an (unspecified) historical Subject is something of metaphysical significance dehistoricizes individuality. It can more truthfully be said that there were collective historical subjects before the individual, as a substance that could be abstracted from the determinations of gender, family, property and the state, ever existed. If one takes individualism as one's starting point, one never arrives at a collective historical subject, or does so only by way of paradox. That such a paradox describes the normative, meteoric trajectory of many a middle-class intellectual into and out of proletarian movements over the last 150 years of history makes it no less of a paradox.

How can I fairly say that Badiou dehistoricizes? After all, has he not said that the individual "realizes his or her belonging to the movement of History"? But Badiou says it himself, or rather, he tells us that "History does not exist". "What does exist, however, under the real condition of organized political action, is the communist Idea, an operation tied to intellectual subjectivation and that integrates the real, the symbolic and the ideological at the level of the individual." (241)

So how does one belong to the movement of something that does not exist? One belongs to it as a "representation", in which one integrates reality into a symbolic order coherent with an ideology that one avows individually. Put another way, "Only the true Messiah denies his divinity." And He never really comes: "I should know, I've followed a few."

I had hoped to get to Truth without Facts, but I'll save it for a week or so later. I'll try to post some comments on Mészáros in the interim.