Social Determination of Method (Introduction)

If I did not seem quite as eager to write part 2 of my critique of Badiou as I was with part 1, there's a simple reason: I wasn't as eager. In good measure, it's because, having started reading the first volume of Mészáros's Social Structure and Forms of Consciousness, "The Social Determination of Method," it now seems to me that much of the work has already been done. (Though Badiou is not an explicit target of Mészáros's polemics.)

Before I get too glowing in my praise of Mészáros, it is only fair to inform the reader that I approached this book predisposed against it. We are told not to judge a book by its cover, but when the largest featured back-cover blurb cites Hugo Chávez, enemy of the working class, praising the author as "the pathfinder of socialism," I must be skeptical.

Alternately, before I get too harsh in my criticisms of this book, it is only fair to inform the reader that I approach the author predisposed to take him seriously. His scholarship in the early 1970s did a great deal to bring attention back to the work of his former teacher, György Lukács, and was quite insightful. If, forty years later, those insights do not seem terribly fresh, it is only because their validity has been taken for granted by most who have written about Lukács since.

Even though I've already made it through several chapters, I will break my comments up in a more piecemeal fashion. For now, I confine myself to the Introduction, which does a good job of laying out the structure of the work. This volume is devoted to describing and connecting to "the need to articulate and defend determinate social interests" (14) "the methodological characteristics of the various systems of though, which emerge within the historical framework and in support of capital's formation." (13) The first seven chapters of the book are each devoted to a methodological characteristic identified by Mészáros as one of "the most important," which he described as follows:

1. "Programmatic orientation towards science and the key methodological/theoretical as well as practical role assigned to natural science."
2. "General tendency to formalism."
3. The standpoint of isolated individuality and its enduring methodological equivalent, capital's "standpoint of political economy...."
4. "Negative determination of philosophy and social theory."
5. "...suppression of historical temporality."
6. "The imposition of a dualistic and dichotomous categorial matrix on philosophy and social theory...."
7. "The abstract postulates of "unity" and "universality" as the wishful transcendence of the persistent dichotomies--in place of real mediations--and the purely speculative supersession of the major social cotnradictions without altering in the slightest their causal foundations in the actually existing world."

Attentive readers will likely guess that I was most dubious of #1. Indeed I was, and the chapter devoted to it is the weakest of the chapters I have read thus far. I will also have a few things to say about #4. It is worth noting that #2-7 can all be related rather directly to Badiou's work with minimal effort. If one accepts Mészáros's basic contention that such methodologies furnish the consistent, interlocking means through which thinkers "not only adopt but actively and ... consciously shape--both when they originally articulate and when they subsequently renew--the position corresponding to the vital interests of the capitalist system," (16) then a rejection of Badiou would be a comparatively trivial step.

The final, and longest, chapter of the volume is devoted to "method in a historical epoch of transition." That would be an apt way of summing up what I'm on about, even if I end up disagreeing significantly with his formulations. In that section, presumably, is where we will find what Mészáros considers to be "those elements of the theories in question which must be and can only be "aufgehoben"; that is, dialectically superseded/preserved by being raised to a historically more advanced level, so as to be put to a socially positive use." (23)

Nonetheless, he puts a rhetorical foot wrong early on, when he claims that "the methodological parameters of the various theories which coherently articulate the fundamental interests of this class basis, notwithstanding the difference of the particular thinkers ... are set for the epoch [of capital] in its entirety...." (12, emphasis added) This can lead even an attentive reader to mistakenly draw the conclusion that Mészáros is arguing that the core features of capitalist thought are basically invariant. Yet further on, he contrasts Descartes insistence "on the importance of making knowledge practical and useful" to Husserl's "rigid opposition between 'the theoretical attitude' and 'the practical'" (21) as an example of a "most revealing" "contrast between the views of the great thinkers of the more remote past and some twentieth century conceptualizations of the same problem." (20) The implication, which ought for political reasons to be made more explicit, being that there are clear differences that can be demarcated with the capitalist epoch, between the period of transition to the rule of capital, the period of its apogee, and the period of its senescence. And when he goes on to praise Descartes for being "fully conscious of the importance of carrying on the work of intellectual creation as a genuine collective enterprise," stating that "Only by reviving such ethos, and meaningfully enhancing it in accordance with the urgent requirements of our own time, can we really face up to the issues we must confront," (21) I can only say, "Hear, hear!" (Yet I must then ask: Why not make explicit what is only implied, that the proletariat can learn from the ethos of the bourgeoisie in the period of its rise? And is that ethos of collective effort quite as dead as the word "reviving" would make it seem?)

Where Mészáros's thought appears to be most provocative, and where I suspect any disagreements would acquire the greatest political force, therefore, is on the topic of "historical necessity". (There's that phrase again!) "Historical necessity is truly historical not simply because it emerges with undeniable firmness from highly complex dialectical determinations in the course of its unfolding, but also because it becomes in due course a "disappearing necessity" ... in Marx's words. Voluntaristically ignoring this vital aspect of historical necessity can produce devastating socioeconomic and political consequences, as we had to learn it in the twentieth century from the tragic failure of some major strategies pursued in the socialist movement." (20) The emphasis both on the reality of historical necessity and on its complex, fleeting character is welcome. The talk of a single "socialist movement" suffering tragedy due only to the failure of one or another "strategy," as if the problems with Stalin or Mao could be summed up in terms of their being too "voluntaristic," is rather more dubious.

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.

Anti-Badiou, Part 1

Looking at my notes on Badiou, I'm realizing that this critique is likely to become a multi-page essay, not suitable to a single blog post. So I'm going to break it into pieces, and intersperse the postings with other topics. This leads to an administrative question: Anyone know of a resource for free, anonymous posting of PDF files?

Badiou and “Communism”: Ideas Masquerading as Hypotheses

Why should we care about Alain Badiou?

From a narrow perspective of political tendency, it would be hard to make a case. For nearly twenty years now, he has been associated with a practice of “politics without parties,” based on a syllogism that directly links the Bolshevik Party to the Stalinist party-state. As with any strict syllogism, the premise must be accepted to for the conclusions to follow. From a perspective that traces Stalinist rule to the annihilation of the Bolshevik Party, however unpopular such a view may conjuncturally be, then either the conclusions are false, or must be derived from different premises.

The reason to care about Alain Badiou is that, after decades of functioning as a (post-)Maoist militant and a metaphysician, he has discovered his true talent, his real calling, as a marketing genius. The juxtaposition of an adjective and a substantive, or a subject and a predicate, in a deliberately provocative manner may have been an ur-technique of the surrealists ("conquently the lion is a diamond"), but it was raised to the level of conscious artifice by the profession of advertisers and image-makers. So to the ranks of “revolutionary whitening systems,” “unforgettable mascara,” and “the children of Karl Marx and Coca-Cola,”—Godard, his fellow ex-“mao,” was also a bit of a publicist—we can now add “the communist hypothesis.”

Which is not to say that the phrase is innately false. As it happens, communism is a hypothesis. Or, more precisely, a nexus of interlinked hypotheses. But a hypothesis is not what Badiou presents it as, and neither is communism, at least not if it is to be understood as a hypothesis. He could have just as easily, and more precisely, said “the Idea of Transcendence,” as we will demonstrate. But that sounds like what it is, the stock in trade of metaphysicians and theologians for 2,500 years. It certainly isn’t provocative; it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that would be put forward by someone whose thoughts on matters as timely as Sarkozy or the Tunisian revolution, or historical matters like the Paris Commune or the Chinese Cultural Revolution, would be of interest. But “the Communist Hypothesis:” Well, that we can sell!

I do not mean to suggest that such crass, commercial considerations were foremost, or even consciously present, in Badiou’s mind when he conceived the phrase. But in the capitalist world we have yet to transcend, ideas have power to the extent either that they inspire mass movements, or are assimilated to the commodity form. Badiou matters because his ideas have power, but not the sort of power needed to put the communist hypothesis to the test.

(For the purposes of this critique, I refer solely to the materials collected in the book The Communist Hypothesis, (London: Verso, 2010). Though Badiou makes repeated references to his earlier philosophical works, such as Being and Event and Logic of Worlds, for fuller expositions of his basic concepts, he at least has the decency to attempt brief definitions of them in the course of the book. That is good, because I firmly believe, regardless of whether of not Badiou would agree with me, that books should stand on their own; in the finitude of human lifetimes, no one should be expected to review a full corpus before confronting a thesis.)

Hypotheses and Conjectures

On pages 6-7, Badiou gives an illustrative example of a hypothesis, that is perhaps more illustrative than he intends. I will quote it at length, and do him the favor of correcting the presentation of Fermat's Last Theorem (which seems to have fallen victim to bad translation and typographical errors):

Take a scientific problem, which may well take the form of a hypothesis until such time as it is resolved. It could be, for example, that 'Fermat's theorem' is a hypothesis if we formulate it as: 'For [integer values of n>2], I assume that the equation xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ has no [positive integer] solutions (solutions in which x, y and z are [positive integers]).' Countless attempts were made to prove this, from Fermat, who formulated the hypothesis (and claimed to have proved it, but that need not concern us here), to Wiles, the English mathematician, who really did prove it a few years ago. Many of these atempts became the starting point for mathematical developments of great import, even though they did not succeed in solving the problem itself. It was therefore vital not to abandon the hypothesis for the three hundred years during which it was impossible to prove it. The lessons of all the failures, and the process of examining them and their implications, were the lifeblood of mathematics. In that sense, failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis, provided that the hypothesis is not abandoned.

For anyone familiar with the histories and terminologies of science and mathematics, this begs the question of why he chose an example from the history of mathematics, rather than an example from the physical sciences (e.g., the Theory of General Relativity). The answer cannot simply be Badiou's (in)famous love of mathematical illustrations. The example leads to some immediate objections:

1. Where scientists usually speak of hypotheses, mathematicians speak of conjectures. Anyone who has ever tried to prove a mathematical statement with an adequate degree of rigor knows the frustrating experience of being able to formulate a statement and say, "I think it's true, it seems like it's true, but I cannot yet devise a proof that establishes its truth, step by step, from what we already know to be true." If the statement is of a high enough level of significance, and one has a high enough degree of certainty, one can publish it as a conjecture and thus set to work an army of interested mathematicians to fill in the missing steps. (If one is a frustrated undergraduate, grappling with something one's professors consider "trivial," one considers changing one's major to philosophy.) If proven true, a conjecture becomes a theorem. This begs the question, however, of whether the statement is thus retrospectively determined to have already true when it was first formulated as a conjecture, a question that would receive conflicting answers. Philosophers of mathematical realist, formalist or structuralist schools, and probably most working mathematicians, would say "yes," George Lakoff and others would say "no," while I, borrowing arguments from Poincaré and Lakatos would say, "yes, but...". Arguing for that would take us far afield of the immediate point, but it's a topic worth researching/pursuing. The point for now is that the example does not demonstrate what it purports to. Rebranding a conjecture as a hypothesis obscures more than it elucidates.

   By contrast to a conjecture, a hypothesis in the physical sciences is never proven true in the mathematical sense. At most, it is plausible, based on the available evidence and received theory. As evidence accumulates in its favor, it can be regarded as a theory, meaning that it still has a provisional, hypothetical nature, but can be regarded as "true enough" for the purposes of serving as a basis for continuing investigation. If superseded by another theory, this does not wholly negate the evidence that the original theory was true, but reveals it to have been "true enough" within a defined sphere. A canonical example of this is the theory of gravitation: Newton's laws were readily testable on a terrestrial scale, even on the scale of the solar system, and demonstrably "true enough" in that sphere. Einstein's theory of general relativity began with a mathematical demonstration of the consequences of applying special relativity within a gravitational frame of reference, and showed slight divergences from Newton's equations. Einstein himself proposed several phenomena that could be observed to detect phenomena that would differ between Newton's model and his own. The first such observation came within a few years, with Arthur Eddington's observation of evidence of the deflection of light from a distant star by the sun, during a solar eclipse. In a certain sense, despite the compelling nature of Einstein's derivations of the Theory of General Relativity, up until that point it was more an ingenious hypothesis than a theory.

   While mathematical demonstration was important for both Newton and Einstein, neither of their sets of equations can be taken to be "true" in the way that Fermat's Last Theorem is. They are not true with reference to a given mathematical formalism, but true with reference to an observable phenomenon.

2. It is inaccurate to refer to the history of the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem simply as a history of "failures". It is true that until Wiles connected it to elliptic curves, no prior attempt was successful. But there were several partial successes. Had Fermat himself not already demonstrated the theorem for the case of n=4, it is likely that, despite his reputation as a brilliant mathematician, his conjecture would not have been taken as seriously as it was. The next major steps forward were by Leonhard Euler, who proved it for n=3 (and thereby, indirectly, for all even multiples of 3), then Sophie Germain and Adrien-Marie Legendre, etc. Wiles' proof ended up using strikingly different methods, using mathematical concepts that could hardly be said to have existed 100 years before. Ironically, it was Legendre who originated several of the branches of mathematics that ultimately contributed to Wiles' proof, while working on problems that to him seemed unrelated to the task of proving Fermat. Special cases do not prove a general rule--every mathematician knows this. Yet mathematicians are human, and human psychology, with our mental tendencies to generalize (and over-generalize), can trick us into thinking that the proof of a special case is a sign of progress toward the general rule, or at least a hopeful sign that the general rule may be provable. Without the incremental progress on special cases--and sometimes transformative progress, as with Ernst Kummer's proof for all regular primes--it is more likely that Fermat's conjecture would have been set aside as uninteresting, implausible, or both.

   Again, Badiou's example does not demonstrate what it seeks to, namely that failures do not matter, so long as you hold on to the misnamed "hypothesis". Failures do matter, but in human endeavors, of which mathematics is just one, they are given their meaning by the incomplete successes they enable.

So what is Badiou on about? That became clear to me as soon as I turned the page, to page 8, and found the following statements: "Universality, which is the real attribute of any corpus of truths, will have nothing to do with predicates. A real politics knows nothing of identities, even the identity - so tenuous, so variable - of 'communists'. It knows only fragments of the real, and an Idea of the real is testimony to the fact that the work of its truth is ongoing."

My marginal note there was "Platonism." I thought I was pretty smart, until I got to page 229, the first page of his concluding essay "The Idea of Communism," where he frankly acknowledges it, in main text and footnote, and gives citations of his past and forthcoming work on Plato. At least he admits it. By the end of that essay, he admits, though in an evasive manner, that the entire book is misnamed: "We can give new life to the communist hypothesis, or rather to the Idea of communism." (260) What we are dealing with, then, is not a hypothesis, which emerges in time, has a history, is never absolutely demonstrated and can, if necessary, be abandoned, but an "Idea" with a big, fat capital-I, which is more real than this icky, contingent, historical mess, and is true whether proven or not. In that respect, it is not even a conjecture in the mathematical sense. Either Badiou does not know what a hypothesis is, or he used it as a kind of disguise, smuggling the old, dusty heritage of metaphysical idealism in under a modern, scientific-sounding guise (like Lenin slipping out of Petrograd clean-shaven and wearing a toupée).

It is still necessary for me to clarify what it means to speak of a hypothesis in the realm of history. After all, I've already pointed to the example of the physical sciences, where the guiding ideological assumption of its practitioners (to the extent that they think about such things, and as opposed to how things actually work) tends to be falsificationism, the creation of Karl Popper, who explicitly used it to deny the applicability of scientific methods to history. And I will do that.

But first I need to finish dealing with Badiou, who, if he did not exist, would have to have been invented by a Popperian, as a living example of a cartoon communist in the post-Soviet world. One for whom "History does not exist," (243) or who speaks of "the non-factual element in a truth." (244)

Alas, as a historical materialist, before I write I need to think, and before I think I need to eat, and before I eat I need to cook. So the next portion will wait until later. Next installment (not necessarily the next post): Ideas without History, Truth without Facts.

A Good Meeting

Last night I had the distinct pleasure of attending a meeting.

The phrase "pleasure of attending a meeting" is rare enough in its utterance as to be nearly a paradox, particularly in New York.

The meeting itself is somewhat hard to describe. Its title was "From Wisconsin to New York: Crisis, Austerity and Resistance". It has a Facebook page, so those of you who have a Facebook login (which I don't) can view it at http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=194911303884295. It was convened by a nameless group of mostly-young leftists who seem to be more or less in an academic orbit, who refer to themselves, perhaps somewhat disingenuously, as "a group of friends who are interested in revolutions." The conveners seem to be largely of a left-communist cast. This was the second such meeting I attended; the prior one, last month, was about the revolutions in the Arab world. At the earlier meeting, the Solidarity organization was in evidence; if its supporters were present at this one, they were not known to me.

The speakers included Loren Goldner of Insurgent Notes, and two younger guys who are not public figures in the same way Loren is, and who therefore I do not know if they would appreciate having their full names published in this connection. Loren spoke on his observations of the Wisconsin protests, in much the same vein as this article. There was also a well-researched historical presentation on the 1975 New York City fiscal crisis and the politics of austerity, and the third speaker gave a presentation of the austerity measures contained in the newest New York State budget. (A presentation which, in content and style, seemed to reflect his job in the legislative office of a New York City council member more than his professed anarchist politics, but which was nonetheless informative.)

For now, however, I will not comment so much on the content of the discussion as on its style. For, in a room that included left-communists, anarchists, Trotskyists (in addition to myself, there was Jan Norden of the Internationalist Group), as well as several people whose political viewpoint was more difficult to pinpoint (social-democrats?), the discussion remained cordial and (mostly) focused throughout. Even Norden, who did filibuster a bit, contributed in a meaningful way and a comradely tone. In fifteen-plus years of leftist militancy, I don't think I've ever attended such a meeting. (The prior meeting called by this grouping certainly couldn't have been described that way.)

A couple of suggestions, however, addressed not only to the conveners of this meeting but to anyone trying such an enterprise:

1. We need to do away with the academic norm of repeatedly giving the original speakers in a discussion the chance to respond. Yes, if they've been asked a direct question, let them respond, briefly, but if it's done after comments as well, it interrupts the flow. More problematically from a perspective of human emancipation, it derives from a presumption of hierarchical expertise. In this particular case, it did not seem to me to result in anyone not getting their say, but it often has that effect.
2. I am greatly tempted to propose a rule that no political meeting disperse without a democratic vote on at least one concrete action of follow-up. Even if the concrete action is just to call another meeting. Toward the end, there was a palpable sense in the room that this sort of thing should continue, but no one (and I certainly include myself in this) made an attempt to propose something specific. The initiative remains with the informal "group of friends," and I hope they'll take it.

The main thing it helped me to do was to clarify my thinking a little bit on the question of proletarian political organization. The basis of the need for such organization is not the existence of different ideas in the minds of individual workers, but the need for the immediate interests of the most exploited and oppressed to be brought forward, as they coincide the ultimate interests of the class as a class-for-itself. Otherwise, the tendency to break into sectoral patterns within the framework of capitalist politics will prevail, as remains the case so far in anti-austerity struggles in Wisconsin, California and New York. (With the struggles in the last location being far behind the prior ones in scope and militancy.) More on this later, but not immediately.

A note on the next post: I believe it was about eight years ago that Sy Landy gave me a photocopy of an old Hal Draper article, entitled The "Inevitability of Socialism": The Meaning of a Much Abused Formula (The New International, December 1947), a polemic against arguments by C.L.R. James (then in the Socialist Workers Party) and George Novack. Draper had, many decades before, been Sy's mentor, and much of his theoretical work amounted to critiquing and setting aside much of what he had been mis-taught by Hal. On this article, he had a gut feeling that Hal was wrong, but neither were James and Novack right, and he wanted someone with more philosophical training to take it on. On and off over the following year, it turned into a sprawling project that took me through Hegel, Plekhanov, Althusser, the philosophy of science, various schools of "ideology critique," etc., going far beyond the original ambit of critiquing what is, actually, a rather slight and amateurish article. The question of "historical necessity" proved to be way more complicated than Draper or his SWP opponents wanted it to be. The results were sheafs of hand-written notes in my barely legible scrawl, and occasional e-mails to various people about what I was thinking about--not even an internal discussion article, because more urgent questions abounded. But the upshot of all this was my conclusion that the necessity of a classless, communist society was a historical hypothesis.

So imagine my disappointment in 2008 as the ex-Maoist, and incurably obscurantist philosopher Alain Badiou was making a splash with his notion of a communist hypothesis--which uses the exact same words I had fastened on four years before, but gives them a very different meaning.

The point of this is not to claim intellectual priority or make a claim to some kind of copyright--Badiou can keep his royalties unperturbed. It's to indicate why, in setting out my thoughts about politics, I now have the duty of beginning with a polemic against Badiou. That will be the subject of my next post. (Probably not today, but hopefully by tomorrow night.)