The Condition of Politics: Badiou and the Space of Compossibility
Been reading Badiou of late and one of his interpreters, Bruno Bosteels:
“The possibility of philosophy instead depends on the joint interplay of multiple truths that take place outside of philosophy, or behind the philosopher’s back. Politics is only one out of four such conditions of philosophy, next to art, science, and love. Philosophy, moreover, cannot in turn subordinate the truths produced in these conditions to the norms and concepts that would be its privilege as a crowning or higher science. Instead, philosophy opens a space of compossibility in which each of the conditions finds its place, not so much to violently seize them but rather so as to let itself be seized by that which takes place in them in terms of events.” (24) 1
To continue that thought, for me it is this “space of compossibility” that philosophy opens up that allows it to become aware of and seized by that which takes place within the condition of politics - as the immanent necessity of the event’s moments- that brings about the ‘moment of intervention’ equal to the event itself.
Bosteel breaks Badiou's condition for politics into a metapolitical orientation:
1. Politics, or a (mode of doing) politics, is first of all a process or a procedure, that is, an active form of militant practice, and not a form of the state.
2. As a process or procedure, a politics starts out from that point in the social order that signals the excessive power of the state. This point is the place, or site, of the political event. Every political event is anchored in a specific situation through such a symptomatic site, which otherwise appears to be near the edges of the void, or inexistent.
3. The state is the instance that doubly controls the situation, for example, by first counting all the inhabitants who have the right to be legal citizens, residents or nonresidents, and then, as in a census, by counting these members a second time in terms of various subcategories, or subsets: male and female, immigrant and indigenous, adults and minors, etc.
4. The difference between these two counting operations, first the elements of a set and then the subsets, corresponds to the difference between the simple presentation of a given situation and its redoubling or re-presentation in the state of this situation. Here as elsewhere, in an ambiguity on which I will have occasion to comment below, Badiou plays with the double sense of the '' state'': both the normal state of affairs (état) and the political state (État).
5. The example of the census already intuitively indicates that there is always an excess of the power with which the state of a situation exceeds this situation itself, signaled by the '' etcetera'' or '' other'' that cannot fail to appear at the end of every list of categories. The number of ways in which we can order the subsets of a given census is in principle always larger than the number of members that figure in this census to begin with. What is more, in an infinite situation, this excess can be shown to be properly immeasurable. It is this simple and fundamental axiom of contemporary set theory that marks the onset, so to speak, of a political intervention. The state's excessive power in fact becomes visible only as the result of an emergent political subject. When everything runs its course as usual, this excess remains invisible even as the errancy of the state's superpower secretly continues to serve an intimidating function. It is necessary to put a limit on the excess that otherwise remains hidden behind the semblance of communal bonds and cultural identities.
6. A political process, thus, does not start out from a previously given bond or group, not even when this social bond is defined in terms of the class struggle, but precisely from a local unbinding of the common bond. It is also not the case that the state rejects the formation of new social bonds but rather what it seeks to avoid at all cost, even if this means allowing all kinds of separations and subversions, is the coming apart of the ideological glue that holds together our particular identities. There is a primacy of struggle over the classes, a primacy that subsequent attempts at classification may actually seek to pacify or stabilize.
7. Politics is not the art of the possible but the art of the impossible. To be more precise, a political process must make the impossible possible. This means in the first place to give visibility to the excess of power in the normal state of affairs. During the revolt of May '68, no less than during the still obscure sequence of later events- from the protests of Solidarity in Poland to the uprising in Chiapas to the second Intifada- this process involves a certain gamble, or wager, through which the state is forced to lay bare its inherently repressive nature as a violent excrescence, typically shielded in a military and police apparatus used both inside and outside its own borders.
8. Politics as a procedure of truth, however, cannot be reduced to the typically youthful protest against the eternally oppressive and corrupt nature of the state apparatus. From the symptomatic site of the event, bordering the void that lurks everywhere in between the cracks of a census even if it cannot find a place in the images of representational politics, a militant subject emerges only when the particular terms of the various memberships that define society are put down and abolished in favor of a generic concept of truth as universally the same for all.
9. Politics, in other words, has nothing to do with respect for difference or for the other, not even the absolutely other, and everything with equality and sameness. This conclusion runs counter to the moral or moralizing consensus of contemporary politicians and political philosophers alike, which holds that a true (democratic) politics can contain the dangers of totalitarianism and fundamentalism only when a place is reserved for difference in the name of freedom. But the market, too, works with differences, or at least with semblances of difference. This is even the way in which the general equivalence of the underlying order is capable of reproducing itself. There is thus nothing inherently subversive, let alone revolutionary, about the affirmation of difference, becoming, or flux within the coordinates of contemporary capitalism. Only a strict egalitarian affirmation can break through this general equivalence of capital disguised as difference.
10. By traversing and deposing the different representations of identity with which the excess of state power maintains itself in its very errancy, a political procedure gradually begins to revolve around the notion of a generic set, that is, a set without determining attributes or qualities. Ultimately, politics is nothing if it is not the active organization of a generic equality, one possible name of which continues to be communism.
11. Indeed, with the notion of the generic, which according to Badiou is the most important conceptual contribution of Being and Event, we finally come back to Marx. It is, after all, he who, in the posthumous Manuscripts of 1844 and the Grundrisse, speaks of the possibility of the human as a generic species-being. Even more pertinently, it is Marx who in '' On the Jewish Question,'' speaking on the subject of complete human emancipation as opposed to purely moral or political emancipation, invokes the authority of The Social Contract where Jean-Jacques Rousseau- for Badiou one of the four great French dialecticians next to Pascal, Mallarmé, and Lacan- had written: '' Whoever dares to undertake the founding of a nation must feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature and of transforming each individual who is in himself a complete but isolated whole into a part of something greater than himself from which he somehow derives his life and existence, substituting a limited and moral existence for physical and independent existence.'' 64 Perhaps there is no better description of the fundamental idea behind communism than to have confidence in this capacity of changing human nature itself- that is, above all, of transforming the human being from an egotistic independent individual, whose self-interest is so often invoked as an ideological legitimation for the natural superiority of capitalism, into a generic species-being. This means not only that politics cannot be referred back to any ontology as first philosophy but also, and perhaps primarily, that all emancipatory thought must likewise refuse to rely on an anthropological preunderstanding of what constitutes human nature. There is no more political ontology than there would exist a political anthropology. Both expressions are equally oxymoronic. (31-32)
1. Bosteels, Bruno (2011-07-20). Badiou and Politics (Post-Contemporary Interventions) . Duke University.