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Alain Badiou: France's most influential radical philosopher structures his entire philosophy around a notion of the event |
Giuseppe
Tomasi di Lampedusa's novel The Leopard, set
amidst the heroic arrival of Garibaldi in Sicily and the ensuing
unification of Italy, contains one of the great clichés of political
reaction. "Everything needs to change so that everything
can remain the same," is the assured counsel of Tancredi
Falconeri, an aristocrat convert to the nationalist cause. Falconeri
here gives voice to that enduring ability of the ruling class to
change its stripes and adapt to new facts. No matter the
epoch-shaking nature of certain events, they will only ever play into
the hands of the ruling elite.
Such is the case with Brexit: despite
the mounting political headcount and the seismic shock to Britain's
economic and political system, the country is likely to remain firmly
in the hands of its long-term political masters. A government
inclined to impose authoritarian cruelty on the poor, people of
colour, foreigners and women has emerged as the only available
option, fronted indeed by a close ally of the former Prime Minister.
Even as the Conservatives doubled-down on their immigrant-bashing
(refusing to guarantee the rights of European nationals currently
residing in the UK), the Chancellor announced plans to further slash
corporation tax to just fifteen percent. As the long-term commitment
to budgetary discipline is yet again kicked down the road, the
Chancellor's emphasis was entirely on soothing the market's jitters
over sterling and winning back waverers in the City. Meanwhile, Nigel
Farage may have quit as leader of UKIP, but his attendance at the
parties of the UK's grateful media barons will no doubt still be
keenly sought. Boris Johnson managed a silence of several days before
he was back in the cabinet by elite demand.
The French philosopher Alain Badiou
advances the notion that some events are - despite all the outward
appearance of violence - merely pseudo-events. Before we can sketch
how he can make this claim, we have to quickly look at his definition
of what an authentic event is. Badiou believes that each dominant
"situation" (the prevailing conditions which allow being to
be ordered into a world) is constituted via the exclusion of one
element. Badiou refers to the much-abused but useful notion of the
proletariat as the revolutionary subject, excluded from influence
over the circulation of capital, as the subject whose formation
intrudes on the situation of capitalism and shatters it with its
demands for political representation. This shattering is what Badiou
calls an authentic event. Badiou insists that mathematics is the only
means by which being can be described (it's complicated) and so
therefore this kind evental opening in being - in which the excluded
"part of no part" intrudes into the order of being and
disrupts it - is productive of truth. Authentic events produce truths
- or more controversially, conditions where unflinching loyalty (what
Badiou calls "fidelity") can be declared. In Badiou's
understanding it is impossible to anticipate an event exactly, they
simply happen and the choice is whether to dedicate oneself to the
event or to turn away from it. An authentic event must propel its
excluded element to a "maximal intensity of appearance" by
rupturing being. In a political event, then, a group that is
basically invisible or unable to create the grounds of its own
visibility in the dominant order, must stake its claim.
It is this appearance of a new
political subject that truly marks an event and it is this subject
which names the event. There are philosophical problems with such a
theory, of course, in that it makes political events purely
subjective - nameable only by those who participate in the project.
But it is nevertheless useful for understanding Brexit from the
perspective of radical philosophy. Brexit is a pseudo-event because
it does not rupture being and fails to propel any subordinate group
into the limelight. As we can already see from the masses of data, no
single political subject can emerge from the Brexit debacle: the very
wealthy, small business owners, many petit-bourgeois, and huge
swathes of the declining working class are counted among the leave
data. There is no sign of some unprecedented emergence and however
much commentators attempt to be shocked by the vote, it is clear that
it falls into a pre-ordained, easily marked out story.
So perhaps we can adjust Lampedusa's
dictum of the renascent aristocracy: "Everything must change in
order that nothing new emerges." In its enthusiasm for a return
to the days of grand political strategy much of the intellectual left
has forgotten this kind of ontological categorisation of events. With
oppositions of the left - and also the far right - forming across
much of the previously moribund political terrain of the west, this
return to immediate engagement with actual politics is both necessary
and appealing. But we would do well to remember that the "potentials"
and "possibilities" for the left that can be unpicked from
the Brexit tangle are exceedingly narrow. This is not fully
understood with reference to the "balance of political forces"
- it has to be taken to a higher level of abstraction. Brexit cannot
yield meaningful opportunities for the left because it is incapable
of producing a subject which breaks with the dominant order.
Slavoj Zizek, one of Badiou's closest
philosophical allies, describes the pseudo-event as an aestheticised
dramatisation of the event shorn of its radical implications, and has
used the rise of fascism as the best example. The discourses
assembled around the Brexit vote do not present any intensification
of class struggle in the left's sense but rather its displacement by
racial and national tensions. Brexit even comes with its own
racialised others: the usually Muslim immigrant/refugee in whose
favour the cosmopolitan Brussels bunch secretly lobby. Brexit, unlike
the rise of fascism, is not articulated exclusively around the
rejection of the racial other. Rather it is a form of petty-bourgeois
and relatively impoverished working-class nationalist reaction - but
reaction nevertheless.
The idea that the left can easily
exploit the ruling class divisions opened up by Brexit is highly
dangerous. How then to fight the racial discourses articulated
through Brexit? It is important that this fight be undertaken in a
way which respects the democratic decision to leave the European
Union. It is not Exit itself that the left should resent, only the
manner of its undertaking and the political discourses which are
articulated through it. Here, it seems to me, it is worth returning
to Badiou, who argued a few years ago, in the wake of the re-election
of Nicolas Sarkozy in France, that the first gesture of a radical
politics must be to assert that 'there is only one world of living
men and women.' This was said in the face of Sarkozy's repeated
deployment of a cultural-nationalist ontology: 'we' constitute this
place, and those not from here should love it or leave. "The
single world of living men and women may have laws," Badiou
writes, "what it cannot have is subjective or 'cultural'
preconditions for existence within it - to demand that you have to be
like everyone else. The single world is precisely the place where an
unlimited set of differences exist. Philosophically, far from casting
doubt on the unity of the world, these differences are its principle
of existence." Fighting the racist or at least racialising
discourses around Brexit doesn't entail fighting for EU membership.
Instead we should work to consolidate that which is universal in all
identities. This insistence on universality is not, Badiou argues, an
argument to abolish all other particular forms of identity, but
rather to supplement them with fully developed commonalities. In
other words to say that from the perspective of the world "no
one is illegal." Once we declare that we inhabit a shared world
- a single world shared by those drowning in boats in the
Mediterranean or fleeing war in Syria or languishing in camps in
Calais - we can develop solidarities that are universal.
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