NEWTHEORISTSOF THEDIALECTIC?

ALAINBADIOUAND SLAVOJIEK
December 23, 2009 at 8:01am

NEW THEORISTS OF THE DIALECTIC? ALAIN BADIOU AND SLAVOJ IEK

The early twenty first century is characterized by a new intellectual constellation. This contrasts with the last two decades of the previous century, which was defined by the dominance of two ideologies neo-liberalism and its junior partner postmodernism. This is no longer the case neoliberalism is widely contested, while postmodernism is history, surviving through institutionalization, as rhetoric, or in the more productive form of postcolonial theory. Many of the most interesting contemporary critical thinkers treat postmodernism with contempt. They are also much more willing to align themselves with Marxism. Perhaps the most important examples are Alain Badiou and Slavoj iek. Their recent major books respectively Logiques des mondes and The Parallax View, both published in 2006 explicitly espouse a materialist dialectic. Their thought is linked in other ways, for example, in a common allegiance to the thought of Jacques Lacan and in the influence that Badiou has plainly had on iek (Badiou says the two of them belong to the last square of anti-humanists The future is ours. ). I want to consider these books in a critical but well-disposed way. But we need to have some conception of dialectic to orient discussion. For Hegel the dialectic denotes a unitary process driven by the emergence and resolution of internal contradictions. The process is a teleological one in that what constitutes it is the self-realization of Absolute Spirit, the supreme form of subjectivity identical with the circular structure of the process itself. Marxist philosophy took its shape from the famous problem of what, if anything, of this dialectic can be salvaged and used by a materialist critique of capitalism. The obvious element of continuity is provided by the notion of internal contradiction. Even Louis Althusser, when attempting to demonstrate a radical difference between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics in texts such as Contradiction and Determination, offers his own account of contradiction. Marx himself in Capital explores a structure constituted by contradictions (primarily those between capital and labour and those among capitals themselves). But these contradictions are overcome, not, as in Hegel, through reconciliation that takes the form of internalization in a more developed subjectivity, but through the explosion of the constituting antagonism. Marx never finished Capital, but he told Engels it would conclude with the class struggle, into which the movement and the smash-up of the whole business would resolve itself. One implication of conceiving a structure or process as constituted by the contradictions internal to it is that it must thought also as a totality, that is, as a whole whose structure is not reducible to its constituent parts. As Hegel famously put it, the True is the whole. One powerful and fertile strand of

Marxist thought tends to treat what is distinctive to it as this privileging of totality and practice of totalization Georg Lukcs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Fredric Jameson, summed up by Lukcss slogan: The primacy of the category of totality is the bearer of the principle of revolution in science. I identify these characteristic themes of Marxist treatments of the dialectic not in order to invoke an orthodoxy relative to which Badiou or iek may be held to account the diversity and sometimes mutual incompatibility of these treatments is indicated by some of the names I have cited Lukcs, Sartre, and Althusser, for example but rather to identify some of the preoccupations of the tradition to which Badiou and iek now claim to be developing. I now turn to a necessarily brief and summary discussion of Badiou and iek. Notoriously, Badious background is as a Marxist (disciple of Sartre and Althusser) and a Maoist militant during the 1960s and 1970s. But Thorie du sujet (1982) marked a break with Marxism, made systematic and explicit in Badious major philosophical work LEtre et lvenement (1988). Badious critical move, already made in Thorie du sujet, is from conceiving the class struggle as a subjective duel the confrontation of antagonistic collective subjects to formulating the notion of the subject as rare and exceptional, emerging from the void of a situation. A subject subtracts itself from all empirical contamination. This is brought out by the portmanteau words, introduced in Thorie du sujet and reaffirmed in Logiques des mondes, esplace and. horlieu. Esplace a fusion of espace and place refers to the situated character of being, the confinement that this implies to a specific place and time. Horlieu is literally that which is outside place, which is able to transcend this confinement. Individual persons and collective communities are examples of esplace, while the subject pertains to horlieu: To the extent that it is belongs to a truth, a subject subtracts from every community and destroys all individuation. There is a privileged relationship between subjects, truths, and events. Events are the improbable occurrences arising from what a situation apparently excludes that make subjects possible. A subject is defined by its fidelity to an event. This requires it to develop truth procedures that thematize what is universal in the event. Thus in Badious remarkable little book Saint Paul (1998), St Paul shows his fidelity to the Christ-Event by transcending the particularism of the Jewish Old Law and constructing Christianity as a universal Church in which Jew and Gentile are equally welcome. In LEtre et lvenement Badiou explicitly rejects the Marxist conception of class antagonism. Thus he writes: It isnt antagonism that is at the origin of the state because one cannot think the dialectic of void and excess as antagonism. But in Logiques des mondes he counterposes the materialist dialectic to democratic materialism, whose prime representative is Toni Negri. Democratic materialism is a naturalistic ontology (a poor mans Spinozism) that affirms there are bodies and languages. The materialistic dialectic, by contrast, affirms that there are bodies, languages, and truths: Its not only in the middle of things, or bodies, that we live and speak. Its in the transports of the True, in which we come to be called to participate. The inclusion of truths introduces subjects,

since for Badiou subjects incorporate truths. The merit of Badious approach lies in its effort to think how the daily course of apparent normal is interrupted by the exceptional. There is a sense in which this captures an aspect of the dialectic the notion of qualitative transformation that Lenin celebrated when he wrote Leaps! Leaps! Leaps! in his notes on The Science of Logic. But this is not enough to establish Badious philosophy as a new materialist dialectic. He argues that dialectical thought understands that the essence of all difference is the third term that marks the distance between the other two, and that the subject plays this role in his version of the materialistic dialectic. This is very tenuous. Hegels dialectic is one of absolute subjectivity, but, as Badiou himself emphasizes in Logiques des mondes, this is very different from Badious notion of exceptional and plural subjects. And he seeks to prove that whole doesnt exist. As I have noted, both Hegel and Badiou seek to thematize the inherent instability of the apparently normal. But they choose very different philosophical strategies. Badiou tends to absolutize the exceptional in the shape of the event, conceiving it as a-relational, lacking any connection to a context that might help explain its emergence. For Hegel, however, the exceptional has to be understood against the background of the tensions constitutive of its situation. While breaking with Hegels absolute idealism and (less consistently) with his teleology, Marx in this respect remains faithful to the Hegelian dialectic. Questioned on this point, Badiou accepted that his is a relatively weak version of the dialectic and suggested tentatively that there may be two kinds of dialectic, one of negation (Hegel) and one of exception (Badiou himself). But this sidesteps the question of totality so central to Marxist treatments of the dialectic. I conclude that Badious espousal of dialectic is rhetorical rather than substantive, but that this rhetorical shift is symptomatic of the larger change in the intellectual and political climate to which I have referred. iek is close to Badiou in his conception of subject but at the level of substantive analysis his recent writing is much authentically dialectical. One might see him as trying to effect a synthesis of Badious two dialectics of negation and exception. The key aspect here is the theme of antagonism. Following Jacques Lacan and Ernesto Laclau, iek understands antagonism as what reveals the limit inherent in the situation. This allows him to undertake a creative development of Ideologiekritik: ideology is understood less as misrecognition or representation than as the displacement of antagonism. See, for example, his excellent discussion, originally published in the London Review of Books at the time of the 2004 presidential election, of why working-class Americans might choose to vote Republican. There is also a very good treatment towards the end of The Parallax View of the way in which class antagonism structures other antagonisms (for example, gender and race). This argument helps to ground ieks critique of postmodernist liberalism, which simply treats class as one among a plurality of antagonisms:

the wager of Marxism is that there is one antagonism (class struggle) which overdetermines all others and is, as such, the concrete universal of the entire field. The term overdetermines is used here in its precise Althusserian sense: it does not mean that class struggle is the ultimate referent and horizon of meaning of all other struggles; it means that class struggle is the structuring principle which allows us to account for the very inconsistent plurality of ways in which other antagonisms can be articulated into chains of equivalences. iek also develops a very effective critique of both postmodernism and Badiou for ignoring and thereby naturalizing economic relations, concluding: today, more than ever, we should return to Lenin: yes, the economy is the key domain, the battle will be decided there, we have to break the spell of global capitalism but this intervention should be properly political, not economic. The problem with iek is partly at the meta-theoretical level, in his allegiance to Lacan and Hegel. Thus he persistently denies that Hegels dialectic is teleological: Hegel is merely a radicalized Kant, who takes the step from negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute as negativity. Or, to put it in the terms of the Hegelian shift from epistemological obstacle to positive ontological condition (our incomplete knowledge of the Thing turns into a positive feature of the Thing which is in itself incomplete, inconsistent): it is not that Hegel ontologizes Kant: on the contrary, it is Kant who, insofar as he conceives the gap as merely epistemological, continues to presuppose a fully constituted noumenal realm existing out there, and it is Hegel who deontologizes Kant, introducing a gap into the very texture of reality. And again: Hegels move is not to overcome the Kantian division but, rather, to assert it as such, to drop the need for its overcoming, for the additional reconciliation of opposites: to gain insight through a purely formal parallax shift into how positing the distinction as such already is the looked-for reconciliation. In a way this is very Hegelian, since the reconciliation of opposites consists in a change of perspective rather than the actual social destruction, the smash-up, in which, Marx predicts or hopes, capitalism will conclude. Similarly in a response to Logiques des mondes iek criticizes Badiou for his all too crude opposition between repetition and the cut of the Event that can lead to a neglect of the tensions within the situation that prepare for an event. But his characterization of these tensions remains within the sphere of the ideological: when we pass from the notion of crisis as occasional contingent malfunctioning of the system to crisis as the symptomal point at which the truth of the system becomes visible, we are talking about one and the same actual event the difference is purely virtual, it does not concern any of its actual properties, but only the way this event is supplemented by the virtual tapestry of its ideological and notional background.

For iek, then, the third term of the dialectic is less the explosion of a structural contradiction than a substitution of ideological supplements. This may be dialectical, but it doesnt seem very materialist. It seems related to the way in which iek in passages such as those cited above gives way to the eternal philosophical temptation to try and make Hegel more plausible than he really is. It is true that the Hegelian Absolute is more a structure than a substance, the negative relationship of its cancelled but incorporated constituent terms. But its structure is necessarily teleological in that its culminating moment is both anticipated by and completes those that precedes it, thus, as Hegel repeatedly says, closing the dialectical circle. iek seeks to obfuscate this problem by appealing to Lacans doctrine of the Real at once the limit and the ruin of the Symbolic (or social) as the ontological ground of antagonism. But this simply seeks to shore up one ramshackle metaphysical structure with another a movement that is concealed by ieks dialectical fluency and skill in changing the subject. Badiou rightly comments that the Real in both Lacan and iek is a concept so vanishing, so brutally punctual, that it is impossible to draw its consequences. The problem of ieks philosophical allegiances recurs at the political level in a quasi-Stalinist rhetorical maximalism based on Badious subtractive notion of subjectivity. Thus he comments on Brechts famous 1953 poem on the Berlin rising where he sarcastically suggests that the government should dissolve the people and elect a new one: we should bravely admit that it is in fact a duty even the duty of a revolutionary party to dissolve the people and elect another, that is, to bring about the transubstantiation of the old opportunistic people (the inert crowd) into a revolutionary body aware of its historical task, to transform the body of the empirical people into a body of Truth. Or again: If we really want to name an act which was truly daring, for which one truly had to have the balls to try the impossible, but which was simultaneously a horrible act, an act causing suffering beyond comprehension, it was Stalins forced collectivization in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1920s. Is it necessary to say, after all the disasters of the twentieth century, that this kind of daring we dont need? Nevertheless, the Badiou-iek theory of subjectivity is an attempt to address a real problem, that of the specifically revolutionary subject and, closely connected, that of the relationship between class relations and the political field. One way of putting this is in terms of the distinction that Badiou draws in Thorie du sujet between the working class as an empirically existing social class and the proletariat as the revolutionary political subject that is the bearer of universal human emancipation. The problem of Marxist politics can then be reformulated as follows: how can the working class become the proletariat? Marx and Engels thought that there was a tendency for the two to coincide thanks to an evolutionary historical process. Lenins conception of the vanguard party is based on the premiss that no such tendency exists: the development of revolutionary class consciousness is

the outcome of an interaction between workers struggles and the intervention of Marxist political organization. Under Lenins inspiration, Lukcs exacerbated the distinction between working class and proletariat by muffling the proletariat in the properties of Hegelian Absolute Spirit. Among contemporary radical thinkers Hardt and Negri are perhaps the closest to Marx and Engels. While not relying an evolutionary philosophy of history, they nonetheless conceive the multitude, understood as all those who work under the rule of capital, as tendentially an active social subject not merely capable of inaugurating different ways of living, but always-already actually doing so. Relative to this, Badiou and iek are better Leninists in insisting that there is nothing automatic about the transformation of working class into proletariat. But the fundamental dislocation that Badiou insists on between situations and subjects makes it impossible to develop a framework in which to address how such a transformation might occur. iek has, as we have seen, a much more nuanced approach. But in the passage on Brecht he slips into the kind of Mao-Stalinism we find Badiou still affirming in Thorie du sujet, where the constitution of a revolutionary subject requires processes of purification and even purges. Even in Logiques des mondes, Badiou paints an approving portrait of the figures of the state revolutionary Chinese Legalists, French Jacobins, and Maoists, all of whom articulated versions of the same political truth defined by four determinations (will, equality, trust in the people, and terror) that iek endorses and appropriates. Quite aside from the failure to come to terms with the experience of Stalinism that this represents, it seems to repeat the political illusion denounced by the young Marx for imagining a political emancipation that floats free of material determinations and social mobilizations. The alternative to both these approaches has to be pursued along two dimensions. First, the resumption of Marxs critique of political economy and in particular analysis of the concrete forms in which people today are subsumed under capital and thereby have capacities for collective action, resistance, and transformation. This task is already being undertaken by a number of contemporary Marxist political economists for example, Robert Brenner, Grard Dumnil and Dominique Lvy, Peter Gowan, Chris Harman, David Harvey, and Claude Serfati. Secondly, what Daniel Bensad has called the return of strategy, in other words, the concerted effort to explore the ways in which contemporary movements of resistance to neo-liberalism and imperialism can go beyond mere resistance and intervene in the political field, constructing alternatives that offer the large majority of the population in North and South a way out of the impasse to which la pense unique has led us. As should be clear, this is involves more than theoretical reflection: it requires the practical skills in initiative, debate, negotiation, compromise, confrontation, and inspiration involved in constructing movements and parties. In this domain no theorist has many answers, but I believe Lenin and Gramsci have not exhausted what they have to say to us. Alex Callinicos 7 May 2007