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43R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 8 1 ( S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 3 )

Our contemporaryimpotence

Alain Badiou

We have, in this conference, discussed all of thecrucial aspects of the situation in Europe and espe-cially in Greece. We have, of course, analysed thegreat historical structures at stake: the particularlyaggressive global politics of contemporary capitalism,the complicit weakness of the various states, and

the reactive role played by Europe as it now stands,but also the law of subjective forms that illuminatesthe contemporary dialectic of submission and insur-rection. We have also taken stock of the urgency ofmilitant demands those that issue from the ordealsthat increasing poverty and the destruction of socialforms have imposed on the people, and others issuingfrom the increasingly arrogant actions of fascist gangs,who play on absolutely cruel nationalist themes andabsolutely intolerable racist realities. To this end, wehave all tried to assess the ongoing acts of resistance.

I have nothing to add to all of this, so far as theimmediate characteristics of the situation in Greeceis concerned. One of my great teachers or masters[matres ] in the domain of communist politics [MaoZedong] used to say No investigation, no right tospeak! Unlike other contributors to our colloquium,our Greek friends in particular, I have not, after all,undertaken a political or militant investigation into thesituation that serves as our point of reference here. Iknow that the experience of a new political situation

can be understood only from within its own process,that ordinary information and opinions do not suf ce.And this is for a very simple reason: political novelty,which is subjective, does not allow itself to be graspedfrom the outside while it is in the process of constitut-ing itself. This is, moreover, what the master I cited amoment ago meant when he added: to investigate aproblem is to solve it. And I have neither the capacitynor the intention of solving any of the problems thatcurrently beset the Greek people.

My subjectivity here is therefore broadly externalto the sequence in question. I will accept the limitsof this position, and begin with a feeling, an affect,

which is perhaps personal, perhaps unjusti ed, butwhich I nevertheless feel, given the information at mydisposal: a feeling of general political impotence. Whatis currently happening in Greece is something like aconcentrate of this feeling.

I certainly admire the eloquence of my friend and

comrade Costas Douzinas, who has buttressed hisavowed optimism with precise references to whathe takes to be the political novelties of the peoplesresistance in Greece, where he has even discerned theemergence of a new political subject. 1 But I am notconvinced. Of course, the courage and tactical inven-tiveness of progressive and anti-fascist demonstratorsthat Costas has evoked is cause for enthusiasm. Suchthings, moreover, are thoroughly necessary. But novel?No, not at all. They are the invariant features of everyreal mass movement: egalitarianism, mass democracy,the invention of slogans, bravery, the speed of reac-tions We saw all of these same things, undertakenwith the same energy joyful and always a littleanxious in May 68, in France. We have seen themmore recently in Tahrir Square in Egypt. Indeed, truthbe told, these things must have already been at work inthe times of Spartacus or Thomas Mnzer. Some fortyyears ago, I suggested calling these determinations thecommunist invariants, and today I would say, moreprecisely: the invariant characteristics of movement

communism. Properly political novelties, and a newpolitical subject, are something else: their vitalitydemands movement, but can never be confoundedwith it.

And so let us set out, provisionally, from anotherpoint of departure.

Greece is a country with a very long history, oneof universal signi cance. It is a country whose resist -ance to successive oppressions and occupations has aparticular historical density. Its a country where thecommunist movement, including the form of armedstruggle, has been very powerful. A country where,even today, the youth set an example by sustaining

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massive and tenacious revolts. A country where,without a doubt, the classic reactionary forces are verywell organized, but where there is also the courageousand ample resource of the great popular movements.A country where there are cer tainly formidable fascistorganizations, but a country where there is also a leftistparty with an apparently solid electoral and militant

base.Now, everything in this country happens as if

nothing could stop the utter domination of capitalism,unleashed by its own crisis. As if, under the directionof ad hoc committees and servile governments, thecountry had no alternative but to follow the savagelyanti-popular decrees of the European bureaucracy.Indeed, with regard to the questions posed and theirEuropean solutions, the resistance movement looksmore like a delaying tactic than the bearer of a genuinepolitical alternative.

Such is the great lesson of the times, inviting usnot only to support the courage of the Greek peoplewith all our strength, but to join them in meditatingon what must be thought and done so that this courageshould not be, in a despairing way, a useless courage.

For what is striking in Greece above all, butelsewhere as well, particularly in France is themanifest impotence of the progressive forces to compeleven the slightest meaningful retreat of the economicand state powers that are seeking to submit the peopleunreservedly to the new (though also long-standing andfundamental) law of thoroughgoing liberalism.

Not only are the progressive forces making noheadway, and failing to score even a limited success,but its instead the forces of fascism that have beengrowing and that, against the illusory backdrop ofa xenophobic and racist nationalism, now claim tolead the opposition to the European administrationsdecrees.

My feeling is that the root cause of this impotenceis not, at bottom, the peoples inertia, a lack of courage,

or a majority support for necessary evils. Manytestimonies, even here at this very colloquium, haveshown us that the resources for a vigorous and massivepopular resistance exist in Greece. Even in France,with the actions against Sarkozys pension reform areform that is of a piece with the dismantling of publicservices and crucial institutions of social assistance byservile bureaucracies, whose decrees are unanimouslyrelayed by the acting governments we have seen thatsigni cant popular elements demonstrate their capacityfor stubborn resistance and enact the invariants ofmovement communism, notably the use of uncon-ventional forms of strike and assemblies subtracted

from trade-unionist hegemony. Nevertheless, no newthinking of politics has emerged on a mass scale fromthese attempts, no new vocabulary has emerged fromthe rhetoric of protest, and the union bosses have

nally managed to convince everyone that we mustwait for elections.

I think that what we are experiencing today is

instead that the majority of the political categoriesmovement activists are trying to use to think andtransform our current situations are, as they now stand,largely inoperative.

In truth, after the sweeping movements of the 1960sand 1970s, we have inherited a very long counter-revolutionary period, economically, politically andideologically. This counter-revolution has effectivelydestroyed the con dence and power that were once ableto commit popular consciousness to the most elemen-tary words of emancipatory politics words, to cite

a few at random, like class struggle, general strike,nationalization without compensation, revolution,clandestine action, workerstudent alliance, nationalliberation, peoples dictatorship, mass democracy,proletarian party, and many others The key wordof communism, which dominated the political stagesince the beginning of the nineteenth century, is itselfhenceforth con ned to a sort of historical infamy,regarding which it must indeed be admitted that thehistorical account in which even progressive opinion isset has been entirely dictated by the enemy. That theequation communism = totalitarianism should cometo appear as natural and be unanimously accepted is anindication of how badly revolutionaries failed duringthe disastrous 1980s. Of course, we also cannot avoidan incisive and severe criticism of what the socialiststates and communist parties in power, especiallyin the Soviet Union, had become. But this criticismshould be our own . It should nourish our own theoriesand practices, helping them to progress, and not leadto some kind of morose renunciation, throwing out

the political baby with the historical bathwater. Thishas led to an astonishing state of affairs: regardinga historical episode of capital importance for us, wehave adopted, practically without restriction, the pointof view of the enemy. And those who havent done sohave simply persevered in the old lugubrious rhetoric,as if nothing had happened.

Of all the victories of our enemy in whose rankswe should list the new guard dogs of the contempo-rary ideological order, who have almost always beenrenegades from the movement of the 1960s this sym-bolic victory is among the most important. Not onlyhave we allowed our own vocabulary to be discredited

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and ridiculed, when it is not simply treated as criminal,but we ourselves make use of the enemys favouritewords as if they were our own. This is particularly thecase for the situation that interests us, with the wordsdemocracy, economy, Europe, and several others.Even the meaning of rather neutral expressions, likepeople [ les gens ], is for the most part dependent on

polls and the media, and incorporated into nonsensicalturns of phrase like people think that

Back in the day of the old communisms, we usedto heap mockery on what we called langue de bois ,or hackneyed, clichd language empty words andpompous adjectives. Of course, of course. But theexistence of a common language is also that of ashared Idea. The ef cacy of mathematics in the sci -ences and it cannot be denied that mathematics isa magni cent langue de bois has everything to dowith the fact that it formalizes the scienti c idea. The

ability to quickly formalize the analysis of a situationand the tactical consequences of that analysis is noless required in politics. It is a sign of strategic vitality.

Today, one of the great powers of the of cial demo -cratic ideology is precisely that it has, at its disposal, alangue de bois that is spoken in every medium and byevery one of our governments without exception. Whocould believe that terms like democracy, freedoms,market economy, human rights, balanced budget,national effort, the French people, competitiveness,reforms, and so on, are anything other than elementsof an omnipresent langue de bois ? We are the ones,we militants without a strategy of emancipation, whoare (and who have been for some time now) the realaphasics! And it is not the sympathetic and unavoidablelanguage of movementist democracy that will save us.Down with this or that, all together we will win, getout, resistance!, it is right to rebel All of this iscapable of momentarily summoning forth collectiveaffects, and, tactically, this is all very useful butit leaves the question of a legible strategy entirely

unresolved. This is too poor a language for a situateddiscussion of the future of emancipatory actions.

The key to political success certainly lies in theforce of rebellion, its scope and courage. But alsoin its discipline, and in the declarations that it iscapable of declarations having to do with a positivestrategic future, and that reveal a new possibility thatremained invisible amidst the enemys propaganda.This is what the organized militants of a movement,or of any situation, ought to extract from what is saidand done; this is what they ought to formalize and torefer for broader discussion to the popular base of themovement or situation. This is why the existence of

sweeping popular movements, although it may wellbe a historical phenomenon, does not by itself furnisha political vision. The reason for this is that whatcements a movement on the basis of individual affectsis always of a negative character: the sort of thing thatproceeds from abstract negations, like down withcapitalism, or stop the layoffs, or no to austerity, or

down with the European troika, which have strictly noother effect than provisionally soldering the movementwith the negative frailty of its affects; as for morespeci c negations, since their target is precise and theybring together different strata of the population, likedown with Mubarak, during the Arab Spring, they canindeed achieve a result, but they can never construct

the politics of that result, as we see today in Egyptand in Tunisia, where reactionary religious partiesreap the rewards of the movement, to which theyhave no true relation. For every politics becomes theregimentation of what it af rms and proposes, and not

of what it negates or rejects. A politics is an active andorganized conviction, a thought in action that indicatesunseen possibilities. Watchwords like resistance! arecertainly suitable for bringing individuals together, butthey also risk making such an assembly nothing morethan a joyful and enthusiastic mixture of historicalexistence and political frailty, only to become, oncethe enemy (who is far better politically, discursivelyand governmentally equipped) wins the day, a bitterredoubling and sterile repetition of failure.

The political master whom I cited earlier also usedto say You cant solve a problem? Well, get down andinvestigate the present facts and its past history! The

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current situation in the world closely resembles that ofthe years 184050. Then, too, after the French Revolu-tion of 179294, just as after the uprisings, revolutionsand victorious peoples wars of the 1960s and 1970s,we have a very long counter-revolutionary sequence,dominated by a vigorous liberal capitalist drive toglobalization. Then, too, between 1847 and 1849, there

was something like a Peoples Spring throughoutEurope, as would later come to pass throughout theArab world, and also in a few Western situations.Then, too, on the side of the rebels we nd a languagethat is enthusiastic, democratic and revolutionary, butalso impoverished and without unity. And then, too, we

nd everywhere the subsequent triumph of reactionar -ies and the rise to power of nancial speculators andnew forms of corruption. It is not until after decadesof organized labour, such as the creation of the FirstInternational or the uni cation of the social-democratic

parties, and after glorious but desperate endeavourslike the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution of1905, that the political capacity of the workers surgesforth, ready for victory, and embodied, as it must be,in international organizations. Again, it was necessaryfor the language of Marxism to become practicallyhegemonic not only throughout the entire workersmovement, but also, in the end, among the vast ruralmasses, whether in China or in countries subject tocolonial terror.

Indeed it seems that its not in the contagion of anegative affect of resistance that we might nd whatit takes to compel a serious retreat of the reactionaryforces that, today, seek to disintegrate every formof thought and action that refuses to follow them.It is in the shared discipline of a common idea andthe increasingly widespread usage of a homogeneouslanguage.

The reconstruction of such a language is a crucialimperative. It is to this end that I have sought toreintroduce, rede ne and reorganize everything that

hinges on the word communism.We should point out, in passing, that the word com-

munism denotes three fundamental things.First of all, it denotes the analytic observation

according to which, in todays dominant societies,freedom, whose democratic fetishization were allfamiliar with, is, in fact, entirely dominated by prop-erty. Freedom is nothing but the freedom to acquireevery possible commodity without any pre-establishedlimit, and the power to do what one wants is strictlymeasured by the extent of this acquisition. Someonewho has lost any possibility of acquiring somethingdoes not, as a matter of fact, have any kind of freedom,

as is plain to see, for instance, with the vagabondsthat the English liberals of rising capitalism executedby hanging, without any qualms.. This is the reasonwhy Marx, in the Manifesto , declares that all theinjunctions of communism can, in a sense, be reducedto just one: the abolition of private property.

Next, communism signi es the historical hypothe-

sis according to which it is not necessary that freedombe ruled by property, and human societies be directedby a strict oligarchy of powerful businessmen andtheir servants in politics, the police, the military andthe media. A society is possible in which what Marxcalls free association predominates, where productivelabour is collectivized, where the disappearance of thegreat non-egalitarian contradictions (between intel-lectual and manual labour, between town and country,between men and women, between management andlabour, etc. ) is under way, and where decisions that

concern everyone are really everyones business. Weshould treat this egalitarian possibility as a principleof thought and action, and not let go of it.

Finally, communism designates the need for aninternational political organization . This organizationsets out from the encounter between the principles andthe effective action of the popular masses. On thisbasis, it endeavours to set peoples inventive thinkingin motion, to construct, in a fashion unalloyed with theexisting state, a power internal to any given situation.The goal is for this power to be capable of bending thereal in the direction prescribed by the tying together ofprinciples with the active subjectivity of all who havethe will to transform the situation in question.

The word communism thus names the complete process by which freedom is freed from its non-egalitarian submission to property . That this wordhas been the one that our enemies have most doggedlyopposed has to do with the fact that they cannotendure this process, which would indeed destroy their freedom, the norm of which is xed by property.

After all, this doggedness alone, this ferocious willto criminalize the word communism which beganin the nineteenth century, well before the experienceof the socialist states amounts to what the Chinesecall teaching by negative example: if that is what ourenemies detest above all, then it is with its rediscoverythat we must begin.

No doubt, and I will nish with this point, we mustalso be as clear as possible, especially when facedwith gangs of fascists, about what we mean whenwe use the word people. Its a matter of connectingthe word people to the reconstruction of the wordcommunism.

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This connection passes through the four possiblesenses of the word people: the fascist sense, the statistand juridical sense, the sense it takes in struggles ofnational liberation, and the sense it has in politicalactions aiming at egalitarian emancipation.

In this classi cation, we have two negative sensesof the word people. The rst, and most obvious, is

the one that anchors a closed and always ctional racial or national identity. The historical existenceof this kind of people demands the construction ofa despotic state, which violently brings into existencethe ction that founds it. The second which is morediscreet, but, on a grand scale, even more noxious,owing to its suppleness and the consensus it enjoys isone that subordinates the recognition of a people toa state that is supposedly legitimate and benevolent,simply because it helps a middle class to grow (whenit can) and to persist (in any case), a middle class

that is free to consume the worthless products onwhich capital fattens it, and thus free to say whateverit wants, so long as what it says has no effect on thegeneral mechanism. We see easily enough that the

rst sense is a usage that is practically obligatory infascist politics. The second is the one that dominatesour parliamentary democracies. Lets say that its therace-people that is at stake in the rst case, and whatwe could call the middle-class-people in the second.

We, likewise, have two positive senses of the wordpeople. The rst is the constitution of a people inthe scope of their historical existence, in so far as thisscope is denied by colonial and imperial domination,or by an invader. People thus exists according to thefuture anterior of an inexistent state. It is a matter ofliberating the people from their subjection, from theirnegation, starting from the idea of a new, popular state.The second is the existence of a people which declaresitself to be a people through a process that star ts fromits hard kernel [ noyau dur ], which is precisely what theof cial state excludes from its supposedly legitimate

people. For example, the workers of the nineteenthcentury, the peasants in every country subject to colo-nization, or today, again, members of the proletariatwho have come from abroad. Such a people politicallyaf rms its existence through its organized solidaritywith its hard kernel. It can therefore only exist inthe strategic ambit of abolishing the existing state,precisely because the latter insists that to recognizethe existence of such a people is absolutely impossible.

People is therefore a political category of commu-nism, whether upstream of the existence of a desiredstate, whose existence power prohibits, or down-stream of an established state whose disappearance

is demanded by a new people, at once internal andexternal to the of cial people.

The word people, at bottom, has a positive senseonly with respect to the possible inexistence of astate: be it a barred state that one wishes to create, oran of cial state that one wishes to destroy. Peopleis a word that draws all of its value either through

the transitory forms of wars of national liberation, orthrough the de nitive forms of communist politics,which have always taken as a strategic norm what theycall the withering away of the state.

Have these verbal exercises taken us far a eld fromGreece and the concrete urgency of the situation?Perhaps. However, a politics [ une politique ] is alwaysthe encounter between the discipline of ideas and thesurprise of circumstances. It is an immediate power,but also the institution of a duration.

My wish is for Greece to be, for us all, the universal

site of such an encounter.

Translated by Olivia Lucca Fraser

Note 1. See Costas Douzinas, Philosophy and Resistance in the

Crisis: Greece and the Future of Europe , Polity Press,Cambridge, 2013.