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What democratic materialism furiously rejects is the notion that there can be an infinite [[universal]] Truth which cuts across this [[multitude]] of worlds – in [[politics]], this means “totalitarianism” which imposes its truth as universal. This is why one should reject, say, Jacobins, who imposed onto the [[plurality]] of the [[French]] [[society]] their universal notions of equality and [[other]] truths, and thus necessarily ended in terror… This brings us to the second supplement: there is an even more narrow [[political]] version of the democratic-materialist axiom: “All that takes [[place]] in today’s society is the dynamics of post-modern [[globalization]], and the ([[conservative]]-nostalgic, fundamentalist, Old [[Leftist]], nationalist, [[religious]]...) reactions and [[resistances]] to it” – to which, of course, materialist dialectics adds its proviso: “… with the exception of the radical-emancipatory ([[Communist]]) politics of truth.”
It is here that the materialist-[[dialectic]] passage from the Two to Three gains all its weight: the axiom of Communist politics is not simply the dualist “class “[[Class Struggle|class struggle]],” but, more precisely, the [[Third]] [[moment]] as the subtraction from the Two of the hegemonic politics. That is to say, the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a field of (ideological) visibility with its own “principal contradiction” (today, it is the opposition of [[market]]-[[freedom]]-democracy and fundamentalist-terrorist-[[totalitarianism]] - “Islamofascism” etc.), and the first [[thing]] to do is to reject (to subtract from) this opposition, to perceive it as a [[false]] opposition destined to obfuscate the [[true]] line of [[division]].
==The false point of hegemonic politics==
==The Politics of Minimal Difference==
These considerations enable us to define the art of a ''politics of [[Minimal Difference|minimal difference]]'': to be able to [[identify]] and then do focus on a minimal (ideological, legislative, etc.) measure which, prima facie, not only does not question the system’s premises, but even seem to merely apply to its actual functioning its own principles and thus render it more self-consistent; however, a critico-ideological “[[parallax]] view” leads us to surmise that this minimal measure, while in no way disturbing the system’s [[explicit]] mode of functioning, effectively “moves it underground,” introduces a crack in its foundations. Today, more than ever, we effectively need what Johnston calls a “pre-evental [[discipline]] of time”:
<blockquote>This other sort of [[temporal]] discipline would be neither the undisciplined impatience of hurriedly doing anything and everything to enact some ill-defined, poorly conceived notion of making things different nor the quietist patience of either resigning oneself to the current state of affairs drifting along interminably and/or awaiting the unpredictable arrival of a not-to-be-actively-precipitated “x” sparking genuine change (Badiou’s philosophy sometimes seems to be in [[danger]] of licensing a version of this latter mode of quietism). Those subjected to today’s frenetic socio-economic forms of late-capitalism are constantly at risk of succumbing to various forms of what one could refer to loosely as “attention deficit disorder,” that is, a frantic, thoughtless jumping from [[present]] to ever-new present. At the political level, such capitalist impatience must be countered with the discipline of what could be designated as a specifically communist patience (designated thus in line with Badiou’s assertion that all authentic forms of politics are “communist” in the broad [[sense]] of being both emancipatory as well as “generic” qua radically egalitarian and non-identitarian) - not the quietist patience condemned above, but, instead, the calm contemplation of the details of situations, states, and worlds with an eye to the discerning of ideologically veiled weak points in the [[structural]] architecture of the statist system. Given the [[theoretical]] validity of assuming that these camouflaged Achilles’ heels (as hidden evental sites) can and do [[exist]] in one’s worldly context, one should be patiently hopeful that one’s apparently minor gestures, carried out under the guidance of a pre-evental surveillance of the situation in [[search]] of its concealed kernels of [[real]] transformation, might come to entail major repercussions for the state-of-the-situation and/or [[transcendental]] regime of the world.(ibid)</blockquote>
There is, however, a [[limit]] to this strategy: if followed thoroughly, it ends up in a kind of “[[active]] quietism”: while forever postponing the Big Act, all one does is to engage in small interventions with the [[secret]] hope that somehow, inexplicably, by means of a [[magic]] “jump from quantity to quality,” they will lead to [[global]] radical change. This strategy has to be supplemented by the readiness and ability to discern the moment when the possibility of the Big Change is approaching, and, at that point, to quickly change the strategy, take the risk and engage in total struggle. In other words, one should not forget that, in politics, “major repercussions” do not come by themselves: true, one has to lay the ground for them by means of the [[patient]] work, but one should also know to seize the moment when it arrives. Even more, the lesson of Rosa Luxemburg’s critique of reformism is pertinent here: it is not enough to patiently wait for the “right moment” of the revolution; if one merely waits for it, it will never come, i.e., one has to start with “premature” attempts which – therein resides the “pedagogy of the revolution“ – in their very failure to achieve their professed [[goal]] create the ([[subjective]]) [[conditions]] for the “right” moment.
The “specifically communist patience” is not just the patient waiting for the moment when radical change will explode like what the system [[theory]] calls “emergent property”; it is also the patience of losing the battles in [[order]] to gain the final fight (recall Mao’s slogan: “from defeat to defeat, to the final victory”). Or, to put it in more Badiouian time: the fact that the evental irruption functions as a break in time, as introducing a totally different order of [[temporality]] (the temporality of the “work of [[love]],” the fidelity to the event), means that, from the perspective of non-evental time of historical evolution, there is NEVER a “proper moment” for the revolutionary event, the situation is never “mature” for the revolutionary act – [[The Act|the act ]] is always, by definition, “premature.” Recall what truly deserves the title of the [[repetition]] of the French Revolution: the Haiti revolution led by Toussaint l’Ouverture – it was clearly “ahead of his time,” “premature,” and as such doomed to fail, yet, precisely as such, it was perhaps even more of an Event than the French Revolution itself. These [[past]] defeats accumulate the [[utopian]] [[energy]] which will explode in the final battle: “maturation” is not waiting for “objective” circumstances to reach maturity, but the accumulation of defeats.
==The Marxist Wager==
Progressive [[liberals]] today often complain that they would like to join a “revolution” (a more radical emancipatory political movement), but no matter how desperately they search for it, they just “don’t see it” (they don’t see anywhere in the social space a [[political agent]] with a will and strength to seriously engage in such activity). While there is a moment of truth in it, one should nonetheless also add that the very attitude of these liberals is in itself part of a problem: if one just waits to “see” a revolutionary movement, it will, of course, never arise, and one will never see it. What [[Hegel]] says about the curtain that separates appearances from true reality (behind the [[veil]] of [[appearance]] there is nothing, only what [[The Subject|the subject ]] who looks there put there), holds also for a revolutionary process: “seeing” and “desire” are here inextricably linked, i.e., the revolutionary potential is not there to discover as an [[objective]] social fact, one “sees it” only insofar as one “desires” it (engages oneself in the movement).
No wonder Mensheviks and those who opposed Lenin’s call for a revolutionary takeover in the summer of 1917 “didn’t see” the conditions for it as “ripe” and opposed it as “premature” – they simply did not WANT the revolution. (Another version of this skeptical argument about “seeing” is that liberals [[claim]] how capitalism is today so global and all-encompassing that they cannot “see” any serious alternative to it, that they cannot imagine a feasible “outside” to it. The reply to this is that, insofar as this is true, they do not see at all, tout court: the task is not to see the outside, but to see in the first place (to grasp the [[nature]] of today’s capitalism) – the Marxist wager is that, when we “see” this, we see enough, inclusive of how to get out…) So our reply to the worried progressive liberals, eager to join the revolution, and just not [[seeing]] its chances anywhere around, should be like the answer to the proverbial ecologist worried about the prospect of catastrophe: don't worry, the catastrophe will arrive ...
==Repetition and Resurrection==
Perhaps, the reason Badiou neglects this dimension is his all too crude opposition between repetition and [[The Cut|the cut ]] of the Event, his dismissal of repetition as an obstacle to the rise of the New, ultimately as the [[death]] [[drive]] itself, the morbid attachment to some obscure [[jouissance]] which entraps the subject in the self-destructive [[vicious cycle]]. In this sense, “life” as the subjective category of the fidelity to an Event “keeps at a distance the conservation drive (the [[instinct]] misnamed ‘of life’), as well as the mortifying drive (the [[death instinct]]). Life is what breaks up with [[drives]].”(Badiou 2006: 531) What Badiou misses here is the fact that “death drive” is, paradoxically, the [[Freudian]] name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within [[psychoanalysis]]: for an [[uncanny]] excess of life, for an ‘undead’ urge which persists beyond the ([[biological]]) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.
As such, [[death drive]] stands for the very opposite of the obscure tendency to self-annihilation or self-[[destruction]] – as is rendered clear in the work of [[Wagner]] whom Badiou admires so much. It is precisely the reference to Wagner which enables us to see how the Freudian [[Death Drive|death drive ]] has nothing whatsoever to do with the craving for self-annihilation, for the [[return]] to the inorganic [[absence]] of any life-tension. Death drive does NOT reside in Wagner's heroes' longing to die, to find peace in death: it is, on the contrary, the very opposite of dying - a name for the "undead" eternal life itself, for the horrible fate of being caught in the endless [[repetitive]] cycle of wandering around in [[guilt]] and [[pain]].
It is at this point that one should turn to [[Deleuze]] against Badiou, to Deleuze’s precise elaborations on repetition as the very [[form]] of the emergence of the New. Of course, Badiou is too refined a thinker not to perceive the evental dimension of repetition: when, in Logiques des mondes, he deploys the three “subjective destinations” of an event (faithful, reactive, obscure), he adds a forth one, that of “resurrection,” the subjective re-activation of an event whose traces were obliterated, “repressed” into the historico-ideological [[unconscious]]: “every faithful subject can thus reincorporate into its evental present a truth fragment which in the old present was pushed beneath the bar of occultation. This reincorporation is what we call resurrection.”(Badiou 2006: 75) His beautifully developed example is that of Spartacus: erased from [[official]] history, his name was resurrected first by the black slaves’ rebellion in Haiti (the progressive governor Laveaux called Toussaint Louverture “black Spartacus”), and, a century later, by the two [[German]] “Spartakists,” Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. What matters here, however, is that Badiou shirks from calling this resurrection ''repetition''…
Is, however, there not something terrorist in the very notion of “death drive” as a political category? Yes – and why not? Therein resides one of Badiou’s key contributions to the contemporary political debate: his courageous rehabilitation of the notion of terror: “Materialist dialectics assumes, without particular joy, that, till now, no political subject was able to arrive at the [[eternity]] of the truth it was deploying without moments of terror. Since, as Saint-Just asked: “What do those who want neither Virtue nor Terror want?” His answer is well-known: they want corruption – another name for the subject’s defeat.” (ibid: 98) In ''Le siecle'', Badiou conceives as a [[sign]] of the political [[regression]] that occurred towards the end of the XXth century the shift from “[[humanism]] AND terror” to “humanism OR terror.” In 1945, Maurice [[Merleau-Ponty]] write ''Humanism and Terror'', his defense of the Soviet [[Communism]] as involving a kind of Pascalean wager that announces the topic of what [[Bernard Williams]] later developed as “moral luck”: the present terror will be retroactively justified if the society that will emerge from it will be truly [[human]]; today, such a conjunction of terror and humanism is properly unthinkable, the predominant liberal view replaces AND with OR: either humanism or terror…
More precisely, there are four variations on this motif: humanism AND terror, humanism OR terror, each either in a “positive” or in a “negative” sense. “Humanism and terror” in a positive sense is what [[Merleau-ponty|Merleau-Ponty ]] elaborated, it sustains [[Stalinism]] (the forceful – “terrorist” - engendering of the New Man), and is already clearly discernible in the French Revolution, in the guise of Robespierre’s conjunction of virtue and terror. This conjunction can be negated in two ways. It can involve the choice “humanism OR terror,” i.e., the liberal-[[humanist]] [[project]] in all its versions, from the dissident anti-Stalinist humanism up to today’s neo-Habermasians (Luc Ferry & Alain Renault in [[France]]) and other defenders of [[human rights]] AGAINST (totalitarian, fundamentalist) terror. Or it can retain the conjunction “humanism AND terror,” but in a [[negative]] mode: all those [[philosophical]] and ideological orientations, from Heidegger and conservative Christians to partisans of Oriental spirituality and Deep [[Ecology]], who perceive terror as the truth - the ultimate consequence - of the humanist project itself, of its ''hubris''.
There is, however, a fourth variation, usually [[left]] aside: the choice “humanism OR terror,” but with TERROR, not humanism, as a positive term. This is a radical [[position]] difficult to sustain, but, perhaps, our only hope: it does not amount to the [[obscene]] [[madness]] of openly pursuing a “terrorist and inhuman politics”, but something much more difficult to think. In today’s “post-deconstructionist” thought (if one risks this ridiculous designation which cannot but sound as its own parody), the term “inhuman” gained a new weight, especially in the work of [[Agamben]] and Badiou. It is against this background that one can [[understand]] why [[Lacan]] speaks of the ''inhuman'' core of the [[neighbor]]. Back in the 1960s, the era of [[structuralism]], [[Louis Althusser]] launched the [[notorious]] [[formula]] of “theoretical anti-humanism,” allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by ''[[practical]] humanism''.
