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FORCE OF NONLAW: ALAIN BADIOUS THEORY OF JUSTICE

Bruno Bosteels*
Under the pretense of defending the law and parliamentary democracy, the state is the quintessential illegal agent of all legality, of the violence of right, and of the law as nonlaw. On the other hand, the communist project is justice, the claim that the nonlaw can become the last law of proletarian politics. Communism, the only modern theory of revolution, realizes the type of subjectivity that can sustain the universal principle of justice, that is, the nonlaw as law.

Alain Badiou, Thorie du sujet 1 Aside from the much-discussed comments in Saint Paul: La fondation de luniversalisme on the canonical passage in Pauls Letter to the Romans that inextricably links law and sin as well as prohibition and the desire for transgression, Alain Badious most sustained reflection upon law and event occurs in the section Lack and Destruction that sits at the physical and conceptual center of his still fairly unknown Thorie du sujet. This section further stands out for our purposes because, unlike what happens in the chapter Paul Against the Law from the later book, here we do not encounter a stark opposition between law and event, or between law and grace, but rather an internally divided and spiraling periodization wherein the event not only emerges out of the impasse of the existing law, but the appearance of a new law itself marks one of the very earliest definitions of the event qua event as well.1 Badious uvre for sure contains a number of other
* Bruno Bosteels is an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University, where he teaches Latin American and Comparative Literature. He is the author of Badiou o el recomienzo del materialismo dialctico (2007). Currently he also serves as editor of diacritics. 1 See ALAIN BADIOU, Manque et destruction, in THORIE DU SUJET 129-91 (1982). Part of this section has been translated into English as Alain Badiou, Lack and Destruction, 2003 UMBR(A): J. OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 39-61 (Marina de Carneri trans.). I have substantially modified this existing version in almost every quotation used in the present essay. For a full translation, see the forthcoming ALAIN BADIOU, THEORY OF THE SUBJECT (Bruno Bosteels trans.,

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discussions on legal or juridical topics, such as the criticism of the idea of right and the rule of law in the way these notions are wielded about by proponents of liberal parliamentary democracy against the threat of so-called totalitarianism, in Dun dsastre obscur (originally subtitled Droit, Etat, Politique before being reissued with the new subtitle Sur la fin de la vrit dEtat); or the comparable criticism of the ethics of human rights in LEthique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal.2 But these discussions, even the ones from the immensely popular LEthique, not only are all too brief, in my eyes at least they also appear to be rather minor in scope when compared to the pivotal reflections on the law in Thorie du sujet. First presented as a seminar between January 1975 and June 1979 but published only in 1982 with a preface dated July 1981, that is, shortly after Franois Mitterrands clamorous arrival to power in the French presidential elections of the same year, Thorie du sujet is the closest Badiou has ever come to the unique style, wit, and audacity of Jacques Lacans seminarwhose teachings he at the same time puts under close scrutiny and proposes to expand. In retrospect, moreover, this work can be said to anticipate certain themes from what I assume to be an in-house favorite among Jacques Derridas many texts on the subject, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, itself in large part a painstaking analysis of Walter Benjamins classical but for this reason no less cryptic essay called Critique of Violence.3 Both Badiou and Derrida in fact seek to bring the law to the limit-point where it capsizes so as to uncover a dimension of nonlaw internal to the law

Continuum 2008). Compare with ALAIN BADIOU, SAINT PAUL: LA FONDATION DE LUNIVERSALISME 79-89 (1997), translated in ALAIN BADIOU, SAINT PAUL: THE FOUNDATION OF UNIVERSALISM 75-85 (Ray Brassier trans., 2003). 2 ALAIN BADIOU, DUN DSASTRE OBSCUR: (DROIT, ETAT, POLITIQUE) (1991), translated in Alain Badiou, Of an Obscure Disaster, 22 LACANIAN INK 58-89 (Barbara P. Fulks trans., 2003). ALAIN BADIOU, LTHIQUE: ESSAI SUR LA CONSCIENCE DU MAL (Nous 2003), translated in ALAIN BADIOU, ETHICS: AN ESSAY ON THE UNDERSTANDING OF EVIL 8-10 (Peter Hallward trans., 2001). 3 JACQUES DERRIDA, ACTS OF RELIGION 230 (Gil Anidjar ed., 2002), reprinting JACQUES DERRIDA, FORCE OF LAW: THE MYSTICAL FOUNDATION OF AUTHORITY (Mary Quaintance trans., 1990), translating JACQUES DERRIDA, FORCE DE LOI (1994) [hereinafter DERRIDA, ACTS OF RELIGION]. As regards our topic of Law and Event, I am tempted to quote Derridas own comments on the and in the title of a previous Cardozo Law School conference, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice: A conjunction such as and dares to defy order, taxonomy, and classificatory logic, no matter how it operatesby analogy, distinction, or opposition. Id. at 231. This is even more applicable to the conjunction in Badious major work Being and Event, as the author explains in an interview: I would like to insist that, even in the title Being and Event, the and is fundamental. Bruno Bosteels, Can Change Be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou, in ALAIN BADIOU: PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CONDITIONS 251 (Gabriel Riera ed., 2005). For Walter Benjamins original text, see ZUR KRITIK DER GEWALT UND ANDERE AUFSTZE (Herbert Marcuse ed., 1965), translated in WALTER BENJAMIN, A CRITIQUE OF VIOLENCE, REFLECTIONS: ESSAYS, APHORISMS, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS 277 (Peter Demetz ed., Edmund Jephcott trans., 1978).

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itself. In French, to be exact, they respectively write of non-loi and nondroit. We can thus initiate an unexpected rapprochement between Badiou and Derrida through the notion of the nonlaweven if what they end up doing with this notion may well take us again in two widely different directions. Finally, a retrieval of the arguments regarding law and event in Lack and Destruction is especially relevant and untimely today insofar as Badious recently published major book, Logiques des mondes, which is the much-awaited follow-up to LEtre et lvnement, not only resurrects many of the pivotal conceptual oppositions that can be found in the older Thorie du sujet but, conversely, the latter can also be said to contain anticipated rebuttals to some of the most widespread objections raised against the two volumes of LEtre et lvnement, despite an underlying sympathy for the latters ambitious project, most notably coming from Slavoj iek. 2 Badious sources for the discussion of law and event in Thorie du sujet are three-fold, covering just as many language traditions and reaching back from modernity to romanticism to antiquity: French psychoanalysis in relation to the work of Lacan; German idealism through a critical Auseinandersetzung with both Hegel and Hlderlin; and Greek tragedy via an opposition of Sophocles and Aeschylus. This last entry into the matter of justice as part of a renewed dialectical theory of the subject, in fact, at the same time interweaves and combines the threads of the other two traditions. We could begin, therefore, with the debate over the significance of Greek tragedy for a modern political theory of the subject, especially as inflected by the legacy of psychoanalysis. Judith Butler reminds us in her own lectures titled Antigones Claim: In George Steiners study of the historical appropriations of Antigone, he poses a controversial question he does not pursue: What would happen if psychoanalysis were to have taken Antigone rather than Oedipus as its point of departure?4 Today, as Butler herself suggests throughout her lectures, this question clearly no longer appears to be controversial at all. To the contrary, reversing the hierarchy implicit in Steiners counterfactual hypothesis, I would venture to say that a theoretical shift from Oedipus to Antigone defines the ethical and politicalif we can speak of politics at this leveldominant of our post-Oedipal times. Today, it is Antigones death-driven fidelity to a principle of justice beyond Creons terrorizing lawa sort of justice
4

JUDITH BUTLER, ANTIGONES CLAIM: KINSHIP BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH 57 (2000).

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without law, a justice beyond law, as Derrida also might put it5that sets the criteria for the authentic ethical or political act (indeed, the very notions of ethics and politics in this line of arguing often seem to become indistinguishable, if the latter does not collapse into the former altogether). As such, though, we remain by and large within the bounds of the Sophoclean model of tragedy. Badious aim in Thorie du sujet by contrast could well be summed up in an even broader and more controversial question than the one Butler adopts from George Steiner, namely: Why is it that psychoanalysisand today I would add critical theory and philosophy in generalhas set its eye so completely and exclusively on Sophocles? Why not step back for a moment from both Oedipus and the mirroring relationship between Antigone and Creon so as to put them into dialectical tension with the twin figures of Orestes and Athena in the Oresteia? In short, why not supplement Sophocles with his predecessor Aeschylus? As Badiou writes:
The whole purpose of our critical delimitation with regard to the psychoanalytic contribution to the theory of the subject can be evaluated by asking the following question: why is its theory of the subject essentially based on Sophocles, that is, predicated on the Oedipus complex? I propose that we must be Aeschylean. Lacan sides with Sophocles, but points at Aeschylus, which is where we want to get.6

The two conceptual pairs that enable this articulation of Sophocles and Aeschylus as signifiers or fundamental concepts in the theory of the subject are respectively anxiety and the superego, on one hand, and courage and justice, on the other:
There is a theory of the subject according to Sophocles and one according to Aeschylus. The latter (which is historically the first, but still the second for Freud and, though invisibly, the first for Marx) entirely dialecticizes its other because, besides anxiety and the superego whose structure it retains, it postulates that courage and justice are the necessary operators of the subject-effect.7

How then should we envision the specific relation between this notion of justice and the law, including that part of nonlaw within law that Derrida calls its mystic foundation, when what happens is not only a repetition of this nonlaw as absent ground or lack of foundation but also the event of a new law and a new right? For Badiou, as well as for Benjamin and despite Derridas reluctance to follow him along this perilous path, the possibility of justice would require that we supplement and extend the iterability of
5 6 7

DERRIDA, ACTS OF RELIGION, supra note 3, at 286. BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, at 178. Id. at 177-78.

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law and nonlaw with a principle of interruption, or even with a destruction. In the absence of destruction as a mastering of lack, by contrast, what remains todayboth in historical terms and at the level of theory and philosophyseems to be reduced once again to the alternative of either boldly embracing the anxiety produced by the lack of lack or else anticipating the impossible possibility of an absolute beyond of the laws terrorizing ubiquitya beyond which, precisely because it does not entail an effective interruption, may very well leave intact the regime of terror except to point up its obscene underside, its groundless foundation, or its rootedness once again in pure nonlaw. In fact, the courage of thought today, if we can still call it this way, seems increasingly to depend precisely on such a sinister exposure alone. 3 Remaining in close proximity to Lacans seminar, which he otherwise never attended, Badiou first of all reads Sophoclean tragedy in terms of an endless duel between anxiety and the superego as figured by Antigone and Creon. Through these two figures, the space circumscribed by the order of the law is disruptedfirst by way of a lack in the law, or rather a lack of lack, unmistakably exposed in anxiety, and, second, by the laws inner excess over itself, laid bare in superegoic fury:
Creon is the name of the superego: the deregulated lawdestroyed and, by its own native essence, returned as an excess over the place that it prescribes. Antigone is the name of anxiety, that is, the principle of the infinity of the real which is unplaceable in the regulated finitude of the place. From this point of view, Antigone and Creon, although antagonists in the play, accomplish the same process, the formation of the Sophoclean tragic subject.8

Badiou, like others after him, thus underscores the mutual dependence of the Sophoclean heroes. Not only does Antigones anxiety-ridden decision not to give up on her desire seem to provoke in return the destructive rage inherent in the law, that is, the element of violent nonlaw parading in the guise of the law of the city-state; but, what is more, her rebellion is already nothing more than a reaction to the excessive form of Creons law. It comes after and completely depends on the latter for its force. As Judith Butler also insists in her reading of the play, Antigone cannot voice her desire except in the very language of the rule of law: Although Hegel claims that her deed is opposed to Creons, the two acts mirror rather than oppose one
8

Id. at 179.

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another.9 Later she adds, still speaking of Antigone: Her words, understood as deeds, are chiasmically related to the vernacular of sovereign power, speaking in and against it, delivering and defying imperatives at the same time, inhabiting the language of sovereigty at the very moment in which she opposes sovereign power and is excluded from its terms.10 Unlike Butler, however, Badiou finds several of the terms to define this relation of chiasmic implication already at work in the published teachings of Lacan. The superego, to begin with, should not be confused with the law, since it opens onto the latters destructive root. What it uncovers is thus the pure force of injunction that sustains the senseless excess of linguistic tautology. The superego gives access to the source of the force of law, to that which is no longer of the order of language but which lies at the core of the imperative character of the law, Badiou writes, commenting on a key passage from Lacans Le Sminaire, livre I: Les crits techniques de Freud: If the law can resist destructionthe excess of the repetition that the law itself articulatesit is because the very order of the law, which takes the form of an imperative, is in itself excess and destruction.11 This element of excess and destruction is what Badiou calls the nonlaw in the law, which as such lies revealed in the ferocity of the superego injunction, reduced to a pure You must, or to redundancies of the type The law is the law: The nonlaw is what manifests itself as the affirmative of the law; for this reason the superego can be simultaneously the index of the law and of its destruction.12 Through the notion of the superego, the law itself in other words paradoxically lays bare its potential for subversion from within. Badiou also borrows a Lacanian (clearly much more so than a Sartrean) understanding of anxiety to approach the figure of Antigone. What produces anxiety in this understanding is not the loss of a specific object, but neither is it the case that anxiety is devoid of all relations to the object as is often argued even in Lacanian circles. Instead, signaling an encounter with the real, anxiety can be defined as the loss of loss, due to the appearance of somethinganything whatsoever reallyin the empty place supposed to mark the lack in the structure. Already from anxiety as lack of lack, though, the attention then begins to shift toward the question of a certain mastery of the effects of such a redoubling of the logic of lack. Lacan says superbly, anxiety is

BUTLER, supra note 4, at 10. Id. at 28. BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, at 163. Badiou is referring in particular to the definition of the superego in JACQUES LACAN, LE SMINAIRE LIVRE I: LES CRITS TECHNIQUES DE FREUD 164-165 (Points 1998) (1975); cf. id. at 303-07. 12 BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, at 163.

9 10 11

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nothing but the lack of lack, Badiou writes referring to Le Sminaire, livre XI: Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse:
But when the lack comes to lack, its metonymic effect is interrupted and there begins a mastery of real loss, which is paid for with the ravaging of all symbolic points of reference. Hence anxiety is what never deceives. Destruction must meet the law of lack in order to sweep away deception, the semblant, and the oblivion of oblivion.13

There is thus something in anxiety, in the rapport to the real for which the affect of anxiety serves as an unmistakable index, that already puts us in touch with a dimension beyond a purely structural or structuralist account of subjectivity based on its constitutive lack. Through anxiety and the superego, in sum, the excessive form of the law and the formlessness of nonlaw come as it were head to head, without providing any way out of the impasseat least not in the Sophoclean modelother than death and sacrifice in the ongoing cycle of revenge and counterrevenge. However, even if they are not the only terms available in this reading of ancient tragedy, anxiety and the superego are not for this reason any less necessary for a coherent theory of the subject and, as we will see, for a theory of justice as well. Badiou thus concludes his analysis of Sophocles: Anxiety and the superego are therefore two fundamental concepts of the subject (although there are another two), two designations of that which lies at the crossing of the inert and civilized law of lack and the barbaric interruption of destruction, but he is quick to add: There is, however, another truth and another tragedy: that of Orestes and of Aeschylus. There, destruction makes possible a subject who knows how to master loss. . . . What does this mean if not that in this way we come out of the radical impasse in which the unity of the place and the insurmountable fixity of
13 Id. at 164. Badiou is referring to a brief passage in JACQUES LACAN, LE SMINAIRE LIVRE XI: LES QUATRE CONCEPTS FONDAMENTAUX DE LA PSYCHANALYSE 49-50 (Points 1990) (1973), translated in JACQUES LACAN, THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PSYCHO-ANALYSIS, (Alan Sheridan trans., 1981). Here Lacan himself, in answer to a question from Pierre Kaufman, refers back to his seminar from the previous year (1962-1963), devoted entirely to the topic of anxiety, but published only recently and, thus, not available to Badiou in Thorie du sujet. See JACQUES LACAN, LE SMINAIRE, LIVRE X: LANGOISSE (2004). Badiou has written a brief review of this edition in ALAIN BADIOU, Angoisse chez Lacan, in AGENDA DE LA PENSE CONTEMPORAINE 27-29 (2005), translated in Alain Badiou, Lacan. Seminar, Book X: Anxiety, 26 LACANIAN INK 70-71 (2005). For more detailed accounts of Lacans understanding of anxiety, see BERNARD BAAS, Langoisse et la vrit, in LE DSIR PUR 83-119 (1992), as well as RENATA SALECL, ON ANXIETY (2004). I should add that Badiou does not (or, given the dates of publication, could not) discuss Lacans own interpretation of Antigone, in JACQUES LACAN, LE SMINAIRE, LIVRE VII: LTHIQUE DE LA PSYCHANALYSE 285-333 (Seuil 1986) (1959-60). Within the vast bibliography on Antigone and psychoanalysis, or on tragedy and psychoanalysis in general, a superb example remains ALENKA ZUPANCIC, ETHICS OF THE REAL: KANT, LACAN (2000) (chapter entitled Ethics and Tragedy in Psychoanalysis). For a commentary on Lacans seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, see MARC DE KESEL, EROS & ETHIEK: EEN LECTUUR VAN JACQUES LACANS SMINAIRE VII (2002); and, on Antigone in particular, Philippe LacoueLabarthe, De lthique: propos dAntigone, in LACAN AVEC LES PHILOSOPHES 19-36 (1991).

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the symbolic has forced us?14 Specifically, the two fundamental concepts of the subject according to Aeschylus, both anticipated by default in Badious reading of Sophocles, are courage and justice. These two terms, too, are borrowed from Lacan. To be more precise, they follow up on a suggestion taken once again from the very first seminar when, toward the end of his discourse for the day, Lacan asks a rhetorical question: Once the successive, suspended, anguishing desires of the subject are named and reintegrated . . . where must this referral find a halting point? Must we push the analytical intervention all the way to the fundamental dialogues on justice and courage, in the great dialectical tradition?15 Lacan himself, however, does not pursue this question any further, and perhaps for good reasons given his undaunted commitment to the Sophoclean paradigm. It is Aeschylus then who opens up the possibility of discussing the themes of courage and justice respectively in the figures of Orestes and Athena: Aeschylus excels in the capacity to grasp, on the ground of the superego, the moment of the institutive disruption. There is never a return to order in his theater, but at work is rather the recomposition of a different order.16 This also means that, instead of remaining caught in a chiasmic relation to the cycle of violence and revenge, the possibility of a new law emerges at the precise point where the old law is found wanting. Anxiety, thus, retains its indispensable diagnostic value as that which never fails to put us on the track toward the realexcept that courage now breaks anxietys death-driven nature by inverting its orientation:
In this way, it is no longer the formal excess that prevails, but the courageous refusal. Although gnawed at by anxiety, and in fact precisely because of it, Orestes does not internalize the law of blood and its infinite debts, nor does he turn against it in a blind fury.
BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, 173. Id. at 174. Badiou is referring to LACAN, supra note 11, at 308-09. BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, at 183. Except for a speculative remark in the conclusion, I will not discuss the extent to which this reading of return and exile is meant as a corrective to Hlderlins reading of Sophocles. See FRIEDRICH HLDERLIN, ESSAYS AND LETTERS ON THEORY 101-16 (Thomas Pfau ed. & trans., 1988). Nor will I go into further details regarding either Badious overall relation to Hlderlin or the latters role, including in a direct criticism of Badiou, for someone like the late Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. A good starting point to address this polemic would be to compare Badious meditation on Hlderlin in ALAIN BADIOU, LETRE ET LVNEMENT 283-89 (1988), translated in ALAIN BADIOU, BEING AND EVENT 25561 (Oliver Feltham trans., 2005) [hereinafter BADIOU, LETRE ET LVNEMENT], with LacoueLabarthes answers to the notion of the age of the poets that Badiou proposes in Lge des potes, part of a seminar edited by Jacques Rancire. ALAIN BADIOU, Lage Des Potes, in LA POLITIQUE DES POTES POURQUOI DES POTES EN TEMPS DE DTRESSE? 21-63 (Jacques Rancire ed., 1992). Several texts in this polemic are now compiled and translated in PHILLIPE LACOUELABARTHE, HEIDEGGER AND THE POLITICS OF POETRY (Jeff Port trans., 2007); see also the Translators Introduction, The Courage of Thought, in id. at ix-xviii. For Lacoue-Labarthes own independent approach to Hlderlins theater in general and Antigone in particular, see PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE, MTAPHRASIS, SUIVI DE LE THTRE DE HLDERLIN (1998).
14 15 16

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Instead, he demands a discussion based on facts; he resists and does not give in to the murderous seduction of the Erinyes. Orestes, first the name of anxiety, is the name of courage. Athena is the name of justice.17

With the intervention of Athena in the tribunal at the end of the Oresteia trilogy, the chain of murders is interrupted and a new law, a new right, or a new type of consistency are instituted. This is, finally, the task of recomposition attributed to the concept of justice as distinct from, yet necessarily instructed by, anxiety and the superego injunction:
Justice is the function of the subjects tie to the place, that is, to the law, when the latter takes on the divisible figure of its transformation, whereas the superego is the representation of the ferocious archaism of the fixity of the law. Justice makes no sense as a constitutive category of the subject if the symbolic operates on indivisibility and founds the subject on terror and obsessive repetition. It requires a dialectical precariousness of the law, open to being shaken and split. This is not the precariousness of a particular law, but of the very imperative character of the law. More radically, from the point of view of the constitution of the subject-effect, justice names the possibility that what is nonlaw might function as law.18

Badious theory of the subject in the end plays off all four concepts against each other: The courage of the scission of the laws, the anxiety of an opaque persecution, the superego of the blood-thirsty Erinyes, and finally justice according to the consistency of the newfour concepts to articulate the subject.19 Read in pairs and horizontally, so to speak, anxiety and courage are situated at the level of what is called subjectivation, through lack and interruption, whereas the superego and justice operate at the level of the so-called subjective process, through destruction and recomposition. Read vertically, they trace two trajectories or strands in the overall construction of the subject-effect, one which leads from anxiety to the superego and the other from courage to justice. Through the proposed shift from Sophocles to Aeschylus, then, the overall aim behind adding the strand that runs from courageous refusal to the recomposition of justice consists in avoiding the disastrous consequences of desubjectivation that derive from the conviction that, beyond the truths that lie revealed in anxiety and superegoic fury, all action is illusory, if not impossible.

17 18 19

BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, at 183. Id. at 176. Id.

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Badious Logiques des mondes, incidentally, brings back the four fundamental concepts from Thorie du sujet that are anxiety, courage, justice, and the superegowith the later now renamed terror pure and simple. To be sure, the definition of the terms is slightly different and their role in the larger project of Logiques des mondes is much diminished insofar as they are now subordinated as so many affects to the four major figures of the subject that are fidelity, reaction, obscurantism, and resurrection. The affects, then, signal various positions toward continuity and discontinuity, that is to say toward the violence with which all true change, or a change in what counts as true, comes about:
Four affects signal the incorporation of a human animal to the subjective process of a truth. The first is evidence of the desire for . . . a decisive discontinuity, that will install the new world with a single blow, and complete the subject. We will name it terror. The second is evidence of the fear of points, of a retreat before the obscurity of all that is discontinuous, of all that imposes a choice without guarantee between two hypotheses. Or, again, this affect signals the desire for a continuity, for a monotonous shelter. We will call it anxiety. The third affirms the acceptance of the plurality of points, that the discontinuities are at once imperious and multiform. We will name it courage. The fourth affirms the desire that the subject be a constant intrication of points and openings. It affirms the equivalence, in regard to the pre-eminence of the becomingsubject, of what is continuous and negotiatied, and of what is discontinuous and violent. These are only subjective modalitites, which depend on the construction of the subject in a world and the capacities of the body to produce effects. They are not to be hierarchized. War can have as much value as peace, negotiation as much as struggle, violence as much as gentleness. This affect by which the categories of the act are subordinated to the contingency of worlds, we will name justice.20

What this return to Thorie du sujet in Logiques des mondes is meant to underscore in other words is the way in which all four affects or modalities are equally necessary for a subject of truth to emerge:
To oppose the value of courage and justice to the Evil of anxiety and terror is only an effect of opinion. In order for the incorporation of a human animal in a subjective process to take placein order for the grace of being Immortal to befall this animal in the discipline of a
20 ALAIN BADIOU, LEtre et lvnement, in LOGIQUES DES MONDES 96-97 (2006) [hereinafter BADIOU, LOGIQUES DES MONDES]. For an English translation, see ALAIN BADIOU, A MUSICAL VARIANT OF THE METAPHYSICS OF THE SUBJECT (Justin Clemens trans., 2007).

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Subject and the construction of a truthall the affects are necessary.21

The new set of definitions can thus be used to correct a possible misgiving, including with regard to the use of the four concepts in the older theory. Even if the content changes, the principle of equiprimordiality above all should keep us from simply privileging one concept or affect over the other. Badiou is particularly adamant about the idea that no truth happens, not even in politics, without some form of terror: None of that which overcomes the finitude in the human animal, subordinating it to the eternity of the True by its incorporation to a subject in becoming, has ever been able to occur without anxiety, courage and justice. But no more, as a general rule, without terror.22 In fact, this reminder of a necessary copresence will turn out to be all the more urgent today if we consider our current situation in light of the destiny given to the concepts of anxiety, courage, terror, and justice. Badiou himself in his most recent book, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, which is the fourth installment in his ongoing series of Circonstances, suggests that what is lacking the most today, even more so than the universally reviled but otherwise ubiquitous regime of terror, is a sustained form of courage. We might even argue that in the face of the generalized reign of fear, including the fear of fear itself, it is precisely the absence of courage that reduces justice to being nothing more than a form of terror in desperate need of moralizing rebuttals and votes in the electoral battles of parliamentary democracy as opposed to military-humanitarian interventions everywhere else. What this diagnostic implies, though, is not a plea for new forms of heroism. Instead, we find a subtle distinction between heroism and courage that might usefully be applied to our understanding of Greek tragedy as well, including in the dialectic between Sophocles and Aeschylus. Thus, whereas Antigone can certainly be said to be courageous, perhaps it would be more appropriate to call her act heroic. Heroism is when one faces up to the impossible. It has always represented somewhat of a posture, eventually sublime, because it is the moment when one turns toward the impossible, that is to say toward the real in question, and looks it in the face.23 Recalling once more the passage from Lacans first seminar in which he calls for an extension of the analytical process in the name of the great dialectical tradition of

BADIOU, LOGIQUES DES MONDES, supra note 20, at 2. Id. at 99. Among several other places in his recent work, Badiou also discusses terror in the context of the invariant form of political truth processes, in the general introduction to Logiques des mondes. Id. at 29-37. 23 ALAIN BADIOU, DE QUOI SARKOZY EST-IL LE NOM? CIRCONSTANCES 4, 97 (2007). On the notion of fear and the fear of fear, see id. at 29-32.

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debates on courage and justice, Badiou instead goes on to call upon courage as the crucial virtue of our timescrucial, that is, because nowadays it is mostly absent:
If heroism is the subjective figure of facing up to the imposible, then courage is the virtue of endurance in the impossible. Courage is not the point itself, but the keeping of the point. What demands courage is keeping steady in a different duration from the one imposed by the law of the world.24

Ultimately, then, the difference between heroism and courage is a matter of time, of a slight but crucial difference in the treatment of the timing of an event. Thus, whereas the frequent warlike grandeur of the heroic actnot unlike the tragic sublimity that shines through the experience of anxietyis almost always a function of its punctual evanescence, it is not the instantaneous face-to-face with the real as impossible that defines couragein the way in which twentieth-century psychoanalysis for example excels in putting the subject face-to-face with the real of sexualitybut rather the production of a lasting sequence of fidelity to making the impossible possible. 5 Indeed, as I noted before, Badious argument in the reconfiguration of Greek tragedy ultimately is not so much with Aeschylus or Sophocles as historical events, not even with Hegel or Hlderlins partial reappropriations of Sophocles and the concomitant displacements of Aeschylus that set the tone for all subsequent, romantic and postromantic theorizing, up until and including Judith Butler, so much as with Lacanian psychoanalysis. To be more specific, the theory of justice and courage, which dialecticizes a certain impasse arrived at through anxiety and the superego, aims to supplement and extend Lacans doctrine on two unshakable presuppositions: first, the presupposition that the truth of the subject, psychoanalytically speaking, is of a structural order, rather than resulting from a rare and contingent

24 Id. at 97. The experience of the act as a radical and heroic face-to-face with the real is also a constant theme in Badious lectures on the twentieth century: The question of the face-to-face is the heroic question of the century. ALAIN BADIOU, LE SICLE 30 (2005), translated in ALAIN BADIOU, THE CENTURY 15 (Alberto Toscano trans., 2007). It is no doubt for this very reason that Badiou repeatedly speaks of Freuds courage and audacity in these lectures: Freud approaches the question of his own audacity with regard to the real of sex, or to the mental genealogy of sexuality; or again . . . of a face-to-face confrontation between thought and sex. BADIOU, LE SICLE, supra, at 104-05, translated in BADIOU, THE CENTURY, supra, at 69. Beneath the obvious tone of admiration, I read in these and other comments an underlying strain of criticismthe symptom of a problem for which the century did not provide a satisfactory dialectical answer, with violence standing in for what does not fail to be missed.

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occurrence of an event; and, second, the presupposition that there is no other of the Other. In both cases, a passage is required from lack to destruction in order for a subject of justice to come into being. In this sense, we must say that, historically, we witness the advent of a subject at the intersection of lack and destruction, and at the point of anxiety, but in the inversion of its truth, Badiou insists: And this subject derives from something the existence of which Lacan deniesan other of the Other where that which stands for the first Other is no longer a disguised modality of the Same.25 Destruction, thus, names the process by which the law not only comes to lack in its place, showing the excessive force that is its obscene underside, but also gives rise to a new law: Destruction is a figure of the anchoring of the subject in which loss not only turns lack into a cause, but also produces consistency out of excess. Through destruction, the subject attaches itself to what within lack survives, and is not the repetitive closure of the effect to the presence of the cause.26 This also impliesand this is the second bone of contentionthat a given impasse or contradiction, if we can still speak in these terms, appears to be no longer structural but historical: If the structural concept of contradiction (the splitting) implies that presence of lack and points to the horizon of the law, the historical concept of contradiction arises from the presence of destruction whose sphere of action lies in the nonlaw.27 As a consequence, the appearance of an impasse, rather than signaling a structural deadlock, actually subjects the structure as a whole to the possibility of transformation. What we might call therefore the force of nonlaw, following the thrust of destruction beyond the law of lack and its redoubling, consists precisely in the capacity to bring into being the non-repeatable within repetition:
The conservative element is identified with the law of lack and subordinates the other to repetition. Force is nothing but that which, being out-of-place (hors-lieu), concentrates in itself a term that was assigned to repetition. In this way, it jams up the mechanism of repetition and triggers the possibility for the destruction of its law. In the place where the old coherence prescribed a mere sliding, we find instead an interruption that takes place through a purification that exceeds the place. This is the history of force.28

This is also, I might add, how the history or prehistory of the concept of the event, so central in this philosophers better-known later work, is anticipated in the force of nonlaw: From this point of view,
25 26 27 28

BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, at 173. Id. at 158. Id. Id. at 159-60.

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just as there is only one subject, there is also only one force whose existence always surfaces as an event. This event, the trace of the subject, cuts across both lack and destruction.29 An event, then, is not just the sudden appearance of the void or empty place of a given situation; it also requires an excess over the gaping void revealed in the latters structure. Something else has to happen, beyond the mere occupation of an empty place. Otherwise the structure of what is given would merely open itself up to a flickering alternation between the false appearance of plenitude and the vanishing act of the real of lack. 6 Let me briefly develop the two underlying polemical aims behind Badious argument on law, event, and nonlaw by putting them in dialogue with contemporary thinkers such as Butler, Derrida, and iek. Badious theory of justice, first of all, seeks to break with the law qua law. This polemic, which is specifically but not exclusively aimed at Lacanian psychoanalysis, actually is a constant throughout his work in an argument that reappears in different guises from Thorie du sujet to LEtre et lvnement all the way to Logiques des mondes. What requires interruption, then, is not this or that law as a particular or empirical injunction, whether written or not, but rather the very law-like status of the law as a structural or transcendental bedrock so as to open up the possibility for another law and for an other of the Other. Badiou explains this part of the polemic with Lacan in LEtre et lvnement:
The choice here is between a structural recurrence, which thinks the subject-effect as void-set, thus as identifiable within the uniform networks of experience, and a hypothesis of the rarity of the subject, which suspends its occurrence from the event, form the intervention, and from the generic paths of fidelity, both returning the void to, and reinsuring it within, a function of suture to being, the knowledge of which is deployed by mathematics alone.30

In Logiques des mondes Badiou raises an almost identical objection while discussing the rapport between language and the body. Lacan makes a structure out of what I believe to be a sequence or a contingent becoming, so that even when there is much ado about the notion of the act in contemporary psychoanalytical debates, ultimately the evanescent intensity of such an understanding not only should not be confused with the process of subjectivation in terms of the event but, in the name of the unconscious, it might even undermine all such processes:
Id. at 160. BADIOU, LETRE ET LVNEMENT, supra note 16, at 472, translated in BADIOU, BEING AND EVENT, supra note 16, at 432.
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The result of all this is that the formal operations of incorporation into the place of the Other and of the splitting of the subject constitute under the name of the unconscious the substructure of the human animal, and not the occurrenceno matter how rareof the present, process of a truth that a subjectivated body treats point by point. Lets say that the Lacanian anticipation restricts its apparatus to the truths of psychoanalysis, which are of the structure. The act in which the cure sometimes resolves itself certainly is an application to the real, but with the skepticism with which every effort of deabsolutization dresses up everything that is created by chance.31

We could argue, to be sure, that there is no reason to accept the need for a strict either/or choice between these two interpretations. In fact, it is not difficult to outline a compatibility between Lacans account of the substructure of the human animal, individuated through the mark of the signifier, and Badious account of the rare incorporation of this individuated but as yet asubjective entity, on the chance occasion of a singular event, into something called a subject. Adrian Johnston, for instance, has recently made this case quite forcefully in his reading of iek:
ieks creative synthesis of German idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis enables the argument to be advanced that certain properties of an asubjective, heteronomous libidinal-material foundation (as the barred Real of human nature) function as fundamental conditions of possibility for the ontogenesis of subjective autonomy (as a transcendence of this same natural foundation).32

Not only would these two perspectivesthe ontological and the evental or the structural and the contingentnot be incompatible, but both of them would already be at work in Lacans theory, even if to remember this today we may first have to learn a lesson or two from iek. What this reading fails to acknowledge, however, is the extent to which the radicality of the structural-ontological question can always be counted onwith Lacan in this context serving as an irrefutable reference point no less than Heideggerto undermine the actual process of the coming-into-being of the evental dimension of the subject. But it is precisely this trend toward radical desubjectivation that is the target of Badious repeated objection to the law-like nature of the law in Lacanian psychoanalysis.

BADIOU, LOGIQUES DES MONDES, supra note 20, at 502-03. Adrian Johnston, Lightening Ontology: Slavoj iek and the Unbearable Lightness of Being Free, THE SYMPTOM 8 (2007).

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The attempt to break with the structural status of the law qua law is not unlike Butlers ongoing argument, including in Antigones Claim, against a tendency in Lacanian circles in particular to follow what she calls a theological impulse within the theory of psychoanalysis that seeks to put out of play any criticism of the symbolic father, the law of psychoanalysis itself, which as a result appears to be an incontestable limit:
The theory exposes its own tautological defense. The law beyond laws will finally put an end to the anxiety produced by a critical relation to final authority that clearly does not know when to stop: a limit to the social, the subversive, the possibility of agency and change, a limit that we cling to, symptomatically, as the final defeat of our own power. Its defenders claim that to be without such a law is pure voluntarism or radical anarchy!33

Not surprisingly, these are the kinds of criticismdefending pure voluntarism or radical anarchymost commonly hurled at Badiou as well. What Butler does not seem to consider, however, is the extent to which the possibility of such a limit, posited as intractable, may well be an imposition of the Sophoclean model with which she otherwise seems incapable of breaking. It is Sophocles, if not historically then at the very least in his reappropriations by romantics and postromantics alike, who may have set this limitanother, ontologically dignified name for which would be finitude. Today, then, it would seem increasingly unlikely, not so say undesirable, to want to supplement the anxiety of Antigone vis--vis the law, which Butler here invokes as well as a final safeguardif not the only oneagainst the closure of the relation to Creons authority, with the courage and justice of Orestes and Athena. Most importantly, I would argue that the Sophoclean dominant of our times can be seen as a symptom of the fact that once courage and justice are dismissed as so many illusions of dogmatic voluntarism, what we are left with are precisely only the twin dispositions of anxiety and terror, that is to say, an excessive dimension of the real as too-much that at the same time exposes the fragility and precariousness of the law qua nonlaw. Badiou uncannily seems to have predicted this when in Thorie du sujet he writes: I believe that this subjective figure, whose dialectic is built on anxiety and the superego, always prevails in times of decadence and disarray, both in history and in life.34 If this is the

33 34

BUTLER, supra note 4, at 21. BADIOU, THORIE DU SUJET, supra note 1, at 180.

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case in history and in life, my concern to conclude will be rather with what happens when theory and philosophy in turn appear increasingly unable to propose anything significantly different. 8 We can retrace some of the steps along this trajectory by taking a closer look at two series of criticism, one actual and the other virtual, aimed against Badious philosophy. The result of these criticisms, or an unwanted effect of their underlying principles, is that just as anxiety and terror seem to spread exponentially in history, so too in theory the suspicion now prevalent is that there can be no new law beyond the nonlaw except at the risk of falling prey to a transcendental illusion, blind dogmatism, or the mystifications of good conscience. Put differently, what this suspicion confirms is that there is indeed no other of the Other. One of ieks often-repeated moves in his ongoing polemic with Badiou, for instance, amounts to reducing all false pretenses of novelty to being little more than death-driven repetition in disguise. Thus, with reference to the proposition that Orestess courage and Athenas justice would exceed the anxiety/superego dyad of Antigone and Creon, he wonders: Convincing as this example is, we cannot avoid the obvious question: is not this new Law imposed by Athena the patriarchal Law based on the exclusion/repression of what then returns as the obscene superego fury?35 More generally speaking, this objection targets a supposed blind spot in Badious thinking in relation to psychoanalysis, that is, his inability to think of the death drive and hence of repetition itself other than as a dimension wholly outside of the domain of truth and fidelity to the event. Perhaps, the reason Badiou neglects this dimension is his all too crude opposition between repetition and 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,36 iek writes more recently in a long review of Logiques des mondes, adding the paradoxical lesson that the event can emerge only out of repetition, not against it. This would be a lesson drawn not only from Freud or Lacan but also from Deleuzewith a
35 SLAVOJ IEK, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO: ENJOYMENT AS POLITICAL FACTOR, at lxxxiii (2002). I have tried to answer some of these objections, which iek raised against my earlier reading of Badious Thorie du sujet, in Bruno Bosteels, Badiou Without iek, 17 POLYGRAPH 223-46 (2005). 36 Slavoj iek, On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes, http://www.lacan.com/zizbadman.htm (last visited Apr. 1, 2008).

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bonus illustration from Benjamin:

The proper Deleuzian paradox is that something truly New can ONLY emerge through repetition. What repetition repeats is not the way the past effectively was, but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed by its past actualization. In this precise sense, the emergence of the New changes the past itself, that is, it retroactively changes (not the actual pastwe are not in science fictionbut) the balance between actuality and virtuality in the past. Recall the old example provided by Walter Benjamin: the October Revolution repeated the French Revolution, redeeming its failure, unearthing and repeating the same impulse.37

It is clear, though, that the cut of the event is here merely displaced onto the balance between actuality and virtuality. Without some split between the past as past and that portion of the past that is as yet purely virtual, no redemption of failureand hence no revolution would ever be possible. And yet, it is precisely this split between repetition and that within repetition which is not yet actualized that defines the locus of the work of destruction for Thorie du sujet. The whole purpose of adding the fundamental dialogues on courage and justice, in the great dialectical tradition, consists precisely in disentangling the element of repetition and the nonrepeatablewhether as an interruption or as a mastering of loss, as a refusal or a torsion. Conversely, the zeal with which the figures of repetition and the death drive are wielded about today in psychoanalytically inflected arguments runs the risk of an equally crude dismissal of all novelty in the name of the irrefutable radicality in which these very same figures always seem to be cloaked. 9 Derrida also seems to rely on repetitionon the law of iterabilityin his reading of Benjamin in Force of Law, many of whose arguments can be read in a virtual dialogue, including a polemical one, with Badious Thorie du sujet. Derrida thus takes as his point of departure an unavoidable contamination between the two types of mythic violence, law-founding and law-preserving, that Benjamin in his original essay tries in vain to keep separate:
For beyond Benjamins explicit purpose, I shall propose the interpretation according to which the very violence of the foundation or positing of law (Rechtsetzende Gewalt) must envelop the violence of the preservation of law (Rechtserhaltende Gewalt) and cannot break with it. It belongs to the structure of fundamental violence in
37

Id.

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that it calls for the repetition of itself and founds what ought to be preserved, preservable, promised to heritage and to tradition, to partaking [partage]. . . . And even if a promise is not kept in fact, iterability inscribes the promise as guard in the most irruptive instant of foundation. Thus it inscribes the possibility of repetition at the heart of the originary. Better, or worse, it is inscribed in this law [loi] of iterability; it stands under its law or before its law [sous sa loi ou devant sa loi]. Consequently [du coup], there is no more pure foundation or pure position of law, and so a pure founding violence, than there is a purely preserving violence. Positing is already iterability, a call for self-preserving repetition.38

Both forms of mythic violence, as Derrida abruptly suggests, may also be called Greek. We might even say that they are more specifically Sophoclean (in the case of law-preserving violence) and Aeschylean (law-founding violence). If this is the case, though, then iterability once again destroys the illusion that there could ever be a pure foundation or a pure position of law without or beyond the anxiety over the laws preservation. This means that once again, the theory of justice and of courage according to Aeschylus would be contaminated through and through by the theory of terror and anxiety according to Sophocles. The latter, by subjecting us to a law of all lawsthe law of iterabilityalso puts an obstacle on the path of any disingenuous belief in the existence of an other of the Other. Instead, what we are left with literally comes down to a combination of anxious responsibilityanxiety as responsibilityand a sense of the laws rootedness in the superegoicferocity of its inherent force. While justice and even courage are constantly invoked in Derridas text, therefore, we could very well argue that they take on a role that runs completely counter to the significance the two concepts have for Badiou. In fact, I want to suggest that the structural presence of anxiety or anguish (angoisse in French) here actually blocks justice as a new law from ever coming into being. Or else, it keeps justice from being anything other than the exposure of the element of nonlaw within the law:
It is a moment of suspense, this period of epokh, without which there is, in fact, no possible deconstruction. It is not a simple moment: its possibility must remain structurally present to the exercise of all responsibility if such responsibility is never to abandon itself to dogmatic slumber, and therefore to deny itself. From then on, this moment overflows itself. It becomes all the more anguishing. But who will claim to be just by economizing on anguish? This anguishing moment of suspense also opens the interval of spacing in which transformations, even juridicopolitical revolutions, take place. It cannot be motivated, it cannot find its
38

DERRIDA, ACTS OF RELIGION, supra note 3, at 272.

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movement and its impulse (an impulse that, however, cannot itself be suspended) except in the demand for an increase or a supplement of justice, and so in the experience of an inadequation or an incalculable disproportion. For in the end, where would deconstruction find its force, its movement or its motivation if not in this always unsatisfied appeal, beyond the given determinations of what one names, in determined contexts, justice, the possibility of justice?39

Derrida admittedly seems to argue for a diagonal passage from anguish to justiceeven anticipating the necessary conditions for the possibility of juridico-political revolutions. He also, though somewhat more ambiguously, points out that such revolutions in principle presuppose the founding of a new law and a new state, which is why they inevitably revert back to the necessary contamination between lawpreserving and law-founding violence that he finds in Benjamin:
All revolutionary situations, all revolutionary discourses, on the left or on the right (and from 1921, in Germany, there were many of these that resembled each other in a troubling way, Benjamin often finding himself between the two) justify the recourse to violence by alleging the founding, in progress or to come, of a new law, of a new state.40

But Derridas never-ending vigilance and his reluctance to embrace this violence as a necessary component of revolutionary situations also seem to cause him to remain on guard so as not to indulge in the good conscience of ever affirming the existence of justice in the present: Is it ever possible to say, I know that I am just? I would want to show that such confidence is essentially impossible, other than in the figure of good conscience and mystification.41 To avoid all mystification, then, justice seems to exhaust itself in the exposure of the excessive force that is the foundation of the law, as the very opening of a dimension that is
39 Id. at 248-49. It is intriguing to note how Lacan, contrary to Derrida, insists that with regard to anxiety the fundamental question is always one of economizing or dosifying it: In experience, it is necessary to canalize it and, if I may say so, to take it in small doses, so that one is not overcome by it. This is a difficulty similar to that of bringing the subject into contact with the real. JACQUES LACAN, LE SMINAIRE, LIVRE XI, supra note 13, at 49-50; LACAN, THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF PYSCHO-ANALYSIS, supra note 13, at 50. 40 DERRIDA, ACTS OF RELIGION, supra note 3, at 269. 41 Id at 245. Again, Badious point in Logiques des mondes and Le Sicle is the exact opposite: all fidelity (of love, politics, and so on) worth the name is to a present and not to ruins from the past or to the future of what is to-come: Besides, Im convinced that the subjective capacities of action, courage or even resignation are always in the present tense. Who has ever done anything in the name of an undetermined future? BADIOU, LE SICLE, supra note 24, at 36, translated in BADIOU, THE CENTURY, supra note 24, at 20. Contrast this with Derridas short treatise on the love of ruins: What else is there to love, anyway? One cannot love a monument, a work of architecture, an institution as such except in an experience itself precarious in its fragility: it has not always been there, it will not always be there, it is finite. . . . How can one love otherwise than in this finitude? DERRIDA, ACTS OF RELIGION, supra note 3, at 278.

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in law more than law itself. We might even say that what Derrida calls the mystical precisely works from within against mystification insofar as
it is, in law, what suspends law. It interrupts the established law to found another. This moment of suspense, this epokh, this founding or revolutionary moment of law is, in law, an instance of nonlaw [dans le droit une instance de non-droit]. But it is also the whole history of law.42

Perhaps in the end then this is not altogether different from the anxiouscompulsive return to the obscene underside of the public law, its surplus enjoyment, or its perverse fantasy dimension, as we see so often laid bare in the case of iek. 10 I do not wish to end, however, without at least hinting at a wildly speculative last possibility. Derrida, after all, does not stop at the necessary contamination between the two types of mythic violence which he so boldly redefines as both being essentially Greek. He also opposes the latter to divine violence, which breaks with the violence of myth and which by contrast would be characteristically Judaic. We could compare this to Hlderlins opposition, in his notes on Antigone, between the native form and the formless chaos whose struggle takes to the stage precisely as tragedy and which later on, for Nietzsche, will be the basis for the opposition between the Apollinian and the Dionysian. For Hlderlin, this opposition corresponds to the struggle between what is properly Greek, on one hand, and, on the other, the background against which Greek form seeks to define itself, its multiple and orgiastic soil which in this peculiar romantic flight of geopolitical fancy is called Asiatic. Could we not be allowed then by way of conclusion to add our own speculative move to this fantasy? Could we not argue that, in addition to the Greek myth and the Judaic God, there lies a vanishing mediator in the Asiatic? The Orientalism of the argument notwithstanding, could we not argue that what this mediator proposes, right before vanishing into the obscure backdrop from which it never completely frees itself, is a justice that would be neither mythic nor divine butwhat, secular and communist perhaps? Is this not what Marx himself, and after him many of the boldest thinkers of the Third World, intuited as an alternate primitive communism through the much maligned notion of an Asiatic mode of production? The formlessness of
42

DERRIDA, ACTS OF RELIGION, supra note 3, at 269-70.

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the form, that is, not as the exoticized other of civilized law and order, but as the bottomless ground for a truly generic type of justice, another name for which would be communism: the force of nonlaw as law? The communist hypothesis as such is generic, it is the background [fond] of every emancipatory orientation, it names the only thing for which it is worth caring about politics and history, Badiou writes: Really, there is no other hypothesis, or in any case, I dont know of any other.43

43 BADIOU, DE QUOI SARKOZY EST-IL LE NOM?, supra note 23, at 151, 130. On the reevaluation of Marxs problematic rapport to the Asiatic mode of production and primitive communism, see ROGER BARTRA, EL MODO DE PRODUCCIN ASITICO: ANTOLOGA DE TEXTOS SOBRE PROBLEMAS DE LA HISTORIA DE LOS PASES COLONIALES (1969); and QHANANCHIRI [AKA LVARO GARCA LINERA], DE DEMONIOS ESCONDIDOS Y MOMENTOS DE REVOLUCIN. MARX Y LA REVOLUCIN SOCIAL EN LAS EXTREMIDADES DEL CUERPO CAPITALISTA (1991).