ALAIN BADIOU THE CENTURY What is a Manifesto?

? The question is of special interest to me in that in 1989 I wrote a Manifesto for Philosophy. The modern tradition of the manifest was established in 1848 by Marxs Manifesto of the Communist Party. It effectively appears that a manifesto is something like an announcement, a programme. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. The have a world to win, Marx concludes. This world to win is an option taken on the future. It seems that the programmatic element is alien to the present urgency of the real. It is a matter of finality, of prospective conditions, of a promise. How are we to understand the way in which the imperative of the act and the present inscribed itself into so many proclamations and manifestos? Again, what is this dialectic of present and future, of immediate intervetion and annunciation? (Badiou, 137) The avant-gardes activated formal ruptures in the present and at the same time produced in the form of manifestos and declarations the rhetorical envelope for that activation. They produced the envelopment of a real present in a fictive future. And they called this double production new artistic experience. (Badiou, 139) Since counter-revolutionary periods resemble one another far more than revolutionary ones, we should not be surprised that after the leftism of the sixties, we now revisit the reactive ideas that emerged in the wake of the Paris Commune. This is because the interval between an event of emancipation and another leaves us fallaciously in thrall to the idea that nothing begins or will ever begin, even if we find ourselves caught in the midst of an infernal and immobile agitation. We have thus returned to classicism, though we are deprived of its instruments: everything has always already begun, and it is vain to imagine that foundations are built on nothing, that one will crate a new art, or a new man. (Badiou, 140)