The Philosophy of Restoration:

Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May

Nina Power and Alberto Toscano

Liquidate ’68

“In this election,” Nicolas Sarkozy proclaimed in 2007, “we’re going

to find out if the heritage of May ’68 is going to be perpetuated or if it
will be liquidated once and forever.” With the voicing of political principle
and its antagonistic distillates an increasing rarity in the capitalist core—
where enmity is naturalized (and racialized) by the imperatives of “national
security” or violently, if antiseptically, outsourced to lands failed and threat-
ening—some might have found it heartening to see the French revel yet
again in the performance, if not always the reality, of political antagonism.
Instead of pragmatically honing in on interest rates or pensions to prod the
inevitable swing voters into action, Sarkozy saw it fit to evoke the specter
of ’68 to dramatize the stakes of the then imminent second round of the
French presidential election. It was as if the tiresomely descried stagnation,

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.

. For Sarkozy’s statements and their intellectual precursors, see Serge Audier, La pen-
sée anti-68: Essai sur les origines d’une restauration intellectuelle (Paris: La Découverte,
2008), 5–16.

boundary 2 36:1 (2009)  DOI 10.1215/01903659-2008-022  © 2009 by Duke University Press

28  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

or worse degeneration, of the French polity rested on the inexhaustible

effects of that fated date.
“Sarko” advertised his presidency as an opportunity, forty years on,
retroactively to cleanse (or “karcheriser,” to use the infamous expression
he used during the banlieue riots of 2005) the mutinous streets of the Latin
Quarter, with all their unruly and malevolent connotations. Witness his
catchy slogan: “I want to turn the page on May 1968.” His political biogra-
phers even tell us that it was only his mother that held Sarkozy back, at the
age of thirteen, from joining in the massive pro–de Gaulle march against
the students and workers which paraded down the Champs Elysées on
May 30, 1968. It might be tempting simply to regard Sarkozy’s tirades as an
obligatory rite for a French politician of the Right, and an attempt to swing
Paris back, after the banlieue riots, the protests against the proposed con-
trat de première embauche (CPE, “first employment contract”), and mobi-
lization against the European Constitution, to its status as “the capital of
European reaction,” to cite Perry Anderson’s famous dictum. But Sarkozy’s
wish to liquidate ’68—to repave the French political imaginary and erase
the very memory of those events in anticipation of their (predictably melan-
choly) fortieth anniversary—seems to bespeak a harsher form of subjec-
tivity than a merely reactionary one.
Despite the presence of the intolerable André Glucksmann, epitome
of reactionary subjectivity in Alain Badiou’s recent Logiques des mondes,
alongside Johnny Hallyday and, alas, Charlotte Rampling, in Sarkozy’s
entourage, the figure of the reactive subject—which we will examine more
closely below—is still too mild to properly identify la singularité Sarkozy.
Taking François Furet as emblematic of this kind of subjectivity, Badiou
sees reaction as a manner of starkly denying the necessity of rupture
embodied in a political event (e.g., the French Revolution) but nevertheless
incorporating some of the novelties it carries within a narrative where radi-
cal subjectivity and collective action are simply hysterical and catastrophic
gestures which, at best, give rise to changes that the gradual and reason-
able unfolding of historical development would have led to anyway. In the
final analysis, from the vantage point of reaction, the event and the impla-
cable fidelity to its consequences are a hindrance to the very principles that
motivate it.
But Badiou’s recent thought, as we shall see in more depth below,
introduces another figure of the subject, whose relationship to novelty and
fidelity is more extreme, less mediated: the obscure subject. The aim of this
subject is not to neutralize novelty by incorporating some of its effects and
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  29

despairing of its needless excess. Rather, political obscurantism is aimed

at radically negating the new present that a faithful or militant subject of
truth (an egalitarian subject) has arduously brought into being. As Badiou
puts it in Logiques des mondes, the obscure subject “systematically resorts
to the invocation of a transcendent Body, full and pure, an ahistorical or
anti-evental body (City, God, Race . . .) whence it derives that the trace will
be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful to the obscure
subject) and, by way of consequence, the real body, the divided body, will
also be suppressed.” In this respect, Sarkozy’s gambit is that the very act
of liquidating the divided body of ’68 may help in conjuring up the full body
of a morally rearmed French nation. His ultimately sinister “Ensemble, tout
est possible” (insofar as the body of this tous is brought together by the
exclusion of immigrants, soixante-huitards, racaille, and so on) is thus infi-
nitely distant from the slogan of the 1995 French protests: Tous ensemble.
While Sarkozy is still functioning well within the ambit of reactive politics
(capitalist parliamentarianism), his tendencies, following Badiou’s useful
formalization, are obscure. As Badiou notes,

It is crucial to gauge the gap between the reactive formalism and the
obscure formalism. As violent as it may be, reaction conserves the
form of the faithful subject as its articulated unconscious. It does not
propose to abolish the present, only to show that the faithful rupture
(which it calls “violence” or “terrorism”) is useless for engendering a
moderate, that is to say extinguished, present (a present that it calls
“modern”). . . . Things are very different for the obscure subject. That
is because it is the present that is directly its unconscious, its lethal
disturbance, while it disarticulates within appearance the formal
data of fidelity. The monstrous full Body to which it gives fictional
shape is the atemporal filling of the abolished present. [It entertains]
everywhere and at all times the hatred of any living thought, of any
transparent language and of every uncertain becoming. (LM, 69)

Sarkozy’s thirst for negation of course can’t be directed at political novelty

itself—which in any instance has been squandered by much of the Left and
systemically nearly obliterated in these years of neoliberal Restoration—and

. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes (Paris: Seuil, 2006), 69. This work has been trans-
lated into English by Alberto Toscano, as Logics of Worlds (London: Continuum, 2009).
Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as LM; page numbers refer to the French
edition.
. See Stathis Kouvélakis, La France en révolte (Paris: Textuel, 2007).
30  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

much less at a living political subject; on the contrary, in a typical manifesta-

tion of the obscurantist mind-set, it is directed at an eclectic set of noxious
predicates and phenomena, a “divided body” indeed—“division” being the
ominous specter that haunted much mainstream political discourse around
the 2007 election. Thus 1968 is the proverbial “quilting point,” the Lacanian
point de capiton for (to quote from a Sarkozy speech) “welfare dependency,
fraud, thievery, egalitarianism,” “moral and intellectual relativism.” It is the
deep cause of a “moral crisis in France not seen since the time of Joan
of Arc.” In order to bury the body of political principles and subjects, what
better than to portray 1968 as the very absence of principles? Also sprach
Sarko: “The heirs of May ’68 have imposed the idea that everything has the
same worth, that there is no difference between good and evil, no difference
between the true and the false, between the beautiful and the ugly and that
the victim counts for less than the delinquent.” Values, hierarchy, morality—
all moribund, all to rise again into the full Body of the Republic once the
canker of 1968 is finally excised. In order to mobilize the electoral hordes for
his counterrevolutionary revolution, Sarkozy was even willing to depict ’68
as a kind of ethical catastrophe that made possible the “excesses of finan-
cial capital,” “golden handshakes” and “rogue bosses.” Sarkozy’s blessed
rage for order did indeed seem to confirm one of Badiou’s hunches, to wit
that an event and the faithful subject it catalyzes do not just generate an
independent political trajectory, a truth, but that they reshape the whole of
“subjective space,” forcing both reactionaries and obscurantists to develop
their positions in relation to it.
But what of Sarkozy’s defeated contender, Ségolene Royal, her
camp, and the culprits of this decades-long moral malaise, the soixante-
huitards? On one level, Royal responded to Sarkozy’s thirst for annihilation
by laying claim to that legacy, having earlier in her campaign even flirted
with the thought of Jacques Rancière and with proposals for participatory
democracy. Hers was, after a fashion, a show of fidelity, declaring that “May
1968 is 11 million workers who obtained the Grenelle accords, the right of
women to access contraception, a wind of freedom against a totally closed
society.” Leaving aside the fact that the Grenelle accords, negotiated by

. Alas, this take on 1968 has been put forward by less obnoxious sources: the otherwise
excellent Adam Curtis, for instance, in his spurious attack on R. D. Laing’s antipsychiatry
in the recent BBC documentary series The Trap; or Régis Debray, who, in the New Left
Review ’s issue on the tenth anniversary of 1968 famously portrayed it as a vanishing
mediator of sorts for American hedonistic capitalism.
. This quote, and the one from Cohn-Bendit below, is taken from a pro-Royal Weblog,
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  31

Chirac, were held in contempt by much of the union rank and file and by
the entirety of the Maoist and Trotskyist Left, another statement of Royal’s
should also be kept in mind: she in fact accused Sarkozy of trying to pro-
voke “another 1968.” In this second sense, closer to the reactive one in
Badiou’s terminology, 1968 stands in for disorder, crisis, anomie, and a con-
flict that must be averted at all costs by the efforts of a stalwart reform-
ism. It is not in any way the cipher for a moment of political invention, for
the possibility of a radical restructuring of society. The tenor of the “Left”
ripostes to Sarkozy in the French media were also symptomatic. Daniel
Cohn-Bendit, now a rather self-regarding European parliamentarian, pre-
dictably rehashed his long-time anticommunism to brand Sarkozy’s liqui-
dationism as “Bolshevik” and, in faultless Euro-liberal form, praised ’68 for
its “liberation of the autonomy of individuals.” Many others emphasized the
“values” of freedom and autonomy, but in the guise of a salutary infusion of
joy, pleasure, and mobility into the polity, not in terms of a radical alternative
to the status quo.

available at http://desirsdavenir11.over-blog.net/article-6524006.html (last accessed Sep-

tember 15, 2008).
. This section was composed during the French elections and prior to the publication of
Badiou’s De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, the fourth volume in his Circonstances series.
In that text, Badiou, drawing on a different aspect of his Logiques des mondes, presents
Sarkozy as the latest incarnation of a “Pétainist” transcendental. As is clear from the
following quote, taken from an excerpt recently published in the New Left Review, the
Pétainist transcendental is a peculiar amalgam of reaction and obscurantism: “the uncon-
scious national-historical roots of that which goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be
found in this Pétainist configuration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted
from the summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This matrix has
been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the Restoration of 1815 when
a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly supported by émigrés and opportunists, was
brought back in the foreigners’ baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a worn-
out population, that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat
once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real content of state
action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the ‘nation,’ yet was installed by the
German Occupation; the most corrupt of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral
crisis; Pétain himself, an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodi-
ment of national rebirth.” This politics of restoration under the simulacrum of rebirth is
one in which “capitulation and servility” (to foreign occupiers or Capital) “are presented
as invention and regeneration” (Alain Badiou, “The Communist Hypothesis,” New Left
Review 49 [January–February 2008]: 32–33). See also Peter Hallward’s perspicuous
comments and criticisms in “L’hypothèse communiste,” Le revue internationale des livres
et des idées 5 (2008): 28–30, a longer version of his review of Badiou’s Sarkozy book in
Radical Philosophy 149 (2008): 50–52.
32  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

“I Fail, Therefore I Am.”

As testified by the French controversies—especially in the pages

of the daily Libération—around Badiou’s Circonstances 3 (his collection of
interventions on Israel, Zionism, and Judaism, now in English in Polemics)
and his best-selling screed against Sarkozy, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le
nom?, the “antitotalitarian” credo of the nouveaux philosophes and the
anticommunist philosophies of finitude, liberalism, and human rights are
still enduring ideological forces, at least as far as the dreaded figure of the
“media intellectual” is concerned. On a broader scale, the intellectual and
philosophical suspicion of emancipatory philosophies—of any prospect of
creating a “new man” or a new society—still pervades much political and
ethical thought, whether in the guise of a concern with ineffable alterity or in
an emphasis on precariousness and vulnerability pitted against any notion
of the radical transformation or transvaluation of society. Whether they find
their sources in Habermas or Levinas, many contemporary ethical and
political philosophies are defined, explicitly or otherwise, by their reaction
either to a supposed totalitarian hubris or to the “left-fascist” excesses of la
pensée 68 (it is interesting that this Habermasian category has resurfaced
in Peter Sloterdijk’s recent post-Nietzschean anticommunist tome, Zorn
und Zeit).
Aside from its assertive advocacy of philosophical speculation against
any affectations of critical humility, the fortune of Badiou’s philosophy can
be chalked up to his marked opposition to any intellectual approach that
takes its cue from the supposed defeat of revolutionary aspirations. Indeed,
for some time, the political philosophy of the “lesser evil” has been one
of his specific adversaries. In a 1987 article, tellingly entitled “Down with
Existing Society!” he railed against the “intellectual coma” that stems from
treating the self-interested preference for living in parliamentary democ-
racies rather than authoritarian states as the basis for a political doctrine.
This ambient hedonistic defense of liberalism finds its sophistic apotheosis
in the idea that the destiny of “the West” (itself one of the categories of
the anti-’68 Restoration) is to fight radical Evil, and that its perdition lies
in any project that would be predicated on an idea of the Good. In the

. For the diagnosis of an emblematic case in this regard, see Daniel Bensaïd, Un nou-
veau théologien: Bernard-Henri Lévy (Paris: Lignes, 2007). Deleuze’s seminal analysis of
the nouveaux philosophes, “A propos des nouveaux philosophes et d’un probleme gen-
eral” (1977), now in Two Regimes of Madness (New York: Semiotext[e], 2006), remains
one of the most acute dissections of this phenomenon.
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  33

nouveaux philosophes’ apologia for local resistances to Evil over against

revolutionary projects for the Good, Badiou discerns an ultimate conserva-
tism, distilled into the motto “let’s hold on to what we have, since there is
worse elsewhere.” Such a perspective forbids any immanent evaluation of
one’s own political conjuncture, and more importantly prohibits the formu-
lation of any political thinking worthy of the name. These observations lead
Badiou to a sardonic remark that could be seen as an emblem for his whole
philosophy:

If the lamentable state in which we find ourselves is nonetheless the

best of all real states this simply proves that up to now the political
history of men has only given birth to restricted innovations and we
are but characters in a pre-historic situation. . . . If, in terms of politi-
cal thought and practice, of forms of collective life, humanity has yet
to find and will not find anything better than currently existing par-
liamentary states, and the forms of consciousness associated with
them, this proves that as a species, said humanity will not rank much
higher than ants and elephants. The communist idea at least had
the merit of announcing a fate that would be a little more capable of
inscribing itself in the annals of the Universe.

Badiou recognizes that the “lesser evil” argument is bolstered by its key
subjective correlate, one that from a very different perspective had already
been identified and condemned by Hannah Arendt in her 1950’s criticisms
of “ex-communist” cold warriors—what Badiou encapsulates in the thesis
“we tried, and it was a catastrophe,” or, more pithily: “I fail, therefore I am.”
He paints an unforgiving portrait of those who—having learned the ropes
of politics and strategy from their revolutionary commitment—now censure
their previous fidelity as a youthful diversion which merely delayed their
rise to positions of power and prestige. Badiou heaps contempt on the
form of reasoning that underlies these comfortable conversions: “Imagine
a mathematician who, having toiled with few results on a problem, would
declare that since he failed, the problem no longer exists! Note that such a
mathematician would not, because of his declaration, be propelled into the
Academy of the Sciences, whilst it seems that having failed in revolution-
ary politics, if one flaunts it loudly enough, justifies the greatest hopes in
journalism. I fail, therefore I am.” But for Badiou the political problems that

. Alain Badiou, “À bas la société existante!” Le Perroquet 69 (March 23, 1987), 2.

. Badiou, “À bas la société existante!” 2.
34  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

called forth revolutionary commitment abide, and their seemingly intrac-

table difficulty is only a spur for further investigation. The supposed combi-
nation of morality and realism promoted by the likes of the nouveaux phi-
losophes is but a confession of incapacity, and a commitment to opposing
society as it stands demands ever-renewed conceptual and practical inno-
vations, which no cozy abdication can ever dispel.
In a recent conference in Paris devoted to Logiques des mondes,
the sequel to his meta-ontological magnum opus Being and Event, Badiou
made a strange but very telling confession: he explained that all of his
work, including or even especially his most forbiddingly abstract philosophi-
cal investigations, stems from the need to answer how and why many of
his generational peers could betray their revolutionary convictions, namely
those convictions that came forcefully to the fore after May ’68. This avowal
is odd for a number of reasons. To begin with, it almost suggests that
militant fidelity—the putative cornerstone of Badiou’s constantly revised
theory of the subject—albeit rare is itself not mysterious, or even that, from
Badiou’s own point of view, it is its abandonment or perversion that stands
as an enigma, not its emergence as such. Furthermore, though Badiou’s
philosophy, especially in books such as Saint Paul, appears to propose a
model of subjectivity that wrests it away from any continuity with everyday
experience—where “subject” stands for a process of purifying subtraction
from worldly entanglements and from embodied individuality, and for the
construction of a singular truth—the role of betrayal in eliciting philosophi-
cal speculation suggests that subjects other than militant ones have a role
to play in Badiou’s thought.10
In what follows, we would like to investigate some of the figures taken
by these other subjects in Badiou’s thought, from its inception in the late
sixties onwards. The object of this bestiary—which does not include just
revisionists, reactionaries, and renegades, but also Thermidorians, demo-
cratic materialists, obscurantists, sophists, antiphilosophers, social-fascists,
and opportunists, among others—is to explore the subjective aspect and
the internal periodization of the phase that Badiou in The Century defines
as the Restoration, that period of triumphant cynicism whose beginning
in France he dates to the late seventies and early eighties, and which sig-
nificantly overlaps with his mature philosophical production. This will allow
us to give a sense of the cultural and polemical context whence Badiou’s

10. See Alberto Toscano, “The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of
Politics,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 2, no. 1–2
(2006): 15–38.
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  35

thought arises, and some of the political motivations that lie behind his
rather Althusserian treatment of philosophy as an activity not of critique
or totalization but of polemical demarcation. Hopefully, a number of the
lessons that may be drawn from Badiou’s rather singular trajectory will be
of interest for a broader reckoning not just with the legacy of ’68 but more
specifically with the many forms taken by its repudiation, disavowal, and
negation.
Much of the attraction of Badiou’s thought in the current conjuncture
may be said to stem from the verve and precision with which he revives
philosophy’s combative vocation. In Logiques des mondes, as we shall see
and as we’ve already suggested, he even provides a transhistorical for-
malization of the subjective space in which militancy coexists with reaction
and obscurantism. But what in the more recent work takes an often formal
guise, in Badiou’s earlier writings, especially his Maoist pamphlets from the
1970s, is filled with very specific content. We will thus begin with a treat-
ment of Badiou’s polemical view of the ideological field in the wake of ’68,
proceed to his understanding of the philosophies of the Restoration in the
1980s and 1990s, and conclude by considering the place of antiegalitarian
or nonuniversal subjects in Badiou’s formal theory of the subject, as set out
in Book 1 of Logiques des mondes.

The Revisionist Foe

Arguably the key plank, as well as the source, of Badiou’s later ven-
tures into polemology and demarcation is his discussion of revisionism in
the early 1970s. In a number of texts principally concerned with outlining
the stance of his Maoist organization, the UCFML (Groupe pour la fonda-
tion d’une Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste), toward
the major French unions (CGT and CFDT) and the French Communist
Party (PCF), Badiou engages in a seemingly orthodox application of the
terminology of the Sino-Soviet clash, and its intensification in the period of
the Cultural Revolution, to the context of post-’68 French politics. The epi-
thets of social-imperialism, social-colonialism, and even the social-fascism
of the “Third Period” Third International make their appearance (one could
criticize these appellations using Badiou’s own refutation of notions like
Islamic fundamentalism or “Islamofascism” in Infinite Thought,11 where
the adjective-noun complex is deemed to hide the vacuity or vagueness

11. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and the ‘War against Terrorism,’” in Infinite Thought, trans.
and ed. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), 141–64.
36  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

of the two terms). The strategic horizon is provided by what Badiou calls
a “revisionist counter-offensive,” the PCF project for state power after the
weakening of the revolutionary upsurge of ’68. Whereas other Marxist-
Leninist groups (PCMLF, Gauche prolétarienne) are targets of derision for
their merely “ideological” criticism of the PCF line, Badiou depicts a situa-
tion in which the drive for emancipation is stuck between one bourgeois
project (liberal capitalist) and another (that of the PCF, or what Badiou in
his Maoist idiom calls “the state-bureaucratic monopolistic fraction of the
French imperialist bourgeoisie,” whose aim is “an imperialist bourgeois
state of a new type”—Badiou even goes so far as painting the PCF as a
party whose intrinsic logic pushes it to a coup d’état scenario . . .). In this
wholly militant period of Badiou’s production, it is not just political criteria
that serve to identify and oppose antiegalitarian projects: revisionist sub-
jectivities are also grounded in a class analysis of sorts. Though Badiou
opposes the idea according to which the PCF is a petty-bourgeois party,
he does seek its organizational basis in an elitist, hierarchical, and techni-
cal “labor aristocracy,” and reiterates that the diagnosis of social-fascism
is founded on regarding the PCF from the perspective of its project: the
seizure and administration of state power.12
The “social” in the term social-fascism thus refers to the instrumen-
talization of a mass base of working-class supporters and the employment
of a counterfeit Marxist ideology, for the sake of a project that would propose
to solve the crisis of capitalism through a nationalist, statist, and organic
centralization of power within a bureaucratic apparatus. Viewed from the
standpoint of Badiou’s own political line, the field is thus one of complex
antagonism: the position of the UCFML is not only faced with two enemies
juxtaposed to one another (classical monopolism and bureaucratic mono-
polism), but within the union movement itself it is confronted with revision-
ism (the CGT as pro-PCF union) and opportunism, that form of anarcho-
syndicalist unionism which promotes self-management and repudiates
state-power but in the end is perfectly compatible with the parliamentary
order (the CFDT and other organizations). We thus have an opposition
between state projects, as well as an antagonism between different types
of struggle. Finally, as Badiou’s 1978 pamphlet on the contestation within
the PCF makes clear, where he lambastes Althusser and his ilk for their
political debility, revisionism, and opportunism, all find their ultimate reason

12. See Alain Badiou, “Édification du parti et question syndicale,” Théorie et politique 3/4
(1975): 114–18; “Syndicalisme et révisionnisme moderne,” Théorie et politique 5 (1975):
58–87; La « contestation » dans le P.C.F (Paris: Éditions Potemkine, 1978).
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  37

in the manner that they react, however implicitly, to the “real” they are trying
to repress: egalitarian revolutionary politics (needless to say, this “real” is
Badiou’s own politics).

The Philosophical Front

As the decade of the 1970s proceeds, and the political context

becomes even less favorable to the kind of struggle promoted by Badiou’s
group, it is in the ideological field that his efforts and those of his comrades
are most insistent. The key text in this respect, a remarkable precursor of
his more recent polemics, as well as a valuable compass for orienting one-
self around Badiou’s antagonistic image of philosophy, is the 1977 collec-
tive text published by the Groupe-Yénan Philosophie of the UCFML, The
Current Situation on the Philosophical Front.13 The purpose of this book
is to identify and drastically undermine those forms of post-’68 thought
which are predicated on the revolutionary upheaval of May and its after-
math but which neutralize, pervert, or counter the political “real” whence
they emerge. The role of philosophy here is depicted as an extreme ver-
sion of Althusser’s “class struggle in theory.” Philosophy is a “distillate of
antagonism” summoned by history and “the servant, not of science, but
of weapons.” It is the “decisive figure of the actual, the divided, of class.”
Lacan, Althusser, and Deleuze—the targets of this left attack on a cer-
tain pensée 68—stand as the masks of philosophical novelty. There is only
one great philosopher . . . Mao, as the emblem of a confrontation between
revolution and counterrevolution. Most importantly, and in sharp contrast
to the avowed wish in Badiou’s later thought to “desuture” philosophy and
politics (see Manifesto for Philosophy), the division between revolution and
counterrevolution is anterior to every philosophy, and what matters is the
frontline. Philosophy follows the periodization and confrontations of political
struggle, and appears at the hinges of historical struggle.
The philosophical front is here defined in terms of one simple ques-
tion: What did May ’68 signify? The period ’68 engenders a kind of philo-
sophical and subjective space, within which philosophical production takes
place. This space is also matched by a periodization. For Badiou, the
period ’68–’71 is one of the simplification of struggle, of a concrete fighting
philosophy married to practice, devoid of speculation and subordinated to
the “immediate density of content.” From 1972, incapable of holding the

13. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie (Paris:

F. Maspéro, 1977).
38  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

line, many turn to terrorism (the hyper-leftist option), or decadence (the

rightist one). It is the capitulation of those who didn’t accept the demanding
labor—rather than the revelation—of suppressing oneself as a bourgeois
intellectual, leading to the return to the “vengeful virtues of philosophy.”
Philosophy appears here as a kind of revenge against history. Incapable
of attaining Power, the likes of the nouveaux philosophes try to show that
Power is Evil, snatching the victory of reprobation from the defeat of their
previous designs. As Badiou quips, “Since they were no longer allowed to
have the starring roles, they would show that the play itself was bad and
that its protagonist (the proletariat) is guilty of a villainous fiasco.”14 The
position of the nouveaux philosophes is accordingly synthesized in these
theses: masses (revolts) are good; the proletariat (Marxism) is bad; Power
(the State, whatever it may be) is Evil.
For these renegades, revolt must be stripped of any organization,
guidance, and roots in a class project. By repudiating the theme of dic-
tatorship, or the very struggle for power, this intellectual petite bourgeoi-
sie refuses politics and descends into metaphysics, nihilism, and so forth
(thus laying the ground for the politics of the lesser evil that Badiou would
later condemn). It is thus that a movement disarticulated from organization
becomes morality and eventually a pretext for restoration. A certain soci-
ologism is still present in these analyses—allowing Badiou, for instance, to
contend that the “poststructuralist” themes of Bodies, Writing, and Jouis-
sance are merely hypostases of the immediate social practice of the intel-
lectual petite bourgeoisie.
Finally, the analysis of the various ways in which the philosophies
of Deleuze, Lacan, and Althusser disavow or suppress the “real” of revolt
is linked to the strictly political and strategic analysis of the two bourgeois
projects (capitalist-fascism and social-fascism, as it were), in a political
cartography of French philosophy which gives some sense of how Badiou
and his comrades conceived of the force field linking reaction to specula-
tion. We reproduce below a diagram of the political topology of revolt and
reaction and its conjunctural “fluctuations,” as ideological hegemonies are
unsettled (Figure 1). The UCFML’s concentrated point of Maoism lies at the
base, whence stem two lines, leading on the one hand to “nihilist fascist
anti-Marxism” (the fascisme du pomme de terre or potato-fascism of the
fans of the rhizome), on the other to the “social fascists false Marxism”
which captures Althusserianism in its submission to the PCF.

14. Groupe-Yénan Philosophie, La situation actuelle sur le front de la philosophie, 11.

 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  39

Figure 1. Diagram taken from La situation actuelle sur le front de la phi-

losophie, 20.

This picture is made more intelligible if we consider, following Bruno

Bosteels,15 the centrality for Badiou of the concept of deviation, which
identifies as immanent possibilities of any universalist, emancipatory phi-
losophy a “leftist” penchant for pure force or act (as might be present in
Deleuze’s vitalism) and a “rightist” affirmation that there is no exception,
only structure (as might be argued of “high” structuralism). Though born
of Badiou’s own diagnosis of the Maoist camp (the Gauche prolétarienne
as leftist spontaneist deviation, the rigorously orthodox PCMLF as rightist
dogmatism), this is a logic that will remain central to his later conceptual-
izations of subjectivity as well.
This period of Badiou’s work leaves a number of questions pending if
we consider it in terms of his later figures of polemic and enmity: Are there
specific forms of philosophical antagonism that do not depend on the prior

15. See, among several important articles he has devoted to Badiou’s politics, Bruno
Bosteels, “Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13,
no. 3 (2005): 575–634.
40  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

delineation of a political and ideological front? If politics and philosophy

are desutured, do notions such as reaction and revisionism remain purely
political, or are their analogs present in all “truth procedures”? And what
happens to the analysis of political reaction when the fundamental parts
played by class perspective and the prospect of state power are so radically
recast in Badiou’s later work?

Thermidoreans, or, The Betrayers of Generic Humanity

In an essay originally published in 1996, translated as “What Is a

Thermidorean?”16 Badiou updates his continued polemic against the nou-
veaux philosophes by returning to an older French Revolutionary trope. In
contrast to the postrevolutionary historical reaction of the original Thermi-
dor, Badiou speaks of the “personal Thermidor” that characterizes many
of the attitudes taken by the nouveaux philosophes to the narrative of their
own supposed political development. This self-narration takes the form of
positing a putative earlier “radical” self—in the French case, usually of a
Maoist bent—with the supposedly “adult” realization that one must rec-
oncile oneself to the existing order. Noam Chomsky has made a similar
point, showing that this kind of retroactive political storytelling about one-
self usually involves a fair amount of exaggerating—I was chucking bricks
through windows and beating up cops!—when nothing of the sort had in
fact taken place. The concept of the “personal Thermidor” promotes the
idea both that the political affiliations one holds in one’s youth are the stuff
of folly, but also that one is reconciled to the status quo in a more profound
way, having been “on the other” side in an earlier incarnation. The idea that
“there is no alternative” receives its justification from the supposed failure
of the idea that at some earlier point there might have been one.
For Badiou, “Thermidorean”—as one concept appropriate to the
forms of reaction in the previous few decades—means, then, “the con-
cept of the subjectivity constituted through the termination of a political
sequence.”17 This consists of, according to Badiou, “statification”—rallying
behind the political process, calculable interest, and the belief that all poli-
tics is motivated by the drive for power and prestige—and what Badiou
calls “placement,” that is, the contrasting of Western democracy with the
purported totalitarianism and the lack of human rights of the “elsewhere.”

16. Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005).
17. Badiou, Metapolitics, 128.
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  41

Badiou’s attack on the use and abuse of the language of human rights
is amongst his most trenchant of recent critiques, most particularly in his
Ethics, from 1993. There he claims that the “return to the old doctrine of
the natural rights of man is obviously linked to the collapse of revolution-
ary Marxism”18 and professes his fidelity to the line of French antihuman-
ism that includes Foucault, Althusser, and Lacan. However, the question
of Badiou’s relationship to the humanism-antihumanism debate is a much
more complex one than his apparently straightforward attack on ethical and
human rights discourse might suggest.
Against the evacuation of any positive use of the term in Althusser’s
work and its reduction to mere ideological effect, it is clear that Badiou
wants to retain a post-Sartrean conception of the “subject,” and that this
has been the case from his earlier, more heavily political works (Théo-
rie du sujet, 1982), to his later exercises in meta-ontology and a theory of
truth (Being and Event, 1988, and Logiques des mondes, 2006). However,
we can immediately complicate this claim by noting that the later Badiou
does take on board one aspect of the Althusserian claim that there are
no extant “subjects” qua autonomous agents, alongside the seemingly
opposed Sartrean idea that subjectivation is possible and, indeed, desir-
able. Badiou’s relationship to the claims and vicissitudes of the so-called
humanism-antihumanism debate plays out over the question of how and
why he retains and defines, not just a question of who or what the collec-
tive political subject might be but also what the significance of the “sub-
ject” might be for philosophy in toto. His work is an attempt to merge and
go beyond the two terms of the debate, in which structuralism “opposes”
humanism, by entering into a topological discourse that nevertheless per-
mits the continued possible existence of the subject (indeed, we could say
that Badiou’s preservation of the “subject” is the most consistent element
of his work). Whilst Badiou seeks to align himself with the antihumanism of
Foucault, Lacan, and Althusser, against both a “return to Kant” in human
rights discourse and the “bad Darwinism” of a contemporary conception
of man as finite animal, there are hints, both explicit and implicit, of his
belonging to a longer trajectory of “political humanism.”
Indeed, we see this in particular in Badiou’s mathematico-political
deployment of terms such as generic, and its political correlate generic
humanity. We don’t wish to argue that Badiou’s “mathematical turn” is
necessarily over-determined by his politics, as some have suggested, but

18. Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2001), 4.
42  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

rather that the mathematics and politics coimplicate each other in ways
which entail that when Badiou uses terms like revolution the resonances
are intended to be heard at both levels, scientific and historico-political.
The major claim made here is that Badiou’s use of the term humanism is,
however, evidence of a political struggle whose vicissitudes have lent the
philosophical implications of the word a different sense at different points
between the original “debate” of the 1960s and the contemporary era: the
story here with regard to Badiou’s work is how the impossibility of using
the term in the era of Stalin (“a ‘Soviet humanism’ through which we can
glimpse the well-heeled dachas and the black Mercedes,” he writes19) has
been transformed into the possibility of equating the quasi-Feuerbachian
term generic humanity with the politics of an egalitarian communism
(“Equality means that the political actor is represented under the sole sign
of his specifically human capacity”20).
The rationalist insistence that “people think” appears everywhere
in Badiou. In an article titled “Democratic Materialism,” excerpted from
Logiques de mondes, Badiou asks “what do we think, today?”21 We should
not, of course, understand this as a Heideggerian worry that thought is not
yet happening, but rather as the persistent claim that thought itself has
been betrayed, in the various revisionist and reactionary antipolitical for-
mations. Badiou’s claim in this piece that the status quo can be summed
up by its “natural” belief that “There are only bodies and languages”22
conveys his contempt for identity politics and the superficial investment in
cultural and linguistic differences. For Badiou, difference is not something
to be dragged up and hailed, but rather the banal stuff of human life; to
reify difference is to deny that sameness is also possible—the sameness
of a political project, a shared commitment to a political goal (and here
Badiou is extremely Sartrean). Against this democratic materialism, Badiou
proposes a materialist dialectic—as he freely confesses, a rather old and
unfashionable phrase—which adds the important proviso to the phrase
“there are only bodies and languages” except that there are truths to the
phrase “there are only bodies and languages.” This exception is precisely

19. See Alain Badiou, “Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution,” trans.
Alberto Toscano with Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power, positions: east asia cultures cri-
tique 13, no. 3 (2005): 635–48.
20. Alain Badiou, “Philosophy and Politics,” Radical Philosophy 96 (1999): 29.
21. Alain Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” Radical Philoso-
phy 130 (2005): 20.
22. Badiou, “Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic,” 20.
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  43

what “democratic” materialism wishes to foreclose. In this return to a kind

of Althusserian language, fused with Plato and Descartes, we see Badiou’s
ambivalent struggle with an old vocabulary and a new subjective horizon;
often he’ll speak of having to move beyond the logic of classical Marx-
ism—the party, classes, et cetera—but the question of what might replace
it remains open.

Meta-physics of the Political Subject:

Reactionaries and Obscurantists

How are these various notions of enmity and polemic formalized in

Badiou’s most recent work? Pitted against hermeneutic, moral, and ideo-
logical models of subjectivity, it is worth reiterating that Badiou’s theory is
not interested in the experience of subjectivity but simply in its form. Nor is
Badiou particularly concerned with the subject as a source of statements,
a subject of enunciation capable of saying “I” or “we.” Rather, the subject is
depicted as what exceeds the normal disposition and knowledge of “bodies
and languages.” The theory propounded in Book 1 of Logiques de mondes,
however, brackets the body (which is why Badiou dubs it a “meta-physics”),
and provides the general parameters for thinking how subjects exceed the
situations from which they arise. The notion of subject therefore “imposes
the readability of a unified orientation upon a multiplicity of bodies” (LM,
58). The subject is thus viewed as an “active and identifiable form of the
production of truths” (LM, 58). The emphasis, evidently, is on form.
But does this entail that the only subjects deserving of our theo-
retical attention are subjects of truth, of the one truth that may affect and
dislocate any given situation? The particular inflection of Badiou’s defini-
tion tells us otherwise: “Saying ‘subject’ or saying ‘subject with regard to
truth’ is redundant. For there is a subject only as the subject of a truth, at
the service of this truth, of its denial, or of its occultation” (LM, 58). This
“with regard to” already indicates that there are, indeed, different subjective
positions or comportments, determined by a subject’s stance toward the
irruption of the event and the truths that may follow from it. Badiou himself
presents this theory as a self-criticism of sorts, arguing that his earlier work
(he is thinking of the Théorie du sujet in particular and its denial that there
was such a thing as bourgeois subjectivity) stipulated an all-too-firm and
drastic opposition between the new and the old. In this new formal theory
he wishes instead to confront the existence, amongst others, of what he
calls “reactionary novelties.” To resist the new, to deny it, one still requires
44  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

arguments and subjective forms. In other words, the theory of the sub-
ject needs to countenance the fact that reactionary forms of subjectivation
exist—which for Badiou unsurprisingly take the shape of the anticommu-
nist antitotalitarianism which spurred the backlash of revisionist histori-
ans (Furet) and the renegade nouveaux philosophes (Glucksmann) to the
emancipatory innovations arising in the wake of May ’68.
In the place of an earlier reliance on class analysis and political par-
tisanship, the dependence of subjectivity on the event permits Badiou to
propose a philosophical argument as to why “other” subjects are radically
dependent on a subject of truth. As he writes, “From a subjective point of
view, it is not because there is reaction that there is revolution, it is because
there is revolution that there is reaction” (LM, 71). This Maoist thesis of the
primacy of revolt, which Badiou had already formulated as early as his 1975
Théorie de la contradiction, is now philosophically articulated in terms of
the key “temporal” category of Badiou’s theory of the subject, that of the
present. In responding to the trace of a supernumerary, illegal event, and in
constructing the body that can bring the implications of this event to bear
on a given world, a faithful subject is involved in the production of a present.
Indeed, the only subjective temporality, which is to say the only historicity,
envisaged in Badiou’s system derives from such an irruption of generic
universality into the status quo.
But if the present, as a kind of rigorous and continued sequence of
novelties belongs to the subject of truth, how can “other subjects” partake
in it? Badiou’s contention is that they do so in a strictly derivative and para-
sitic (albeit by no means passive) manner. As he puts it, subjective “des-
tinations proceed in a certain order (to wit: production → denial → occulta-
tion), for reasons that formalism makes altogether clear: the denial of the
present supposes its production, and its occultation supposes a formula of
denial” (LM, 71).
Given the arduous and ongoing production of a truth, reactionary
subjects seek to deny the event that called it into being, and to disaggre-
gate the body which is supposed to carry the truth of that event. It is for
this reason that reaction, according to Badiou, involves the production of
another, “extinguished” present. The thesis of reaction, at base, is that all
of the “results” of a truth procedure (e.g., political equality in the French
revolution) could be attained without the terroristic penchant of the faithful
subject, and without the affirmation of a radically novel event. As Badiou
recognizes, this constitutes an active denial of truth, which demands
the creation of reactionary statements and indeed of what we could call
 Power and Toscano / Alain Badiou and the Enemies of May  45

reactionary anti-bodies. Think, for instance, of the elaborate strategies of

cultural organization, admirably narrated by Frances Stonor Saunders, with
which the CIA and its proxies sought to incorporate some of the innovations
of aesthetic radicalism in order to deny their link with communist politics,
invariably borrowing many formal traits and discursive dispositions from
their nemeses.
While the reactionary suspends or attenuates the present produced
by an event, denying its novelty but absorbing many of its traits, the second
type of “unfaithful” subject, what Badiou calls the obscure subject, enter-
tains a far more severe relation to the new present that the faithful subject
had given rise to. Rather than denying its novelty, the obscure subject is
focused on actually negating the very existence of this new present. As we
already noted above, the obscure subject, in order to occult novelty, “sys-
tematically resorts to the invocation of a transcendent Body, full and pure,
an ahistorical or anti-evental body (City, God, Race . . .) whence it derives
that the trace will be denied (here, the labour of the reactive subject is useful
to the obscure subject) and, by way of consequence, the real body, the
divided body, will also be suppressed” (LM, 68). The obscure “anti-body” is
thus very different than the reactive one. While the latter may be repressive,
it is also aimed at persuading the faithful that “it’s just not worth it,” that they
should resign themselves to a “lesser present” and enjoy its diminished but
secure rewards. The transcendent body conjured up by the obscure subject
is instead a kind of “atemporal fetish” (LM, 69), writes Badiou, under whose
weight novelty must be thoroughly crushed and silenced.
Most importantly, Badiou suggests that the faithful subject, the sub-
ject that produces a new present by drawing the worldly consequences of
an event, must entertain a differentiated relationship to the other figures
who inhabit the new subjective space that his fidelity has opened up. This is
why, as quoted above, he thinks that it “is crucial to gauge the gap between
the reactive formalism and the obscure formalism.” While the reactive or
reactionary subject incorporates the form of faithfulness, the obscure sub-
ject seems to be defined by the twofold movement of laying waste to the
immanent production of the new and generating a transcendent, monolithic
novelty, essentially indistinguishable from the most archaic past.
This logical geography of subjective space marks an important step
in Badiou’s work, as well as a significant contribution to developing a politi-
cal theory of reaction and betrayal—a theory which is of crucial importance
if we are to truly confront the “subjective space” arising not just from the
Parisian May ’68 but from the “world sixties,” especially in terms of the
46  boundary 2  /  Spring 2009

myriad figures of reaction and obscurantism that currently occupy much of

the global political scene. Badiou is of worth here inasmuch as he moves
beyond the violent identification of rivals and enemies to trying to account,
at least at a formal level, for how attempts at emancipatory politics are
not merely quashed by external powers but determine the very forms that
reaction takes, for how the traces of a generic politics may be read in the
strategies of authority and oppression, and, finally, how the attempt to
undermine egalitarianism can take radically different forms, which demand
different evaluations and responses on the part of militant subjects, espe-
cially from those subjects which, in his meta-physics, Badiou suggestively
calls the subjects of the resurrection of a truth.