10,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
What is the relation between politics and the world? It might seem that global capitalism has created one world, but this is an illusion because capitalism creates a world of objects and money that divides human existence into regions separated by fences and walls built to keep some people out. In place of this falsely unified world of global capitalism, we need to assert a fundamental principle - namely, that there is one world of living subjects. This, in Badiou's view, is the categorical imperative of all true politics. The one world of living subjects is the place where an infinity of differences and identities exist. Hence foreigners are not a problem but rather an opportunity and a gift. They bear witness to the youth of the world in its infinite variety, and it is with this youth that the politics of the future rests. Foreignness is the means by which existence is re-evaluated, and all true politics is a new dawn of existence. This collection of essays by Badiou, in which he draws out the political implications of recent events and social movements, will be of value to anyone interested in the great social and political questions of our time.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 140
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Preface
Part I Structures and Notions, Becomings and Visions
1 The Neolithic Age, Capitalism, and Communism
2 The Notion of ‘Crisis’
3 Science, Ideology, and the Middle Class
4 Lecture at the Institute of Political Sciences
Genius
Notes
Part II Thinking the Present from the To-Come
5 Lessons from the ‘Gilets Jaunes’ Movement
6 Pandemic, Ignorance, and New Sites of Collectivity
7 Movements without an Idea and an Idea for Movements
8 World, Existence, Foreignness: A New Dawn for Politics
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
vii
viii
ix
x
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
A New Dawn for Politics
Alain Badiou
Translated by Robin Mackay
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Les Possibles matins de la politique by Alain Badiou © Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2021
This English edition © Polity Press, 2022
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5300-6 (hardback)
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5301-3 (paperback)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935231
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface
The texts in this collection were conceived, written, and delivered between 2016 and 2020, for various purposes and in various locations. Revised, and where necessary amended, here they are given a kind of new lease of life. What all of them try to do, although not necessarily in a systematic way, is to talk about the present ideological and political situation, both in France and worldwide. The aim being not just to ‘recount’ the various news stories that make the headlines, whether in print, on the airwaves or on smartphones, but to arm ourselves with a few useful notions, largely the product of the last three hundred years, in order to understand what is going on. In doing so we must also keep in mind that the official ‘news’, a commodity placed on the market by a few billionaires, is itself part of ‘what is going on’, rather than being any aid to its comprehension.
The first part opens with some necessary general overviews. Contrary to empiricists, then, who think that the only way to understand a totality is by listing all of its elements and parts, I begin from afar, from a great distance, even though I am adamant that we can only comprehend what is going on right under our noses if we go to see it, and then only if we are active, activist even. We must be activists, but activists with a faculty of comprehension broadened and enlightened by long-term thinking. Symmetrically, contrary to dogmatists, who believe that everything depends upon what they have been taught to believe, my assertions will be guided not so much by existing states of affairs as by the gap, generally quite glaring, between the constraints imposed upon the future of societies and what could have been done, and still ought to be done, in order to overcome those constraints.
The first part of the book brings together essays that in some sense offer a ‘bird’s eye view’, operating a dialectic of different epochs by examining what was constitutive of them, shedding light on their becomings and how they come to an end, and drawing some useful conclusions from these vicissitudes.
The second part, on the contrary, sets out from what is closest of all: those movements that have burst onto the scene, particularly in France, in recent years. It attempts to draw some lessons, both theoretical and practical, from these local adventures, in order to shed light upon what was misunderstood, to examine carefully what was proclaimed to be important, to point out what was neglected, and finally to prescribe what needs to be thought (the logic of Ideas) and done (the logic of activism) in order to bring about what I regard as, quite simply, the Good.
Alain Badiou
28 February 2021
Part IStructures and Notions, Becomings and Visions
1The Neolithic Age, Capitalism, and Communism
Let’s start by being ambitious, in terms of both time and space. We shall go back to a few millennia before our own time and also, as is fashionable, we shall take a look at the fate of our beloved planet, revered by some contemporary believers under the name of the goddess Gaia.
It has become commonplace today to announce, for various reasons, that the end is nigh for the human species as we know it. From the typically messianic perspective of a certain brand of ecology, the predatory excesses of the evil animal that is the human being will soon bring about the end of the living world. And then, from the perspective of runaway technological development we are told, in no particular order, of the takeover of all labour by robots, the sumptuous delights of the digital realm, automated art, deadly microplastics, and the threat of superhuman intelligence.
Consequently, we see the emergence of menacing categories such as transhumanism and the posthuman, or, in the other direction, a return to the animal, depending upon whether we listen to the prophecies of the tech industry or laments about the wounds inflicted on Mother Nature.
I regard all of these prophecies as so much ideological rhetoric designed to obscure the real danger facing humanity today, namely the impasse into which we are being led by globalised capitalism. It is in fact this social form, and it alone, which, wedded as it is to the pure notion of private profit, authorises the destructive exploitation of natural resources. That so many species are endangered, that the climate is still running out of control, that water is becoming a rare treasure – all of this is a by-product of the ruthless competition between predatory billionaires. And the fact that scientific development is anarchically enslaved to the imperative of producing saleable technologies has the same origin. Ecological preaching, which, despite its prophetic excesses, is often based on convincing descriptions, is in general becoming pure propaganda, useful to states that want to show everyone how caring they are, and transnational firms that, for the greater good of their turnover, are eager to make people believe in the noble and fraternal natural purity of the goods they traffic in.
Moreover, technological fetishism and the uninterrupted succession of ‘revolutions’ in this domain – the ‘digital revolution’ being currently the most fashionable – has constantly served to convince people that we are simultaneously heading for a workless paradise of helpful robots and universal laziness, and witnessing the human intellect being overtaken by electrical ‘thought’. Today, not a magazine is published that does not present its astonished readers with the imminent ‘victory’ of artificial over natural intelligence. But in the majority of cases neither ‘nature’ nor ‘artifice’ are correctly or clearly defined.
Since the very origins of philosophy, it has often been asked what the word ‘nature’ means. It has meant the romantic reverie of sunsets, the atomic materialism of Lucretius (De natura rerum), the innermost being of all things, Spinoza’s Totality (‘Deus sive Natura’), the objective flipside of all culture, the countryside as opposed to the suspicious artifices of the city (‘The earth does not lie’, as Marshall Pétain said), biology as opposed to physics, the scope of cosmology as opposed to the minuscule neighbourhood of our planet, invariant tradition as opposed to frenzied innovation, natural sexuality as opposed to perversion …. Today, I’m afraid, ‘nature’ refers principally to nothing much more than the peace of gardens and villages, the touristic charms of wild animals, the beach, and the mountains where you might spend a pleasant summer. So who could possibly imagine that man is responsible for this Nature – man, who even now is nothing more than a thinking flea, hopping around on a secondary planet in a medium-sized solar system on the edge of a commonplace galaxy?
Since its origins, philosophy has also thought technics, or the arts. The ancient Greeks meditated on the dialectic of technè and phusis, situating the human animal within this dialectic and thus paving the way for the idea that the human is ‘only a reed, the weakest in nature, but […] a thinking reed’, which, according to Pascal, means: stronger than Nature, and closer to God. They long ago realised that the animal capable of mathematics would achieve great things in the material order. And are these ‘robots’ we hear so much about anything more than calculations assembled into the form of a machine, numbers crystallised into movements? They certainly count faster than we do, but it is we who designed them for precisely this task. Even if a crane can lift a huge concrete pole to a great height, it would be stupid to conclude from this that humans are incapable of doing so and that we are witnessing the birth of some muscular transhuman giant …. Similarly, counting at the speed of light is not a sign of unsurpassable ‘intelligence’. Technological transhumanism just replays the same old trope, an inexhaustible theme in horror films and science fiction, of the creator outmanoeuvred by his creature, either so as to revel in the coming of the superman, which has been overdue since Nietzsche announced it, or to become fearful and take refuge under the skirts of Gaia or Mother Nature.
Let’s get things into perspective.
For four or five thousand years now humanity has been organised by the triad of private property, which concentrates enormous wealth in the hands of tiny oligarchies, the family, in which wealth is passed on via inheritance, and the state, which protects both property and family by means of armed force. It is this triad that defined the Neolithic age of our species and we are still living in that age, indeed perhaps more so than ever. Capitalism is the contemporary form of the Neolithic: its enslaving of technics to competition, profit, and the concentration of capital only brings to an apotheosis the monstrous inequalities, social absurdities, military massacres and deleterious ideologies, which throughout the historical reign of the class hierarchy have always accompanied the deployment of new technologies.
It should be clear that technical inventions were the initial conditions for the arrival of the Neolithic Age, not its result. Looking at the fate of our own animal species, we can see that sedentary agriculture, the domestication of cattle and horses, pottery, bronze, metal weapons, writing, nationhood, monumental architecture, and monotheistic religions are inventions at least as important as the aeroplane and the smartphone. What is human in history has always been artificial by definition, otherwise the humanity we know, Neolithic humanity, would not exist, but only a humanity that was still close to the animal realm – something that did indeed continue to exist in the form of small nomadic groups for around two hundred thousand years.
Fearful, obscurantist primitivism has its roots in the fallacious concept of ‘primitive communism’. Today it takes the form of a cultic belief in friendly archaic societies where babies, women, men, and old people lived fraternally along with mice, frogs, and bears. Ultimately, all of this is nothing more than ridiculous reactive propaganda, since everything points towards the fact that the societies in question were extremely violent, constantly labouring under the yoke of necessity, just struggling to survive.
}
Moreover, to talk today in hushed tones of the victory of the artificial over the natural, of the robot over the human, is a ridiculously regressive point of view, a real absurdity. Our reply to these terrors and prophecies should be as follows: a simple axe, or a trained horse, to say nothing of a papyrus full of signs, are already exemplary trans- or posthuman items; the abacus already made it possible to calculate much faster than with the fingers of the hand.
The question of our time is certainly not that of a return to primitivism or a messianic terror in the face of the ‘ravages’ of technology, nor is it that of a morbid fascination with the science fiction of all-conquering robots. The real task before us is to make a methodical and urgent exit from the Neolithic. This millennial order, which values only competition and hierarchy and tolerates the misery of billions of human beings, must be overcome at all costs, before we witness the unleashing of more of those wars that have been the preserve of the Neolithic since its emergence, technologised conflicts in the lineage of the two World Wars of 1914–18 and 1939–45, in which tens of millions died. This time it could be many more.
The issue is not technology or nature, but the organisation of societies on a global scale. It is about insisting that a non-Neolithic social organisation is possible, meaning: no private ownership of what should be common, i.e. the production of everything necessary for human life, and everything that makes it worthwhile. No family inheritances, no concentration of wealth. No separate state to protect the oligarchies. No hierarchical division of labour. No nations, no closed and mutually hostile identities. Collective organisation of everything pertaining to the collective interest.
All of this has a name, a fine name: communism. Capitalism is only the ultimate phase of the restrictions that the Neolithic form of society has imposed upon human life, the final stage of the Neolithic. Encore un effort, fine human animal, to break out of a condition that has seen five thousand years of inventiveness benefiting only a small handful of people. For almost two centuries, since Marx at any rate, we have known that the new age must begin, the age of unprecedented technologies for all, of work distributed equally to all, of the sharing of everything and of education that affirms the genius of all. In short, this new communism must oppose, everywhere and in all matters, the morbid survival of capitalism, this supposed ‘modernity’ of a world that in reality has already been around for five thousand years, which makes it old, far too old.
