State, subject, representation

So when we reach the end of Meditation Eight Badiou has placed before us a developed terminology and a set of clearly marked conceptual distinctions that promise a means of accomplishing the passage – the impossible passage, as some would have it – from issues within mathematics and the formal sciences to issues in the socio-political domain. He has done so, to repeat, by pur-suing the logic of those set-theoretical terms and operations that bring out the constant disruptive or destabilizing effect of incon-sistent upon conincon-sistent multiplicity, of that which is included in

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any given multiple upon that which is taken as belonging to it, and of all those uncounted parts of a certain situation upon the count-as-one that purports to represent its every last element.

Thus, despite his above-mentioned caveat regarding its ‘meta-phoric’ character, Badiou’s usage of the term ‘state’ at this point of his exposition – in particular his claim (p. 101) that ‘in ontology, the state’s “anti-void” functions are not guaranteed’ – is sure to evoke its social-political as well as its up-to-now predominantly technical, i.e., set-theoretical sense. So likewise with Badiou’s sum-mary remark, again towards the close of Meditation Eight, that – according to the terms and conditions of membership laid down by an existing state – ‘inclusion must not arise on the basis of any other principle of counting than that of belonging’ (p. 101). While this still has primary reference to certain regulative precepts in the discourse of mathematics (in Kuhnian terms, those which charac-terize periods of ‘normal’, problem-solving or non-revolutionary work) it can scarcely be read without evoking a whole range of analogous political situations. Among them – most emphatically – is that of the displaced, immigrant, socially excluded and disenfran-chised minorities whose cause Badiou has taken up through his involvement with various extra-parliamentary activist groups.⁹

These themes are developed more fully in Meditation Nine, where in effect (although without declaring as much) he withdraws the cautionary note and allows that these points of cross-reference between mathematics and politics are indeed something more than merely metaphorical. Its purpose is to specify more exactly – by way of adequate conceptualization rather than suggestive analogy – the order of relationship involved. As so often it is Aristotle who provides Badiou with his opening example of a thinker whose basic orientation – whose entire apparatus of meta-physical, ontological, ethical, political and scientific concepts – stands squarely opposed to his own (since in various ways committed to denying the existence or possibility of the void) yet for just that reason throws the relevant issues into sharp relief.

Badiou makes that case with respect to what he sees, along with other recent commentators, as the close affinity between Aristotle and Marx in certain crucial respects.¹⁰ Chief among them is Aristotle’s clear recognition that any dealing the state might have with those under its jurisdiction is not a matter of relating to individuals, to persons, or even to ‘subjects’ in a sense of that

term connoting the possession of particular traits beyond their generic (structural) placement as ‘subject to’ the power and authority of the state.¹¹ Rather – at its most fundamental – it has to be conceived in terms of precisely such an undifferentiating structural relationship maintained across and despite all distinc-tions between one and another individual.

This emphasis on the generic as opposed to the specific (i.e.

experiential or existential) aspects of the relation – or quasi-rela-tion – between ‘subject’ and state is one that Badiou has taken from, or developed through critical engagement with, a wide range of philosophical precursors from Plato and Aristotle to Pascal, Spinoza, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx, Husserl and Heidegger.

More directly, it shows his continued allegiance to certain aspects of Althusserian ‘structuralist’ Marxism, in particular Althusser’s conception of the subject as ‘interpellated’ by the ruling ideo-logy or as always, inescapably caught up in those structures of

‘imaginary’ misrecognition that grant it the illusory sense of individual subjecthood.¹² Also, as we shall see later on, it reflects his likewise continued commitment to the central claims of Lacanian psychoanalysis. That is, Badiou subscribes to Lacan’s cardinal and again broadly structuralist idea that the ego as sup-posed locus of identity or conscious, reflective selfhood is in fact a mere epiphenomenon of discourse, a ‘plaything’ of the uncon-scious whose ubiquitous workings (like those of ideology in Althusser’s account) are there to be glimpsed – but never truly or fully comprehended – in the verbal exchange between analyst and analysand.¹³ However, what is most decisive here is the example of mathematics and its demands upon the conduct of disciplined enquiry both within and beyond the formal sciences.

Above all it is the set-theoretical requirement that thought should be concerned with universal rather than particular, struc-tural or combinatorial rather than discrete, and – in the techni-cal sense of these terms current among logicians and philosophers of language – an extensional rather than intensional approach to issues of sense and reference. On this account the operative sense of a term is fixed entirely by the range of those objects, whether physical or abstract, to which it applies or extends and not by any-thing specific about those objects (their distinctive properties, qual-ities or attributes) that marks them out as rightfully falling under the term in question. That is to say, an extensionalist conception of

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sets and their membership conditions is one that rigorously excludes any thought of whatever might otherwise be taken to dis-tinguish potential or candidate members, and thus to determine which items qualify for inclusion.

There has been much debate among mathematicians as regards these rival approaches. Thus the advocates of extensionalism mostly espouse a realist principle according to which set-theoretic statements or theorems have their truth-value fixed by the way things stand in mathematical reality, while the advocates of intensionalism more often incline towards an anti-realist position whereby truth becomes a matter of epistemic warrant and there is no making sense of the claim that there exist such objective truth-makers beyond our furthest powers of proof or ascertain-ment.¹⁴ Badiou adopts an extensionalist, that is, a strictly non-differentiating ontology of sets, subsets, elements, parts, members and so forth, which leaves no room for any kind of qualitative distinction and which therefore conceives their various orders of relationship in purely numerical terms. It is on this basis that he is able to mount what most analytic philosophers would think an exorbitantly far-fetched claim, that is, to derive from certain axioms and theorems of set theory not only a generalized social ontology but also a conception of political justice grounded in the clear-cut distinction between two set-theoretical concepts, namely those of belonging and inclusion. Whence, as I have said, his mathematically derived and ethico-politically strengthened conviction that these interests can best be served – or the claims of justice best advanced – only by a radically egalitarian and universalist outlook opposed to any form of identity politics, or any notion of difference (whether ethnic, national, gender-based, or cultural-linguistic) as having a significant role to play in such matters.

Here it is worth noting a certain calculated ambiguity about Badiou’s usage of those two key terms ‘inclusion’ and ‘belong-ing’. On the one hand it is a thesis basic to his political-activist project – in the simplest terms, that of ‘counting those who aren’t counted’ – that the multiplicity of elements or parts included within a given multiple may far exceed the multiplicity of mem-bers taken as ‘properly’ belonging to it or accorded the rights (along with the concomitant responsibilities) of full participant status. In which case, it would seem, this excess of inclusion over

belonging is the axiom of set theory most strongly conducive to the interests of a radical-emancipatory politics that would push so far as possible towards ensuring that the status of belonging was extended to all those included – though as yet not acknowl-edged to enjoy such status – within some given socio-political situation. On the other hand it is clear from Badiou’s formula-tions as cited above that inclusion is also the principle of reck-oning which the State applies in its false claim to treat everyone on equal terms, that is, in its claim to respect each and every person who figures in the dominant, supposedly comprehensive count-as-one – whatever their rank, class or socio-cultural posi-tion – as equally ‘belonging’ to the all-inclusive, democratically constituted body politic. Thus ‘[t]he “voter”, for example, is not the subject John Doe, it is rather the part that the separated structure of the State re-presents, according to its own one; that is, it is the set whose sole element is John Doe and not the mul-tiple whose immediate-one is “John Doe”’ (p. 107). There is a certain tension in his thinking here – even a sense of conceptual strain – between ‘inclusion’ as that which offers a merely formal or abstract (hence delusive) notion of equality and as that which affords a powerful means to conceptualize and thereby think a way beyond the drastic shortfall in every hitherto existent version of liberal or social democracy. Nor is this surprising, it might be said, given the notorious adaptability of mathematical (or pseudo-mathematical) techniques to all manner of politically or ideologi-cally loaded persuasive ends. However it is precisely against such abuses – so Badiou maintains – that one can muster the unique probative force of those set-theoretical concepts, axioms and procedures that he lays out for detailed inspection in Being and Event. That is, they can most aptly serve to demonstrate the kinds and degrees of democratic deficit – or political disenfranchise-ment – that typify the workings of ‘liberal democracy’, whether US-style or in various forms throughout Western Europe and the ex-Soviet bloc.

Thus his point about the State’s obsessive concern with inclu-sion is that this goes along not only with a systematic disregard for issues of belonging (or of how individuals relate to their con-ditions of socio-political existence) but also with a narrowed and bureaucratic sense – brought about by rigid application of the count-as-one – of what inclusion properly signifies.

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The individual is always – patiently or impatiently – subject to this elementary coercion, to this atom of constraint which constitutes the possibility of every other type of constraint, including inflicted death. . . . Any consistent subset is imme-diately counted and considered by the State, for better or worse, because it is matter for representation. On the other hand, despite the protestations and declarations to the con-trary, it is always evident that in the end, when it is a matter of people’s lives – which is to say, of the multiple whose one they have received – the State is not concerned. Such is the ulti-mate and ineluctable depth of its separation. (pp. 107–8) It is characteristic of Badiou’s thought that the passage should convey such a clear sense of moral and political passion – of mixed anger and sadness at the cost in terms of human well being of such avowedly inclusive but in fact highly selective or exclu-sionary practices – while none the less making its point through a mode of argument deriving from certain, as it might seem, decidedly abstract set-theoretical procedures. However, this widely held idea (at least among arts-and-humanities types) of mathe-matical discourse as a realm of soulless abstractions devoid of human or creative content is one that Badiou has rejected with great energy and eloquence, most often by instancing the rich profusion of previously unthought-of entities that mathemati-cians have discovered by dint of their jointly conceptual and imaginative powers.¹⁵ At the same time he is keen to insist – against any kindred notion of mathematics as inherently remote from political concerns or the interests of social justice – that one very effective way to bring home the wrongs inflicted by unjust or oppressive (even if self-styled ‘democratic’) regimes is to deploy the conceptual resources of set theory as a means of clearly specified and logically precise articulation. That is, they offer the strongest purchase for an account of how presently existing forms of pseudo-democratic governance operate to ensure the belonging of all and only those members or subjects in good standing who qualify according to the count-as-one.

What set theory makes possible is a formalized reckoning with just that excess of inclusion over acknowledged or recognized belonging – or of uncounted subsets over any count according to presently accepted rules and conventions – which constitutes

the basis, in theory and principle, of a properly motivated chal-lenge to the socio-political status quo.

Nor should it be thought that this is an overly, even inhumanly

‘abstract’ approach to issues that can have so decisive a bearing on the welfare, the life-hopes and the very survival of so many people across such a range of real-world oppressive situations.

After all, as Badiou pointedly remarks,

it is not for nothing that governments, when an emblem of their void wanders about – generally, an inconsistent or riot-ing crowd – prohibit ‘gatherriot-ings of more than three people’, which is to say they explicitly declare their non-tolerance of the one of such ‘parts’, thus proclaiming that the function of the State is to number inclusions such that consistent belongings be preserved. (p. 109)

What is striking here is Badiou’s ability to move straight across with such consummate ease – though without the least sense of tricksy semantics or conceptual legerdemain – between a regis-ter of set-theoretical ‘abstractions’ and a language of engage-ment with directly political or social-activist concerns. That he is able to do so against all manner of likely objections – including various analytic updates on the fact/value dichotomy or the sup-posed logical impossibility of deriving a normative-evaluative

‘ought’ from a purely constative ‘is’ – should be put down to Badiou’s highly focused and concentrated sequence of arguments up to this point, rather than to any evasive strategy or vaguely analogical habit of thinking on his part. More specifically, it has to do with his singular gift for locating just those erstwhile stress-points yet also (and for just that reason) stress-points of subsequent radical advance within the history of set-theoretical thought which lend themselves to re-statement in political terms. If poli-tics is always, by very definition, ‘an assault against the State, whatever the mode of that assault might be, peaceful or violent’, then such a claim finds support in the proven capacity of formal reasoning to ‘mobilize the singular multiples against the normal multiples by arguing that excrescence is intolerable’ (p. 110).

An ‘excrescence’ is defined, in this context, as a term that is

‘represented by’ the state of some given situation while not ‘pre-sented in’ the situation itself, or again – what amounts to the same

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thing – as ‘included in’ that same situation while not recognizedly

‘belonging to’ it for social-political-administrative purposes. It is therefore a locus of maximal challenge to the structures of State-accredited authority and power that in turn derive their appearance of legitimate, that is, ‘democratic’ warrant from the count-as-one and its fallacious claim to represent a consistent multiplicity of free and equal subjects, rather than – as emerges through Badiou’s analysis – an inconsistent multiplicity that in truth subtends and belies that false appearance. What is uniquely capable of breaking through this ideological façade is the sudden irruption of those same ‘excrescences’ or stubbornly resistant, hence ‘intolerable’ instances of failure (or refusal) to be counted as belonging to some given self-image of the fully democratic since all-inclusive body politic. Thus ‘excrescence’ takes its place as another key term – alongside ‘void’, ‘event’ and ‘evental site’ – in the range of set-theoretically derived concepts whereby Badiou seeks to understand and explain how it is possible for something radically new to occur (whether a great advance in mathematics, discovery in science, or episode of major political change) despite and against all the odds of received belief or entrenched socio-political power. For this is the point at which his project hinges between its ontological orientation, that is, its concern to explicate the structures and modalities of being con-ceived not in static but dynamic or constantly self-transformative terms, and on the other hand its orientation towards an idea of the event as involving a more drastic (and wholly unpredictable) break with whatever may seem to have led up to it from a subse-quent or post-evental viewpoint.

Hence Badiou’s sceptical – some would say cynical – attitude concerning the prospects for genuine as opposed to merely cos-metic change through any ‘democratically’ sanctioned parliamen-tary means or any process that exists under present conditions in the United States or countries belonging to the (so-called) Euro-pean ‘community’. Hence also, conversely, his passionate convic-tion that alternative means can be found whereby to circumvent, outflank or break through what he cites as the phenomenon despairingly noted by Lenin and other revolutionary thinkers, namely the ‘obscene persistence’ of the State despite the best efforts of those ranged against it. All the same such despair of the State’s ever being brought to let go of its established powers

and prerogatives should by no means be thought to entail a simi-lar despair with regard to the existence of other, extra-parlia-mentary or non-State-involving means by which to bring about that desirable upshot. ‘Rather than a warrior beneath the walls of the State, a political activist is a patient watchman of the void instructed by the event, for it is only when grappling with the event that the State blinds itself to its own mastery’

(p. 111). The power of the State is exercised – and perpetuated – only on condition of ignoring, discounting or (at the limit) forcibly suppressing those whose very marginality or social invis-ibility gives them the countervailing power which comes of their excluded, anomalous and hence potentially subversive or desta-bilizing presence. If granted recognition even in this outcast role as ‘excrescences’ or not-to-be-tolerated others they would be strongly placed to expose both the arbitrary, unjust nature of the State’s claim to power and the weakness of that claim when subject to challenge on ethico-juridical and indeed, according to Badiou’s central thesis, on formally specifiable grounds.