Our Wound Is Not So Recent by Alain Badiou

Author:Alain Badiou
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509514960
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2016-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

III

Reactive Subjectivities

At this stage, I want to come to the typical subjectivities that appear in our conjuncture. By ‘typical subjectivity’ I understand the psychic forms, the forms of conviction and of affect, that are produced by the world of which I speak. This is not a catalogue of all possible subjectivities, but of those that I consider as being induced or produced by the structure of the contemporary world.

I think there are three: Western subjectivity, the subjectivity of desire for the West – which is not the same thing – and the subjectivity that I would call ‘nihilist’. I think that these three subjectivities are the typical creations of the contemporary state of the world.

Western subjectivity is the subjectivity of those who share the 14 per cent left over by the dominant oligarchy. It is the subjectivity of the middle class, and it is largely concentrated in the most developed countries. It is here that the crumbs can be shared out. This subjectivity, as we see it functioning today, is in my view beset by a contradiction. Its first element is a great self-satisfaction – Westerners are very happy with themselves, they like themselves a lot. There is a historical arrogance behind this, of course: it was not so long ago that Westerners held the world in their hands. At that time, one needed only to add up the possessions of the French and the English, obtained by pure violence, and one would have practically the whole map of the extra-European world. What remains of this direct and immense imperial power is a self-image of the Westerner as, in some way, the representative of the modern world, as having invented the modern way of life and being its defender.

But this is just one side of things. The other side is a constant fear. The constant fear of what? I would say, employing a rather brutal materialism, the fear of sliding from the side of the shared 14 per cent onto the side of the 50 per cent who have nothing. In the world such as it is, members of the middle class are what one might call a privileged few. And the constant fear of a privileged few is that they might lose their privilege.

For it may be, given the tensions of contemporary capitalism, that a middle class will no longer be able to exist as before. This is not impossible. It’s not impossible, given the increasing rapacity of the oligarchy and the costly conflicts that it is bound to pursue in order to defend its profit zones, that the middle class will no longer be allowed its 14 per cent of available resources, but only 12 per cent, for example. And then we’ll see the looming spectre of what has been called the ‘pauperization of the middle classes’.

This is why we have a typically Western dialectical relation between an extreme arrogant self-satisfaction and a constant fear. Whence the definition of the art of democratic government these days: it is

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