The Rebirth of History by Alain Badiou

Author:Alain Badiou
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

7

Event and Political Organization

This localized rallying in a square, on avenues or in factories, this quantitative contraction or compaction – all this acts as reality, because what informs it is a super-existence, intensive and subjectivized, of pre-political truth, or the violent restitution of an inexistent, correlated, in the form of an historical riot, with a ‘disengagement’ from symbols of the state. It emerges from nothing; it has the dictatorial power of a creation ex nihilo. When there are traces of the event prior to the event, pre-evental indices that can be identified retrospectively, then they reproduce or pre-produce the articulation of a quantitative contraction and an intensive super-existence. In Egypt, as in France prior to May 1968, there were such traces: the factory strikes of 1967 and early 1968, which were peculiar because they were decided independently of the representative trade unions by groups of young workers (this is the aspect of representation of the totality by contraction – the ‘activist minority’, as our apprehensive democrats put it); and they involved, before any reference could be made to strikes, factory occupations (this is the aspect of activist intensity bound up with occupation of the site).

As a reopening of history, the event is heralded by three signs, all of them immanent in massive popular demonstrations: intensification, contraction and localization. These are the pre-political elements, the awakening of History by riots that go beyond an immediate riot and its potent nihilism. With them begins the labour of the new truth which, in politics, is called ‘organization’.

An organization lies at the intersection between an Idea and an event. However, this intersection only exists as process, whose immediate subject is the political militant. The militant is a hybrid being, since she is what a riotous movement that has once again been seized hold of by the Idea can give birth to. The Idea was republican for decades, ‘naively’ communist in the nineteenth century, and state communist in the twentieth century. Let us provisionally suggest that it is dialectically communist in the twenty-first century. Its true name will arrive in the margins of the rebirth of History.

How is militant hybridization accomplished as fidelity to the event? That the historical value of the Idea is first of all attested by the riot is certain. That the political value of the riot is attested by the organization which is faithful to it, and faithful to it because for it the riot affirms the Idea, is no less certain.

Here the Idea refers to a kind of historical projection of what the historical becoming of a politics is going to be – a becoming originally validated by the riot. For example, we shall say that equality ‘will have to become’ the rule, as the norm of all the struggles being waged; or that ‘communism’ refers to the possibility, subjectively assumed, of a society that is radically different because subtracted from the sway of Capital, normed by equality and governed by the free association of those who constitute it. But

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