Democracy in What State? by Badiou Alain Agamben Giorgio Brown Wendy Nancy Jean-Luc Bensaid Daniel

Author:Badiou, Alain, Agamben, Giorgio, Brown, Wendy, Nancy, Jean-Luc, Bensaid, Daniel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/Political
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

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From then on, our history has two alternatives: either politics (with law) is ungrounded and should stay that way or else it seeks to endow itself with a ground or foundation, a “sufficient reason” à la Leibniz. In the first case, for lack of reason(s), it contents itself with motives like security, mutual interest, and protection against nature and unsociability. In the second case, the reason or Reason invoked (divine right or reason of State, national or international myth) unfailingly turns the shared heavenly assumption it proclaims into domination and oppression.

The fate of the notion of “revolution” was played out in the tension between these two alternatives. Democracy comes right out and demands a revolution: a shift in the very basis of politics, frank acceptance of the absence of foundation. But a complete revolution, a 360-degree revolution, would bring the situation back to the supposed point of foundation. Democracy interrupts that; it suspends the revolution.

In recent years, various thinkers have offered us their take on the suspended revolution, on the insurrectional moment as opposed to the hardening into place of the revolutionary State, on politics as an ever-renewed act of revolt, critique, and subversion stripped bare of foundational pretense, on the option of continual harassment rather than overthrow of the State. (The word State means literally that which is established, guaranteed, and thus supposedly grounded in truth.) These ideas have merit: they throw into relief the fact that “politics” is not the same thing as the heavenly assumption either of humanity or the world (since by now mankind, nature, and the universe are indissociable). They are a necessary step toward the dissipation of what will prove to have been one of modernity’s grand illusions, the illusion that generates a longing for the State to disappear altogether, for a foundation acknowledged as nonexistent to be replaced by a foundation in truth. And where does truth reside? In the democratic apotheosis of mankind (and the world) into a realm of equality, justice, fraternity, and freedom from power of any kind.

It is necessary now to take a further step, to start thinking about how politics without foundation, politics in a State of permanent revolution (if that expression can stand) must permit spheres that are, strictly speaking, foreign to it, to expand on their own. The spheres I mean are those of truth and meaning, the ones labeled more or less correctly art, thought, love, desire, and all the other possible ways of designating rapport with the infinite—or, to put it better, of infinite rapport.

To think the manner in which these spheres are heterogeneous to the properly political sphere is a political necessity. But what we have got into the habit of calling democracy, tends, on the contrary, to present these spheres or orders as homogeneous. Even if it remains vague and confused, this supposed homogeneity misleads us.

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