Trump by Alain Badiou

Author:Alain Badiou
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509536092
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2019-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 1

The global democratic system – that is, the constitutional system in our world, the system with elections, representation, and so on – is the idea that the two dispositions, the two parts of the world, can be represented by organizations or parties or factions; that there is a process of representation of this subjective differentiation, this subjective contradiction, which is ultimately the power of the state. By the mediation of the parties, the power of the state is distributed, sometimes divided, between the different tendencies. So we can describe the global representation as such. What is named today the “political elite” or “professional politicians” represents the tension between the two tendencies at the center of the general space in the form of two different organizations or parties. So we can have, for example, Democrats and Republicans, we can also have left and right, and so on.

The fundamental characteristic of this sort of system is that, in some sense, the division cannot be too strong, because if the division at the level of the state is too strong we have civil war. So the very essence of this sort of political system is to represent the contradiction without opening up the possibility of civil war. In the United States, you are very familiar with such a division in the form of the Civil War – a terrible war, because it was impossible to create a state where you have on one side [the right side of figure 1] the possibility of slavery and on other [the left side of figure 1] the impossibility of slavery. So the war between the South and the North was the moment when the unified representation of the fundamental contradiction was impossible. So, in order to avoid a civil war, we must have a sort of common opinion among the political elite. But what, in the end, is this common opinion? In the world as it is, the common opinion is precisely that the general law of the space as a whole [which is represented by the background to figure 1] is globalized capitalism. So there really is something like a common ideology, which creates a formal unity of global representation at the level of the state and which excludes civil war at the price of accepting the general law as the structure of the world as it is – the law, in short, of globalized capitalism.

Of course, this complicity between the two parties, which is the key to the existence of the state, is criticized by many groups. So we have, on both sides, organizations, groups, ideologies, and individuals, some of whom are saying, “No, this political elite is not sufficiently on the side of universality and equality,” while others are saying, “No, it’s not sufficiently on the side of identity, hierarchy, and old ideas.” So we have something like the permanent possibility that there exists something on the left of the left and something on the right of the right. We know very

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.