Appendix 2

BEYOND FORMALIZATION

An Interview with Alain Badiou Conducted by Peter Hallward

and Bruno Bosteels (Paris) July 2} 2002)

THINKING THE CENTURY

Peter Hallward. We'd like to start with sorne questions about the book
you've just finished on the twentieth century} then talk about your current
lecture series on aspects of the present historical moment} before finishing
with a few points relating to your major work in progress} Logics of Worlds.
Starting then with The Century: what is your basic thesis in this book? In
particular, can you explain the relationship between the "passion for the
real" [passion du réel] you describe as characteristic of the truly inventive or
innovative sequences of the last century, and the various programs of
radical formalization this passion inspired?

Alain Badiou. l should begin by saying that my lectures on the twentieth

century were devised in reaction to the mass of prevailing opinion against
various media campaigns regarding the meaning of the last century. In
France the question of the twentieth century has been dominated - in the
official record - by the ide as of totalitarianism, of the great massacres, of
communism as crime, and the equation of communism with fascism. The
twentieth century has been designated as the century of horror and mass
crime. My lectures on the twentieth century sought to propose a different
version of what happened-different, though not necessarily contrary as
regards the facts. lt is not a question of opposing facts with other facts but
of fin ding another path or a way of thinking, so as to approach the cen-
tury. This path had to be constructed. To do so, l sought out certain theses
that the twentieth century proposed in the realm of thought-theses that
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 319

would be compatible with the unfolding of the major politicalJ artisticJ and
scientific experiments that took place in that century.
In the end 1 identified as the possible center of the eentury's experienee
something l've called the passion for the reaLWhat is this passion? It is the
will to arrive-at aIl costs-at a real validation of one's hypotheses or
programs. This passion for the real is a voluntarism. It marks a break with
the idea that history carries with itJ in its own movementJ the realization of
a certain number of promises JpropheciesJ or programs. RatherJ a real will is
needed to arrive at the realization of this promise or that program. The
nineteenth eentury was by and large the eentury of progressJ of an ide a of
progress tied to a certain ide a ofhistory. The twentieth century was funda-
mentallya eentury of the realJ of the will to the real [la volonté du réel]. A
century in which it was necessary to have precise and practicable projects
concerning the transformation of the world.
1 then saw that this passion of the real-the ide a that things had to take
placeJ here and nowJ that they had to come aboutJ to realize themselves-
implied a whole series of other notions. For instanceJ the notion of the
appearing of a new humanity, or that of a total revolutionary overthrow of
existing societiesJ or the creation of a new worldJ etc. And 1 saw that these
consequences were themselves conditioned by a proeess of uninterrupted
purification of the real. In order to arrive at the realJ to produee itJ a method
was needed to eliminate the old worldJ to eliminate all the habits and
things of old. In my viewJ a large part of the violence of the century, the
extreme political cruelty that dominated its first sixty years or so, was
rooted in the conviction that ultimately no priee is too high for an absolute
beginning. If it is really a matter of founding a new worldJ then the price
paid by the old worldJ even in the number of deaths or the quantity of
sufferingJ becomes a relatively secondary question.
In this sense the relation to the real is not a matter of realism but is in-
ste ad expressed through a powerful will to formalization. IndeedJit is a mat-
ter of attaining a radical simplification that would allow one to extract the
kernel of the opposition between the new and the old in its purest form.
One can only extract this kernel by proceeding through a series of extrica-
tions or disentanglementsJ through a series ofaxiomaticJ formalizingJ and
often brutal simplifications that allow one to operate this distinction with-
out too many nuances or complications because if one reestablishes nuance
or complexityJ the pure idea of creation and novelty is in turn enfeebled.
320 APPENDIX TWO

The major consequence of my hypothesis is that there is no contradic-

tion, but rather complementarity, between, on the one hand, the idea that
the twentieth century was the century of the passion of the real, and, on the
other, the obvious fa ct that the century's avant-gardes were fundamentaUy
formaI ones. The idea that the avant-gardes were concerned with creation
in the domain of forms is evident in the case of art, but if you think about it
it's no less dear in politics. What took the name ofMarxism-Leninism, for
instance, when you look at it dosely, is nothing but an extremely for-
malized view of Marxism itselE Today this type of stance is said to be
"dogmatic;' but in reality it was not lived or practiced as a dogma or a
belieE Rather, it was lived and practiced as an effective pro cess of formal-
ization. Needless to say, with regard to a large number of issues Leninism
proceeded by way of extremely stark simplifications. But these simplifi-
cations should not be understood in terms of a stupid dogmatism. In the
final analysis, they bear a great affinity to the paintings of Mondrian or
Malevich, which are themselves projects that pursue radical simplifications
of the project of painting.
You see, 1 tried to get a sense of the profound unity of the century's
aesthetic adventure (understood as an adventure governed by formaI ab-
straction and aU its consequences, by defiguration [défiguration] and its
consequences) and the century's political adventure, which was that of a
radical and revolutionary simplification guided by the idea of an absolute
beginning.We could add that the movement of radical formalization is
equaUy dominant in the history of mathematics. The creation of modern
algebra and general topology is situated in this selfsame space of thought,
and was inspired by the effort to begin the whole of mathematics aU over
again, by way of a complete formalization.

PH. How then are we to understand the opacity, so to speak, introduced by

the state apparatus (the police, the army) into this political project to
formalize or simplify society, to make it transparent? Can this be dismissed
as a merely contingent perversion of the communist project?

AB. One day, someone should write a new history of the state in- the
twentieth century, a history that would not entirely subordinate the ques-
tion to the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism, or between
parliamentarism and bureaucracy. 1 believe that the twentieth century has
indeed been the century of state power. But 1 also believe that the state
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 321

itself really embodied, in the most extreme instances, something like the
omnipotence of creation.We must understand where the possibility of
these figures of the state cornes from-for example, of states of the Stalinist
type. It is obviously absurd to reduce these states to their extraordinary
police function, which they certainly exerted. But we must inquire about
the conditions of possibility of these fllnctions. We know very weIl that a
link must be found between the policing and dictatorial pressures, on the
one hand, and, on the other, the general system of the subjective factors
that made them possible. Everyone knows that in Russia, as weIl as in the
rest of the world, the Stalinist state was endowed with a real aura. It was
not merely the sinister figure that we otherwise can and should associate
with it.Where did this aura come from? l think that the state itself was
experienced as the formalization of absolute noveIty, that it was itself an
instance of formalization and thereby aiso a violently simplified state in
regards to its operational capacity. Think of the general directives of these
states, the five-year plans, the "great leaps forward;' the powerful ideologi-
cal campaigns. This formalizing function, which was also one of purifica-
tion [épuration, signifying both purification and purgingJ and simplifica-
tion, is also perfectly evident in what was called the cult of personality, the
extraordinary devotion accorded to the Sllpreme leader. This is because
this cult is nothing but another formaI conviction. It cornes down to the
ide a that the state should be able to present itself in the simple figure of a
single will. To reduce the state to the figure of a charismatic leader is
ultimately an effort related to the dialectic of singularity and universality: if
the objectives of the state are formally univers al, if they embody universal
etnancipation, then the state must itself be absolutely singular. In the end
this absolute singularity is simply the singularity of a single body, a single
will, and a single leader. Thus, the dialectic between singularity and univer-
sality, considered with respect to an absolutely formaI agency [instance J,
ends up-in a way that is consistent and not at aIl paradoxical-in such
Stalinist or otherwise despotic figures of the state.
The problem is that there is obviously something mistaken in this line of
reasoning. The truth is that there can never be any genuinely absolute
beginning. Everything is ultimately a matter of procedure and laborj truths
are always plural and never single or unique [uniques], even in their own
particular domain, and so on. Consequently, state formalization (and this
will be true of the other formalizations as weIl) is prey to the real in a way
32 2 APPENDIX TWO

that always partially differs from how it pretends to be. In other words, it
differs from what it presents as its own absolute capacity without reservej it
differs from the absolutist character it attributes to its own inauguration, to
the unhindered pursuit of its projectj it differs, in short, from the entire
thematic of the resolute march toward socialism. This "march;' in fact,
doesn't exist. There is always only a localized becoming, irreducible to aIl
totalization, which in turn is to be thought only as a singular point within
this local becoming.
To my mind this last remark is of great importance. The formalization
organized by the passion for the realleads to a kind of crushing of the local
under the weight of the global. Each and every localization of the pro-
cedure is immediately thought as an instance of the totality.
Such a relation to the real cannot be sustained indefinitely. Hence the
massive inversion that progressively takes place, which shifts the terrain
onto the side of nontransparency, secrecy, and hidden operations. Those
who know what's reaIly going on, those who have knowledge of the sin-
gularity of the situation, are supposed to keep quiet, and aIl the rest of it.
Thus, little by little, a sort of general corrosion of the situation occurs that,
while announcing the absolute formal transparency of a grandiose project,
is turned into an extremely defensive procedure. Everything that is locally
produced seems at aIl times to threaten the aim of global transparency.
Thus (and this is something very striking when you read the serious stud-
ies on Stalinism, which are generallywritten by British scholars, or scholars
from the United States, who have a less ideological relation to Stalinism
than do the French or the ltalians), the conviction held by the leaders of
these revolutionary states is in fact nothing but the awareness of an abso-
lute discrepancy between the situation and the means at their disposaI.
They themselves have the impression of being absolutely precarious fig-
ures. Any circumstance whatsoever gives them the impression that their
own overthrow is imminent. On top of the police violence and the recipro-
cal surveillance of everyone by everyone, this subjectivity generates as its
own gui ding rule the circulation of lies and secrets, together with the
nonrevelation of what's reaIly going on. But this rule can in turn be· ex-
plained from the vantage point of the relation between the real and the
formaI, as weIl as of the relation between singularity and universality. That
is to say, a universality that should remain local and prudent (as is always
the case of true universality) is forced instead to bear an absolutely formaI
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 323

globality, and one is immediately obliged to refer this to an all-powerfui

singularity, to a will as inscrutable as God's-to take up a comparison that
you [Peter] often draw between the event's absolutism and the theory of
sovereignty.
l wanted to clarify this entire matter by showing that in the political,
aesthetic, and scientific adventures of the century we are not dealing with
pathologies of gratuitous cruelt}'J or with sorne kind ofhistorical sadism-a
ridiculous hypothesis-but rather with significant intellectuai operators
[opérateurs]. That is why l adopted the method of always restricting my-
self as dosely as possible to that which the century itself said about the
century, so as to avoid being caught in retrospection, in the tribunals of
history or judgment. The twentieth century interrogated itself with par-
ticular intensity regarding its own nature, its own singularity. l wanted to
remain very dose to this interrogation, as well as to the intimate reasons of
that which remains doaked in shadow from the point of view of retrospec-
tive judgment-I mean the remarkable enthusiasm that surrounded aIl
these developments. The widespread popular enthusiasm for communist
politics, the creative enthusiasm of the artistic avant-gardes, the Prome-
thean enthusiasm of the scientists .... To reduce this enthusiasm to the
domain of the imaginary, to mere illusions, to misleading utopias, is to
engage in a completely vacuous argument.
l find this argument just as weak and false, by the way, when it is used
with reference to religion. Even today, it is an aberration to explain the
subjective power of religion, at its highest moments, in terms of the logic of
imaginary alienation. It is infinitely easier and more truthful to understand
that there really is a genuine subjective dimension present in that which
ultimately, in my own jargon, resembles a confusion between event and
truth, that is, something that reduces the considerable difficulties involved
in maintaining fidelity to an event to a matter of pure insurrection. These
difficulties require an infinite series of local inventions. It is always tempt-
ing (and moreover it is partially correct) to daim that these local inven-
tions are anticipated by the primordial figure of the sequence, by the pure
power of the pure event-for instance, the figure of the revolution, in
politics, and l think that we could prove the same holds in art and in the
sciences. It is beyond doubt, for example, that the project of a complete
formalization of mathematics by Bourbaki in France, which in one respect
led to something grandiose, at the same time also failed (if one must really
324 APPENDIX TWO

speak of f"ailure) as dramatically as did the construction of socialism in the

USSR. It was something grandiose, which generated true enthusiasm and
renovated mathematical thinking, but nevertheless it never proved pos-
sible to show that the actual development of mathematics was reaUy antici-
pated by a stable axiomatic foundation. AlI the evidence points to the fact
that the movement of mathematics also indudes the need to modify the
axioms, to transform them, to introduce new ones, and sometimes even to
accept that the general position to which one adhered had to be aban-
doned. No formalization can daim to encompass the totality of the conse-
quences of the event that it draws upon. However, the idea that it could be
otherwise is not simply an illusion or an alienation. It is a powerful and
creative subjective disposition, which brings to light new strata of the real.
l think the same is true of art. The varions manifestos and new orienta-
tions proposed during the century sought to le ad art back to the expression
of its own conditions. The end of art was declared on the basis of an
integral formalization of art's own possibility. Everything that had to do
with art's relation to empirical reality, to the contingency of representa-
tions, to imitation, was proclaimed to be nothing but a form of retardation
[arriération mentale]. This whole movement was formidable, enlightening,
and creative. By and large, ithas defined the century-but it could not
anticipate the development of art for an indefinitely long time. In fact, the
question today instead concerns the identification of formaI conditions for
a new realism.

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Bruno Bosteels. To what extent does your own itinerary reflect a growing
critical distance from this effort of the century? l am thinking in particular
about your continuing debts to Maoism. At the height of the Cultural
Revolution the passion for the real was indeed exceptionaUy strong and
often included an extremely violent tendency to purify the revolutionary
attitude from aU remnants of so-caUed revisionism-the tendency to anni-
hilate the old and to develop the new. Does your current work on the
twentieth century amount to sorne kind of self-criticism in this regard?
After aU, you devote a central lecture in The Century to the sequence of the
Cultural Revolution and you seem to want to reevaluate the significance of
the famous idea that "One divides into two:' To what extent does your
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 325

conception of "subtraction;' as opposed to what you used to caU "destruc-

tion;' offer a genuinely alternative conception of radical innovation, sub-
jective sacrifice, purification, and so on?

AB.lfl felt that l needed to make a self-criticism l would make one, but l
don't think it's the case. Maoism reaUy was an epic attempt, as Mao himself
would have said, to relaunch the subjective process of the revolution. But
this relaunching took place within the framework of categories inherited
from Leninism and Stalinism, that is, at base, within a figure of the party-
state conceived as the only formaI figure of power. The idea of the Cul-
tural Revolution was that the mass dynamics of the revolution were to
be relaunched as a pro cess of renovation, reform, and transformation of
the party-state. Mao himself~ however, observed that this was impossible.
There are sorne texts of Mao's in which he accepts unequivocaUy that
something in the Cultural Revolution did not work. The mobilization of
the masses, among the youth and the workers, was huge. But it destroyed
itself through divisions, factions and anarchic violence. The desperate
preservation of the party-state framework in the midst of this storm finally
led to its restoration in completely reactive conditions (the ubiquitous
reintroduction of capitalist methods, etc.). This is why we can define the
Cultural Revolution as a saturation. It saturates the form of the party-state
inherited from Lenin and from the Russian Revolution. The Cultural Revo-
lution was an experiment at the farthest reaches of the truth procedure that
had been initiated by the October revolution.
Perhaps the issue needs to be considered on an even larger scale. The
Cultural Revolution was perhaps also the last revolution. Between the
October revolution and the Cultural Revolution, or even between the
French Revolution and the Cultural Revolution, there takes place a satura-
tion of the category of revolution as a singular form of the relationship
between mass movement and state power.
The word revolution designates a historical form of the relation between
politics and the state. This term first of aU sets the relation politics / state-
or politics / power-in a logic of antagonism, contradiction, or civil war. In
the second place it sets this relation in a logic of sublation [relève Jj that is, it
aligns it with the project of a new state that would be entirely different: a
revolutionary, republican state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. It is
this figure of the sublation of the state by another state under the decisive
pressure of the-popular, mass, or class-historical actor that the word
 APPENDIX TWO

revolution designates. We could say that the Cultural Revolution consti-

tutes the extreme limit of the age of revolutions.

PH.And the turn to subtraction, as opposed to destruction, is part of this

new, postrevolutionary orientation?

AB. For the time being l don't want to accord a metaphysical privilege to
subtraction. l calI "subtraction" that which, from within the previous se-
quence itself, as early as the start of the twentieth century, presents itself as
a possible path that differs from the dominant one. It is not just an idea that
cornes "after" antagonism and revolution. It is an idea that is dialecticalIy
articulated with those of antagonism, the simplifying formalization, the
absolute advent of the new, etc. Malevich's painting, for example, can be
interpreted in two different ways. We can say that it expresses a destructive
radicalism: starting out from a destruction of all figuration, Malevich al-
lows the purely pictorial to arise in the form of an absolute beginning. But
we might also say that in fact, this painting finds its point of departure
in what l've calIed the minimal difference, the minimal gap-for instance
the gap between white and white-·and that it draws considerable conse-
quences from the capture of this minimal difference. These two interpreta-
tions do not contradict one another. There is something like an ideological
decision involved here, one that gives priority to subtraction (or minimal
difference) rather th an to destruction (or antagonistic contradiction).
Is it realIy productive, today, to fix the deterinination of politics within
the framework of a global antagonism? Can we, except in a completely
abstract way, calI on a massive Two, a Two capable of structuring alI
situations: bourgeoisie against proletariat, or even republicans against aris-
tocrats? Once again, l do not repudiate any of this, but it seems to me that
we are oblige d, at least for the moment (1 also don't wish to anticipate the
course of things ), to consider the consequences of that which is given as a
local difference, that is, to think and to act on one point or, at most, a few.
For instance, in terms of the organization of workers without official resi-
dency papers [prolétaires sans papiers]; or on the question of Palestine; or
on the "Western" and American aggressions against Serbia, againstAfghan-
istan, or against Iraq. And we must construct, on the basis of these points,
an adequate political logic, without a preliminary formaI guarantee that
something like a contradiction within the totality necessarily structures
this local differentiation. We can only rely on principles and we can only
treat, on the basis of these principles, local situations in su ch a way as to
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 32 7

pursue singular political processes within them. Based on this minimal,

local, or punctual differentiation (or as the Lacanians would say, based on
this point of the real), you will begin experiments to as certain if the general
system of consequences (that is, the politicallogic thought in terms of its
results), is homogeneous or heterogeneous to the disposition of the state
of your situation. Let's calI "state logic" that which pretends to carry the
meaning of the totality and that therefore includes governments and ordi-
nary "political" apparatuses, as weIl as the economy or legal system.
In Maoism itself there are elements of a subtractive type, if only because
the revolutionary history of the liberated zones is different from the history
of insurrections. Insurrectionism is the concentration in one point of a
global deliberationj it is a certain relationship of the local and the global
where you globaIly force the issue on one point. But, in the history of the
Chinese revolution, insurrectionism failed. The uprisings in Canton or in
Shanghai were drowned in blood. The alternative logic proposed by Mao
sets out a whoIly different relationship between local confrontation and
the situation as a whole. This is what Sylvain Lazarus has called the "dialec-
tical" mode of politics.When you find yourself in Yenan for years, with a
popular army and an independent administration, you do not stand in a
metonymic relation to the global state of things. Yenan does not present
the punctual test of strength in which the fate of global confrontation will
be decided. You are somewhere, a place in which you have managed to
remain, perhaps a place to which you were eventually to retreat, as in the
case of the Long March. You were somewhere elsej then you came here,
and you have tried to preserve your strength by moving from one point to
ànother. The temporality involved in this movement is not at aIl that of
insurrection. The whole problem is that of endurance. This is what Mao
caIls "the prolonged war:' So the Maoist experiment was different, and l'd
say that something in the liberated zones was already rather more" subtrac-
tive" than antagonistic in the traditional sense of the latter term.ln particu-
lar, l'm thinking of the idea of holding out on one point in such a way as to
have the capacity to preserve your forces, without necessarily engaging
them immediately in a global confrontation. Much the same could be said
regarding Mao's quite remarkable ide a oflimiting an antagonism [écono-
miser l'antagonisme J. Mao often repeated that it is better to treat aIl contra-
dictions as if they were secondary ones, contradictions in the midst of the
people, rather than between the people and their enerny.
Now l think it's clear that these general ide as continue to exercise a real
328 APPENDIX TWO

influence. Every interesting politieal experience today takes place along

these lines. This is also the reason why the "planetary" demonstrations
against globalization, such as the one in Genoa, demonstrations whose
model is clearly insurrectional (even if in them the insurrectional schema
is considerably weakened), are absolutely archaic and sterile. AlI the more
so to the extent that they congregate around the meetings of their adver-
sary. What's the point of concentrating one's forces, not in the place de-
cided according to the needs of a long-term and independent politieal
strategy but rather in precisely those places where the governments and
global banking institutions hold their economieo-politieal ceremonies?
Here is another subtractive imperative: never appear where you are most
expected. Make sure that your own action is not undertaken on terrain
decided by the adversary. It's also the case that the "anti-globalization"
movements dedieate themselves to a systemie and economicist identifica-
tion of the adversar)lj which is already utterly misguided.

PH. I certainly see the strategie value in such a "guerrilla" approach to

polities, one that asks what can be done here and now, with these partieular
people, these partieular resources, etc. But how can we think such an
approach together with Marx'sbasic insight, that each of these individual
"points;' as you describe them, are indeed structured by global, systematie
pro cesses of exploitation or domination?

AB. l'm not saying that we cannot think of each point as being determined
by the global situation. But when we think of them that way, we do nothing
to enhance the strategie capacity of the point in question. We need to
distinguish here the analytical view of the situation and its politieal view.
This distinction is of considerable importance. In approaching a singular
point, one must always begin with its singularity. This does not mean that
singularity is incompatible with a general analysis. However, it's not the
general analysis that gives this singular point its politieal value but rather
the politieal deployment, experienced as a possibility, of its singularity.
Today, for instance, we can always state that the world is polarized, that we
should analyze the various manifestations ofU.S. sovereignty, the question
of wars, the renewed forms of capital, etc. But aIl this does not determine
anything effective in the field of polities. In my own philosophical vocabu-
lary I would say that these analyses are truthful [véridiques] but not true
[vraies]. Consider the example of Chiapas. It's clear that, from the moment
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 329

when it was constituted, this new arena of political activity could not be
derived from any general analysis. Ifwe stick to the general analysis, we can
immediately and quite reasonably conclude that this attempt is destined to
fail, in exactly the same way that here in France those who devote them-
selves to global analysis conclude that ifs necessary to participate in elec-
tions, that representative democracy must be upheld, because that is what
the consensus deems to be the only acceptable space in which to negotiate
the political relations of force. The conclusion will thus be that any truly
independent politics is impossible. L'Organisation politique, for example, is
impossible.
Objective Marxist analysis is an excellent, even indispensable practice,
but ifs impossible to construct a politics of emancipation as a consequence
of this analysis. Those who do so find themselves on the si de of the totality
and of its movement, hence on the side of the actually dominant power. To
my mind, the "anti-globalization" movements, or the ltalian autonomists
who follow the analyses of Toni Negri, for example, are only the spectacu-
lar face of the adaptations to domination. Their undifferentiated "move-
mentism" integrates smoothly with the necessary adjustments of capital
and in my view does not constitute any really independent political space.
In order to treat a local situation in its political terms, that is, in its subjec-
tive terms, something more is needed than an understanding of the local
derived from the general analysis. The subjectivization of a singular situa-
tion cannot be reduced to the idea that this situation is expressive of the
totality.
This issue already sets Mao apart from Lenin-or at least from what
Lenin could still believe in abstract terms.When Lenin says that conscious-
ness cornes from outside, what he means is that the scientific knowledge of
the inclusion of a particular situation in the general situation-in the
situation ofimperialism as the superior stage of capitalism-creates revolu-
tionary consciousness. Today, l don't think (and already Mao and a few
others had sorne insights into this matter) that a reflexive and systematic
Marxist analysis of the general distribution of capitalist and imperialist
phenomena in the contemporary world constitutes a consciousness that is
sufficiently subtracted, precisely, from this distribution.

PH. But is there a danger, then, that you simply presuppose, in a less explicit
way, the criteria that define a political situation, or the circumstances in
which political subjectivization can take place? That you effectively treat
330 APPENDIX TWO

each such singular point as if shaped by less precise (because less explicit)
patterns of domination or inequality, and each mobilization as inspired by
a prescription that in each case is relatively predictable: the militant refusaI
of domination or the subjective assertion of Political equality? That despite
your professed interest in the singularity of a situation, you affirm a con-
ception of political truth that is always formaIly, fundamentaIly, the same?

AB. For a philosopher political thinking is always the same and always
different. On the one hand, it's always the same because it's based on
principles. Politics, like aIl active thought, is axiomatic. It's true that, in my
conception of them, these axioms are relatively stable. They are always
egalitarian axioms. Notwithstanding this axiomatic stability, in politics you
have what we might calI directives [mots d'ordre J, which are singular inven-
tions. The distinction between princip les and directives is as essential in
politics as the distinction in mathematics between the great axioms of a
theory and its particular theorems. The directives express the way in which
the principles, which are largely invariant, might become active in a situa-
tion. And their activity in the situation is also their transformationj they
never simply stay the same. Just as we cannot maintain that the determina-
tion of political singularity is transitive to the global analysis, it isn't simply
transitive to axioms of the will or to strictly egalitarian maxims. l'm neither
objectivist nor subjectivist with respect to these questions. In the end what
happens is the constitution of the situation info a political situation by the
emergence of directives.When these emerge, they also provide sorne in-
dication of the political capacity of the people in the situation.
Take the Palestinian situation, for example. We can say that this situa-
tion today is clearly defined: it is a colonial situation, perhaps even the last
colonial situation. In this sense it has a particular status: it figures as a sort
of summary or consummation of a much larger sequence, the sequence of
colonial occupations and the wars of liberation. This is also why the situa-
tion is so violent and so exemplary. From the point of view of subjective
principles the situation is not especiaIly complex. The axiom in question,
in the end, is "a country and a state for the Palestinians:' On the other
hand, as things stand today, what are the exact directives for this situation?
To my mind this question is far more complicated, and this is one of the
reasons for the relative weakness of the Palestinians. This isn't a criticism
(which would be ridiculous), it's an observation. Today, the actual direc-
tives that might be capable of reaIly attracting a univers al sympathy to the
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 331

Palestinian cause, are precarious or badly formulated. It's in this sense that
the situation in Palestine is both a situation that is objectively and subjec-
tively eminent and well-defined [éminente et constituée], and at the same
time, politically speaking, it is a rather confused and weak situation.

THE DIALECTIC OF THE DIALECTICAL

AND THE NONDIALECTICAL

BB. Now that we are talking in terms of objective and subjective conditions,
rd like to ask you about your current understanding of dialectics. It's dear
that in Theory of the Subject (1982) you maintained a broadly dialectical
position, and as late as Can Politics Be Thought? (1985) you suggest that
terrns such as situation, intervention,jidelity, and so on, can lead to a renewal
of dialectical thought. Being and Event (1988), however, seems to abandon
or sidestep this tradition in favor of a strictly mathematical approach, even
though you continue to speak of a "dialectic" of void and excess. Then
again, in what l've had a chance to read of the first chapters of Logics of
Worlds, you continue to measure your approach alongside, and against,
Hegel's Science of Logic, in particular against Hegel's und ers tan ding of the
negative. Through much of The Century, finally, your analysis is indebted
to what Deleuze called "disjunctive synthesis:' Much of the inventive force
of the twentieth century would have privileged a type of nondialectical
solution: disjunctive resolutions of the relation, for example, between poli-
tics and history, between the subjective and the objective, between begin-
nings and ends, or between the real and its appearances. So where do you
stand vis-à-vis the dialectic now?Would you say that the last century's
penchant for disjunctive synthesis indicates a lasting exhaustion of dialecti-
cal thought? Or do the failures of the last century suggest that the dialectic
is perhaps incomplete, or still unfulfilled, but not in principle finished and
over with?

AB. That is a major question. You could almost say that my entire enter-
prise is one giant confrontation [démêlé] with the dialectic. That is why
sometimes l dedare myself a dialectician and write in defense of the great
dialecticians (but l mean the French dialecticians,l which is not exactly the
same as the Hegelian dialectic), while at other times l dedare myself an
antidialectician. You are absolutely right to perceive a certain confusion in
this whole business.
332 APPENDIX TWO

First of aIl, rd like ta say that the nineteenth century was the great
century of dialectics, in the ordinary sense of the term. FundamentaIly,
dialectics means the dialectics of progress. This is already the case with
Hegel. In the end we go toward the Absolute, however long it may take
before we get there. And if the negation does not exhaust itself~ if negativity
is creative and is not absorbed into itsel~ it is because it is pregnant with
finality. The question of the labor of the negative is not simply the question
of the efficacy of the negativej it is also the question of its work, in the sense
of an artisan ofHistory. This great nineteenth-century dialectical tradition
of thought allows us to think a sort of fusion between politics and history.
Political subjectivity can feed on historical certainty. We might say-and in
any case this has always been my conviction-that The Communist Mani-
festo is the great political text of the nineteenth century. It is the great text of
that fundamental historical optimism that foresees, under the name of
"communism;' the triumph of generic humanity. It's weIl known that for
Marx "proletariat" is the name for the historical agent of this triumph.
And l remind you that in my own speculations, "generic" is the property of
the True.
What happens at the beginning of the twentieth century? We go from
the promise of a reconciliation or emancipation borne by history (which is
the Marxist the sis ) to the will, animated by the passion of the real, to force
the issue, to accelerate the proletarian victory. We move to the Leninist
idea according to which everything is still carried by history, of course, but
where in the end what is fundamental is precisely the decision, the organi-
zation, and the force of political will. As my friend Sylvain Lazarus has
shown, we move from a consciousness organized by history to a conscious-
ness organized by the party.
In the nineteenth century both historicism and dialectical thinking (in
the Hegelian sense) share a common destiny. Hegel's principal thesis was
that "truth is the same as the history of truth;' and this the sis endures
through any number of materialist reversaIs and elaborations.
But what are the consequences for dialectics, when we arrive at the
moment that recognizes the supremacy of the political principle of organi-
zation, the moment that celebrates the party as the source of political truth
(a moment that is fully reached only with Stalin)? Which aspects of the
dialectic are retained?Which aspects are dropped? l think that what is
retained is certainly the antagonism, and hence the negativity, but in a
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 333

purely disjunctive sense: there is conflict, there is violence. Wh.at is pre-

served from histofy) and from its metaphor, is the figure ofwar. l'm perfectly
prepared to say that Marxism in the twentieth century was, deep down, a
Marxism of war, of dass warfare. In nineteenth-century Marxist thinking
this conception of dass warfare was supported by the general figure of
history. In the twentieth century, what is preserved and stressed is war as
such. So what is retained from Hegelian finality, from the Absolute, in war?
It is the idea of the ultimate war, the idea of a final war, a war that in a sense
would itselfbe the Absolute. Wh.at happens, in the end, is that the Absolute
no longer figures as the outcome of conflict. The Absolute as "goal":
nobody has any experience of thisj nobody seriously announces that this
will come to pass. The Absolute is rather the ide a of the final conflict, of the
final struggle, very literaIly. The ide a of a decisive war. The twentieth
century presented itself to people's minds as a century that would bring the
decisive war, the war to end aIl wars. It's in this sense that l speak of
disjunctive synthesis. Instead of a figure of reconciliation, that is, a figure of
the Absolute as synthe sis, as that which absorbs aIl previous determina-
tions, we have the presentation of the Absolute itself in the guise of war.
From this point of view l would like to reply to an objection that Bruno
has often made to me. Don't l now have too pacified a view ofthings? Was l
right to give up the central place of destruction? l would answer as follows:
l think that the idea that war is the absolute of subjectivity is now satu-
ratedj it is an idea that no longer has any political intensity. That's aIl l'm
saying. l don't think that implacable conflict is a thing of the past or that
there will be no more wars. It's the ide a of the war to end aIl wars that l
criticize, because in the end, in the field of politics, this idea was the last
figure of the One. This idea, that of the "final struggle;' indicates an inade-
quate acknowledgment of multiplicity. The ultimate war is the moment
when the One takes possession of war, induding war within the domain of
the state. The Stalinist state was evidently a state of war, a militarized state,
and this was also true at its very heart. It is one of the very few states that
coldly decided to liquidate half of its military hierarchy. This is the war
against oneself.Why? Because here, in the end, the only instance of the
absolute that one can take hold of is war. Such is the outcome, within
dialectical thinking, of the passage from the historicist dialectic to the
voluntaristic, partisan, or party dialectic: a self.-immolation in the absolute
of destruction.
334 APPENDIX TWO

This tendency, which is related to the intellectual transformations that

took place at the beginning of the twentieth century, is not limited to so-
called totalitarian politics. We could observe how, in the arts or sciences,
there was also a passage from a constructive dialectic, one tied to the
history of progress, to a dialectic of experimental immolation [brûlure
expérimentale J, of disjunction and destruction. This is why, in the end, the
outcome of the experiment becomes indifferent. There is something in the
century's thinking that says: "The process is more important than the
producf' ln politics, this me ans that war is really more important th an its
result, that the class struggle is more important than its product, that the
terrorist socialist state is more important than communism (which never
arrives). The transition is itself interminable, and as a warlike transition, it
is aIl that matters.We should recall Stalin's thesis, according to which the
class struggle intensifies and becomes even more violent under socialism.
This me ans that socialism, which was once anticipated as a peaceful out-
come of the violent revolution, becomes in reality only one of several
stages of conflict and an even more violent stage than the previous one.
r think that today we must learn what politics means in times of peace,
even if this politics is a politics of war.We need to invert the way we think
about these questions. We must find a way to subordinate the politics of
war to a subtractive understanding of politics-a politics that has no guar-
antee either in history or in the state. How can we understand emancipa-
tory politics in terms other than those of the absolute of war? Mao, more
than any other political thinker, was a military leader. Nevertheless Mao
already sought to subordinate the absolute of war to something else. He
considered that the principal tasks of the people's army were political.We
too are experimenting with a politics that would not be completely impli-
cated with the question of power. Because it is the struggle for power that
ends up leading revolutionaries to the absolutization of war. What does it
mean to construct, preserve, and deploy one's force, to hold firm on one
point, in the domain of peace? This is our main question, so long as no one
forgets that when it's necessary to fight, we will fight. You don't always have
the choice.

PH; To what extent does your distance from dialectics, your determination
to pursue a wholly affirmative conception of truth, push you toward an
ultimately abstract conception of truth, or at least one whose subjective
integrity is largely detached from the objective or concrete circumstances
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 335

of its situation? In other words, just how radical is the pro cess of subtrac-
tion? A thinker like Foucault (himself hardly a disciple of Hegel) works
insistently toward an evacuation of aH the things that fix or determine or
specify the way people think or act in a situation, precisely by paying dose
attention to what he called the "microscopie" processes of its regulation or
specification. By comparison, your conception of politics seems to leave
very little scope for a dialectical relation with the historical or the social
dimension.

AB. Abstraction is the foundation of aIl thought. However, the procedures

of truth should not be reduced to abstraction. Yes, we start with the
affirmation of a principle, with an axiomatic proposition. But the whole
question is to know how and at what moment the axiom becomes the
directive of a situation. It can do so only if something from the situation
itself passes into it. It's obvious that a demand, for example for the "une on-
ditional regularization of aH workers without residency papers [ouvriers
sans-papiers ];' implies the existence of workers without papers, the perti-
nence of the question of their papers, the effect of certain governmental
policies, etc. Above aH, it's necessary that the sans-papiers themselves speak
out about the situation, that they speak about it politieaHy and not just by
bearing witness to their own misery or misfortune. (It's time we recog-
nized, by the way, that in politics misfortune does not exist.)
As for Foucault, l think that he completely underestimates the impor-
tance of separation [la séparation]. Among his disciples this tendency only
gets worse. If there is now a convergence between "Foucauldianism" and
"Negrism;' if Agamben relies on Foucault, etc., it's because they aIl share
the philosophical axiom that resistance is only the obverse of power. Re-
sistance is coextensive with power itself. In particular, you begin thinking
politics through consideration of the forms of power. l think that this is
completely wrong. If you enter polities by thinking the forms of power then
you will always end up with the state (in the general sense of the word) as
your referent. Even the famous "multitudes," whieh is only a pedantic word
for mass movements (and in partieular petit-bourgeois mass movements)
are thought of as "constituent" with regard to domination. AlI this is only a
historicism paintecl in fashionable hues. It's striking, moreover, that, be-
sicles Foucault, the philosophical sources for the "Negrist" current are to be
founcl on the sicle of Spinoza ancl Deleuze. Both these thinkers are hostile
to any form of the Twoj they propose a metaphysical politics, in the guise
 APPENDIX T'WO

of a politics of the One, or what for me is a politics of the One. This is an

antidialectical politics in the precise sense that it excludes negativity and,
thus, in the end, the domain of the subject, or what for me is the subject. l
am entirely opposed to the thesis according to which it is presumed possi-
ble, merely by isolating (within the orbit of domination and control) that
which has a constituent value, to create a space ofliberty cut from the same
doth as that of the existing powers themselves. That which goes by the
name "resistance;' in this instance, is only a component of the progress of
power itself. In its current form, the anti-globalization movement is noth-
ing other than a somewhat wild operator (not even that wild, after aIl) of
capitalist globalization itself. In any case, it's not at aIl heterogeneous to it.
It seeks to sketch out, for the imminent future, the new forms of comfort to
be enjoyed by our planet's idle [désœuvrée] petite bourgeoisie

POWER AND RESISTANCE

BB. We were talking about sorne themes in Michael Hardt's and Toni
Negri's Empire a few days ago. The most important of these is the rever-
sibility between power and resistance, or between Empire and multitude-
both appearing as a bloc, in a global, and no doubt much too structural
way, in a relation of immanent and thus antidialectical reciprocity. How-
ever, this relation of immanence explains that, in sorne way, Empire also
always already means the power of the multitude. This imposes, then,
merely a certain reading strategy, and perhaps it doesn't even allow for
anything else.We remain, therefore, in spite of everything, in an interpre-
tive, even hermeneutic, approach. You've already analyzed this in your
book on Deleuze, in terms of the doctrine of the "double signature": every
thing, for Deleuze, can be read both as an entity and in sorne sense as
signaling being itself.With Negri and Hardt this double signature is de-
ployed in political terms. In an extremely seductive manner, especially for
our times, dominated as they are by the homogeneity with no escape of the
laws of the market and of war, it then becomes possible to read even a most
brutal instance of domina tion by way of a sign of the very thing it represses,
that is, the creativity and effervescence of the pure multitude, which for
them in the end is nothing but the political, or politico-ontological name
for Life. Is this how you would reply to the theses expounded in Empire by
Hardt and Negri? Aren't there more profound affinities, for example, with
your Metapolitics?
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 337

AB. In The Communist Man~festo Marx already praised capitalism in an

ambivalent way, based on a double reading. On the one hand, capitalism
destroys aIl the moth-eaten figures of the old world, aIl the old feudal and
sacred bonds. In this sense it is the violent creator of a new leverage point
for generic humanity. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie is already orga-
nized in such a way as to maintain its dominationj in this sense it is the
designated enemy of a new creative cycle, whose agent is the proletariat.
Negri and his friends are desperately looking to reestablish this inaugural
vision, in which the "multitudes" are both the result of capitalist atomiza-
tion and the new creative initiator of a "horizontal" modernity (networks,
transversalities, "nonorganizations;' etc.). But aIl this amounts only to
dreamy hallucination [une rêverie hallucinée]. Where is this "creative" ca-
pacity of the multitudes? AlI we've seen are very ordinary performances
from the well-worn repertoire of petit-bourgeois mass movements, noisily
laying claim to the right to enjoy without doing anything, while taking
special care to avoid any form of discipline, whereas we know that disci-
pline, in aIl fields, is the key to truths. Without the least hesitation Marx
would have recognized in Negri a backward romantic. l believe that deep
down, what truly fascinates these "movementists" is capitalist activity itself,
its flexibility and also its violence. They designate by "multitude" flexibility
of a comparable sort, a predicate which their fictions attribute to "social
movements:' But today, there is nothing to be gained from the category of
movement. This is because this category is itself coupled to the logic of the
state. It is the task of politics to construct new forms of discipline to replace
the discipline of political parties, which are now saturated.

PH. Nevertheless, one of Foucault's fundamental ide as was precisely that

the localization of a possible break is always ramifie d, that it cannot be
concentrated in a singular and exclusive point. To adequately think one
such point (injustice in prisons, for example), you need to treat it precisely
as an overdetermined instance within a wider network. In this specifie case
it's obviously a matter of understanding that the operation of punitive or
disciplinary power is located not only in this point, wruch is the instance of
the prison as such (itself a point that, as you weIl know, Foucault treated for
sorne time in as "punctual;' as focused, and as militant a fashion as you
could wish for), but also in the general configuration of power at issue in
the organization of work, the education of children, the surveillance of
public health, sexuality, etc. And he says this is not so as to lose himself in
 APPENDIX TWO

the complexity of the network but, on the contrary, to analyze it in detail,

to understand its effects, the better to darify and undo it-and therefore
very much in order to keep himsel~ to borrow from your vocabulary, at a
distance from the normalizing effects of power (since, unlike Deleuze,
Foucault did not believe that you could ever escape absolutely from the
networks of power). For example, l think that when you treat the question
of the sans-papiers by considering the question of immigration along with
the question of the organization of work, you are in fact being quite faithful
to Foucault.

AB. But the actual content of the political statements made by those who
daim to be folIowing in Foucault's footsteps does not localize this break [la
coupure] anywhere. Of course, a given situation must be envisaged within
an open space. There is a topology of situations, to which Foucault himself
made important contributions. But in the end you need to find a way to
crystallize the political break into differentiated statements. And these
statements must concentrate the political rupture on a single point. It is
these statements that are the bearers of discipline, in the sense that poli-
tics is nothing other than the constitution of the power of statements and
the public exploration of their consequences. Now, "power" and "conse-
quences" mean organization, perseverance, unity, and discipline-in poli-
tics, and likewise in art and in the sciences. It seems to me that the people
l'm criticizing here-Iet us calI them the third generation of Foucauldians
--abhor every crystallization and retreat to the ide a that creative power will
be "expressed" in the free unfolding of the multitudes. On this point the
organized logic of power is opposed to the expressive logic of power. Or
perhaps you might say that axiomatic thought is opposed to descriptive
thought. Plato against Aristotle.

IMAGES OF THE PRESENT TIME

PH. Can we move on now to look more dosely at the way you propose to
understand the "Images of the Present Time;' to borrow the title of your
current lecture series at the Collège International de Philosophie? Has this
new three-year series picked up where the previous series on the twentieth
century left off?

AB.The lessons on the twentieth century aroused considerable interest. l

decided that it was worth continuing the project by angling it toward the
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 339

present time. Can we think the present philosophicalIy? Can we reply to

Hegel, who argued that philosophy always cornes after the fact, that it
recapitulates in the concept what has already taken place?
For the moment l'm guided by two main ideas. The first is that in order
to think the contemporary world in any fundamental way, it's necessary to
take as your point of departure not the critique of capitalism but the
critique of democracy. To separate thought from the dominant forms of
ideology has always been one of philosophy's crucial tasks. Philosophy is
useless if it doesn't allow us to criticize consensual and falsely self-evident
ideas. Today it's easy to see that the consensual category is not at aIl that of
liberal economics. ln fact, lots of people are perfectly happy to criticize
what Viviane Forrester, in a superficial and successful book, referred to as
"the economic horror:' We are constantly being reminded of the cynicism
of stock markets, the devastation of the planet, the famine in Africa, and so
on. At the same time, this denunciation is in my view completely ineffec-
tive, precisely because it is an economico-objectivist one. The denuncia-
tion of objective mechanisms leads at best to reformist proposaIs of an
entirely illusory nature. By contrast, no one is ready to criticize democracy.
This is a real taboo, a genuine consensual fetish. Everywhere in the world
democracy is the true subjective principle-the rallying point-of liberal
capitalism. So my first ide a was to think about the role of the word democ-
racy in the framework of a functional analysis: what exactly is its function,
where is it situated, how does it operate as subjective fetish, etc. l've
incorporated within this aspect a careful rereading of Plato's critique of
democracy.
The second idea is the obverse of the first. It's a matter of identifying
what 1 calI contemporary nihilismj in other words, today's ordinary regime
of subjectivity. 1 say that an ordinary subject, today, is nothing but a body
facing the market. Who is the citizen of the market? This is a necessarily
nihilistic figure, but it's a singular nihilism, a nihilism of enjoyment.
In the end the goal is to clarify the coupling of nihilism and democracy
as a politico-subjective configuration of the present time. Speaking in the
terms of Being and Event, you could say that this coupling constitutes the
"encyclopedia" of the present time. It's what organizes its regime of pro-
duction, its institutions, its system of judgment and naming, its validations
and countervalidations. Today, truth procedures involve finding a passage
-which is always local, difficult, but creative-through the encyclopedic
coupling of democracy and nihilism.
34° APPENDIX TWO

Today's truth procedures will figure as "authoritarian" (because they

must exceed democratic consensus) and affirmative (because they must
exceed nihilistic subjectivity). This correlation of affirmation and author-
ity is a particular characteristic of the present moment, because the ency-
dopedia of this present is democratico-nihilistic. There have been times
when things were different, of course, for example times in which nihilism
figured as part of the cross to be borne by those who sought to pro daim a
truth. This was the case, for example, during the end of the nineteenth
century.

PH. Could you give us sorne examples of today's tnIth procedures?

AB. This is my project for next year: to identify the sequences that es-
cape from the democratico-nihilistic encyclopedia. For example, ifs from
this angle that l read your work on postcolonialliterature. 2 l read it and
ask myself: isn't there something here that anticipates, as a result of the
postcolonial situation, something pertaining to affirmation and authority?
And l think that other artistic examples can be found, in a certain return
to musical constructivism, in the tentative experiments of contemporary
writers trying to move past postmodernism, in the way sorne painters are
riow abandoning the formalism of the nonfigurative, etc. l'm also very
struck by the great debate in today's physics that sets those pursuing the
axiomatic renewal of physics on the basis of a generalized doctrine of scalar
transformations (and therefore an even more generalized relativity than
the currently available version)_ against those who defend a configura-
tion cobbled together from developments in quantum mechanics (a con-
figuration that is extraordinarily sophisticated but nonetheless trapped in a
hopeless empiricism).

BB. Did your work on antiphilosophy-your lectures on Nietzsche, Witt-

genstein, Lacan, and Saint Paul, among others-prepare the ground for
this analysis of our contemporary nihilism? Are antiphilosophy and nihil-
ism part of the same configuration? What precise role does antiphilosophy
play in the organization of today's nihilism, as you describe it?

AB. The analysis of what l called antiphilosophy offered a sort of genealogy

of this nihilism's dominant operators. Although you couldn't say that Lacan
was a nihilist, and stilIless a democrat (in fact, you couldn't calI Witt-
genstein a democrat either, to say nothing of Nietzsche, who was an overt
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 341

antidemocrat), 1 nevertheless think that these antiphilosophers antici-

pated a fundamental trait of contemporary nihilism, namely the thesis that
in the last instance there is nothing but bodies and language. 1 equate
contemporary nihilism with a certain position of the body; in this sense
our nihilism is aH the more important insofar as it presents itself in the
guise of a materialism. Such would be the materialism of democratic multi-
plicity, which is nothing but the multiplicity of bodies. Spinoza already
proposed systematic arguments that work along these lines, which you still
find among the theoreticians of the multitude-even in Balibar. Everyone
believes that the starting point is the multiplicity of bodies.We might say
that this idea-that there is nothing but bodies and language-traverses all
of contemporary antiphilosophy. Ever since Nietzsche, contemporary anti-
philosophy wishes to have done with Platonism. But what is Platonism?
Fundamentally, and this is why 1 always declare myself a Platonist, Pla-
tonism says that there is something other th an bodies and language. There
are truths, and a truth is neither a singular body (since it is generic) nor a
phrase (since it punches a hole in the en<.:yclopedia of the situation).
The critical examination of antiphilosophy is already the examination of
those who maintain that there is nothing but language and bodies. What 1
want to show is that, beneath its materialist surface, this thesis does noth-
ing but prepare the contemporary consensus, the democratico-nihilistic
consensus. This is why in my seminar 1 presented a reading of Pierre
Guyotat, in particular of the Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats. Guyotat is
the most radical writer of an atomistic vision ofbodies. In the real [réel] of
colonial war there is nothing but bodies, and between these bodies there is
only sexual attraction, which operates like a deathly consumption. The
only relief to be found in this universe is in linguistic sublimation. Let's say
that for Guyotat, aIl there is are the sexed body and the poem. Incidentally,
this is precisely Lucretius's position, at least in the version thatJean-Claude
Milner and Guy Lardreau are today trying to revitalize, the first explicitly
against Plato (and against me) and the other by cobbling together a "mate-
rialist" Plato (precisely in the sense of our nihilistic materialism).
Now, it is indeed absolutely necessary to maintain that there is nothing
but language and bodies if one wants subjects to be subjects of the market.
Such a subject is someone who identifies him- or herself as a consumer,
someone exposed to the market. The consumer can be rich or poor, ac-
complished or clumsy-it doesn't matter. The essential thing is that every-
342 APPENDIX TWO

body stands before the market, whether one resents it or assents to it. But
you can only reach this point and hold this position insofar as you are
essentially a desiring body summoned by the generallanguage of adver-
tisement. The consumer is a body of (nihilistic) enjoyment submitted to a
(democratic) linguistic injunction. The only obstacle to this injunction is
the Idea, the intractable element of a tnIth. This is why the only truth of the
pseudo-materialist thesis "there is nothing but bodies and language" lies in
the presumption that every ide a is useless. When aIl is said and done, the
democratic imperative becomes: "Live without any Idea:' Or if you prefer:
"Buy your enjoyment:'

FROM BEING AND EVENT TO LOGICS OF WORLDS

PH. rd like to conclude with sorne questions about the changes to your
general system proposed in your forthcoming Logics ofWorlds. Being and
Event obviously dealt with the question ofbeing; with Logics ofWorlds you
are moving on to the question of appearing and appearance. What is the
relation between the one and the other? What is the relationship between
being and what you present in terms ofbeing-there?

AB .We should start from the way Being and Event sets out its most basic
category, the category of situation. In Being and Event there are two funda-
mental theses regarding being-as-being. First thesis: being is pure multi-
plicity, and so the science of being is mathematics, mathematics as they
have developed over the course ofhistory. Second thesis: a multiplicity is
always presented in a situation. The concept of situation is designed to
think being-as-being not only in its internaI composition as pure multi-
plicity but aiso as having to be presented as the element of a multiplicity.
The fundamental operator in the ontology of the multiple is belonging--A
E B, which reads ''A belongs to B:' Obviously this operator cannot be
symmetricai (it does not have the same sense for A as it does for B).
Multiplicity can be thought either as a constitutive element of another
multiplicity or as a collecting together of other multiplicities (as its eIe-
ments). This distinction does not have any great philosophical importance
in Being and Event because that book remains on a very formallevel. The
only thing that needed to be axiomatized, via the axiom of foundation, was
the rule which ensures that the situation can never be an element of itseif.
The question, then, ofhow we should think this particular dimension of
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 343

being-as-being-the fact that being-as-being can be deployed as truth only

to the extent that it belongs to a situation-remains absolutely open. It's
this obligation to belong to a situation, the fact that every multiple-being
must be localized, that l have decided to calI "being-there:' By treating such
localizations as "worlds;' what l'm trying to propose is a way of thinking
being-there.
So-and now l'm getting to your question-it's clear that you cannot
pass directIy from being-as-being to being-there. Were l to pass from the
one to the other by rational deduction, l would simply be engaged in a
reconstruction of Hegelianism. l would be drawing a figure ofbeing-there
from the being of multiplicity. Against this Hegelian inspiration l assume
the contingency ofbeing-there. But, at the same time, l defend a variant of
the thesis according to which it is of the essence of being to be-there. The
two statements must be asserted together: being-there (or belonging to a
world) pertains to the essence ofbeing, but being-there cannot be drawn
out or inferred from the essence of being. Every being is presented in a
world, but no singular world can be drawn out from the system of multi-
plicities of which it is composed. It remains impossible to deduce the
singularity of a world. But we can and must examine the conditions of
possibility ofbeing-there, the logic ofworlds. The approach is more phe-
nomenological, or critical, than that of pure ontology. l'm trying to de-
scribe the laws under which appearance can be thought.

PH. If it's not possible to move smoothly from the one to the other, are
there then two irreducibly distinct operations at work here? First, a being
(or a multiplicity) is insofar as it belongs to another multiplicity, i.e.,
insofar as it is presented in a situation or set. And second, this same being
then appears insofar as it appears as part of a world (which is obviously a
much larger notion th an a set). Or do these two actions, belonging and
appearing, overlap in sorne other sense?

AB.With Hegel l assume that it's of the essence ofbeing to be there and
therefore that there is an intrinsic dimension of being that is engaged
within appearancej but at the same time there is a contingency to this
appearance, to this being-there-in-a-world. Our only access to being is in
the form ofbeing-there. Even when we think being-as-being in the field of
mathematics, we must recalI that historically constituted mathematics is
itself a world and therefore a dimension ofbeing-there. l hold absolutely to
344 APPENDIX TWO

the thesis that figures expressly in Being and Event, that ontology is a
situation. We can therefore say the foIlowing: there are only worlds [il n'y a
que des mondes]. So what is a world? This is the question with which the
book is concerne d, at least in its first movement.

PH. One of the arguments that can be made against Being and Event is that
you simplify the actual mechanics of domination and specification-the
mechanics conceived, for instance, in terms ofhegemony by Gramsci, and
in terrns of power by Foucault-by referring them back to a single opera-
tion, the re-presentation performed by the state. Might a comparable argu-
ment be made against Logics of Worlds, that you now refer everything back
to what you calI the transcendental regime [le transcendentül] of a world,
which determines the relative intensity with which different things appear
in a world? Isn't the whole question one of distinguishing and analyzing the
various processes that shape this transcendental regime? I can easily see
the descriptive value of such an operator, but its explanatory value is less
obvious.

AB. Strictly speaking, the transcendental cannot be reduced to the degrees

of intensity of appearance, even if these degrees constitute the basis for the
ordering of appearance. The transcendental regime includes singular oper-
ations, like the conjunction or the envelope, along with immanent to-
pologies, like the theory of points, etc. The transcendental regime will
account for two things that are formally essential. First, what does it me an
to say that two entities appearing in a given world have. something in
common? Second, how does it happen that a region of the world possesses
a certain consistency? And what is this consistency? I answer these ques-
tions by me ans of what I believe to be a quite original theory of objects.
This theory is not exclusively descriptive; it also accounts for why there is
an object. That is, it accounts for why and how the One cornes to he
in the domain of appearance [pourquoi et comment y-a-t-il de l'Un dans
l'apparaître]. This is why, in this book, I equate the laws of appearance with
a 10gic.What is at stake is thinking consistency in general, the consistency
of aIl that appears.

PH. What is the precise role that relation plays in your new conception of
things? In Being and Event you effectively exclude relations from the do-
main ofheing, or presentation, and tend to consider them exclusively from
the perspective of the state, or of re-presentation.
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 345

AB. Relation is defined very precisely in Logics of Worlds. In pure being

there is only the multiple, and therefore relation is not [la relation n'est
pas]. In the domain of appearing, on the contrary, there is relation, pre-
cisely in the sense that there is existence. l make a distinction between
being and existence, inasmuch as existence is being in its specifie intensity
of appearance, being such as it appears "there;' in a world. Relation is not
between two beings, but relation exists between two existents. It is a fact of
the world and not a fact of being.

PH. And what happens then when an event takes place? Does an event
suspend the prevailing rules that go vern the way things appear in a world?

AB. This is precisely the question l'm working on at the moment. l would
like the theory of the event to be at once logical and ontological. l would
like to maintain, if at aIl possible, the essential aspects of the ontological
definition of the event. The essence of this definition is that the event is an
unfounded multiplicity: it does not obey the axiom of foundation, because
it is its own element; it belongs to itself. This is why, in Being and Event, l
said that the event is an "ultra-One:' l would also like to retain the the ory of
the event-site [site événementiel]: the event in sorne sense is always a surg-
ing forth of the site, or an insurrection of the site, which for a moment
cornes to belong to itself. But l would also like to introduce the idea that
the event is a deregulation of the logic of the world, a transcendental
dysfunction. An event modifies the rules of appearance. How? This is
empirically attested by every genuine event: something whose value within
the world was null or very weak attains, aIl of a sudden, in the event, a
strong or even maximal intensity of existence. Within appearance the core
of the question of the event is really summed up by the ide a that "we are
nothing, let us be everything" (in the words of the Internationale). An
element that prior to the event was indifferent, or even nonexistent, which
did not appear, cornes to appear. An existence--the political existence of
the workers, for example-that the transcendental regime had measured as
minimal, that was null from the vantage point of the world, aIl of a sudden
turns out to have a maximal intensity. Therefore the event will conserve its
ontological character as a surging forth of the site in a moment of self-
belonging [auto-appartenance] and, at the same time, it will pro duce a
brutal transformation of the regime of intensity, so as to allow that which
was inexistent to come into existence.
 APPENDIX TWO

PH. Will an event figureas maximally intense within the existing limits of its
world, or will it appear above and beyond the preestablished maximum
level of intensity?

AB. These are complicated technieal details that to my mind do not really
have important consequences. If an element finds itself absolutely modi-
fied in its transcendental degree of existence, then slowly but surely the
transcendental regime in its entirety will no longer be able to maintain its
rules. Everything will change: the comparisons of intensity in appearance,
the existences involved, the possibility of relations, etc. There will be a
rearrangement of the transcendental regime and, therefore, strictly speak-
ing, a change of world.
The truth procedure itself will also receive a double status. 1 certainly
aim to conserve its status as a generie production, its horizon of genericity.
But, on the other hand, it will proceed to reconstruct-locaIly, to begin
with - the whole set of rules by whieh things appear in keeping with the fact
that something that previously did not appear now must appear. Some-
thing that was invisible must now become visible. Therefore, a truth proce-
dure will also consist in a rearrangement of transcendental correlations,
around this passage from inexistence to existence. In particular, given that
every object possesses its own inexistent [un inexistant propre], if this in-
existent acquires a maximal value, then another element will have to take its
place. AlI of a sudden the question of destruction reappears, ineluctably. It's
in this sense that 1 hope to satisfy our friend Bruno with a synthe sis of The-
ory of the Subject and Being and Event. 1 am obliged here to reintroduce the
theme of destruction, whereas in Being and Event 1 thought 1 could make do
with supplementation alone. In order for that whieh does not appear in a
world to suddenly appear within it (and appear, most often, with the maxi-
mal value of appearance ), there is a priee to pay. Something must disappear.
ln other words, something must die, or at least die to the world in question.
For example, the moment that something like the proletariat cornes to
exist within politics, it is indeed necessary to accept the fact that something
which prior to this irruption possessed prestige and intensity findsitself
annulled or denied-for example, aristocratie values, bourgeois authority,
the family, private property, etc. And by the same token, it's this element of
new existential intensity-the proletariat-that will now mark aIl possible
political subjectivities, at least for the duration of a certain sequence. Pro-
letarian politics will be defined as that form of polities that assumes, or
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 347

even pro duces, the consequences of this modification of intensity. Reactive

politics, on the other hand, will be that which acts as if the old transcenden-·
tal circumstances had themselves produced the consequences in ques-
tion, as if the existential upsurge of the proletariat was of no consequence
whatsoever.
In order to think through all this, l will need a general theory of change
in the domain of appearing. You will see that l distinguish between four
types of change: modifications (which are consistent with the transcen-
dental regime), weak singularities (or novelties with no strong existential
consequences), strong singularities (which imply an important existential
change but whose consequences remain measurable), and, finally, events
(strong singularities whose consequences are virtually infinite).

BB. In your seminar "The Axiomatic Theory of the Subject" you also
anticipate a whole segment of Logics of Worlds that will present a typology
of various subjective figures, ad ding the reactive and obscure figures to that
of fidelity, which was the only one considered in Being and Event. Con-
cretely, what will be the consequences of this new configuration of things
for your theory of the subject?

AB. In Being and Event the theory of the subject is reduced to its namej in
other words the subject is absolutely nothing more than the local dimen-
sion of a truth, a point of truth. Inasmuch as there is an active element to
the subject, it is to be found entirely in the process of forcing, as you
yourself demonstrated in your contribution to the Bordeaux conference. 3
In Logics of Worlds the fundamental notion of consequence is introducedj
since we are in the realm of the transcendental, or of logic, we can give a
rigorous meaning to the operator of consequence. But it will be necessary
to locate differentially the subject within a wider virtuality, which l call the
subjective space.lt's not at all as it was in Being and Event, where all that's
described is the truth procedure, where the subject is nothing but a finite
fragment of this procedure. It was, l must admit, a compromise with the
modern notions concerning the finitude ofhuman subjects, notions that l
nevertheless try to oppose whenever l get the chance. Bruno made this
objection, to which l am quite sensitive, very early on. AlI in all, in Being
and Event the subject is defined as a finite instance of the infinity of the
True.What this means, in the end, is that one can only enter into the space
of the subject as finite, under axioms of finitude, which is by no means a
satisfactory solution.
348 APPENDIX TWO

Hegel's position has some advantages here. He maintains the possibility

that the subject dialecticizes the infinite in an immanent wayj this con-
stitutes the genuine theme of absolute lmowledge. Leaving the anecdote
about the end ofhistory to one side) what's true in absolute lmowledge is
the idea that the finite can hold the infinite) that it's possible for the finite
and the infinite not to figure as essentially disconnected. This was not
exactly the case in Being and Event) where it's said rather that the infinite
carries or bears the fini te) that a truth carries the subject. We come baclc
here to the question of dialectics: rd like to develop a new dialectic) one
that accepts that the distribution of truth and subject need not coincide
with the distribution of infini te and finite.
My argument therefore is as follows: l demonstrate that the subject is
identified by a type of marking) a postevental effect) whose system of opera-
tions is infinite. In other words) subjective capacity really is infinite) once
the subject is constituted under the mark of the event.Why? Because sub-
jective capacity amounts to drawing the consequences of a change) of a new
situation) and if this change is evental) then its consequences are infinite.
In Being and Event subjectivization ultimately fades away no less than
does the event. Its status remains somewhat indeterminate) outside the
thematics of the name of the event. But) as Lyotard suggested to me from
the beginrüng: isn't the naming of the event itself already fundamentally a
form of subjectivization? And isn't there then a second subjectivization
that is under the condition of the name fixed by the first subjectivization?
Isn't the subject) as is often the case in philosophy, thereby presupposed by
its very constitution?
l think that in my new arrangement the infinite capacity of subjects can
be maintained in an immanent fashion because the notion of consequence
will be constantly bound to the subject itself: this subject will need to have
been specmcally marked by the event in order really to participate in the
labor of consequences.

THE UNNAMEABLE

PH.What will the consequences of this be for your somewhat problematic

theory of the unnameable?

AB. It's quite possible that the category of the unnameable may prove
irrelevant. The theory of appearance provides aIl by itself the guarantee
BEYOND FORMALIZATION 349

that every object of a world is marked (in its multiple composition) byan
inexistent term. Since an event produces the intensification of an inexis-
tence, at the cost of an inevitable price to be paid in terms of destruction,
there is no need to limit the effects of this intensification. Once a price has
been paid in the do main of the inexistent, one cannot act as if this priee had
not indeed been paid. Disaster will no longer consist in wanting to name
the unnameable at aU costs but rather in daiming that one can make
something pass from inexistence to existence, in a given world, without
paying any priee. Ethics will consist instead in the assumption and evalua-
tion of this priee. In sum, l'm coming back to the maxim of the Chinese
communists during the Cultural Revolution: "No construction without
destruction:' Ethics consists in applying this maxim with darity and with
moderation. Of everything that cornes into existence or cornes to be con-
structed, we must ask: does it possess a universal value that might justifY
the particular destruction that its coming into existence demands?

PH. Can you describe how this might work more precisely? In the case of
love, for instance, whose unnameable aspect was sexual pleasure: in what
sense is such pleasure now directly accessible to the subject of love? At
what price?

AB. l'm not saying that the inexistent will take the place of the unnameable.
l'm not saying that sexual desire will become inexistent. The perspective is
a different one. The unnameable testified to a point, within the general
field in question, that remained inaccessible to the positivity of the true.
These points of opacity, these resistances to the forcing of forms ofknowl-
edge, will always exist. But unnameable is not the right word. l've already
do ne away with the moment of the naming of the event. In the procedure
of love it may happen that one is unable to draw aIl the consequences
implied by an encounter (in such a way that the sexual factor might be
entirely absorbed in these consequences). This does not mean that the
sexual is unnameable. We are no longer in the logic of names but in alogie
of consequences. l will simply say that there are sorne things that are incon-
sequential, that sorne things do not enter into the field of consequences.

PH. Does a subject no longer run the risk, then, of perverting or totalizing a
truth, as you suggest in Ethics?

AB.The risk does not disappear. But it's no longer of the order of a forced
nomination. BasicaUy, by recognizing the quasi-ontological category of the
350 APPENDIX TWO

unnameable, l made concessions to the pervasive moralism of the 1980s

and 1990S. l made concessions to the obsessive omnipresence of the prob-
lem ofEvil.1 no longer feel obliged to make such concessions. But neither
do l wish to give up on the general idea of an ethic of truths.What corrupts
a subject is the process of treating as a possible consequence of an event
something that is not in fact a consequence. ln brief, it's a matter oflogical
arrogance. For there's no reason why the possible consequences of a new
intensity of existence should be identical to the totality of the world. To be
honest, l have yet to work out these ethical questions in detaiL The general
ide a is to substitute, for the overly moralizing idea of a totality marked by
an unnameable point, the idea (which is far more closely linked to the
concrete practices of truth) of a field of consequences whose logic must be
both reconstructed and respected. 1'11 be taking up these difficult questions
in the final chapter of Logics of Worlds.

Translated by Bruno Bosteels and Alberto Toscano