Philosophy and the Idea of Communism Philosophy and the Idea of Communism Alain Badiou in conversation with Peter Engelmann Translated by Susan Spitzer polity First published in German as Philosophie und die Idee des Kommunismus © Passagen Verlag GmbH, 2013 This English edition © Polity Press, 2015 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8835-0 (hardback) ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-8836-7 (paperback) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 12.5 on 15 pt Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd., St. Ives PLC The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com 1 23 March 2012 Peter Engelmann Before we turn to the spe c i fic topic of our discussion, “the Idea of communism” in your philosophical work, I’d like to contextu- alize these questions in terms of both philosophy and politics. In your philosophy you develop a concept of the subject different from that of capi- talist society, which views the subject reductively as a consumer and an economic competitor. The concept of the subject has a long history in phi- losophy, and in France there has been, as well, a theory of the death of the subject. What I’m interested in is how your concept of the subject has been inscribed in the French philosophical context since the 1960s to 1970s. 1 philosophy and the idea of communism Alain Badiou I’d like to make two comments about this. First of all, my first great philosophical influence was Sartre, in the 1950s. During all my early years of studying philosophy I considered the category of the subject to be fundamental, and it was, in particular in the form of the free consciousness, as Sartre was developing it at the time. I can therefore say that, philosophi- cally, I come from, or come out of, a philosophy dominated by the theory of the subject, with a phenomenological vocabulary. So it was the sub- ject in Sartre’s sense, but also in Merleau-Ponty’s sense, or even in Husserl’s sense. Starting in the late 1950s, when I arrived at the École Normale, met Althusser, read Derrida’s first books, and encountered Lacan’s teaching, I became involved in what was called structuralism at the time, that is, a philosophy in which the subject is prob- lematic. In Althusser’s view, the subject was an ideological concept, a bourgeois concept. In the view of Lévi-Strauss and the structuralist tradi- tion, it was structures that mattered, and, in the Heideggerian tradition, the subject was a concept from metaphysics that needed to be decon- structed. So I came into contact with all these things at that time, but with a sort of instinctive 2 23 march 2012 resistance that had a philosophical origin – the teaching of Sartre and of the great phenomenol- ogy of the period – as well as more personal or practical roots, which were that I couldn’t see how you could do without the category of the subject in politics. PE Why wasn’t it possible to give up the sub- ject in politics? AB In politics in particular, because it was very clear to me that politics was a matter of orienta- tion, action, decisions, and principles, a matter that demanded a subject or a subjective dimen- sion. I observed, moreover, that the attempt to reduce politics – and Marxism – to a purely objective, purely structural, context, without the figure of a subject, led to nothing but a sort of pure economism, in which it wasn’t even clear what political action properly speaking, as deci- sive, voluntary, and constructive action, was. For all these reasons, I got involved in structuralism nonetheless, along with my friends at the time, but with the idea that it ought to be possible to reconcile the teachings of structuralism and/ or deconstruction with a renewal of the concept 3 philosophy and the idea of communism of the subject, by transforming and retaining the category of the subject. Ultimately, I think the most important teaching for me back then was Lacan’s, because Lacan was someone who, on the one hand, attached great importance to structures and particularly to the structures of language – the unconscious is structured like a language, etc. – but who, on the other hand, as heir to the psychoanalytic tradition, naturally retained the category of the subject. He not only retained it but even transformed it, making it into something absolutely central. So I regarded this teaching as a chance to find a way in which some of the lessons of speculative modernity could be accepted while at the same time the category of the subject could still be retained, in exchange, of course, for an important transformation of that theory. I think this has remained my project to this day. PE I have long wondered how you define your position in this connection. You said that it was impossible to act without the concept of the sub- ject, particularly with regard to politics. But I’d like to go back to philosophy. You alluded to some philosophers who developed a critique of 4