Politics, philosophy and the ontological mood
We have now analysed three possible figures of the ethical limit to the unfolding of the political procedure, dismissing them as either derivative (evil), superfluous (the unnameable) or inessential (violence). The inapplicability of such ethical limits as non-destruction or non-violence to the political process does not mean that politics is as such un- or anti-ethical. First, there is what we might call a specifically political ethics that prescribes continuous fidelity to the axioms of the World and persistence in the process of their intra-worldly affirmation against the temptations of passive and active nihilism. Second, in its universal affirmation of universal axioms of freedom, equality and community, politics also conditions the possibility of ‘ethics proper’. While the discussion of ethics proper is beyond the scope of the present book, let us merely indicate its relation to politics. Whereas we have defined politics as the universal affirmation of universal axioms, whereby any being of any world is understood as in common with, equal to and as free as any other being, we may approach ethics as the affirmation of the singularity of each worldly being, whatever it is. If politics discounts, suspends and subtracts itself from all differences between beings in order to affirm the freedom, equality and community that these beings share as beings, irrespectively of their intra-worldly predicates, then ethics consists in the responsiveness to the singularity of these beings with all their predicates (cf. Agamben, 1993: 2). While at first glance ethics appears as diametrically opposed to politics as a disposition concerned with singularity and not universality, it is in fact conditioned by political affirmation and impotent in its absence. The singularity of another being may only be problematized in ethical terms if this being is already held as in common with us, equal to us and as free as us, otherwise it would merely appear to us as a worldly object, disposed according to the transcendentally prescribed ways of the world, its singularity reducible to a simple phenomenal difference that characterizes all worldly objects and to which we may well be indifferent. For singularity to become a matter of ethics, it must be ‘universalized’, much as universality itself must be singularized, i.e. located in the sheer facticity of one’s being, to become politically meaningful.
This does not mean that ethics may only come ‘after’ politics, since, as we have argued, the political process is strictly infinite and may only end by being defeated or betrayed. Instead, the ethical concern with the other is only intelligible when it comes on the basis and simultaneously in excess of the political affirmation of the co-belonging of the self and the other as free, equal and in common. Any ethical gesture of recognition or respect for the singularity of the other would ring at best hollow if this being were to remain inexistent within its world. Gestures of compassion, sympathy or pity for the downtrodden and the oppressed that do not simultaneously confront the transcendental order that resigns them to inexistence have nothing ethical about them but are rather expressions of the intra-worldly logic of charity: ‘Charity is what is left when there is neither kindness nor justice’ (Saramago, 2010: 61). While it is by definition in excess of ‘justice’ (the universal affirmation of freedom, equality and community), ‘kindness’ (ethical responsiveness to the other) differs from charity only through being supplemented by justice. Thus, it is ethics that is conditioned by politics, while remaining autonomous from and heterogeneous to it. It therefore cannot prescribe the form and direction of the subjective process of politics, other than call for its persistence that assures ethics of its own consistency.
Yet, this imperative appears to be a poor guide indeed on the perilous path of the political subject, characterized by a double risk of the passive-nihilist retreat into intra-worldly security via world-establishing and world-preserving violence and the active-nihilist destruction of the world in the name of the World. Simply put, how does the political subject know how to avoid these risks once the ethical limits that prescribed moderation, constructive and non-violent orientation have been removed? If the path of subject cannot be regulated by ethical limits, perhaps it can be regulated by the knowledge of the kind provided by political science and philosophy, which help the subject to distinguish between the real and the simulacrum, defensive and offensive violence, disqualification and annihilation, etc. In this chapter we shall consider the relationship between politics and philosophical or scientific knowledge, posing the question of the possibility of grounding the subjective process epistemically and in this manner guiding the process of its unfolding in any given world.
Let us begin by revisiting the relation between the two conceptual personae that both dwell, however momentarily, in the ontological mood, in which the World is disclosed within the world, i.e. the political subject and the philosopher (see also Prozorov, 2014, Chapter 3). As we have argued in Chapter 2 , while the philosopher seeks and gains explicit access to the axioms of the World, the political subject only gets an approximate ontic ‘idea’ of them. And yet, precisely through developing this idea of the wrong in the form of the determinate negation of the transcendental of its world, the subject is able to affirm the axioms without explicit knowledge of ontology of the World that underlies them. By developing the idea of the wrong of the world on the basis of its weakened degree of existence in it, the subject is capable of acting politically without depending on the knowledge developed by the philosopher on the basis of its own dwelling in the ontological mood.
Moreover, the philosopher cannot be counted on to provide such guidance, since, in contrast to the political subject that affirms the axioms without knowing them, it knows the axioms without necessarily having to affirm them. The philosopher subtracts itself from the world to the extent that all positive worlds appear the same to it, as they of course are ontologically, being nothing more than contingent compositions of the void. The knowledge of the freedom, equality and community that characterize being-in-the-World, disclosed to the occupant of the ontological mood, does not necessarily translate into the practice of affirming these ontological axioms in the ontic coordinates of positive worlds. Politics is only one possible consequence of traversing the ontological mood, which may also produce other dispositions, from a melancholic withdrawal from the world to its cynical manipulation, from the cultivation of freedom, equality and community at a distance from the world to their renunciation in one’s immersion into the ways of the world in order to enhance one’s degree of existence in it. While the disclosure of the World in the ontological mood is a necessary condition for political subjectivation, it is definitely not a sufficient condition: it is always possible to respond to the disclosure of the World in a reactive or obscure manner, rendering this disclosure inconsequential for one’s world. Similarly, the philosopher, whose occupation of the ontological mood gives it insight into the ontological difference between the World and worlds, might well refrain from returning to the world and acting to transform its transcendental on the basis of this difference. As we all know from history, even great philosophers can be nihilists.
Even if the philosopher does explicate the path of the political subject in ontological terms, as this and many other books venture to do, this specifically philosophical activity has nothing to do with intervening in politics in a faithful, reactive or obscure manner. As we shall argue at length in this chapter, a philosophical or scientific discourse on politics is not itself political as long as it does not, in accordance with our definition, affirm the universal axioms of the World universally for the world in question. While this book does not attempt to conceal its admiration for the faithful subject of world politics, it does not itself practise this fidelity. Conversely, if the philosopher does act politically, its status as a philosopher is merely a particular identity and has as much relevance to its political subjectivation as the identity of a gardener, a woman, a pianist or an Italian, i.e. none . If the political subject is constituted by the dis-identification with its intra-worldly identity, this identity could not possibly enter into its subjective consistency. Of course, such a dis-identification is never complete and the subject remains a gardener, a woman, a pianist or a philosopher, albeit to a weakened degree. Yet, this remnant of intra-worldly identity may only determine the possible sites , in which the subject intervenes in the wrongs of the world, and never the process of intervention and subsequent fidelity, which is entirely the same for all worlds. Even if we may expect the philosopher to politicize its most proximate world of the academia, this politicization will have nothing philosophical about it and will not be different from the politicization of the same world by a grocer, piano tuner or body artist. Thus, the conceptual personae of the political subject and the philosopher must be held rigorously distinct, as must be the modes of thought proper to them.
Nonetheless, despite this distinction, it is impossible to deny the linkage between politics and philosophy, which has taken various historical forms. Just as philosophy has in different periods been seduced, disgusted, fortified, dominated and destroyed by politics, so politics has historically been judged, dismissed, enthralled, strengthened or weakened by philosophy. We may elaborate this complex relationship by addressing Badiou’s discussion of the relation between philosophy and politics as one of its conditions . In Badiou’s theory of truths politics is one of four truth procedures that function as the conditions of philosophy (2005a: 339–343; 2008a: 10–21). Unlike politics, art, science and love, philosophy does not itself produce truths but rather seizes them and transports them into its own domain, where they become compossible . Thus, philosophy does not expand into the spheres of love, art, science or politics, introducing its own insights into these domains, but rather constitutes a domain in which it is possible to extract from the truths produced in these spheres their own philosophical content. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben refers to Feuerbach’s principle of Entwicklungsfähigkeit (capacity for elaboration) as the key feature of the philosophical procedure: while philosophy does not have its own object, it can graft itself to any object whatsoever in order to elaborate or develop insights that are not external to the object yet remain inaccessible to a non-philosophical observation: this is why there can be a philosophy of science, politics, art, fashion, nature, sport, etc. (Agamben, 2009b: 1–2).
Lacking its own truths, philosophy operates with an empty category of the Truth, which has no referent in reality, but makes it possible to abstract the logic of the truth procedure from the realities of the four procedures in question and to formalize it. ‘The relation of (philosophical) Truth to truths (of a scientific, political, artistic and amorous nature) is a relation of seizing. By seizing I mean capture, hold and also seizure, amazement, astonishment’ (Badiou, 2008a: 13). Thus, it is important not to confuse truths and the logical category of Truth, the conditions of philosophy and philosophy itself, since the two have entirely different modes of operation:
Politics disposes its own operators, which are operators of thought and enquiry. Philosophy endeavors to seize this truth and therefore to anticipate its being, which, as generic, has on principle not yet taken place: what exists is its (finite) subjects, not its (eternal) being. To perform this seizing, philosophy will dispose its own names and its own operators.
(ibid.: 154)
The category of truth is one such name and operator. While in actual political struggles, whose immanent operators are power, interest, efficiency, etc., truth may be a useless and sometimes even a dangerous commodity, it becomes of supreme interest in the philosophical reconstruction of political praxis:
[T]he essence of a singular politics lies in the pathway of its procedure, and whether it does in fact comprise a truth procedure is sayable only in the philosophical act, which, for politics itself, only ever constitutes a sort of inactive recognition.
(ibid.: 154)
The permanent risk for both politics and philosophy is the occlusion of the difference between their names and operators, arising out of a
chronic temptation to bring the operation of the empty category of Truth level with the multiple procedures of production of truths. Or again: that philosophy, abdicating the operational singularity of seizing truths, presents itself as a truth procedure. This also means that it presents itself as an art, as a science, as a passion or as a politics.
(ibid.: 15)
In his Manifesto for Philosophy (1999: 61–67) Badiou terms this temptation the suture of philosophy to one of its conditions, whereby philosophy becomes scientific (e.g. logical positivism), political (Marxism), poetic (Heideggerian phenomenology) or amorous (Lacanian psychoanalysis).
The paradigmatic example of the suture of philosophy to politics is offered by the work of Louis Althusser (Badiou, 2008a: 159–162; 2009c: 54–89). In Badiou’s reading, in his late 1960s work Althusser moved from a previous suture of philosophy to science , later dismissed as ‘theoreticism’, to its suture to Marxist politics . As a result of this suture philosophy itself becomes conceived as part of class struggle and class struggle is endowed with a philosophical foundation. Yet, this suture destroys the very identity of philosophical practice: while the effects of philosophy were previously held as immanent to it, it is now expected to intervene directly into political reality, for which its apparatus is evidently ill-suited and which can therefore only be a ‘blind activity’ (Badiou, 2008a: 161). Moreover, insofar as philosophy continues to intervene in politics as philosophy, it is necessarily confused with the modes of thought immanent to politics itself, which end up dominated by the correct ‘theory’: ‘[P]olitics is itself a site of thought through and through. Trying to find in it a practical version and a theoretical version is simply futile’ (ibid.: 161).
For politics this suture leads to even more problematic results. First, this fusion displaces the infinite plurality of sites, in which politics may be practised, by the unique site prescribed by philosophy as the site of truth, be it ‘France as the land of freedom, the millenary Reich, the homeland of socialism or the red base of the world revolution’ (ibid.: 156). Second, the diversity of names inherent to politics is reduced to a single and primordial name (the Party, state or even proper names: Stalin, Mao, etc.). Finally, the subsumption of the truths of politics under a philosopheme transforms these truths into a ‘despotic injunction’ (ibid.), whereby the contingency characteristic of the political procedure is converted into a latent necessity. The incompleteness and infinity of generic truth are effaced in the assertion of its total power, guaranteed by its philosophical foundation, and whatever cannot be subsumed under this foundation is dismissed as a mere simulacrum, something that only appears as existent but has no being. ‘When this community [of emancipatory politics] is actual, then its troubles, its dissidence, its ineluctable crack turn into mere remainders whose fictive being is a trick played on it by nothingness’ (ibid.: 158). In this manner, terror and annihilation appear to ensue almost automatically from a philosophical verdict on being: ‘[W]hen the philosopheme of emancipation takes hold of the emancipatory political procedure, when it saturates the contingency of its statements, then terror completes the ecstasy of the site and the sacredness of the name’ (ibid.). For Badiou the paradigmatic figure of this fusion of philosophy and politics is nothing other than Stalinism:
Dialectical materialism, as the philosophy of the party and eventually of the party-state, is precisely the supposed fusion of the philosophemes of communism or community and the names of politics. In this particular case, it resulted in a fusion and legitimation of a criminal present through the future perfect of its latent truth. That is, in the identification of oppression and devastation with the community itself .
(ibid.: 155)
Thus, the suture of philosophy to politics ultimately leads to the most violent form of depoliticization in the mode of the obscure occultation of the axioms and the production of the simulacrum of the community of the free and the equal.
Philosophy of politics: beyond suture
These disastrous effects of the fusion between politics and philosophy make it necessary to reaffirm the separation between the practice of political affirmation and the philosophical discourse that takes it as its object. The theory of the world-political subject presented in this book is part of what we shall term ‘philosophy of politics’ that should not be confused with the immanent rationality of ‘political thought’ that we shall address in detail at the end of this chapter. The task of philosophy of politics is to explicate the effects of political praxis, produced in particular worlds, in terms of philosophical, specifically ontological, discourse. While we have defined political practice within worlds in terms of the ontic translation of ontological axioms, we may now define philosophy of politics as the process of backward translation of ontic political practices into the terms of ontological discourse or, more precisely, the terms of the discourse of the ontological difference between the World and worlds. Philosophy of politics only exists as a branch of ontology , in the same way as the philosophies of art, science, love or any other practice that convokes the void of the World in its operations. In other words, philosophy of politics takes as its object political praxis insofar as it establishes a relation between the world, in which it is practised, and the void of the World. It is thus only interested in politics insofar as it is not wholly intra-worldly. Whatever in politics is reducible to the world in which it is practised, i.e. the positive history of the world, the social distribution of identities in it, the cultural tradition inscribed in the transcendental, the roles and identities of intra-worldly beings, leaves the philosophy of politics utterly unmoved. What is of philosophical interest in political practice is its transcendence of the positive world from within and not the immanent characteristics of the world in question.
Why do we speak of a philosophy of politics rather than the rather more familiar ‘political philosophy’? The problem with the latter term is the ambiguity of the attributive use of the adjective ‘political’. While in the use of the objective genitive the syntagm ‘philosophy of politics’ clearly indicates the status of ‘politics’ as an object of philosophical activity, something extraneous to philosophy that it seizes and transports to its own domain, the adjective ‘political’ remains vague, paving the way for various modes of suture between politics and philosophy. Does political philosophy prescribe the norms for and evaluations for political practice and in this manner participate in politics as a supreme legislator and a judge at the same time? Or, on the contrary, does philosophy find its own foundation in a certain political orientation, be it libertarianism, communitarianism or egalitarianism? Finally, could it mean that philosophical practice is itself political, i.e. that it produces effects of the axioms of the World in the world so that its distance from politics proper disappears and the concept of ‘political philosophy’ thus becomes a pleonasm?
Evidently, all these three functions are extremely problematic. First, philosophy cannot normatively condition politics, since it is itself conditioned by the political production of the effects of the axioms. Political practice that is the object of philosophy must be autonomous from it for the relationship of conditioning to be at all intelligible. The philosopher of politics cannot tell the political subject what to do simply because all that the philosopher does is reconstruct in ontological terms the actions of the political subject. If philosophy begins to condition politics, it loses precisely those features that permit it to be the philosophy of politics as a truth procedure, namely the abstraction from the realities of political practice that enables ‘seizing’ political and other truths and making them ‘compossible’ in the space of the empty category of Truth. When philosophy intervenes in politics, it begins to condition its own condition , ending up in absolute self-effacement and impotence precisely as philosophy: the ‘truths’ it seizes from now on are its own products, hence the only effect of philosophical operations is the reiteration of its own statements in the guise of external truths.
Neither can philosophy itself be founded by politics: the Badiouan ‘condition’ is entirely distinct from a foundation (Badiou, 2008a: 160; 2009c: 70–73). Along with the other conditions, politics provides philosophy with external objects, be they truths (for Badiou) or effects of the axioms (for us), without in any way determining philosophy’s own mode of operation on these objects. It is evident that any foundation of philosophy by politics would efface precisely this singular mode of operation, reducing philosophy to a legitimating doctrine or ideology. In fact, this is precisely what takes place in the non-maximal, particularistic modes of politics that we have analysed above. As we have demonstrated in Ontology and World Politics (Prozorov, 2014: Chapter 4), any politics that involves the negation of one or more axioms necessarily also entails the diminution of the degree of appearance of the axiom(s) that it affirms, so that e.g. a libertarian politics will never attain the maximal affirmation of freedom as long as it negates equality or community. What compensates for this diminution, whereby the avowedly maximal affirmation of an axiom is dragged down to a non-maximal level, is precisely the reduplication of this axiom as an intra-worldly homonym that is inscribed in the transcendental of the world as a hegemonic ideology, discourse or symbolic framework. The function of this hegemony is less to suppress alternative discourses or ideologies, which are either recognized by the transcendental or relegated to inexistence, than to make up for the weakness of the world’s own foundational axiom.
It is because freedom is not maximally affirmed in a world where equality and community are negated that a liberal ideology emerges as a transcendental reduplication of the axiom, whose plethoric invocation in the discourse of the world is meant to conceal the lack of its actual appearance in it. If freedom were indeed affirmed maximally in a world, there would be little sense in a ceaseless discourse about it. Similarly, the ideology of racism or ethnic chauvinism in avowedly communitarian worlds not only works to legitimize the negation of freedom and equality but also to compensate for the weakening of the affirmation of community that this negation necessarily entails. Racism, either in the form of the exultation of the privileged race or the denigration of others, is necessary to conceal the weakness of the very community that the political practice in question affirms. Finally, socialist ideologies in egalitarian worlds compensated for the manifest lack of equality in these worlds, which arose out of the negation of freedom and community that established new groups of the oppressed and the excluded. Thus, insofar as a philosophical doctrine is ‘founded’ by politics, it functions as a hegemonic discourse that supplements the lack in the maximally affirmed axiom as a result of the negation of at least one other axiom. In this process, political affirmation is reduced to hegemonic particularism in the service of the construction and maintenance of a positive world, while philosophy loses the very freedom that gave it the singular function of seizing and explicating political effects, ultimately degenerating into a legitimating doctrine by means of which the world, in Marx’s famous phrase, ‘only imagines that it still believes in itself’ (Marx, 1975: 247). 1
Finally, let us consider the possibility that philosophy may itself be directly and immediately political, i.e. produce positive effects of the axioms of the World in the world. This is the ultimate ambition of any suture: if both the philosophical foundation of politics and the political foundation of philosophy are problematic, could not these problems be resolved at once by postulating a simple identity between the two? We could then define philosophy and politics in terms of each other as theoretical and practical registers of the same activity of bringing the World within the world. After all, cannot the philosopher, whose intra-worldly identity is defined by its knowledge of the ontology of the World, apply this knowledge in order to affirm the axioms of the World in its world?
As we have argued at the beginning of this chapter, it certainly can do so, yet only at the price of ceasing, however momentarily, to be a philosopher and becoming a political subject in the same mode as other worldly beings become political subjects, i.e. through a dis-identification with one’s place in the world. In this manner, the philosopher sets aside its identity, defined by its knowledge of the relation between the World and worlds, and becomes incorporated into the subjective process of the overturning of the world’s wrongs. Since the subtraction from one’s identity as a philosopher is the condition for this incorporation, this identity evidently cannot serve as the basis for any privileged position of the philosopher in relation to other subjects of politics. Moreover, given that the subject is defined by its maximal affirmation of freedom, equality and community universally for the world, any privileged status of a particular being in this process is impossible even to conceive, let alone advocate. Thus, there is nothing wrong with philosophers becoming engaged in politics as long it is clear that their political practice does not constitute philosophy, just as their philosophy does not constitute politics. Politics is never ‘philosophical’, even if it takes place in the narrow domain of academia. A faculty or student meeting of the philosophy department in protest against budget cuts does not become a philosophical symposium, whatever names of great thinkers might be dropped in the discussion. Conversely, a philosophical article is never political, even if it happens to be filled with slogans and invectives against the powers that be. It is therefore essential to distinguish philosophy that might take politics as its object from political practice itself, which is precisely what the expression ‘political philosophy’ obscures.
This distinction might appear counterintuitive from a historical perspective. After all, is it really possible to neatly distribute the classics of political thought between the categories of philosophy of politics and political practice? While Aristotle’s Politics could perhaps be securely placed on the side of philosophy and Lenin’s State and Revolution on the side of immanent political rationality, what about Machiavelli’s Prince , Hobbes’ Leviathan or Rousseau’s Social Contract – are not these works simultaneously philosophical and political, both in their intention and in their effects? Indeed, just as any being may appear in different worlds as a different object, the same work may be read as either a philosophical account of politics or as a political intervention in its own right. Yet, these two readings are not mutually enriching but more often mutually exclusive: a philosophical reading of Machiavelli or Marx tends to bracket off the historical force of their political affirmation, while a reading of Machiaevelli’s or Marx’s thought in terms of their immanent political rationality tends to suspend the efficacy of their philosophical claims.
While the decision on whether a work is best read as philosophical or political is ultimately a matter of personal interest or even taste, let us merely suggest that the effects produced in philosophy and politics do not necessarily coincide: Marx was most certainly a much poorer politician than a philosopher, while Lenin, on the contrary, would probably not be remembered as a philosopher today, were it not for his political achievements. Just as a politician’s foray into philosophy might make for embarrassing reading (see e.g. the entire oeuvre of Joseph Stalin), the entry of philosophers into politics has often resulted in misadventures ranging from silly to perilous and errors ranging from ridiculous to repulsive. Surveying the history of political thought, we cannot help but notice that philosophers of politics rarely make for its successful practitioners: the examples of Plato and Hobbes, Machiavelli and Schmitt, Heidegger and, why not, Badiou himself (see Bosteels, 2011b: 110–156; Hallward, 2003: 29–48) show, in very different ways, the heterogeneity between the practice of politics and the philosophy that takes this practice as its object. This is why, while it is possible for a single worldly being to be both a philosopher and a political subject, the confusion between these two positions or conceptual personae is likely to be catastrophic for both.
We may thus conclude that any suture between politics and philosophy is illegitimate from the perspective of either of the procedures. Another way of demonstrating this illegitimacy is by returning to the conditions of the emergence of both the political subject and the philosopher in the ontological mood. Neither of the two positions can be derived from the other, since both are founded on the experience of the disclosure of the World, which is itself neither political nor philosophical. Neither the process of universal affirmation of the axioms of the World nor the explication of the ontological difference between the World and worlds follows necessarily from the occupation of the ontological mood, which is, after all, open to any human being whatsoever: anxiety, boredom or any other subtractive experience can befall us without any regard for our place in the world. Politics and philosophy are strictly equiprimordial , both of them founded on the disclosure of the sheer facticity of being-in-the-World, of the appearance of beings in their very being.
Thus, when we speak of being-in-the-World and its axioms as the ontological ground of politics, this is not to say that political praxis is grounded by a philosophical discourse on being. The sole ground of politics is not a discourse on being but being itself , disclosed in the ontological mood attained by the subtraction from the transcendental of the world. It is this ground that politics shares with philosophy as well as any other activity that traverses this mood (art, love, etc.). This is why it is impossible to ground politics in philosophy, philosophy in politics or simply make the two procedures identical: these are distinct procedures that both originate in the disclosure of the World in the world, yet proceed into different directions on the basis of different logics. Thus, the philosophical knowledge of being cannot serve as a ground, limit or guide for the political subject, who, in its traversal of the ontological mood, appears together with the philosopher in the mode of being-inthe-World and is thus axiomatically in common with it, equal to it and free from its guidelines, regulations and prescriptions.
Political science and traces of politics
If philosophy cannot ground politics due to their common origin in the ontological mood that makes any relationship of suture between them logically impossible, might not the epistemic limit to politics rather be found in political science , whose positive and empirical orientation contrasts favourably with the lofty utopianism or sterile normativism of philosophical prescriptions? Does not the empirical knowledge of the historical sequences of political affirmation offer valuable insights for contemporary political practices, guiding and directing them and keeping the power of political affirmation within proper limits? While many among political scientists would certainly like to see things this way, in this section we shall argue that political science is actually even further separated from political praxis than the philosophy of politics.
While ‘political science’ means different things in different national disciplinary contexts, sometimes subsumed by political philosophy or theory and sometimes rigorously and proudly distinguished from it, it may be generally defined by the ambition to be a positive science, in contrast to ‘merely’ philosophical speculation or the accumulation of historical facts. It is precisely this ambition that separates it from politics as the process of bringing the World into worlds. A positive science is by definition a phenomenology of a particular positive world, of which it constitutes a part. Prior to any observation or experiment, prediction or evaluation, a science must first produce a phenomenology of its world as a particular limited totality endowed with a transcendental order that distinguishes it from other worlds. Thus, jurisprudence is a phenomenology of legal worlds, ethnomusicology is a phenomenology of musical worlds and psychology is the phenomenology of the psychic world. 2
On the basis of this understanding of science, a science of politics immediately appears problematic, since, as we have argued throughout this book, politics (and specifically world politics as a mode of politics most adequate to its concept) does not have or form its own world but is rather the process of bringing the World into any world whatsoever, which does not thereby efface the particular identity of this world but produces universal effects within it. Thus, legal, musical and psychological worlds may be politicized in an affirmation of the axioms of the World, but this politicization never constitutes a ‘political world’ of its own. Thus, political science does not have a correlate world, whose phenomenology it would be, and it certainly cannot claim dominance over all the worlds, in which politics has been or might ever be affirmed – such a ‘universal science’ would be absurd, since politicized worlds do not lose their phenomenal particularity and hence cannot be unified by one discourse. Yet, neither does political science have any relation to the World as void, which is the subject matter of ontology alone: by definition, no positive science can take as its object the nothingness of the World.
Yet, if political science neither has access to the World whence politics originates nor to a world that politics could claim as its own, what exactly is its object? The first possibility is that political science takes as its object the aspects of the transcendental that we have described as homonymous to politics, i.e. the principles of ‘freedom’, ‘equality’ and ‘community’ that have no relation to the void of the World but rather serve as instruments of intra-worldly regulation and management. In this manner, political science would return to its historical origin as a ‘state science’ (Staatswissenschaft in German, statsvetenskap in Swedish, valtio-oppi in Finnish, etc.), a ‘royal science’ in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms (1988: 367–374) or, in our terms, the phenomenology of world orders. The ‘politics’ that this science addresses is then nothing but the processes by which a given world is governed and its transcendental order is formed, maintained and modified. Politics is thus reducible to the immanent governmental rationality of any world whatsoever, while political science becomes a general science of government. While this approach clarifies the positive domain of political science, it logically entails that this science is separated from politics in the sense of universal affirmation of universal axioms by an abyss, since politics rather consists in the deactivation of the order of the world through the affirmation of the axioms about which this science knows nothing.
The second possibility is more generous to political science and is based on the possibility that the homonyms of politics that this science takes as its objects are not simply unrelated to the universal axioms but rather have a shared origin, i.e. they are polysemous . In this case, the intra-worldly homonyms of the axioms are traces of past sequences of political affirmation that have expired, were betrayed or defeated. Freedom, equality and community were once affirmed universally in this world, yet all that remains of this affirmation now are ‘dead letters’ that have long ceased to signify the ontological attributes of being-in-the-World but are rather inscribed in the transcendental. Since, unlike philosophy, political science has no access to the axioms of the World, it cannot but confuse these institutional traces with the expressions of politics itself. Yet, institutions are never political in and of themselves but merely possible intra-worldly sites of political affirmation. Even though historically politics did take the form of parliamentary debates between plural parties contesting free elections, it is not at all certain that much remains of politics in contemporary elections, parliaments or parties in contemporary Western democracies undergoing rapid depoliticization under the aegis of neoliberal economic rationality. By the same token, politics is clearly missing in elections, parliaments and parties of authoritarian regimes in various post-Soviet states that cynically deploy these institutions to attain a modicum of international respectability. The identification of politics with the institutional settings that it might have traversed only testifies to the increasing oblivion of politics as such, the confusion and uncertainty regarding its meaning, which most probably arises from its absence in the world in question. Intra-worldly institutions are merely contingent sites of politics, on which it might (or might not) leave its traces in the form of polysemous homonyms. It is only via these traces that a science of politics can gain access to its object.
Lacking access to the void of the World, political science cannot recognize political affirmation prior to this transcendental inscription. Insofar as it is a part of the world, deriving its identity from the transcendental order, this science inevitably treats political affirmation in the manner of the (wo)man of the world as a meaningless disruption of order, which only acquires meaning retroactively when its effects are stabilized and sedimented in the transformed transcendental order. Yet, as we have seen, this subsumption of the axioms under the particular transcendental necessarily weakens the degree of their affirmation and ultimately betrays its universality. Thus, the traces of politics that political science takes as its object are, strictly speaking, traces of de -politicization, of the withering of the force of political affirmation as a result of the negation of one or more of the axioms. This means that political science can have no access whatsoever to the mode that we have termed world politics, insofar as the maximal affirmation of the three axioms cannot be converted into a world-making project and thus leaves no positive traces in the transcendental of the world, aside, of course, from the traces of its failure or defeat. 3 It is not that world politics is somehow invisible to a political scientist, which would be absurd given the turmoil it has historically unleashed in the world, but rather that its effects cannot be recognized as political as long as political science remains ‘positive’, i.e. an objective phenomenology of the world.
This is certainly not to cast doubt on the intra-worldly utility of political science or its scientific status but solely to indicate that this very status comes at the price of misrecognizing the most intense political sequences as long as they do not leave positive traces on the world’s transcendental. This is why we so often encounter in political science the theme of the necessary failure of every revolution, while philosophers continue to find inspiration in them despite this failure (cf. Furet, 1981; Malia, 1995; Lefort, 2007: 49–65; Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 100–101; Badiou, 2010: 1–40; 2008b: 97–104). If, as we have argued, political science can only access politics in the form of its positive traces in the world, it is easy to see that it would not find much to admire in the traces of the revolution: pre-revolutionary institutions and practices tend to resurface under new (and sometimes even old) names, the idealist spirit of radical change quickly gives way to cynicism and pragmatic readjustment, the momentary destabilization of the world’s apparatuses of security gives way to their reconstitution and strengthening, etc. On the basis of this meagre and unimpressive evidence of positive traces, it is easy to conclude that the revolution never really happened or that its very event was entirely unnecessary, given that its results could have easily been achieved within the framework of the world (cf. Badiou, 2005a: 182; 2009b: 54–58; 2005b: 21–25). Yet, what this reactive account of the revolution misses is precisely the universality of political affirmation that by definition could never be inscribed in the form of intra-worldly traces: the maximal affirmation of freedom, equality or community simply does not produce an ordered world that would be amenable to the phenomenological exercises of political science.
On the contrary, philosophers at least since Kant (1991: 176–190) have found inspiration precisely in the fragile and fleeting sense of ‘enthusiasm’ that every revolution inspires, which could never serve as the basis of the construction of a new order but rather exposes every possible world to the possibility of transformation whose effects are never guaranteed (see Foucault, 2010: 18–20). What philosophy recovers in a world-political sequence is the power of affirmation that exceeds the symbolic resources of any given world, the power that therefore can continue to inspire long after its exercise in the world and even this world itself have expired. Yet, in order for philosophy to be able to extract this power and explicate it, the world-political sequence must have actually taken place , the affirmation of the axioms in the world must have been maximal, the inexistent restored to maximal existence and some elements of the transcendental order disqualified. It is in this sense that politics is the condition of both the philosophy and the science of politics: in the absence of intra-worldly effects of a political sequence the universality of being-inthe-World would not appear in the world and philosophy would lose itself in the abyss between ontology and phenomenology, while political science would powerlessly watch its object disappear without even leaving a trace. Both philosophy and the science of politics can only benefit from the successful unfolding of a political sequence but could never condition it.
Thus, politics neither grounds nor is grounded by either a philosophy or a science of politics. Instead, it contains its own immanent mode of thought that takes as its object the practical process of the production of the effects of the axioms of the World within the world. It is therefore interested in what both philosophy and the science of politics by definition miss. Insofar as it focuses on the appearance of the World within the world in the form of positive effects of political practice, philosophy reduces the richness of the details of this practice to the mere registration of the effects of the ontological rupture in the order of the world: what axiom is affirmed and to what degree? What is the inexistent object that rises to maximal existence and what subject makes this ascent possible by its own momentary descent into the abyss of inexistence? How is the transcendental of the world transformed as a result of the absolutization of the inexistent and what aspect of the transcendental is destroyed in this process? In contrast, insofar as political science focuses on the retrospective reconstruction of the traces of politics, it is interested in the phenomenological elaboration of the effects of political affirmation, i.e. the intra-worldly identities of its objects and subjects, the social composition of the political subject, the positive transformation of the rules, norms and principles of the world, the redistribution of the structures of authority in the world, the socioeconomic consequences of political transformation for the world in question, etc.
Evidently, the immanent thought of the political subject is entirely heterogeneous to this retrospective reconstruction that could not possibly be of interest to the participant in an actual political sequence. By the same token, since, as we have seen, the political subject lacks the explicit ontological knowledge of the axioms and only affirms them in the intra-worldly form of the idea of the wrong, it has no time for philosophical questions whose significance may well evade it. What it is interested in are concrete local circumstances of the political sequence that would allow it to adapt its tactics to attain maximal efficacy of its practice in its world. What is the most effective way to affirm freedom, equality and community in the world, whose apparatuses of security respond to such affirmation by repression? What sites of the world are particularly receptive or, on the contrary, resistant to political affirmation: where should a political sequence start and what parts of the world should it steer clear from? How could one expand the composition of the political subject and sustain fidelity to the axioms in the face of their reactive negation and obscure occultation by the (wo)men of the world, indignant about destabilization and demanding the restoration of order? Is it possible to weaken the intra-worldly identity of these beings so as to ensure their cooperation in the confrontation with the world’s apparatuses of security? What is the best response to repression: flight and exodus or frontal confrontation, preemptive attacks or the retreat underground? In short, what this mode of thought is interested in is precisely the question of the adequate form of political praxis in a concrete world, which philosophy of politics brackets off as entirely contingent from the ontological perspective and political science only accesses retrospectively through its institutional traces.
The immanent mode of knowledge that addresses these questions is practical reasoning or phronesis , which unfolds in the absence of epistemic rules that characterize, in different ways, both science and philosophy. Just as politics is a practice of axiomatic affirmation that takes the form of an unfounded decision to intervene and remain faithful, its proper mode of knowledge lacks an epistemic ground, let alone a proper method. Instead, it surveys and rummages through the entire world without rules and guidelines, in order to identify its strong and weak points, problematic zones, the possibilities of destabilization or sabotage, infiltration or resistance, etc. It also develops various practical crafts of politics, e.g. the arts of organization, public demonstrations or undercover activities that neither science nor philosophy have much expertise on. Thus, while the subject certainly might have something to learn from science and philosophy about the world, whose order it subverts and transforms, this knowledge is oriented towards a very specific purpose. While philosophy of politics has no interest in the particular order of the world and political science takes this order for granted as the condition of the intelligibility of its own operation, political thought involves the positive knowledge of the world’s order, which it deploys for the negative purposes of the destabilization of its transcendental. Evidently, neither the philosophy nor the science of politics holds any particular privilege with regard to this self-education of the political subject who might find sciences such as physics, medicine or psychology much more useful for its activities.
From this perspective, the perennial aspiration of the philosophers and scientists of politics to get ‘closer’ to their subject matter, and become more attuned to the ‘reality’ of its practice, begins to appear somewhat ambivalent. It is certainly understandable and laudable if in addition to the philosophical or scientific interest in politics the scholar develops a properly political interest in it and undergoes political subjectivation. Yet, if the call for philosophy and science to be closer to politics implies the hope that this double engagement could yield something for either politics or philosophy and science, e.g. give epistemic guidelines to political practice or enhance the practicality of one’s own philosophical or scientific pursuits, it is entirely misleading. Philosophy and science can learn little from the concrete practicalities of political struggle and they can teach the subject of political struggle even less. Political and philosophical or scientific practices both produce forms of knowledge, yet these forms are not reciprocally transitive or translatable. To reduce one to the other is always to lose one or the other and frequently to lose both.
We may therefore conclude that neither philosophical nor scientific knowledge may ever serve as a limit to political praxis, which produces its own immanent practical knowledge that, in accordance with the understanding of politics as axiomatic affirmation, is not epistemically grounded. Just as the problems of evil, destruction and violence cannot pose an ethical limit to the activity of the political subject, science and philosophy of politics cannot pose an epistemic limit to it. And yet, at the same time as it eliminates this limit from the path of the subject, our conclusion appears to invoke yet another possible figure of the limit. We have not only argued that philosophy and science cannot ground politics, but also that the attempt of politics to ground philosophy and science ends up in a disastrous suture. Let us now rephrase this claim in terms of our concept of the world. As we have seen, both philosophy and science are positive worlds, endowed with a certain transcendental order (e.g. discursive, epistemological and disciplinary principles, norms and rules), just as are the worlds of sport, diplomacy, family or fishing. Thus, our claim entails that philosophy and science are worlds that should not be politicized. While politics is not limited by the fear of evil, the unnameable element of the world, the prohibition on destruction, the renunciation of violence or philosophical and scientific knowledge, it now appears that there exist worlds in which politics simply should not be practised at all . Yet, if we cannot politicize philosophy or science, then there must presumably be other worlds that are not to be politicized because of their particular positive content or function. But how is this decision regarding politicization or non-politicization made and what are its grounds, if any? This is the question that we address in the final chapter of the book.
Notes
1 Ironically, the fate of Marxist philosophy in ‘real socialist’ regimes demonstrates the problematic character of both the foundation of politics by philosophy and the grounding of philosophy by politics. The derivation of revolutionary politics from Marxist philosophy in the prerevolutionary period and the intra-party struggles on the interpretation of this philosophy in the aftermath of the revolution led to the extreme contraction of the political space, whereby not only bourgeois but also alternative socialist modes of politics were delegitimized and eventually proscribed. Yet, having founded an ideocratic order, in which, according to the famous Leninist slogan, ‘Marx’s teaching is omnipotent because it is true’, Marxist philosophy quickly found itself re-founded by politics, when, during and after the ascent of Stalin, it became an instrument in the intra-party struggles of the late 1920s and the weapon of state repression during the Great Purges. The degradation of the sophisticated post-revolutionary philosophical debates into the idiotic canon of the Short Course in the History of the CPSU as well as the reduction of former ideological opponents to subhuman ‘mad dogs’ in the show trials of 1936–8 demonstrates this radical reversal of philosophy’s fortunes. Finally, in the late-Soviet period, when the regime’s desire and capability for repression weakened, Marxist philosophy degenerated into a sterile officialdom, dominated by senile bureaucrats and unadventurous opportunists and producing volumes of tedious, if inoffensive, drivel. The desire to dominate has led philosophy to the dominated position, from which it barely began to recover in the post-Soviet period.
2 See Heidegger (1988: 11–19), Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 117–134) for the discussion of the relation between philosophy and positive sciences along similar lines.
3 Sometimes, these traces of failure may be virtually indistinguishable from the traces of victory. For instance, the phenomenon of universal suffrage, the struggle for which we have analysed in Chapter 1 as a genuinely world-political sequence, has, precisely as a result of its victorious establishment in all Western democracies, become an integral part of their transcendental order and thus a trace accessible to the investigations of political science. Whether it is to be understood as a trace of victory or of defeat depends on the phenomenological analysis of its function in the transcendental order: insofar as the incorporation of universal suffrage serves the purpose of the reactive negation of the egalitarian axiom by presenting gender equality as already attained, this effect of world politics has evidently been converted into a transcendental homonym. Yet, insofar as universal suffrage remains a reference point for emancipatory, egalitarian and communitarian struggles that venture to transfer its logic to other domains of the world, this phenomenon resists full subsumption under the transcendental and continues to animate the world-political subjective process. Moreover, a trace of an apparently extinguished politics may be ‘resurrected’ by being taken up in a new political sequence. For example, the Soviets (councils), emerging in the Russian revolutionary sequence of 1905–17, were quickly downgraded by the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Civil War and survived in the regime named after them in the purely ceremonial form as a pseudo-democratic appendix to the party dictatorship. It was only during the Perestroika period that anti-communist opposition mobilized the Leninist slogan ‘All power to the Soviets!’ against the Communist Party and the Soviet government in its struggle for free parliamentary elections in 1989–90. In short, the question of whether a given effect of political praxis is subsumed under the transcendental as a positive, intra-worldly trace or continues to function in the mode of world-political affirmation cannot be answered from an ontological perspective but calls for the detailed phenomenological analysis of the world in question.