Badiou is very clear that politics is not a striving to realise but a striving – this is a very important detail of his theory of political action. It is also what makes him ambivalent about the condition of any particular evental sequence – is May ’68 an event? that is a matter that is suspended by the potentially infinite trajectory of action – for which apparently no judgement can be final.

The interview was difficult for Badiou and the talking head fronting ‘Hard Talk’. Badiou’s politics is obscure – organising an adequate understanding of his position is a testing proposition. However, Badiou is also a political figure and should be more adept at trading in the shallow axioms from which politics is supposed to occur – if it was only as simple as ‘All people who are here, live here!’

I do appreciate your reply. I think this is exactly what Badiou wants to happen (i.e. the fact that you and I are discussing the theoretical means of political action, etc). Now there will be disagreements down the line, of course, but the fact that we are simply discussing it is a good thing.

I don’t think that Badiou (nor I) mean that we must ‘return to Marx’. One thing that Badiou/Zizek et al mentioned in their ‘The Idea of Communism’ panel discussion was that the very notion of communism preceded figures such as Marx and Engles, Lennin, etc, and that it dates back thousands of year through human history. The notion of communism has developed dialectically (if you want to be very Hegelian about it…) and thinkers such as Rousseau, Marx/Engles, Lennin, Trotsky and other post-Marxists (Frankfurt school, etc),have contributed to the development of the very notion. Now it is key to note that its first implementation in the 20th century was a disaster (Stalinism, Maoism). For Badiou, those who want to strive to realize the notion of communism (and you don’t have to be labeled simply as a Marxist to want this) then we must learn from the mistakes of the past and go back to the theoretical drawing table, metaphorically speaking. But the answer is not to JUST go back to Marx. I think Badiou understand the contributions Marx made to concretely realizing the notion of communism, but it the ‘answer’ is not just in Marx. More theory needs to be done, obviously-and so Bakunin might have something to add to the theoretical work.

I think that your comment makes my philosophical point for me, when you write, ‘… This is where he talks about the idea of communism … and the thought/work done to manifest the idea…’ Whether we agree or not about the political economic question of action – and it would seem that one would have to be naive to believe that the possibility (or even the necessity) of mass action or resistance is over – I feel that the Platonic residue of your words undermines the possibility of comprehending the role of philosophy in the context of power and action. We must begin with the concrete, and we must seek freedom by means of freedom. If we were to resurrect any 19th century figure, I think it would have to be Bakunin – and not Marx.

I think you’re missing the point of Badiou’s thought and its importance within the contemporary world. The interviewer aside, Badiou’s whole point is that the old formula of establishing a Communist society not only ended up in disaster (Stalin, Mao) but that not the methods of mobilizing the working class has become obsolete (at least within the most advanced capitalist countries).

The has been a known fact since the 1960s, especially since May ’68, where in France the riots failed to amount to a concrete and productive movement. Unlike thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, who all saw this as a sign that political activism had become moot, Badiou read this as a wake up call to rethink the approach to actualize the idea of communism concretely. This is where he talks about the idea of communism (something which preceded Marx) and the thought/work done to manifest that idea in the material world. His point is: the 21st Century needs to create its own Marx-we need to start anew and not fall into the old tired cliches of trying to mobilize the people, when it stopped working over 50 years ago.

The vast majority of the show’s relatively well-educated audience–what should we say, 95%?–will, despite being relatively well-educated, not have read any of Badiou’s work. Even the interviewer may lack requisite knowledge of Badiou’s thought. But ultimately the more important and interesting point is that regardless of the interviewer’s knowledge about Badiou’s published positions, the burden of clarification–we might even say testimony–falls on Badiou to adequately answer the questions posed to him, even and especially if those answers are to be found in his already published work.

And this brings me to Nathan’s question about what more I would want: precisely a clarification of his position of the kind Badiou doesn’t, on my interpretation, adequately provide, even to an audience member like me who is relatively familiar with his work. Nathan and I may disagree about the effectiveness of Badiou’s responses, and that itself calls for serious discussion; but I certainly agree that point totals shouldn’t determine one’s estimation of the interview. For me, it’s the quality of the clarification that counts; and I don’t believe that Badiou’s conceptions of “politics,” “freedom,” “progress,” etc. were sufficiently elaborated vis-a-vis the interviewer’s own conceptions of the same terms, even within the confines of a short interview given to a popular audience.

(Moderator: please use this post. The other contains a grammatical error.)