18 April 2009

From an interview with Alain Badiou on BBC’s HARDtalk, 24 March 2009. I’ve just slightly edited a few of Badiou’s remarks, when his English wasn’t quite right or when I couldn’t understand it. The questions I’ve paraphrased.

Do you, to put it bluntly, want to overthrow the system as it currently works in the rich Western democracies?

We don’t know yet today what is the extension of the crisis. Maybe finally, the rich Western world, will find new means to develop a new sequence of capitalism itself. So the crisis is an opportunity, maybe, but it’s not a solution, it’s not by itself the beginning of something new.

But what I’m wondering is whether for you, as a philosopher, an intellectual, a figure on the far left of French politics, you would be expecting the French people to be more angry than they appear to be?

The question of popular movements is not only a question of being angry, or being in difficulties or big difficulties, or a question of crisis; you must have some ideas, some great ideas—ideas of emancipation, ideas of the possibility of something else. That is the point. The failure of all socialist and communist experiences in the last century has as a consequence that we have, today, no great and clear idea of another world.

You are, are you not, a communist?

The idea of communism was the idea of a new possibility during the 19th century. During the last century, all experiences of this idea have been a failure. So today we have to reconstruct—not immediately a new solution after the crisis of capitalism [?]—we have to reconstruct a new idea.

But don’t you say in your books that communism is “the right hypothesis”?

I think that communism is the right name for another form of society, certainly. Because communism signifies, first, the idea of society which is not under the rule, not ruled by, private interests.

What about the 20th century? How can you say that communism is the right hypothesis when we know what we know now about how that played out?

We have to distinguish between the general idea of communism—for example, in the work of Marx himself—and the experiences of the last century, because the experiences of the last centuries are the first attempt to realize the new society. This attempt is a failure, OK. But that the failure of this sort of experience is the failure of the idea itself, I don’t believe.

But that reduces your communist adherence to nothing more than a faith!

Maybe! But faith is a great thing sometimes.

…

The people watching this show will say, his ideas are interesting, but he’s just an old man caught in the romantic memory of 1968!

I think the problem is much more complex. For example, today, the word “revolution”—we cannot understand this word. I am not a revolutionary in that sense. I don’t know what a revolution in France today would be. It was unclear in 1968, too. The word revolution was there, but the revolution itself was not there, not at all. Nobody knows the meaning of the word revolution today. Which is why we have to begin with something else: not with revolution and so on, but with an abstract idea first, an abstract conviction concerning communism as such, that is, the possibility of something else besides the world as it is. And when we speak about the possibility of something else besides the world as it is, we are speaking philosophically.

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Tags: Alain Badiou,Communism