Polemics

ALAIN BADIOU teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy; Ethics; Metapolitics; The Communist Hypothesis; and Five Lessons on Wagner.

This book is supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the Burgess programme run by the Cultural Department of the French Embassy in London. (www.frenchbooknews.com)

First published by Verso 2006

Paperback edition first published by Verso 2011

© Verso 2011

Translation © Steve Corcoran 2006, 2011

‘Part One’ first published as Circonstances 1 in 2003 © Editions Léo Scheer: Lignes et Manifestes 2003 and Circonstances 2 in 2004 © Editions Léo Scheer: Lignes et Manifestes 2004; ‘Part Two’ first published as Circonstances 3 in 2005 © Editions Léo Scheer: Lignes et Manifestes 2005; ‘Part Three’ first published as ‘La commune de Paris’ and ‘La revolution culturelle’ in 2003 © Les Conferences du Rouge-Gorge, Paris 2003

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors and translator have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-763-4

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eISBN (UK): 978-1-78168-956-1

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v3.1

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright

Translator’s Introduction

Acknowledgements

Part One: Philosophy and Circumstances

Introduction

Philosophy and the Question of War Today

1. On September 11 2001: Philosophy and the ‘War against Terrorism’

2. Fragments of a Public Journal on the American War against Iraq

3. On the War against Serbia: Who Strikes Whom in the World Today?

The ‘Democratic’ Fetish and Racism

4. On Parliamentary ‘Democracy’: the French Presidential Elections of 2002

5. The Law on the Islamic Headscarf

6. Daily Humiliation

Openings/Affirmations

7. The Power of the Open: A Discourse on the Necessity of Fusing Germany and France

8. Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art

Notes to Part One

Part Two: Uses of the Word ‘Jew’

Introduction

1. Israel: the Country in the World where there are the Fewest Jews?

2. The Destruction of the European Jews and the Question of Evil (fragments from Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward)

3. A Dialogue between a Jew from Darzia and an Arab from Epirus

4. Saint Paul and the Jews (excerpt from Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, translated by Ray Brassier)

5. Against Negationism

6. Local Angel

7. Interview in Haaretz

8. The Master-Signifier of the New Aryans (by Cécile Winter)

9. The Word ‘Jew’ and the Sycophant

Notes to Part Two

Part Three: Historicity of Politics: Lessons of Two Revolutions

1. The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics

2. The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?

A Brief Chronology of the Cultural Revolution (translated by Bruno Bosteels)

Notes to Part Three

Translator’s Introduction

Steve Corcoran

This collection of Badiou’s political essays brings together some of his pointed contributions to the resistance to today’s general ideology, and to the preparation of the ground for future political invention. What general ideology? The rampant promotion of neo-liberal economics and the ethics of human rights, to be sure. The double discourse on democracy that says democracy is bad when it allows itself to be corrupted by demands for the equality of all and good when it rallies individuals to the war chant to spread itself across the globe, of course.¹ But also the ideology that says a political movement cannot be grounded in any reference to metaphysical truths or a priori universals, that philosophy cannot have a bearing on politics. The notion that the experience of our century, having proven that such references lead to totalitarian social consequences, that the Enlightenment results in the Gulag, requires that we accept, humbly, that in our complex ‘risk societies’ the only appropriate politics is one of the dialogue of interests, strategic judgement and expert management, precluding all notion of politics as the application of cognitive insight. On the contrary, Badiou maintains, it is fully possible, ‘even’ in today’s conditions of global contingency, to revive a politics of universal truth.

As the name suggests, Polemics is not so much a general reflection on principles as it is an engagement with these forms of reaction as they have surfaced during a number of recent events.² Badiou launches a vigorous polemic against the forms of leftist melancholia, guarded reformism and right-wing offensive that all accept, in one way or another, the inevitability of the end of transformative revolutionary politics. As is necessary when past progressive sequences have been year in year out buried under masses of Thermidorian propaganda, the assertion of the existence of something whose visibility is altogether obscured will require a relentless critique of what passes for normality. And Badiou’s work, as Peter Hallward remarks, is nothing if not polemical. But what distinguishes his thinking from that of other voices who today call into question the prevailing consensus is his insistence – against mere pragmatic assertions of what is or nostalgia for what once was – that the novelty of universal forms of affirmation can only ever take place as a rigorous break from the situation, a break with the norms governing everyday political existence.

Part One consists of a number of essays originally published in French as the first two volumes of a series called Circonstances.³ Fittingly, then, we begin with an essay – originally the preface to the second volume – in which Badiou explains how he understands the relation between philosophy and circumstances, or the notion of a philosophical situation. This very accessible essay emphasizes that, for Badiou, philosophy is not just a discipline of general reflection on any phenomenon whatsoever. What imports is that philosophy can produce an encounter, one that sheds light on the irreducible distance between thought and power, that marks the value of the exception and seeks to know whether or not an event bears a rupture. The first terrain of investigation concerns the encounter between philosophy and war today. Essays on the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, on the American war against Iraq and on the NATO intervention against Serbia, all explore the nature of war and power in the world today. Following these come three articles dealing with parliamentary ‘democracy’ and racism, in which the question is to know whether or not the figures of racism and intolerance that (French) parliamentary democracy projects as external to it really are so. Is Le Pen really external to the French parliamentary scene? His very presence in the second round of France’s presidential elections of 2002 suggests otherwise. Does the recent French law banning the wearing of headscarves in schools really reflect a concern that ‘communitarianism’ is encroaching upon the egalitarian ideals of the Republic? That the real effects of this law may result in the exclusion of young (Muslim) women from school suggests not. What then is really at stake? The third article is a shorter, more personal piece, originally published in Le Monde after the riots in the Parisian banlieues and throughout France in November 2005. In it Badiou recounts the daily humiliation that his own adopted son, who happens to be black, is forced to endure at the hands of that same Republic. The last section in Part One contains two essays that will not surprise those already familiar with the programmatic side of Badiou’s philosophizing. The first essay articulates his bold plea for a political fusion of Germany and France, and the second comprises the latest version of his Manifesto of Affirmationist Art.

Part Two of Polemics was published in French as the third, and to date last, volume of the series: Circonstances 3: Portées du mot ‘juif.’⁴ It has been reproduced here in its entirety. The theme of this volume concentrates more specifically on questions of the political circulation of communal predicates, that is, the question of the status to be accorded to communal predicates in public intellectual discussion in general and on the current uses and appropriations of the word ‘Jew’ in particular. These texts, as Badiou underscores, are not texts ‘on the Jewish question’ – a question that would evoke a ‘solution’. Instead, what is at issue is to know ‘whether or not the word Jew constitutes an exceptional signifier in the general field of public intellectual discussion, exceptional to the point that it would be licit to have it play the role of a destinal, or even sacred, signifier’. The texts themselves come from a variety of sources – short essays, interviews, excerpts from literary and philosophical texts – published over a period of twenty-three years. Two more essays round off Part Two; one that is not by Badiou himself but by Cécile Winter, which originally comprised the annex of Circonstances 3. In this essay, Winter undertakes a provocative unravelling of the tortured history of the word ‘Jew’ in order that it might once more be restored to the infinite variability of its past. The other, entitled ‘The Word Jew and the Sycophant’, warrants a little explanation. This article was not part of the original volume, but was written by Badiou in response to the violent polemic provoked by the publication of Circonstances 3. Articles in Le Monde by Frédéric Nef and Roger-Pol Droit appeared shortly after the book’s publication, acting to disqualify its main proposition by asserting that anything contrary to the Zionist promotion of ‘Jews’ as belonging to an essentially religious ahistorical substance is tantamount to racial anti-Semitism. An article in Le Monde by Daniel Bensaïd, defending Badiou’s general thrust, put the context of the debate back into focus: it is indeed hard to deny the fact that the predicate ‘Jew’ has become ‘marked by the usage the Nazis made of it; that Hitler indeed invested the name Jew, and that the genocide irreversibly branded it, to the point that its identity glorification can today appear as the inversion of this stigmata and the reproduction of this branding’.⁵ So much so that it is of the utmost intellectual dishonesty to suggest that by so doing Badiou identifies, as his detractors make out, today’s Israeli Jews with the Nazis! The censuring effects of such intellectual dishonesty are well-known and the reactions provoked by the book’s publication merely confirm Badiou’s above-mentioned reason for publishing it in the first place. Nonetheless, Bensaïd’s intervention did not have the effect of warding off an improbable attack published in Les Temps Modernes by Eric Marty, in which Badiou stands accused of harbouring hidden intentions. ‘The Word Jew and the Sycophant’ is Badiou’s response to this twenty-page trial.⁶

From critique to the Truth-Event

In Part Three we move on to two essays originally published as part of the Rouge-Gorge conferences, where what is at stake is not a critique of the conjuncture, but an attempt to construct a philosophical fidelity to two great sequences of political innovation: the Paris Commune and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Badiou’s work has become well-enough known in English-speaking countries not to warrant making any detailed introduction to his thought.⁷ Nevertheless, I shall make a few brief remarks here in order to situate these essays within Badiou’s general project.

Very schematically, the fundamental distinction in Badiou’s work is between Being and Event. The realm of Being is figured as the positive ontological order accessible to knowledge – as the infinite set of what presents itself to our experience, categorized in terms of species and genus. A situation is defined as a consistent multiplicity (‘Paris after the Franco-German War in 1871’). It is a structured presentation but, Badiou argues, the stuff of what is so structured is nothing other than pure multiplicity per se. Nothing – or void – then, is the proper name of Being qua Being. Badiou’s operational assumption then, is that inconsistent multiplicity lies always at the heart of consistency. It is quite simply the void of the situation, which from the standpoint of knowledge simply appears as nothing. Further, a situation is structured but it does not have the capacity to count its own structure; its being counted as one necessarily implies the metastructure that designates it as one, that re-presents it in the symbolic order. Such that, as Žižek puts it, ‘when a situation is thus counted as one, identified by its symbolic structure, we have the state of the situation. (Badiou plays here on the ambiguity of the term state – state of things versus State in the political sense; there is no state of society without a State in which the structure of society is re-presented/redoubled.)’⁸ The knowledge of the situation provides the means for grouping its elements into parts, but it is the state of the situation that orders these elements into parts to which it gives a global organization. (The state is what organizes the multiplicity of elements into various tax-paying brackets, gives them a legal status, etc.) The state of the situation is what counts the count, as it were, through sanctioning a series of knowledges that serve to name, identify and index bodies to places. Because there are always more parts than elements, re-presentation is always in excess of presentation, and it is this excess that, as Žižek again reminds us, accounts for why the liberal idea of a state reduced to the service of civil society will always remain a dream: it misses the fact that ‘representation always act as a violent intervention into what it represents’.⁹

In order to maintain this structure in dominance, certain elements must remain uncounted or excluded, elements that inhabit what Badiou calls the edge of the situation’s void. The void cannot, of course, be localized or presented in the situation, it is scattered throughout it (the capitalist situation, for example, is structurally incapable of recognizing the capacity for proletarian innovation which inhabits everyone). But those on the edge of the void, those with ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, are situated in it, but as a sort of negative magnitude, the living lack of positive qualities that define the way the situation is re-presented. In Badiou’s terms, then, they are presented in, and hence belong to, the situation, but are not represented in it. So long as the elements of a situation do not radically deviate from their assigned places, or lack thereof, this gap will normally not show. To the always total structure of knowledge, which knows neither void nor excess, this element will simply appear as a non-essential or contingent disturbance to the situation, not as a symptom of the structural ‘lie’ of the situation itself. From the standpoint of the state of the situation, this inconsistent multiplicity simply appears as nothing, as non-being. It is, of course, much more convenient, if your aim is to keep the dominant structure intact, simply to construe this inconsistency as the locus of ‘evil’ external to the situation. The theme of evil is the best way to avoid having to think the situation from the standpoint of its void, which is the only way, Badiou argues, to grasp the specificity of the situation. (The systematic recourse to evil among today’s ideologues is just as disastrous as the refusal to think Nazism politically by positing it instead as an inexplicable evil.)

Grasping this specificity thus remains inaccessible to the totalizing structure of knowledge. What it knows of individuals in any given situation is the criteria they fulfil that helps to locate them in the situation: their scholastic aptitude, their social status, their tax bracket, their efficiency, and so on. But, what remains unknown, what is void for the situation, are those capacities which can appear in the situation only as unauthorized or unqualified, those qualities that can be presented but not re-presented with the terms structuring the situation.

Then, every so often, in a completely unpredictable fashion, a Truth-Event comes to pierce a hole in the totalizing, static structure of knowledge. An Event for Badiou is a properly contingent and unaccountable occurrence, exceeding everything that can be known in the situation – its identity conflicts, ideological struggles, fluxes of people and money, etc. An event cannot, Badiou argues, be generated nor deduced from the situation; but that it exceeds the terms of the situation does not mean that it arrives from some beyond or outside. There is no transcendence here; the Event attaches itself precisely to the void of the situation, revealing its inherent inconsistency.¹⁰ To be sure, inherent inconsistency can never be presented or counted as such since it is properly meta-situational. But what can come to be counted, and what links each specific situation to this inconsistency, are those that inhabit the edge of the void. Politics, in so far as it is universal and democratic, is for Badiou a process that comes to count those who are uncounted. Stigmatizing the uncounted as backward, dangerous, etc., then, is the best way to ward off a more profound ‘evil’: the emergence of a popular subjective force that would be capable of opposing the sterility of comfortable self-perpetuation, capable of developing the latent possibilities for democratic action that are immanent to the situation; a subjective force that, as subtracted from all sociological categories and classifications (‘illegal immigrants’, ‘citizens’), is grounded in the simple norm of belonging to the situation.

Badiou separates out from the always particular structure of Being an ‘exceptional’ realm of singular events that do not have any objective foothold in the situation, but which persist only through those individuals who constitute themselves as the Subjects of a Truth. The passage from the realm of Being to that of Truth demands a Subject which, in taking a wager on the Event (‘the Revolution has begun’, ‘Workers are political beings too’), develops ways of maintaining a ‘fidelity’ to it. The Subject here is the collective agent which, as it were, serves the Truth of that situation by intervening in the particular historical multiple, identifying signs of the Truth-Event and drawing out its consequences. It demonstrates the Truth of what the previous situation simply dismissed with collectively sanctioned labels (social difficulties caused by ‘communist infiltrators’, ‘illegal immigrants’). And by so doing it demonstrates the lie that sustained the preceding situation (‘Capitalism i.e. the logic of profit, is simply an objective basis for progress’).

In so far as, for Badiou, the power of the state is precisely the power of the count, the power of the truth-procedure that follows an Event lies in its capacity to construct a set of elements – this is its goal – that challenges the hierarchical structure of the situation, a set whose sole norm is the pure belonging of the elements to the situation. In times when the count of the state is unchallenged, the effective ontological closure means that the sphere of politics will always consensually appear to be localized in the State, as a matter of looking after the affairs of the ‘political community’. With exceptional rigour, Badiou shows that, on the contrary, democratic politics, properly speaking, is never simply about managing collections of specified individuals or groups. Nor is it about a state of the social as if there were such a thing as democratic ‘society’. It is about the presentation of the collective itself as indivisible. And this presentation, since the general interest always opposes dominant, particular interests, is inevitably divisive.¹¹

Both the Paris Commune and Cultural Revolution represent events of this kind. In these essays, Badiou’s concern is to grasp the historicity specific to the invention of egalitarian political forms, and the lessons that they have bequeathed to future political invention. Why discuss these events now? Of the reasons for focussing on these events in the present conjuncture I shall mention two.

The first concerns the historicity of truth-events themselves; the question of how we are placed with respect to the lessons of past truths, and, in particular, with respect to the vexing question of the status of the political organization. The second reason has to do with the fact that the Paris Commune is an especially vivid example of the organization of a proletarian political capacity that did not allow itself to be appropriated by representative forms. For this reason, it provides Badiou with the perfect material for his most recent work, which concerns not so much the way the Truth-event punctures a hole in the knowledge of the existing situation, but the way that the onto-logy of situations transforms, that is, the way the elements of the situation transform in the intensity of their appearing.

The historicity of truth-events

The historicity of political sequences is not to be understood in the historicist sense, i.e. as something that can be explained by the indwelling relations of power and knowledge comprising the situation. We know that one of the chief characteristics of ideology is precisely that it involves dissolving the punctuality of the event in the longue durée of mechanist change, on the one hand; and on the other of compacting its advent and its corruption together into a single inevitable disaster, as though Lenin always leads to Stalin. François Furet’s work on the French Revolution is exemplary in this regard. In contrast to historicism, historicity proper is the time proper to the always unpredictable, incalculable event, the time spanning the event’s beginning and its ultimate end. It is the time that begins with a wager, proceeds, by drawing the consequences of that decision, through a series of chance-ridden investigations and ends when it is finally exhausted, betrayed or overturned.

If the historicity of an event is the time that an event genuinely opens or founds, then what can be the present justification for returning to the Commune? In the ‘classical interpretation’ of the Commune, that initiated by Marx, homage is paid to it but its failure is seen as ensuing from the weakness of its political forms, from its incapacity to take over the more centralized functions of state. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Brecht and Mao, are all in agreement on this point. Indeed, it was in response to the perceived weaknesses of the Commune that Lenin would propose the solution of a more enduring party instance that would ‘dominate the way to non-domination’.

Instead of lauding the Commune for its innovation of political forms and social issues, for its principled stances, but deploring its failure as a failure to take over more centralized operations of state, Badiou sees in this failure its real import: the radicality of a structural gap between political invention and the state. If the history of revolutionary movements (1830, 1848, 1870, 1968) in France has been one of rupture and then quick reabsorption and betrayal by state representatives, then the Commune is what for the first and, to this day, only time succeeded in breaking with this apparent destiny: the idea that the social movements must be represented by a parliamentary ‘Left’. The contemporary interest of the Paris Commune, then, lies for Badiou not only in the way its subjective force presented itself or separated itself out from the ordinary rules according to which things are distinguished in a given situation, but also from the way it refused to be incorporated within the existing institutions of state.

What about the Cultural Revolution, then? Has it not long ago been discredited as simply a violent struggle for power within the top echelons of the party? A struggle that Mao, after the failure of economic voluntarism and his loss of influence in the party, was unable to win without a chaotic and violent recourse to popular forces? Badiou argues that for all its violence and radicality, and the cruel failure of the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution is the political sequence that takes the radical ambiguity of the classical interpretation and solution of the unresolved problems of the Paris Commune to its extreme. As the instance that is supposed to lead the way to a non-state society (the theme of revolution) but that is also devoted to taking over centralized functions of state, the party apparatus, in the last analysis, is never able to maintain the gap between political innovation and functions of state – never able to free itself from the state. The Cultural Revolution clearly shows that of the two it is, in the last instance, always the latter that ends up imposing itself on the former. Badiou seeks to show that the Cultural Revolution is the last significant political sequence that is internal to the party-state. What it demonstrates is nothing other than the point of saturation of the classic Marxist–Leninist interpretation of the Commune – a saturation that it accomplished, if you will, for politics to be thinkable today outside of the party-state.

The onto-logy of the situation

In the terms of Being and Event, what the Paris Commune succeeded in doing was making pure presentation, i.e. pure and simple belonging to a situation irrespective of all cultural predicates, the principle of its politics. It succeeded in rupturing with all relation and creating a new set that was subtracted from the existing classifications and nominations structuring the preceding situation. Badiou’s more recent work does not go back over this point, but sets out to grasp the way that an event comes to transform the logic of the situation, that is, the way that its elements appear in it or the intensity with which they are endowed. For not having any objective foothold in the situation, a truth will succeed in imposing itself on the situation only in so far as it manages to transvaluate the intensity of its elements – or come to impose a different regime for their appearing. So, a truth proceeds as a subtraction from the classifications and distributions of the state, but it does so by altering the appearing, or the intensity, of the elements constituting the situation. As Peter Hallward says, ‘the key point of reference remains the anarchic disorder of inconsistent multiplicity’;¹² but because the being of the situation must also be made to be there (i.e. experienced as connected, related) it must always be made subject to the logical constraints of a particular situation. As Badiou figures it, these logical constraints mean that there will always be, in any situation, elements that exist maximally (politically speaking, those whose voices are sanctioned, whose speech leads to action), elements that are less intense, and elements that, like those on the edge of the void, are effectively invisible (whose speech registers as pure noise, and who as such constitute the ‘non-existent’ element of this situation).

This distinction between maximally and minimally existing members enables us to account, amongst other things, for the stakes of public discussion about communal predicates. The maximally existing members of this situation appear to embody the (economic, educational, linguistic, etc.) criteria that structure the situation to greater perfection than others. In France in 1871, for example, it is clear that some things – industrialists, bourgeois politicians, the Vendôme Column – appear incontestably more French than others, which nonetheless also belong to the situation: worker organizations, internationalist elements, disaffected literati, etc. At a given point in time, what it means for a situation to be French will involve the degree to which certain things appear in the situation: the degree to which, for example, religion should be included as an integral part of state declarations and educational institutions, the extent to which workers are seen as being able to participate in decisions affecting the community, the allowance made for women’s demands for equal rights, the adherence of a country to the principles of international law, to the principle of fraternity, and so on.

In his recent work, Badiou figures the truth-event not just as the eruption of being in the situation but as an emergence that transforms in a revolutionary manner the logic structuring the appearing of bodies in the situation. When Terry Eagleton calls the Paris Commune ‘that most political of revolutions’ he touches upon something essential. The way Eagleton sees it, this peculiarly political quality arises from the fact that the Commune’s ‘seizing of the streets was not about using the streets as a front-line of defence of the seizure of capital, as about the streets themselves; it was not so much a revolt within the means of production, rooted in factory soviets and a revolutionary proletarian party, but a transformation of the means of everyday life itself’.¹³ For what is of key interest in the Paris Commune is something it shows all the more clearly for not attempting to take over the operations of the state: that it is not, in a sense, the taking hold of the reins of state in the name of the proletariat that is most revolutionary, but rather, the way a truth process imposes a revolutionary change on the logic structuring the situation. Badiou’s work on the onto-logy of the situation is an attempt precisely to give us the formal means¹⁴ to understand the nature of such revolutions of everyday life and why, in a way that is not determined in advance by any preformed party apparatus, they open onto the sort of investigations they do.

Prior to the Paris Commune, for example, the situation is one of a country at the end of a long war: a visibly divided world with, on the one hand a set of maximally existing elements, i.e., everything appearing in the sphere of consecrated political power – the Prussian occupiers, the Assembly of traditionalist Rurals, Theirs’ capitulard Republican regime, and a regular army spoiling for a fight with the mainly working-class National Guard. The other half of this divided world is what appears outside this sphere – a chaotic mix of Parisian worker organizations, the Federation of trade unions, local military committees, the Central Committee of the National Guard, and so on.

This world is split, but there is one thing holding it together, one thing that both sides share or consent to, namely, the assumption of the political incapacity of the workers. On the side of established power, there is fear, and so visibility, of the workers and people as an unruly, irrational mass. But within the terms structuring the situation, there can be no recognition of their political significance. By contrast, Badiou demonstrates that when, on the side of the workers, a decision is taken to end betrayal, to take matters into their own hands and to follow through on the proclamation of the Commune by creating, out of this inconsistent grouping internal to the situation, properly political forms of proletarian discipline and organization, these previously politically non-existent workers come to exist absolutely, in their own right. In a process that takes place independent of the norms of state, they are called upon to proceed to elections and occupy government. It is from then on that the new non-existent term of the situation becomes, on the contrary, the political incapacity of workers. In its apparent failure, what the Commune bequeathed to the future was an ‘unheard-of transcendental evaluation of the political scene’. That is why the Paris Commune would, starting with Marx and Lenin, come to inspire a century of political innovation.

If the Commune made exemplarily clear the structural gap between political innovation and state representation, it can be said that the Commune is still present, still with us to the extent that it is liable to furnish us with inspiration for the creation of new political alternatives right here and now.¹⁵ Its example makes explicitly clear how a true political event today would necessarily attach itself to those whose political capacity constitutes the nonexistent term of our consensual ‘democratic’ states. As measured against the Paris Commune, our prevailing consensus looks less like an exchange between partners rationally discussing their interests, than the intolerable arrogance of an oligarchy whose main aim is to ward off the possibility that, according to the norms of radical equality, anyone at all might appear in the place of politics.

It is more important than ever to emphasize this gap today, when the sole criterion of democracy is usually taken to be the representative system. The amalgam ‘representative democracy’ is not a form of government necessary to our socially, economically and technologically complex societies – this is historicism at its