201

Negation and Politics

A reply to Matthew Sharpe on Alain Badiou

Jonathon Collerson

Alias: Man’s consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but
creates it,
Lenin, 1914
I
Underlying Matthew Sharpe’s ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political
Theology, or the Abstract Passion of Alain Badiou’ is the
intersection of philosophy and the Left.1 ‘If the Left is not to repeat
… those moments of its history that today provide such
ammunition for the “there is no alternative” chorus from the Right’,
Sharpe says, ‘Badiou cannot save us’.2 He proposes instead a
critical theory ‘addressed [to] those subjects … most historically
capable of … and most directly interested in … progressive political
change’.3 But the impasse of the Left is exactly the absence of the
subject. Whom, therefore, to address?
The powerful vote that elected Labor in 2007 does not count
today, given the very law that Your Rights at Work campaigned
against has been retained. In Badiou’s jargon, this was a campaign

1 M. Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology, or the Abstract Passion of Alain

Badiou’, in Arena Journal, New Series, no. 29/30, 2008, pp. 273–303.
2 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 299.
3 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 300.

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202 Jonathon Collerson

‘convoked by the state’, in the leadership of the ACTU.4 The

parliamentary Left is so much the property of property that, where
once it would have used state power to reduce inequality, it now
advocates a ‘productivity revolution’. The self-immolation of the
radical Left — let’s say, a Left that abjures inequality, property and
the state — after 1968 has clearly left a gap in the landscape. The
return of radical thought in the decades before 1968 was a response
to the morose theory of Stalinism and the need to reassert the
political subject. However, the crisis that stretched from 1968 to
1989 left this Left lacking any referent in the state, or with the
obscure and difficult referent of social democracy. Either way, Alex
Callinicos concludes, even with the (re)emergence of some sort of a
Left during the late 1990s and after, ‘the present is ... a moment of
transition, in which one political subject has died and a new one
has yet to emerge’.5 But from where does a political subject emerge,
if not from its own impasse?
Alain Badiou’s project in philosophy has been to continue the
radical thought that came under attack after May 1968. His
philosophy highlights an entropic tendency in thought and
counters this with the ethic ‘keep going’.6 ‘Philosophy in its very
essence elaborates the means of saying “Yes!” to the previously
unknown thoughts that hesitate to become the truths that they are,’
he says.7 The relationship of philosophy to politics is not to provide
directives, which politics provides itself, or a theory of ‘the good
state’, an oxymoron after Marx, but to work out what is required
for political thought not to deteriorate into the non-thought of a
dull reflection of what is; for Theodor Adorno, to become ‘a piece of
the politics it was supposed to lead beyond’.8 For this reason

4 He makes this claim about the French ‘No!’ campaign against the European Union
constitution. Badiou wrote a polemic for the ‘No!’ campaign. It is interesting to note that
Badiou’s position regarding the state (he does not vote in elections, for instance) is not
dogmatic. He also wrote a stunning polemic against the introduction of the law banning
young Muslim women from wearing the veil. See F. Del Lucchese and J. Smith, ‘We Need a
New Popular Discipline’: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative, Interview
with Alain Badiou, 2 July 2007. For Badiou’s polemic, ‘The Law on the Islamic Head Scarf’,
see A. Badiou, Polemics, trans. S. Corcoran, London, Verso, 2006, pp. 98–110.
5 A. Callinicos, The Resources of Critique, Cambridge, Polity, 2006, p. 257.
6 See A. Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. P. Hallward, London,
Verso, 2003.
7 A. Badiou, ‘Democratic Materialism and the Materialist Dialectic’, trans. A. Toscano, in
Radical Philosophy, no. 130, March/April 2005, pp. 20–4; see p. 21. See A. Badiou, Logics of
Worlds, trans. A Toscano, London, Continuum, 2009 (forthcoming).
8 T. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. D. Redmond, 2001, ‘The Relationship to Left
Hegelianism’, Part II: Concept and Categories, <www.marxists.org/reference/archive/
adorno/1966/negative-dialectics/index.htm>.

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Badiou argues that to break its impasse, to reassert the political subject
today, the Left must develop a ‘discipline of thought’ subtracted
exactly from what is generally taken to be political, or what is.9
This makes politics unpalatably indiscernible for Sharpe.10 At
the centre of his article is an insistence on what is generally taken
to be political against Badiou’s insistence on politics as something
going beyond this.11 So he suggests an immediate question: What is
politics? But in Sharpe’s discussion, where the central claim is that
Badiou’s thought is a pristine example of Hegel’s ‘unhappy
consciousness’,12 this question settles on a more specific problem
for philosophy: What is negation? If politics is a ‘renunciation’ of what
is generally taken to be political, what is the nature of this negation?
II
Hegel describes the unhappy consciousness as being aware of its
own preference for an abstract freedom of thought; but, in this,
being aware that its preference is for something one-sided. In fact,
it experiences it as a violent denial of self-realization.13 Hegel draws
on this idea to account for The Terror during the French Revolution,
but the significance here is the example of Christianity. For Sharpe,
the best way to understand Badiou is to locate Christianity as the
hidden condition of his thought — something Badiou unwittingly
invites with his 1997 book Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism.14
Badiou is a ‘(Meta-)Political Theologian’ because his notions of
event, truth and subject exactly deflect verifiability from the
standpoint of their situation.
This is particularly the case with Badiou’s notions of equality

9 ‘Politics puts the State at a distance, in the distance of its measure.’ A. Badiou, Metapolitics,
trans. J. Barker, London, Verso, 2006, p. 145. See also Del Lucchese and Smith, ‘We Need a
New Popular Discipline’.
10 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, pp. 290, 292.
11 ‘ … the point here concerns how Badiou talks about the vast majority of events, processes
and actions that the rest of the world describe as “political”’: Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)
Political Theology’, p. 293.
12 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p 277. Peter Hallward makes the same
suggestion in the standard English-language reference for Badiou: P. Hallward, Badiou: A
Subject to Truth, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2003, pp. 241–2. Daniel Bensaid,
Slavoj Zizek and Alex Callinicos have drawn similar conclusions. See D. Bensaid, ‘Alain
Badiou and the Miracle of the Event’, in P. Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Alain Badiou and the
Future of Philosophy, London, Continuum, 2004, chapter 7; S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The
Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London, Verso, 1999, chapter 3; and A. Callinicos, The
Resources of Critique, chapter 3.
13 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), trans. J. B. Baillie, New York, Harper &
Row, 1967, pp. 242–67.
14 For Badiou’s rebuttal of these claims, including a comment on Slavoj Zizek’s contribution
to this reading of his work, see A. S. Miller, ‘An Interview with Alain Badiou “Universal
Truths and the Question of Religion”’, Journal of Philosophy and Scripture, vol. 3, issue 1, Fall
2005, pp. 38–42.

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204 Jonathon Collerson

and justice. Politics is entirely subjective; not simply a necessity in any

given situation, but something directed upon it. For instance, sexual
equality should not be investigated, it should be affirmed as a
political axiom. Any politics that is not immediately egalitarian is
not a politics.15 ‘Justice is that by which the subject’s nodal link to the
place, to the law, takes on the divisible figure of its transformation,’
Badiou says. ‘More radically, justice names the possibility — from the
point of view of what it brings in to being as subject-effect — that
what is non-law may serve as law.’16 This strong subjective quality
captures Saint Paul’s invocation: ‘you are not under law, but under
grace’.17 This is why, Sharpe argues, Badiou separates and valorizes
‘a new elect’ (the subject) from those ‘left behind’ the affirmation of
a truth. As for Martin Luther, the problem of bridging ‘Higher
Truth’ and ‘this worldly politics’ then emerges.18
Sharpe goes on to draw on Luther’s political writing to suggest
the consequences of Saint Paul’s distinction between law and grace.
For Luther, responsibilities to God are incommensurable with those
to any human community.19 Sharpe finds appropriately shocking
passages in Luther to demonstrate this: Christian government is
impossible because ‘the wicked always outnumber the good’ and
therefore, in order to compel the wicked to law, ‘the secular sword
should and must be red and bloodthirsty’.20 This is the ‘rub’.
Political thought must negotiate the relationship between a
‘transcendent Truth’ and the situation it transcends. But Luther’s
‘Christian appeal to the freedom of thought from secular

15 ‘Only politics is required to declare that the thought it is, is the thought of all.’ Badiou has
been celebrated for securing universal truth against the grain of postmodern thought. For
Badiou, any truth is truth for everyone in a definite situation; politics as a truth procedure,
the production of a political truth, must therefore address itself to everyone; equality is
axiomatic for politics. ‘Politics is impossible without the statement that people, taken
indistinctly, are capable of the thought that constitutes the thought of the post-evental
political subject.’ By contrast with Badiou’s other truth procedures, the scientist only needs
one other scientists to recognise a truth; two lovers are a truth; and the artist has their truth
alone. See Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 142.
16 A. Badiou, Théorie du sujet, Paris, Seuil, 1982; quoted in B. Bosteels, ‘Alain Badiou’s Theory of
the Subject: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism (Part II)’, in Pli, no. 13, 2002, p. 185.
See A. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels, London, Continuum, 2009 (forthcoming).
17 Romans 6:24. See Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, pp. 275 and 278–9.
18 ‘Higher Truth’ is of course contradictory with Badiou’s philosophy, where truths only exist
within real historical practices; truth is concrete, as the maxim goes. Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting
(Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 291.
19 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 279.
20 Quoted in Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, pp. 292, 301.
21 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, pp. 280, 279. Badiou does not disagree
with this point; below we will see that he does not think that anything is created in
destruction, but only in subtraction from a situation.

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“tyrannies” does not itself legislate any political consequences’.21

Indeed, for Hegel, the only political consequence it can have is ‘the
fanaticism of destruction’.22
III
What is missing here is that the unhappy consciousness is an
expression of what Hegel calls ‘negative infinity’.23 Hegel’s
criticism of traditional Christianity is exactly that its God is
transcendental. For this Christianity, ‘the death of Christ means
that God has withdrawn from the world, and that there are no
longer any mediators between individual and God’.24 The vogue
for Epicurus and Spinoza during Hegel’s youth subsequently led
him to pursue the redemption of the Christian God under the
notion that an absolute God must by definition be immanent in the
world: if God is not in the world there is a place where God is not
— God is not absolute.25 Accounting for the infinite within the
finite (God in the world) then becomes a dominant motif in Hegel.
This culminates in the ‘Absolute Idea’ that closes his logic.
In the early paragraphs of the Philosophy of Right, quoted by
Sharpe, Hegel sets out the basic movement of his dialectic of will.
First, the will denies all limits; negating determination and naming
itself infinite. Second, the will cancels this denial, and determines
itself within the (finite) world. But this denial is a determination
without the universality given (negatively) in the first moment. And
so we finally have, third, ‘the unity of both these moments’.26 He
describes this final moment as the ‘self-determination of the ego’ and
it is at this point that negative infinity, or the unhappy consciousness,
gives way to the substantial being that he calls true or good infinity.
With the simple denial of limits all that is achieved is an infinite
repetition of negation. Everything appears as a limit from the one-
sided standpoint of the abstractly infinite will. This is a bad negation,
a repetition compulsion. The location of the infinite within the

22 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (1821), trans. T. M. Knox, Oxford, Oxford University

Press, 1967, p. 22. See also Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 599–610: ‘All these
determinate elements disappear with the disaster and ruin that over take the self in the state
of absolute freedom [abstract autonomy]; its negation is meaningless death, sheer horror at
the negative which has nothing positive in it, nothing that gives a filling’, p. 608.
23 G. W. F. Hegel, Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830),
trans. W. Wallace, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975, p. 137. Sharpe does not mention
it directly, but he directs us to Hegel’s notion of negative infinity. The passage he quotes
from, the remark for paragraph five of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, is exactly where Hegel
introduces the concept of infinity in this book. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 21.
24 F. Beiser, Hegel, New York, Routledge, 2005, p. 137.
25 See Beiser, Hegel, chapters 1 and 2.
26 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, pp. 21–3.

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206 Jonathon Collerson

finite, ‘the unity of both these moments’, breaks this logic. What
previously appeared as a limit is now a determination of the will
itself. ‘It is the will whose potentialities have become fully explicit
which is truly infinite’, Hegel says, ‘because its object is itself and
so is not in its eyes an “other” or a barrier; on the contrary, in its
object this will has simply turned backward into itself’.27
IV
Badiou retains negative infinity as a problem to be solved. An
event, for Badiou, interrupts a situation and demonstrates a
dysfunction in its structuring principle; the count-as-one, in his
jargon.28 A truth process involves an activist intervention that
traces the consequences of an event through a situation. He insists
that this intervention happens under the condition of the state and,
therefore, criticizes attempts to name the event a radical break:
‘Speculative leftism imagines that intervention authorizes itself on
the basis of itself alone; that it breaks with the situation without any
other support than its own negative will’, he says. ‘This thought is
unaware that the event only exists insofar as it is submitted ... to the
ruled structure of the situation.’29
During the twentieth century this ‘negative will’ took the form of
an absolute attempt to purify the real. Badiou argues that the
century was motivated by a ‘passion for the real,’ expressed in the
destruction of the state but equally in a subtraction from it. Kasimir
Malevich’s 1918 painting White on White is either the destruction of
painting (nothing is presented) or, in Badiou’s view, a subtraction
from the law of painting that is active in the ‘minimal difference’
between white and white, ‘the difference between place and taking-
place’.30 Badiou concludes, however, that it is was ‘the century of
destruction’: Stalinism, Fascism, et cetera.31 Like the denial of limits
in Hegel’s dialectic of will, destruction aims to strip the inauthentic
away from the real but finds it infinitely laden. It is ‘a process
doomed to incompletion, a figure of the bad infinite’, he says.32
Badiou draws together the categories destruction and
subtraction in the concept of ‘true negation’. He argues that any
novelty is a negation and that any negation involves both
destruction and subtraction. But it is in a subtraction from the law

27 Hegel, Philosophy of Right, p. 30.

28 See A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham, London, Continuum, 2007, pp. 23–30.
29 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 210 (emphasis in original).
30 A. Badiou, The Century, trans. A Toscano, Cambridge, Polity, 2007, pp. 55–7.
31 Badiou, The Century, p. 54.
32 Badiou, The Century, p. 56.

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Negation and Politics 207

of a situation, not destruction, that novelty is created: destruction is

never creation. Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of serialism in music
is an example of this unity. ‘The new musical axioms which structure,
for Schoenberg, the admissible succession of notes in a musical
work, outside the tonal system, are in no way deducible from the
destruction of this system’, says Badiou. ‘The musical discourse
avoids the laws of tonality, or, more precisely, becomes indifferent
to these laws.’ He continues: ‘we can say that the musical discourse
is subtracted from its tonal legislation. Clearly, this subtraction is in
the horizon of negation, but it exists apart from the purely negative
part of negation. It exists apart from destruction’.33 As for Hegel,
where the final moment in the dialectic of will is ‘the unity of both
these moments’, for Badiou ‘true negation’ is the unity of
destruction and subtraction. Serialism is irreducible to either
destruction or subtraction, but involves both: tonality must be
destroyed for the Second Viennese School to create a-tonal music.
What is essential to this process is the (re)definition of the act of
composition against what is generally taken to be composition.
This (re)definition, a formalization of composition, is indifferent to,
is subtracted from, the law of composition: tonality. The production
of novelty is not reduced to the destructive act, the absolute break
of a ‘speculative leftism’, but neither is destruction cast aside. This
renders Sharpe’s claim that ‘Badiou is interested … in a radical new
beginning’ implausible.34 It is not the stoicism of an unhappy
consciousness, but a (re)definition en acte of what will count as legal
for a definite situation.
V
Sharpe insists that the benefit of ‘immanent critique’ is its
negotiation of ‘the descent of the philosopher back into the polis’.35
The difficulty emerges as he repeatedly conflates this negotiation
with Badiou’s assumption that thought and practice form a
tautology. For instance, ‘Badiou’s ... philosophy seems to sail very

33 Badiou, ‘Destruction, Negation and Subtraction’, public open video lecture for the faculty
and students of the European Graduate School, Media Studies Department Program, EGS,
Saas-Fee, Switzerland, Europe, 2007. A transcription of a version delivered in Los Angeles
is available at, <www.lacan.com/badpas>.
34 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 275. If Badiou is interested in a new
beginning, he agrees with Deleuze that, ‘One begins again through the middle’. Quoted in
J. Marks, Gilles Delezue: Vitalism and Multiplicity, London, Pluto Press, 1998, p. 33.
35 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 300. I do not agree that Sharpe has at all
produced an immanent critique of Badiou; the quotation marks here are important: I am
one who thinks that there is a priceless contribution to thought in dialectical thinking.
36 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 289. Also, ‘Badiou’s numerical
definition of politics … at least demands an enquiry as to whether Badiou’s “metapolitics”

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208 Jonathon Collerson

close to recasting politics in its own elevated image’.36 What Sharpe

misses is, first, that ‘politics is thought’ and, second, that
philosophy is the thought of thought for Badiou.37 It is therefore
quite straightforward that Badiou’s philosophy would deal with
the question of politics in terms of what is required for thought to
continue.
If we are to restate some old principles, let’s say that Sharpe’s
assumption captures what Lenin referred to as economism: the
attribution of philistinism to practice, or the separation of thought
from politics.38 In a deliberately ironic passage, Sharpe suggests
that whether democracy is thought or not, ‘is not a question many
militants, or any other political agents, can be expected to have
reflected upon’.39 The problem is that Sharpe’s irony is
presupposing a role for philosophy within militant politics after he
has noted that Badiou holds the opposite view.40 This conflation
discloses the limit of his own critical theory in relation to practice:
he wants a transcendental synthesis of philosophy and politics;
thus the language of ‘ascent’ and ‘descent’. The pertinent question
is: Can we think thought outside some practical activity? If we can,
it is only as a distinction of reason, as Hume suggests we can think
whiteness and sphericality separately to a white marble globe.41
Adorno insists that a materialist philosophy must acknowledge
an outside. ‘Philosophical content must be grasped solely where
philosophy does not mandate it’, he says.42 This is why Badiou says
political thought is a condition on philosophy, rather than a sub-
genre. Adorno presupposes Marx’s view that capitalist society
hypostatizes an irreconcilable split between value and use-value; it
stops at book two of Hegel’s Science of Logic. The task of capital is to
deny that values have an outside, viz. use-values, or to say that

does not rest on a fundamentally mistaken prioritization of theoretical knowledge over the
categories and considerations generic to political practice’, p. 285.
37 Badiou, Metapolitics, pp. 22–57.
38 Lenin’s argument in What is to be Done? (1902) is that the working class is spontaneously
validating the view that communism is their self-emancipation, but that his fellow
intellectuals see workers as very limited, only being able to engage in ‘economic’ struggles,
‘hip pocket’ issues, and not ‘political’ struggle, which should be left to the enlightened
middle classes. He repeatedly accuses his contemporaries of attributing their own
philistinism to workers. See Lenin, What is to be Done? (1902), Moscow, Progress, 1978, pp
63-4.
39 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 287.
40 ‘Badiou is a student of Althusser, who always maintained the ‘relative autonomy’ of
different disciplines and their theoretical objects. Badiou is accordingly careful to ‘delimit’
the scope of his ... philosophy.’ Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-) Political Theology’, p 280.
41 See D. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, London, Penguin, 1985, p. 72.
42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, ‘Infinity’, Introduction.

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Negation and Politics 209

money is simply a differential measure. ‘The circle of identification,

which ultimately always identifies only itself,’ Adorno says, ‘was
drawn by the thinking which tolerates nothing outside; its
imprisonment is its own handiwork’.43 It is the task of dialectical
thought to think against this. ‘To think is, in itself and above all
particular content, negation, resistance against what is imposed on
it,’ he says. ‘The primacy of the principle of contradiction in
dialectics measures what is heterogeneous in unitary thought.’44
VI
The primacy of contradiction becomes a motif in Badiou’s thought
after 1968.45 By 1975 a core group of May activists had moved from
the speculative leftism of Gauche prolétarienne to the Thermidor of
Nouvelle philosophie. At the same time, the communist and socialist
parties joined in the Programme commun under the leadership of
François Mitterrand in a bid for political clout; indeed the
communists were good enough to announce that the ‘dictatorship
of the proletariat’ did not apply to modern French conditions. In
philosophy, Althusser and Lacan dismissed the May events.
Althusser rejected the possibility of the subject, claiming rather that
‘ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as
subjects’.46 Bruno Bosteels notes that Lacan’s comment to a meeting
of young radicals, that ‘the only chance of the revolutionary
aspiration is always to lead to the discourse of the master’, was
exactly the argument made later by the Nouveaux philosophes in
their denunciations of May.47
The apparently bi-polar shift from Gauche prolétarienne to
Nouvelle Philosophie was supposed otherwise by Badiou. It simply

43 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Part II, ‘Mediation Through Objectivity’. The ‘circle’ in question
is Hegel’s ‘journey through otherness back to oneself’. Throughout Negative Dialectics
Adorno mocks Hegel with the recurrent phrase, ‘the magic circle’.
44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, ‘Dialectics Not a Standpoint’, Introduction. Compare with
Badiou: ‘Thus, at the heart of the Hegelian dialectic we should disentangle two processes,
two concepts of movement. (a) A dialectical matrix covered by the term alienation; the idea
of a simple term that unfolds in its becoming-other, in order to come back into its own as an
accomplished concept. (b) A dialectical matrix whose operator is scission, under the theme:
there is no unity other than split. With out the least return to self, nor any connection
between the final and the inaugural’. Badiou, Theorie du sujet, quoted in Bosteels, ‘The
Subject of the Dialectic’ in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, London,
Continuum, 2004, p. 156.
45 The best account of Badiou’s Maoist period, and its influence on his later work is B. Bosteels,
‘Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics’, Positions, vol. 13, no. 3, winter, 2005, pp. 575–634.
46 L. Althusser, ‘Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses’, in Lenin and Philosophy and
Other Essays, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1971, p. 175. Bosteels suggests that
Althusser’s references to schools and police in this essay are references to May 1968; but this
can only be speculated. See Bosteels, ‘Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject (Part II)’, p. 133.
47 Quoted in Bosteels, ‘Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject’ (Part II), p. 135.

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reflected a sort of thinking that can only grasp opposing forces in

their alterity.48 Badiou rejects this. ‘There is not just the law of
Capital, or the cops’, he says. ‘To miss this is to stop seeing the unity
of the space of placement [esplace], its consistency. It is to fall back
into objectivism, whose inverted ransom by the way is to make the
state the only subject — whence the antirepressive logorrhea.’49 The
fall back into objectivism was also what Althusser and Lacan
achieved in the doctrine of structural causality, where the key
moment of the dialectic is the location of a structure’s absent cause:
the economy or the traumatic real.50
Keep in mind that Badiou is doing philosophy here, and not
political analysis.51 What he is trying to work out is what is required
for thought not to deteriorate in the midst of a general abandoning
of the May events so dear to him.52 It is in this connection that he
says, ‘those who gave up on revolution, whether they talk about the
gulags or the retreat of the masses, show that, if they were part of the
movement, of ’68 and its consequences, they never seriously partook
in the subject whose evanescent cause they beheld in those
occurrences. These people belong to the structure’.53 What is
required, of course, is (anachronistically) ‘true negation’. The logic
that must supplement structural causality is dialectical scission. ‘There
is A, and there is Ap (read: “A as such” and “A in an other place,” the
place distributed by the space of placement, or P),’ Badiou says. ‘We
thus have to posit a constitutive scission: A = (AAp).’54 Any force, A,
is split between itself and its indexation to the regime of places that

48 Indeed, Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, two ex-militants of Gauche prolétarienne,
produced a book called L’Ange (1976) where they identified their ’68 selves positively with
Hegel’s notion of the Beautiful Soul. See Bosteels, ‘Post-Maoism’, pp. 612–17.
49 Badiou, ‘Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution’, trans. A. Toscano,
Positions, vol. 13, no. 3, winter 2005, p. 637 (translation altered).
50 The most substantial study of Badiou’s thought during this period is B. Bosteels, ‘Alan
Badiou’s Theory of the Subject Part I: The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism?’,
Pli, vol. 12, 2001, pp. 200–29; and Bosteels, Alain Badiou’s ‘Theory of the Subject’ (Part II),
pp. 173–208. See also B. Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, Durham, Duke University Press
(forthcoming).
51 Alex Callinicos makes this error by asking Badiou to provide an account of how we can
identify a genuine event from a false event. Badiou’s entire point is that we cannot know in
advance what is going to happen; we therefore have ‘faith’ in the event of a situation. Lenin
could not have known the proletariat would really overturn tsarism; and yet he was faithful
to the working class as event. See Callinicos, The Resources of Critique, p. 110.
52 ‘I admit without reticence that May 68 has been for me, in the order of philosophy as well
as in all the rest, an authentic road to Damascus’: A. Badiou, Théorie de la contradiction, Paris,
Maspero, 1975, p. 9, quoted in B. Bosteels, ‘Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject’ (Part II),
p. 173.
53 Badiou, ‘Further Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution’, trans. L.
Chiesa, Positions, vol. 13, no. 3, winter 2005, p. 652.
54 Badiou, Théorie du sujet; quoted in Bosteels, ‘Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject’ (Part II),
pp. 175–7.

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structure a situation, P. As we saw earlier with Malevich’s White on

White, there is both place and taking-place. The unhappy
consciousness thinks there is only the stark alternation of P and A,
‘the idea that the world knows only the necessary rightist backlash
and the powerless suicidal leftism’.55 What the formula A = (AAp) is
decomposed to here is Ap(Ap), where there is nothing but the regime
of places, and A(A), where the force is entirely abstract.56
What Badiou is moving towards is an account of the subject as
something more than the affirmation of the situation’s absent
cause. Badiou takes from Lacan the idea that the alternation of
anxiety and the superego can be positively supplemented with the
figures of courage and justice.57 The first two terms alternate over
the abyss of the absent cause; recognition of the absent cause
undermines the structure, giving either the anxiety of placelessness
or a punitive superego that reinforces the unhealthy situation itself.
Badiou supplements this with an account of how the impasse
might not only lead to indefinite anxiety or the superego, but let the
absent cause extend the situation, creating a new truth. While anxiety
and the superego are subordinated to the space of placement,
Ap(A), courage and justice actively limit this determination, A(Ap).
The latter actively exacerbate the situation. Anxiety is given courage
to affirm the destruction of placement, while justice sublates the
superego as the subject reconstructs the situation. ‘Everything that
belongs to a place returns to that part of the itself which is
determined by it in order to displace the place’, Badiou says, ‘to
determine the determination, to cross the limit’. The dialectical
matrix that Badiou affirms contains the structural determination
given in a situation, Ap(A), but also the limit put on this, A(Ap).
VII
If this dialectical scission is left aside, or if the Hegelian matrix of
synthesis is presupposed, we miss what is at stake in Badiou’s
thought. An example of this is Sharpe’s argument that the thesis of
Badiou’s 1988 book Being and Event is ‘a category error of the first

55 Badiou, Théorie du sujet; quoted in Bosteels, ‘Alain Badiou’s Theory of the Subject’ (Part II),
p. 177.
56 From Badiou’s Maoist perspective, at the time, these are the rightist and leftist ‘deviations’.
See B. Bosteels, ‘Post-Maoism’, pp. 575–634, esp. 595–608.
57 ‘Should we not push the analytical intervention all the way to the fundamental dialogues
on justice and courage, in the great dialectical tradition? J. Lacan, Le Séminaire I, Les écrits
techniques de Freud, Paris, Seuil, 1975, pp. 164–165. Quoted in Bosteels, ‘Alain Badiou’s
Theory of the Subject’ (Part II), p. 184
58 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 284.

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212 Jonathon Collerson

order’.58 Sharpe’s concern is that, ‘If the power of the state is

postulated as infinite, it follows directly that there is no immanent
space, process or potentials within the world as it is that the Left
might look to with a view to progressively transforming the existing
order’.59 What Badiou maintains in Being and Event is that, if God is
dead, we have to affirm that being is not one but many, or infinitely
multiple; the language of ontology is, therefore, mathematics.60 The
notion that state power is errant says that an excess of included parts
is counted over belonging elements when we try to grasp infinity.
What does that mean?
If our situation is the infinite set of ‘all natural numbers’, we can
count out a supplementary set of its squares. The elements — 1, 2,
3, 4 et cetera — belong to the situation, the part — 1, 4, 9, 16 et cetera
— is included. The ‘state of the situation’ duplicates the situation by
including every conceivable part in order to delimit the situation’s
‘void’, viz. the underlying and indifferent multiplicity that testifies
that the structure might be otherwise — what we have just been
calling the absent cause. If we consider the national situation,
individuals are presented as elements but are re-presented as parts:
citizens and non-citizens, tax payers, trade unionists and bosses,
ethnic and sexual minorities, et cetera, in order to fix them to a set of
structural places; to hold together an inconsistent multiplicity in a
consistent ‘one’ nation.61 What is important is that these included
determinations have a quantitative power (number) in errant
excess of the presented situation as such; an individual relates to
this errant infinity as having ‘alienating and repressive powers of
indeterminacy’, what we have just been writing Ap(A).62
Badiou refers to the fixity that the state gives its situation as ‘literally
the fictionalising of the count’.63 That the state is a fictionalization of
what it duplicates means that parts do not necessarily rely on elements

59 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 296.

60 Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 4–16, 23–30.
61 Badiou comments that the void is a ‘spectre’ ‘haunting’ the state, in a very oblique allusion
to The Communist Manifesto (1848). Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 95, 94. A chapter called ‘The
Factory as Event Site’ was removed from the final version of Being and Event, but printed in
the journal of his political group, L’Organisation Politique. Here Badiou considers the great
discovery of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts (1844) to be ‘the void, directly subsumed by the
generic being of workers, since the latter possess nothing but a saleable abstraction … it is
because they are nothing that they are capable of organising everything’. This renders
Sharpe’s view that with Badiou we lose Marx’s early humanism implausible. See ‘The
Factory as Event Site’, trans. A Toscano, in Prelom, no. 8, 2005, pp. 171–2. See also A. Toscano,
‘Marxism Expatriated’, in Prelom, no. 8, 2005, pp. 152–69.
62 This is the closest Badiou comes to stating the Marxist notion of alienation: Badiou, Metapolitics,
p. 147. He stakes his dialectic against any reconciliation of Hegelian alienation by affirming the
single law of the dialectic as scission, or in Mao’s inescapable axiom: ‘one divides into two’.
63 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 95.

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Negation and Politics 213

for their existence. This creates opacity. A situation can include

absolute fictions: for instance, ‘race’ is an entirely fictional part of the
human situation. By allowing fictions to exist in the situation, the state
itself creates the possibility of a breakdown of the structure, that it
might have missed or included something it should not have. What it
risks including is its void, that is, its not-being, demonstrating that the
structure might be otherwise. We only need to note the onset of the
financial crisis to see the problem that indeterminate excess, the
valuation of various derivatives, creates when it encounters its void,
the not-being of these values.
This ‘dialectic of void and excess’ is exactly what Sharpe misses.64
He takes us as far as the infinite excess of state power and stops.
Badiou goes on to say, ‘the resignation that characterises a time
without politics feeds on the fact that the State is not at a distance,
because the measure of its power is errant’.65 The question that
Sharpe does not ask is: What is a time with politics? The purpose of
Badiou’s insistence on the errancy of state power is that politics is
entirely subjective. ‘However exact the quantitative knowledge of a
situation may be’, he says, ‘one cannot, other than by an arbitrary
decision, estimate “by how much” the state exceeds it’.66 In other
words, it is necessary to act to determine the state. Sharpe’s account
leaves us amidst an infinity of determinations without truth, a
negative infinity; but it is exactly the affirmation of what is generic
in the situation, the collective’s truth, that can, in turn, determine
that infinity: ‘The real characteristic of the political event and the
truth procedure that it sets off is that a political event fixes the
errancy and assigns a measure to the superpower of the state’.67
Bruno Bosteels notes that this creates the immediate reversal of
an objective impasse into its subjective determination.68 Lenin says,
‘the human mind should grasp ... opposites not as dead, rigid but
as living, conditional, mobile, becoming transformed into one
another’.69 In other words, there is no relationship of descent nor
ascent between subject and object (philosopher and polis). By
presupposing that there is, Sharpe misses what Badiou’s ontology
achieves. The infinite power of the state does not limit possibilities
for the Left but creates them; in the last instance the subject is the

64 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 110.

65 Badiou, Metapolitics, p. 145.
66 Badiou, Being and Event, p. 278. See also Badiou, Being and Event, pp. 93–103.
67 Badiou, Metapolitics, pp. 145, 148.
68 Bosteels, ‘The Subject of the Dialectic’, p. 161.
69 Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38, Moscow, Progress, 1972, p. 109.

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214 Jonathon Collerson

product of its own impasse, or A = (AAp).

VIII
But why does Sharpe miss this? The best point about his article is
that it makes negation a problem to be solved. We can relate his
view that the philosopher ascends from the polis before
descending, a fortiori, to Hegel’s conception of ‘determinate being’
travelling through otherness back into itself.70 This is a simple
treatment of the movement of the Absolute Idea, the negation of the
negation, and is the form Hegel finally attributes to the state: the
state is the transcendental synthesis of contradictory elements. The
matrix it works within is the reconciliation of alienation within the
‘absolute moment’, when the idea and the real are
indistinguishable: ‘the unity of both these moments’. Sharpe’s
repeated defence of the state seems to demonstrate a belief in
something of this sort. His comment about Badiou’s ‘renunciation
of the institutions and power relations constitutive of political life’
misses Badiou’s opposite view of the state; Badiou does not view
the state as constitutive of political life, but exactly as its death. This
polarity finally draws out Sharpe’s inability ‘to see why Badiou’s
thought tends to be perceived as progressive at all’.71
The problem Badiou’s thought rests on is how we can think
against the state under the condition of the state: ‘to think the new in
the situation ... we have to think what is repetition, what is the old,
what is not new, and after that we have to think the new’.72 If thought
is put under the weight of the state it is stopped, as Sartre said, in the
exigent pragmatism of ‘practical politics’, just as practice is made the
junior partner to normative thought. Is this not what leads to
Sharpe’s defence of ‘discursive democratic will-formation’?73 This
pessimism is a problem of the subject. The absence of a coherent
subject leaves radical thought homeless, or a couch-surfer in
antithetical rooms. But the fact that we can locate and talk about this
gap is cause for optimism. I agree with Badiou that it is in making
this gap a force within our situation that the subject of a new politics
can emerge. Philosophy is simply charged with what it is always
charged: to set out the possibility of thinking against the state under
the condition of the state; for Adorno, ‘not to play along’.

October 2008
70 See Hegel, Logic, pp. 133–41.
71 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 297.
72 B. Bosteels, ‘Can Change be Thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou’, in Alain Badiou:
Philosophy and its Conditions, Albany, SUNY, 2005, p. 253.
73 Sharpe, ‘Resurrecting (Meta-)Political Theology’, p. 297.

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