Extrait retranscrit de l’émission Contre-courant du 30 mars dernier, animée par la journaliste Aude Lancelin, et avec Alain Badiou. Le thème de cet épisode : "Qu'est ce que la politique?" Je vous mets l'émission complète juste en dessous. La seconde moitié est plus intéressante, l'extrait présenté débute à 52:50.
#dialectics
Alain Badiou : « Il faut ramener à la surface l’hypothèse communiste. C’est
la question de la voie, des deux voies. Il faut revenir à une situation où il y
a deux possibilités et non pas une seul. Ca c’est un travail qui se passe aussi
dans les discussions avec les gens, avec les rassemblements. Mais c’est une
discussion majeure parce que depuis les années 80, le terrain est occupé par
l’hypothèse qu’il n’y a qu’une seule voie. Tant que nous ne créons pas d’écart
significatif, à grande échelle, dans l’esprit des gens, simplement sur ce point
qu’il faut passer du un au deux, et bien on sera dans une grande difficulté.
(...)
C’est la même chose que ce que tentait Marx. On est revenu
au commencement. Il faut re-commencer. Heureusement on en sait un peu plus que
lui quand même. Il faut implanter par tous les moyens l’existence d’une autre
voie et organiser dans la société la lutte entre les deux voies, que la scène
générale soit la lutte entre les deux voies. Après, le caractère tactique des
choses sera discuté, à l’intérieur de chaque voies d‘ailleurs, mais encore
faut-il en finir – c’est une tâche peut être longue et difficile mais elle est
prioritaire, il faut en finir avec la conviction qu’il n’y a qu’une seule voie.
(...)
L’existence de deux voies à partir de laquelle commence la
possibilité de la politique ne peut pas se contenter de la négation d’une des
voies. Que vous soyez opposé à ce que les politiciens du jour vous présentent,
que vous meniez des combats contre cela, etc. Que vous disiez « Moubarak
dégage ! » en Egypte. Tout cela est nécessaire et le mouvement de
masse est volontiers négatif en ce sens là. Les gens se rassemblent facilement
contre quelque chose. Mais ce ‘contre quelque chose’ ne constitue pas encore
une politique. De ce point de vue le contre quelque chose c’est la révolte. Je
redirais avec Mao « on a raison de se révolter » et si les gens ne se
révoltent pas, il ne se passe rien à la fin des fins. La révolte est absolument
nécessaire. Mais en même temps, la révolte ne dit pas exactement, n’ouvre pas
la discussion entre les deux voies. Elle consiste à dire « tel aspect de
la voix dominante nous n’en volons pas ». Peut-être que nous voulons
autre-chose mais cet autre-chose reste stratégiquement nébuleux. Et il faut
faire attention au fait que le mouvement a en général une forte unité négative
mais que si on vient y discuter politique, véritablement, il va forcement se
diviser. Il va forcement se diviser parce que les deux voies elles existent,
quand on les fait vraiment exister, elle existent dans l’esprit de chacun. C’est
une discussion, c’est un choix, c’est une option. Ca n’est pas la même que de
dire, « ce gouvernement est néfaste et je n’en veux pas ».
C’est
donc un des aspects du travail dont vous me demandez de vous dire en quoi il
consiste. Il faut absolument être présent dans les grands mouvements populaires
et il faut y être présent en essayant de chercher à ce que quelque chose
d’affirmatif, quelque chose de positif soit mis en discussion. C’est toujours
très difficile parce que la négation est beaucoup plus facilement unanime que
l’affirmation, mais il faut en passer par là. Et si on considère que l’unité du
mouvement est la seule chose qui doit être garantie à tout coût, on va échouer
parce qu’on ne pourra pas faire cela. Il faut avoir du courage et dire « je
suis du mouvement, mais je suis aussi le partisan de cette hypothèse là, de cet
voie stratégique là, et je veux savoir comment le mouvement s’articule avec ça ».
Il faut être dans une maxime que les chinois, une fois de plus, avaient mis à
l’ordre du jour comme un point fondamentale de discussion philosophique :
Est-ce que la dialectique c’est deux qui fusionnent en un, ou est-ce que la dialectique
c’est un qui se divise en deux. Et ils avaient conclu que c’était la deuxième
formule qui était la vraie formule communiste. »
Je bouffe du Badiou et du Zizek comme jamais j'en avais eu le courage. Je partage ici du Badiou, une conférence bien touffue, en anglais (désolé), en vidéo, en transcript et en résumé. Sérieux c'est pas trop perché, y a de très belles idées, tentez le coup. Il y parle de démocratie, de dialectique, de nature humaine, de l'Etat, de la tension entre son intérieur et de son extérieur, et de bien d'autres choses. Le résumé est sous la vidéo. Le transcript est ici. P.
Alain Badiou : From Logic to Anthropology, or Affirmative
Dialectics' « (…) After
two centuries of successes and dramatic failures in revolutionary politics, and
in particular after the dramatic failure of the state form. But we also have to
find a new logic, a new philosophical proposition adequate for all forms of
creative novelty. (...)
I
think the burden today is to find a way of reversing the classical dialectic
logic inside itself so that the affirmation, or the positive proposition, comes
before the negation instead of after it. My attempt is to find a dialectical
framework where something of the future comes before the negative present. (…)
Certainly revolt and class struggle remain essential—and critique of the past
too, like criticism of all forms of artistic creation. All that is a necessity.
(…)
The question is not whether we need to struggle or oppose. Certainly we
need. (…)
I am saying first that to open a new situation, a new possibility, we
must have something like a new creativity of time, in time, and a new
creativity inside the situation. (…)
Event is the creation of a new possibility of
a new world. In Paris Mai '68 there was an opening for a new possibility of new
forms of political action and this is what I call an Event. After that there is
the possibility of the materialization of the consequences of this new
possibility. (…)
Naturally, among these consequences there are different forms
of negation (we find finally negation): struggle, revolt, a new possibility to
be against something, destruction of some part of the law, and so on. But these
forms of negation are consequences of the birth of the new subjectivity and not
the other way round. (…)
Today
‘democracy’ is really the common term of all the ideological dispositions of
the states—of pretty much all the reactionary states in fact. Therefore we must
declare our first rupture by saying that we don't accept that sort of
ideological line, which ultimately amounts to the idea that one can't resist
democracy without being a terrorist or an ally of despotism. How can we do
that? How can we really create a new way to critique the false democratic order?
(…)
The
question is to inscribe democracy in the new affirmative framework. (…)
We
can distinguish popular democracy from bourgeois democracy or perhaps to be
more contemporary, popular democracy from European democracy. The possibility
of that sort of division is also the possibility of thinking democracy as
something other than the pure form of state. It is a decision not only between
popular democracy and European democracy but between true democracy and
democracy as a form of state, as a form of power, as a form of oppressive state
or as the form of a class state. All that is the classical discussion. The
point is today that this strict duality is not convincing in the framework of a
new dialectical thinking. It's too easy to negatively determine the popular
democracy as being all that the state democracy is not. To escape that sort of
game of negation and negation of negation, I do not present two understandings
of democracy—not a division in two, but in three. (…)
For
Rancière democracy exists only from time to time. t's not a state of affairs,
it's something that happens: we have democracy sometimes, but not very often.
It's normal if democracy is the name of an exceptional situation concerning the
people. What Rancière says is that this sort of democracy is in fact the
activation of the principle of equality. (…)
In
the movement of revolutionary rupture we have the true meaning of democracy,
mass democracy, but it's not exactly the political concept of democracy. This
is why I propose to say that it's much more the historical definition of
democracy than it's political definition. (…)
In the new dialectical framework
we must find a third sense of democracy, which is properly the democracy of the
determination of the new political subject as such: the new political subject
as [in] the consequences of the Event and not only in the Event as such. This
is my ultimate conception. Democracy at this level is a name for the
elaboration of the consequences of collective action and for determining the
new political subject. So we have three terms in appearance: democracy as a
form of state (first affirmation), democracy as a mass democracy (second
affirmation), and after that we have collective action,. (…)
But in fact we
have four terms finally, because after the classical representative democracy,
which is a form of state power; after mass democracy, which is of historical
nature; after democracy as a political subject; we have as in Hegel the process
of all that returning to the first term—returning to the state. What is the
democratic process when it is returning to the first term? It is necessarily
the possibility of declining the state itself, as in Marx. It's the
possibility—the horizon—of the progressive disappearance of the state as the
central necessity, as a form of power. So the fourth term is the first three
terms when they return to the first (to the state) in the Communist vision of
the vanishing of the state, the historical process of the progressive
disappearance of the first term. (…)
Revolution
is first the possible destruction of the state of the enemies and after that
the creation of a new state or finally the creation of the conditions of the
vanishing of the state. (…)
We
must affirm that our goal is not by itself the state, the seizing of the state
power. We have to be in some sense outside state power (subjectively) but we
know that the state is always in the field of political questions, and in the
space of action. If our political subjectivity is not inside the state, inside
the common law and so on, if to the contrary it is on the outside of the state,
[then] the state is nonetheless in the field of every political action today.
(…)
We
will have to create something, some new form of organization that will be
face-to-face with the state; not inside the state but face-to-face with it. (…)
The
big difficulty—and it's really the big difficulty in the new dialectical
framework—is to maintain the possibility of being outside while prescribing
something that concerns the inside. (…)
The
problem is simple. For the state—and it's a general law of the power—to be
somebody is to be inside the state. Otherwise you cannot be heard at all. How
can we be somebody without being on the inside? (…)
If
I can organize something outside the state, it's real. It's real to be outside
the state. If you are saying that it's not real [then] you are saying that all
that is real is only that which is inside the state. That is precisely the
return to the old form of political negativity. I know, naturally, that the
Event comes first, that the reality of action comes first. Without the French
Revolution, without the action of workers; without the real and concrete
movement of the Parisian proletariat, Marx certainly would never have created
his political concept of proletariat. The movement is not from the concept of
proletariat to the proletarian movement—the real becoming is from the revolt of
workers to the new proposition (…)
The real question is whether today the
political determination is to be outside or inside the state. The fundamental
idea [is that] to be in the new affirmative dialectical framework you must be
outside the state. Inside the state you are precisely in the negative figure of
opposition. (…)
Capitalist
anthropology is the conviction that fundamentally Humanity is nothing else but
self-interested animals. It's a very important point (…)
Modern Capitalism is
always speaking of human rights, democracy, freedom and so on, but in fact we
can see concretely that under all these names we find nothing else but human
animals with interests, who have to be happy with products. We have to search
for the Good Life in the big market. What the Capitalist world names ‘subject’
or ‘citizen’ is something like ‘animals in front of the market’ and nothing
else. This is really its definition of the Human. It's only with this
definition of the human being that Capitalism can work: ‘animals with
interests’. (…)
The
human being is properly living only when he or she is the agent of the passage
from particularity to universality, from local process to genericity, from the
singular world to an eternal truth. (…)»
