Editor s Introduction

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1 Editor s Introduction In Love What You Will Never Believe Twice, Alain Badiou asks how to think about the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution for a history of our time. A year prior to Love, in Le Marxiste-Leniniste, a journal produced by Badiou and his Parisian Maoist colleagues in the Group for the Foundation of the Union of Communists of France Marxist-Leninist (or UCFML), the 1981 introduction had stated about the Chinese political catastrophe that we carry their questions rather than their outcomes. Alain Badiou is one of the most important philosophers living today. This special issue puts the question of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (GPCR) directly into French philosophy. How to love the Chinese Cultural Revolution and how to carry what it poses for our times are Badiou s questions. Lorenzo Chiesa, Bruno Bosteels, Alessandro Russo, and Alberto Toscano, who are scholars, interpreters, adapters, and translators of positions 13: by Duke University Press.

2 positions 13:3 Winter Badiou s philosophy and engagement with Communist revolution, consider what use this philosophy is for us. They have posed these questions through what they have chosen to translate and to interpret, and in the ways they creatively develop core Badiou methods of analysis and use them to innovative effect. Of course, how Badiou s unfolding work remains entrenched in the international political uprisings of forty years ago and how it contributes to our grasping the legacy of the sixties are problems among progressive scholars internationally. This special issue unfolds in several parts. The first set of articles asks, with Badiou, Why? Why is the Cultural Revolution a pivotal question for political philosophy and the history of Marxism? Written in 2002, The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution? opens by asking what gives unity to a politics, if it is not directly guaranteed by the formal unity of the state? Though the essay is preoccupied with laying out a correct sequence of events for understanding both Maoism s catastrophic failures and the lessons to be drawn from them, the essay pursues the question of a post-maoist politics by considering precisely what Maoism did; how did it do cultural revolution? What strikes Badiou now as significant is the political inventiveness of the Cultural Revolution and, in its tragic outcome, its thorough delegitimation of the party in politics. Badiou s criteria are not stability, civility, or order but the new, the invented, the created, the contradictory. Reordering what he sees as the central sequence of significant events in the political uprising of elite leaders in the Chinese Communist Party and universities, Badiou reperiodizes and retells the history of through an imminent staging of contradiction itself. Foremost among these is the name of Mao or the cult of personality. No politics is possible in the prison house of the party-state, he argues, but this truism stands now precisely because of the catastrophic events of the GPCR. The 1981 Maoism: A Stage of Marxism, a collective essay penned by the UCFML, abridges the Badiou group s positions between 1968 and the early 1980s. These included the theses that Maoism is a stage of post-leninism, that the Cultural Revolution stands in the same position within Marxism as the Paris Commune does for its historical period, and that all Marxists after the Cultural Revolution are Maoists, because of and also in spite of what had happened in China. The decision to include translations of documents such as this one, which shows the UCFML in its collective process of stocktaking,

3 Editor s Introduction 477 is taken to illustrate the historicity of Badiou s position and the continuous engagement that he, Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, and the other core members of the group have had with Maoist theory and practice. The essay Maoism, Marxism of Our Time brings into sharp focus the other axis of the UCFML and Badiou s politics, Maoism in France. May 68 in France opened up to European Marxists a political possibility to be a Maoist revolutionary, the document argues, which is to say the chance to turn a mass revolt in Europe into proletarian revolution. Yet it was No amount of bold cap letters, a symptom of the times, announcing the GREATNESS of the GREAT PROLETARIAN CUL- TURAL REVOLUTION could avoid the event s spectacular failure. Russo s essay The Conclusive Scene: Mao and the Red Guards in July 1968 pioneers the effort to rethink the historicity of the Chinese Cultural Revolution through Badiou s philosophy. The essay underscores the inextricability of the Chinese Revolution with efforts to rethink a postparty Marxism, a post-maoism. Russo enlivens two problems. The first, running throughout his exegesis, is the scholarly problem of overselectivity in reading Cultural Revolution data. Prematurely frozen orthodoxies that are the result of selective reading block our scholarship from exploiting what is a vast archive of documentary evidence. To make good this lack, therefore, he translates and interprets a widely available transcript of the meeting on July 28, 1968, between Red Guard leaders in Beijing and the Maoist leaders of the People s Republic. Russo s evidence suggests that far from dismissing young revolutionaries, Mao attempted in every way possible to deal with the youths politically. Their conversations revolve around the central theoretical question of factionalism. And so Russo cites Mao Zedong: What has happened must have historical reasons; it should have a history. These things do not happen accidentally. The leaders may have taken the students seriously. But they also faced a contagious factionalism and the possibility of civil war. Thus, in Russo s view, the Mao group in the government sought to intervene in the politics of the students without destroying the subjective energy that allowed their existence. The result, according to Russo and Badiou, was an impasse, a failure to resolve a subjective (i.e., a political) dilemma. For Russo, who is a specialist in this historical era, a resulting long-term objective must also be scholarly. It must lead to a better history of the Chinese

4 positions 13:3 Winter Cultural Revolution, a better means of interpreting documentary evidence, and the full use of the huge archive at hand. Russo s other central theme is that the Chinese Cultural Revolution was not a singularly Chinese problem. No matter where on earth cultural revolution erupted in the late sixties, it brought into crisis the question of the university or, in Russo s language, the established conceptual bridges between history and politics and the relation of the human sciences to politics as such. It is, he implies, one of those useful questions that we carry in the wake of the failures of the Cultural Revolution. How, his essay asks, do we bring alive the living politics of political actors? How is it possible to draw from their experiences the futurity embedded in their impasses? The second set of contributions in this issue shifts away from questions of writing the history of the Cultural Revolution in China to the impact of that event s political sequence on Badiou s praxis. Here the question is philosophy and, more specifically, Badiou s unfolding interpretation of the Maoist transformation of Marxism. In Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics, Bruno Bosteels lays out the case that the inner core of Badiou s strictly philosophical work is already apparent in his earliest political commitment, and enduring relationship, to Maoism. The question of the investigation or enquête, the practices of self-criticism, and, for Bosteels most particularly, the dialectic of truth and knowledge are the spaces where Badiou s Maoism is most evident. Bosteels s exegesis then considers questions like continuity in Badiou s philosophy, Badiou s views on dialectical materialism, the tenor of his repudiation of Red Guard politics, and his attachments to cult politics. Primarily, however, the essay considers what Badiou s mature post-maoism implies for philosophy. Badiou s philosophical breakthroughs rest on problematics adapted directly out of Maoism and Maoist political practices, in relation to the history of structuralist philosophy and Marxism in France. Philosophically the Cultural Revolution is part of the worldwide problem of culture in Marxism. European Maoists like Gramscians and Althusserians all confronted questions of the cultural drag, sometimes called feudalism or backwardness, in newly established socialist or new democratic societies and, conversely, the problem of cultural hegemony in capitalist ones. Over the last forty years one initiative has sought to rework the relation of interiority and exteriority

5 Editor s Introduction 479 or what Bosteels calls at one point the topology of the constitutive outside, or the structure in structuralism. Taking on particularly the work of contemporaries Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, Badiou subjected psychoanalytic resolutions of the outside within to political interrogation. This led Badiou, according to Bosteels, to stress process. Because process complexly unfolds, it exceeds the divisions of stable structure. Eventually, still in Bosteels s view, Badiou s Maoist notions of process led him to a critique of space in structuralist and psychoanalytic Marxisms, and eventually to lay particular stress on notions of torsion, mutual implication, and the diagonal route of interiority and exteriority in historical process. Citing Badiou directly, Bosteels sees in the thesis of diagonal torsion a philosophical and political resolution to post-structuralist, post Cultural Revolutionary, Marxist dilemmas of culture. The concluding documents, all but one written by Badiou, give instances of how directly UCFML and Cultural Revolution writing provides the core or instigation for Badiou s philosophical formulations. In Selections from Theorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution, for instance, the questions of subjectivity and objectivity in relation to class subjects and consequently the problem of appropriate political organization is at stake. Badiou joins the question or what he terms the advent of subject-process to problems of historical periodization and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The second selection from Theorie du sujet, Love What You Will Never Believe Twice, links questions of subjectivation, love, and ethics. The Triumphant Restoration, a 1980 Le Monde editorial, raises the Maoist heritage, the imperative of the march toward communism, and the current impasse or question of the party and its embourgeoisement. Writing again, in 1992, in the newsletter of the Organisation Politique, the successor party to the UCFML, Badiou is still reconsidering the dialectical mode in The Dialectical Mode: With Regard to Mao Zedong and Problems of Strategy in China s Revolutionary War. Placed at the end of this issue is An Essential Philosophical Thesis: It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries. Written in 1975, it is a clear exposition of core ideas of Maoism and of Badiou s own work, never repudiated. Tani E. Barlow, Senior Editor

Affirmative Dialectics: from Logic to Anthropology

Volume Two, Number One Affirmative Dialectics: from Logic to Anthropology Alain Badiou The fundamental problem in the philosophical field today is to find something like a new logic. We cannot begin by