74 The Becoming-Oedipal of Gilles Deleuze

suggestions, I am deeply indebted to the perspicuous commentary to my text by Marta Hernandez Salvan and Juan Carlos Rodriguez.

17 One of the metaphors for the way mind relates to body, that of a magnetic field, seems to point in the same direction: "as a magnet generates its magnetic field, 50 the brain generates its field of consciousness:'(William Hasker, The Emergent Self [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999], 190.) The field thus has a logic and consistency of its own, although it can persist only as long as its corporeal ground is here. Does this mean that mind cannot survive the body's disintegration? Even here, another analogy from physics leaves the gate partially open: when Roger Penrose claims that, after a body collapses into a black hole, one can conceive the black hole as a kind of self-sustaining gravitational field-so even within physics, one considers the possibility that a field generated by a material object could persist in the object's absence. (See Hasker, 232.)

18 See F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000).

19 For a more detailed reference to the "Higgs field:' see Chapter 3 of Slav oj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003). For a popular scientific explanation, see Gordon Kane, Supersymmetry (Cambridge: Helix Books, 2001).

20 See Schelling, op. cit.

21 See Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 22 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 127.

23 Hasker, op. cit., 24.

The Flux and the Party:

In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus

Alain Badiou

So tempting to give a warm round of applause. Yes, yes! Read on: "It is a question of knowing how a revolutionary potential is realized, in its very relationship with the exploited masses or the 'weakest links' of a given system. Do these masses or these links act in their own place, within the order of causes and ends that promote a new socius, or are they on the contrary the place and the agent of a sudden and unexpected irruption?'" Could Deleuze and Guattari be dialecticians? The revolutionary dialectic as theory of discontinuities and of scissions, as logic of catastrophes-that's it, after all: the order of causes assigns no place where a rupture could take hold. No quantitative cumulation incorporates a new quality, or counts the latter's limit among its number of terms, even though quality is, necessarily, produced as the limit.

True, the revolutionary crisis is an irruption oflarge masses into history" The revolution is "a sharp turn in the lives of vast popular masses." Deleuze-Guattari echo this here, with a touch of pedantry and vain Latinisms that stick to the soles of these nomads weighed under their baggage ("promoting a new socius;' you call that cute?).

Any Marxist-Leninist-Maoist learns in school (cadre school," of course) that the Parisian workers, the soviet people, the Hunan farmers, and the young workers of Sud-Aviation in May' 685 one day rose in revolt; and he knows better than anyone that whoever pretends having read, in his mental horoscope, the good news in its precise sequence, merely wants to justify by this lie, after the fact, his personal defeat in the heat of the moment.

Marxists- Leninists precisely base their particular energy

and unvarying persistence on two facts:

"Where there is oppression, there is revolt:' But it is the revolt that, at its own hour, passes judgment on the fate of the oppression, not the other way around.

Polygraph 15116 (2004)

76

The Flux and the Party

"One has reason to revolt against reactionaries:' The popular and proletarian revolt is the reason of the bourgeois oppression, it is what gives reason, it is our reason."

True class revolt, in essence, surprises. It is a war by surprise, the generic brutality of scission. How could the established rule of the old (including the revolutionary old) put up with a deduction of what tends to break it asunder? How many people have we not seen enraptured by the fact that "no one could have foreseen May '68"! I even suspect that the ascent of the anti -Oedipus and all the fabrications about the pure mysteries of Desire take off from this question. The question is, strictly speaking, stupid. Can one imagine a "foreseen" May '68? And by whom? Who does not see that the unforeseeable constitutes the essential historical power of May '68? To baptize this unforeseeable "irruption of desire" is about as soporific as opium.

This baptism, however, is not innocent. It stages the entrance of the irrational.

Unforeseeable, desiring, irrational: follow your drift [derive], my son, and you will make the Revolution.

It'~ been quite a while now since Marxist - Leninists ceased to identify the rational WIth the analytically predictable. The dialectic, the primacy of practice, means first and foremost affirming the historical objectivity of ruptures. Masses make History, not Concepts. No one can ever really know precisely how, and in which workshop, a revolutionary (anti-union) strike began. Why Tuesday and not Thursday? The masses' gesture closes one period and opens another. What was dividing itself reversed its terms, the working class viewpoint takes over. A local, dialectical rationality opens for itself a new space of practice. The revolt condenses one rational time and deploys the scission of another. The revolutionary process of organization is itself reworked, recast, penetrated and split by the primacy of practice: "The composition of the leading [dirigeant] group ... should not and cannot remain entirely unchanged throughout the initial, middle, and final stages of a great struggle:' (Mao).7

The material objective base of everything (the revolutionary class practice) is never quite exhausted in that to which it gives rise. Revolutionary history renounces Hegelian circularity, imposes periodization, the uninterrupted by stages: one sequence's rationality cannot absorb the practical rupture from which the sequence deploys itself as such. The rupture can be thought in its dialectical generality. Historically, it is only practiced. Concept, strategy and tactic, organization, all have the solidity of a sequence; but behind them lies the historical new, that which founds the sequence and which the concept within the sequence necessarily leaves outside itself as its remainder. Masses make history-practice comes first in respect to theory. There is, therefore, a leftover of "pure" practice, the historical rupture as such, which historical materialism and theory will not be able, integrally, either to deduce or to organize any longer, because their deductions and their organizing principles presuppose it as fact.

What remains, however, is neither the cause nor the hidden essence." It is not at all unknowable: it is an infinite historical source, at least throughout a historical period governed by the same principal contradiction (bourgeoisie/proletariat).9 The "remainder" is that which, in the periodizing scansion (Commune, October,

Alain Badiou

77

Cultural Revolution ... 10), deploys such force of rupture that the long work of ruptures to come is needed to clarify the historical contribution of the masses, which is what sustains and what carries forward theory and organization, in an infinite approximation that is itself always split (battle of the two roads ).11 Who doesn't see that practice, by the Shanghai workers in 1967, of the "workers' commune" slogan returns to the practical, historical, inexhaustibility of the Paris Commune? And at the same time, the positive development of this slogan, in the new form of the three-in-one revolutionary committee, carries this return forward."

From Paris 1871 to Shanghai 1967, revolt is the furnace [fond], the great production of class. From a just idea dismembered to a continental rupture, everything is there. The furnace of the class break, revolt, is without hearth and home [sans feu ni lieu].

The good fortune of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary has never been his ability to predict and assign the revolt, but rather the irreparable suddenness of its storm." Whatever weapons the Marxist-Leninist has assembled for the people-of organization, doctrine, prevision, patience, compactness of the proletariat-he will be judged according to his capacity to have them all taken away without warning by those who, suddenly rising up, are indeed destined to have them, but as a rule for later.

The revolt surprises Marxists-Leninists and their organization too. It must surprise, by a new kind of surprise. For the Marxists- Leninists must stand precisely where the surprise will slam right into them. The revolutionary, who professionally prepares himself for the mass rising, for the revolt's irruption, obviously can never be ready enough. Only for him does the historical "not ready" have a rigorous meaning, since what is ahead is for him alone, class struggle professional, what he ceaselessly prepares for. But he is not ready: were he ready, how could he have left the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, the sole asset of this preparation, in reserve? The Marxist-Leninist, who analyzes, predicts, directs, who alone knows the revolutionary potential at each moment, is precisely the one to ask the question of the revolt's hour.

What is at stake, for the Marxist-Leninist organization, is not to change the "it was for later" of its prevision, an approximating reserve of tactical composure, into the repressive "it's too early" of the Right. Here, its identity is played out all at once.

Marx before the Commune: the Parisian proletarian uprising is bound to fail, but I stand unconditionally by its side; its real movement instructs and reworks through and through the theory of my (correct [juste]) prevision: the historical failure, the proletarian uprising, works and displaces my prevision. It criticizes my prevision, even though it is correct, because it is correct."

Mao and the peasant revolt of 1925-1927: the peasant revolt-very good. Fundamental. Our tactical application of the primacy of the proletariat, as urban insurrection, must explode into pieces. The peasants in revolt teach us that it is not the demand of the countryside, but the proletarian uprising that is premature. The masses' violent rupture carries this rationality to come: the encirclement of cities by the countryside."

The Marxist-Leninist leader [dirigeantl is the one who sunders and splits him-

78

The Flux and the Party

self, between the objective form of the rational revolutionary preparation and the unconditional and unconditionally immediate reason of the masses' revolutionary revolt, that which Lenin called the actual moment. May my enlightened preparation break apart and be verified by the fire of irrefutable historical unpreparation: such is the essence of Marxist - Leninist direction, the direction of the party!

There is no other direction but of the new. The old is managed, it is administered, it is not directed." The revolutionary direction scrutinizes the conflicted state of things," the class struggle, the clues accumulated during the proletariat's revolution in process. From there the leadership [direction] systematizes a guiding prevision that is both strategic and tactical. Let us take an example: since 1970, the revolt of the o.S.18 puts to work a dispersed program of class against capitalist hierarchy. Condensing this program as soon as possible, formulating combatant slogans that have its originary class power, we put ourselves forward, granted. But such an advance is but the point where a new assault wave is received and accumulates. Who clings to it too tightly, forever stays behind: with the Renault Of'73 when it is about the Renault Of'75.19

The same goes for analytical prevision: there is a capitalist crisis today, there will be an anti-capitalist revolt. This is Marxism. So, let's get ready: propaganda, worker schools, popular committees on anti-capitalist direct action. But where and on what will the masses make their violent judgment bear? This must be studied quite closely, enumerating the practical hypotheses, half-living in the work of the masses. Then and only then will the unexpected breach, armed with this previous work on itself, taking along the skeletal frame of a sketched organization, carrying its directing virtuality [virtualite dirigeante], draining and reworking the MarxistLeninists' strategy, tear down the oppressive web as far as it can.

A correct Uuste ] line is the open road to the most powerful striking force of the proletarian irruption. The party is an instrument of knowledge and of war in an ever-widening space of maneuver and irruption. A correct line, a vanguard organization, an iron discipline, an organic relation [liaison] to the popular masses, a constant exercise of Marxist - Leninist analysis,"? reclaimed and unraveled and reworked to the most minute detail, carried forward to the shadow of the trace of the new; the bark of class struggle pressed down to its imperceptible acid; everything interpellated by directives: all of this-the party-is needed for the revolutionary revolt to strike completely, past the meshes [of the situation], into the historical unicity of the new. The directive activity of the party must be tireless, perfect, exhaustive; as the unexpected revolt and the unicity of the revolutionary hour will demand of it that it be split again, beyond anything it could and in fact did foresee, and, inevitably constrained by the new of the class that casts it forward. At which point proletarian thought filters through and gathers anew, itself establishes its kingdom, before destroying it again; "There is no construction without destruction" (Mao).21 To which we add: without construction, there is no destruction - before destroying it there where nothing can be deducted or managed any more.

Marxism-Leninism and the idea of the class party go further than the anti-dialectical moralism of the theoreticians of desire. Moralism, yes, and of the dullest kind. Look at the two-column chart with which these jingly subversives would like

Alain Badiou

79

us to conclude;

"The two poles are defined, the one by the enslavement of production and the desiring-machines to the gregarious aggregates that they constitute on a large scale under a given form of power or selective sovereignty, the other by the inverse subordination and the overthrow of power; the one by these molar structured aggregates that crush singularities, select them, and regularize those that they retain in codes or axiomatics, the other by the molecular multiplicities of singularities that on the contrary treat the large aggregates as so many useful materials for their own elaborations; the one by the lines of integration and territorialization that arrest the flows, constrict them, turn them back, break them again according to the limits interior to the system, in such a way as to produce the images that come to fill the field of immanence peculiar to this system or this aggregate, the other by lines of escape that follow the decoded and deterritorialized flows, inventing their own non-figurative breaks or schizzes that produce new flows, always breaching the coded wall or the territorialized limit that separates them from desiringproduction; and, to summarize all the preceding determinations, the one is defined by subjugated groups, the other by subject-groups?"

And this would be called "beyond Good and Evil" perhaps? All this cultural racket, all this subversive arm-pumping, only to slip us, at the end, that Freedom is Good and Necessity Evil?

Freedom, and by the way, what Freedom? "Subject-group;' Freedom as Subject.

Deleuze and Guattari don't hide this much: return to Kant, here's what they came up with to exorcise the Hegelian ghost.

For quite a while, I wondered what was this "desire" of theirs, stuck as I was between the sexual connotations and all the machinic, industrial brass they covered it up for that materialist feel. Well, it's the Freedom of Kantian critique, no more, no less. It's the unconditional; a subjective impulse that invisibly escapes the whole sensible order of ends, the whole rational fabric of causes. It's pure, unbound, generic energy, energy as such. That which is law unto itself, or absence of law. The old freedom of autonomy, hastily repainted in the colors of what the youth in revolt legitimately demands; some spit on the bourgeois family.

The rule of the Good, with Deleuze, is the categorical imperative upright again, by means of an amusing substitution of the particular for the universal: always act so that the maxim of your actions be rigorously particular. Deleuze would like to be to Kant what Marx is to Hegel, Deleuze flips Kant upside down; the categorical imperative, but a desiring one; the unconditional, but materialist; the autonomy of the subject, but like a fluid flux. Sadly, turn Kant, and you will find Hume, which is the same thing-and Deleuze's first academic crushes. Critical idealism has no obverse and no reverse, that's even its very definition. This is the Mobius strip of philosophy. On the toboggan of Desire, the head bobs down and up again, until it doesn't know one side from the other, object from subject, any more. All in all, that this be the Good or that, Evil is just a reversible matter of mood, with not much consequence: always act so that the maxim of your action does not, strictly, concern anybody."

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The Flux and the Party

Marxism-Leninism thinks of otherwise forceful "schizzes," ones that secure themselves otherwise to the material of history. The unity of opposites, the impossibility to grasp the One except as the movement of its own scission; the step-bystep struggle against all figures of reconciliation (two fuse into one: the essence of revisionism in philosophy); the refusal of all static dualisms, such as the moralism of desire, a structuralism full of shame. Yes, this is quite different from the catechism of the System and the Flux, the Despot and the Nomad, the Paranoiac, and the Schizo, all that, under the colorless banner of a freedom, invisibly leaks out [coule] its sterile other side.

It is so different that a major historical object, like a class party, completely evades the "schizo" grip precisely since it concentrates dialectical divisions to the extreme. The "schizos" imagine they are done with the concept of representation. The party "represents" the working class: it is Theater, image, territorial subjection. Obviously it must end with the Great Despot.

Bourgeois party, indeed, revised party: one facet, separately undecipherable, of the party as one in two. This theater is a necessary threat from the inside, as the party is itself split. Short of that, it is a cadaver. "If there were no contradictions in the Party and no ideological struggles to resolve them, the Party's life would come to an end" (Mao).24

More than any other historical object, the party is one in two: the unity of the political project of the proletariat, of its state-project, the project of its dictatorship. And in this sense, yes: apparatus, hierarchy, discipline, renunciation. And so much the better. But at once, also, the historical flip side: the essential aspiration of the masses, whose organ, whose iron hand is the party, to the non-State, to communism. Which is what gives the party, as direction, all of its strategic content.

The party directs the withering of what it must direct (the State, the separation of politics). The party's only proletarian reality is the turbulent history of its own self-dissolution. "Concern yourself with the affairs of the State!" says Mao to the vast masses." And this is the party's word, as communist party, precisely. The State is the serious matter, the central matter. The petit-bourgeois leftist wallows into the mass movement and parades there with delight. But when matters turn to power, t~ the S~ate, when matters turn to dictatorship (because all state-power [etatique] is dictatorial), see how he gets all furious, clamoring loudly of the Right to Desire. He is even relieved: the shameful electoral rallying of all the "leftists" to the MitterandMarchais clique proves this, shows their appetite for bourgeois parliamentary politics, this dictatorship that squashes the people, but in the end lets all the intellectuals babble as they wish. In the end, the "leftist" political daydream is a mass movement that proceeds straight on until it is joyfully proclaimed that the State has quietly faded away. And since confusion belongs, invariably, to the thought of the vacillating classes, it will come as no surprise that this speaks both the true and the false.

The false, for the most part: the State is the only political question. The revolution is a radically new relation of the masses to the State. The State is construction. A rupture without construction is the concrete definition of failure, and most often in the form of a massacre: the Paris Commune, the Canton Commune, the anarchists of Catalonia ....

Alain Badiou

The true, nonetheless: it is true that the mass movement engages in a necessary dialectic with the State. Between the two there is no continuity, but rather unity of opposites. If the State is a proletarian State, the contradiction can be of the nonantagonistic type." If it is a State of exploiters, the contradiction is antagonistic at heart. But in either case a contradiction exists, and a severe one, in that the masses cannot concern themselves with the affairs of the State other than by pushing the State, brutally or organically, towards its own dilution; by pushing the great dichotomies of the State, city and country, agriculture and industry, manual and intellectual labor, the military and the civilians, nation x and nation y, to pure and simple disappearance.27 The masses take hold of the State with the communist design [visee] [set on] its withering away. Any other way and we can be sure that it is the State that takes hold of the masses: bourgeois State, party infected by the bourgeoisie.

Actually, each great revolt of the working and popular masses sets them invariably against the State. Each revolt takes position against one power and in the name of another, of one thought as a step toward the dilution of the state. Each extensive revolt, across its specific contents (the school, the country, factory hierarchy), is an anti-state proposition.

This is what puts the party through torture, while the masses' anti-state proposition has no other chance, no other way out than to see its summons succeed, the summons it addresses to the party or to that which takes the party's place. It is here that the party (which, as apparatus, as a real historical object, nourishes its own permanent prevision toward power, toward the State), summoned to fall into temporary blindness by another political thought, the one that brings out the antistate challenge [sommation] of the masses, must overcome its own fear. Here it will always be eager to say "it is too early:' And there is barely the time to fall over into what has already opened up, as another sequence of political thought.

Look at "The Crisis has Matured;' this literally inspired, work of Lenin." The passage from "it is too early" to "it is almost too late" solders in one block these pages where Lenin puts his resignation from the Central Committee on the scales. Brutally bound together, we have:

1. The unforeseeable constraint exerted by the popular uprising, accelerating practically in days.

2. The rational prevision of the party, itself in turn split into:

a. the wait-and-see approach [attentisme] of the Central Committee majority (it is too early)

b. the Leninist anticipation (only immediate insurrection brings the prevision of the party on par with the violent practice of the masses; the masses in revolt broke with the State: they summon us to direct, to practice our proper kind of rupture-the order of insurrectionor become nothing. If we reject the insurrection, from one day to the next we, the great Bolshevik party, become leftover riffraff).

Lenin says: there is a peasant uprising. "It is incredible, but it is a fact."? This objective "incredible" does not surprise us, Bolsheviks, who analyze the class struggle. Kerensky's government protects capitalists and landowners, it oppresses the peasant masses that hoped to be liberated. But the only revolutionary question is this: will

81

82

The Flux and the Party

our broad theoretical prevision (our lack of astonishment) let itself be transformed, revolutionized, by the truly incredible reality of the peasant uprising? How will the party carry forward its correct prevision under the unforeseeable historical constraint of the irruption of popular forces? How will it formulate, in the direction of the vast masses, that which hits it in the face, this divided, sundered, immediate realization of what was given in the organized calm of Marxist knowledge? To this question, Lenin replies: immediate insurrection, whose signal, whose time, whose urgency, are in truth fully fixed by the movement of the masses, by concrete history. Meanwhile, so as not to infringe upon their necessary system of causes, ends and deadlines, the majority in the Central Committee persist in their perpetual "it is too early:' sheltering thus their Marxist prevision from the storm. And Lenin, intuitively at the very heart of the popular rising, beside himself with rage, literally slashes through the party, bombards it with all that history demands: "[Tjhere is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee and among the leaders of our Party which favors waiting for the Congress of Soviets, and is opposed to taking power immediately, is opposed to an immediate insurrection. That tendency, or opinion, must be overcome.

Otherwise, the Bolsheviks will cover themselves with eternal shame and destroy themselves as a party.

For to miss such a moment and to "wait" for the Congress of Soviets would be utter idiocy, or sheer treachery. "30

The source of all the party's strength, against "sheer treachery" and self-destruction, lies in this: it is the party to whom history addresses its summons, the party that must remain steadfast as the movement escalates, the party whom the revolt questions as regards direction. You who have foreseen all and were thus at the heels of the irruption, what good is it to us now that you're close by? Will you remain close, or will you let yourself be left behind by this for which you said you were accountable?

Lenin is, here, the question cast from within by the revolutionary practice of the masses (the unforeseen, rupture) to the party's vocation to direct (prevision, project). This is the party as one in two, the working class itself as one in two: its apparatus on one side, its anti-state focus on the State on the other. From one to the other, the vertigo in the movement of history comes from the scission between a settled tactical rationality and a rupture that demands more than political rationality; that demands plunging into what the masses opened. Insurrection, Lenin will say, is an art. Not a science, an art."

The party always directs the proletarian transition. The party is the dialectic. Its proper effect is the creative scission of the masses and the State as a directed process, as dictatorship of the proletariat.

The party is a being of the thresholds [lisieres J. It holds out amidst the tearing apart [ecartelementj of the foreseeable theoretical, and the unforeseeable practical, of the project and the revolt, of the State and the non-State. "Fusion of MarxismLeninism and the working-class movement:' the classics would say." "Fusion" is a metaphor, it too must be divided. The party is the process of dialectical division of Marxism-Leninism and the proletarian movement. It is their torn encounter [ren-

Alain Badiou

contre ecartelee], always to be remade. Between Marxism-Leninism and the proletarian movement, there is no coincidence (neither spontaneism, nor theoreticism), nor is there simultaneity: theory is in advance, but the movement of the revolutionary revolt is in advance of this advance. Marx did say "dictatorship of the proletariat" before the Paris Commune. But the Commune, which enacts this slogan, is no less a decisive advance on the question of this dictatorship.

Yes, between Marxism-Leninism and the workers' movement there is unity, but it is a unity of opposites. The Marxist-Leninist party is the existence of this opposition [contrariete]. The party is that blind spot from which the proletariat grasps its own class practice, sorts it out, purifies it, concentrates it and prepares another stage of its war, a stage realized, however, by the masses, not by the party, so that what the party apprehends is always both in front of it (the project) and behind it (the revolt), but never exactly on the same plane. The party is the ever transposable [depla~able] organization of the proletarian present, as the split unity of the prevision and the assessment.

That is what Mao means to say: "The masses are the real heroes, while we ourselves are often childish and ignorant" "The mastery of Marxism-Leninism is the essence of communist direction. It is the solidity of science. But it is also childish and ignorant, if it believes history can be done by delegation, by representation, if it believes it can sidestep the heroic wisdom of the masses, the wisdom given in their irruption, in their practice, without appeal.

And Stalin: he emphasizes that the party certainly does direct, but at the same time it is part of the working class, its detachment. 34 Detachment is something quite different from representation, it is the opposite: the proletarian party is the opposite of an image. The party is what cuts, what detaches. It is a body of the class at its cut: a threshold [lisiere J.

The party has an essential historical instability. This is why it is constantly threatened from within by bourgeois forces of restoration, which take hold on the separateness [separeJ of the party. The party, which concentrates the directive force of the proletariat, is also its latent weakness, its worst threat. Repress the revolt in the name of the prevision; smother the new in the name of legitimacy; crush the living present, give in to the shadows, abandon the mobile threshold; put up the State against the vigorous communism of the masses: the bourgeoisie does not cease to work on the party's essential instability.

What makes Stalin and Mao great proletarian leaders, aside from their differences, which are enormous, is, among other things, the conviction that the proletarian project is ever to be reconquered, ever unstable and corroding from within; the conviction that all inertia tends towards restoration; that there is no place for mechanical adjustment. Lenin, Stalin, Mao critique ever more profoundly the reactionary mechanism, the pacifism, the treachery of wait-and-see in the form of reformism and revisionism. The party, according to which the proletariat adjusts itself to its own class practice in terms of the project, in terms of state-construction, must be adjusted in turn: since the party is where the greatest burdens accumulate as well. Against this threat, nothing but a counter-threat will do. From here on, Stalin and Mao part completely, but this divergence lies within the history of the proletariat,

84 The Flux and the Party

within the dialectical movement of Marxism- Leninism.

Stalin saw only one possible counter-threat: terror, everywhere. Be tirelessly wary, above all of the party (practically exterminated in the thirties) then of the masses as well, at the slightest suspicion of softness or resistance, during the magnificent industrial upheaval.

Mao set out from the same idea: the transition submits this dialectical object, the party, to a severe test. And it is a long transition: "A very long period of time is needed to decide 'who will win' in the struggle between socialism and capitalism.t» But the answer turns Stalin's upside down. The answer is this: have tireless confidence, above all in the masses (confidence in the masses is the central element of the counter-threat), then in the party too, and especially in the torn correlation of the two: proletarian cultural revolution, which is at the same time an assault of the masses, their anti-state focus on the State, against the reactionary stabilizers of the party, and the reconstitution, regeneration, revolutionization of the party itself as instability, as threshold, as dialectical inductor of communism.s"

To these astounding dialectics of history, to these unstable objects, these proletarian risings of unheard-of violence and richness, what do the little professors oppose, from their ambush full of desire?

What do they oppose, here as well, to the toil of prevision and of revolt immersed at the deepest in the workers' divisions, which constitutes the unparalleled affirmative power of Maoist militants? What can they capitalize on against these thoughts, real in themselves, ever recast and traversed through and through by proletarian interpellations? Is there anything of value [equal to 1 the project ofletting the idea of the party be torn from one's hands by the masses, that which, in France, is not yet established, not yet decided upon, but still to be proposed and remade? What kind of "desire" will ever equal the one deployed throughout the profound entanglements and countercurrents of our history, the one Marxist - Leninists formulate: to hand back to the working class the question of its communist party of the new type?37

What is the final word of these hateful adversaries of all organized revolutionary politics? Read: to complete "this process that is always and already complete as it proceeds:'38 In effect, to seep out like pus.

In the end, such maxims are innocent. Look at them, these old Kantians who pretend they're playing at scattering the trinkets of Culture. Look at them: the time is nigh, and they're already covered in dust. •

Translated by Laura Balladur and Simon Krysl. Originally published as "Le flux et Ie patti: dans les marges de L'Anti-Oedipe," in Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus, eds., La Situation actuelle sur Ie front philosophique, Cahiers Yenan no. 4 (Paris: Maspero, 1976): 24-41. Having introduced the early '70S philosophical conjecture in France, the collection brings together interventions against Deleuze ("Deleuze en plein"], Lacan and Lacanians (''So us l.acan"), and Dominique Lecourt for the Althusserians ("La compagnie d'Althusser"). Badiou's essay is the first in the Deleuze intervention. The translators wish to thank Bruno Bosteels, Roland Ferguson, Eva Poskocilova, Ingo Schaefer, and Alberto Toscano, whose help made the translation and the notes possible.

Alain Badiou 85

2

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipu~: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New

York: Viking, 1977), 377 [translation slightly modified]. ..

Th . n is Lev Trotsky's See "Preface" to the History of the RUSSian Revolution

e expresslO. . hi

( ). Max Eastman's translation (1932) online at http.r/www.marxists.org/arc ive!

1930 m h di I . . B

rrotsky/works/rcjo-hrr/choo.htrn. This is not the place to explore tela eCh~, I~ a-

dious Maoist writings, between the radical novelty of the rupture(s) and. the continuity of Communist history beyond any single sequence, or between Maoist disregard for ~ere

d ( Badiou's Theorie de la contradiction, [Paris: Maspero, 1975], 90) and fidelity to

wor s see f lu hi (P t

the slogans, to the words and phrases that make up the la~guage ~ t IS Istory.. e er

Hallward points out the ensuing change in Badi~u's conception of~lstory-and philosophy-in Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Pr~ss, 2003), 49-50.) Rather than to assign-were it useful or .r0~sibl~-:-each element of this vocabulary, let us merely take note of this feature of Badious wnnng.e- Tr.

Lenin, "Lessons of the Revolution" (July 1917), Collected Works, 4th English ed., vol. 25 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 229 [translation modified).

Ecole de cadres is a divided term. It refers, on the one hand, to ':c~dre schools" (party ~adre school, weekend cadre school, etc.) or specifically t~e political reform schools ( 7th May Cadre Schools") of the Cultural Revolution, set up in 1968 and named after the May

1966 directive on the integration of intellectual and manual labor; on the other hand, It ~ames "school for managers" or more specifically, "business school:' The actual meanmg

will change with the historico-political conjecture.- Tr. . .

The first factory occupation of 1968 France took place on May 14 at Sud-A~atlOn near Nantes. Here, as in the Shanghai Commune, the proletariat entered the revolution. Work-

. d the factory and declared indefinite strike without consent on control of the

ers occuple i: . h f, II

union leadership, inaugurating the general strike that swept across France In. t e. 0 ow. eeks Control over the citv of Nantes passed, effectively if momentanly, into the ~:~~ of the revolutionary force~. Whether "co-operation",betw~e.n workers and students or working-class hegemony is accented will express ones positions on May 1968 as a whole.-Tr.

Both quotations attributed to Mao Zedong.

. . " [N- li -u yapo na [( jiit you

1. "Where there is oppression, there IS resistance a I yo . ' .'.,

fankimg). For all its future resonance, the origin of t?e phrase IS elusive: some Chinese sources suggest its source may not be in Maos wntmgs at all. Mao used the phrase in his interview with Edgar Snow (Janua? 9,1965): It continued to :ecur during the Cultural Revolution and was forced mto-of ~ll pla~es---:-,the [oint Communique from Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. The mtervJe':, South of the Mountains to North of the Seas:' appeared in several newspapers in the West

d . . t d i Snow The Long Revolution (New York: Random House, 1971),

an IS repnn em, . C

191-223. The quotation in question appears on page 204. For the [oint ommunique, see Peking Review 9 (March 3, 1972): 4-5 and Depa~tr;:ent of State B~lletl~ (March 20, 1972): 35-38. For an earlier reference, see Maos The Great Union 0 the Popular Masses" (Xiangjiang pinglun)2-4 (July zr-August 4, 1919), translate~ in Collected Works of Mao Tse- Tung, 1917-1949, vol. 1 (Arlington: JPRS, 1978), 2. and in Stuart R. Schram, China Quarterly 49 (January-March 1972): 87. The ChInese original is available online at http://www.gongfa.com/minzhongdallanhe. htm.

2. "One has reason to revolt against reactionaries" or "It is justified to rev~lt against

. ." [D 'fia-ndo'ngpa'i zaoian you 11). Mao coined the phrase 111 his 1939

reactionanes ut ,~,

3

4

6

66

The Flux and the Party

"Stalin is our Commander" speech, made in Yenan to celebrate Stalin's 60th birthday: "There are innumerable principles of Marxism, but in the last analysis they can all be summed up in one sentence: 'To rebel is justified.' For thousands of years everyone said: 'Oppression is justified, exploitation is justified, rebellion is not justified.' From the time when Marxism appeared on the scene, this old judgment was turned upside down, and this is a great contribution." (Renmin ribao, September 20,1949, translated in Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse- Tung, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1969), 427-428.) The thought is attributed to Marx, its elaboration into doctrine and into reality to Stalin. In 1966, the phrase appeared on two big character posters in Beijing (Peking Review 37 [September 9, 1966]: 19-21). The extended version used here comes from Mao's reply. ("A Letter to the Red Guards ofTsinghua University Middle School;' [August 1, 1966], translated in Stuart Schram, ed. and intro., John Chinnery and Tieyun, trans., Chairman Mao Talks to the People: Talks and Letters: 1956-1971 [New York: Pantheon, 1974],260-261.)

See Badious analysis of les trois sens du mot "raison" [three senses of "reason"] in Theone de la contradiction: "The phrase says all according to the dialectic: a simple that divides itself. What concentrates this division, what supports it, while apparently occulting it, is the word 'reason': there is reason, the revolt has reason, a new reason stands up against the reactionaries. Through the word 'reason; the phrase says three things, and the articulation of the. three makes up the whole" (21). The revolt is reason, practice is primary to theory. Marxism formulates the reason of the revolt, beyond its particular causes: the cumulative wisdom of the masses through history, the antagonism that underlies the obstinacy of the revolt. But the revolt "has reason" also in the practical sense: the proletariat will win. The revolt will "bring to reason" [rend raison], settle accounts with the exploiters for all oppression. The phrase bespeaks, then, the split fusion of the objective and the subjective, of wisdom and perspective: the "fusion of Marxism and the real workers' movement" articulates the two. The knowledge (Marxism) summed in this very phrase is the reason of the revolt, the for-itself of the proletariat, where the revolt returns to reinforce itself. That the revolt has reason against reactionaries is, finally, the core of the sentence, the "internal condition of truth": not, as it may appear, a selective limit imposed upon it as an afterthought. Revolt has reason in contradiction and scission, in criticism and self-criticism, ever against those who keep things the same.- Tr.

7 Mao Zedong, "Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership" (June 1, 1943), Selected Works, vol. 3 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 118.-Tr.

8 See also Badiou, Theone du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), z17 In Bruno Bosteelss translation:

"I posit that there exists no intrinsic unknowable. This can be said clearly with Mao: 'We can learn what we did not know.' Except to add that what we did not know before was determined as leftover from that which just came to be known, at the crossover of the movement without a name by which the real poses a problem and the retroaction, named knowledge, that offers a solution." Mao's quote is from his "Report to the Second Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee of the Communist Party of China" (1949), Selected Works, vol. 4 (Beijing: FLp, 1965), 374. We are thankful to Bruno Bosteels for this reference.- Tr.

9 See Mao Zedong, On Contradiction (1937), chapter 4, "The Principal Contradiction and the Principal Aspect of a Contradiction;' Selected Works, vol, 1 (Beijing: FLp, 1965), 331- 336.-Tr.

10 Ellipses here and throughout are Badiou's.- Tr.

Alain Badiou

Antagonistic contradictions under dictatorship of the proletariat are expressed. in the

11 party as the battle of two roads (socialist and ca~~talist), ,~wo classes" (proletanat and bourgeoisie), and two lines (revolutionary and .revlsl~~lst? _Two roa~s were first ta~en b easants and the agricultural development, m the SOCIalist education movement. In t~e~'23 articles" of Ianuary 14, 1965, Mao spoke of the "power-holders in the party that go the capitalist road." (Only much later were Peng Zhen and ~iu Shaoqi named.) For ~he 23 articles, see Richard Baum and Frederick C. Tewes, Ssu-Ch ing: The SOCIalIst Education Movement of 1962-1966 (China Research Monographs, UC Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies, 1968), app. F, 120. The concept is omnipresent in the Cultural Revolution: see the CC circular of May 16,1966 (Peking Review, May 19), as well as the "Decision of th.e CC CCP Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution;' in K.H. Fan, The ChI-

c Cultural Revolution: Selected Documents (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968),

nes d "ld

162-182. Being antagonist, the scissions in the party allow no middle roa ; any go en

middle" is always on side of the reaclion.- Tr.

12 The 1967 Shanghai People's Commune, announced on February 5, marks the entr~ of the industrial proletariat into the Cultural Revolution, the beginning of the revolution as seizure of power. In January, the rebel worker groups seized the party p~per, forced reorganization of the party committee and proceeded to assume the .. ~ondltlons of production themselves, from wages to organization of labor. (Both Beijing rebel students and revolutionary intellectuals of the Cultural Revolution leadership were at the birth of the rebellion, the Shanghai "directives" were soon affirmed by Mao and the central party organs, as well as reannounced in the central press: a split unity of the workers and t~e party in control of revolutionizing the state.) For the original texts, see K. H. Fan, op .. cit,

The Paris Commune example had been invoked throughout the Cultural Revolution, including the 1966 "Sixteen Point" Central Committee decision (Fan, 169)· In Shanghai, to reannounce this history was also to speak of the March 1927 Shanghai Com~une, crushed by Chiang Kai-shek's coup. The objective contradiction between Shanghm and Commune, the local and the universal, the promise of an industrial center that effectlve.ly fragments the proletariat and the political demand of workers as workers reappeared m 1967. Real "contradictions among the people" were not resolved in the s.eizure: temporary workers-peasants or youth forced from the city by lack of work-contmued to challenge new power structures. Within the totality of the country (of state ~o,:er): th.e chances of the revolution remained undecided: any weakness on its part, contmumg inside struggles between various workers' organizations, a failure of production, could and would be used by the structures and tendencies it ruptured. The name lasted a ~ere three. weeks. After Mao's interventions, the Commune's steering committee became Shanghai Revolution-

y Committee" and in the "triple alliance" [sanjiehe] of mass rebel organizations, the army, and the cadres, the relative weight of the latter two displaced the rebels. Against the sense of "totalitarian expropriation" of a workers' revolt (however abstract, fragmented, and isolated), Badiou sees, consistently with his argument against Deleuze's anarchism, an invention of political form in the concrete conjecture.- Tr.

13 As Mao writes in "A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire" (1930):

"How then should we interpret the word "soon" in the statement, "there will soon be a high tide of revolution"? This is a common question amo~g c?mrades. Marxists are not fortune-tellers. They should, and indeed can, only indicate the general direction offuture developments and changes; they should not and cannot fix the day and the hour in a mechanistic way. But wh.en I say that there will soon b.e a high tide of revolution in China, I am emphatically not speaking of somethmg which in the words of some people "is possibly coming:' something illusory, un-

87

HH

'Ihe Flux and the Party

attainable and devoid of significance for action. It is like a ship far out at sea whose mast -head can already be seen from the shore; it is like the morning sun in the east whose shimmering rays are visible from a high mountain top; it is like a child about to be born moving restlessly in its mother's womb:'

See his Selected Works, 1.127.- Tr.

14 Aside from The Civil War in France (New York: International Publishers, 1988) itself, see Marx's letters to Ludwig Kugelmann on the Paris Commune, April 12 and 17, 1871 (online at www.marxists.org), as well as Lenin's introduction to the letters. In Commune de Paris: une declaration politique sur la politi que (Paris: Les Conferences du Rouge-Gorge, 2003), Badiou recapitulates Marx and Brecht on the Commune, as well as the Chinese "reactivation" of the Commune between 1966 and 1971, before proceeding to the "logic of the Commune;' in terms of his Logic of Worlds. Our thanks to Bruno Bosteels for this information.- Tr.

15 On the peasant revolt, see Mao Zedong's "Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan;' Selected Works, 1.23-59.

"Encircle the cities by the countryside" [nongcun baowei chengshi] defines Mao's conception of the guerrilla war. The metaphor, taken from the weiqi table game, dates to 1930 or earlier (the struggle against Li Lisan and the tensions with the Comintern); Mao developed it in his 1938 anti-Japanese war writings. (On Protracted War, Selected Works, vol. 2 [Beijing: FLP, 1965], §54, 146-147; Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan, idem, 79-112; the report to the 6th Plenum of the 6th CC CPC, "On the New Stage;' excerpted in Stuart Schram, ed., The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung, 288-90.) Lin Biao's "Long Live the Victory of People's War;' written to commemorate the zo" anniversary of the victory in the anti- Japanese war (Renmin Ribao September 3,1965; English by Foreign Language Press, 1965) applies it as a global-political directive, in a double sense: everywhere, liberation struggles are peasant struggles, making the Chinese military strategy pertinent generally; through the allegory of "cities and villages of the world;' encirclement becomes a sweeping notion of world revolution. The allegory originates with Bukharin and the Comintern program of September, 1928: Mao had projected the strategy's globalpolitical pertinence, in Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan (102), without relying on the trope.- Tr.

16 As Bruno Bosteels has pointed out to us, the opposition of management [gestion] and politics proper (what here is direction) returns in Badiou's later writing, after the Maoist works, as well. See Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 12. Analogous oppositions, or "occlusions;' are then posited regarding other truth procedures: sexuality and love, culture and art, technology and science.- Tr.

17 The wordplay of "Etat" and "etat" ("State" and "state [of the situation],,) is prominent in Badiou's later work. The main explanation is found in "L'etat de la situation historicosociale,' meditation 9 of L'Etre et l'evenement (Paris: Seuil, 1988), 121-128.- Tr.

18 Ouvriers specialises, unskilled workers. o.S., mostly immigrant workers, were key in the Maoist mobilizations in post-May France.- Tr.

19 Strikes of the o.S. at Renault-Billancourt, in March-April 1973 and at Renault, of truck drivers in the spring and ofline workers in December, 1975. See Laure Pitti, "Greves ouvrieres versus luttes de l'immigration: une controverse entre historiens," in Sylvain Lazarus, ed., Anthropologie ouvriere et enquetes d'usine, Ethnologie francaise 31/3 (2001): 465-476. The general context of the change is the incoming economic crisis on the one hand, and the "unity" of the electoral, revisionist Left-long dreamt about and for this reason all the

Alain Badiou

89

re disappointing-after 1972 on the other. The victorious 1973 strike brought forward ~: rupture between the demands and the strategies of the. w?rkers and the union~. This antagonist contradiction, of the union demand for negotiations an~ t~e ,,:or~ers nonnegotiable claim to "equal pay for equal work;' the ~emand ~or the objective sta~dard of hierarchy, and the claim that the workers determine what IS e~ual to what, contmued to determine the sequence of proletarian struggle throughout the 70S. Both a refinement of hierarchies (granting a place on a wage ladder to all, including the former O.S.) and a continuing workers' pressure against them ensued from the stnke.- Tr.

20 See Lenin, "Left-Wing' Communism, an Infantile Disorder" (1920) Collected Works, vol. 31 (Moscow: Progress, 1964), 23.- Tr.

21 Mao Zedong, "On New Democracy" (January 1940), Selected Works, 2.369 and elsewhere.-Tr.

22 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.

Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977),366-367 [translation modified].

23 The obvious subtext regarding Deleuzes turning upside down of Kant is Althusser on Feuerbach's-and early Marx's=-reversal of Hegel. See Althusser's For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 35-39 and Reading Capital, trans. ~e~ Brewster (London: NLB, 1970), 39 and passim. Elsewhere, theorizing with Mao the principal asp~ct of contradiction tTheorie de contradiction, 70-82), Badiou has shown the rep:esse~ lme of inheritance that links Deleuze-and fellow "postmodern' or petit-bourgeois ph,~losophers of the '68 aftermath-through Luxemburg, Bakunin, and Proudho~ to the Samt Max" Stirner of The German Ideology. If principal and secondary contradictions, as well as both aspects of the principal, class contradiction, are articulated in equiva~ence .on the

b t ct axis of "domination;' then there is no logical escape than abstract identity, No

a s ra h . hd I "D . "t k

revolution is then possible, just subjective "revolt" or, rat er, Wit rawa . esire a es

the place of Stirner's "egoism:' structuralism and anarchy mirror each other, opposed to the dialectic and history.- Tr.

24 Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, Selected Works, 1.317.- Tr.

25 Mao's statement at "meeting the masses" in Beijing on 10 August, 1966 in Peking Review 34 (August 19,1966): 9 [translation modified].-Tr.

26 See Mao Zedong, On Contradiction, chapter 6, "The Place of Antagonism in Contradic-

tion;' Selected Works, 1.343-345.-Tr. ,

27 "Three major distinctions" [san da chabie] which shall be overcome on the path to communism. After Marx (in the Manifesto and the Critique of the Gotha Programme) and Lenin (State and Revolution), see the Political Bureau of the Central Committee2f the CPC, "Resolution on the Establishment of People's Communes in the Rural Areas, August 29, 1958, Peking Review 29 (September 16, 1958): 22, as well as, during the Cultural R~volution, Mao's "Talk to the Leaders of the Centre" (July 21, 1966) or "Talk at the Meetmg of the Central Cultural Revolution Group" (January 9, 1967), Selected Works, vol. 9,. online at

. In Theorie du suiet Badiou writes' "Transversal to class conflicts, there

WWW.maOlsm.org. 0 ' " ., , b

are these great millenary structural invariants, these three major differences - etween

city and country, between industry and agriculture, ~~tween manual and ~ntellectu~llabor-which it is communism's entire aim to abolish (m Bruno Bosteelss translation). In his forthcoming Le Siecle, Badiou discusses the tendency to reestablish and sh~~pen the dichotomies-corresponding to the "capitalist road"-in post-Mao China. See One Divides into Two;' trans. Alberto Toscano, online in Culture Machine 4, http://culturema-

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The Flux and the Party

chine.tees.ac.uklCmach/Backissuesl jo041 Articles/badiou.htm.- Tr.

28 Lenin, "The Crisis Has Matured" (October, 1917), Collected Works, trans. Yuri Sdobnikov ~nd George Hanna, 4th English ed. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 74-85. Slavo' ~izek has taken up the play of "too early" and "almost too late" in "Repeating Lenin" (onIme at www.lacan.com) and in "Georg Lukacs as the philosopher of Leninism;' his postface to Lukacs's A Defence of "History and Class-Consciousness": Tailism and the Dialectic trans. Ester Leslie (London: Verso, 2000), 162-166. See also Badious Theorie du sujet, 18~ and following. The account follows John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World, chap. 3, online at www.bartleby.com.-Tr.

29 "In a peasant country, and under a revolutionary, republican government which enjoys the s.upport of the SOcial~st-Revolutionary and Menshevik parties that only yesterday dommated petty-bourgeois democracy, a peasant revolt is developing. Incredible as this is, it i~ a fact." "The Crisis has Matured;' n Lenin uses the phrase many times ("The Agrarian Program of the First Russian Revolution;' 1907; "A good resolution but a bad speech;' 1913; "Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade;' 1918, and others).Tr.

30 "The Crisis has Matured;' 82. Italics in Lenin's original.- Tr.

31 "What has the Party done to study the disposition of the troops, etc? What has it done to conduct the insurrection as an art? Mere talk in the Central Executive Committee, and so on!" Lenin's note to "Crisis Has Matured;' 83n.- Tr.

32 Throughout the history of Marxism after Marx and Engels, "fusion of Marxism and proletarian practice;' t~e Leninist version of the "unity of theory and (revolutionary) practice;' punctuates M~rxlst t~~ory of organization. The latter is the threshold of Marxist thought and Communist politics: here, m the concept of fusion, theory comprehends their scission, the.ir contradiction. Lenin determines the working class party through the fusion of socialism and the working class movement in "The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement" (1900) Coll~cted Works, trans. Jo~ Fineberg and George Hanna, vol. 4 (Moscow: Progress, :,972), 3~8; 1\ Retrogr~de Trend in Russian Social-Democracy" (1899), idem., 257, and in

Left - ':"'I~g Comm~msm, an I~fantile Disorder;' 23-4. Rosa Luxemburg's polemic with Lenm in Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy" concerns the content of this notion above all. See Lenin's "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in Our Party" Collected Works, vol. 7 (Moscow: Progress, 1972),203-425. Luxemburg's 1904 text, m the 1934 edition, is available online at www.marxists.org. Mao Zedong first discusses the ~otion in the late '30S ("The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War [1938], Selected Works, 2.209 and passim). It comes to the fore in the rectification movement of 1~42, a st~uggle against those who both theorize instead of organizing work and apply foreign, Soviet models onto Chinese practice. The same concept, rather than mere "~inification" of Marxism, remains at stake: the concrete determination by Chinese revolutionary practice reconstitutes, rather than to negate the universal claim. "Dialectizing" a concept of the legalist philosopher Han Fei Zi (280-233 BeE), Mao uses the metaphor of the fusion between an arrow and a target C'Rectify the Party's Style of Work" [February 1, 1942J, in Selected Works, 3.38, 42). Yet the concept the two characters name is contr~diction (mao dun): in Han Fei Zi, the logical contradiction of an arrow that pierces anythmg and a target that cannot be pierced, in Mao, two opposites that both repulse and presuppose each other. As Badiou insists here, "fusion" is not immediate unity, it does not oppose the general dialectical law of "one divides into two" [YI fen we; er], to which he has remained faithful. See "One Divides into Two:' The concept must be divided: in the major controversy on the Cultural Revolution philosophical front, the revisionist "two

Alain Badiou

fuse into one" [he er er yl] of Yang Xianzhen stands precisely against the Marxist- Leninist "one divides into two:' The controversy is relevant to the struggle between two roads, to the USSR as well as to all "post-capitalism" convergence theories. Regarding theory and practice, the history of Marxism is full of fusions of opportunist practice and theory in no tension with it. (Badiou takes up Yang's philosophy of "reconciliation" in Theorie de la contradiction, 61-66. See also "New Polemic on the Philosophical Front: Report on the Discussion Concerning Comrade Yang Hsien-chens Concept that 'Two Combine into One;" Peking Review 37 [September 11, 1964]: 9-12 and "Theory of 'Combine Two into One' is Reactionary Philosophy for Restoring Capitalism;' Peking Review 17 [April 23, 1971]: 6-11.)

In France, the concept of "fusion" emerges, as classical, in French Maoism and across the '60S conjecture: Badiou or Althusser use it without having to quote. (See note 7 above; Althusser, For Marx,16; Althusser, "Marx dans ses limites," Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, vol. 1 [Stock/IMEC, Paris 1994], 371-387-)

In the opening blurb in the Yenan collection volumes (not in the present one), Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus ask: "from what the anti-revisionist struggles in China and Albania are, what is to be retained, and transformed, to battle revisionism in France? What way is to be taken, here and now, so that Marxism and the real workers' movement fuse?" [emphasis in the original]. New French misreadings have also appeared, from Debord's Society of the Spectacle to Deleuze. Georges Peyrol's "Potato Fascism" ("Le fascisme de la pomme de terre;' La Situation actuelle sur le front philosophique, 42-52) takes up the mistranslation "one becomes two;' on whose basis Deleuze and Guattari, in "Rhizome;' do away with the dialectic. We thank Bruno Bosteels for his suggestions on these points.- Tr.

33 Mao Zedong, "Preface and Postscript to Rural Surveys" (1941), Selected Works, 3.12.- Tr. 34 Joseph Stalin, "On the Problems of Leninism" (1926), Problems of Leninism (Moscow:

FLP, 1940), chap. 5, 132 and passim; online as "Concerning Questions of Leninism" at www.marx2mao.org. Stalin quotes Lenin's "Greetings to Hungarian Workers" (1919), Collected Works, vol. 29 (Moscow: Progress, 1965), 388.- Tr.

35 Stalin's theory of transition in "On the Problems of Leninism" quotes Lenin's "Greetings to Hungarian Workers" to this effect. The quotation here is from Mao Zedong's "Speech at the CPC National Conference on Propaganda Work" (March 12,1957), in Selected Works, vol. 5 (Beijing: FLP, 1977), 423 [translation modified). See also On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People (February 27, 1957), Selected Works, 50409.- Tr.

36 "We must have faith in the masses and we must have faith in the Party. These are two cardinal principles. If we doubt these principles, we shall accomplish nothing:" Mao Zedong, On the Co-operative Transformation of Agriculture (July 31,1955), Selected Works, 5.188. In his "Critique of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR" (1958), in A Critique of Soviet Economics, trans. Moss Roberts (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), Mao writes that "Stalin's book from first to last says nothing about the superstructure. It is not concerned with people; it considers things, not people .... The basic error is mistrust of the peasants (135):'- Tr.

37 Revolutionary, not parliamentary, party as subject. The project of the "party of a new type" is a constant concern in Badiou's Maoist, militant thought, beginning from his political work from within the Parti socialiste unifi«. See Badiou, H. [ancovici, D. Menetrey and E. Terray, Contribution au probleme de la construction d'un parti marxiste-leniniste de type nouveau (Paris: Maspero, 1970), as well as Theorie du sujet, 38. The concept itself was developed by Lenin at the 1912 Prague party conference that refused the party model of Western Social Democracy and split the Bolshevik party from the Mensheviks. It has

91

92 The Flux and the Party

received its canonic formulation in History of the CPSU(b): Short Course (New York: International Publishers, 1939), 138-142, 172. English online at www.marx2mao.org.

The instance and concept of the party, so central here, are put aside in further development of Badious philosophy-if indeed the logic of abandoning them does not compel the transformations-as well as in his politics today. See Peter Hallward's "Politics and Philosophy: An Interview with Alain Badiou," app. to Hallward's translation of Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2001), 95, but also the theses Qu' est-ce que I'Organisation Politique (Paris: Le Perroquet, 2001) and online at www.organisationpolitique.com.) Yet, (Groupe pour la Fondation de) l'Union des Communistes de France Marxiste-Leniniste, Badious Maoist organization, did not consider itself a party even before it "re-began," shedding some of its Maoist legacy, as Organisation Politique. As A. Belden Fields observes in his Trotskyism and Maoism in France and the United States (chap. 3, online at www.maoism.org): .. TheUCFMLhasmadenociaimtobeaparty.as have the other two organizations [Parti Communiste Marxisie-Leniniste de France, PCMLF, and Parti Communiste Revolutionnaire tmarxiste-leniniste], PCR(m-l)]. In fact, it has not even claimed to be a 'union' yet, but a 'group' for the formation of a 'union: It has readily admitted that it does not yet have a mass base which would entitle it legitimately to refer to itself as a party. It also questions the legitimacy of the PCMLF and the PCR(mI) so doing:' Many thanks to Bruno Bosteels for his suggestions on this point.- Tr.

38 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 382.

Logics of Antagonism:

In the Margins of Alain Badiou's "The Flux and the Party"

Bruno Bosteels

Introduction:

Philosophy as the Struggle Against Revisionism

Alain Badiou's early Maoist text, "The Flux and the Party: In the Margins of Anti-Oedipus;' is part of a 1977 collection of polemical interventions titled The Current Situation on the Philosophical Front. Published by members of t.he so-ca~led Yenan-Philosophy Group, itself part of the Maoist orgamzation UCFML, or (Groupe pour la fondation de) l'Union des Communistes de France Marxistes-Leninistes, these interventions tackle the state of philosophical thinking around the mid-seventies in France by targeting Lacan (in the guise of Iacques-Alain Miller's "Matrix" and Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreaus The Angel: Ontology of Revolutions and AIthusser (in the guise of Dominique Lecourt's little b?ok o~ the "Lysenko affair") no less than Deleuze and Guattan (AntlOedipus and the short text "Rhizome" that would soon thereafter become the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus). The main thrust of the polemic states that a new revisionist mode of thinking has taken hold of philosophy-a mode of thinking that, whether in the name of writing, science, the bod!, or desire and its libidinal flows, abandons the harsh questions of political organization and the class struggle in ~avor of an abstract and purely formal dualism that, by dropping the referent of the proletariat and its party vanguard, directly opposes the masses to the State. "Everywhere to substitute the couple masses/State for the class struggle: that's al,~ there is. t.o it;' part of the collective opening statement reads; The pol.ltlcal essence of these 'philosophies' is captured in the following principle, a principle of bitter resentment against the entire history of the twentieth century: 'In order for the revolt of.the masses against the State to be good, it is necessary to r~Ject the class direction of the proletariat, to stamp out Marxism,

Polygraph 15/16 (2004)