Marxist Politics：马克思主义政治
巴迪欧与马克思主义的关系仍然是他的理论和政治创作中最有争议的方面之一，特别是他对更新的共产主义政治的呼吁。他将马克思主义定义为 "有组织的知识，即为消除现有社会并最终实现平等的、理性的集体组织形象所需的政治手段，其名称为共产主义"（Rebirth of History 8-9）。然而，巴迪欧的马克思主义拒绝了马克思主义正统的政治和哲学的关键方面，尤其是他对将哲学与政治缝合的警惕。他与马克思主义的关系将通过四个基本概念来探讨，这些概念是他在 "红色年代 "以及《存在与事件》出版期间和之后所概述的。然而，巴迪欧的马克思主义在他的作品中在两个方面保持一致。(1)一种非统治的政治的必要性，这种政治是不可还原于国家的；以及 (2)指定最大的奇异点，或需要辨别一个特定系统中最薄弱的环节。
《主体理论》中马克思主义的四个基本概念
在《主体理论》中，巴迪欧指出，有 "马克思主义的四个基本概念"：党、阶级斗争、无产阶级专政和共产主义（282）。这些概念中的每一个都被马克思主义政治的每一个后续模式深深地改变了，其中有三个。这三个阶段，对于巴迪欧和他的法国马克思列宁主义共产主义者联盟（UCFML）基础小组的同志们来说，就是马克思主义、列宁主义和最后的毛泽东主义。因此，UCFML的，同样也是巴迪欧的，马克思主义不仅仅是一种后马克思主义的形式，也是一种后列宁主义，因为它承认马克思主义的最新 "阶段"--毛泽东主义（法国马克思列宁主义联盟基金会小组 2005: 527）。因此，在讨论巴迪欧的马克思主义时，必须注意这四个概念的不断翻新。此外，人们必须注意到，巴迪欧的马克思主义始终与法国共产党（PCF）保持着距离，并与之尖锐对立。这种距离和反对的结果是，巴迪欧支持的 "战斗 "形式的马克思主义部分是由PCF的马克思主义形式形成的（TS 9）。巴迪欧和他的同志们关注的是一种马克思主义的形式，这种形式在内容上是具体的、同质的，同时又是适应工人阶级的，以此将其纳入资产阶级和帝国主义的 "空间"（TS 9）。有争议的是，巴迪欧和UCFML将这个工人阶级占据的资产阶级和帝国主义空间理解为包括工会和选举政治。这导致了巴迪欧抵制工会和选举政治，认为它们不是可以实践马克思主义政治的空间。
对巴迪欧来说，马克思主义最初是作为一个参考点，允许工人运动的主观化（TS 44）。巴迪欧和他的同志们认为，工人只有通过被组织成一种工具，或机器，能够通过承认一种不单纯由具体利益指导的政治，将群众统一到集体行动中，才能成为革命主体。巴迪欧认为，这种对组织的需求是因为，工人阶级没有能力解决其社会直接性和产生它的政治项目之间的分裂。因此，需要有一种机器，通过这种机器可以充分理解和克服这种分裂。然而，这个机器必须对作为一个机器的生存不感兴趣，而对实现共产主义的政治目标更感兴趣，这就需要机器的自我毁灭。在1970年代，对巴迪欧和UCFML来说，这个机器仍然是党。因此，UCFML一直主张在马列主义-毛泽东思想的基础上形成一个 "新型的政党"。
然而，巴迪欧对马克思主义概念的重构并不限于他对党的重新定义，还包括对阶级的定义。巴迪欧对阶级的定义违背了正统的马克思主义对阶级和阶级斗争的定义，因为它避免了社会学对阶级的定义，即以生产关系为基础，并作为 "对资产阶级的所有对立的集中"。相反，它倾向于将阶级确认为 "党派政治行动"，它立足于群众生产历史的能力（TS 26-7）。对巴迪欧来说，资产阶级不再是简单地归结为对国家机器的控制或经济利润的逻辑，而是也能够领导阶级斗争和产生一个能够干预阶级斗争的主体（42）。事实上，与其他马克思主义者不同，巴迪欧承认资产阶级本身能够组织自己的政治项目，并围绕这样的项目使工人阶级主体化。
巴迪欧的最终项目是共产主义。巴迪欧把这种共产主义的内容等同于马克思主义的另一个主要概念，即无产阶级专政（282）。对巴迪欧来说，共产主义和专政是 "同一件事"，前者是关注正义的部分，而后者则是关注通过其作为社会的超我的功能来调节社会的能力（同上）。
事实上，这种将共产主义和正义等同起来的做法是巴迪欧今天继续坚持的，尽管他已经拒绝了无产阶级专政的超我功能的需要。
在《存在与事件》中，巴迪欧认为，主体 "不再是创始的主体，中心的和反思的，其主题从笛卡尔到黑格尔，在马克思和弗洛伊德（事实上，在胡塞尔和萨特）中仍然清晰可见。当代的主体是虚无的、分裂的、非实体的、非反思的"（存在与事件 3）。事实上，巴迪欧所论证的主体不再是像无产阶级和党那样的创始主体，而是通过像社会学或经济学所提供的实体主义范畴来固定的主体，而是通过对某一事件的忠诚度和由上述忠诚度所产生的 "真理 "而产生的。这个新的主体不再被组织在一个政党中，而是被组织在一个没有政党的政治中。巴迪欧解释说："无党派政治 "意味着政治不是来自于或源自于政党...政治源于真实的情势，源于我们在这些情势中可以说和做的事情。因此，在现实中存在着政治序列、政治进程，但这些并没有被一个同时代表着某些社会力量和政治本身的源头的政党所概括"（伦理学 95-6）。
后《存在与事件》的 "后毛主义
《存在与事件》标志着巴迪欧与马克思主义的关系有了明显的不同，这种不同的关系被敏锐地称为 "后毛主义"（Bosteels 2005）。在MP中，巴迪欧写道："在其主导的经典形式中，马克思主义本身提出了一种缝合，即哲学与政治条件的缝合"（元政治学概述 62）。这种将哲学缝合到它的政治条件的做法，导致了哲学没有能力以足够的严谨来欣赏和内化来自其他条件的新 "真理"（63）。由于哲学与政治的缝合，哲学本身被压制，无法将新的真理纳入其理论体系（同上）。相反，巴迪欧把马克思主义限制在它在政治条件中的位置。因此，在进行哲学操作的同时，巴迪欧也对上面讨论的马克思主义的四个基本概念进行了重新表述。巴迪欧不再主张毛主义党，而是主张 "去党政治"，同时也拒绝了激发《主体理论》的阶级和阶级斗争的概念。此外，尽管巴迪欧继续倡导共产主义，但他现在是通过保持 "与国家的距离"，而不是通过夺取国家政权来进行的。
这种对党的拒绝与对工人阶级作为一个由其生产关系决定的特定社会经济类别的拒绝相类似。巴迪欧写道："阶级"是一个分析性和描述性的概念，一个"冷"的概念，而 暴动的积极原则——真正的变化，是以"群众"概念来指定的。RH 91）。然而，同时，工人的形象确实仍然是他政治项目的核心。巴迪欧认为，国家试图通过将 "法国工人 "与那些实际上是 "移民 "的罢工者，以及后来的 "非法移民 "并列，来抹去工人的政治形象（伦理学 9）。
因此，工人的形象不是一个社会学范畴，而是一个政治范畴。通过这种方式，巴迪欧仍然致力于一种工人政治，不试图命名和代表工人。正是在这一背景下，Organisation Politique和巴迪欧强调了sans-papier的形象，即无证工人。
巴迪欧理论体系的另一个深刻变化是他主张 "远离国家"，而不是 "无产阶级的专政"。在《存在与事件》中，他把政治定义为对国家的暴力或和平的攻击（存在与事件 110）。那么，与要求夺取国家政权的马克思主义传统不同，巴迪欧认为党-国或无产阶级专政已成为一种饱和的经验，文化大革命就是证明（毛泽东很早就认识到这个关键的马克思主义政治概念已经被文革变得不确定，因此缺乏内容，因为即使中国的社会主义国家概念也被工人和红色权贵的矛盾所击穿）。然而，这并不意味着不应该与国家进行关联。问题在于，不能把权力交给一个旨在接管国家的组织，而应该交给一个通过向国家开出处方而与其在一定距离内运作的组织。事实上，巴迪欧并没有完全放弃专政的概念，但他不是在谈论无产阶级专政，而是在谈论 "人民专制"，即一种适合于人民运动的现时力量的权威形式，所以它反对所有形式的国家独裁（Rebirth of History 45, 59）。所以巴迪欧并不排斥解放政治，只是认为党-国不能导向共产主义。
对巴迪欧来说，共产主义作为 "正义 "的正式定义在他的作品中一直没有改变，它与解放和平等的概念有着深刻的联系。此外，共产主义现在被阐述为一种理念，它 "是一种真理程序的奇异性和历史的表征之间相互作用的主观化"（共产主义假说 235）。事实上，共产主义的理念正是涉及一个主体对一个事件的后果的展开以及它与普遍人性的表征的衔接。
MARXIST POLITICS
Dhruv Jain
Badiou’s relationship to Marxism remains one of the most contentious aspects of his theoretical and political production, especially his call for a renewed communist politics. He defines Marxism as ‘the organised knowledge of the political means required to undo existing society and finally realise an egalitarian, rational figure of collective organisation for which the name is communism’ (RH 8–9). However, Badiou’s Marxism rejects key aspects, political and philosophical, of Marxist orthodoxy, especially as regards his wariness of suturing philosophy to politics. His relationship to Marxism will be explored through four fundamental concepts that he outlines both in the period marking his ‘red years’ and during and after the publication of BE. However, Badiou’s Marxism remains consistent throughout his oeuvre in two regards: 1) the necessity of a politics of non-domination that is irreducible to the state; and 2) the designation of the maximal sites of singularity, or the need to discern the weakest links in a given system.
The four fundamental concepts of Marxism in TS
In TS, Badiou notes that there are ‘four fundamental concepts of Marxism’:the party, the class struggle, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and communism (282). Each of these concepts has been deeply transformed by each subsequent mode of Marxist politics, of which there are three. These three stages, for Badiou and his comrades in the Group for the Foundation of the Union of Communists of France Marxist-Leninist (UCFML), are Marxism, Leninism and finally Maoism. The UCFML’s, and similarly Badiou’s, Marxism was thus not simply a form of post-Marxism but also a post-Leninism in its recognition of the newest ‘stage’ of Marxism, Maoism (Groupe pour la Fondation de l’Union des Communistes Francais (Marxiste-Leniniste) 2005: 527). Thus, when discussing Badiou’s Marxism one must necessarily be attuned to the constant refurbishing of these four concepts. Furthermore, one must note that Badiou’s Marxism remains consistently distant from, and in sharp opposition to, the French Communist Party (PCF). This distance and opposition results in the ‘combative’ form of Marxism that Badiou espouses being in part shaped by the PCF’s form of Marxism (TS 9). Badiou and his comrades were concerned by a form of Marxism that is specific and homogeneous in its content, while being adapted to the working class as a means by which to include it in bourgeois and imperialist ‘space’ (TS 9). Controversially, Badiou and the UCFML understood this bourgeois and imperialist space, which the working class occupied, as including trade unions and electoral politics. This resulted in Badiou’s boycotting of both trade unions and electoral politics as spaces in which one could practise Marxist politics.
Marxism, for Badiou, initially served as a referential point that allows for the subjectivisation of the workers’ movement (TS 44). Badiou and his compatriots argued that workers could only become a revolutionary subject through being organised into an instrument, or apparatus, capable of unifying the masses into collective action through recognition of a politics not simply guided by specific interests. This need for organisation is because, Badiou argues, the working class is incapable of resolving the division between its social immediacy and the political project that produced it. Thus, there needed to be an apparatus through which this division could be fully comprehended and overcome. However, this apparatus must be less interested in surviving as an apparatus and more interested in achieving the political goal of communism, which would require the apparatuses’ self-destruction. During the 1970s, for Badiou and the UCFML this apparatus remained the party. Thus, the UCFML consistently advocated for the formation of a ‘party of a new type’ based on Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
However, Badiou’s reframing of the concepts of Marxism was not limited to his redefinition of the party but also included that of class. Badiou’s definition of class contravenes orthodox Marxist definitions of class and class struggle due to its avoidance both of a sociological definition of class, which is grounded in the relations of production, and as a ‘concentration of all antagonism to the bourgeoisie’. Rather, it favours the recognition of class as ‘partisan political action’ that is anchored in the capacity of the masses to produce history (TS 26–7). For Badiou the bourgeoisie is no longer simply reducible either to control over the State apparatuses or to the logic of economic profit, but rather is also capable of leading the class struggle and the production of a subject able to intervene in the class struggle (42). Indeed, unlike other Marxists, Badiou recognises that the bourgeoisie itself is able to organise its own political project and subjectivise the working class around such a project.
The final project for Badiou is communism. Badiou equates the content of this communism with that of another main concept of Marxism, the dictatorship of the proletariat (282). Communism and the dictatorship for Badiou was the ‘same thing’, with the former being the part that was concerned with justice, whereas the latter was concerned with the capacity to regulate society through its function as a superego of society (ibid.).
Indeed, this equating of communism and justice is something that Badiou continues to uphold today, although he has rejected the needed for the superegoistic function of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The ‘post-Maoism’ of post-BE
BE marks a discernible difference in Badiou’s relationship to Marxism, and this differential relationship has perceptively been referred to as ‘post-Maoism’ (Bosteels 2005). In MP, Badiou writes: ‘In its dominant canonical form, Marxism itself has proposed a suture, the suture of philosophy to its political condition’ (MP 62). This suturing of philosophy to its political condition results in the incapacity of philosophy to appreciate and internalise new ‘truths’ from the other conditions with sufficient rigour (63). Due to the suturing of philosophy to politics, philosophy itself is suppressed and is unable to incorporate new truths into its theoretical system (ibid.). Instead, Badiou limits Marxism to its place in the political condition. Thus, a philosophical operation is also accompanied by Badiou’s reformulation of the four fundamental concepts of Marxism discussed above. Badiou no longer advocates for the Maoist party, but rather for a ‘politics without a party’, while also rejecting the concepts of class and class struggle that animated TS. Furthermore, although Badiou continues to advocate for communism, he now does so through maintenance of a ‘distance from the state’ rather than through the capture of the state.
In BE Badiou argues that the subject ‘is no longer the founding subject, centred and reflexive, whose theme runs from Descartes to Hegel and which remains legible in Marx and Freud (in fact, in Husserl and Sartre). The contemporary Subject is void, cleaved, a-substantial, and ir-reflexive’ (BE 3). Indeed, rather than a founding subject like the proletariat and the party, Badiou argues for a subject that is no longer fixed through substantialist categories like those provided by sociology or economics, but one that is produced through fidelity to an event and the ‘truth’ that is produced by the said fidelity. This new subject is no longer organised in a party, but rather in a politics without a party. Badiou explains that ‘ “Politics without party” means that politics does not spring from or originate in the party . . . Politics springs from real situations, from what we can say and do in these situations. And so in reality there are political sequences, political processes, but these are not totalised by a party that would be simultaneously the representation of certain social forces and the source of politics itself’ (E 95–6).
This rejection of the party parallels the rejection of the working class as a specific socio-economic category determined by its production relations. Badiou writes, ‘it is “class” that is an analytical and descriptive concept, a “cold” concept, and “masses” that is the concept with which the active principle of the riots, real change, is designated’ (RH 91). However, simultaneously, the figure of the worker does remain central to his political project. Badiou argues that there was an attempt by the State to erase the political figure of the worker by juxtaposing the ‘French worker’ against those strikers that were in fact ‘immigrants’, and later ‘illegal aliens’ (E 9).
Thus, the figure of the worker is not a sociological category but a political one. In this way Badiou remains dedicated to a kind of worker politics that does not seek to name and represent the worker. It is in this context that the Organisation Politique and Badiou placed emphasis on the figure of the sans-papier, or worker without papers.
Another profound change in Badiou’s theoretical corpus is his advocating a ‘distance from the state’, instead of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. In BE he defines politics as an assault, violent or peaceful, against the State (BE 110). Unlike the Marxist tradition, then, which calls for the capture of the State, Badiou believes that the party-state, or dictatorship of the proletariat, became a saturated experience as evidenced by the Cultural Revolution (Mao recognised very early on that this key Marxist political concept had been rendered indeterminate by the GPCR and thus lacked content, since even the Chinese socialist state was traversed by contradictions between workers and a red bourgeois). However, this does not mean that there should be a non-relation to the State. The point is rather that authority must not be invested in an organisation designed to take over the state, but on one that operates at a distance by making prescriptions to the State. As a matter of fact, Badiou does not altogether abandon the notion of dictatorship, but instead of talking of a dictatorship of the proletariat he speaks of a ‘popular dictatorship’ qua a form of authority adequate to the presentative power of a popular movement, so one that is opposed to all forms of state dictatorship (RH 45, 59). So Badiou does not reject emancipatory politics by any means, considering simply that the party-state cannot be oriented towards communism.
The formal definition of communism as ‘justice’ for Badiou remains unchanged throughout his oeuvre, and is deeply related to the concepts of emancipation and equality. Furthermore, communism is now articulated as an Idea, which ‘is the subjectivisation of an interplay between the singularity of a truth procedure and a representation of History’ (CH 235).Indeed, the Idea of Communism involves precisely a subject’s unfolding of the consequences of an event and its articulation with a representation of universal humanity.
