new left review 49 jan feb 2008 29
Alain Badiou
THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS
There was a tangible sense of depression in the air in France
in the aftermath of Sarkozy’s victory.1 It is often said that
unexpected blows are the worst, but expected ones some-
times prove debilitating in a different way. It can be oddly
dispiriting when an election is won by the candidate who has led in the
opinion polls from the start, just as when the favourite horse wins the
race; anyone with the slightest feeling for a wager, a risk, an exception or
a rupture would rather see an outsider upset the odds. Yet it could hardly
have been the bare fact of Nicolas Sarkozy as President that seemed to
come as such a disorientating blow to the French left in the aftermath
of May 2007. Something else was at stake—some complex of factors for
which ‘Sarkozy’ is merely a name. How should it be understood?
An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the mani-
fest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within
the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive man-
ner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes
any embodiments of dissenting political will. A second component of
the left’s depressive disorientation after May 2007 was an overwhelming
bout of historical nostalgia. The political order that emerged from World
War Two in France—with its unambiguous referents of ‘left’ and ‘right’,
and its consensus, shared by Gaullists and Communists alike, on the
balance-sheet of the Occupation, Resistance and Liberation—has now
collapsed. This is one reason for Sarkozy’s ostentatious dinners, yacht-
ing holidays and so on—a way of saying that the left no longer frightens
anyone: Vivent les riches, and to hell with the poor. Understandably, this
may fill the sincere souls of the left with nostalgia for the good old days—
Mitterrand, De Gaulle, Marchais, even Chirac, Gaullism’s Brezhnev, who
knew that to do nothing was the easiest way to let the system die.
Sarkozy has now finally finished off the cadaverous form of Gaullism over
which Chirac presided. The Socialists’ collapse had already been antici-
pated in the rout of Jospin in the presidential elections of 2002 (and still
more by the disastrous decision to embrace Chirac in the second round).
The present decomposition of the Socialist Party, however, is not just a
matter of its political poverty, apparent now for many years, nor of the
actual size of the vote—47 per cent is not much worse than its other recent
scores. Rather, the election of Sarkozy appears to have struck a blow to the
entire symbolic structuring of French political life: the system of orienta-
tion itself has suffered a defeat. An important symptom of the resulting
disorientation is the number of former Socialist placemen rushing to take
up appointments under Sarkozy, the centre-left opinion-makers singing
his praises; the rats have fled the sinking ship in impressive numbers.
The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all
accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so
forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties?
A third component of the contemporary disorientation arose from the
outcome of the electoral conflict itself. I have characterized the 2007
presidential elections—pitting Sarkozy against Royal—as the clash of
two types of fear. The first is the fear felt by the privileged, alarmed that
their position may be assailable. In France this manifests itself as fear of
foreigners, workers, youth from the banlieue, Muslims, black Africans.
Essentially conservative, it creates a longing for a protective master, even
one who oppresses and impoverishes you further. The current embodi-
ment of this figure is, of course, the over-stimulated police chief: Sarkozy.
In electoral terms, this is contested not by a resounding affirmation of
self-determining heterogeneity, but by the fear of this fear: a fear, too, of
the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows
nor likes. This ‘fear of the fear’ is a secondary, derivative emotion, whose
content—beyond the sentiment itself—is barely detectable; the Royal
camp had no concept of any alliance with the excluded or oppressed;
the most it could envisage was to reap the dubious benefits of fear. For
both sides, a total consensus reigned on Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan
(where French forces are fighting), Lebanon (ditto), Africa (swarming
with French military ‘administrators’). Public discussion of alternatives
on these issues was on neither party’s agenda.
1
This is an edited extract from De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, Circonstances, 4,
Nouvelles Editions Lignes, Paris 2007; to be published in English by Verso as What
Do We Mean When We Say ‘Sarkozy’? in 2008.
badiou: After Sarkozy 31
The conflict between the primary fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ was set-
tled in favour of the former. There was a visceral reflex in play here, very
apparent in the faces of those partying over Sarkozy’s victory. For those
in the grip of the ‘fear of the fear’ there was a corresponding negative
reflex, flinching from the result: this was the third component of 2007’s
depressive disorientation. We should not underestimate the role of what
Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through
the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv
and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments.
Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of
the real; a process even further advanced with regard to the secondary
‘fear of the fear’ than with the primitive, reactionary one. We react, after
all, to a real situation, whereas the ‘fear of the fear’ merely takes fright at
the scale of that reaction, and is thus at a still further remove from real-
ity. The vacuity of this position manifested itself perfectly in the empty
exaltations of Ségolène Royal.
Electoralism and the state
If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by cer-
tain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility
which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would
have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apoliti-
cal procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal
imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of
political or ideological convictions. It is good to vote, to give a form to my
fears; but it is hard to believe that what I am voting for is a good thing in
itself. This is not to say that the electoral-democratic system is repressive
per se; rather, that the electoral process is incorporated into a state form,
that of capitalo-parliamentarianism, appropriate for the maintenance of
the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function.
This creates a further feeling of powerlessness: if ordinary citizens have
no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what
way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics.
If the electoral mechanism is not a political but a state procedure, what
does it achieve? Drawing on the lessons of 2007, one effect is to incor-
porate both the fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ into the state—to invest
the state with these mass-subjective elements, the better to legitimate
it as an object of fear in its own right, equipped for terror and coercion.
For the world horizon of democracy is increasingly defined by war. The
West is engaged on an expanding number of fronts: the maintenance of
the existing order with its gigantic disparities has an irreducible military
component; the duality of the worlds of rich and poor can only be sus-
tained by force. This creates a particular dialectic of war and fear. Our
governments explain that they are waging war abroad in order to protect
us from it at home. If Western troops do not hunt down the terrorists
in Afghanistan or Chechnya, they will come over here to organize the
resentful rabble outcasts.
Strategic neo-Pétainism
In France, this alliance of fear and war has classically gone by the
name of Pétainism. The mass ideology of Pétainism—responsible for
its widespread success between 1940 and 1944—rested in part on the
fear generated by the First World War: Marshal Pétain would protect
France from the disastrous effects of the Second, by keeping well out
of it. In the Marshal’s own words, it was necessary to be more afraid of
war than of defeat. The vast majority of the French accepted the rela-
tive tranquillity of a consensual defeat and most got off fairly lightly
during the War, compared to the Russians or even the English. The
analogous project today is based on the belief that the French need sim-
ply to accept the laws of the us-led world model and all will be well:
France will be protected from the disastrous effects of war and global
disparity. This form of neo-Pétainism as a mass ideology is effectively
on offer from both parties today. In what follows, I will argue that it is
a key analytical element in understanding the disorientation that goes
by the name of ‘Sarkozy’; to grasp the latter in its overall dimension, its
historicity and intelligibility, requires us to go back to what I will call its
Pétainist ‘transcendental’.2
I am not saying, of course, that circumstances today resemble the
defeat of 1940, or that Sarkozy resembles Pétain. The point is a more
formal one: that the unconscious national-historical roots of that which
goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Pétainist configu-
ration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the
2
See my Logiques des mondes, Paris 2006 for a full development of the concept of
‘transcendentals’ and their function, which is to govern the order of appearance of
multiplicities within a world.
summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This
matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the
Restoration of 1815 when a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly sup-
ported by émigrés and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners’
baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a worn-out population,
that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat
once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real
content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the
‘nation’, yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt
of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Pétain himself,
an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment
of national rebirth.
Numerous aspects of this neo-Pétainist tradition are in evidence today.
Typically, capitulation and servility are presented as invention and regen-
eration. These were central themes of Sarkozy’s campaign: the Mayor of
Neuilly would transform the French economy and put the country back
to work. The real content, of course, is a politics of continuous obedi-
ence to the demands of high finance, in the name of national renewal. A
second characteristic is that of decline and ‘moral crisis’, which justifies
the repressive measures taken in the name of regeneration. Morality is
invoked, as so often, in place of politics and against any popular mobi-
lization. Appeal is made instead to the virtues of hard work, discipline,
the family: ‘merit should be rewarded’. This typical displacement of poli-
tics by morality has been prepared, from the 1970s ‘new philosophers’
onwards, by all who have laboured to ‘moralize’ historical judgement.
The object is in reality political: to maintain that national decline has
nothing to do with the high servants of capital but is the fault of certain
ill-intentioned elements of the population—currently, foreign workers
and young people from the banlieue.
A third characteristic of neo-Pétainism is the paradigmatic function
of foreign experience. The example of correction always comes from
abroad, from countries that have long overcome their moral crises. For
Pétain, the shining examples were Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany
and Franco’s Spain: leaders who had put their countries back on their
feet. The political aesthetic is that of imitation: like Plato’s demiurge, the
state must shape society with its eyes fixed on foreign models. Today, of
course, the examples are Bush’s America and Blair’s Britain.
A fourth characteristic is the notion that the source of the current cri-
sis lies in a disastrous past event. For the proto-Pétainism of the 1815
Restoration, this was of course the Revolution and the beheading of the
King. For Pétain himself in 1940 it was the Popular Front, the Blum
government and above all the great strikes and factory occupations of
1936. The possessing classes far preferred the German Occupation to
the fear which these disorders had provoked. For Sarkozy, the evils of
May 68—forty years ago—have been constantly invoked as the cause
of the current ‘crisis of values’. Neo-Pétainism provides a usefully sim-
plified reading of history that links a negative event, generally with a
working-class or popular structure, and a positive one, with a military
or state structure, as a solution to the first. The arc between 1968 and
2007 can thus be offered as a source of legitimacy for the Sarkozy gov-
ernment, as the historic actor that will finally embark on the correction
needed in the wake of the inaugural damaging event. Finally, there is the
element of racism. Under Pétain this was brutally explicit: getting rid of
the Jews. Today it is voiced in a more insinuating fashion: ‘we are not an
inferior race’—the implication being, ‘unlike others’; ‘the true French
need not doubt the legitimacy of their country’s actions’—in Algeria
and elsewhere. In the light of these criteria, we can therefore point: the
disorientation that goes by the name of ‘Sarkozy’ may be analysed as the
latest manifestation of the Pétainist transcendental.
The spectre
At first sight there may seem something strange about the new President’s
insistence that the solution to the country’s moral crisis, the goal of his
‘renewal’ process, was ‘to do away with May 68, once and for all’. Most
of us were under the impression that it was long gone anyway. What is
haunting the regime, under the name of May 68? We can only assume
that it is the ‘spectre of communism’, in one of its last real manifesta-
tions. He would say (to give a Sarkozian prosopopoeia): ‘We refuse to be
haunted by anything at all. It is not enough that empirical communism
has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the
hypothesis of communism—generic name of our defeat—must become
unmentionable.’
What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its
canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class—
the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the
arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it
can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collec-
tive organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of
wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of mas-
sive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The
existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer
appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free asso-
ciation of producers will see it withering away.
‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual
representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory func-
tion, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist
principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are
intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure
Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since
the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coer-
cion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the
hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts—the slaves led by Spartacus,
the peasants led by Müntzer—might be identified as practical examples
of this ‘communist invariant’. With the French Revolution, the commu-
nist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity.
What remains is to determine the point at which we now find ourselves
in the history of the communist hypothesis. A fresco of the modern
period would show two great sequences in its development, with a
forty-year gap between them. The first is that of the setting in place of
the communist hypothesis; the second, of preliminary attempts at its
realization. The first sequence runs from the French Revolution to the
Paris Commune; let us say, 1792 to 1871. It links the popular mass move-
ment to the seizure of power, through the insurrectional overthrow of
the existing order; this revolution will abolish the old forms of society
and install ‘the community of equals’. In the course of the century, the
formless popular movement made up of townsfolk, artisans and stu-
dents came increasingly under the leadership of the working class. The
sequence culminated in the striking novelty—and radical defeat—of the
Paris Commune. For the Commune demonstrated both the extraordi-
nary energy of this combination of popular movement, working-class
leadership and armed insurrection, and its limits: the communards
could neither establish the revolution on a national footing nor defend it
against the foreign-backed forces of the counter-revolution.
The second sequence of the communist hypothesis runs from 1917
to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cultural
Revolution and the militant upsurge throughout the world during the
years 1966–75. It was dominated by the question: how to win? How to
hold out—unlike the Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of
the possessing classes; how to organize the new power so as to protect it
against the onslaught of its enemies? It was no longer a question of for-
mulating and testing the communist hypothesis, but of realizing it: what
the 19th century had dreamt, the 20th would accomplish. The obses-
sion with victory, centred around questions of organization, found its
principal expression in the ‘iron discipline’ of the communist party—the
characteristic construction of the second sequence of the hypothesis. The
party effectively solved the question inherited from the first sequence:
the revolution prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popu-
lar war, in Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and
succeeded in establishing a new order.
But the second sequence in turn created a further problem, which it
could not solve using the methods it had developed in response to the
problems of the first. The party had been an appropriate tool for the
overthrow of weakened reactionary regimes, but it proved ill-adapted
for the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense
that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the
transition to the non-state: its dialectical ‘withering away’. Instead, the
party-state developed into a new form of authoritarianism. Some of these
regimes made real strides in education, public health, the valorization
of labour, and so on; and they provided an international constraint on
the arrogance of the imperialist powers. However, the statist principle
in itself proved corrupt and, in the long run, ineffective. Police coercion
could not save the ‘socialist’ state from internal bureaucratic inertia;
and within fifty years it was clear that it would never prevail in the fero-
cious competition imposed by its capitalist adversaries. The last great
convulsions of the second sequence—the Cultural Revolution and May
68, in its broadest sense—can be understood as attempts to deal with
the inadequacy of the party.
Interludes
Between the end of the first sequence and the beginning of the second
there was a forty-year interval during which the communist hypothesis
was declared to be untenable: the decades from 1871 to 1914 saw impe-
rialism triumphant across the globe. Since the second sequence came
to an end in the 1970s we have been in another such interval, with the
adversary in the ascendant once more. What is at stake in these circum-
stances is the eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist
hypothesis. But it is clear that this will not be—cannot be—the con-
tinuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass
democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all
the inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more.
At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consider-
ation; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable.
The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it.
At this point, during an interval dominated by the enemy, when new
experiments are tightly circumscribed, it is not possible to say with cer-
tainty what the character of the third sequence will be. But the general
direction seems discernible: it will involve a new relation between the
political movement and the level of the ideological—one that was prefig-
ured in the expression ‘cultural revolution’ or in the May 68 notion of a
‘revolution of the mind’. We will still retain the theoretical and historical
lessons that issued from the first sequence, and the centrality of victory
that issued from the second. But the solution will be neither the form-
less, or multi-form, popular movement inspired by the intelligence of the
multitude—as Negri and the alter-globalists believe—nor the renewed
and democratized mass communist party, as some of the Trotskyists
and Maoists hope. The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century)
party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer
possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the
‘socialist’ states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution
and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into exist-
ence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political
experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental.
We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improv-
ing its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the
proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not
inevitable—within the ideological sphere.
What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding
a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order
and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long
as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline
of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: ‘There is only
one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts,
of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of
‘alter-globalization’. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as
a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we
would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The
‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and
monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelm-
ing majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world.
They are locked out, often literally so.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single
world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the
world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it
now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South.
New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians
and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and
the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of
the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in fave-
las, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the
supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human exist-
ence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval
patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is,
in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other coun-
tries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of
globalization is a sham.
A performative unity
The political problem, then, has to be reversed. We cannot start from
an analytic agreement on the existence of the world and proceed to
normative action with regard to its characteristics. The disagreement
is not over qualities but over existence. Confronted with the artificial
and murderous division of the world into two—a disjunction named
by the very term, ‘the West’—we must affirm the existence of the single
world right from the start, as axiom and principle. The simple phrase,
‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is perfor-
mative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this
point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow
from this simple declaration.
A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as
myself: the African worker I see in the restaurant kitchen, the Moroccan
I see digging a hole in the road, the veiled woman looking after children
in a park. That is where we reverse the dominant idea of the world united
by objects and signs, to make a unity in terms of living, acting beings,
here and now. These people, different from me in terms of language,
clothes, religion, food, education, exist exactly as I do myself; since they
exist like me, I can discuss with them—and, as with anyone else, we can
agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I
exist in the same world.
At this point, the objection about cultural difference will be raised: ‘our’
world is made up of those who accept ‘our’ values—democracy, respect
for women, human rights. Those whose culture is contrary to this are
not really part of the same world; if they want to join it they have to
share our values, to ‘integrate’. As Sarkozy put it: ‘If foreigners want
to remain in France, they have to love France; otherwise, they should
leave.’ But to place conditions is already to have abandoned the princi-
ple, ‘there is only one world of living men and women’. It may be said
that we need to take the laws of each country into account. Indeed; but
a law does not set a precondition for belonging to the world. It is simply
a provisional rule that exists in a particular region of the single world.
And no one is asked to love a law, simply to obey it. The single world
of living women and men may well have laws; what it cannot have is
subjective or ‘cultural’ preconditions for existence within it—to demand
that you have to be like everyone else. The single world is precisely the
place where an unlimited set of differences exist. Philosophically, far
from casting doubt on the unity of the world, these differences are its
principle of existence.
The question then arises whether anything governs these unlimited dif-
ferences. There may well be only one world, but does that mean that
being French, or a Moroccan living in France, or Muslim in a country
of Christian traditions, is nothing? Or should we see the persistence of
such identities as an obstacle? The simplest definition of ‘identity’ is
the series of characteristics and properties by which an individual or a
group recognizes itself as its ‘self’. But what is this ‘self’? It is that which,
across all the characteristic properties of identity, remains more or less
invariant. It is possible, then, to say that an identity is the ensemble of
properties that support an invariance. For example, the identity of an art-
ist is that by which the invariance of his or her style can be recognized;
homosexual identity is composed of everything bound up with the invar-
iance of the possible object of desire; the identity of a foreign community
in a country is that by which membership of this community can be
recognized: language, gestures, dress, dietary habits, etc.
Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to dif-
ference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the
rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which
is invariant. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The
first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am
not the other. This is often indispensable, in the face of authoritar-
ian demands for integration, for example. The Moroccan worker will
forcefully affirm that his traditions and customs are not those of the
petty-bourgeois European; he will even reinforce the characteristics of
his religious or customary identity. The second involves the immanent
development of identity within a new situation—rather like Nietzsche’s
famous maxim, ‘become what you are’. The Moroccan worker does not
abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially
or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion,
to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he is—a
Moroccan worker in Paris—not through any internal rupture, but by
an expansion of identity.
The political consequences of the axiom, ‘there is only one world’, will
work to consolidate what is universal in identities. An example—a
local experiment—would be a meeting held recently in Paris, where
undocumented workers and French nationals came together to
demand the abolition of persecutory laws, police raids and expulsions;
to demand that foreign workers be recognized simply in terms of their
presence: that no one is illegal; all demands that are very natural for
people who are basically in the same existential situation—people of
the same world.
Time and courage
‘In such great misfortune, what remains to you?’ Corneille’s Medea is
asked by her confidante. ‘Myself! Myself, I say, and it is enough’, comes
the reply. What Medea retains is the courage to decide her own fate;
and courage, I would suggest, is the principal virtue in face of the diso-
rientation of our own times. Lacan also raises the issue in discussing
the analytical cure for depressive debility: should this not end in grand
dialectical discussions on courage and justice, on the model of Plato’s
dialogues? In the famous ‘Dialogue on Courage’, General Laches, ques-
tioned by Socrates, replies: ‘Courage is when I see the enemy and run
towards him to engage him in a fight.’ Socrates is not particularly satis-
fied with this, of course, and gently takes the General to task: ‘It’s a good
example of courage, but an example is not a definition.’ Running the
same risks as General Laches, I will give my definition.
First, I would retain the status of courage as a virtue—that is, not an
innate disposition, but something that constructs itself, and which one
constructs, in practice. Courage, then, is the virtue which manifests
itself through endurance in the impossible. This is not simply a matter
of a momentary encounter with the impossible: that would be heroism,
not courage. Heroism has always been represented not as a virtue but as
a posture: as the moment when one turns to meet the impossible face to
face. The virtue of courage constructs itself through endurance within
the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes courage is to operate
in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world. The
point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another order of
time. Those imprisoned within the temporality assigned us by the domi-
nant order will always be prone to exclaim, as so many Socialist Party
henchmen have done, ‘Twelve years of Chirac, and now we have to wait
for another round of elections. Seventeen years; perhaps twenty-two; a
whole lifetime!’ At best, they will become depressed and disorientated;
at worst, rats.
In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century
than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-
century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening
inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism
of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia;
the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways
to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as
in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at
stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during
the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination
of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and
political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew
the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and
on the ground.
