Editor's Introduction

In "Love What You Will Never Believe Twice," Alain Badiou asks how to think about the catastrophes of the Cultural Revolution for a history of our time. A year prior to "Love," in Le Marxiste-Leniniste, a journal produced by Badiou and his Parisian Maoist colleagues in the Group for the Foundation of the Union of Communists of France Marxist-Leninist (or UCFML), the 1981 introduction had stated about the Chinese political catastrophe that "we carry their questions rather than their outcomes."

Alain Badiou is one of the most important philosophers living today. This special issue puts the question of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (GPCR) directly into French philosophy. How to "love" the Chinese Cultural Revolution and how to "carry" what it poses for our times are Badiou's questions. Lorenzo Chiesa, Bruno Bosteels, Alessandro Russo, and Alberto Toscano, who are scholars, interpreters, adapters, and translators of Badiou's philosophy and engagement with Communist revolution, consider what use this philosophy is for us. They have posed these questions through what they have chosen to translate and to interpret, and in the ways they creatively develop core Badiou methods of analysis and use them to innovative effect. Of course, how Badiou's unfolding work remains entrenched in the international political uprisings of forty years ago and how it contributes to our grasping the legacy of the sixties are problems among progressive scholars internationally.

This special issue unfolds in several parts. The first set of articles asks, with Badiou, "Why?" Why is the Cultural Revolution a pivotal question for political philosophy and the history of Marxism? Written in 2002, "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?" opens by asking "what gives unity to a politics, if it is not directly guaranteed by the formal unity of the state?" Though the essay is preoccupied with laying out a correct sequence of events for understanding both Maoism's catastrophic failures and the lessons to be drawn from them, the essay pursues the question of a post-Maoist politics by considering precisely what Maoism did; how did it do cultural revolution? What strikes Badiou now as significant is the political inventiveness of the Cultural Revolution and, in its tragic outcome, its thorough delegitimation of the party in politics. Badiou's criteria are not stability, civility, or order but the new, the invented, the created, the contradictory. Reordering what he sees as the central "sequence" of significant events in the political uprising of elite leaders in the Chinese Communist Party and universities, Badiou reperiodizes and retells the history of 1966–68 through an imminent staging of contradiction itself. Foremost among these is the name of "Mao" or the cult of personality. No politics is possible in the prison house of the party-state, he argues, but this truism stands now precisely because of the catastrophic events of the GPCR.

The 1981 "Maoism: A Stage of Marxism," a collective essay penned by the UCFML, abridges the Badiou group's positions between 1968 and the early 1980s. These included the theses that Maoism is a stage of post-Leninism, that the Cultural Revolution stands in the same position within Marxism as the Paris Commune does for its historical period, and that all Marxists after the Cultural Revolution are Maoists, because of and also in spite of what had happened in China. The decision to include translations of documents such as this one, which shows the UCFML in its collective process of stocktaking, is taken to illustrate the historicity of Badiou's position and the continuous engagement that he, Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, and the other core members of the group have had with Maoist theory and practice. The essay "Maoism, Marxism of Our Time" brings into sharp focus the other axis of the UCFML and Badiou's politics, Maoism in France. May '68 in France opened up to European Marxists a political possibility to be a Maoist revolutionary, the document argues, which is to say the chance to turn a "mass revolt" in Europe into "proletarian revolution."

Yet it was 1976. No amount of bold cap letters, a symptom of the times, announcing the...