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37 2 One Must Have Confidence That the Other Does Not Exist: Select Preconditions for Events and Acts in Contemporary Circumstances§6 Impotent Powers: Illusions of Statist Potency In his early Maoist reflections on politics and ideology from the 1970s, Badiou decisively denounces the tendency of many French theorists of the period to portray statist power as a monolithic colossus overshadowing the relatively weak, feeble masses, disparate and dispersed crowds whose sole option for defanged rebellion is the “intimate revolt” of desiring away in the dark corners and recesses of their depoliticized libidinal economies.1 He vehemently asserts that Marxism requires seeing things the other way around: statist power is inherently fragile and reactionary in the face of the masses2 (an assertion echoing key statements from Mao’s “little red book,” such as “We must never be cowed by the bluster of reactionaries”3 and “We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong”).4 Instead of positing the ideological and material domination of the alliance between capital and state as the point of departure for political analyses, a proper Marxist, according to Badiou, must begin with an opposed axiom: “It is resistance which is the secret of domination.”5 A few years later, inThéorie du sujet, Badiou explicitly links this line of thought with Mao’s dictum that one must have confidence in the masses.6 In this vein, Badiou maintains that “in the matter of Marxist politics and the class subject, the one manner of giving up is to lose confidence.”7 He then proceeds to the statement that “the essence of confidence is having confidence in confidence.”8 For Lacan, there is no Other of the Other, truth of the truth, or act of the act (see chapter 4, section 19). However, an essential feature of Lacanian desire is its reflexive character: as Lacan puts it in the seventh seminar, “desire . . . is always desire in the second degree, desire of desire.”9 (Along these lines, 38 A L A I N B A D I O U Badiou speaks of the “pure desire”10 moving a subject-of-an-event as “the desire of a desire,”11 the subjective willing of the willful pursuit of the implications of an event-revealed truth.) Put differently, Lacan’s 1959 proposition regarding the modes of desire peculiar to the subjectivity of speaking beings alleges that there is only desire of desire (of desire . . .). Badiou says something similar about confidence. On the basis of this, one could contend that theoretical confidence in “communist” qua genericegalitarian political projects must be redoubled and reinforced by a corresponding practical confidence surging forth out of the intermingled sources of will and affect. (For more on the place of the political will with respect to both theory and practice, see appendix A below.) A key matter to be examined critically here is what sorts of influences tying politics to events might have on the determination of political agents, a determination relying upon specific forms of courage. To ask a question in Badiouian terms that Badiou doesn’t pose: what would be the likely effects of Badiou’s metapolitics on politics? If Badiou succeeds in gaining an audience among practitioners of politics, then, contrary to his insistence that political practices condition philosophical theories and not vice versa, it’s reasonable to anticipate that there will be extra-philosophical repercussions generated by a reciprocal counterconditioning of politics by (Badiouian) metapolitics. That the metapolitical can or should remain entirely conditioned without being in the least bit conditioning relative to the political is not only of questionable desirability (especially from any number of Marxist perspectives)—it’s utterly unrealistic to expect, unless one pathetically and pessimistically assumes in advance the complete inefficacy and irrelevance of one’s theorizations apropos politics. And even then, whether or not theories conditioned by practices end up becoming theories that condition practices is far from being under the sole authoritative control of the philosophical metapolitician . As mentioned earlier, Being and Event uses the word state in two overlapping senses: on the one hand, the ontological-phenomenological conception of the state as the representational architecture of a stateof -the-situation (or, in the language of Logiques des mondes, the transcendental regime of a world); and, on the other hand, the state according to the everyday understanding of the word as referring to the institutional apparatus of...

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