Badiou: Unreformed, Unbowed

Critical Inquiry is preparing to publish an interview with Badiou on the rather grand topic of philosophy's relevance to politics. The interview is noteworthy, although perhaps mostly for an accessible take on what is presently on the mind of the former philosophy chair at the ENS. While refusing any sort of renunciation of old-guard communism, Badiou appears to have largely redefined the term in his usage to refer to more 'cultural struggles'—à la Laclau. The interview also gives treatment to Real Existing Socialism—Badiou is critical of Leninist praxis—and to the thinker's hopes and fears for the communist project at present. Here's part of what he has to say about events and the socialist possibility in the Middle East:

The attacks of September 11, for example, were not accompanied by any political discourse addressed to the entire world, nor with any declaration of war—such declarations are the condition for politics. What we have instead is a violent destabilization whose concept is ungraspable. The only declarations that followed the event were completely rooted in a religious particularism that I read as exclusively negative. I won’t have anything to do with this type of practice.

I don’t confuse this phenomenon with the theological character of certain mass organizations in the Middle East. But I do think that the fact that the organizations that are the most active and most rooted in the “people” are of this type is part of what I have been calling the contemporary crisis of negation. In this case, religion presents itself as the surrogate for something else that has not been found, something that should be universalizable, should be able to uproot itself from the particularity of religious limits. It is for this reason, I think, that Marx still seems so current. Communism, according to Marx, is essentially internationalist in character. With religious dogmatism, in this case with Shia Islam, we are confronted with a collective messianism that I know and recognize is quite powerful but which is, finally, intrinsically limited. We need to consider these phenomena on their own terms, but also understand their limitations. I think these movements represent a passage that bears witness, in a very vivid way, to the limits of our thought on the problems of the negative, critique and political organization.