Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider
Hegel, Mao, Badiou and the subject as outsider
David Morgan, University of Newcastle
(paper presented at the 2009 Joint Conference of the Society for European Philosophy and the Forum for European Philosophy, University of Wales Institute, Cardiff. 27-29 August 2009.)
Abstract:
Badiou’s project in Theory of the Subject can be read as an appraisal of Hegel’s dialectics in the light of Mao’s quite different dialectical approach as laid out in On Practice, On Contradiction and as further developed in the Cultural Revolution. But Badiou makes key changes in Mao’s terminology and uses this new terminology to develop a distinct revision of classical Marxism and a misreading of Mao. In Theory of the Subject, the contradiction between the forces of production and the relations of production is treated as essentially passive and structural, and the role of driving force in history is assigned to the proletariat in their confrontation with the bourgeoisie. However, when this confrontation is not understood as grounded in the creativity and initiative unleashed in productive activity, there are two consequences for Badiou’s theory of the subject, consequences that are carried over into his later work in Being and Event, and Logics of Worlds:
a) The subject is located outside the structure of the situation. In Theory of the Subject, this is described as the contradiction between the splace and the outplace.
b) The subject is essentially passive, reacting to oppression and exploitation, rather than driven by its own creative impulses.
Thus Badiou is unable to give an account of structural change that arises out of empirically identifiable internal forces and that places the subject at centre of this process.
For the complete paper, go to http://davidpalestine.wordpress.com/hegel-mao-badiou/ on this blog
the church of the universal wow!
When you try to get back to the beginning, to what happened before things
started happening, you get to the point where there is no why. Science doesn’t
have an answer to this because it isn’t really a question. It’s bigger than a question.
All you can do is say WOW!
postscript
leibnitz asked why are there things rather than nothing?
why not? = the end of theology
there is only science and wow
everything else is gilding the lily
and actually, even gilding the lily is part of the wow
