Metapolitics in Badiou’s sense is to be distinguished from political
theory. It involves thinking of a higher-order sort than the former (hence the meta–
prefix) and it is unapologetically normative or partisan. This is not to say
that anything akin to a political program is offered, although there is
something in the style of writing that is occasionally reminiscent of a draft
resolution at a party conference. Politics itself is taken by Badiou to be
about rupture and is left to the activist, to the militant. By contrast, metapolitics
does not presume to dictate the right course of action. Rather, it seeks to
register at the level of philosophy what is made possible by the political
condition. Because of this, metapolitics does not involve any totalizing theory
to be used in the hands of a guiding elite or a historical subject. It is more
of a barometer.

Badiou is also adamant that what he means by ‘metapolitics’ is not
political philosophy. "One of the core demands of contemporary thought is
to have done with ‘political philosophy’." This is a problematic claim to
make and a difficult one to sustain. But it is made without apology. Through
set-piece sections drawing upon the work of Sylvain Lazarus, Althusser and
Jacques Rancière, the text aims at a certain kind of rupture. It tries to set
political philosophy at a distance and thereby recover the idea of politics as
a ‘truth procedure’.

A rejection of political philosophy on such grounds is problematic for
at least two reasons. Firstly, while the idea of truth has been subject to
various (now perhaps receding) assaults at the hands of ‘postmodernism’, it is
not obvious that political philosophy per se has ever threatened the
pursuit of truth. Badiou disagrees. If political philosophy concerns itself
with ‘the political’ in the sense of theorizing the state, then it risks
becoming a mere adjunct of the state, which for all practical Western purposes
amounts to collapsing into parliamentarism. And this, for Badiou, is just what
we must not do. Moreover, if political philosophy is an adjunct of
parliamentarism, then there is a sense in which its proper business is with the
mythology of consensus, rather than truth. "As soon as politics finds its
rightful place in public opinion it goes without saying that the theme of truth
is excluded from it."

Here, I find it difficult not to concede that Badiou has a point, even
if a limited one. The idea of consensus does seem to have registered at a
philosophical level, not only in postmodern hostility towards the very idea of
truth, but also in more ‘analytic’ treatments of the latter concept which have
sought to retain the label of ‘truth’ but without much substance to it. The
claim that ‘x is true if and only if a normal competent observer would assent
to x’ is not altogether unfamiliar in analytic literature even if, as a
formulation, it fails to do full justice to what we might call
response-dependence accounts of truth. In short, politics of the parliamentary,
consensual sort seems to provide an irresistible, if at times covert, model for
all manner of philosophical accounts of the self and truth in various different
domains.

A second, and perhaps more intractable problem for Badiou is that the
metapolitical standpoint that he puts in place of political philosophy looks
suspiciously like a version of it. The very idea of registering the political
condition through philosophy has a clear (and acknowledged) continuity with
Althusser’s project of making sense of politics ‘through its immanent effects
within philosophical activity’. This again makes Badiou’s metapolitics look
like political philosophy of a special non-statist sort.

How special or peculiar Badiou’s standpoint is will come down, in part,
to what is involved in registering a philosophical effect of politics. At least
in part it seems to involve arguing for the primacy of one category over
another and for one understanding of a category over a different understanding
of it (and doing so as a way of registering political events). What Badiou
specifically argues for is a downgrading of rights, as the kind of concern that
might lead us towards a preoccupation with the state and with programs for its
reform. He notes that just such a focus on rights figured prominently in the
New Philosophies, the parliamentary or ‘Thermidorian’ reaction to the
disappointment of post-1968 hopes. The point of this historical metaphor of
Thermidor is that the right-wing philosophical current in question was led by
disillusioned leftists who had embraced parliamentary democracy with something
of a vengeance.

Against such a focus upon rights, as the
cornerstone of the West’s imagined moral superiority, Badiou champions justice
and he appeals to Saint-Just and the moment-to-moment struggle for virtue as a
counterbalance to Thermidor. Here, Badiou is at his most fascinating as he
attempts to develop a workable understanding of the concept of justice that
severs it from any statist ideal. Our temptation is to understand justice in
terms of the just state and what it would enforce, but "justice, which is
the philosophical name for the egalitarian political maxim, cannot be
defined".

Such an appeal to maxims does, however, take Badiou into identifiably
Kantian political philosophy, with its concern for the universal and for
equality but without Kant’s presupposition of a final end-point or kingdom of
ends. For Badiou, "equality is not an objective of action, it is an axiom’
and its axiomatic status does not relate to any regulative ideal of what a good
state would be like. Equality can no longer be understood as something
‘realized, something that might serve as part of a program for a self-styled
Marxist organization or an electoral machine promising so much equality
in return for electoral support.

Instead,
equality is to be ‘practiced’ and defended on a localized, ongoing basis (the
moment-to-moment emphasis drawn from Sait-Just). "In politics, let us
strive to be militants of restricted action."  In the face of politics of this sort, Badiou claims that the
state itself ceases to be a measureless dominating abstraction and is brought
down to earth, it becomes something tangible, something to which a finite
measure can be put. Badiou, ever the mathematician, toys with some
formalizations for this claim but they are, thankfully, not too obtrusive.

Whether or not
this text ultimately conforms to its own rhetoric of achieving a rupture with
political philosophy is not clear. Either way, it is a challenging defense of,
and attempt to rethink, the relevance of egalitarianism in the (perhaps
permanent) absence of any possibility for establishing a good society. It is
not exactly light bedtime reading but a difficult and disturbing work, and
perhaps an important one. It deserves the final word. "Despite its rarity,
politics — and hence democracy- has existed, exists and will exist. And
alongside it, under its demanding condition, metapolitics — which is what a
philosophy declares, with its own effects in mind, to be worthy of the name
‘politics’."

© 2005 Tony Milligan

Tony Milligan completed his doctorate on Iris
Murdoch at Glasgow University, and currently tutors in philosophy both there
and with various other bodies such as the Centre for Lifelong Learning at
Strathclyde.

Categories: Philosophical