The Dialectics of the "Red Years": The Matrix of Scission and the Politicity of Theory in Alain Badiou
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15691/0718-5448Vol5Iss2a386Keywords:
Structure, History, Politics, Subject, StrategyAbstract
In this paper I explore Badiou’s construction of dialectics during the "red years" (1966-1976). I intend to highlight the political character of dialectics on the basis of a double hypothesis. First, that the Badiouan construction of dialectics provides an immanent and localist answer to the problem of the relation between structure and history. In this sense, I will organize Badiou's response to this problematic on the basis of his adoption of the principle of scission in Theory of the Subject [1982], in order to show the extent to which this specific construction comprises of a series of shifts in the relationship between structural and historical dialectics. The second hypothesis regarding Badiou’s approach is that such a dialectical construction remains on a political plane while at the same time restricting strategic questions to a speculative register. I will argue that the Badiouan dialectic elaborates the relation between structure and history via an affirmation of militant subjectivity, which might also be complemented with an engagement with effective history and a study of emancipatory struggles.
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