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Whatsapp Alain Badiou on love, the revolution, and the contradictions that could unmake the modern liberal state.

Alain Badiou is one of the best-known French philosophers alive today. He was at the barricades during the 1968 Paris uprisings, and as he approaches 80, Badiou retains his commitment to revolution. He speaks to Joe Gelonesi about his views on contemporary political change.

French philosopher Alain Badiou is a contemporary of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze, but unlike his contemporaries, his intellectual star has waxed and waned over the past four decades.

The question of how to change the world is a very complex one ... First there needs to be a strategic vision—an idea common to all the actors. Today, that does not exist.

Despite this, the philosopher’s zeal for connecting thought to action has not been diminished, and Badiou continues to play his part of the driven continental philosopher pitted against the contradictions of the world.

Approaching 80, Badiou is one of the last philosophers of the Paris uprisings, and still seriously in the game.

Alain Badiou has just completed an Australian tour that was packed with seminars, masterclasses and public lectures. With charm and gregariousness, Badiou has little difficulty in attracting followers, with his well-attended Australian events attesting to this septuagenarian’s pulling power.

Oliver Feltham has been watching and studying Badiou closely for some years. The Paris-based Australian scholar recounts how in his early years at university he became hooked on the philosopher’s thinking.

‘I came across his work as an undergraduate. I had learnt just enough French to put the French word for event into the database and this book popped up. I went down to the Fisher stack [a University of Sydney library] and pulled it out. It was very thick. I could just work out that it was called—Being and Event. It looked fascinating.’

Feltham would later seek out Badiou in Paris.

‘I knew where Derrida was giving his classes, and I was already attending those, but I was told about this other philosopher who was far more radical, with far younger people going along,' he recalls.

'I turned up and here was this guy wearing a flannelette shirt, a cardigan, smoking cigarettes furiously. People were handing out political pamphlets in the actual lecture. There was far more noise and far more life.’

Feltham was fascinated by Badiou’s unwavering radical commitment. It seemed to him that this revolutionary had lost none of his theoretical fervour in the face of the triumph of history, as Francis Fukuyama would have it.

Feltham went on to translate some of Badiou’s most influential works, including the book he pulled from the stack—Badiou's magnum opus, Being and Event. He has closely studied Badiou’s path through a decade of turbulence culminating in the disorder and clamour of May 1968.

Related: How capitalism failed the Arab world

As an original soixante-huitards at the barricades, Badiou decided early on that thought and action should not be strangers. As Feltham describes it, 1968 is etched deep in Badiou’s political psyche.

‘His understanding of politics was formed by a botched event—May ‘68. He was already active, he was protesting against the Algerian war, running with comrades down the Boulevard Saint-Michelgetting beaten by police with their long batons,’ Feltham says.

‘But when May ‘68 happened, he suddenly saw a necessity to open up his own philosophy and to change the relationship between it and what was happening on the streets.’

For Badiou, the death of socialism as a practice has not meant the extinction of the idea. To the contrary, the idea in its purest form is still thinkable; and if it is still thinkable, it is still do-able. Though, the philosopher admits that it’s harder than it looks to get a foothold on all-conquering capitalism.

‘The question of the situation of the world today is a very complex and difficult question. A long historical sequence has finished. The question now is: what are the contradictions of the contemporary world if it is not between socialist estates and private property?’

Badiou is on the lookout for clues of where instability might arise, attempting to think against the grain of a system which does not readily admit to fissures of real disagreement.

‘It’s necessary to clearly understand the dominant ideology today. That dominant ideology is that there is no real contradiction. All these contradictions are inside the same world. No different orientation; no two worlds. Inside the one world there might be some differences but not a central contradiction.’

Badiou has cannily surveyed the faultiness in what appears to be the smooth surface of the modern democratic economy. He sees lurking just beneath the surface, tensions created by two antithetical forces.

‘I propose that the contemporary world is organised around two fundamental contradictions—not one but two—this is very important. The first is a theoretical and abstract contradiction: one side there is capitalism and on the other side there are the different types of socialism and communism.’

Communism in the post Berlin Wall era is a spent force but in Badiou’s reckoning, the idea cannot and will not be fully subsumed by the modern capitalist democratic state. It can still function as an opposite and equal force.

‘It is possible to organise the economy and social determinations without the domination of private property today. For historical reasons the idea of communism is very weak but at the theoretical level it is true always that there is something else [apart] from capitalism, and so the first contradiction is between communism and capitalism.’

Related: Cuban cuisine under communism

Badiou is at pains to point out that it is not the failed and bloody communism of Stalin and the USSR, but a more crystalline version which he believes can still be rescued.

‘I mean communism in its primitive sense, not of communism of the last century but the communism of Marx,’ he says.

Some would say that the pure version can never find success in practice because of the coercion that is required to steer all in the correct direction. Events of the 20th century tell that story well. However Badiou is undeterred from his position that the idea of communism can still work as the legitimate antithesis to the world we live in now.

There are no surprises here—a radical on revolutionary ideas. However his second contradiction sets up a curious and under-explored dialectic.

‘Today there is a second and very important contradiction: between modernity and tradition. It seems to me that during all the experiments of the social estates communism has been in relation to tradition—it was morally orthodox, had a conservative aesthetic, a taste for order and discipline and so on. The result is that modernity has been entirely on the side of the capitalist world and today we have this contradiction at a very big scale.'

'To understand the world today we must understand the two contradictions: capitalism versus communism on one side and tradition and modernity—which is very active today—on the other side.’

Badiou identifies tradition as an enigma in the modern setting: religion, convention and other forms pre-modern arrangements show little sign of abating in the face of a voracious newness. Here, he feels is the source for true irruptive consequences, but latent contradiction alone won’t do. In fact, Badiou sees real change based on a tripartite foundation.

‘The question of how to change the world is a very complex one. When there is a new proposition in the concrete world there is always three dimensions not one. First there needs to be a strategic vision—an idea common to all the actors. Today, that does not exist. Most people today think that capitalism is here for many centuries to come. In the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street there is no strategic idea; they are built on negative conviction. We want something else and so on, but there is no clear opposition common to all. The second point is that uprising and revolt by itself cannot change the situation.’

‘This is why we have the third necessity: the question of organisation. And this is always the most obscure question in the field of politics because it’s the question between action and thinking.’

The eternal political conundrum: converting thought to action. For Badiou it has dogged him for decades and with a characteristic cheeky aside he tells me that when he finds the answer I will be the first to be know. Playfully evasive—yes, but you can be sure he’s not jesting about continuing his quest to find a way to link the two without the grim results of past movements.

‘We must invent a new paradigm, a new conception of the organisation which is less military, less strict, and less centralised. It needs to nearer to the movement, but being close to the movement is not to be confused with the movement. The organisation cannot disappear into the movement. We know that. And we know also that if the organisation is without the movement, the organisation and the movement will become the same thing: this is [the failed] history of socialism.’

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