Back to the Subject?

In times when leaders of major tech companies are able to exercise unprecedented influence over economic, social and political processes, the question of political subjectivity is, once again, back on the table. At least some constituencies believe that corporate leadership is the only option left for addressing multiple global crises and achieving progressive goals given the inaction of public actors. Perhaps, some form of visionary corporate agency relying on groundbreaking scientific discoveries may even come close to what Alain Badiou describes as political subjectivity. This would support the thesis that a qualitatively different kind of global corporate leadership may currently be emerging from the anonymous transnational elites of old (Varoufakis 2023).

Yet, taking a clue from Alain Badiou, one would likely respond that forms of corporate hyper-agency resting on power relations and problem-solving capabilities should not be confused with subjectivity proper, which must be grounded on a nexus between the subject and political truth. Corporate action remains trapped within dynamics of power and may turn out to be ‘reactive’ even when it supposedly moves beyond self-interest to embrace progressive global causes. For Badiou, political subjectivity should not be mistaken for an ability to solve problems, since the production and reproduction of crises is business as usual (Badiou and Gauchet 2016c: 147). In his view, there cannot be anything new under the sun as long as the ‘state of the situation’ is not radically challenged and the question of universalist emancipation is tackled in the first place.

This article shows that Badiou offers a conceptual toolkit for engaging critically with the question of subjectivity at present. His philosophy both allows making sense of ordinary life-experiences of evental moments and enables critique of elitist forms of political and corporate leadership. If there is a political horlieu or event as Badiou contends, it must generate a space for intersectional struggles including the ‘quasi-totality’ of the people. The evental moment must also be undecidable and indiscernible, since the genuine subject experiences not full certainty but a normative void, the collapse of the norms available within a ‘state of the situation’. Finally, subjective action must be guided by a project of radical equality. Anything short of this would fall back into ordinary politics. Following Badiou, I do not seek to ‘demonstrate’ that the subject or the event ‘exist’ but instead suggest that it is possible to believe in the event and act accordingly.

Badiou first provided a book-length treatment of the matter in Theory of the Subject (TS) of 1982, when most of his colleagues in France and abroad discounted the concept of the subject as a metaphysical construction. When Badiou published a Theory of the Subject, Natacha Michel wrote a review in which she characterised Badiou's book as a remarkable feat given the coeval context (Michel 2011a; 2011b). In later years and to the present day, Badiou continued discussing political subjectivity and partly revised the view taken in TS. Accordingly, this article examines TS along with Badiou's major works, including Being and Event (BE), Axiomatic Theory of the Subject (ATS), Logic of Worlds (LW) and The Immanence of Truths (IT), as well as other relevant writings. The article accounts for both continuities and discontinuities between TS and Badiou's later works.

To be sure, Badiou has not been immune from criticism concerning his ideological stance, in particular his support for Maoism and the related justification of violent political action, as well as the elitism that allegedly characterises his philosophy. These critiques have a long pedigree. For example, Jean-François Baré in an early critical review of Badiou and François Balmès’ De l'idéologie dismissed the authors’ commitment to the proletariat and the party as sources of alleged truth (Baré 1978: 211); Antonio Calcagno (2008) has stressed that Badiou's philosophy may justify political oppression, running counter to the egalitarianism that Badiou is supposed to champion; Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça has noted the aprioristic nature of some of Badiou's normative claims and the cavalier manner in which Badiou distinguishes between genuine and untruthful forms of subjectivity (2014); Brent Adkins has taken a Deleuzian perspective to show that Badiou's philosophy is overly and needlessly reliant on the concept of truth (2015). Within the French academic context, François Laruelle (2011) and Mehdi Belhaj Kacem (2011) have dismissed the whole of Badiou's thought as deeply authoritarian.

While it would be beyond the scope of the present inquiry to engage with the specific claims of these and other authors, the key issues raised by the critics regarding truth, ideology, violence and Badiou's relation to Maoism are discussed throughout. In dealing with these issues, I highlight that Badiou's position has evolved significantly over time, and this evolution must be taken into account for a thorough assessment of his thought. Most importantly, his later work no longer condones political violence. At the theoretical level, it offers an increasingly universalist and inclusive outlook that enables the reader to benefit from Badiou's theoretical insights without buying into specific political strategies and ideologies. This is a direct consequence of Badiou's use of concepts such as undecidability, indiscernibility and the generic as entailing that neither the identity nor the political agenda of the subject can be pre-determined. At the empirical level, it is important to note that one of the most ubiquitous universalist figures of resistance in Badiou's late work is the sans-papier, who epitomises the conditions of marginalisation, exclusion, rightlessness and sometimes statelessness. The sans-papiers are an utterly rejected multiplicity, present yet not represented (BE: 194). Their struggle for social inclusion is a peaceful, non-violent struggle.

In terms of structure, the second section of the article discusses how the subject emerges by investigating the relation between horlieu and truth, as well as horlieu and the world. Section three focuses Badiou's conceptualisation of common, intersectional struggles carried out by collective subjects consisting of the ‘quasi-totality’ of the people. The following section applies Badiou's distinction between faithful, reactive and obscure subjects to the issue of the potential emergence of corporate subjectivities in an age characterised by technological and scientific breakthroughs. Section five examines Badiou's concept of undecidability as allowing genuine subjectivity to emerge. The section that follows focuses on the importance of Badiou's defence of equality as a political compass for the subject. The final section concludes by summarising the main points.

The Emergence of the Subject

For Badiou (2006), truth unveils itself in four domains – politics, art, love and science – thus generating a variety of individual and collective subjects as well as non-human subjects, as long as they function as material supports for a variety of truths. Since, in Badiou's view, truths are historically visible occurrences, they need humans, bodies and materialities (in the case of the work of art) to be made visible in the world (ATS: 260). In his latest formulation, Badiou notes that truths can be defined as immanent because they are created by ‘a human subject, personal or impersonal, individual or collective’ (IT: 21).¹ Thus, Badiou recovers the concept of truth but situates it within a non-metaphysical dimension. For him, truths are created through human agency in the particular fields of action of politics, art, love and science.

In his new preface to ATS, Badiou states that ‘the subject . . . is what makes a process out of the consequences of an event. . . . A subject is what takes hold of the excess [that the event is] and draws from it consequences in the world’ (ATS: 9).² In some passages there is a more ordinary way in which Badiou understands the subject as any human individual (ATS: 206; IT: 81), but he constantly qualifies as the ‘truthful’ subject only the one who is faithful to the event. This is the process whereby the ‘individual’ becomes an actual faithful ‘subject’ (IT: 23). Still the ontological status of the subject can only be asserted, rather than demonstrated by empirical or rational proof. Consequently, in ATS, Badiou states that the theory of the subject is axiomatic and cannot be otherwise (ATS: 13). In LW he develops a ‘formal’, non-empirical theory of the subject (LW: 51). This differentiates Badiou's philosophical standpoint not only from (non-analytic) psychology and empirical social and political sciences, but also from strands of social theory that reevaluate human agency without feeling the need to establish a connection between agency and truth-based subjectivity (Giddens 1984). Badiou's subject may be an actor endowed with strong agency and able to transform its social environment – as a political and corporate leader could – but it is simultaneously much more than that. The subject's agency matters since it is evental and truly challenges the very foundations of the existing social order. Badiou's subject does not negotiate with but radically defies social structures in the name of equality.

Still, Badiou points out that the emergence of truths and subjectivities is rarely visible in the world given the predominance of instrumentalism and entrenched institutional practices. He views ordinary political reality as a normalised condition only occasionally fractured by exceptional moments of resistance and decision that display the emergence of the subject. In TS he calls this the dichotomy of esplace and horlieu. Esplace and horlieu in TS correspond to the ‘state of the situation’ and the ‘evental site’ in Badiou's later work (Bosteels 2003: 130). Both the horlieu and the evental site are loci of subjective action. In BE, Badiou expands on the previous conceptualisation by describing the evental site as the (non)location of the ab-normal, unstable and anti-natural (BE: 193). It is the genuinely historical in opposition to the naturally given and factual.

In TS, though, Badiou is still experimenting. In a ‘terminological remark’ he begins by explaining that the terms of social dialectics are force and esplace (force vs ‘place of emplacement’) (TS: 28). After a few lines he proposes a fully topological dialectic between the horlieu (the ‘outplace’) and the esplace (TS: 28). This topological vocabulary is retained in the tension between the ‘state of the situation’ and the ‘evental site’ in BE.

For some, the differentiation between horlieu and esplace may appear to be an undue mystification of otherwise explainable political, social and economic processes. Badiou would readily recognise the importance of explanation in analysing social phenomena, not least because it was heavily relied on by the Marxist tradition he subscribes to and because he recognises that science is one of the areas in which truth manifests itself. Yet, precisely because Badiou highlights the evental character of scientific breakthroughs as revolutionising conventional science, he assumes that only some explanations count as being truthful. While revolutionary explanations of social phenomena can be part of a truth process, they may gradually turn into extenuated statements within established discourses. In IT, Badiou describes the three-stage process that leads from ‘truth’ to ‘knowledge’ (as mere savoir, with reference to Foucault) and eventually sheer ‘routine’ (IT: 435). Thus, the problem with the construction of forms of savoir, at all levels, not only in history and the social sciences, may be what Badiou calls the ‘covering up’ of an initial horlieu, so that the event can no longer be recognised as a moment of rupture and a source of political inspiration. Ontology precisely helps highlight the exceptionality of the horlieu, which might vanish within the prevailing discourses of a ‘state of the situation’. This remains one of the most powerful and hopeful messages in Badiou's philosophy.

Importantly, Badiou does not situate the horlieu in a noumenal or transcendent dimension that allows absolute freedom of decision. In the field of politics, which deals with collective subjects in addition to individual ones, absolute freedom cannot sustain a truth process. In Badiou's work, the collective subject is conceptualised not as a free agent but rather as a group unified by common fidelity to an event. This approach differs from contemporary theories of collective intentionality that tend to stress the importance of individuals to the formation of collective will and the possibility of a shared sense of participation in democratic decision-making procedures (List and Pettit 2011; Tuomela 2013). Yet, while Badiou prefers to avoid discussing freedom, he does not dismiss intentionality in the same breath. Indeed, for him intentionality understood as a political project supported by fidelity to the event is key to distinguishing genuine political subjectivity from mere political agency. In his discussion of the Arab Spring, Badiou notes that insurgents cannot give rise to a historic event unless they move beyond the stage of sheer, common opposition to the ruler and attempt to articulate a ‘partly universalisable intention’ (Badiou 2011b: 41).³ In his view, it is under these circumstances that it is possible to speak of the ‘people’ as a political subject (Badiou 2015).

As Badiou suggested in an interview given in the aftermath of the wave of repression that followed the Arab Spring, the failure of the uprisings as emancipatory projects stemmed from the lack of such universalisable popular intentionality (Musso 2013). It is important to emphasise that Badiou does not argue that all members of the collective must have the same motivations for joining the struggle, only that they must share a minimum level of ideal political intentionality. Badiou's emphasis on the need to universalise the struggle with regard to the Arab Spring is significant as it shows that his philosophy, at least in its latest iterations, has the potential to move beyond the conventional conflict between proletariat and capital. In TS, Badiou made the uncompromising, Lacanian-sounding statement that ‘there is no class relation’ (TS: 145), and the whole of TS was imbued with the logic of class antagonism. This language cannot capture complex social struggles in the present day, as Badiou seems to recognise in his views on the Arab Spring.

In explaining the failure of the Arab Spring as resulting from its lack of universality, Badiou does not oppose possible historical and sociological interpretations of political struggles but offers an alternative angle for exploring collective identity. In fact, his view of insurgent agency is perfectly compatible with social research on revolution and civil war, which draws attention to the variety of motivations that support collective intentionality (Schlichte 2009; Tilly 2003). From a philosophical perspective, however, the key question is not whether some past occurrence can be explained accurately or described historically by reference to categories such as causation and relationality, but whether that occurrence qualifies as evental, that is, whether a project of universality and equality had been visible within it. To be sure, identifying universalist ideals in past moments of history entails acquaintance with the historical context, yet this is not sufficient. Historical work typically produces elaborate narratives of entanglement and multifaceted models of explanation concerning relations within the esplace, leaving the question of the horlieu unanswered.

Now the question arises of how the political subject relates to a political event. As becomes increasingly clear in Badiou's trajectory from BE to LW and IT, the relation between the subject and the event is circular. Badiou sees the event as expressed through subjectivity, and the subject as the necessary condition for the concrete emergence of the event (Palti 2003: 471). This dialectic echoes classical theological discussions, which go back to Saint Paul, on the relationship between the respective efficacy of grace and works for salvation. Commenting on Saint Paul, Badiou pleads for subjective action precisely on the grounds that ‘waiting is pointless, for it is of the essence of the event not to be proceeded by any sign, and to catch us unawares with its grace, regardless of our vigilance’ (Badiou 2003b: 111).⁴ To qualify as truthful, subjective action needs the event as much as the event needs subjective action to enter the world. This circularity is further visible in Badiou's frequent historical illustrations of truth processes. He postulates that the political subject must be inspired by some historical precedent of truth, typically a major social upheaval, but the subject summoned by this event in turn becomes an exemplary figure and a source of inspiration for future events. In ATS, Badiou states that that the subject is that which ‘draws the consequences of an event’,⁵ yet by drawing these consequences the subject creates a new event (ATS: 9). In this respect, the event itself depends on the existence of the subject. While ontologically the event may be thought as prior to the subject, what occurs historically is a process of co-constitution of subject and event.

In addition to the relation between subject and event, a key relation that Badiou explores is the one between event and ‘state of the situation’, or horlieu and esplace. In TS he clearly stressed the conflictual relation between horlieu and esplace, that is, the world. In the opening pages of the book, Badiou engages with Hegelian logic and the Heideggerian ontic/ontological distinction to demonstrate the primordial nature of difference and the impossibility, or fictitious nature, of metaphysical oneness, from which no variation and subjectivity can ever be deduced. Later in the book, he makes an additional step, this time following the Marxist tradition, as he assimilates ontological difference with social contradiction, thus introducing the need for ‘struggle’ – not only difference and plurality – to the world. This view comes with a rather fixed, static understanding of social actors. This is well illustrated in Badiou's critiques of Deleuze's ontology of the multiple as a reiteration of the metaphysics of oneness and sameness (TS: 40; Badiou 2008b: 104; Badiou 2012: 50). In TS, Badiou replaces the ontology of the multiple with an ontology of conflict between horlieu and esplace, between the subject and the surrounding world.

In LW, Badiou moves beyond this static image of the social as he thoroughly examines the phenomenological conditions of the possibility of the excess taking shape in the world. This phenomenological analysis is significant especially since it reveals truth to be a process, not only an exception. For truth to arise in the world, there must be fidelity to a past political event, and this fidelity generates a process whereby the subject endeavours to assert the meaning of that event. In response to his critics, Badiou makes it clear that truth is not a miracle to be awaited but rather ‘an undertaking; it is a process made possible by the event. . . . May ‘68 is far behind us, it's forgotten and its traces have almost disappeared. Yet, insofar as I do something, or that I have principles of action, these are in line with what took place then’ (Badiou and Tarby 2013: 12). This view has important ramifications. It means that truth is not a monopoly of exceptional individuals able to gain special access to it, but rather a common heritage that can be shared by a multiplicity of subjects. Whereas existentialist philosophy as expounded in TS came with aristocratic overtones, theorising truth as a process opens up a space for democratising truth.

But how to recognise the horlieu or the event? How can individuals and collectives be genuinely faithful to the event once it has occurred? In TS, these questions are addressed in a rather cavalier manner, since Badiou relies almost exclusively on the assumption that modern society is marked by the bourgeoisie/proletariat antagonism. The proletariat is the actual, ‘material’ subject of modern politics and it operates through the mediation of the party (TS: 259). Further, the party itself is internally split and must purge itself of bureaucrats and revisionists to fulfil a true revolution. Finally, successful political change requires the utter destruction of the existent and the construction of a new order. On the final page of TS, all this culminates in Badiou's nearly eschatological call to savour the ‘sour taste of uprising’, and in his cryptic ‘confidence in dictatorship in proportion to our concrete confidence . . . in the existence among the people of this subject through the effect of which the State shall be foreclosed’ (Badiou 2009: 331).⁶ Such assumptions and radical proposals for anti-state revolt are largely shelved in BE, but even in TS Badiou seems aware of the risks of conflating ideology and philosophy. In one of the last chapters, he acknowledges: ‘I certainly participated in the “cult of Mao” . . . during the second half of the 1960s and the early 1970s – years of grandeur if ever there were any. In retrospect, I have come to know its ridiculous aspects . . . But I confess that I feel no remorse whatsoever for having traversed this experience’ (Badiou 2009: 302).⁷ Here it should be noted that TS is a work composed between 1975 and 1979, when Maoism was going through its final phases, and which did not undergo much revision before publication in 1982. The abundance of contradictions in TS, in particular between Maoist enthusiasm and a more critical outlook, contrasts with the more systematic theory expounded by Badiou in his trilogy consisting of BE, LW and IT. The universalist potential of his philosophy is definitely more visible in the trilogy than in TS. Still, TS remains crucial to understanding Badiou's political experience and to spotting both continuities and discontinuities in his view of political subjectivity.

The Voice of the Quasi-Totality and the Possibility of Common Struggles

In light of the foregoing, Badiou is partly in line with a strand of contemporary political theory, including writers such as Laclau, Mouffe and Rancière, which stresses the distinction between ordinary politics or politicking on the one hand, and exceptional or genuine politics on the other (Laclau and Mouffe 2014; Mouffe 2013; Rancière 1995). Yet there are important dissimilarities between Badiou and other theorists concerning the nature of subjectivity as emerging from the space of political conflict. While Laclau and Mouffe argue that the lines of conflict are the product of identification processes and chains of equivalence that unite contingent alliances, Badiou defends an evental, not strategic, understanding of political battles. While Mouffe retains the concept of representation and notes that collective subjects are constructed discursively (Mouffe 2013: 125), Badiou believes that the subject emerges in the world through an event of truth. Badiou thus occupies a fairly radical place in the philosophical discussion of subjectivity, with Althusser standing at the other end of the spectrum, and Mouffe taking a moderate position. Badiou clearly disagrees with Althusser's constitutive theory of subjectivity, according to which the subject only comes into existence as a passive entity through interpellation by the authority. Badiou also rejects the view that the subject is created discursively, as Mouffe contends.

Here it is important to acknowledge the evolution of Badiou's thought on subjectivity: while in TS he still proposes a fairly static view of the antagonism between the proletariat and its enemies and rejects the idea of a ‘convergence of struggles’ (Badiou 2009: 44),⁸ in his later work he accepts the notion of a liaison des masses bringing together diverse actors all fighting for emancipation (Badiou 2008a: 42). Since the beginning of his trilogy, Badiou clearly broadens the spectrum of what counts as a subject or an ‘index’ of truth. He praises the revolts of Spartacus and Thomas Müntzer, writes books on Plato and Saint Paul, and discusses the revolutionary politics of Robespierre and Toussaint Louverture, which occurred well before the emergence of the Marxist tradition (Badiou 2010: 250). The commonality between the historical revolts mentioned by Badiou is expressed by their egalitarian and universalistic potential, an ideal principle that makes his philosophical system fairly flexible in accommodating different historical types of events and subjectivities. For Badiou, equality and political truth are synonymous (Badiou 2011a: 62; Badiou 2008a: 42).

In IT, Badiou underlines the importance of intersectional struggles and argues that a truthful collective subject is a configuration of various organisations of women, young people, workers, neighbourhoods and artists (IT: 334). I believe that this acknowledgement of the complexity and variety of current struggles is absolutely central in evaluating the importance of Badiou's later work. It shows that Badiou has, at the very least, come to terms with the need to theorise a more inclusive struggle, beyond the class war between proletariat and bourgeoisie. It is important to note that this evolution in political thinking is in line with Badiou's theoretical trajectory. Badiou's ontology of the multiple offers the best support for a universalistic understanding of equality as political truth. In his seminar of 1996–1998, Badiou explicitly posits that ‘if there is truth, it is for everyone’ (ATS: 124).

When women, young people, workers, neighbouroods, artists – along with the sans-papiers – all come together they display a power ‘comparable to that of the totality.’ They constitute ‘a part almost as large as the whole’ (IT: 335).⁹ Thus, Badiou believes that it is possible for large numbers of alternative forces to form a quasi-totality compared with the whole society and thereby destabilise entrenched social structures. Eventually, for Badiou, a truthful collective subject has at least three features: fidelity to the event; a truly universalistic project, making it an actual ‘99 percent’ of society struggling for common emancipation; and the capability to escape state and corporate capture, making it genuinely transformative.

While the mathematical language used by Badiou to advocate for intersectional struggles stresses the importance of ‘large numbers’, the quality of popular resistance is fundamental, too. A collective political subject should always include the truly marginalised and dispossessed, such as the sans-papiers to whom Badiou has devoted much of his political activity and who are not recognised as existing within a ‘state of the situation’. For Badiou, an evental political movement must truly include the voices of the unheard. The centrality of inclusiveness in Badiou's thought is visible, for instance, when he discusses Rousseau's concept of general will as an indiscernible subset in BE. Therein Badiou argues that an indiscernible subset of a political body must be viewed as a subset of the whole body, not as a fraction of the body (BE: 386). Badiou maintains that the general will must truly be inclusive of the totality of the people, which especially means including the most marginalised groups of the population. In his view, this would require moving away from traditional, state-centred politics that can only provide a semblance of inclusiveness and always reproduce some kind of exclusion. He criticises the ‘fetishism of universal suffrage’ (Badiou 2005b: 350)¹⁰ and the traditional principle of representation (Badiou 2005a).

The lack of connection between movement and totality is the reason why Badiou finds some social movements problematic. In LW, he dismisses the demonstrations in Seattle and Genoa where, in his view, ‘an idle youth participated, in its way, in the sinister gatherings of finance’ (LW: 409).¹¹ In La vraie vie he discounts Occupy Wall Street as a revolt of the middle class that lacked any genuine will to change the state of the situation (Badiou 2016b: 39). For Badiou, these movements were not transformative enough. This criticism resonates with Badiou's early remark on the Arab Spring, which failed due to a low degree of universality. Badiou's later work is increasingly concerned with making the struggle as universal – and therefore as inclusive – as possible.

To be sure, one may wonder whether the organisations in which Badiou has been involved, such as the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste (1969–1985) and the Organisation Politique (1985–2007), were radically different from the movements he criticises as being overly moderate and conventional. The founding of the Organisation Politique in the 1980s precisely represented an attempt by Badiou to distance himself from the revolutionary principles of Maoist ideology. The Organisation emerged programmatically as an extra-parliamentary movement of contestation but eventually acted in a similar way as many other civil society organisations, in particular by fighting for the legal rights of labour and immigrants (Hallward 2003: 238). The Organisation Politique has not been particularly effective in producing social change, yet its approach might originally have been fairly innovative, and still inspiring to date (Nail 2015).

Although Badiou defines the state as an enemy in TS, his organisation explicitly recognised the role of the state as the potential guarantor of the public space and the general interest. The organisation was also committed to promoting traditional constitutional reforms, transparency and the rule of law. In his late work, Badiou often highlights that the nature of the struggle has changed. He has increasingly shifted the target of his critique from state institutions to transnational capitalism or what he considers to be the ideologies of the day, such as the doctrine of humanitarian intervention (Badiou 2003a; 2011: 17). Although he does not go as far as to view the state as a possible bulwark against the logics of a global market, he no longer defines the state as the sole obstacle to emancipation. As noted earlier, this increasing attention to the novel nature of the contemporary political conjuncture is mirrored in developments in Badiou's ontology, in particular in his move away from the struggle between proletariat and esplace in TS towards an ontology of multiplicity in BE and LW.

At the level of theory, there is no inherent reason why Badiou's recent work should be read as justifying violent change. This motive was fully visible in TS, but Badiou's mathematical ontology as developed in and after BE no longer leads in that direction. It asserts the possibility of novelty, not the necessity of violence. Badiou makes this point explicitly in BE, where he distances himself from TS as to the relevance of violent destruction and death for meaningful political change:

I was, I must admit, a little misguided in Théorie du sujet concerning the theme of destruction. I still maintained, back then, the idea of an essential link between destruction and novelty. . . . If indiscernibility and power of death are confused, then there has been a failure to maintain the process of truth. The autonomy of the generic procedure excludes any thinking in terms of a ‘balance of power’. A ‘balance of power’ is a judgement of the encyclopaedia. . . . There is no link between deciding the undecidable and suppressing a presentation. (Badiou 2005b: 407–408)¹²

In the later phenomenological analysis proposed in LW, Badiou again refuses to provide a justification of political violence when talking of revolution, since in his view the category of destruction is an empirical category with no essential links to the event. The event might come with or without destruction, and reactionary politics might similarly be violent or non-violent. That the event and violence are not mutually dependent in Badiou's later thought is also proved by his increasing attention to non-political events, i.e., in art, science and love. In his treatment of politics, he still discusses violent change at length, not least since he maintains that the French Revolution constituted an enduring ideal for modern political events, but this does not entail that the means that were used to strive for equality during the Revolution should be used to realise equality now, in a vastly different historical context.

Although Badiou's interest in the complexity of relationality in the world becomes visible in his later work, especially in LW, TS already shows awareness of the internal complexity of the subject, if not of the subject's relations with the outside. In TS, a work openly supportive of socialism but heavily indebted to Lacan's notion of subjectivity, Badiou critiques the dogmatic socialist idea of the subject as embodied by an essentialised people and by leaders, such as Stalin and Mao, as transcendent history-making entities. For Badiou, the ‘People’ at most emerges as the product of the political project of a faithful collective agent that struggles for equality, not as a pre-determined and fixed entity (Badiou 2015). He challenges the notion of the people as totality, given its deep cleavages, as well as the notion of the subject ‘as simple center, point of origin, as constitutive of experience’. Thus ‘the theory of the subject is diametrically opposed to all elucidating transparency. Immediacy and self-presence are idealist attributes for what is introduced only with the aim of relinking the dialectical division’ (Badiou 2009: 180).¹³ Badiou therefore rejects the hypothesis that any political subject, including the proletariat, can clearly be defined as a concrete empirical entity (TS: 152).

It is not Badiou's point to ‘demonstrate’ that novelty can take place in the world. This would be an operation of the ‘encyclopedia’. He instead wishes to show that it is possible to believe, hope, bet and decide that novelty can happen. From his discussion of Pascal's wager to his treatment of Cantor's decision for the infinite, Badiou constantly stresses that novelty belongs to the sphere of ethical and political commitment and has little to do with facts. He does not want to tell the reader what exactly they should do and spell out the costs and benefits that might arise in complying with normative guidelines. He would rather reveal the philosophical conditions of possibility for living a meaningful life (Badiou 2016b).

One may not agree with how Badiou defines those conditions, but his project of a philosophy of the event makes sense if contextualised and understood as a counter-hegemonic move against the assumption that ‘there is no alternative’. The axiom that there are truths and subjects, and things can be done differently, is one of the most stimulating aspects of Badiou's philosophy. From the perspective of the marginalised, it is hard to think of a genuinely emancipatory political project that would not appear to be evental in some sense. For the marginalised and the dispossessed, genuine change necessarily entails a radical break with the ‘state of the situation’.

Faithful or Reactive Subjects? Corporations, Technology and the Social Question

As shown thus far, Badiou's theorisation of subjectivity in TS is still a work in progress. For instance, he first argues that the bourgeois class – not only the proletariat – is a political subject (TS: 60) and then corrects this view by defining the bourgeoisie as a non-subject, a mere location (lieu) in the social world (TS: 148). This contradiction results from Badiou attempting to develop a notion of the subject as both truthful and concrete. The bourgeois class appears to him as a concretely powerful political subject that does not fully meet the requirements of a truthful subject. In LW, Badiou resolves the issue by means of a three-fold characterisation of subjectivity: while there are different types of subjects, and all of them stand in a relationship to truth (by means of acceptance, denial or rejection), only the ‘faithful’ subject that accepts the truthfulness of the event is a genuine subject literally embodying truth (LW: 58). Conversely, the obscure subject seeks to erase truth entirely, as occurs in radical nationalist politics or religious fundamentalism, while the reactive subject denies truth (LW: 62 and 67). This reactive subjectivity refers to the range of moderate political positions presently compatible with liberal democracy. The reactive subject assumes that no ‘event’ has actually taken place in history and that, rather than idealising implausible egalitarianism, humanity should focus on achievable goals through properly designed institutions and rules. In Badiou's view, reactive subjectivity encompasses forms of robust agency endowed with financial and political power as well as marginalised groups that remain confident that gradual progress might be possible within existing political and economic structures (IT: 653). A sub-species of reactive subjectivity is ‘consumerist subjectivity’, which reduces social and political life to the notion of accessibility, profit-making and consumption (IT: 94).

Since true political subjectivity must have an organic connection with the masses (IT: 648), Badiou does not attribute any subjectivity to corporate power.¹⁴ Corporate leaders may show a strong agency in sociological terms but do not necessarily possess any subjectivity in the philosophical sense. Thus Badiou does not acknowledge that corporate leaders may be the ‘index’ of a political oeuvre, which he regards as an evental political project that displays an organic connection with a large number of ordinary people (IT: 648). Corporate power may boast an enviable connection with many people around the world, yet this nearly universal outreach and social influence does not compensate for the lack of truly evental, emancipatory projects underlying the conduct of corporations. Since, from Badiou's viewpoint, corporations inevitably follow the logic of profit-making and strategic behaviour, they can only develop narratives of technological progress and global problem-solving that cannot be genuinely universalistic. From this angle, corporate power is at most reactive, and may go hand in hand with reactive political power. Badiou notably mentions political leaders such as Churchill and De Gaulle as merely ‘great adventurers’ who represented existing power and failed to produce a truly political oeuvre (IT: 654).

Further, corporate power may qualify as ‘obscure’ when complicit in a totalitarian organisation of society, such as that advanced by Mussolini and Hitler (IT: 654). In Ethics, Badiou defines Nazi politics as a mere simulacrum of truth. This claim is based on the argument that whereas evental truth is sparked by a claim to universality enabled by a generic subject operating in the void, Nazi politics was sheer identity politics expressing the purported fullness and self-sufficiency of the body of the nation (Badiou 2003a: 105). For Badiou, neither reactive nor obscure forms of economic or political agency qualify as genuine subjectivity.

Some intellectual or economic leaders may still introduce what Badiou calls ‘reactive novelties’, i.e., ideological changes that appear progressive yet do not challenge existing power relations and therefore remain situated within the ‘state of the situation’ (LW: 62). A case in point is that of André Glucksmann, one of the key representatives of the ‘new philosophy’ which, in Badiou's opinion, was ‘new’ only in name. Badiou views the worldview of the nouveaux philosophes as both theoretically fallacious and politically obnoxious, as their ‘democratic moralism’ provided justifications for the reordering of markets and the western unleashing of military force in the Global South (LW: 63). These allegedly ‘new’ philosophers in fact adapted to the state of the situation and denied the need for radical change.

Technological utopias, too, might fall within Badiou's category of reactive novelties, as long as they merely convey the illusion of progress and do not contribute to dismantling structural inequalities:

The fetishism of technology, and the unbroken series of “revolutions” in this domain — of which the “digital revolution” is the most in vogue – has constantly spread the beliefs both that this will take us to the paradise of a world without work – with robots to serve us, and us left to idle – and then, on the other hand, that digital “thought” will crush the human intellect. Today there is not one magazine that does not inform its astonished readers of the imminent “victory” of artificial over natural intelligence. But in most cases neither “nature” nor the “artificial” are properly or clearly defined. (Badiou 2018)

No corporate, technology-driven subjectivity can act as a genuine political subject if it does not bring about a social and political revolution. Technological revolutions are merely situational variations within a never-ending plot of struggles for economic resources. What Badiou calls for is not problem-solving through the technological transformation of the natural and biological world, but rather the re-emergence of a subject of history, a transnational proletariat, no longer including only factory workers but all those who are marginalised and dispossessed. For Badiou we do not need global gurus but a ‘global political force’ (IT: 101).¹⁵ This does not mean that Badiou rejects the potential usefulness of advanced technology, if properly deployed. Instead, he simply submits that ‘the problem is not technology, or nature. The problem is how to organise societies at a global scale’ (Badiou 2023). The technological question hinges on the social question.

Mathematics and Undecidability

The ontological status of the subject is clarified in BE. Therein Badiou develops a complex ontological theory through which he undertakes to provide an alternative to postmodern thought, analytic philosophy and scientific positivism (Badiou 1988: 7). He accomplishes this by expanding on the dichotomised image of esplace and horlieu. In both TS and BE, Badiou is strongly critical of totality (as the idea of the ‘One’) as well as stability in politics, and he makes his point by relying, in addition to dialectical materialism, on the mathematical argument that there cannot be any ‘set of all sets’ (TS: 232). Given Cantor's Theorem, the power set of a set A, that is, the set of all subsets of A, which can be denoted as P(A), has greater cardinality (and thus can be considered, as it were, ‘larger’) than A itself. For any given set, there are several ways in which its elements can be composed, thus generating different subsets. Even a basic set A containing the three elements x, y and z has at least eight subsets, including the empty set:

P(A) = {Ø, {x}, {y}, {z}, {x, z}, {x, y}, {y, z}, {x, y, z}}

Cantor's Theorem thus rules out the possibility of a set of all sets, since the power set of this universal set would be even larger than the original. Badiou takes this to be a confutation of oneness and stability. For him, Cantor's Theorem is a fundamental ontological statement that goes beyond ontology itself; it is the ‘impasse, or point of the real, of ontology’ (Badiou 2005b: 502).¹⁶ It is that which demonstrates that the One can only belong to a symbolic world, constantly destabilised by its internal other.

For Badiou, the dilemmas treated by mathematics, such as the alternative between numeric discretion and the idea of continuum, or the notions of emptiness and infinity, are existentially significant as they point to a Real beyond mere existence, although mathematics itself cannot describe the features of that Real.¹⁷ And mathematics itself, far from giving ultimate pre-determined solutions to ontological dilemmas, carries with itself a core of undecidability, as illustrated by the notion of an axiom itself as a statement that cannot be demonstrated but must be admitted if further, ‘evident’ statements are to remain valid. Thus Badiou often points out that mathematicians such as Cantor and Cohen have literally ‘decided’ to admit certain axioms in a sense close to that of ethical decision-making: where mathematical argumentation, as well as ‘existence’, must stop, there begins the Real. The ontological task of mathematics is precisely to point to that Real without ever comprehending it fully.

This core of undecidability is one of the key aspects of Badiou's ontology. Not only does it resonate with the human experience of existentially meaningful decisions in ordinary lives; it also creates a productive space of uncertainty and openness within Badiou's system itself, away from particular ideological dogmas. For Badiou, the subject is the one that forces a condition of undecidability. The subject is an entity that takes action precisely when no normative guidelines are available. Undecidability entails that the subject is never compelled to act in a specific way, as every act of fidelity to past events is a novel creation that grounds a novel practice. Providing guidelines would entail subscribing to normative political philosophy, which Badiou wishes to avoid.

Badiou's unwillingness to spell out a normative political and ethical programme beyond his advocacy of equality is directly linked to his notion of truth.¹⁸ As he often recalls, there is no single truth but rather truths in the plural. Truth for him is not an ultimate principle or a set of well-defined prescriptions; rather, it is an existentially and historically meaningful idea that radically challenges a state of the situation. Since for Badiou the political state of the situation is structurally defined by inequality, its ideal opposite, equality, becomes the main principle of political truth. In addition to undecidability, Badiou relies on received ideas of the void and the multiple to point out that the One is internally unstable and the state of the situation can be contested from the inside.

Badiou's linking of the political idea of universality to the notion of the void has been criticised (Laclau 2004; Vasconcelos Vilaça 2014: 286). While ontological concepts such as ‘void’, ‘multiplicity’ and ‘infinity’ may provide metaphors for political discourse, they must be sustained by a specific set of principles and an underlying anthropology that endows those metaphors with a meaningful content in the field of politics (Power 2006). For some, Badiou's mathematical theory is mostly about providing insightful metaphors (Nirenberg and Nirenberg 2011).

In his early writings, Badiou himself readily acknowledges that the function of mathematical language in his theory is to provide metaphors:

I imprudently expose myself . . . to the mathematician's condemnation if I borrow metaphorically from his vocabulary. . . . My ambition here is to adorn materialism with a few signifiers whose sustained rigour will be that of precious stones, with the diversion of its end goal contributing to its force. (Badiou 2009: 210)¹⁹

In recalling the development of his early thought, Badiou candidly admits that he initially intended to address the question of ‘how to make Sartre compatible with the intelligibility of mathematics. Of course, this is not at all a Sartrean question, but at the bottom I had always been a secret Platonist for love of mathematics and their regime of intelligibility’ (Bosteels 2005: 242). Mathematical ontology was thus added to a theory of the subject rooted in existentialism. Over time, Badiou became increasingly attracted to the power of mathematical language and began to regard it as a true ontology rather than a source of metaphors. This process is brought to completion in the trilogy.

Even as a mere supplier of metaphors, mathematics may still be welcome in political theory. After all, metaphors and allegories have constantly played a key role in political discourse and representation. This is likely to continue, since political discourse essentially speaks about a form of non-being, that is, the community (Esposito 2006). Since the community does not ‘exist’ strictly speaking, it needs to be talked about by reference to something else than itself. It needs metaphors. Metaphors may be used for emancipatory or counter-emancipatory purposes, but at their best they can contribute to visualising things that are usually invisible. Forfeiting metaphorical discourse would likely impoverish political language.

Equality and Social Transformation: Beyond Conventional Philosophies of History

Badiou relies on mathematical metaphors when discussing the fundamental principle of politics, that is, equality. In BE he theorises a nexus between the political principle of equality and the mathematical concepts of the ‘generic’ and the ‘indiscernible’ (BE: 361). In Meditation 32, in particular, he builds on Rousseau's distinction between law – which expresses the generic – and decree to argue that the general will is ‘intrinsically egalitarian’. For Badiou, as a reader of Rousseau, ‘equality is politics’, whereas anti-egalitarian statements qualify as ‘anti-politics’ (BE: 382).

Since equality demands such radical transformations in society, Badiou assumes that it cannot be fully realised by means of legal struggles and social justice. The logic of doing justice by redressing imbalances and reestablishing a supposed societal harmony may be co-opted and prevent actual political change (TS: 316 and 334; Badiou 2004; Bosteels 2008; Rancière 1995: 23). Whereas ‘doing justice’ may be an individualistic and eventually fruitless enterprise, ‘doing equality’ is part of the project of universality inherent in evental politics (Tarby 2005: 134).

While Badiou's advocacy of equality is not the most original part of his work, it remains highly topical. Even readers who might be sceptical of Badiou's mathematical ontology and reduce it to a source of metaphors might accept his egalitarian philosophy in terms of substance. After all, Badiou himself has accepted that readers may well engage with his political theory without necessarily being familiar or agreeing with his mathematical ontology. In IT he even guides the reader by suggesting that those not interested in mathematics may take a quicker route and skip some of the mathematically dense chapters (IT: 47). Overall, Badiou has increasingly accepted and drawn comparisons between himself and other political theorists, such as Jacques Rancière, in recent years (Badiou 2012: 248). Hence, Badiou's reliance on mathematical ontology for the purpose of constructing a coherent philosophical system does not prevent readers from focusing on the strictly political core of his theory.

Badiou's concept of equality can productively be read as part of his theory of history, which offers an alternative to ideologies of historical regress, progress or presentism. This reading might be especially helpful as the major political narratives that have prevailed in past years – the neoliberal discourse of growth and austerity, the nationalist mythology of shared identity and destiny, and the techno utopias – are premised on particular visions of history that need to be engaged with. Neoliberals present their policies as historical necessities; nationalists believe in the existence of nations as historically evolving organic totalities; and technological utopians pose as global problem-solvers promising a better future for humanity as a result of sheer technological evolution. Finally, presentism means the perceived flattening of historical time as a result of prevailing production, consumption and communication patterns (Hartog 2003). None of these ideas is new, and in fact each of them reiterates familiar philosophies of history.

Badiou offers a radical alternative to a presentist view of history. In his work, he constantly seeks to turn the reader's attention from the ordinary everyday of the esplace to the eternality of truths. The concepts of progress, cyclicity and regress may be valuable as discursive tools for narrating the history of facts and nature yet are not applicable to the history of the event. Evental history and the history of facts/nature propose two entirely different understandings of the world (BE: 196; Corcoran 2015).

The main opponent of Badiou's philosophy of history is the idea of progress as conveyed by modern capitalism and related ideological underpinnings. From Badiou's perspective, ordinary transformations within the state of the situation can produce progress and novelty only relatively, usually in the form of economic and technological ‘innovations’ and ‘revolutions’, compared with a previous state essentially undergirded by the same logics of power. Conversely, evental history produces genuine novelty by challenging the existing order through reference to the political idea of radical equality.

Here it is important to stress the qualitative difference between progressive ‘innovations’ and evental ‘novelty’. While innovations are meant to produce concrete improvements to be measured against prevailing standards, the event is not defined by its effect of empirically improving a ‘state of the situation’. The event radically challenges that state, but often does not ‘improve’ it at all. Badiou does not theorise an evolutionary historical pattern towards increasingly optimal political and social conditions. Neither does he defend the idea of equality from a consequentialist perspective, as a means to progressively increase happiness and wellbeing within the esplace. He instead asserts the idea of equality as the only possible political truth, which in turn may be accompanied by the feeling of happiness through the experience of existentially meaningful transformations, encounters and discoveries. It is the experience of evental politics in the making – not the outcome of political action – that generates true happiness. Badiou's critique of progressivism does not lead him to defend a cyclical view of history as a viable alternative. History cannot be cyclical since the event constitutes an utter and genuine novelty by definition, not a return of the same or an iteration of a paradigm shift within a recognisable evolutionary model of the esplace. Moreover, past events do not constitute a condition of possibility of future events, and the appearance of future truths is never dictated by how truths appeared in the past. This is most visible in love, where encounters regularly occur without the subjects being aware of, or reflecting on, previous manifestations of truth, within their own lives or others’.

The same logic of genuine novelty also applies to politics and art – in which novel movements may emerge without taking the lead from previous movements – as well as science, where past discoveries only enable further scientific developments but do not necessitate the latter, and do not determine the form that these developments will take. Finally, Badiou does not uphold any narratives of historical decline. Such narratives typically insist that living standards and conditions have deteriorated, and one may be sympathetic to these complaints. Yet they are hopelessly partisan. They typically spread when a once ‘represented’ part of the population experiences loss of income, rights or status it previously enjoyed. From Badiou's perspective, this would not qualify as a struggle of the permanently invisible, marginalised and dispossessed. Those who have always been at the margins are unlikely to buy into regressive narratives since there is no paradise lost that they could long for. Only a genuine event bringing absolute novelty can save them.

Conventional philosophies of histories become politically problematic when they operate as an ideological tool for justifying social hierarchies. Techno, i.e., techno-utopias as well as neoliberal and nationalist narratives, in particular, come with an aristocratic understanding of the social. Societal beliefs in historical necessities must be backed by the word of charismatic authorities that appear to bring order in a messy world. This would run against the principle of egalitarianism advocated by Badiou. To be sure, one might argue that Badiou's thinking also features elitist traits. Yet this article has showed that the message of Badiou's philosophy does not need to be undermined by the aristocratic tendencies one may find in some of his texts.

What is key for Badiou is that the event of equality is not utopian. Equality is a political truth that has already entered the world several times, although it has been covered up on each occasion and sometimes betrayed by the very subjects that once defended it. Equality still appears as a way through which individuals and collectives can endeavour to escape the laws of historical necessity and make their lives politically humane. The idea of equality may be one that allows humanity to exit the box of necessary evolution and avert its elitist consequences. One of the ways in which egalitarian politics has been thwarted has been to argue that, while excessive inequalities may be damaging, they can be reduced by economic policies that focus on growth and full employment, which will have a spillover effect. Some seem to suppose that progress in technology and business practices, too, will result in more horizontal societies with increasing autonomy for individuals. Yet these practices are part of the problem, as they individualise the quest for equality, making collective action less likely (Boltanksi and Chiapello 1999). Badiou posits that the question of equality is the primary political question and must be addressed up front.

It is a significant trait of Badiou's philosophy that the principle of equality may be invoked by everyone, at best precisely by those who are not recognised within the ‘state of the situation’, the sans-papiers being the most telling example. This means truly universalising and democratising the event. Badiou's concepts of undecidability and equality show that there are no pre-determined limitations as to who can become a subject on the basis of supposed qualities, leadership skills, life-stories or social circumstances. This is one of the most inspiring propositions in Badiou's philosophy. He believes that everybody has at some point in their lifetime may encounter events in the most genuine sense, though not necessarily in the field of politics. In IT, at a key moment in his intellectual trajectory, Badiou notes that truths are universal and recognisable as such ‘by any human subject’ (IT: 21). There are no meta-events, meta-subjects or hierarchical ordering of faithful subjectivity. All subjects and all events count, and glimpses of truth are visible in anyone's life without distinction. Importantly, this entails a call for everyone to be faithful to the event, and not expect salvation from the powers that be.

Conclusion

Badiou's thought has evolved significantly over time. While TS offered the groundwork for a theory of the subject and the event, it remained anchored to a fairly dichotomic worldview based on the opposition between workers and capital. In Badiou's later work, the figure of the worker, while still important as a source of historical inspiration for communist revolutions, makes room for additional figures, notably the sans-papier, in what appears to be an inclusive move resulting from Badiou's growing attention to the complexity of social struggles in contemporary society. This process is accomplished in IT, in which he explicitly advocates a common struggle conducted by women, young people, workers, local communities and artists.

Badiou's increasingly universalist outlook is confirmed by a non-elitist redescription of the event: every human, not only a few privileged, can experience an event in their lifetime. For Badiou, there are no meta-events nor meta-subjects, and everyone is called on to realise truth in the world. This inclusive view is in line with Badiou's mathematical ontology, which, while criticised by some, provides helpful metaphors and a rich conceptual toolkit for Badiou's theory of the event, including the notions of the generic, the multiple, the indiscernible and the void.

In Badiou's view, acting in the name of equality is the only means for humans to be politically alive, that is, to challenge established social and historical structures. This theory of a ‘genuine’, evental historical subjectivity offers an alternative to conventional philosophies of progress, regress or an eternal present. The subject is precisely the one that disrupts any established historical narrative by being faithful to an event and revealing the actuality of radical equality. The political subject is defined by its affirmation of equality, which inevitably destabilises the existent.

Despite the importance of this message in the face of growing disparities in society, universal equality is rarely acknowledged as the core political, let alone historical, task at present. Some constituencies and part of the media instead tend to place their hope in individual political or corporate leaders as innovators and problem-solvers. These representations of personalistic agency are far removed from Badiou's understanding of subjectivity. For him, political subjectivity as fidelity to a political event specifically requires the formation of collective subjects fighting for radical equality and embodying the universality of the struggle. Neither visionary leaders nor new technologies will dismantle the social structures that enable global inequality. Instead, Badiou argues, what is needed is a global political force, a political subject that is both evental and universal.