The significance of the events of 1989—what some call the fall of Communism, though a certain so-called Communism did not fall at Tiananmen Square that year—remain, more than three decades later, to be understood. What they clearly weren’t, despite the illusions entertained by some at the time, was the triumph of the west, of capitalist democracies, or the end of history. For Alain Badiou, these events weren’t even an event—a key term in his philosophy—for “these regimes had in fact been dead for a long time.” Well, dead maybe except for those who lived under them. But the people, Badiou believes, had nothing to do with it; their governments simply collapsed from within. And besides, “everything dies, which also means: no death is an event.” Can he really be that cold-blooded? The death of a parent, a lover, a child but also of an enemy, a tormenter is not, for the one left behind, like the death of everything else; it is not a non-event. Badiou, in his three-part essay Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of State-Truth, published in French in 1991 but only translated into English (and also, in this back-to-back edition, into Serbo-Croatian) in 2009, wants to say what 1989 means, above all, for philosophy, which, he claims, “has always and forever accompanied the great popular uprisings.” What is it, this accompaniment? Is it like the chords (F Em7 A7…) you strum on a guitar as someone else sings the tune? The scattering of vegetables next to the steak on your plate? What have those great uprisings actually gained from their philosophical contorni? Badiou points out, with the lucidity typical of him, the chiasmatic relation between philosophy and liberal democracy—what he calls capitalo-parlimentarianism—on the one hand, Stalinism on the other. The former conceives of itself as a state of law, whereas the latter claimed a “substantial and not formal” relation to truth—thus the “philosophy” of Stalin, Hoxha, et al. “In the first case,” explains Badiou, “politics ceases to depend upon truth: the ‘dominant’ philosophy is relativist and skeptical” (or as Richard Rorty would have said, ironist) whereas for the latter, “politics prescribes a ‘true State’: the reigning philosophy is monist and dogmatic.” (Despite his living in a capitalo-parliamentarian state, Badiou’s own philosophy is monist if not dogmatic, and his style, at least, brooks no skepticism.) In liberal democracy, the philosopher becomes a sophist; in totalitarianism, an apparatchik or cop. Badiou concludes that to “save philosophy as such…the law should neither be put at the center of politics, nor excluded from its field.” But this supplemental relation, neither essential nor disregarded, remains shrouded in mystery, or scattered—to sustain the Mallarméan note proposed by the book’s title—through the future.
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Alain Badiou, Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of State-Truth, translated by Barbara P. Fulks, Alberto Toscano, Nina Power, and Ozren Pupovac, with an Afterword by Ozren Pupovac and Ivana Momčilović (2009), is published by Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and Arkzin d.o.o., Zagreb.
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BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.