Badiou

Ang historikal na papel ng kaganapang Mayo 1968 sa Pransiya ay tinalakay ng pilosopong si Alain Badiou sa kanyang kahangahangang akdang The Meaning of Sarkozy (2008), sa seksiyong, “The History of the Communist Hypothesis and Its Present Moment”. Ang buong akda ay isang manipis ngunit siksik na pag-aaral tungkol sa mga nangingibabaw na tema ng kasalukuyang panahon, sa pananaw ng isang beteranong militanteng pilosopo ng Pransiya.

May ilang praktikal na listahan ng mga mahahalagang paalala para sa kanyang mga kababayan si Badiou dito (“Eight Points, to Start With”):

Point 1. Assume that all workers labouring here belong here, and must be treated on a basis of equality, and respected accordingly–indeed honoured–especially workers of foreign origin.
Point 2. Art as creation, whatever its epoch and nationality, is superior to culture and consumption, no matter how contemporary.
Point 3. Science, which is inherently free, is absolutely superior to technology, even and especially when the technology is profitable.
Point 4. Love must be reinvented (what we can call the ‘Rimbaud point’), but also quite simply defended.
Point 5. Any sick person who asked for a doctor to treat them should be examined and treated as well as possible, in the present conditions of medicine as the doctor understands these, and unconditionally with respect to age, nationality, ‘culture’, administrative status or financial resources (this is the Hippocratic point).
Point 6. Any process that is intended to serve as a fragment of a politics of emancipation must be held superior to any managerial necessity.
Point 7. A newspaper that belongs to rich managers does not have to be read by someone who is neither a manager nor rich.
Point 8. There is only one world.

Tatlong bagay ang pwede sigurong salungguhitan sa akdang ito ni Badiou: ang kahalagahan ng tapang, ang konsepto ng pag-ibig, at ang kasalukuyang tungkulin ng pulitikang mapagpalaya.

Una, ang kanyang panawagan na sa ngayong panahon, higit kaylanman, tapang ang pinakamahalagang kabutihan na dapat panghawakan ng sino mang nakikibaka sa buhay:

I define courage then as the virtue displayed by endurance in the impossible. It is not simply a question of encountering the impossible, experiencing it. For then we only have heroism, a moment of heroism. And, at the end of the day, heroism is easier than courage. Heroism is when one faces up to the impossible. It has always been represented as a posture, possibly a sublime one, because it is the moment at which one turns towards the impossible, in other words the Real that is required, and faces up to it. Courage is distinct from heroism because it is a virtue, and not a moment or a posture. It is a virtue to be constructed. For our part, as materialists of the event and the exception, we have to understand that a virtue is not something that one already has, a kind of disposition, which for example would divide people into the courageous and the cowardly. A virtue is displayed in practices that construct a particular time, regardless of the laws of the world or the opinions that support these laws. If heroism is the subjective figure of facing up to the impossible, then courage is the virtue of endurance in the impossible. Courage is not the point itself, it is holding on to this point. What demands courage is holding on, in a different duration from that imposed by the law of the world. The raw material of courage is time.

Pangalawa, ang kanyang (sa unang tingin) kakaibang konsepto ng ‘pag-ibig’ bilang ‘isang paraan sa pag-alam ng katotohanan’ (a truth procedure):

Love, a truth procedure bearing on the Two as such, on difference qua difference, is threatened on all sides. It is threatened from the Left, if I can use that term here, by
libertinage, which reduces it to variations on the theme of sex, and, from the right, by the liberal conception that subordinates it to contract. [...] We maintain, against this view of things, that love begins beyond desire and demand, even though it embraces these. It is an examination of the world from the point of the Two, with the result that its territory is in no way the individual. If love has a subject, it is precisely because it is a disciplined construction that cannot be reduced either to the satisfaction of desire, or to an egalitarian contract between responsible individuals.

Pangatlo, ang pagbibigay signal sa lahat ng mga kasama niya sa kilusan, na dumadaloy mula sa halus-mitikal na kaganapang ‘Mayo 1968′, na ‘tapos na’ ang panahong iyon:

Those of us who remember May ’68 and the Cultural Revolution absolutely must transmit to the scattered militants of the communist hypothesis a rational certainty, already immanent at these intense political moments: what will come will not be, and cannot be, a continuation of the second sequence. Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass democracy, Leninism, the proletarian party, the Socialist state – all these remarkable inventions of the twentieth century – are no longer of practical use. At the theoretical level, they certainly deserve further study and consideration; but at the level of politics, they have become impracticable. This is a first point of essential awareness: the second sequence is closed, and it is no good trying to continue or restore it.

Kaya, ano na ang anyo at tunguhin ng ‘pulitika ng pagpapalaya’ (politics of emancipation) sa kasalukuyang siglo kung, ayon pa, ang ika-20-siglong mga imbento ng militanteng kilusan (Marxismo, kilusang manggagawa, demokrasya ng ‘masa’, Leninismo, proletaryadong partido, at sosyalistang estado) ay ‘wala nang praktikal na gamit’ sa kasalukuyan?