Jacques Bidet a Stathis Kouvelakis

Badiou • 541
porary politics of equality, whose aim is to engender the real impossibility
of inegalitarian statements (this will remain the chief trait of Badiou’s later
concept of the generic). What is surprising here, especially in terms of the earlier
commitment to a communist dialectic of destruction, is the idea of a complementarity
between the politics of liberty and the politics of equality, along
with the stipulation of the general problem of equality in ‘times of peace’, as
detached from the revolutionary problematic of power, war and the state. As
Badiou writes: ‘under the general conditions of a non-despotic state, how can
one think and practise a politics whose overarching philosophical category is
equality?’ 41 A politics of equality, in this framework, works within the symbolic
politics of prohibition for the sake of an equality that is real but which
the symbolic order relegates to impossibility (Badiou’s position repeats here
the Lacanian link between the Real and the impossible).
Two problematic consequences ensue from these considerations. The � rst is
that politics cannot be primarily or directly concerned with the betterment of
the polity itself, for ‘politics must be thinkable as a conjoined excess over the
state and civil society, even if these are good or excellent’. 42 The second lies
in the implicit suggestion that the politics of emancipation, having rescinded
the project of power (in short, the dictatorship of the proletariat) is externally
conditioned (‘in times of peace’) by a kind of liberal frame. We can register
here the entire ambiguity of Badiou’s later conception of ‘politics at a distance
from the state’ 43 – a position that maintains the antagonism against ‘existing
society’ and, to an extent, the problem of how to change it, but combines this
seemingly stark antagonism with the toleration of the symbolic framework
provided by the very same society: ‘We therefore continue to demand modern
freedom (symbolic according to non-prohibition) from within which we work
towards contemporary equality (real, according to the impossible)’. 44 Is this
to say that Marxist politics can only persist from within a liberal envelope?
Can we ‘reformulate from within politics the synthetic vision of the backwards
and nefarious character of our society and its representations’ and maintain
the ‘dif� cult’ problem of ‘changing existing society’, if we do not unequivocally
pose and seek to resolve the problem of the tension between liberty
41 Ibid.
42 Badiou 1985, p. 20.
43 Badiou 2005b, pp. 150–1.
44 Badiou 1987a, p. 3. See also Badiou 1992, p. 248.