that achieved extraordinary historical credit in the 20th; a validation which was reflected in three major areas. The first of these was the existence of a series of states which played an emblematic role as actually achieved revolutionary transformations and not simply as imagined ones. Marxism was actually lived as that subjectivity through which the oppressed (workers, peasants, national minorities, colonised, etc.) could vanquish the military might of their oppressors, if not for the first time in modern history – that honour belongs to the slaves in Saint-Domingue, as we shall see – at least for the first time in the 20th century. This resulted not only in Marxism becoming a state ideology – and in the vanguard party becoming a state-party – but also in the creation of a beacon to which popular forces all over the world could refer and by which they could be inspired. Secondly, this credit was reflected in the struggles (and wars) of national liberation, in which the ideas of the nation and the people were often fused (as in China, Algeria and Cuba) under the direction of a party and of Marxist ideological hegemony. These national liberation struggles in turn had a major ideological impact on youth struggles elsewhere, such as during May 1968 in Europe. Finally, it was reflected within the working-class movement in the West itself, where Marxism had a major ideological effect on trade unions and parties, which became a permanent feature of state politics. These three cases proved the exceptional and successful character of Marxism as an emancipatory discourse during the previous century. The crisis of Marxism was occasioned by the gradual collapse of these three referents, while the failure of socialism as well as that of national liberation to enable popular emancipation was a failure of a politics focused entirely on the state and its capture. The state in fact cannot emancipate anyone; its fundamental reason for existence is precisely to reproduce at most a continuity with the extant; it is opposed to discontinuous (i.e. real) change as such. Yet this failure has not meant the disappearance of the need to think human emancipation nor implied the end of history. The difficulty consists in identifying precisely the source of that subjective problem and in beginning to overcome it without abandoning an emancipatory politics. The thought of emancipatory politics must thus be developed from within Marxism itself and must be a politics of activism and militancy, not one focused on state power and the problematic of state capture.
In this context it is crucial to insist on the fact that political subjectivities can be analysed, explained and understood rationally as much as any objective factor can be, and that this can be done without any collapse into idealism. We must therefore have the courage to move beyond Marx’s statement in his famous 1859 Preface and to assert that the ‘ideological forms in which men become conscious of this [class] conflict and fight it out’ can indeed be explained rationally without reducing them to ‘the existing conflict between social productive forces and the relations of production’ (1859: 182). In fact, Badiou shows quite clearly that subjectivity itself is part of the real, and not expressive of it in a distinct domain; it is this that allows for a rational investigation of political subjectivities. As a result, Badiou argues, the core concept in an analysis of politics must be that of ‘practice’; politics therefore must be understood as a ‘thought-practice’.37 It is this that makes it real:
I do not think it pertinent to oppose idealism to materialism on the basis of the distinction between thought and the real (primacy of the first over the second for idealism, and the opposite for materialism). Because this very common conception misunderstands the fundamental (materialist) point that thought is part of the real. To define materialism in terms of the primacy of the real over thought is already to have taken an idealist position ... Materialist, dialectical thought (dialectical materialism) itself begins with the notion of practice. What does ‘practice’ mean? For me it means that the finitude of objective conditions allows for the development of an immanent exception (Badiou, 2012c, 24 October, 14 November 2012, my translation, emphasis in original).38
For Rancière also, it is from the practical exception that one must begin if one wishes to understand political subjectivities, for it is such exceptions which show that people speak for themselves – contrary to much social science, which sees itself as speaking for people who do not speak for themselves:
The normal is when people remain in their place and when it all continues as before. Nevertheless, everything of note in the history of humanity functions according to the principle that something happens, that people begin to speak ... If we are speaking of the ‘workers’ voice’, we speak from the perspective of people who speak. That seems to be a truism. Yet it is contrary to a certain scientific method which requires that when we speak of the voice of the people, we are speaking of those who do not speak ... the point essentially is to speak for those who do not speak. This is as much a strategy of top politicians as it is of historians or sociologists, to say that the voice which counts is the voice of those who do not speak (Rancière, 2012: 194, my translation).
IN CONCLUSION
In sum, ‘politics is thought’, ‘thought is real’ and ‘people think’ are the three fundamental axioms of this book. Today, in the 21st century, it is apparent that emancipatory politics are not necessarily constituted around class, although they invariably are constituted around the politically ‘in-existent’, in Badiou’s sense of the term (Badiou, 2011c).39 The social categories of the people, the poor, the youth (and, during certain periods, women), have equally provided the basis for the thought of emancipation; yet, however excessive that thought of politics may have been at times, in most instances emancipation has been thought in terms of access in one form or another to the state, a fact which has had the effect of reversing emancipatory gains. The reduction of emancipatory political subjectivity to class (and indeed to any other social location or identity) is today redundant because the thought of politics as expressive of social location is the foundation of state politics: it is the state which thinks location, hierarchy, interests and identities, as it must ensure their reproduction. For emancipation to be adequately thought, social reductionism must be replaced with an understanding of the politically subjective which, while in some way marked by the objectively social, recognises its excessive – and hence its irreducible – character. It is not just a matter of critiquing neo-liberalism, socialism or nationalism as such. Rather, an alternative vision of freedom must also be affirmed, and it is the old notions of emancipation and freedom that need to be critiqued. In order to do this we need new categories and concepts to propose as part of a new vision of freedom. It follows that without opening up political subjectivities – including those of freedom – to rigorous study, making them visible, recognising their existence as worthy of analysis, we will be stuck within the past ways of thinking freedom (liberalism, Marxism, nationalism), which could not move beyond state thinking.
The way forward intellectually must be to think emancipatory politics, to think subjectivities as such, not simply as expressive of the social, which amounts to state thinking, but by detaching them from their current anchor in identity politics in general and from (social) psychology or morality in particular. This is a complex enterprise, but part of it must consist in a rethinking of history beyond historicism and of politics beyond the state; not as determined ‘in the last instance’ by the social (economy, state, nation, etc.), a conception which is always founded on material interests, but to refashion Althusser’s insight that history has no subject. In this manner politics can also become thinkable outside the party form, for the party represented the subject of history in radical thought, being said to represent the working class, the masses, the people or the nation in the political sphere. Subjects – which, according to Badiou (2009a), are always collective subjects in politics – can therefore be rigorously understood as produced and not as given; they can in fact be conceived as produced through a politics, as the products of subjectivities (through a process of ‘subjectivation’) and not the other way round, thus avoiding a collapse into idealism.
As Lazarus (1996: 67ff) insists, the foundation statement for the thinking of politics today must be ‘people think’. The foundational axiom of the thought of emancipatory politics must be that people are capable of thinking a different ‘possible’ – in other words, ‘what could be’ – in the present: ‘to say “people think” is to say that they are capable, under a name, of prescribing a possible
