Panache, he never lacked. While the gratin of the proletarian left has long since turned his back, Alain Badiou does not let go: on his attachment to “the communist idea”, to Lenin of 1917, to Mao of the Cultural Revolution. All things blood red, of course, but “saying the number of dead does not allow us to think” (being killed either, one will object). Even if Stalin leaves him “perplexed”, and he admits to having been wrong about Pol Pot, the philosopher – major of the aggregation in 1960 – continues to see in the great evenings a desire for emancipation that the capitalist narratives would seek to suffocate.
At 86, one of the most quoted living French intellectuals in the world, and the most invited on TV sets, writes his Memoirs. A perilous exercise, which his elders were careful not to practice: it is hard to imagine Foucault or Deleuze, whom he knew, telling us about mom and dad and how they grew up. Badiou, flamberge in the wind, yes. It was time to explain to the world how one becomes a being who knows himself to be exceptional.
If the first volume of Memories from beyond politics sheds no light on the work, it confirms its author’s taste for discipline and control – of himself, first of all. Not the space of a hesitation, of a misstep in this ordering of a life in which each event is rationalized to become the mirror of an intractable will, a link in Badiou’s “becoming-Badiou”, with the mania for dividing everything up like in a textbook: four points, three things, two elements. It’s not the autobiography of a philosopher, it’s the report of a chief warrant officer, punctuated by very elegant “Well” (my little guys?). As for the few philosophical considerations, they always end with a quote from Chairman Mao – distressingly banal (you have to get off the horse) or diabolically tricky (you have to prepare public opinion ideologically). To hear the mantras of little red book recited by Badiou, we tremble like Tintin when faced with the mad Taoist of blue lotus (“First I will cut off your head, then you will know the truth”).
Only Badiou understands Badiou
The years of apprenticeship, from colonial Morocco to the University of Vincennes “the red”, could have moved, touch the universal or learn about his contemporaries. But Badiou has a problem, for which he is the first to apologize: his “chronic glory” which puts him, reluctantly, at the center of everything. And when he finally agrees to mention a great elder – the immense Georges Canguilhem – it is to slip in this confession: “He admired me.” Reading these Memoirs, we understand the brave Canguilhem: since CE1, Badiou has won all the prizes for excellence and, as soon as there are more than two people together, he must become the leader. This is his great suffering: this natural ascendancy, “to be considered almost automatically worthy of the presidency, whatever the assembly”. To this irresistible hegemony, which also works in love, he says, an obvious empirical explanation: “My large size, my voice, my calm, my pedagogical virtues…”
Looking closely, we note that the more Badiou’s ascendancy grows, the more the size of the group decreases: the SFIO, then the Unified Socialist Party, the Autonomous Socialist Party, the Union of Marxist-Leninist Communists of France and, finally, the very small Political Organization. This group destiny goes well with our proud Eaque: “Basically, my predisposition was that of an imperial solitude”, opportunity to compare himself to Archimedes or de Gaulle (and to Jules César for the frequent use of the third person : “the Alain Badiou of the time”, “master corporal Alain Badiou”, etc.). The autobiography is cruel in that it lays bare the ego and lets it soliloquize without a safety net – Badiou ignoring that of irony, of distance from oneself.
The only surprise: an original scene of bare-bottom whipping in an attic, which is reminiscent of Rousseau’s mythical spanking. A taste for discipline, already? Bad luck: “I infinitely admire psychoanalysis when it comes to anyone, except myself”. Only Badiou understands Badiou. Too bad, he would have made a good client.
Memoirs from beyond politics (1937-1985), by Alain Badiou, Flammarion, 480 pages, €24.