Liu Xin: Badiou's Philosophy of the Event and the Question of China
Within radical Leftist theory, Alain Badiou’s philosophy of the event has had a profound impact on global Leftist thought. In his view, the occurrence of an "event" prompts a human encounter with it, and fidelity to that event allows a person to become a "subject" of truth. For Badiou, "truth" is that which is proclaimed, constructed, and upheld by a person acting as a subject; both the appearance of truth and the emergence of the subject are contingent and singular. With what kinds of events might we encounter to become subjects faithful to them? Badiou argues there are four, and only four, such "truth procedures": poetry, matheme, politics, and love. The author contends that this influence is not a unidirectional "eastward flow of Western learning" [1]. Rather, Badiou’s philosophy of the event is itself the result of his dialogue and fusion with Chinese theory. The mutual interaction and generation between Badiou and Chinese theory, along with the resulting "Chinese problem in Western theory," provide an opportunity for us to observe the philosophy of the event "in the world."
I. Interpretations of Hegel by Chinese and French Scholars
During the 1960s, as the "May 1968" [2] ferment was brewing in France, Badiou—then a student at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris—was a student of Louis Althusser and a member of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU), a Leftist socialist party. Following May 1968, Badiou transformed the Union of Communist Youth Marxists-Leninists (UJC-ML) at the Ulm campus of the ENS into the Marxist-Leninist Communist Organization of France (UCF-ML), gradually distancing himself from Althusser, who remained a member of the French Communist Party (PCF). For a long period, Badiou remained "faithful" to Mao Zedong Thought and maintained an affirmative stance toward China’s "proletarian" revolution; the unique thought and political events of China once dazzled this disciple of Althusser. However, we can still find a repressed Hegelian dialectic in his early philosophy. Returning to the intellectual field of the 1960s, we find that Neo-Marxists generally rejected Hegel: Althusser pitted Hegel and the "Young Marx" against "scientific Marxism," while Sartre ignored the materialist tendencies of the Hegelian dialectic in the Science of Logic.
According to the Hegelian philosophy of history, world history is a "rational process" in which the occurrence of various events serves a unified purpose: the "Spirit" (Geist) achieving consciousness of its own freedom. Regardless of how humans struggle, whether they are willing, or whether they are aware of this "purpose," all their practices ultimately constitute the ladder leading to it. Consequently, the study or narration of history can only be "retrospective," infinitely demonstrating the rationality of the Absolute Spirit through the interpretation of "events." Within teleological and progressivist philosophies of history, the "event" cannot acquire a meaning that transcends the totalizing structure of history; that is to say, historical events here lack true eventness. In the radical social atmosphere of the 1960s, Hegel’s "cunning of reason" came under concerted attack. Hegel, the "conservative" philosopher of the state, seemed discarded, and the historical science of classical Marxism similarly faced skepticism regarding "totalization."
Under these circumstances, Badiou turned to Chinese Hegelian studies to find a breakthrough. He primarily valued Mao Zedong’s "one divides into two" [3] attitude toward Hegel. He noted that Mao frequently mentioned Lenin’s reading of the Science of Logic and explicitly referenced Hegel in On Contradiction: "Hegel, the famous German philosopher who lived in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, made a very important contribution to dialectics, but his dialectics was idealist. It was not until Marx and Engels, the great activists of the proletarian movement, synthesized the positive achievements in the history of human knowledge and, in particular, critically absorbed the rational elements of Hegelian dialectics and created the great theory of dialectical materialism and historical materialism, that a great and unprecedented revolution took place in the history of human knowledge." In his "Speech at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Committees" on January 27, 1957, Mao expressed agreement with Lenin's view that the absolute "struggle of mutually exclusive opposites" overrides the conditional "unity of opposites." He criticized Stalin’s total negation of German Classical Philosophy and emphasized that only by studying and understanding the "opposite side" could one firmly master materialism and dialectics: "I advise the comrades present here: if you understand materialism and dialectics, you also need to supplement your studies with their opposites—idealism and metaphysics. The books of Kant and Hegel, and those of Confucius and Chiang Kai-shek—these negative things need to be read. If you do not understand idealism and metaphysics, and have not struggled against these negative things, your materialism and dialectics will not be consolidated." In tracing Chinese Hegelian studies prior to 1949, Badiou could not bypass the famous Hegel expert He Lin, though here He Lin dramatically becomes a "negative example."
Badiou positioned He Lin as the spokesperson for the dominant "classic" Neo-Hegelianism and described his Hegelian research as a conservative theoretical game. Its main features, according to Badiou, were: "fear of the revolutionary essence of the dialectic; an emphasis on Hegel's theory of the state; a lack of interest in the Science of Logic alongside an emphasis on the Phenomenology of Spirit; or rather, a morbid curiosity regarding the structure and conceptual sequence of the Logic." In his book A Brief Explanation of Modern Idealism, He Lin pointed out that Hegel’s dialectic was not a negative, skeptical disputation or a sophistry that leaves one at a loss, but a method—similar to Plato’s—for dispelling the contradictions of finite things to achieve organic unity and trend toward the Absolute Idea. Drawing on the Logic and the "Preface" to the Phenomenology of Spirit, He Lin noted that Hegel distinguished rational activity into "negative reason" and "positive reason." To view the universe through negative reason is to see that nothing is not self-contradictory—this is "things turn into their opposites when they reach the extreme" [4]. To view the universe through positive reason is to see that all things are a harmony of contradictions and a unity of opposites—this is "opposites complement each other" [5]. Hegelian dialectics itself was seen as a unity of opposites: "the unity of form and content; the unity of gifted intuition and rigorous system; the unity of life experience and logical laws; and the unity of the rational method and the empirical method." He Lin indeed strengthened the mystical and intuitionist aspects of the dialectic and dialectical outlook, while grounding the truth of speculation in "seeing identity within difference, seeing union within division, seeing constancy within change, and seeing harmony within conflict." That is, he valued the positivity of the "negation of the negation," uprooting the subversiveness of spiritual life (cf. Badiou’s "love and poetry") and historical events (cf. Badiou’s "politics"). He Lin explicitly unified the logic of the dialectic with the history of social life:
This method (dialectic) prizes the use of "wisdom-eyes" [6] to recognize the points of contradiction and conflict between things, then seeks a common destination from different paths and mutual completion from opposites, so as to reach an organically unified truth or reality. This method can also be described as looking from a distance or from the overall situation to resolve and mediate local contradictions and conflicts, allowing each to find its proper place. Hegel’s particular ingenuity with this method lay in discerning the points of contradiction and conflict within spiritual life and historical facts and resolving them to seek a consistent historical insight.
From this, Badiou concluded that He Lin’s dialectic was a concept and method for overcoming contradictions, whereby the event is internalized by the historical totality; this is what he called the "fear of the revolutionary essence of the dialectic." He Lin did indeed nationalize Hegelian dialectics. After the "September 18th Incident" [7] in 1931, he published an article in L’Impartial (Ta Kung Pao) claiming that the dialectic reflected Hegel’s patriotic spirit—an "attitude presented before Heaven, Earth, and the spirits"—attaining through the dialectic the "faith, hope, desperate spirit, and supreme principles of life" to "seek life through death" or "find life within death." This undoubtedly gave Badiou ample reason to criticize He Lin’s excessive emphasis on state authority. He Lin’s focus on the Phenomenology of Spirit likely reminded Badiou of Jean Hyppolite’s similar work, which extended Alexandre Kojève’s Hegelian interpretation to Sartre, Lacan, and Althusser. In Badiou’s view, the Hegelian philosophy discussed by Kojève was merely that of the Phenomenology, understood from the psychologistic perspective of the split in self-consciousness, profoundly influencing revolutionary romanticists and surrealists with its romanticized interpretation of the master-slave dialectic. Althusser, for the sake of a scientific, positivist Marxism, had wiped Hegel out entirely, reinforcing a fundamental rupture between the two. Having tested these ideas through the practice of May 1968, Badiou saw only sterility in this nearly 40-year history of French Hegelian interpretation: the relationship between Hegel and Marx became increasingly blurred, and furthermore, the "rational kernel" of the Hegelian dialectic remained long obscured. Badiou committed himself to unifying thought and action, rejecting both the totalizing view of history found in Hegel and dogmatic Marxism, as well as the skeptical view of history held by postmodernists like Jacques Derrida, choosing instead a "science" of history based on the event. "Having escaped Hegelian teleology and defended the autonomy of science, this contemporary French theoretical path (Althusser–Badiou–Meillassoux) ultimately leans more toward the contingency of the event than classical Marxism does." What Badiou craved was a radicalized interpretation of Hegel; his ideal state was to fully grasp what Marx called the "rational kernel" of the Hegelian dialectic while recognizing the total fallacy of its idealist system, thereby avoiding romanticized, self-indulgent individualist passion.
II. Badiou’s "Rediscovery" of Zhang Shiying
In his quest for a radicalized interpretation of Hegel, Badiou discovered the Chinese Hegel expert Zhang Shiying. Badiou commented on the long essay "On the 'Rational Kernel' of Hegel’s Dialectic" (hereafter "Rational Kernel") in Zhang’s book Hegel’s Philosophy (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1972 edition), referring to it as a new work by Zhang. In fact, "Rational Kernel" first appeared in the book On Hegel’s Philosophy (1956). Hegel’s Philosophy (1972) was published as a revision of the 1956 text. Thus, Badiou’s interpretation of the 1972 Zhang text, published in 1978, was actually a "rediscovery" of a text from as early as 1956.
In the introduction to the 1956 edition of On Hegel’s Philosophy, the 35-year-old Beijing University philosophy instructor Zhang Shiying, writing from the standpoint of Marxist philosophy, established the legitimacy of his Hegelian research by viewing Marxist philosophy as a brand-new intellectual event: "The emergence of Marxist philosophy was a great revolutionary transformation in philosophy. Marxist philosophy is fundamentally different from all previous philosophy (including progressive philosophy); it is an essentially brand-new philosophical doctrine." A brand-new, revolutionary doctrine could not "emerge from thin air"; to deeply understand Marxist philosophy, one had to understand the "critical transformation" of the "precursor" Hegel by Marx and Engels from the standpoint of the working class. It must be emphasized that as a Hegel expert, Zhang Shiying’s interpretation of Hegel from the 1950s to the 1970s should be regarded as one of the achievements of Chinese Marxist philosophical research. It was precisely because his interpretation allowed Hegel to lead toward Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong that his work possessed the value of being "rediscovered." Zhang’s Hegelian research became part of Chinese Marxist philosophical research; it was a necessary condition for activating the "revolutionary nature" of the Hegelian dialectic. Compared to He Lin’s obsession with the mysticism in the Hegelian dialectic, Zhang Shiying’s interpretation clearly distanced itself from Hegel’s religious discourse. At the start of "Rational Kernel," Zhang decisively applied "one divides into two" to Hegel’s philosophy: "The idealist system of Hegel’s philosophy is the conservative and even reactionary aspect of his philosophy, but within his idealist philosophy there also runs something of great value: the dialectic." It can be said that Zhang Shiying’s discourse greatly met Badiou’s expectations. As a young Hegel expert and Marxist in Mao-era China, Zhang’s unique identity gave his interpretation a symbolic weight. In it, Badiou found the opportunity to activate the revolutionary nature of the dialectic. Consequently, he became fascinated with "Rational Kernel," collaborating with the sinologists Joël Bellassen and Louis Mossot to translate and annotate the text.
The "Rational Kernel" attempts to elucidate the rationality of Hegelian dialectics from six dimensions. Its overarching goal is to explain why Hegel was held in high esteem by Marx, Lenin, and Mao Zedong: "Although what Hegel discussed was by no means the dialectics of the objective world, within the dialectics of 'Absolute Spirit' or 'Absolute Idea'—in the self-contradictory process of the mutual interconnection and transformation of all pure logical concepts—in a word, within his idealist dialectics, he conjectured, or unconsciously reflected, the dialectics of objective things themselves." In Zhang Shiying’s view, Hegel’s dialectics gained insight into the contradictory movement of world history and human life itself at the conceptual level: reality and truth are internally connected, in constant motion, and in a state of becoming; every stage, aspect, and link of the "Absolute Spirit" is interrelated and mutually transforming; truth and reality are concrete, multi-dimensional, and living. This fundamentally constitutes a critique of metaphysics. The pivot for restating the "rational kernel" of dialectics previously mentioned by Marx and Engels lies in guiding the practice of the Chinese revolution. The reason the "Old" Hegel could still be utilized for the construction of "New" Chinese philosophy is that his dialectics is not merely a game of concepts or formal logic; as idea and method, dialectics is inextricably linked to the choice of the path for real-world politics.
In Badiou’s view, the examples Zhang Shiying provides to illustrate the "rational kernel" of Hegelian dialectics possess a practical power that penetrates reality. When discussing the second aspect of the "rational kernel"—the "thought that contradiction is the source of movement"—Zhang Shiying argues that Hegelian logic involves the transformation and transition of concepts. The reason each concept transforms and transitions into another is that the interior and nature of each concept contain the factor of another concept that is distinct from or opposite to itself; it is due to the internal contradictions of these two aspects that a concept is compelled to transform and transition. He takes the two concepts of "identity" and "difference" as an example: "For instance, the transformation of 'identity' into 'difference' is not due to some external force existing outside of 'identity' and lacking internal connection to it, but rather because the concrete concept of 'identity' itself contains the opposite concept of 'difference' within it." Badiou interprets this as "One" (identity) dividing into "Two" (difference), while questioning the evolutionary coloring of Zhang Shiying’s discourse. Badiou’s concern is how the entirely new emerges and how entirely new events occur. In his view, Zhang Shiying is not radical enough here: "The fact is that the only existing identity is the identity of difference; thus, the existence of all things is the process of their dividing from one into two. Insofar as we understand the qualitative identity of a force, it still involves: (1) the site [8] it exceeds, and (2) the structural system (distribution system) it destroys." Crucially, Badiou believes this radicalized interpretation marks the revolutionary identity (both "identity" and "oneness" are l’identité in French) of the French proletariat. Its task is to construct a political class to subvert the existing social system of French imperialism. This is the significance of identity transforming into difference (one dividing into two [9]).
Badiou believes that the first three aspects of Hegelian dialectics mentioned by Zhang Shiying (continual movement and interconnectedness of things; the law of contradiction; the transition from quantitative change to qualitative change) are extremely critical because these philosophical principles concentrate the reflection of the struggle between the "two lines" during the transitional stage of socialism. Is socialism an entirely new stage of the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, or is it a totality-in-becoming determined by the dictatorship of the proletariat? Is the dictatorship of the proletariat at the current stage a concept of an authoritative State, or a political concept concerning continuous class struggle? Here, Badiou introduces Mao Zedong’s "decision": "Particularly under a socialist regime, in the dialectic of State/Revolution, it is the viewpoint of class—that is, of revolution—that constitutes the principal aspect of the contradiction regarding the historical mission of the proletariat. From this arises the philosophical viewpoint that the law of splitting (political class struggle) takes strategic priority over the law of totality (State stability)." The proletariat and revolutionary politics constitute the core forces of the socialist transitional period; thus, class struggle is placed above the reason of State [10], negativity overwhelms positivity, and difference overwhelms identity.
The key to dialectics lies in the relationship between quality and quantity. In Hegel’s view, any thing possesses both qualitative and quantitative properties, but for truth and reality, development is not merely the reduction or superposition of quantity. When quantitative change reaches a certain limit, a fundamental qualitative change will inevitably occur: "On the one hand, the quantitative determinations of Dasein can change without affecting its quality; but at the same time, this increase or decrease of quantity that does not affect quality also has its limit, and once that limit is exceeded, it causes a change in quality." This portends that when the gradual quantitative changes of a thing in the process of movement reach their extreme limit, a qualitative change unpredictable at the quantitative level will occur, and a new meaning-event will be created. Hegel uses the movement of water-steam-ice and the example of a farmer increasing a donkey's burden to illustrate the dialectics of quality and quantity, but these do not seem to explain the possibility of a qualitative change brought about by an event. If one looks beyond the level of common sense to the practical consequences produced by human decisions, the event will break the restrictions of quantity and open a future of qualitative change. The transformation from quantitative change to qualitative change was established as a basic law of dialectics in Engels’ Anti-Dühring, and later developed into a theory of revolutionary events in Plekhanov’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism and Kautsky’s The Social Revolution—namely, the view that when gradual quantitative accumulation reaches a certain node, a leap-like qualitative change between different states will suddenly occur. This theoretical legacy concerning the "event" in Hegelian philosophy remained in a state of concealment, and Badiou attempts to awaken it through his "rediscovery" of Zhang Shiying.
Zhang Shiying points out: "Quantitative change is gradual movement; qualitative change is the interruption of the gradual process. Here, Hegel clearly expresses the thought of development through leaps, dealing a blow to the metaphysical viewpoint that reduces movement to pure quantitative change." In his interpretation, the leap of qualitative change breaks the inherent structure of quantitative change, manifesting as a disruptive intrusion into the developmental process of things. This lays the foundation for the occurrence of an event; his interpretation of Hegel reserves a proper place for a radical thought of the event. Badiou captures this acutely. Quantitative change is change within its inherent site; as a totality, it remains in its original position forever if it does not reach the limit that triggers qualitative change. The qualitative leap, however, subverts the spatial site where quantitative accumulation resides, forcibly destroying it and creating another site. At the level of concrete political decision-making, the proletariat and its vanguard, who are increasingly gaining an advantage in quantity, cannot allow the revolution to end at the "democratic revolution" dominated by the bourgeoisie; at this moment, they must either seize political power to achieve absolute victory or be destroyed. This is called by Badiou the dialectics of quantitative "differentiation" (différentielle) and qualitative "integration" (intégrale)—a Hegelian theoretical legacy that must be respected. Within the calculable range of reason, countless events occur as expected, and people habitually submit to convention or routine, maintaining the stability of the status quo at the quantitative level. But at this moment, qualitative change has already occurred quietly, announcing the rupture and restart of history at a certain node with the occurrence of a completely new event. This event disturbs the conventional apparatus of knowledge-narrative and transforms people's expectations of an entirely new future into reality.
Through the "rediscovery" of Zhang Shiying, Badiou successfully "divided into two" the Chinese study of Hegelian dialectics: the conservative "Hegel" understood by He Lin was a Hegel who integrated humanism, nationalism, and mysticism; the revolutionary "Hegel" understood by Zhang Shiying was a Hegel characterized by the unity of opposites between idealism and dialectical materialism. For Badiou, Chinese Marxist Hegel studies link the dialectics of Hegel, Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao Zedong, the latter being the "source of living water" [11] that can point the way for the contemporary French revolution. Without a doubt, Zhang Shiying’s interpretation of the "rational kernel" of Hegelian dialectics became a catalyst, participating in the birth of Badiou’s philosophy of the event.
III. The Philosophy of the Event and Literature and Art
Through the "rediscovery" of Zhang Shiying, Badiou returns to Mao Zedong’s dialectical thought—specifically, the "one divides into two" of dialectical materialism. Badiou made it very clear in interviews that his purpose in introducing and commenting on the article "The 'Rational Kernel'" was to "prove that the principle of 'one divides into two' is not a crude summary of dialectics but, on the contrary, a meticulous and entirely new horizon that can be used to overcome the vulgar interpretations of Stalinism." In fact, when Mao Zedong was reading the book Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism written by the Soviet philosophers Mitin and others in 1937, he had already noted: "The insight of splitting a unity into two is the basic characteristic of dialectics." In Badiou's view, the common law of the 20th century was neither the One nor the Many, but the Two—that is, it was the split and confrontation of "one divides into two," rather than the synthesis of "two combine into one" [12]. China's experience lies in the idea that a socialist state should not be the end of mass politics; on the contrary, it should be seen as the "Two" on the road to "true" communism, though ultimately synthesis triumphed over the split. It is precisely at the moment of "one dividing into two" and qualitative-quantitative transformation that a unique and unpredictable event occurs. Badiou's "philosophy of the event" is actually an invocation of these events, initiating events of thought from the events of number, politics, love, and poetry. He regards the radical revolutions of the 20th century as political events: the October Revolution of 1917, the Chinese Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and the national liberation wars in Algeria and Vietnam. The victories of these revolutions collectively salvaged the failure of June 1848 and the failure of the Paris Commune. After these revolutions, when the authoritarianism of the new Party-State returned, the "May 1968" events in France were an attempt to confront such authoritarianism. These split-off "Twos" that overflow from the truth of the "One" are the prerequisites for creating new thoughts and practices.
Facing these events that have already occurred, Badiou believes what we need to do is to "stay faithful to the event itself." This means re-creating political and literary events with subversive potential; politics and literature wander like ghosts in the depths of history and thought, waiting to encounter a "subject." What Badiou calls a "subject" are those people who remain faithful to a specific event that may have happened, who will reactivate those accurately named events in a new historical context. So, compared with other types of events, what is special about literary and artistic events? Badiou explicitly points out that the strength of art lies in its ability to endow the event with its due value within the order of thought: "In politics, the event is positioned within retrospective history. But only art has the powerful force to restore or attempt to fully restore the event. Only art can restore the sensible power of an encounter, a rebellion, or an insurrection. Any form of art is a great reflection of such events." In his view, literature is one of the "conditions" of philosophy. The "suturing" of philosophy and literature often hinders the production of truth, whereas literature can produce truth independently: the junction of language and reality is the sentence; sentences form "phrasing" within the text and form "style." Thus, literature encounters the Real in the dimension of thought, stamping a unique mark on the real world through fiction and the complexity of language: "To leave a symbolic scar on the 'One' in the form of fiction, marking a Real—this is precisely where literary thinking lies." The philosophical expression of literature—that is, literary criticism—is the activity of language reflecting upon itself. In this activity, literature completes itself and reaches the "literary absolute." Badiou takes the whole of literary activity (including the literary criticism of philosophers) as an object of thought to reveal the operational mode of literary thought.
Badiou's discourse on literary and artistic events is quite rich, and his interpretations often provide highly speculative readings from the perspective of eventality. Badiou believes that the poetry of the 20th century that can be called an "event" is all communist poetry, and that truly great poets are all communists. There is a fundamental connection between poetry and communism:
Now, as an absolute common good, language is endowed to all people from the moment of birth. The poet is the one who makes a language speak that which it seems powerless to express. Poets are those who seek to use language to create new names to name the as-yet unnamed. For poetry, these inventions and creations are intrinsic elements of language, sharing the same destiny as the mother tongue itself: they are, without exception, endowed to everyone. Poetry is the poet’s gift to language. And this gift, like language itself, is destined for the masses—that is to say, at this anonymous point, what matters is not a particular person, but all people in the singular. Consequently, the great poets of the 20th century recognized something familiar in the grand revolutionary plan of communism—namely, just as poetry offers its inventions to language and language offers itself to everyone, the material world and the world of ideas must likewise be given to everyone in their entirety; they are no longer the property of a few, but the common good of all humanity.
Among the list of communist poets he mentions are Pablo Neruda of Chile, Rafael Alberti of Spain, Edoardo Sanguineti of Italy, Yannis Ritsos of Greece, Mahmoud Darwish of Palestine, Bertolt Brecht of Germany, and Ai Qing of China. It can be seen that the Chinese revolution and its revolutionary singers have been incorporated by Badiou into the sequence of the "event." Chinese leftist literature, as a form of world literature, inevitably becomes a part of the evental totality.
In Alain Badiou: Den lilla boken om historien och händelsen [13], Badiou’s disciple Quentin Meillassoux contextualizes Badiou’s philosophy of the event, demonstrating how Badiou contemplates the significance of the event under a materialist conception of history and truth. From political revolution to literature and art, Badiou affirms that the event possesses the political potential to activate suppressed subjects. His close "comrade-in-arms" Slavoj Žižek, meanwhile, believes that Badiou’s "event" possesses the possibility of breaking out of the operations of the ideological state apparatus [14]: "The event is a commitment to a universal cause of inner necessity, disregarding all opportunistic considerations." In Žižek’s view, theory needs to accurately diagnose the nature and significance of an event before it can pave the way for revolutionary action: "The truly new emerges from a narrative, namely from an apparently pure redoubled restatement of what happened—it is this restatement which opens the passage to a new act (possibility)." Although Žižek’s philosophy of the event is not identical to Badiou’s, and "one divides into two" [15] is interpreted by Žižek as a kind of endless negativity trapped in "bad infinity," they both preserve a place for literature and art as unique events. Literature and art thus become a practical force for subverting systems, customs, and laws.
IV. Conclusion
We have already demonstrated that a "two-way travel" [16] relationship of dialogue exists between Badiou and Chinese theory. The philosophy of the event is the intellectual result of his encounter with Chinese "subjects" such as Mao Zedong, He Lin, Zhang Shiying, and Ai Qing. The strategies in Mao Zedong Thought that mobilize and empower the masses inspired him to develop a "fresh interpretation of French Marxism, social movements, and the cult of personality." Through the synergy of these theoretical efforts, the occurrence of the philosophy of the event, as a global intellectual event, embodies the contemporary progress of Neo-Marxist philosophy and will continue to trigger new narratives regarding different types of events.
It must be pointed out that Badiou’s "event" is absolute and pure. It occurs and appears like a miracle, described as an existence captured by a structure that cannot be explained: "all unique truths are rooted in an event. Something must happen for there to be something new. Even in our personal lives, there must be an encounter; something must happen that is not deliberated, unforeseen, or difficult to control—there must be a breakthrough that is merely accidental." The event points to a solitary existence, alienated from anything currently existing; humans can only passively wait for the event to descend. This view of the event appears overly abstract; it wanders inside and outside of history in a synchronic guise, and carries the risk of simplification (over-emphasizing the "eventness" of a certain event) and utopianization (falling too deeply into nostalgic passion). In fact, Badiou has no firsthand experience of China. The reason he is interested in "China" is because a romanticized "Revolutionary China" could seemingly be used to alleviate the theoretical anxiety of a "Son of May '68" [17]. That is to say, "Revolutionary China" was merely a projection reflecting the cultural and political crisis of "France" itself in the 1960s and 70s. For Badiou and the French youth of that time, what exactly happened during the Chinese revolution was not important; what mattered was that they had found a symbolized ancient Eastern country that they might never even need to understand deeply.
the "subjects" of history are people in the singular; they throw themselves into the torrent of time, choosing to remain faithful to or to forget a certain event. It is not the event itself or the degree of people’s "fidelity," but rather the actual existential conditions of human beings that determine whether an event is worth being "faithful" to. Although Badiou personally participated in French political events, he was also unable to clarify the educational significance of "Revolutionary China" for a "post-revolutionary" France. "China" was simplified by him into a utopia/heterotopia destined for permanent revolution. When Badiou incorporated "China" into the system of the philosophy of the event, "différance" or "misreading" had already occurred. When we introduce his philosophy into China and appropriate it as a form of hermeneutics, we should likewise be aware of where its limits lie.
(Author’s Affiliation: School of Humanities, Institute of Literary Criticism, Hangzhou Normal University) Online Editor: Tong Xin Source: Marxism & Reality, No. 6, 2022