Fan Chunyan: On the "Resurrection" of the Subject—From Lukács and Althusser to Badiou

The "resurrection" of the subject is an "Althusser-Badiou" proposition or, viewed from a longer perspective, a "Lukács-Althusser-Badiou" proposition. This is primarily because Badiou’s "resurrection" of the subject is built upon the foundation of Althusser’s proclamation of the "death" of the agentic subject. This resurrected subject remains anti-humanist, still premised upon structural "positions" and aleatory events, and maintains a hereditary relationship with the subject as the bearer of aleatory practice proposed in Althusser’s later work. On the other hand, Badiou did not stop at contingency; rather, he sought to drag universality out of contingency and ultimately completed a corporeal reconstruction from the "subject of the event" to the "subject of truth." This restored the agency and creativity of the practicing subject, effectively providing a new theoretical response to the many explorations regarding the reshaping of revolutionary subjectivity undertaken by Lukács and others in the early period.

I. The "Death" of the Subject: Althusser’s Interpellation of the Subject and Its Background

Among the various schools of Western Marxism, the debate surrounding the question of subjectivity is the key catalyst for the divergence between humanism and structuralism. The line of "totality" represented by Lukács is usually termed Humanist Marxism; that is, it seeks to restore the agency of the subject through the dialectic of subject and object and the reshaping of class consciousness, thereby breaking away from the economic determinist orientation of orthodox theory to provide a revolutionary alternative to reformism. Althusser’s Structuralist Marxism, by contrast, is known for its anti-humanism. For him, the subject can only function as a passive bearer of the structure, stripped of subjective agency and revolutionary character.

This article contends that it is necessary to re-examine the theory of the subject from Lukács to Althusser starting from the theory of ideology, deriving a more continuous analysis therefrom rather than remaining confined to a binary of humanism versus structuralism. Under the scrutiny of ideological theory, the humanist subject also possesses an aspect of subjection, while the structuralist subject also has a humanist dimension. More crucially, we can see that from Lukács to Althusser, the "death" of the subject actually underwent a long process rather than being merely a diametrically opposed "turn."

In Lukács, the revolutionary, active subject is not "in-itself" ^[1]. Only individuality is a given fact; subjectivity is something that must be "recovered" from reified ideology, undergoing a process from "being-in-itself" to "being-for-itself." For Lukács, ideology is a form of false consciousness—a distorted cognition of reality. For example, the reified consciousness of commodity fetishism is a naturalized displacement of the reality and history of capital. Values that originally embodied relations between people are displaced by the "nature" of use-value. This "reifying" displacement of history by nature is the expression of bourgeois ideology. Of course, Lukács does not limit himself to the sphere of production discussed by Marx; what is displaced are not only labor and exchange relations, but also the psychological structure of man—even every level of society is covered by such a "veil" of things.

Lukács argues that only the class consciousness of the proletariat has the potential to expose this false consciousness, because proletarian class consciousness can transcend a state of abstraction and fragmentation to achieve a totalizing understanding of reality. However, Lukács also emphasizes that this represents only a possibility. Although the proletariat has the potential to transcend reified consciousness and "the ability to grasp reified forms as processes between men," the proletariat, in its state of "being-in-itself" or under non-revolutionary conditions, remains subject to reified consciousness. Only by constantly cutting itself off from reified consciousness and through repeated efforts to lift the veil of false consciousness "can the consciousness of the proletariat mature into a consciousness of the process itself, and the proletariat become the identical subject-object of history." Only then can it restore its historicity and subjectivity, ensuring it is no longer mediated by the objective laws of the production process, moving from "in-itself" to "for-itself." Therefore, in Lukács, the "restoration" of the practicing subject is not a simple matter of a shift in consciousness; it must undergo an arduous and long process. It is achievable only through continuous ideological critique (repeatedly "lifting the veil") and practice. In other words, if "reification is the necessary, immediate reality," then "its overcoming can only take the form of a constant and repeated effort to break through the reified structure of existence in practice, by concretely relating to the contradictions of the total development as they manifest themselves, and by recognizing the inherent significance of these contradictions for the total development."

The understanding of ideology in the (early) Frankfurt School underwent some changes relative to Lukács. For instance, Adorno argued that ideology is "false consciousness with objective necessity." He emphasized the objective necessity possessed by ideology rather than merely its falsity; moreover, the goal of ideological critique was not to restore human historicity from the naturalness of things, but to restore the inherent richness of nature from an "identitarian" instrumental rationality. For Adorno, ideology is first and foremost not a question of human consciousness but the material structure of commodity exchange. Exchange value, as the secret of ideology, embodies an abstract law of identity that allows qualitatively different things to become commensurable, thereby erasing the difference and richness of use-values. This logic of identity, and the instrumental rationality built upon it, is both a false consciousness and a key link in the operation of capital, thus possessing objective necessity. Thus, in Adorno, breaking false consciousness cannot be achieved through "lifting the veil," nor by replacing reified consciousness with the totalizing consciousness of the proletariat. Rather, one must find a law of "non-identity" to dissolve the identity of instrumental rationality and liberate the richness of use-value to restore the subjectivity of nature.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno further point out—through their discourse on the relationship between self-preservation and self-sacrifice—that because the subject is engulfed by instrumental rationality, it has to some extent moved toward a self-sacrificial "death." Self-sacrifice was originally a means of self-preservation, but in the Enlightenment rationality of capitalism, self-preservation becomes the means while sacrifice becomes the end. Once sacrifice becomes the end, self-preservation is replaced by self-abandonment. "Because the nature of man is denied, not only the purpose of controlling external nature but also the purpose of human life itself is distorted and becomes blurred. Once people are no longer aware that they themselves are nature, all purposes for maintaining their own lives—including social progress, the increase of all material and spiritual forces—in a word, self-consciousness itself becomes meaningless; the means become the end." Under the conditions of late capitalism, this inversion reaches its zenith; self-preservation as a means ultimately leads to the destruction of the subject. Horkheimer and Adorno point out that in this situation, it is no longer possible to restore subjectivity by revealing false consciousness. This is because, within false ideology, not only are people deceived, but "man becomes superfluous." "If anyone attempts to escape the universal, non-equivalent, and unfair exchange, society will surely leave him with nothing; this is social necessity." In other words, under the universal coercion of the principle of exchange and calculative rationality, since self-preservation no longer serves as the end, man inevitably moves toward self-abandonment, and the subject inevitably moves toward destruction.

Althusser continued the Frankfurt School’s notion of the objective necessity of ideology, but he completely disagreed with the idea of "false consciousness." In Althusser’s view, ideology, as the "imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence," does not exist at the level of consciousness at all, but at the level of the unconscious. This imaginary relationship located in the unconscious is not supported by a set of systems derived from the subject's consciousness or ideas; rather, it is a construction of the Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) that bypasses the subject's consciousness. This is a material force located in the Symbolic ^[2], which "interpellates" individuals directly, turning them into its own subjects—that is, as supporters of the Ideological State Apparatuses. But at the same time, such a subject can only be a "subjugated" subject. Having lost subjective agency, the subject serves only as a passive bearer of material forces.

Althusser effectively dissolved the subject in the name of "structure." History no longer unfolds around the subject; history is no longer the product of man’s own activities but exists as a "process without a subject." This is entirely different from the historical dialectic described by Lukács. Although both start from the disappearance of subjectivity brought about by capitalist production, Lukács’s theory points toward the restoration of subjectivity at the level of class consciousness. In Althusser, the material forces behind ideology are rock-solid, and more importantly, ideology always bypasses consciousness to shape the subject at the level of the unconscious. Therefore, the subject is not the self-awareness that follows the disposal of some false ideology; the subject is precisely the result of the shaping of ideology as an unconscious structure. In other words, for Althusser, there is no longer any possibility of "restoring" the subject. Because whether it is self-sacrifice or self-abandonment, for Althusser, both are necessary to becoming a subject. In the scene of interpellation, the subject always "actively" makes itself a "submissive" subject through its own language and behavior (answering the haul). The subject no longer implies the rise of some self-consciousness, let alone an agency to transform the world; the subject can only serve as a passive bearer of the capitalist structure: "The structure of the relations of production determines the places and functions occupied and adopted by the agents of production, who are never anything more than the 'bearers' of these functions. The true 'subjects' (in the sense of the constitutive subjects of the process) are therefore not these occupants or functionaries... the true subjects are these definers and distributors: the relations of production (and political and ideological social relations). But since these are 'relations,' they cannot be thought within the category of the subject." This passage clearly demonstrates Althusser's view: the structure is the subject, and since the relations of production are not the category of the subject, history can ultimately only be "a process without a subject."

It can be seen that from Lukács’s emphasis on the "restoration" of subjectivity to Althusser’s dissolution of the subject's agency in the name of structure, the discussion of ideology and the subject in Western Marxism underwent a process in which certain views of the Frankfurt School served as a transition between the two. But it was ultimately Althusser who announced the death of the subject, because in his view, the attempts by early Western Marxists to achieve the "restoration" of class consciousness through ideological critique inherently carried an idealist tendency. For Althusser, materialism must be an anti-humanism—that is, starting from the over-determination of the capitalist structure to announce the non-determinacy of the subject. A subject without the capacity for determination and choice represents the death of the agentic subject. Under Althusser’s structuralist Marxism,

The thoroughness of the "death of the subject" is also manifested in this: even before they are born, the individual has already been interpellated ^[3] across time and space by certain structural forces (ideological apparatuses). In this sense, the subject is "always already" a submissive subject.

II. The Subject of "Aleatory Encounter": From Structural Bearer to Practical Bearer

One point worth emphasizing here is that although Althusser’s structuralism makes it impossible for the subject to exist as an active being endowed with self-consciousness and the capacity for choice, Althusser did not abandon the concept of the subject; the subject always occupies a position within the ideological structure. It is precisely this occupancy that allows the subject to maintain a pivotal role in Althusser's theory. Despite being a passive "bearer" (Träger), the subject itself is indispensable. Without the subject's linguistic-performative acts, ideology itself would be unable to complete its interpellation. Ideology can only exist as an ideology with material force when it is instantiated in the actions and discourse of the subject (albeit unconsciously). That is to say, for Althusser, there always exists a relationship of "double reflection" between the subject and ideology: not only does the subject come into being through the interpellation of ideology, but ideology is also always centered on the subject, ensuring its function through a mirror-like structure of replication. From this perspective, the subject not only exists but "acts on its own": "the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the Subject, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection 'all by himself.'"

In other words, if we say that in humanist Marxism ^[4], subjectivity maintains a see-saw relationship with capitalist ideology—for example, reification and the coercion of identity lead to the atrophy of the subject, while the thought of totality and negative dialectics weaken the control of bourgeois ideology, thereby restoring the subject’s totality or richness—then for Althusser, the subject and ideology themselves constitute a relationship of mutual construction and mutual mirroring. The "effect" of the subject is "subjection" (assujettissement). This subjection does not indicate an atrophy of the subject; rather, it is precisely the manifestation of the subject's "autonomy" and "freedom," and of the subject as the "author of and responsible for its own actions." Therefore, Althusser argues: "the category of the subject is constitutive of all ideology... only insofar as all ideology has the function (which defines it) of 'constituting' concrete individuals as subjects." Which is to say, the effect of structure on the subject is the cancellation of the subject's agency, but it does not cancel the subject itself. The "death" of the subject is predicated on the preservation of the subject's unique position.

In his later work, The Materialism of the Encounter, Althusser shifted to emphasize the importance of the subject as a bearer of practice. However, for him, the emphasis on practice and class struggle remained built upon a passive view of the subject. It was not as Marx described—where the subject of practical activity can act according to its own will and desires, transforming the world according to its subjective purposes. In Althusser’s concept of practice, there is no space for purposiveness (Zweckmäßigkeit). Furthermore, due to the influence of unconscious structures, the subject naturally does not inquire deeply into the background from which practice arises, nor is the subject a reflective subject; this excludes the law-governed nature (Gesetzmäßigkeit) of practice. In other words, for Althusser, practice can only function as an "independent" aleatory practice ^[5] outside of laws, and the subject can only serve as the bearer of such aleatory practice.

Regarding aleatory events, we can use the famous metaphor from Althusser’s book: the subject of an aleatory encounter is like someone who happens to board a moving train. He knows neither the destination nor the starting point of the journey, nor does he know his own fate. Everything is unpredictable, and he himself does not care; he is always "on the road." But from another perspective, he is substantively involved in what happens inside the train: recording and organizing the sequence of aleatory events based on experience, deriving a certain theoretical picture, and remembering to leave room within these theoretical pictures for the particularity of the events. It can be seen that the subject here is capable of participating in the process of practice, except that practice here excludes the guidance of any ready-made theory; everything is subject to contingency. Or rather, in an aleatory encounter, the "given" world serves as the point of intervention for the subject and is the prerequisite for practice. Because it is full of contingency and randomness, the subject’s practice (such as the workers' movement) will no longer be restricted by any established framework, thereby escaping the constraints of certain rigid theories and allowing aleatory practice to always point toward the future. After all, Althusser’s original intention in proposing "the materialism of the encounter" was to restore political practice, enabling the European Communism of the time to escape its passivity and overcome reformist tendencies. Political practice cannot be separated from the subject. Although Althusser denied the purposiveness and law-governed nature of practice, the subject, as the result of an open-ended practice oriented toward the future, can be recognized retrospectively.

However, Althusser could not "resuscitate" the subject. He pointed out: "The materialism of the encounter is a materialism... not of a subject (whether God or the proletariat), but of a process... a process without a subject which imposes on the subjects (individuals or others) it dominates the order of its development, with no assignable end." There are two types of subjects here: one is the Subject with a capital S, and the other is the subject based on contingency that has lost its essential determination—the subject as an individual. The aleatory subject "is not faced with any kind of definite 'subjectivity,' but with infinitely open possible situations." That is to say, under the condition of contingency, the subject is present in the practice of the encounter and possesses a certain revolutionary potential, but in the practice of the aleatory encounter, the subject can only exist in the retrospective sense as a result of practice; the subject remains always governed by randomness.

III. The "Resurrection" of the Subject: The Subject of the Event and the Subject as the "Body" of Truth

Alain Badiou is one of the few philosophers to re-address the subject and subjectivity after the decline of Western Marxism. He continues Althusser’s emphasis on contingency, explicitly proposing that the subject is first and foremost a "position." But unlike Althusser, Badiou gives the subject not only a "position" but also a "body." In Badiou's view, the resurrection of the subject must be realized in a "body." The resurrected subject is an active subject, capable of creating a new world through intervention, naming, choosing, and deciding. Furthermore, contingency serves only as the starting point for the resurrection of the subject; only by extracting a certain universality from contingency can the subject truly be generated.

What Badiou resurrects is not the "subject" that Althusser sought to kill—the subject in the humanist sense. The resurrection of the subject must be completed upon a base where the subject has been truly killed, and then with the help of another, completely different "body." Badiou once remarked: "In any case, I am against all paths that take the subject as a retreat into simple subject-centrism," and "the primary function of a materialistic theory of the subject is 'exclusion'." That is to say, only by excluding a certain idealistic concept of the subject can a new concept and theory of the subject emerge.

In his early work Theory of the Subject, Badiou explicitly proposed the concept of the subject’s "place." The word "place" here certainly carries a structuralist dimension—that is, as a space of structural configuration—but Badiou did not stop there. In his view, place itself contains a dialectic of "outplace" (hors-lieu) and "splace" (esplace). If the subject-position as a structural space (i.e., "splace") represents the limit of the status Althusser could accord the subject while trapped within structuralism, then the "outplace" proposed by Badiou points toward the possibility of the subject’s "resurrection." For "outplace" signifies a "force," the dismantling of fixed structural configurations, pointing toward the possibility of an active subject. During the Theory of the Subject period, Badiou’s definition of the subject was: "the process of the gathering of force." At the same time, "outplace" is linked to the aleatory event; the event serves as the rupture of the structure and the guide through which the subject’s force is gathered: "Just as there is only one subject, there is only one force here, and the existence of this force only surfaces through the event."

In the mature period of Badiou’s theory—the period of Being and Event—the subject is the subject faithful to the event. In Being and Event, Badiou points out that the characteristic of the event is "undecidability," and to decide upon this undecidability, one must rely on the subject. When an event occurs, nothing guarantees that it is indeed an event; only after the subject intervenes—by naming the event and conducting a positive investigation around the series of "traces" left by the event—can the "undecidability" of the event finally be decided through "forcing" (forçage). In other words, it is only through the subject's choice and judgment that the event retrospectively confirms itself.

For Badiou, the event (contingency) is merely the starting point. Unlike Althusser, he does not remain within contingency but insists on drawing universality out of it, which requires the deep intervention of an active subject. Badiou calls the subject that intervenes in the event the "faithful subject"—the subject that remains consistently faithful to the traces of the event. "Fidelity" is a term Badiou borrowed from the realm of love; in his view, the "encounter" (the aleatory event) of love is not enough; the key lies in the subject's fidelity to the labor of love. Only in this way can the contingency of the encounter be overcome by a lasting universality (the truth procedure of love). In other words, the faithful subject is the crucial link from aleatory event to universal truth. Badiou emphasizes precisely the triple link of "Event-Truth-Subject": the "roll of the dice" of the event establishes the transition between contingency and necessity; the subject's naming of the event and its hazard-laden investigation draw out a universal truth procedure, finally allowing the undecidable event to be decided.

Furthermore, the agency of the subject is reflected in the fact that the characteristic of truth is an indiscernible universality (i.e., generic universality). Truth has no substantive existence within the "situation"; it is constructed by the subject from nothing, based on the traces of the event. Using Badiou's mathematical language, truth is a "generic subset" constructed by the faithful subject. After the event occurs, the faithful subject, by investigating the traces of the event and centering on the "primordial statement," continuously selects elements positively related to the event (which are also indiscernible elements within the "situation") to constitute an infinite generic set. Of course, when the subject constructs the generic subset, it is still subject to contingency; which elements are chosen and which are not is random, and the subject's investigation is completely without a prior plan. It is evident that in Badiou, the subject's practice likewise lacks space for purposiveness and law-governed nature.

The key here is the subject's "forcing." Forcing is also a mathematical term, referring to the process of forcing a statement from a certain generic premise, such that this statement holds "veridicality" within the generic extension. That is to say, forcing the indiscernible generic subset (i.e., truth) to such an extent that the undecidable statement is veridical...

Thus, the undecidable is rendered decided. Through forcing, the subject not only enables the event to be judged but also allows truth to be made present. Consequently, Badiou arrives at his definition of the subject for this period: "As the bearer of faithful forcing, the subject links the indiscernible (truth) to the decision upon the undecidable (event). Or rather, through the decision upon the undecidable, the subject elucidates the indiscernible." In other words, the significance of the subject is manifested in its constant position at the crossroads of knowledge and truth, being and event; only the subject is capable of elucidating truth (the indiscernible) and judging the event (the undecidable).

If the agency of the subject during the Being and Event period was primarily manifested in its ability to decide upon the undecidable through intervention, investigation, and forcing, then by the time of Logics of Worlds, Badiou explicitly proposes the reconstruction of the subject's "body." That is, he positions the subject as the worldly body of truth, suggesting that the process of subjectivation is the process of constructing a new truthful body. In fact, the body is vital to the "resurrection" of the subject. For instance, a person must always relate to reality and participate in actual action and struggle through their own body. Badiou once asked: "If we are materialists, should we not believe that every subject possesses a body?" However, Badiou's "body" is by no means a body in the biological sense. Badiou’s definition of "body" is "that which exists in a world." That is to say, proceeding from materialism, the subject must appear in the world as something, "which means it arrives in the form of some kind of body." Furthermore, Badiou's body is not a fixed body that serves as a passive carrier of truth; the body of the subject can only be a "subjectivized" body. In other words, the body is one that reveals the truth procedure through practice; it represents the transformation from individual to subject and embodies the process of subjectivation. The body is not a passive bearer of a static truth, but an active participant in the construction and configuration of the truth procedure. "Experiencing the existence of such a body is a practice, not a representation"; the subject is generated through practice. Badiou emphasizes that in this process of subjectivation, there are three types of subjects: the faithful subject, the reactive subject, and the obscure subject. All three types are new bodies because they all "participate" in the body of truth to varying degrees; thus, they can be called "variables of subjectivation." For example, the faithful subject is linked to the New Era ^[6] revealed by the post-evental truth; the reactive (or conservative) subject denies the consequences of the event, "placing this new body in a corner as much as possible"; while the obscure subject seeks to "provide a completely fictional body to compete with the new body of truth." Among these three, only the faithful subject represents the body of truth; the other two are reverse operations revolving around the body of truth, differing only in degree—that is, they either restrain or oppose it based on an investigation of the body of truth.

In summary, the faithful subject is the worldly body of truth. It fully restores the agency and vitality of the subject through its incorporation with truth during the process of practice. Therefore, it can be said that the faithful subject points toward a new, groundbreaking future: "If we can understand that gradually participating in the creation of the subjectivized body is to make our lives more powerful, rather than merely surviving, then we will possess what Rimbaud called 'truth in soul and body,' and we shall be stronger than our times."

(The author is an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) Web Editor: Zhang Jian Source: Marxist Philosophy, Issue 4, 2024.