Toscano on Badiou and Revolutionary Thinking

In the following essay Alberto Toscano concerns himself with delineating Alain Badiou’s political thinking in the crucial period of the mid-1980s, and in particular to differentiate Badiou’s conclusions from those reached by theorists Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe in their contemporaneous and influential Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.

Marxism Expatriated
By Alberto Toscano

Today’s radical political (or metapolitical) theory is the offspring of a contorted dialectic of defeat and reinvention. Though it is common to take contemporary ideas on emancipation and political subjectivity at face value, many of the defining characteristics of these recent writings are obscured if we fail to address how they emerged out of a reckoning with the failure or distortion of Marxist politics, and, moreover, if we disregard the extent to which they maintain an underlying commitment to the Marxist impulse whence they arose.

The mode of separation, as it were, from the organisational and theoretical tenets of Marxism (in whichever guise) can tell us a lot about the present resources and limitations of theoretical contributions to the contemporary thinking of politics which drew initial sustenance from that tradition, even if they are now allegedly “beyond” Marx and Marxism. This is certainly the case with the work of Alain Badiou, whose knotty relationship to his own Marxist-Leninist militancy and to Marxist theory has recently become the object of rich and detailed investigation…

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