Abstract
This article examines the changing relation between politics and violence in Alain Badiou's theory of the subject. It is argued that, emerging from his early Maoism, Badiou initially entertains the notion of a ‘creative destruction’ but that, in his later work, he moves towards a ‘subtractive destruction’ which is logical rather than ontological. As a result, he moves away from the Leninist instrumentalisation of violence. On this basis, it is claimed that an emancipatory relation between politics and violence can be envisaged as long as violence is subtracted from the dominant Statist version of violence, which has at its core the trope of the vulnerable individual but also social body. The last third of the article applies this renewed theory of violence to Gandhi's satyagraha movement. It is shown that Gandhi's form of ‘non-violence’ is in fact a mode of ‘progressive violence’ in the Badiouian sense, but also, that the trope of the vulnerable body remains central to its logic, and that it is this that has enabled the cycle of violence witnessed in post-Independence India.
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Notes
Liberal critics of Fanon assume a possible space of non-violence. Fanon's subtle admixture of psychoanalysis and Marxism, more connected to actual struggles than the Frankfurt School version of the same conjunction, exposes the production of the figure of ‘the native’ as a constitutive violence which is dialectically turned on the coloniser during anti-colonial resistance. Hence Fanon's acerbic dismissal of the Gandhian strategy of non-violence, as ‘an attempt to solve the colonial problem around a green baize table’ (Fanon, 2001, p. 48). I will be complicating this picture by applying a Badiouian framework to Gandhi's satyagraha.
My thanks go to one of the reviewers of this article, who pointed out that the link between the students’ ‘May’ and the workers’ ‘May’ was precisely State violence: the excessive intervention by the CRS mobilised a wide spectrum of French society against police repression.
This is something acutely recognised by psychoanalysis. In Lacan's Kant avec Sade, it is clear that perversion is not outside the law but consists in a constant and repetitive attempt to make the Other of the law exist in more severe and authoritative forms.
Where this syllogism falls down is in the middle term, where it is asserted that there can be only one religion. Gandhi is here pushing towards the generic, and elsewhere he substitutes ‘spirituality’ for religion to this end, but contemporary India demonstrates that this declaration is more suited to the hate-filled separatist zeal of religious fundamentalists than to the generic language of love.
Jayatilleka's claim is that Fidel Castro invented a form of just war theory appropriate to guerrilla war, and that this Marxist ethics of the correct use of violence is what has allowed the Cuban revolution to survive while others imploded under the effects of internecine violence.
References
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