Alain Badou. "Situations of great disorientation end in world war"

2022-05-21T03:55:28.659Z

He is one of the most influential living French thinkers, a strange bird. He does not deny Maoism and has not voted since 1969. He predicts a world war in the medium term

Alain Badiou (Rabat, 85) is one of the most influential living French philosophers in the world.

He is a peculiar intellectual, a strange bird: he has not renounced communism or —even more exotic— Maoism.

The author of the monumental

Being and the Event

is the last of a lineage that has in Sartre, Lacan, Althusser... some of his antecedents, his "masters", as Professor Jordi Riba points out in

Alain Badiou: politics and politics

(Gedisa, 2021).

He is studied as a classic, but he does not stop producing.

In French he has just published, at the Gallimard publishing house, the booklet

Observations on the disorientation of the world

Up close it imposes.

He has an air of a biblical prophet.

Or of an intellectual from another time, a time of intellectuals to whom he listened and who often, in his political opinions, were spectacularly wrong.

QUESTION.

 "We are disoriented," you write.

What disorients us?

RESPONSE. 

Disorientation are those moments in history when no clear choice is offered to the population.

I met an oriented era.

In politics, a clearly identified right and left faced each other.

The right: conservative, nationalist, supporter of private property.

The left: socialist, communist and internationalist, in favor of a class struggle.

In France there was a fundamental choice: were you for or against the war in Algeria?

And of the colonial wars?

Is all this over?

 Now this type of definition is difficult to find and to define.

The ruling world - property owners, shareholders, but also parties and deputies - agrees that there will be no fundamental transformation.

There are also no really different political parties from each other.

The political choice becomes very difficult and confusing, and is expressed through more or less violent protests against this or that point.

But they are protests detached from an overall vision.

Those who protest feel disoriented.

They don't know what the next stage will be, they don't know what their defeat or victory means.

It's like a sea voyage without a compass.

“The ruling world agrees that there will be no fundamental transformation”

You are not convinced by movements like the

yellow vests.

I understand its nature.

I know that there is a real issue behind it: the progressive abandonment of the rural and provincial world by the authorities and also the populations.

But the movement itself does not indicate by what method he intends to solve his problems.

Due to the lack of a clear vision of what to do, a scapegoat is sought.

"It's Macron's fault!"

They imagine that by bringing down Emmanuel Macron, the situation will change.

They are movements of anger, but anger is not a good political passion because it is negative: we know what it does not want, but not what it wants.

The pandemic, did it disorient us?

It arrived at a time that was already disoriented, but it aggravated it.

Nobody was prepared.

Deep down, what prevailed was anger, our habits were disturbed: not being able to go to the cafe, having to wear a mask, a vaccine.

The pandemic allowed us to measure to what extent we were disoriented.

And the war in Ukraine?

 It reminds rather of the moment before the 1914 war, a possibly global conflict that is linked to detailed situations in Central Europe, such as the First World War, which was triggered by Serbia and by disputes over the colonial empires.

It was a showdown to see if Germany was going to be admitted to the club of great powers.

On the horizon today is the question of whether China will be admitted to the concert of nations.

For this situation to be clarified, Russia must no longer be a factor in the game.

Isn't there simply a sovereign and democratic country, invaded and bombed?

And when the Americans bombed Belgrade in 1999?

Wasn't there something unacceptable there?

Wouldn't it have been necessary to leave NATO?

There is a total asymmetry.

What did the US Army go to Afghanistan to do?

Why did you destroy Iraq?

In the last period, the main international flaws are not the work of Russia or China, but of the wars of the American Army.

With our support.

Now we realize that Ukraine is a sovereign country.

Iraq was also a sovereign country!

Does it mean that, since those episodes happened, nothing has to be said now?

It means that the exercises of sovereignty must be egalitarian.

I am a resolute anti-Putinian, all the more so because I believe that Putin is the end result of the decomposition of communism in Russia.

There is an unjustified aggression, but the general context must not be forgotten.

Why should one be shocked by Russia's aggressiveness towards one of its neighbors without being shocked by US aggression around the world?

Putin's action must be condemned, but from a total independence from NATO and the Americans.

I say: neither Putin nor Joe Biden.

Personally, do you feel disoriented?

 Disorientation is a situation, it is not something subjective.

One can have a personal orientation, but this will not change the general disorientation.

We live in a confused historical time.

I want to make a sad prognosis, which I don't know if I'll see because I'm starting to get old.

World situations of great disorientation end in a world war.

It is my medium-term forecast.

The best possible leader is the best proxy of capital with a good relationship with the citadels of capitalism.

In this role, Macron seems suitable to me

Do you predict a world war?

I predict a world war.

I see accidents multiplying — the situation in Ukraine is one of them, but the American defeat in Afghanistan was another — like those that preceded the 1914 war, more than the 1940 war, because the 1940 war was ideological, between democrats , fascists and communists: three orientation protocols.

That of 1914 was between powers to consolidate hegemony.

France has held presidential elections.

You never vote.

I haven't voted since 1969, so I did for a local candidate from the Unified Socialist Party.

I have never found any reason to do so.

I think that voting should be one of the forms of expression of the conflicts of the orientations.

But visibly it is not this, but an election to know if we keep the man who is in office for lack of anything better.

For lack of anything better, Macron?

Not for lack of anything better, but it is in the logic of disorientation.

Marx defined the leaders of the great capitalist metropolises as proxies of capital.

We have returned, after more complicated times with the long interruption of socialist and communist ideologies, to the fact that the best possible leader is the best proxy for capital, the one who develops local capitalism and maintains a good relationship with the citadels of capitalism. .

In this role, Macron seems suitable to me.

In the presidential elections, the candidate of the extreme right, Marine Le Pen, lost, but obtained her best result, 13 million votes.

Are you worried?

The rise of the extreme right is part of the disorientation.

The absence of any perspective beyond the continuation of the parliamentary dictatorship of capital, falsely called democracy, has pushed millions of people into the field of pure reaction: the desire to return to the past and hostility towards foreigners.

Look at the development of antisemitism before the last world war.

The development of an identity concept of nations, which aims to return to their misery the proletarians who come from Africa, Asia or South America, is the same.

And it is also a factor of war, civil and international.

The union of the left in France, is it a reason for hope for you?

What is today, in France, the left, in quotes?

The socialists, completely broken and ready to ally themselves with anyone?

The communists who are ordered not to use the word communism in their propaganda, and who are about to become a small group?

Our last union of the left was made in 1981 under the presidency of Mitterrand.

The result?

The beginning of the counterrevolution of the 1980s and 1990s, which installed an avid and reinforced capitalism in France.

The left cannot be unified, because it practically does not exist.

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