Alain Badiou

translated by Jake Bellone with James Curley-Egan

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“Political power” in the territory where the subject-body exists, raises, be it on the small scale, the question—decisive in the entire history of the Soviet Union and Popular China—of the links between the State and the Communist Party. In the liberated zones executive committees are everywhere put in place, “elected in sorts of mass meetings”. But, not only are these committees often composed of big-mouths without any real conviction (Mao says, and I know from experience how right he is that, “in such meetings, the intellectuals and upstarts take over easily”), but also “the organs of the Party, wanting to simplify work, settle themselves a large number of affairs bypassing the authority of the committees”. The form “Two” of the point is here particularly clear: either one concentrates the totality of the capacity of decision in the hands of the directors of the Party, or one endows the popular power with a militant reality, under the guise, Mao advocates, of “councils of delegates of the workers, of the peasants and of the soldiers”.

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L'Être et l'évenement: Tome 2, Logiques des Mondes, Paris: Broché, 2006. A forthcoming translation by Alberto Toscano as Logics of Worlds (Continuum) is due in 2008.