Democratic materialism and the materialist dialectic

Alain Badiou

France’s agony was not born of the flagging reasons to believe in her: defeat, demography, industry, etc., but of the incapacity to believe in anything at all.
André Malraux

What do we all think, today?* What do I myself think when I don’t monitor myself? Or, rather, what is our (my) natural belief? By ‘natural’, of course, I mean in accordance with the rule of an inculcated nature. A belief is all the more natural to the extent that its imposition, or its inculcation, is freely sought out – and to the extent that it serves our immediate and often unavowed designs. Today, natural belief can be summarized in a single statement:

There are only bodies and languages.

This statement is the axiom of our contemporary conviction. I propose to name this conviction democratic materialism. Why? Democratic materialism. The individual fashioned by the contemporary world recognizes the objective existence of bodies alone. Who would ever speak today, other than to conform to a certain rhetoric, of the separability of our immortal soul? Who does not subscribe de facto – in the pragmatics of desires and the self-evidence of commerce – to the dogma of our finitude, of our carnal exposition to enjoyment, suffering and death?

Take one symptom among many: artists, the ‘creative’ people of our day – choreographers, painters, video-makers – track the self-evidence of bodies, of the desiring and machinic life of bodies, of their intimacy, their nudity, their entwinings and ordeals. They all adapt the inhibited, quartered and soiled body to the domain of fantasies and dreams. All, in the end, impose upon the sphere of the visible the partition of bodies shot through with the noise of the universe. Aesthetic theory merely follows in their wake. A random example: a letter from Antonio Negri to Raúl Sanchez, from December 15, 1999. In it, we read the following:

Today the body is not just a subject who produces and who – because it produces art – shows us the paradigm of production in general, the power of life: the body has become a machine into which production and art are inscribed. This is what we postmoderns know.1

‘Postmodern’ is certainly one of the possible names for contemporary democratic materialism. Negri is right about what the postmoderns ‘know’: the body is the only concrete instance [instance] available to individuals who aspire, in their desolation, to enjoyment. Man, within the regime of the ‘power of life’, is a somewhat unhappy animal, perpetually needing to be convinced that the law of the body harbours the secret of his hope.

In order to validate the equation ‘existence = in­dividual = body’, contemporary doxa must bravely absorb humanity into an overstretched vision of animality. ‘Human rights’ are indistinguishable from the rights of the living – that is, the rights of the living being to remain a desolate individual aspiring to enjoyment. Mortal bodies. Suffering lives. The humanist protection of all animals, humans included: such is the norm of contemporary materialism. It supplies contemporary materialism with its scientific name, ‘bioethics’. The progressive inversion [envers progressiste] of bioethics borrows its own name from Foucault: ‘biopolitics’.

This materialism is therefore a materialism of life. It is a bio-materialism.

Moreover, it is essentially a democratic materialism. This is because the contemporary consensus, in recognizing the plurality of languages, presupposes their juridical equality. That is why the absorption of humanity into animality culminates in the identification of the human animal with the diversity of its subspecies and with the democratic rights that inhere in this diversity. This time, the progressive inversion of this stance borrows its name from Deleuze: ‘minoritarianism’.

Communities and cultures, colours and pigments, religions and religious orders, traditions and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate: everything and everyone deserves to be recognized and protected by the law. 

Having said that, democratic materialism acknowledges a global limit to its polymorphous and animalistic tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule over all bodies, will be termed dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of our ‘right to intervention’: legal, international and, if necessary, military intervention. Aggressive actions serve to rectify our universalistic claims, along with our linguistic sectarianism.

Bodies will be made to pay for their excesses of language. That is how a violent Two (the war against terrorism, democracy against dictatorship – at any cost!) sustains the juridical promotion of the multiple. In the final analysis, war, and war alone, makes possible the alignment of languages.

War is the barely hidden materialist essence of democracy. This is something we can already see, and shall not stop seeing, as this new century unfolds, if we do not manage to cut short the effects of the following maxim (which nonetheless guides us, irresistibly): ‘There are only bodies and languages.’

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