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Corrupting the Youth: A Conversation with Alain Badiou

At 79 years of age the philosopher Alain Badiou surveys the youth: the
youth whom liberalism has left without a compass, the youth tempted by
Daesh, and so, too, his own youth, marked by communism, to which he
remains faithful. Interview by Juliette Cerf for Tlrama. Translation by
David Broder

In Alain Badious essay published in the wake of the 13 November Paris


killings, "Notre mal vient de plus loin," he puts things directly: "Our ills
today come from the historic failure of communism." Faithful at
whatever cost to the Maoist ideals of his youth, applauded by some and
jeered by others, this politically-committed philosopher is the author of a
multi-faceted oeuvre that has been translated worldwide. It ranges from
metaphysical tomes based on mathematics like Being and
Event and Logics of Worlds soon to be followed by a third
volume, LImmanence des vrits to a series of political interventions
named Circonstances, via plays for the stage, seminars on the great
thinkers of the philosophical tradition, books for the wider public like In
Praise of Love, and his translation of Platos Republic. This abundant
output is reflected in three of his essays published this summer: La Vraie
Vie. Appel la corruption de la jeunesse (Fayard), Un parcours grec.
Circonstances 8 (Lignes) and Que pense le pome? (ditions Nous). Here
we meet a fierce critic of capitalism, faithfully radical as he is radically
faithful.
Why did you want to address youth in this new book, La Vraie
Vie?
A number of different factors came together. Firstly, personal factors put
me face-to-face with the great disorientation that the youth is today
experiencing. Since the 1980s it has gradually seen the horizon of the
possible closing down. I have seen the difficulties my children and their
friends have had in traversing the world such as it is, and finding their
place within it. Ive seen young peoples growing tendency toward self-
depreciation. Moreover, I have been surrounded by students, and having
long been politically active in migrant hostels and factories where I was
frequently in contact with a nomadic working-class youth bearing a rich
experience drawn from extraordinarily diverse situations. And then
theres the fact that one of my great sources, Platos dialogues, is made up
of discussions between Socrates and young people. For the tradition I set
myself in, youth is simultaneously both the very question of philosophy
and its destination. The philosopher tries to transmit something that
might still be of value in the future, and in this sense, his audience is
always the youth To philosophies is to research the question of truth in
the conditions of ones own time. But the youth also enters into a world
that is in becoming; it is also seeking its bearings and points of fixture.

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Corrupting the Youth Juliette Cerf Halaman 2

That is its very process. Youths problem is exactly the same as the
philosophers, though it doesnt know it!
Like Plato you call for the "corruption" of youth. But how does
wanting to help young people to orient themselves, to find
truth, constitute a form of corruption?
What were Socratess judges reproaching him with when they accused
him of corrupting the youth, and condemned him to death for doing so?
They reproached him with putting in doubt certain aspects of tradition, of
openly flaunting his impiety with regard to the gods of the city, of turning
the youth away from its familial and civic duty. If philosophy "corrupts,"
that is because its function is more critical than conservative. However, in
this regard the current situation is more complex than the situation in
Platos time. Today the great landmarks of tradition have been destroyed,
but without society proposing new ones in their place. There are new
pleasures [jouissances], yes, but not new values. Everything has dissolved
in the fascination for the commodity, in what Marx called the "icy waters
of egotistical calculation." Young people are wedged between, on the one
hand, the mortifying possibility of a return to tradition which is always
a matter of resuscitating a corpse and bringing ghosts to life and, on the
other hand, the possibility of taking a place in the general competition
and struggling for their own survival therein, to the sole end of not being a
loser. What I, following Rimbaud, call the "true life" is a third way: neither
the return to defunct traditions nor the adoption of the rules of globalised
capitalism, which whatever their semblance of civilization are in reality
brutal and savage. At an extremely young age Rimbaud was acutely
conscious of the disorientation that was on its way. He saw very clearly
that the old Christ had abandoned the Earth. He roamed through the
world, where he did a little of everything, including poetry, one of his
follies. He burned through life before concluding that the modern world
is money and success. He then became a colonial trafficker
So what is the true life?
A life that does not limit itself either to obedience or the satisfaction of
immediate impulses. A life in which the subject constitutes herself as a
subject. For me there are four domains in which truth manifests itself,
what I call the four procedures for the construction of truth: art, love,
politics and science. My wish for the youth is that they traverse these four
conditions: to encounter art in all its forms; to be loving in fidelity, and for
a long time; and to participate in the political reconstruction of a world of
justice, as against the world such as it is. And not to be as ignorant of
science as they currently are, so that they do not leave it in the hands of
technology or capital.
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You devote one section of your text to young men and women:
is the difference between the sexes still relevant for thinking
about youth today?
Yes. The weakening of traditions has not had the same effects on young
women and on young men. It has opened up more doors to women, who
have little-by-little been liberated from the male oppression and
dependence on marriage that reigned in the old world. It has opened up
career prospects and possibilities that they did not previously have.
Ultimately young women are more at ease in the contemporary world
than young men, and that includes doing better at school. I have attended
trials of young men who are completely disoriented: petty dealers, mock
local bosses in the cits [projects/council estates] etc. Their sisters, for
their part, were lawyers For young men the disappearance of military
service symbolized the general disappearance of any initiation. For
thousands of years the question of youth and reaching adulthood was
governed by regulated procedures that set out the relevant thresholds.
Nowadays identifying the different ages of ones life is difficult, hence the
cult of youth the fact that the norm is now to remain young as long as
possible, even when power remains in the hands of the old and there also
reigns a fear of young people, gangs of young people All this creates a
general confusion.
In some of your recent political interventions another youth
appears: the young people enrolled by Daesh, who you
characterize as "young fascists."
The word "radicalized" is very much in fashion, but I prefer the term
"fascists." I use "fascism" as the name for a popular subjectivity generated
by capitalism which mixes into an identitarian, nationalist discourse.
Fascism is a reactive subjectivity: indeed, these young people have often
experienced the frustration that goes with being nothing more than a
petty trafficker in the cits, and the disillusionment over not having been
able to become a great hero of capitalism. They reject the rather desolate
and opportunist roam through immediate, worldly satisfactions, as well as
the harsh law of competition and success. They situate themselves outside
the alternative most youth live through the alternative between
consuming and burning up ones life in transgression and immediacy, or
taking a place in society, becoming a banker or the manager of a start-up
listed on the Stock Exchange. Their nihilism is a mix of sacrificial and
criminal heroism, and a general aggression toward the Western world.
This fascist aggression is based on forms of traditional and identitarian
regression, on the debris of tradition that are offered to them, in part by
Islam. It is the fascination that Islamizes them, not Islam that makes
them fascist. Religion is but a formalism; it proposes a general
envelopment allowing the satisfaction of a frustrated subjectivity that
thinks it can save itself through suicidal acting out and the murder of the
other.
Corrupting the Youth Juliette Cerf Halaman 4

What kind of young person were you? What animated you at


that time?
I was born in 1937. My youth took place in a completely different world
the postwar world of the reconstruction of France, a period that was
simultaneously both structured and dynamic. Class differences were very
marked at that time. Young people from working-class or peasant
backgrounds ended their studies at 12 years of age, and only 10 percent of
each age group passed their baccalaureate. The Communist Party was
very strong and enjoyed a powerful aura, through its association with the
victorious Soviet Union. Two different orientations were taking shape: the
capitalist reconstruction of the country, or the proletarian orientation
embodied by the Communist Party. Revolution or conformism? Or having
it both ways?
Did you have it both ways?
Yes. I did not come from the masses, by birth I belong to the upper half of
the middle class. My parents both went to coles normales [lite higher
education] and my father was Socialist mayor of Toulouse. I embody the
typical intellectual figure (having been through the cole normale and
then agrgation [competitive exam to become a professor]), at the same
time as choosing to be intellectually on the side of the revolution. In the
end this was a rather comfortable arrangement, since you could thus have
the advantages of both ways, following in the tradition of what the
audience of the eighteenth-century philosophes did. It was the colonial
wars that disturbed this double-game. My true political education was the
Algerian War. It was that which made me take radical decisions. Even
though that was in an era when people were being tortured in the Paris
police stations That was a moment when you had to commit yourself
against the current, break out of your comforts and set your life in tune
with your thinking. The first demonstrations we organized were very
violently repressed posters everywhere denounced "defeatist
intellectuals." I participated in the split in the Socialist Party, which gave
rise to the PSU. After May 68 I became a militant very active in the
workers hostels, in the cits, in the factories. I did so under a Maoist
label, which together with the Trotskyist label was one of the main
determinations of that era.
Of that era, you say. But you still are a Maoist, and your
detractors attack you for that
Indeed, I do hold on to the communist hypothesis. I refuse to inhabit a
world in which the currently hegemonic social and economic organization
is the only hypothesis. I cannot accept this monstrosity, this inequality,
the fact that 10% of the planets population possesses 86% of the available
resources, of capital. Far from being obsolete or ready to be chucked
away, the communist idea is, in my view, still too young. It is at the very
beginning lasting a few decades of its historical journey, while
capitalism, born six or seven centuries ago, is reproducing the
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throwbacks, the inequalities of the ancient rgime indeed, 10% is more


or less the percentage of the population that were nobles in that era I
should make clear that I know perfectly well the vices and the crimes of
the communist societies. I became a Maoist because I identified in
Maoism certain critical elements for surpassing and changing Stalinism.
The period that opened up with the Russian Revolution of October 1917
was punctuated with errors and dramatic falsifications, the main one
being that although in its very principle communism bore a distrust for
the centralized state, it ultimately built a state more centralized and
bureaucratic than any that had gone before, a state that gave in to the
temptation to regulate every problem through violence. The communist
hypothesis ran aground in its earliest successes and the lean sixty years
that followed. So should that lead us to abandon the hypothesis itself? I
dont think so. We should not heap a total ideological defeat onto a
circumstantial defeat.
What is your understanding of the coming election year and the
return of Nicolas Sarkozy to whom you devoted your fierce
2007 pamphlet, The Meaning of Sarkozy?
I havent voted since June 1968, and at my age I dont think Ill be giving
in It would be pointless. Electoral consultation is just a consultation
internal to the established order, the mediation of a few nuances within
one same way of managing things. The Left continues exactly the same
policy as the Right. And we cannot speak of democracy when there is not a
real choice between two different paths. You mention Sarkozy. Well, there
were talking about an allergy of mine! It must be that I still have a certain
residual patriotism, inherited from my father who was in the Resistance,
but I cant stand a head of state being such a scumbag But in fact
Hollandes policy has not been substantially different from Sarkozys.
Hollande has even accelerated the dismantling of past social conquests.
He has theorists at his side like [finance minister Emmanuel] Macron to
justify that, in the name of modernity. For him modernity means
returning to the nineteenth century, to liberalism, the natural ideology of
capitalism, which has no love for social regulations, the right to work or
pensions. This ideology today enjoys full freedom of action it has no
strong enemies to deal with. I propose that we hold onto the hypothesis of
its only real enemy: communism. And that we continue to philosophise,
because while we know perfectly well who Plato was, in two millennia
from now and thats the temporal scale of philosophy absolutely no
one will know who Sarkozy was.

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