Politics in Pre-political Times

Abstract

This essay explores the transformation in Alain Badiou’s conceptualisation of the “pre-political” between his mid-1980s Peut-on penser la politique? and the recent philosophical commentary on the uprisings of 2011, Le Réveil de l’Histoire. Basing itself on a reflection on the uses of this category within the domain of subaltern social history, by E. J. Hobsbawm and Ranajit Guha, it argues that the pre-political is a critical prism through which to think political action in what Badiou would term “intervallic” times. It also indicates a crucial tension obscured by the continuity in Badiou’s usage of the pre-political across these two important texts, which concerns the status of representation. While in the former the pre-political heralds a thinking of subjectivity outside of its capture by history and representation, in the latter the move from the pre-political to real politics precisely requires a representation of History, in the guise of an idea of communism. The essay concludes by suggesting that a reflection on the political and economic category of crisis might serve as a way out of this antinomy of representation.