Obscure Subject/Subject to Obscurity

Abstract

The material object of this article is quite precise: the final pages of Badiou’s D’un désastre obscur. The pretextual use of such textual reference is due to the fact that a singular twist is performed in these pages. After a wise and ironical analysis of the vulgata of the so called “death of communism”, the book opens onto a peculiar and yet strategic point: it allows us to conceive of communism as a condition for thought. And this for two reasons: because it poses the necessity of a radical break against present categories, and because it poses the necessity of a collective procedure whose aim is universal. We will in fact see how the singularity of a radical novelty and the universality of a declared truth appear to be essential elements via which, simultaneously, communism establishes itself against a present state of fact, and philosophical thought exposes the difference between a universal truth and a system of opinions in which it appears as a radical break. Finally, by analysing some difficult points of Badiou’s thought we will try to unfold how such a relation between communist practice and philosophical thought cannot take place under the mode of a deduction, but only as a constant fracture, which is always embodied in specific, polemical modes which are active inside communism, inside philosophy, and in the relation of the two.