We Can, so We Must

Abstract

The present situation seems to leave only one door open when it comes to communism: To learn a lesson from history and renounce all the emancipatory dreams that in the end brought nothing but violent injustices and innumerable deaths. Against this stance Alain Badiou upholds the claim that it is necessary to insist on the – impossible – possibility of the idea of communism. The article attempts to draw some consequences from Badiou’s militant emphasis on a necessary reworking of the ‘communist hypothesis’: It therefore initially focuses on the question of how to think communist sequences in the Badiousian sense as historically specific instantiations of singular-collective subjects that install and support an impossibility of inegalitarianism. Philosophy, as the article argues in its second section, needs to think the communism of communist singularities not only for political reasons but also in order to remain philosophy and to avoid becoming sophistry. For philosophy to remain philosophy it has to take the communist hypothesis as its own proper starting point: Therefore the article eventually concludes why at least in and for philosophy one urgently needs to sustain the claim that we can and therefore must be communists.