Alberto Toscano : Lenin Dancing on the Snow: Periodisation Against History

Aiming to salvage the subversive and emancipatory nucleus of the dialectic, Alain Badiou’s theory of the subject has consistently worked against a vision of History as full, legible meaning for the sake of an internal, subjective and discontinuous grasp of the periodisation of political ‘sequences’. In this talk, I will examine the theoretical movement that leads Badiou to dislocate the dialectics of history and historicity of the dialectic, generating a comprehension of political time that is no longer bound to an ordered matrix of expression and development. In order to gauge the pertinence of this conceptual proposal to debates on revolutionary historiography, I will examine Badiou’s philosophical counter-histories of the Paris Commune and of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, considering the manner in which, rather than belonging to a continuum of emancipations, these political ruptures and procedures can be seen both as internally periodised and as periodising one another. In conclusion, I will attempt to problematise the juxtaposition of periodisation and History/historiography along three axes: (1) the tension between an internalist approach such as Badiou’s and the consideration of the constraints and determinations imposed by capitalism on historical events and transformations; (2) the difficulty for a perspective founded on a concept of truth-as-exception to investigative the subjective charge and unfolding of ‘impure’ political sequences (e.g. that of the non-aligned movement and the Third World); (3) the effect of Badiou’s notion of periodisation on the very historicity and mutability of his own philosophical apparatus (i.e. the threat of an ‘absolute historicism’).

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