Is my reading thus “negligent?” I don’t think so. I wasn’t trying to address Badiou comprehensively but rather in his articulation of post-Maoist post-Marxist neo-communism. And polemically. Badiou doesn’t require and is not improved by either Zizek’s explanation or critique.

I was not trying to condemn Badiou for expressing fidelity not to the Marxist historical self-consciousness of communism but to the bourgeois revolution. Rather, I was trying to demonstrate something unconscious that could be redeemed by making it conscious.

As I have written elsewhere, in “Chinoiserie,” the issue is the historical transformation of the bourgeois revolution after the crisis of bourgeois emancipation, with its social solidarity of labor, in the Industrial Revolution, which Badiou, among many, many others, neglects.

In the 20th century, ostensibly “Marxist” Communism — Stalinism — expressed what Marx called “reactionary attempts to hold back bourgeois development” and “the ethical indignation and all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats.” So does Badiou.

I agree that on fidelity we need some Maoist anti-hermeneutics (paradoxically of the kind Badiou himself developed in Theory of the Subject): fidelity needs to be split into a left-wing fidelity and a right-wing fidelity. To read communism as an eternal structural position which has been filled by different things in different times is a right-wing reading. Now, by talking of eternal invariants Badiou seems to be making a right-wing use of his own theories, but he doesn’t do this, for example, in “The Factory as Event-Site” nor on “Being and Event” itself – events appear in sites, sites are particular to every historical situation and an intervention (a concrete, historically situated intervention) is needed to produce new meaning. Interventions are always authorised by previous interventions BUT THIS DOES NOT MEAN that they are a single structure – instead it means that you’re weaving a subjective history. It is foolish to claim that the intervention of communism in 1848 is not authorised by the Jacobins, what with Marx writing letters to people he addresed as “citizen” and not as “mister”, and in this sense we can speak of continuity – however, the extent and relevance of this continuity should not be elevated to eternal forms which, I claim, is incompatible with the triad of event-site-intervention (but not with the negligent reading for whom only event exists – the absence of any mention of site and intervention or Part V of Being and Event while denouncing Badiou as an ahistorical, platonising structuralist, is quite negligent.)

How, besides, the clearly avant-guardist notions of fidelity and intervention (the same ones through which a continuity is artificially and historically, very important point you seem to miss completely, established between the Jacobins and the workers of the Commune) are compatible at all with bourgeois forms of equality and liberalism is beyond me.

From the fact that subordination has lasted for millenia it does not follw that subordination is eternal: not for you and not for Badiou, I think.

Actually I think any talk of the unattainable or the unsurpassable is actually proof of Badiou’s fidelity to Marxism, of the Maoist brand, and quite determined by Zizek’s critique of Mao, where he mobilises the theme of bad infinity. The problem goes as follows: Badiou is trying to conceptualise revolutions as permanent, struggle as perpetual, against a teleological vision of history where a moment without contradiction would be possible (remember Mao’s centrist solution: “under communism there is contradiction but no antagonism”.) You sort of need a structure which entails the withering away of the state, but somehow you need to think how through all the changes, including the final jump into communism, a communist fidelity can go on (whether this is under different, historical, forms is beside the point.) Any Marxist revolution, and particularly the Cultural Revolution, has explored this theme.

Granted, the individual choice to reject capitalism/choose communism still requires collective organizations as a mechanism of persuasion (at the very least) that they have the capacity to choose to reject capitalism/choose communism.

(Indeed, from the standpoint of choice regarding the political economic system, neoliberalism is (perhaps surprisingly) un-Friedmanite. When Thatcher said There is No Alternative to neoliberalism, a (Left)-Friedmanite response would be to point out that if There Is No Alternative to neoliberalism, there is no freedom (because freedom is interpreted (narrowly) as ‘freedom to choose’ and while for Friedman, this refers to consumer choice, it should also refer to (meaningful) political-economic choices).