DOCUMENT
UFD0021
Nick Land
Sore Losers
In his response to Alain Badiou’s analysis of the
terrorist attacks in Paris, Nick Land detects a residue of
‘Frenchness’ in Badiou’s universalism, reconfigures the
battlefield of the future, and plays devil’s advocate
for globalised capitalism
It is understandable, therefore, that the elegance
of Badiou’s presentation is unable to fully conceal
its structural irritability. ‘We’ have been distracted,
which is how adults understand ‘terror’. It is a distraction of ‘thought’ that has occurred here, Badiou
insists, and thus an annoyance, in multiple senses,
including that of simple condescension. As befits
a member of the socio-cultural elite, Badiou’s response takes the form of a thoughtful meta-irritation—an irritability directed at irritation as such. This
is an anti-empirical reflex and therefore, in some
definite way, ‘French’—but we will get to that soon
enough. Those scores of dead youngsters strewn
across Paris demand some affective acknowledgement, which is undignified (and annoying). Far more
significantly, the atrocity upsets people. It is—precisely as intended by the perpetrators, and also in
the most neutral sense of the word—exciting. The
public response it elicits is not only philosophically
useless, but positively deleterious to the work of the
universal. ‘So, to counter these risks, I think that we
must manage to think what has happened.’
To be French is to understand—with peculiar lucidity—what it is to have been defeated by modernity.
The world’s first modern nation, enthralled beyond all
others by the call of the universal, has been cropped
back to a nexus of untaken paths, over the course
of two centuries. If Hubert Védrine says this more
clearly than Alain Badiou, Badiou says it nevertheless. Our Wound is Not So Recent. The title already
says almost everything. To anticipate: ‘…our wound
comes from the historical defeat of communism.’
Compared to this primary, chronic and, by now, essential misfortune, occasional disasters are mere
accidents. The recent massacre in Paris by soldiers
of Jihad provides an unusually dramatic (or ‘particularly spectacular’) instance. Yet, despite its colorful,
richly affective character, the disturbance of state
security represented by the slaughter of a few score
Parisians is a minor affair, when compared to the
1. <http://www.theglobalist.com/france-and-globalization/>.
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conquest of modernity itself—and thus the world—
by a far more ominous adversary. Whatever philosophical dignity is to be found in reflection upon the
November 13 incident lies in its cognitive adoption
as a relay, leading back to the main story, ‘the triumph of globalised capitalism’.
[L]et’s admit it: Globalization does not automatically
benefit France. […] Globalization develops according
to principles that correspond neither to French tradition nor to French culture. These principles include
the ultraliberal market economy, mistrust of the state,
individualism removed from the republican tradition,
the inevitable reinforcement of the universal and
‘indispensable’ role of the United States, common
law, the English language, Anglo-Saxon norms, and
Protestant—more than Catholic—concepts.
—Hubert Védrine, February 9, 20021
these words strikes us as sheer retaliation. This is
only to say that Badiou’s ‘we’ was already a project
of mobilization and a declaration of war, if only as
a recollection, and a gesture of defiance. The haze
that surrounds ‘us’ is the fog of war. No one can be
sincerely shocked by that. (We are not children.) Our
conflict is not so recent.
We have a duty to philosophy—which
is to say, to our only credible model of nobility—to be cold. Emotional
spasms in response to blood spatter
would be unbecoming.
The stakes, on both sides, are absolute. There is—most probably—nothing we would not do, were it still necessary, in order to prevail against
each other
I think so, too. We have a duty to philosophy—which
is to say, to our only credible model of nobility—to
be cold. Emotional spasms in response to blood
spatter would be unbecoming. It would also be an
integral contribution to the achievement of ‘fascist’
terror. Worst of all, it distracts. Terror excites identity,
by concentrating it, and packaging it in a false simplicity. Badiou is not concerned to disguise the fact
that, for the European Left, in particular, ‘identity’ is
the true terror.
There are, however, other distractions—for ‘us’.
When Badiou proclaims that ‘Our wound is not so
recent’, we are compelled to ask: How far does
this collective pronoun extend? A response to this
question could be prolonged without definite limit.
Everything we might want to say ultimately folds
into it, ‘identity’ most obviously. Whatever meaning
‘communism’ could have belongs here, as ‘we’ reach
outwards to the periphery of the universal, and thus
(conceivably) to the end of philosophy. ‘Frenchness’
is, in some complex way, involved by it, among other social sets of lesser and greater obscurity. This
‘we’ is the whole, even as it is hidden in the margin.
It is also strategically non-negotiable. (Nobody asks
‘who?’—as Badiou knows they will not.) Smuggled
into grammar, it says everything of ultimate consequence in advance of any possible rejoinder, framing
subsequent controversy in its terms. A sovereign or
transcendental antagonism—settled securely beyond discussion—thus announces itself, in a whisper.
Let us explicate, then, that which Badiou leaves
still partially implicit. We do not care about Islam.
No one does—at least no one we care about, but
only ‘fascists’. For the industrialized world, it is never more than an annoyance, and more typically a
complex opportunity to be exploited, a weapon to
be directed at those whose antagonism is respected. Having failed at modernity with a comprehensiveness that approaches the comedic, it has been
many centuries since Islam has had any kind of serious claim upon history to lose—so ‘a whole section
of the global population is counted for nothing’, inevitably. We can parasitize Badiou’s shallowly-buried
contempt without qualification: ‘it’s fascization that
islamizes, not Islam that fascizes’. We will decide
upon the way to categorize their refusal of our categorizations. Your coldness is tested by this joke.
In comparable fashion, then, we can only propose
another ‘us’ outside it. As already promised, the
detail—if only a little—will soon follow. For the
moment, it need only be noted that ‘their’ identity cannot be assumed to be ‘ours’, any more than
we share their problems, their successes, or their
defeats. The pronoun is scrambled, torn apart. We
are not ‘wounded’ by what hurts them, unless accidentally, and by the failure of their collective project least of all. Whatever malice might appear in
It is not that religion is quite nothing, of course, even
for Badiou, at his most French. Not originally, in any
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‘It must be seen that the objective victory of globalized capitalism is a destructive, aggressive practice,’ Badiou asserts. We can only shrug, since of
course, for you (collectively), that is simply true. Its
successes are your defeats, and reciprocally. No
one is being educated by any of this. We have, not
so very long ago, menaced each other with thermonuclear warheads, and burnt down states still more
recently. The stakes, on both sides, are absolute.
There is—most probably—nothing we would not
do, were it still necessary, in order to prevail against
each other. ‘Victory’, ‘defeat’—these are Badiou’s
words, even if—for no reason at all—war is not, at
first, although it soon will be.
Let’s recapitulate. We have a contemporary world
structure dominated by the triumph of globalised
capitalism. We have a strategic weakening of states,
and even an ongoing process of the capitalist withering away of states. And thirdly, we have new practices of imperialism that tolerate, and even encourage in certain circumstances, the butchering and the
annihilation of states.
The main story of recent times has been ‘the liberation of liberalism’—the freeing of capitalism—Badiou insists. (His preferred identity lies in
insisting this.)
To succumb to excitement about the
empiricity of ‘Capitalist globalization’,
in its scandalous singularity, is to thrill
to its vast annoyance, rather than its
universal disaster
It could easily have been some other faith that provided this ‘terminus’, we are expected to accept
(unless the concession to ‘a suitably anti-Western
referent’ is the clue to a more persuasive—and decorously unspoken—claim). All right, we accept. For
the sake of moving forward, we accept it, despite
the extraordinary deformation of historical evidence
required to do so. Let us pretend that our Jihadi
‘fascists’ are only randomly differentiated from
Buddhists or Confucians, in order to proceed to the
identities that more immediately concern us.
This Thing—the Great Foe—is not devoid of identity, however embarrassing it may be to explicitly
acknowledge that fact (i.e. its factuality as such).
To succumb to excitement about the empiricity of
‘Capitalist globalization’, in its scandalous singularity,
is to thrill to its vast annoyance, rather than its universal disaster. Yet it is, as everyone clearly recognizes, an Anglophone global affliction that disturbs
‘us’, and an Anglophone ideological negligence that
has ‘counted for nothing’ those without any productive part to play in its expansion. The major enemy
is Anglophone, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-American—
‘Anglo-Jewish’, it will inevitably be said, if not by
Badiou then by innumerable others, including especially the Islamic ‘fascists’ whose sensitivities refuse
to be dulled on the point. It is, in any case, the positive ethnic constituency primarily identified with ‘the
liberation of liberalism’ when this is acknowledged
with coarse realism. No one gets to see how peculiar this thing is from nowhere. Its critics, we can
confidently—if indelicately—speculate, have been
concretely offended. They have been ‘wounded’—
and not only so very recently.
Those dead Parisian youngsters cannot be ‘counted
for nothing’ quite so easily. They would have certainly done some capitalism, even despite themselves,
and also – being young and French—quite probably some communism, in addition, so they matter
to ‘us’, at least a little. The young Jihadi ‘fascists’
who slaughtered them, in contrast—with nothing to
make but a distraction—are nothing at all, to either
of us. That saddens Badiou, rhetorically, and tactically. ‘Their own life did not count. And since their own
lives did not count, the lives of others meant nothing
to them either.’ Look what globalized capitalism did
to them. Perhaps we should turn our attention to this
far more serious, historically-productive monstrosity,
before we upset people—gratuitously—with our
unfathomable and entirely mutual indifference.
Of course, there could be nothing more gauche
than to articulate ideological criticism in the voice
of national resentment. From the perspective of
philosophy, to speak in the name of any positive
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case. ‘Religion can perfectly well act as an identitarian sauce for all of this, precisely in so far as it
is a suitably anti-Western referent. But as we have
seen, in the final analysis, the origin of these youths
doesn’t matter much, their spiritual or religious origin, as they say, and so on.’ (It ‘is counted for nothing’.) ‘What counts is the choice they have made
about their frustration’ (we decide). ‘And they will
rally to the mixture of corruption and sacrificial and
criminal heroism because of the subjectivity that is
theirs, not because of their Islamic conviction. What
is more, we have been able to see that, in most
cases, islamization is terminal rather than inaugural.’
Nihilistic individuals, seduced into ‘fascism’, articulating their motivations in words that count for nothing, pathetic existentialist communists with false
consciousness, malicious punks…if there are some
further resources of contempt that might be added
to this analysis, they will not be easy to find. Which
is not at all to suggest that we encounter anything
problematic here, or in need of rectification.
identity—even one far more fashionable than the
nation and its associated ethnic categories—is a
simple disgrace. Selected identities might be exalted
from a distance, in approximate proportion to their
transgressive or victimological status, but every elite
intellectual understands profoundly—if often only
implicitly—that ontic definition is dirt.
French. It identified reason with revolutionary innovation—to a degree commonly found amusing beyond the Gallic cultural sphere, despite its menacing
incarnation in an armed re-origination of the state,
from first principles. Naturally, these ‘first principles’
were already a dismissal of the old religion, through
their very originality, and also an exaltation of philosophy—as smelted in the flames of insurrection.
They were the monsters bred from Descartes’s methodically exacerbated, artificial nightmare, released
by a passage through zero (radical doubt), in which
organic tradition was immolated upon the altar of
the universal. They would—for instance—have
decimalized time and geometry, and struggled earnestly to do so, repeatedly, without even a moment
of pious reservation or residual doubt…but they
failed. Modern history, from a particular but illuminating angle has been this failure, this defeat. Our
Wound is Not So Recent.
French identity, radically conceived,
corresponds to a failed national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern period, and thus—concretely—of
humiliation by capital?
France, what is singular about France—because if
there are French values, we must ask what is singular about them—is the revolutionary tradition.
Republican first of all, from the ’89 revolution. And
then socialist, anarchosyndicalist, communist, and
finally leftist, all of this between 1789 and, let’s say,
1976. […] But all that’s over. It’s over. France can no
longer be represented today in any credible way as
the privileged site of a revolutionary tradition. Rather,
it is characterised by a singular collection of identitarian intellectuals.
French identity, radically conceived, corresponds
to a failed national project. Is it not, in fact, the supreme example of collective defeat in the modern
period, and thus—concretely—of humiliation by
capital? It is the way the ‘alternative’ dies: locally,
and unpersuasively, without dialectical engagement,
dropping—neglected—into dilapidation. It can be
inserted into a limited, yet not inconsiderable, series
of identities making vehement claim to universality
without provision of any effective criterion through
which to establish it. When frustrated by the indifference of the outside, such objective pretentions
tend to turn ‘fascist’ in exactly the sense Badiou employs. Their claims are shown—demonstrably—to
be non-compelling beyond their own shrinking domain. They are ignored, so they ‘act up’. A certain violent madness is easily spawned. Yet it is rarely more
than a distraction.
The surrender of France to the identitarian vice is
but part of the more comprehensive defeat. Yet the
dramatic quality of Badiou’s stance here should not
blind us to what it evades. The French accent in
what he has to say—both before and after this passage—extends far beyond his lament for the nation’s
withered revolutionary vocation. The ethnic identity
that speaks in his words encompasses, among many
other things, a specific mode of universal aspiration,
a secular faith ‘freed’—contemptuously—of religious trappings, and a firm confidence in the moral
dignity of the State. There has only been one ‘revolution’ of the kind he inherits as a model, and it was
What we are suffering from is the absence, at the
global scale, of a politics that would be detached
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Badiou is fastidious, therefore, in avoiding all temptation to self-identification in less than universal
terms. His ‘discursive position’ depends upon his
identity as a proud communist, who merely happens
to be French. There is a cost to be paid for this, in
honesty—or realism—first of all. A necrotic collectivist utopianism does not constitute a plausible site
of enunciation, and no one believes that it does. It
is perhaps for this reason that Badiou refrains from
quite closing the door onto a certain nuanced ‘patriotism’, even if his catastrophist narrative demands
that it is held ajar only in a mode of nostalgia (and
one that is not wholly devoid of bitterness). What
France was, as a revolutionary power, is still affirmed,
in a tone at once tragic and philosophical, drawing
the requisite quantum of detachment from both:
entirely from the interiority of capitalism. It is the absence on the global scale of this politics that means
that a young fascist appears, is created. It is not
the young fascist, banditry, and religion, that create the absence of a politics of emancipation able
to construct its own vision and to define its own
practices. It is the absence of this politics that creates the possibility of fascism, of banditry, and of
religious hallucinations.
This is Badiou’s analysis. The pin-pricks so far—and
the far greater sufferings to come—result from an
ethno-political defeat, in a long conflict still recalled
by its stubborn survivors as a global drama of the
Universal. It is a defeat that they imagine—or at
least, still claim to imagine—might one day be undone. Who would deprive them of their old songs,
and strange flags, and wounded dreams?
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The ‘liberation of liberalism’ has
scarcely begun
Spite, or triumphalism, are identitarian confusions,
extravagances, and also simply errors that we cannot afford. Our war is far less comprehensively won
than theirs is lost. The adversaries that matter—real
fascists—have controlled the commanding heights
of our societies since the New Deal. The techno-economic dispersion of power remains radically
incomplete. Sino-capitalism—momentarily trembling—has yet to re-make the world. The ‘liberation
of liberalism’ has scarcely begun. None of this is a
concern for Badiou, however, or for the Islamists. It
belongs to another story, and—for this is the ultimate, septically enflamed wound—as it runs forwards, ever faster, it is not remotely theirs.
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