Book Review: The Meaning of Sarkozy
The most striking thing about Alain Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy is how little it is about Nicolas Sarkozy. This will disappoint those who are expecting a savage evisceration of the personality of the little man in the Élysée Palace. I suspect that Badiou saw a canny way of sneaking his call for an embrace of the ‘communist hypothesis’ in under the cover of a book about a man who so polarises French opinion. Some might uncharitably say that he and his publishers, Éditions nouvelles lignes, also saw a big marketing opportunity and the book, published in the months following Sarkozy’s election in 2007, has indeed been a bestseller in France.
In fact the English title is a bit of a misnomer, albeit one forced on it by the inelegance of a literal translation of the original. In French, the title is De quoi Sarkozy et-il le nom? –‘Of what is Sarkozy the name?’ – a much better one, and which is evoked a number of times in the text. The title literally reduces Sarkozy to the cipher Badiou clearly thinks he is and Badiou doesn’t waste too much time on the man, summing him up in two short chapters before advancing to his counsel for resisting the ‘disorientation’ that Sarkozy’s election has occasioned.
Sarkozy is, for Badiou, a vulgar opportunist, who used his election to brazenly proclaim a new order based on capital, a reversion to an order where everyone, particularly the lower classes, know their place. There is little to quarrel with in that. Nor is there much to quarrel with in Badiou’s assertion that the French parliamentary left have nothing with which to counter even a Sarkozy who now enjoys drastically reduced popularity. The Presidential candidacy of Ségolène Royal was prosecuted solely in the hope of avoiding the eventuality of a Sarkozy presidency. There was precious little active policy being offered from the left. While Sarkozy, like any reactionary, exploited fear in his election campaign, all Royal and the Socialist party could tap into was fear of fear. Since then Royal has been unable to live without her old adversary, pathetically chasing Sarkozy in a futile pas à deux, which has most recently seen her apologising on behalf of France for Sarkozy’s off the record indiscretions.
And if Ségo’s Dixie-Chick politics of apology is hardly too convincing, neither is that of the Socialist Party, who have been wrong-footed by the reality that Sarko, for all his pre-election bluster, is nothing more than an old-fashioned interventionist Gaullist stripped of the patina of gentility. This is where I disagree with Badiou’s analysis of Sarkozy; Badiou says that Sarkozy has benefited from Chirac’s reducing Gaullism to a carcass. I would say rather that Chirac’s second term – for practically the entirety of which the President was a monumental irrelevancy – was merely the pupa from which the Gaullist butterfly would be regenerated as President Sarkozy. I’m sure Badiou would dismiss this theory as irrelevant but Sarkozy’s recent off-the-record praising of Silvio Berlusconi, stating ‘in politics, the only important thing is to be re-elected’ suggests that there is a lot less change we’re being asked to believe in.
Badiou characterises Sarkozy’s election as another period of reaction common throughout French history, from the Thermidorean apotheosis of the Revolution, through to the Second Empire and the Vichy regime. The popular spirit that Sarkozy represents is ‘Pétainist transcendentalism’, and even some anti-Sarkozyist reviewers have baulked at such an association. But the paradigm is largely sound. Sarkozy represents an appeal to petit-bourgeois order, and exclusion/repression of undesirables (immigrants, the poor, leftists and the young), not a million miles away from the same impetus that saw a compromise being sought in Philippe Pétain in 1940, an impetus that was already in train long before the Nazi occupation. A look at Sarkozy’s two main fields of activities bears this out. He thrives, on the one hand, on publicity-friendly crisis-management interventions on an international level (the Bulgarian nurses in Libya, the Georgian war, Ireland’s impunity in rejecting the Lisbon treaty) and, on the other, on mass clampdowns on undocumented immigrants and a push to broaden the scope of the criminal code (the Hadopi law introduced at the behest of Sarkozy’s many friends in Big Media) and a stiffening of police activity with the ultimate goal of influencing crime statistics. The Pétainist transcendental recognises a social cleavage in France and seeks to resolve it by might and an appeal to the fears of the petit bourgeoisie.
But Badiou’s biggest concern is building, or rather fomenting, an alternative. And the alternative is extra-parliamentary (Badiou, being the largely unreconstructed Maoist he is, thinks of parliamentary politics as no more than a charade), based on an alliance of the vast untapped reserve of popular discontent in France. This reserve consists of the masses of undocumented immigrants, who have been involved in a number of workplace occupations over the past eighteen months, in some cases with the tacit or overt approval of their employers and French workers, some of whom have resorted to increasingly militant and successful tactics like ‘bossnapping’ to secure better severance packages in the recent downsizings.
The formula for resistance is the Lacanian ‘raising impotence to impossibility.’ Many on the left might dismiss an invocation of psychoanalytic theory as at best, fanciful and at worst, quasi-mystical but it is grounded in real action. Chief among Badiou’s recommendations is to accept, and insist, that there is only ‘one world’, in other words rejecting the notion of non-European immigrants being at odds with the integrity of Western society. He calls for solidarity with immigrants (and, by extension, a solidarity with ‘native French workers’). It is not out of a pious, left-of-centre notion of charity or ‘multi-culturalism’ that Badiou urges such solidarity but out of strategic necessity. And there is also the energising potential of immigrants from poorer regions of the world:
‘A Socialist prime minister said in the early 1980s adopting the role of a ‘civilized’ mouthpiece for Le Pen: “immigrants are a problem.” We must reverse this judgement and say: “Foreigners are an opportunity!” The mass of foreign workers and their children bear witness, in our tired old countries, to the youth of the world, its widespread and its infinite variety. Without them we would sink into nihilistic consumption and an order imposed by the police.’
Unfortunately this is as far as Badiou goes in terms of concrete steps to transform the political landscape. His book is a rallying call rather than a manifesto, offering a credo rather than a programme. That would be his intention, as he is more interested in shifting the popular perception of revolutionary change from futile (or impossible) to viability. In this he is similar to his friend and colleague Slavoj Zizek, who has said that the notion of the world ending at any minute in a disaster-movie apocalypse scenario has a greater hold on the popular imagination than the notion that any social system other than capitalism might ever be possible. Badiou is exhorting the workers of France, and the world, to heave a bit and cast off their chains, rather than giving them any indication of how things would be after the revolution. Like many Marxists, and Marx himself, he is better at analysis than hypothesising, but his first priority is to bring the ‘communist hypothesis’, as he calls it, back into the frame. Once the conditions are set for change the visionary side of the revolution can step in.
There will, of course, be those who are uneasy with Badiou’s unabashed enthusiasm for extra-parliamentary political systems. Those uneasy are on the left as well as the right: the editor of Libération, Laurent Joffrin, has sparred with Badiou, saying the latter has a ‘nostalgia for blood and iron regimes’. Badiou, to be fair to him, does not deny the failings of communist systems as seen in both the Eastern Bloc and Mao’s China, though his diagnosis can be uncomfortably clinical at times, focussing more on the costs of systemic inefficiency rather than the costs of ‘counter-revolutionary’ repression. And there is no suggestion that Badiou believes things would be any different from Lenin’s Russia in the initial post-revolutionary phase: the establishment of communist regimes is, for Badiou, only the victory of the ‘first form of the hypothesis.’ Which presumably means permanent revolution is the only option, which puts Badiou firmly in the classic Marxist, as opposed to Stalinist, tradition. Where Badiou departs from this tradition though is his disdain for notions of parties, trade unions and communist states (a term he himself calls oxymoronic); the terms have changed and for capitalist systems to be overthrown new apparatuses and new players need to be engaged.
The Meaning of Sarkozy is unavoidably unsatisfying, even for those who are less troubled by the prospect of a communist future. Based on a series of monthly seminars given at the École normale supérieure (where Badiou teaches) the book is both episodic and structurally awkward; the break from the sections about Sarkozy is summary and abrupt and there is little in the way of practical instruction. The book is well written, wittily abrasive and perfectly readable but its overall rhetorical tone is incantatory. An urge to will, which may well be lost on the presumably petit bourgeois readership of the book. But propagating a message, an exhortation to ‘courage’ for the long road ahead is Badiou’s agenda here. If you will it, it’s not a dream. A Socialist Theodor Herzl, if you will.
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May 6th 2009