Some Notes (with Badiou and Žižek) on Event/Truth/Subject/Militant Community in Jean-Paul Sartre's Political Thought

Abstract

The main object of this paper is to examine the new philosophical frame proposed by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek and to show that it implies some traces of Sartre's philosophical and political heritage. According the project of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek one should no longer accept today's constellation of freedom, particularistic truth and democracy, but to (re)inscribe the issues of freedom and universal truth into a political project that attempts to re-activate a thinking of revolution. Their thinking consists in the wager that it is still possible to provide a philosophical frame for this leftist emancipatory position that claims the dimension of the universal against the vicious circle of capitalist globalization-cum-particularization and, by following Marx's claim that there are formal affinities between the ambitions of emancipatory politics and the working mode of capitalism, takes up the struggle of universalism against globalization (capital). It is only through this struggle for the universal that the intertwined processes of a constant expansion of the automatism of capital and "a process of fragmentation into closed identities," accompanied by "the culturalist and relativist ideology" (Badiou) can be suspended. It is precisely this constellation of revolutionary act, universal truth, subject, and militant community, that reveal some similarities with Sartre's concepts of the subject, the revolutionary action, the militant community a.o.

Keywords

• Jean-Paul Sartre, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, political philosophy, subject, revolutionary action, militant community