“One Divided into Two”
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Mladen Dolar One Divides into Two
One divides into two, two doesn’t merge into one. This was an old Maoist slogan from the 1960s. Despite its air of universal truth it has become dated, and I fully realize the danger of appearing dated myself by starting in this way. Nowadays, one can recite this slogan in front of a class full of students and none will have ever heard it or have any inkling as to its bearing or its author—it’s almost like speaking Chinese. The slogan combines an ontological statement, a mathematical theorem, and a political battle-cry. So why does one split into two in mathematics, ontology, and politics? And why, once we arrive at two, can we never get back to the supposed unity of one? I will try to speak about something very minimal and basic, something extremely simple and at the same time very enigmatic: namely, how to get from one to two. This movement suggests ways to conceive difference and, more precisely, how to conceive the difference between two kinds of difference. The first kind of difference can be seen as the difference of numerical count. What accounts for counting, for getting from one to two? What pushes the count in its forward thrust? For if we have successfully managed this heroic feat of addition, assuming that one plus one makes two, then there seems to be no stopping this process, we can reproduce this step again and again, and thus count to infinity. To be sure, what seems to be a simple operation, the most elementary of all, the one acquired with the first lesson in mathematics, is itself full of pitfalls and hidden traps, and we only need to mention Frege, set theory, the suture, or Badiou’s intricate theory of numbers to remind ourselves of the complexity of the operations involved. But I will not follow this path.1 I will simply point out that in this way one hasn’t really arrived at two, first because the two that has been thereby produced is still hostage to one, is its extrapolation and extension, its replication, one splitting itself and reproducing itself; and second, one hasn’t arrived at two but at more than two, the two of many, the whole host of numbers, since the process that one has instigated cannot stop at two, it is endowed with the forward thrust to multiply itself, so that “two” is merely a provisional stopover, a halt from which we must hurry on. Republican watch from the French Revolution. The other side of this question of the two is precisely the side of the other, the Other, its capital letter signifying the “big Other,” underscoring the implication of drama. The question of the Other brings forth not merely the numerical two, the second following the first, but the question of something of a different order, something that is not a mere extension of the first, but rather something that would really present two, count for two, the two heterogeneous to the one and recalcitrant to the progression of ones into infinity. However much we count, however many ones we add to the first one, we cannot count to the two of the Other. The progression of counting extends the initial one into a homogeneous and uniform process, while the Other presents a dimension that would be precisely “other” in relation to this uniformity. In a nutshell, the otherness of the Other, if it can be conceived, is a dimension that cannot be accounted for in terms of One. If the Other exists, then we have some hope of escaping from the circle, or the ban, of One. The dimension of the Other might present a two that would really make a difference, not merely a difference between one and another, that is, ultimately, between the one and itself, the count based on the internal splitting of one, but rather another difference altogether, beyond the delightful oxymoronic phrase “same difference.” One can immediately appreciate the high philosophical stakes here. A large part of modern philosophy, if not all of it, has aligned under the banner of the Other, in one way or another, whatever particular names have been used to designate it, and if philosophy has thus espoused the slogan of the Other it has done so in order to establish a dimension that would be able to break the spell of One, in particular its complicity with totality, with forming a whole. There is a hidden propensity of One to form a whole, to encompass multiplicity and heterogeneity within a single first principle. That program was pronounced at the dawn of philosophy, spelled out by Parmenides in three simple words, the slogan hen kai pan, one and all—to conceive the all as one, to encompass the whole in its unity, and to take the one as the simple clue to the whole and whatever multiplicity it may present; to take the whole under the auspices of One. “One and all” served as the blueprint for philosophy, holding in check its whole history; it spelled out philosophy’s mission, its grand overarching chart, its task and its calling, in whatever particulars one conceived it. So if the Other exists, if it can be conceived in terms other than the terms of one, it would permit us to get out of this ban and this circle. Indeed, the task of modern philosophy, if I may take the liberty of using this grossly simplified and massive language, was to think the Other that would not be complicit in collusion with the One of hen kai pan, and thus, ultimately, the task to think the two, to conceive the Other that wouldn’t fall into the register of the One. And if I content myself to mention just three great names, I will invoke Nietzsche with a single line from the end of Beyond Good and Evil: “Am Mittag wars da wurde eins zu zwei” [It was at noon that one turned into two]—the noon as the time of the shortest shadow and the minimal difference, the time of the suspension of time, the division of time—and the title of Alenka Zupančič’s book The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. I will invoke Marx and the two of antagonism—Mao’s slogan was designed to spell out its political and ontological impact in a simple adage, transposing it into terms of counting. I will invoke Freud—and now I will take the tricky path of conceiving the two in terms of the Other in psychoanalysis, the Other being a key psychoanalytic term.2]. To contradict this is a duty [Y contredire est un devoir]].” To contradict the synonymy of One—but with what?] The French autre, for the other, stems from the Latin alter, which basically means the other one of two and two only (as opposed to alius or secundus, the second of many). Many languages have retained a distinct word for the second of many as opposed to the second of merely two, not to be followed by a third and so forth. This etymological lead already puts us on the track of the problem of the two, it already gives us an inkling that the two poses a different problem than the second of many and that there is something there that defies counting. This other would be something that contravenes against oneness, while the second merely extrapolates what has already been encapsulated in the one and presents its prolongation. I said above “If the Other exists…” and this brings me to a very basic asset that lies at the heart of psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Lacan. There is something like a spectacular antinomy at the foundation of psychoanalytic theory, an antinomy worthy of Kantian antinomies, and Kant has brought the notion of antinomy to a pinnacle—where reason, as a striving for unity, runs into an irremediable two, an opposition that cannot be reduced. This Lacanian antinomy of the two pertains to the nature of the Other. One can pose it as the antinomy of two massively opposing statements: first, There is the Other, which is the essential dimension that psychoanalysis has to deal with. Notoriously, Freud spoke of the unconscious as “ein anderer Schauplatz,” the other scene, another stage, a stage inherently other in relation to the one of consciousness, to its count and to what it can account for. It defies the count of consciousness, which is ultimately the homogeneous count providing sense as a unitary prospect. So there is the Other of the unconscious. Lacan, who had, in addition to his extremely difficult style, a talent for simple and striking formulas, proposed the slogan “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other.” There is an Other that speaks through the unconscious and defies the count of consciousness. And another of his formulas runs: “Desire is the desire of the Other”—there is an Other that agitates our desires and prevents us from assuming them simply our own. These two short statements, in no uncertain terms, place the unconscious and desire under the banner of the Other. There is the unconscious, and there is desire only insofar as each intimately pertains to the Other, they are “of the Other,” and the Other is what stirs their intimacy. There is the Other at the heart of all entities that psychoanalysis has to deal with, and this may be seen as a shorthand to pinpoint their specificity, to assemble them with a single stroke under one heading, the heading of the Other, the Other of a qualitatively different nature in relation to the realm of One. They present the rupture of unity, they defy being counted for one. Yet this is but the first part of the antinomy, the part positing the Other at the core, the alterity that determines intimacy as extimate, in Lacan’s excellent neologism. The second part of this antinomy, in stark contradiction to the first, states bluntly: The Other lacks.3].] There is a lack in the Other, the Other is haunted by a lack, or to extend it a bit further: The Other doesn’t exist. “There is the Other” vs. “The Other doesn’t exist.” How can the very dimension on which psychoanalysis is ultimately premised not exist? What is the status of this Other that is emphatically there, permeating the very notion of the unconscious, of desire, and so forth, and that yet at the same time emphatically lacks? Can the two statements be reconciled in their glaring contradiction? Is this a case of a Kantian antinomy, exceeding the limits of knowledge and unitary reasoning? And how can one posit the Other as the very notion surpassing the boundaries and the framework of One while maintaining that it lacks? Is this an exhaustive alternative? Special edition on salmon colored paper inserted in the deluxe programs for the 1896 performance of the play at the Théâtre de l'Oeuvre, Paris. Lithograph. What, if anything, is the Other? What is the Other the name for?4 The first answer proposed by Lacan develops in the direction of the Other as the Other of the symbolic order, the Other of language, the Other upholding the very realm of the symbolic, functioning as its guarantee, its necessary supposition, that which enables it to signify. And if this claim is to be placed within the general thrust of structuralism, which was then dominant, the name of the Other, in this view, would be the structure. The Other is the Other of structure, and one can nostalgically recall its Saussurean and Lévi-Straussian underpinnings. What follows from there, in the same general thrust, is the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language (another way of saying “The unconscious is the discourse of the Other”). But what kind of Other is announcing itself such that the unconscious is structured like it? What Other is the unconscious the discourse of? It is clear that Freud’s first three books, The Interpretation of Dreams, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious, all single out the unconscious as a series of “marginal” phenomena that pertain to language but only as its slips, cracks, short-circuits, breaches, temporary out-of-jointness, not as belonging to its normal, standard, universal use. They pertain to homonymy5—as opposed to synonymy, which tries to preserve the unity of meaning—verbal contaminations, puns, and mix-ups, which all condition what Freud described as the process of the work of the unconscious, ultimately to be put under the two broad headings of condensation and displacement. They are condensed and displaced in relation to the signifying One of language. There are two perspectives on this structure. The first, stemming from Saussure, treats language as a system in which all entities are differential and oppositive, made of differences. No element has an identity or substance of its own; it is defined only through its difference from others, its whole being is exhausted by its difference, and hence they hang together, they are bound together with an iron necessity of tight interdependence. The symbolic is made of differences, and only of differences—and since it has no firm, substantial hold it can equally and with equanimity be applied to language, kinship, food, myth, clothing—the whole of culture. (There is a univocity of difference that can be predicated in the same way of any positive entity—this was structuralism’s bottom line.) But the second perspective, the one that Freud opens up with the unconscious, presents the slide of contingency within this well-ordered system. The words contingently and erratically sound alike; not ruled by grammar or semantics, they contaminate each other, they slip, and this is where the unconscious takes the chance of appearing in cracks and loopholes. The first perspective hinges on necessity, ruled by differentiality, which is what makes linguistics possible. The second perspective hinges on contingent similarities and cracks and is the nightmare of linguistics, because its logic is quirky and unpredictable; it pertains to what Lacan called linguisterie and lalangue. It pertains also to what Alfred Jarry, the immortal Jarry of Le roi Ubu, called pataphysics, the science opposed to metaphysics that deals with the exception, the contingent, the non-universal. So if we have on one hand the Other of the Saussurean structure, or system, then the unconscious represents a bug in the system, the fact that it can never quite work without a bug. With the unconscious the structure slips. What was supposed to work as the Other, the bearer of rule and necessity, the guarantee of meaning, shows its other face, which is whimsical and ephemeral and makes meaning slide. The Other is the Other with the bug.6 And what is more, it is only the bug that ultimately makes the Other other—the Other is the Other not on account of structure, but because of the bug that keeps derailing it. The bug is the anomaly of the Other, its face of inconsistency, that which defies regularity and law. Inside the Other of language, which enables speech, there emerges another Other that derails speech and makes us say something else than we intended, derailing the intention of meaning. Yet the second Other cannot be seized and maintained independently of the first as another Other, the Other within the Other—the Other cannot be duplicated and counted, the bug makes it uncountable.7 The alterity of the unconscious is not cut of the stuff of symbolic differences, it opens a difference that is not merely a symbolic difference, but that is, so to speak, “the difference within the difference,” another kind of difference within the symbolic one, a difference recalcitrant to integration into the symbolic, and yet only emerging in its bosom, with no separate realm of its own. And the very notion of subjectivity pertains precisely to the impossibility of reducing the second difference to the first one. In other words, the subject that emerges there is premised on a “two,” on the relation to a kernel within the symbolic order that cannot be symbolically sublimated. So the bottom line would be: there is an irreducible two, an irreducible gap between the One and the Other, and the unconscious, at its minimal, presents the figure of two that are not merged into one. The problem that remains is that, well, the Other doesn’t exist. Yet the figure of the Other as the Other of language, structure, code, and the symbolic order is but one face of the Other. There is another face, which pertains to the other strand of discovery in psychoanalysis, to sexuality and sexual difference. In Lacan, for example, we can read the following: “The Other, in my parlance, cannot be anything else but the Other sex” [L’Autre, dans mon langage, cela ne peut donc être que l’Autre sexe].8 “The Other, if it may be one, must certainly have a relation to what appears as the other sex.”9 So it appears now that the other face of the Other may well be the face of the woman, and that the Other is inherently and at the same time the Other of sex, of sex as the Other, sex under the auspices of the irreducible two. But, and this is essential, not the two of count. If in the first instance the Other seemed a disembodied entity that had to do with signifiers and structures, then in this other aspect it is the Other that most intimately sticks to the body and represents its rift. Not a structural difference, but the rift of our natural bodily being. This implies that the sexual difference, if this be the name of this rift, is not a difference that could be encompassed or covered or accounted for in terms of the signifying difference, the difference of Saussurean differentiality, that is, in terms of One and its split or its replication. It doesn’t present the two of counting, based on counting one and then extending this count, it pertains to the “other” difference that cannot be counted and stops at two, that is, at the difference of the one and the Other. But according to the other part of our Lacanian antinomy, the Other lacks, it doesn’t exist, it has no ontological consistency on its own, it marks the persistence of a difference that eludes the series of signifying differences and cannot be captured by them. Consequently, it would follow that the Other, as “the Other sex,” doesn’t exist either, and this is indeed the consequence drawn by Lacan’s notorious dictum, which caused so much havoc, that “The Woman doesn’t exist.” If the Other is the Other sex, the conclusion inevitably follows—but the trouble is that non-existence doesn’t make the Other vanish, it doesn’t amount to zero. Something is proclaimed not to exist—the Other, the Woman—but that doesn’t mean it has disappeared. Of this non-existence something stubbornly persists. Thea Alba at the Berlin Scala, 1925. There is an enigma at the very discovery of psychoanalysis, which developed in two separate ways. In his first three books, Freud presents the unconscious as the new object of the new science, something that Lacan summed up, half a century later, in the notorious formula The unconscious is structured like a language, that is, like a derailment of language, its constant slippage. Then in 1905, Freud published the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, a surprising work with respect to the earlier books. Its focus is not on language and its vicissitudes—there is an astounding absence of linguistic considerations—but rather on the body and its vicissitudes, deviations from its natural habitus, needs, and maturation. This is not a physiological body of firm substance and natural causality, but a body haunted by a cut, and this cut into physiological causality conditions and produces the drives, the new entities. Sexuality, such as Freud describes it, is placed in this cut in the body, causing the bodily needs to deviate from their natural goal and tend toward other aims. To put it in terms of counting, bodies can be counted, but the cut makes for uncountable entities, what Freud appropriately called partial objects, that is, objects “less than one,” not to be counted as one, objects partial by their very nature, not by virtue of a curtailment of a unity. But this partial nature is precisely what makes for the two, the two heterogeneous to the numerical one. If the first way concerns “the mind” and its derailments, the second concerns “the body” and its derailments. How do the two fit together? Well, they are connected precisely by the Other. From here one could propose Lacan’s major thesis on “What, if anything, is the Other?” “Of what is the Other the name?” It is the Other of the symbolic, but naming the locus where the symbolic slips—the Other is the Other of the bug, not of order—and this is the place where the unconscious sneaks in and where the subject of desire takes its slippery hold. And the Other is the Other of sex, the body, enjoyment, surplus enjoyment, the drives, partial objects, the heterogeneous excess that is the bug of sexuality and can never be assigned its place. Those are the two directions of the initial discovery of psychoanalysis, and the notion of the Other brings them together under the same roof. It names together, under one heading, in the same framework, in language and the body, that which presents alterity, that which emerges precisely at the interface of bodies and languages, at the interface of these countable entities, at their infringement. One could say that there is a univocity of the Other that can be predicated of both in the same way. In many languages, sex is etymologically the cut. But is it the cut in half (as in Plato’s legendary theory)? Is it the cut into two? How many sexes are there? If sex is section, rather than vivisection, does it cut into two only? There is a widespread strand of criticism that aims at binary oppositions as the locus of enforced sexuality, its regimentation, its imposed mold, its compulsory stricture, or “the compulsory heterosexuality.” By the imposition of the binary code of two sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint of placing ourselves on one side or the other, thus discarding the multiplicity of sexual positions. But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition nor accounted for in terms of the numerical two. It is irreducible to the signifying difference which defines the elements of the structure. It cannot be adequately described in terms of opposing features or as a relation of given entities existing prior to difference. It presents the figure of the two precisely by being irreducible neither to the one of count replicating or splitting itself, nor to the two that would form a complementary whole. The two that we are after is not the binary two of equal or different ones, extensions of the same order, but the two of the one and the Other. The sexual difference establishes the two precisely because it can neither be numerically counted two nor squeezed into a binary opposition. And if there is an astounding variety of sexual positions, it’s because of the impossibility of coming to terms with this count, its irreducible two-ness. To be sure, language constantly attempts to capture the sexual difference by means of the signifier, and perhaps this defines a very basic linguistic gesture. The most general classification of nouns, in most languages, follows precisely the sexual pattern in order to establish the roughest of divides, that into masculine and feminine gender. This opposition, supposedly taken from nature, is used as the most elementary guideline to sort out the vocabulary. But the spectacular metonymic proliferation in all directions testifies to the impossibility of the task—when anything can be grammatically sexed, nothing can be, and the very instrument of such classification is ruined by its own success. In Truffaut’s Jules et Jim there is a famous line where Oskar Werner, as a German, tells Jeanne Moreau (the French woman par excellence): “What a strange language is French where l’amour is masculine and la guerre is feminine.” In German, with die Liebe and der Krieg, it’s the opposite, supposedly how it should be if we are to follow “a natural pattern.” In Germany, love is the domain of women and war is the domain of men, while in France, reputed for perversion, it seems to be the other way around. “Make love not war” would have a completely different meaning and impact in Germany than in France. So taking the sexual difference as the pattern of grammatical gender makes for infinite possibilities of extension in any direction, while the guiding principle becomes completely useless. Everything can be accounted for and squeezed into the gender mold except for the sexual difference itself, which served as the model. The difference on which everything may be modeled persists as a real which cannot itself be seized as a difference. One can briefly hint at the question of the phallus in this context. In the traditional view and as the pragmatic “rule of thumb,” the phallus has served as the simple discriminatory factor supposed to distinguish two sexes. Either one has it or one doesn’t, which should suffice. This is where a simple anatomical contingency meets the basic trait of the signifying logic, the difference between marque and manque, the mark and its absence. The presence or absence of a privileged anatomical marker follows the same logic that fuels the differential structure, it coincides with its elementary matrix. The “phallic signifier” can thus serve as a model of the signifying difference, based on the presence or absence of differential traits. The privilege of the phallus could therefore be seen to follow from the overlapping of two spheres, the signifier and the body, which coincide at this privileged site. The phallic difference would thus present the very model of the first difference, the oppositive and binary difference, the Saussurean difference, from which it would seem that in this relation to the sexed body it obtains its hidden reference point, standing at the core of the production of signification (hence the title of one of Lacan’s notorious écrits, “The Signification of the Phallus”).10 But here is one of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis: the sexual difference cannot be accounted for in terms of phallic difference. It eludes this phallic logic. It stands in difference to this logic as such, as another difference irreducible to presence or absence of differential traits, irreducible to the phallus as signifier. This is why the sexual difference cannot be written—it is what doesn’t cease not to be written.11 Yin Yang Infinity by OneiromancerNJV. If there is a real of sexual difference, a real that makes its two irreducible to the two of count or the expansion of One, then it can be most simply and economically epitomized by Lacan’s dictum “There is no sexual relation” [Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel]. There is a two, but there is no relation. There is no relation between the One and the Other, they don’t complement each other. The supposition that there is a complementarity of two principles, that there is a relation, this supposition has largely underpinned traditional ontological assumptions. Perhaps the best known figure of the relation between the two is the Taoist yin-yang symbol. It is an image that has massively served as support for an entire cosmology, ontology, social theory, astronomy. It gives figure precisely to the two (and only two) poles of masculine and feminine, and the image is formed in such a way that they complement and complete each other, in perfect symmetry. There is a circle, and the circle itself is divided by two half-circle lines. The masculine and the feminine principle, their conflictual complementarity, are taken as the clue that informs every entity, indeed the entire universe. What does this image convey? There is a strong thesis presented in it that one could spell out like this: there is a relation. There is a sexual relation. Every relation is sexual. The relation exists emphatically, conspicuously, in a demonstrative manner, in the complementarity of the masculine and the feminine, in their perfect balance, the perfect match, and can serve as a paradigm for everything else. Everything can be interpreted in light of this image. The thesis implies and manifests even more: there is sense, this is the visual embodiment of sense that can endow everything else with sense. Sense basically consists in relation—if there is relation, there is sense, and only relation “makes sense.” The paradigm that regulates sense also regulates the sexual relation.12 It has the power to bestow sense, which emerges from the complementarity of the two. So this sign states: one divides into two, and the two merge into one. The exact opposite of the other notorious Chinese dictum, the one we started with: one divides into two, but two doesn’t merge into one. For Lacan, Aristotelian ontology is like our Western version of yin-yang, it makes analogous assumptions about hyle and morphe, matter and form, the feminine and the masculine, the passive and the active. And this goes for the bulk of traditional dichotomies: matter and form, body and spirit, nature and culture, intuition and intellect, active and passive—all of them are secretly sexualized, premised on an assumption about the relation. There is a theme to ponder: ontology and sexuality. To what extent were ontological assumptions always underpinned by sexual assumptions, assumptions about the sexual relation, its existence as a guiding principle, the hidden assumption about the relation?13 So the thesis that there is no sexual relation contains a strong ontological implication: there is an irreducible two but no relation, not even, especially not, the relation of count; there is also not complementarity. There is the Other (of the unconscious, of sex), but it cannot be counted for one, and it cannot complement its other (consciousness, “opposite sex”) in a division of labor. It lacks, it doesn’t exist, but nevertheless, and this is the whole problem, its non-existence doesn’t run out into a simple nothing. But what remains of this non-existence? Can one name it? Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, (Natura morta), 1956. Oil on canvas. In the first pages of his last big book, Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou proposes the term “democratic materialism” to name the prevailing spontaneous set of assumptions that form the contemporary doxa. This democratic materialism can be summarized, according to Badiou, in one “ontological” statement: “There are only bodies and languages” [Il n’y que des corps et des langages].14 There is the firm being of bodies, their proliferation, their striving for pleasures and enjoyment, the increase, growth, and expansion of life; and there is the multiplicity of languages, the democracy of their plurality and proliferation, multiculturalism, minoritarian practices, all of them entitled to recognition. Democratic materialism is the spontaneous idealism of our times—nobody believes any longer in the salvation of the immortal soul, we firmly believe in bodies and languages. Badiou’s addition to this axiom is simple: “There are only bodies and languages, but apart from that there are truths” [… sinon qu’il y a des verities].15 There are truths that are of another order than bodies and languages, they engage subjectivity and raise a claim to universality, but they don’t exist on some separate location somewhere else—for our particular purpose we could say that they emerge precisely with that excess at the interface of bodies and languages, something that psychoanalysis brings together under the names of the unconscious and sexuality, at the intersection that prevents the neutral coexistence of bodies and languages, in a subtraction from the regime of bodies and languages, epitomized by the Other. Bodies and signs can be counted, but the Other makes for a two that is uncountable. The axiom of democratic materialism has a corollary: there are only bodies and languages, but there is no Other. The promotion of their expansion and proliferation precludes the Other. And this is where our adage that the Other lacks takes precisely the opposite direction: it doesn’t mean that, since it lacks, we are only stuck with bodies and languages, happily or unhappily stuck, it means that the very existence of bodies and languages has to be put into question. It is the two of the Other that undermines their multiplicity and proliferation. The two that is neither one nor multiple, and provides a precarious hold for truth. I can, in conclusion, propose a very simple name for it, a name stemming from the pre-Socratic times of the dawn of philosophy. And the question of One and its division into two is indeed a pre-Socratic question to start with. The first appearance of materialism in the history of philosophy was linked with the atomists, and most notably with the figure of Democritus. What is atomism, if not precisely a radical attempt to submit bodies, the whole matter, indeed the cosmos, to count? Matter can be counted, and the atoms are the indivisible particle
New Polemic on the Philosophical Front Report on the Discussion Concerning Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s Concept That “Two Combine Into One” by “HONGQI’S” CORRESPONDENT
A NEW and heated polemic has developed on the philosophical front in China; it concerns the concepts of “one divides into two”* and “two combines into one.” This debate is a struggle between those who are for and those who are against materialist dialectics, a struggle between two world outlooks - the proletarian world outlook and the bourgeois world outlook. Those who maintain that “one divides into two” is the fundamental law of things stand on the side of materialist dialectics; those who maintain that the fundamental law of things is that “two combine into one” stand in direct opposition to materialist dialectics. The two sides draw a clear line of demarcation between themselves and their arguments are directly opposed to each other. This polemic is an ideological reflection of an acute and complex class struggle now being waged both internationally and in China. Counting from May 29, the date of publication in the newspaper Guangming Ribao of the article “‘One Divides Into Two’ and ‘Two Combine Into One,’” by Comrades Ai Heng-wu and Lin Ching-shan, this debate has already been going on for three months. In order to get a better understanding of the present state of this polemic and in order to promote it, the Hongqi [Red Flag] Editorial Department organized a forum on August 24-25 attended by cadres and students from the Higher Party School. Our correspondent subsequently interviewed a number of the comrades concerned. The following is a report on the forum and interviews. The Polemic Was Provoked by Comrade Yang Hsien-chen Comrades attending the forum stated that the polemic had started in the Higher Party School long before the publication of the article by Ai Heng-wu and Lin Chingshan. Recalling events in the last few years, they all noted that, in line with the situation in the class struggle at home and internationally, the Party had strengthened its propaganda on the dialectical materialist concept that “one divides into two.” Our Party has pointed out that everything tends to divide itself into two. And theories are no exception; they also tend to divide. Wherever there is a revolutionary, scientific theory, its antithesis, a counter-revolutionary, anti-scientific theory, is bound to arise in the course of its development. As modern society is divided into classes and as the difference between progressive and backward groups will continue far into the future, the emergence of such antitheses is inevitable. The Party has further pointed out: The history of the international communist movement demonstrates that like everything else, the international working-class movement tends to divide itself into two. The class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is inevitably reflected in the communist ranks. It is inevitable that opportunism of one kind or another should arise in the course of development of the communist movement, that opportunists should engage in splitting activities against Marxism-Leninism and that Marxist-Leninists should wage struggles against opportunism and splittism. It is precisely through such struggles of opposites that Marxism-Leninism and the international working-class movement have developed. The Party has criticized the so-called “new concept” advanced by modern revisionism with regard to the current international situation, pointing out that this concept implies that in the present-day world antagonistic social contradictions of all kinds are waning, and that contradictory social forces are tending to unite themselves into a single whole. For instance, they hold that the conflicting forces represented by the socialist system and the capitalist system, by the socialist camp and the imperialist camp, by one imperialist country and another, by the imperialist countries and oppressed nations, by the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the proletariat and other laboring people on the other in the capitalist countries, by the different monopoly groups in the imperialist countries, as well as the contradictions within socialist countries - that all these are uniting or on the way to uniting into a single whole. The revolutionary dialectical method summed up in the concept that “one divides into two” has been grasped more and more fully by our comrades and the masses to become a powerful ideological instrument for achieving a correct understanding of the present situation in the class struggle both domestic and international. It helps people to recognize that the contradiction and struggle between imperialism and the revolutionary people of the world are irreconcilable, and that the contradiction and struggle between Marxism-Leninism and modern revisionism are irreconcilable. It enhances people’s courage in opposing imperialism, the reactionaries in various countries, and in fighting modern revisionism. It increases people’s confidence in victory. But, while our Party is strengthening its propaganda on the revolutionary dialectics of “one divides into two,” Comrade Yang Hsien-chen talks a lot about the concept of “two combine into one,” thus setting up another platform opposite to that of the Party. Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s idea of reconciling contradictions and negating struggles was formed a long time ago. In November 1961 when lecturing in the Higher Party School, he said: “The unity of opposites, the unity of contradictions means: The two opposites are inseparably connected.” “What we want to learn from dialectics is how to connect two opposite ideas.” Since the Party strengthened its propaganda on the concept of “one divides into two,” Comrade Yang Hsien-chen has disseminated his idea of reconciling contradictions with even greater zeal. In November 1963, he generalized his idea as “two combine into one,” and made this public while lecturing in the Higher Party School. In April 1964, in a lecture to a class of Sinkiang students at the Higher Party School, he further developed this thesis, making it more “systematic,” and more “complete.” Subsequently, he attempted by every means to propagate this thesis, trying to thrust in his anti-dialectical viewpoint wherever possible. Comrade Li Ming, lecturer of the Research and Teaching Group in Philosophy, also publicized Comrade Yang’s thesis in the classroom. On May 14, in a class, Li declared that there had been too much talk about “one dividing into two,” and too little about “two combining into one.” He even encouraged his class to write articles propagating this latter concept. What Li Ming actually meant was that there had been too much talk about Marxism-Leninism, about the revolutionary dialectics of Mao Tsetung’s thinking, and too little about Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s anti-dialectical views. According to him, more articles should be written on Yang’s anti-dialectical views. Both Ai Heng-wu and Lin Ching-shan said that while writing their article, they several times consulted Comrade Yang Hsien-chen. Yang helped them to revise it. Li Ming, too, twice gave suggestions for the article and revised it. Ai Heng-wu recalled that when they heard that the concept that “two combine into one” was described as a deliberate attempt to put over something new and different, and felt uncertain whether to publish their article or not, they went to Yang. Yang said: “Who said that it is something new and different? Whoever said that is ignorant.” He continued: “The concept that ‘two combine into one’ is a matter of world outlook; the concept that ‘one divides into two’ is a matter of methodology.” Soon after, he again encouraged Ai and Lin, saying: “The viewpoint of your article is well-founded; send it out!” In this way. Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s concept that “two combine into one” was spread from the Higher Party School and made public through the article by Ai Heng-wu and Lin Ching-shan. Thus the debate between “one divides into two” and “two combine into one” was unfolded in the press. This polemic on the philosophical front was therefore provoked by Comrade Yang Hsien-chen. Criticism and Repudiation of Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s Concept After the article by Ai Heng-wu and Lin Ching-shan was published in Guangming Ribao, the leading comrades in the Higher Party School, seeing that the debate involved a matter of principle and that it was a debate between revolutionary dialectics and anti-dialectics, asked the Research and Teaching Group in Philosophy to hold a discussion on it. When Comrade Yang Hsien-chen was told of this by Li Ming, he was very displeased and angry. On July 17, Comrades Wang Chung and Kuo Pei-heng wrote an article in Renmin Ribao, exposing and criticizing Yang’s concept that “two combine into one.” At the same time, quite a number of comrades in the Higher Party School rebutted this concept in discussions and in articles in the school magazine and papers. Yet there were still some who insisted that it was correct. Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s concept that “two combine into one” has also evoked a great deal of controversy among the general public. Some people support it; but, many criticize and reject it. Up to the end of August, more than 90 articles on the subject had been published in newspapers and in magazines, both national and local. Theoretical workers in Party schools, universities and colleges, and research institutes in various places have held forums on it. At the present time the central question in the debate is whether or not to recognize the law of the unity of opposites as the fundamental law of objective things, and materialist dialectics as the world outlook of the proletariat. The majority of the students and staff workers of the Higher Party School have come to see clearly from the words and deeds of Yang Hsien-chen and others that it is not fortuitous that Comrade Yang Hsien-chen should at this time have made public the concept that “two combine into one.” He has done this with the aim and plan of pitting the reactionary bourgeois world outlook against the proletarian world outlook of materialist dialectics. Participants in the forum pointed out that Yang Hsien-chen had all along, repeatedly and painstakingly, propagated the idea that “the tendency in everything is for ‘two to combine into one.’” He had talked with great zeal about “the inseparable connection” between antitheses, the “inseparability” of things, and asserted that the task of studying the unity of opposites lies solely in seeking “common demands,” or “seeking common ground while reserving differences.” If things are viewed in the light of his concept that “two combine into one,” their internal contradictions disappear and the struggle of opposites within them disappears; the concept that one side of a contradiction must of necessity overcome the other side, that the outcome of struggle is the destruction of the old unity and the emergence of a new unity, and that old things are replaced by the new - all this, too, disappears. In this way, Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectics is completely negated. The concept that “one divides into two” is the kernel of the revolutionary philosophy of materialist dialectics, the world outlook of the proletariat. Using this world outlook to apprehend things, the proletariat recognizes that contradictions are inherent in everything, that the two sides of a contradiction are in a state both of unity and of struggle, and that contradiction is the motive force in the development of things. While the identity of opposites is relative, their struggle is absolute. Therefore, the task of materialist dialectics has never been to cover up contradictions, but to disclose them, to discover the correct method for resolving them and to accelerate their transformation, in order to bring about the revolutionary transformation of the world. Using the world outlook of materialist dialectics to analyze class societies, the proletariat recognizes class contradiction and class struggle; it recognizes class struggle as the motive force of social development; it firmly maintains that the proletariat must carry out the class struggle through to the end and so bring about the transformation of society. But to view relations between the various classes of society in accordance with the concept that “two combine into one” as advocated by Comrade Yang Hsien-chen will inevitably lead to obscuring the boundaries between classes, and to repudiating the class struggle, and thus lead to the theory of class conciliation. Comrades Yang Hsien-chen, Ai Heng-wu and Lin Ching-shan gave an intolerably distorted picture of the basis on which the Party maps out its principles, lines and policies. They arbitrarily asserted that the Party’s general line for socialist construction, the principles of political life of the Party and the State, the Party’s economic, foreign and cultural policies, etc., were all worked out in accordance with their concept that “two combine into one.” Thus, they themselves have raised a fundamental question of political principle. However, the defenders of Yang Hsien-chen’s concept that “two combine into one” are unwilling to admit that a question of political principle is involved. Actuated by ulterior motives, they have even said that an academic question should not be turned into a political question. Some comrades maintain that Comrade Yang Hsien-chen described the concept that “two combine into one” as a matter of world outlook and the concept that “one divides into two” as a matter of methodology, and point out that this runs completely counter to the materialist theory of the unity of world outlook and methodology. The fact that Comrade Yang Hsien-chen has time and again stressed that the aim of studying the dialectical method “is to acquire the ability to unite into one two opposite ideas.” This precisely shows the complete unity of his world outlook and his methodology; both conform to the concept that “two combine into one.” Comrade Mao Tse-tung has taught us: It is only the reactionary ruling classes of the past and present, and the metaphysicians in their service, who regard opposites not as living, conditional, mobile and transforming themselves into one another, but as dead and rigid, and they propagate this fallacy everywhere to delude the masses of the people, thus seeking to perpetuate their rule. Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s concept that “two combine into one” treats the connections between the two sides in a contradiction as precisely “dead and rigid things.” Utilizing every opportunity to disseminate this kind of view, he has tried to mislead many people, thus playing a role which serves the reactionary classes. In the debate, some people made statements which, though differing slightly, coincide in the main with Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s concept that “two combine into one.” For example, some said that the controversy is merely concerned with phraseology or usage; and added that anyone can make a slip or two when lecturing in the classroom. Others, pretending to be fair and to see the question from all sides, have advanced the idea of using the concept that “two combine into one” to supplement the concept that “one divides into two,” thus making the former into one aspect of the law of unity of opposites; they assert that only in this way can we avoid “one-sidedness.” Others again, pretending to make a concrete analysis of contradictions, divide contradictions into two types: Those which have “unity as their main feature,” and those which have “struggle as their main feature,” claiming that the concept that “two combines into one” should be used in handling contradictions which have “unity as the main feature.” Still others describe the concept that “one divides into two” as a means of analysis and the concept of “two combine into one” as a means of generalization, asserting that each is a component part of the dialectical method of cognition. All these assertions, however, are nothing but attempts to defend the thesis that “two combine into one.” Many comrades pointed out that the Marxist-Leninist concept that “one divides into two” has its definite meaning and that the concept that “two combine into one” put forward by Yang Hsien-chen, likewise, has its definite meaning. As a technical term, “one divides into two” very accurately, vividly and colloquially expresses the kernel of dialectics, that is, the essence of the law of the unity of opposites, whereas the concept that “two combine into one” put forward by Yang Hsien-chen is systematic metaphysics from beginning to end. These are two fundamentally opposite world outlooks. How can one possibly mix them together and not distinguish the one from the other? Class Struggle in the Realm of Ideology At the forum, many comrades touched upon the great significance of this debate in philosophy. Philosophy is a part of social ideology; it has its distinct Party character, that is, class character. The struggle on the philosophical front invariably reflects class struggle on the economic and political fronts. In class struggle, different classes, proceeding from their respective class interests, are bound to put forward different points of view and make philosophical generalizations of these viewpoints, which are either revolutionary or reactionary. There is the revolutionary philosophy of the proletariat, and there is the reactionary philosophy of the bourgeoisie. Thus, the struggle between the two antagonistic groups is reflected on the philosophical front. Those individuals within the ranks of the proletariat who have a bourgeois world outlook or who are influenced by the bourgeois world outlook, likewise often use bourgeois philosophy to oppose the revolutionary philosophy of the proletariat. At the present time, internationally, the revolutionary struggle waged by the people of various countries is developing vigorously against imperialism, headed by the United States, and its lackeys. Inside the international communist movement, a fierce struggle is being waged between Marxism-Leninism and modern revisionism. In our country, the class struggle between the proletariat on the one hand and the bourgeoisie and the remnant feudal forces on the other, as well as the struggle between the socialist and capitalist roads have advanced to a new, deep-going stage. Confronted with this situation in the class struggle internationally and at home the Central Committee of the Party and Comrade Mao Tse-tung place great emphasis on using the concept that “one divides into two” and the Marxist-Leninist theory of the class struggle to combat modern revisionism and to arm our people and have proposed to crush the offensive launched by the bourgeoisie and the remnant feudal forces by carrying out a widespread movement for socialist education in the cities and the countryside. Comrade Yang Hsien-chen’s propagation of the concept that “two combine into one” at such a time is precisely and deliberately designed to meet the needs of modern revisionism and aid the modern revisionists in their propaganda for class peace and class collaboration, and also for the theory of reconciling contradictions. It is at this same time deliberately designed to meet the needs of the bourgeoisie and the remnant feudal forces at home by providing them with so-called theoretical weapons for resisting the movement for socialist education. It has already become very clear that this new polemic, that concerns the question of who will win over whom on the philosophical front, is a serious class struggle in the realm of ideology. That such a debate should have arisen on our philosophical front is not difficult to understand. History has shown that whenever a sharp class struggle develops in the political and economic fields, there is bound to be acute class struggle in the ideological field as well. Social life in the Soviet Union was in a period of drastic change towards the end of the 1920’s. The unfolding of the movements for agricultural collectivization and socialist industrialization and the desperate resistance put up by the kulaks and the bourgeois forces has made the class struggle in Soviet society very acute. At that time the anti-Party group of Trotsky and Bukharin emerged within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The deeper the socialist revolution went on the economic and political fronts, the greater the shock it caused ideologically to various classes and strata. It was at this crucial moment that Deborin’s anti-dialectical philosophical views became the ideological weapon of the anti-Party group, while the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union headed by Stalin sharply criticized and rejected the philosophical position of the Deborin school. That struggle in the realm of ideology was precisely a reflection of the acute class struggle in Soviet society. At the present time, the debate which has started on the philosophical front in our country is continuing. In terms of numbers of participants or of its widespread influence and great significance, a debate such as this has rarely been seen in our academic circles for many years now. It seems that it is still far from being concluded. Step by step, it is deepening, truth always develops in struggle. Through this debate, the dialectical way of thinking will certainly triumph over the anti-dialectical and the political and theoretical level of our people will be greatly raised. _______________ * Translator’s note: This phrase is derived from the formulation given by V.I. Lenin in his “Philosophical Notebooks,” Collected Works, Vol. 38, F.L.P.H., Moscow, 1961, p. 359. “The splitting of a single whole and the cognition of its contradictory parts ... is the essence ... of dialectics.”
ONE DIVIDES INTO TWO
Today, Lenin's political works are being entirely revisited through the canonical opposition between democracy and totalitarian dictatorship. Yet the truth is that this debate has already taken place. For it was equally on the basis of the category of democracy that from 1918 onwards, Western social democrats, lead by Karl Kautsky, attempted to discredit not just the Bolshevik revolution in its historical unfolding, but Lenin's political thought as such. What can still be of interest to us here, above all, is Lenin's theoretical response to this official attack, which was contained in particular in the pamphlet that Kautsky published in Vienna in 1918 under the title The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, and to which Lenin responded with his famous text, The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky the Renegade. Kautsky, as behoves a declared partisan of the representative and parliamentary political regime, puts almost all the emphasis on the question of the right to vote. What is altogether remarkable is that Lenin regards this procedure as the very essence of Kautsky's 'renegation'. Not that Lenin thinks that upholding the right to vote is in any way a theoretical error. On the contrary, Lenin thinks that it can certainly be useful, or even necessary, to participate in elections. He will reiterate this view with violence, against the absolute adversaries of parliamentary vote, in his pamphlet on leftism. What Lenin reproaches Kautsky with is far subtler and more interesting. Had Kautsky said: I oppose the Russian Bolsheviks' decision to deny the right to vote to reactionaries and exploiters, he would have taken a stance on what Lenin calls an essentially Russian question, and not on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat in general. He could then have entitled his pamphlet Against the Bolsheviks. Politically, things would have been clear. But this is not what Kautsky did. Kautsky claimed to intervene on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat in general, and of democracy in general. To do this on the grounds of a tactical and localised decision in Russia is the essence of 'renegation'. The essence of 'renegation' is always to argue from a tactical circumstance in order to renege on principles; to start from a secondary contradiction in order to pronounce a revisionist judgement on that conception of politics which defines it as a matter of principles. Let us look in greater detail at how Lenin proceeds. I quote: By invoking the right to vote, Kautsky has revealed himself as a polemicist enemy of the Bolsheviks, one who makes litter out of theory. For theory, that is, the study of general class principles of democracy and dictatorship ? not just those particular to one nation ? must not bear on a special question such as the one of the right to vote, but instead on a general problem: can democracy be maintained for the rich and the exploiters, in the historical period marked by the overthrow of the exploiters and the substitution of their State with the State of the exploited? It is thus, and only thus, that a theorist can pose the question. Properly speaking, theory is thus what integrates within thought the moment of a question. The moment of the question of democracy is in no way fixed by a local and tactical decision, such as that of the prohibition of the right to vote for the rich and the exploiters, a decision linked in this instance to the particularity of the Russian revolution. This moment is instead fixed by the general principle of victory: we are, Lenin says, in the moment of victorious revolutions, in the moment of the real overthrow of the exploiters. We are no longer in the moment of the Paris commune, a moment of courage and bloody defeat. A theorist is one who approaches questions ? of democracy, for example ? from within a moment so determined. A renegade is one who takes no account of the moment. One who hangs his political resentment onto a particular episode. One clearly sees here in what sense Lenin is the political thinker who opens the century. He is the one who makes victory ? what is effectively real in a revolutionary politics ? into an internal condition of theory. In this way, Lenin fixes what will constitute the main political subjectivity of the century, at least until its last quarter. So the century, between 1917 and the end of the seventies, is in no way ? as today's liberals claim ? the century of ideology, of the imaginary or of utopia. Its subjective determination is a Leninist one. It is the passion for the real, for what is immediately practicable, here and now. What does the century have to say about itself? In any case, that it is not the century of promise, but that of realisation. It is the century of the act, of the effective, of the absolute present, and not the century of portent, of the to-come. The century experiences itself as the century of victories, after millennia of attempts and failures. The cult of the vain and sublime attempt, bearer of ideological enslavement, is assigned by the actors of the 20th century to the one preceding, to the unhappy Romanticism of the 19th century. The 20th century declares: no more failures, the time of victories has come! This victorious subjectivity outlasts all apparent defeats, because it is not empirical, but constitutive. Victory is the transcendental theme that commands failure itself. 'Revolution' is one of the names of this theme. The October Revolution of 1917, and then the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, as well as the victories of the Algerians and the Vietnamese in their wars of national liberation, all of this counts as empirical proof of the theme, and amounts to the defeat of defeats, redressing the massacres of June '48 or of the Paris Commune. For Lenin, the means of victory is theoretical and practical lucidity with respect to a decisive confrontation, to a total and final war. Only a total war will lead to a victory that is truly victorious. In this regard the century is the century of war. But this statement intertwines several ideas, all of which turn around the question of the Two, or of antagonistic scission. The century declared that its law was the Two, antagonism; in this sense, the end of the cold war (American imperialism against socialist camp), the last total figure of the Two, also signals the end of the century. Nevertheless, the Two can take on three different guises: 1. There is a central antagonism, two subjectivities organised on a global scale in mortal combat. The century is the stage of this combat. 2. There is an equally violent antagonism between two ways of considering and thinking antagonism. This is the very essence of the confrontation between communism and fascism. For the communists, the planetary confrontation is in the last instance that of classes. For the radical fascisms it is that of nations and races. Here, the Two divides in two. We witness the entanglement of an antagonistic thesis, on the one hand, and of antagonistic theses on antagonism, on the other. This second division is essential, perhaps more than the first. All in all, there were more anti-fascists than communists, and it is characteristic that the second world war was fought in accordance with this derivative split, and not on the basis of a unified conception of antagonism, which only gave rise to a cold war, save on the periphery (Korean and Vietnam wars). 3. The century is summoned as the century of the production, through war, of a definitive unity. Antagonism is to be overcome by the victory of one camp over the other. Thus one can also say that, in this sense, the century of the Two is animated by the radical desire of the One. What names the articulation of antagonism with the violence of the One is victory, as attestation of the real. Let us note that we are not dealing with a dialectical scheme. Nothing allows one to foresee a synthesis, an internal overcoming of contradiction. On the contrary, everything points to the suppression of one of the terms. The century is a figure of the non-dialectical juxtaposition of the Two and the One. The question here is to know what is the century's assessment of dialectical thought. In the victorious result, is the motor antagonism itself or the desire of the One? This is one of the main philosophical questions of Leninism. It revolves around what one must understand in dialectical thought by the unity of opposites. Without doubt, it is the question that Mao and the Chinese communists worked on most assiduously. Around 1965 there begins in China what the local press, always inventive when it came to the designation of conflicts, calls a great class struggle in the field of philosophy. This struggle opposes, on the one side, those who think that the essence of dialectics is the synthesis of contradictory terms, and that it is given in the formula one divides into two, and, on the other side, those who think that the essence of dialectics is the synthesis of contradictory terms, and that the right formula is consequently two fuse into one. Apparent scholasticism, essential truth. For this is in fact a question of the identification of revolutionary subjectivity, of its constitutive desire. Is it the desire of division, of war, or is it instead the desire of fusion, of unity, of peace? In any case, in the China of the time those who hold to the maxim 'one divides into two' are declared leftists, and rightists those who advocate 'two fuse into one'. Why? If the maxim of synthesis (two fuse into one) taken as a subjective formula, as desire of the One, is rightist, it is because in the eyes of the Chinese revolutionaries it is altogether premature. The subject of this maxim is yet to fully traverse the Two to the end, it does not yet know what an integrally victorious class war is. It follows that the One whose desire it harbours is not yet even thinkable, which means that under the cover of synthesis, this desire is calling for the old One. This interpretation of dialectics entails a restoration. In order to not be a conservative, in order to be a revolutionary activist in the present, one must instead desire division. The question of novelty immediately becomes that of the creative scission within the singularity of the situation. In China the Cultural Revolution opposes, singularly during the years '66 and '67, and in the midst of unimaginable fury and confusion, the partisans of these two versions of the dialectical schema. There are those who behind Mao, at the time practically in a minority within the direction of the Party, think that the socialist State must not be the policed and police-like end of mass politics, but, on the contrary, that it must act as a stimulus for the outburst of politics, under the sign of the march towards real communism. And there are those who, behind Liu Shaoqi, but especially Deng Xiaoping, think that, economic management being the principal aspect of things, popular mobilisations are more nefarious than necessary. The educated youth will be the spearhead of the Maoist line. The Party cadres and a great number of the intellectuals will undertake more or less overt opposition. The farmers will cautiously bide their time. The workers ? the decisive force ? will be so torn between rival organisations that in the end, from '67-'68, it will prove necessary, with the State at risk of being carried away by the political flood, for the Army to intervene. There begins a long period of extremely violent and complex bureaucratic confrontations, not without a number of popular irruptions, all the way up to the death of Mao (1976), swiftly followed by the Thermidorian coup that brings Deng to power. This political hurricane is, as far as its stakes, so novel and at the same time so obscure, that numerous lessons that it doubtless entails for the future of the politics of emancipation have yet to be drawn, in spite of the fact that it provided a decisive inspiration for French Maoism between 1967 and 1975, the only innovative and consequent political current of post-May '68. In any case, it is beyond doubt that the Cultural Revolution signals the closure of an entire sequence, whose central object is the Party, and whose main political concept is that of proletariat. Let it be said in passing that it is fashionable today, among the restorers of imperial and capitalist servility, to qualify this unprecedented episode as a bloody and feral power struggle, in which Mao, a minority in the Chinese Politburo, attempted by any available means to climb his way back to the top. First of all, one will reply that to qualify a political episode of this type with the epithet of power struggle is to attract ridicule by breaking down a wide-open door. The militants of the Cultural Revolution never stopped quoting Lenin's declaration (perhaps not his best, but that's another matter) that, ultimately, the problem is that of power. Mao's threatened position was one of the explicit stakes of the conflict, as Mao himself officially indicated. The findings of our sinologist interpreters are nothing but immanent and public themes of the quasi-civil war that took place in China between '65 and '76, a war whose properly revolutionary sequence (in the sense of the existence of new political thought) is to be found only the initial segment ('65-'68). Besides, since when do our political philosophers consider it a horror that a threatened leader might attempt to regain influence? Is this not what they discuss all day long as constituting the delectable and democratic essence of parliamentary politics? One will then argue that the meaning and importance of a power struggle is judged according to the stakes involved. Especially when the weapons in this struggle are classically revolutionary, in the sense that lead Mao to remark that the revolution is not a gala dinner: unprecedented mobilisation of millions of workers and youths, a truly unheard of freedom of expression and organisation, gigantic demonstrations, political assemblies in all places of work or study, brutal and schematic debates, public denunciations, the recurrent and anarchic use of violence, including armed violence, etc. Now, who can argue today that Deng Xiaoping, qualified by the activists of the Cultural Revolution as second highest amongst the officials who, whilst members of the Party, were nevertheless committed to the capitalist path, was not in fact on a line of development and social construction that was diametrically opposed to Mao's innovative and collectivist one? Did we not see, when after Mao's death he seized power in a bureaucratic coup d'?tat, how Deng unfurled, during the whole of the eighties and up to his death, a completely savage and completely corrupt sort of neo-capitalism, all the more illegitimate as it maintained the Party's despotism? Thus there really was, with respect to all of these questions, and singularly regarding the most important of all (relations between town and country, between intellectual work and manual work, between the Party and the masses, etc.), what the Chinese in their delightful tongue call a struggle between two classes, two ways and two lines. But the acts of violence, often so extreme? The hundreds of thousands of dead? The persecutions, especially against intellectuals? One will say the same thing about them as about all the acts of violence that have marked the history, to this very day, of any expansive attempts to practice a free politics. The radical subversion of the eternal order that subjects society to wealth and to the wealthy, to power and to the powerful, to science and to scientists, to capital and to its servants, cannot be sweet, progressive and peaceful. There is already a great and rigorous violence of thought when you cease to tolerate that one counts what the people think for nothing, for nothing the collective intelligence of workers, for nothing, to say the truth, any thought that is not homogenous to the order in which the hideous reign of profit is perpetuated. The theme of total emancipation, practiced in the present, in the enthusiasm of the absolute present, is always situated beyond Good and Evil, because, in the circumstances of action, the only known Good is what the status quo establishes as the precious name of its own subsistence. Extreme violence is therefore reciprocal to extreme enthusiasm, because it is in effect, to speak like Nietzsche, a matter of the transvaluation of all values. The Leninist passion for the real, which is also the passion of thought, is without morality. The only status of morality, as Nietzsche saw, is genealogical. It is a residue of the old world. Thus, for a Leninist, the threshold of tolerance to what, seen from our old and pacified present, is the worst, is incredibly high, regardless of the camp that one belongs to. This is obviously what causes some today to speak of the barbarity of the century. Nevertheless, it is altogether unjust to isolate this dimension of the passion for the real. Even when it is a question of the persecution of intellectuals, as disastrous as its spectacle and effects may be, it is important to recall that what makes it possible is that it is not the privileges of knowledge that command the political access to the real. Like Fouquier-Tinville said during the French Revolution, when judging and condemning to death Lavoisier, the creator of modern chemistry: The Republic does not need scientists. Barbarous words if there ever were, totally extremist and unreasonable, but that must be understood, beyond themselves, in their abridged, axiomatic form: The Republic does not need. It is not from need, from interest, or from its correlate, privileged knowledge, that derives the political capture of a fragment of the real, but from the occurrence of a collectivisable thought, and from it alone. This can also be stated as follows: politics, when it exists, grounds its own principle regarding the real, and thus is in need of nothing, save for itself. But perhaps it is the case that today every attempt to submit thought to the ordeal of the real, political or otherwise, is regarded as barbarous. The passion for the real, much cooled, cedes its place (provisionally?) to the acceptance, sometimes joyous, sometimes dismal, of reality. Of course, the passion for the real is accompanied by a proliferation of semblance. For a revolutionary, the world is the old world, it is replete with corruption and treachery. The purification, the divestment of the real, must always begin again. What must be emphasized is that to purify the real means to extract it from the reality that envelops and occults it. Whence the violent taste for surface and transparency. The century attempts to react against depth. It carries out a fierce critique of foundations and of the beyond, it promotes the immediate and the surface of sensation. It proposes, as heir to Nietzsche, to abandon all other-worlds, and to pose that the real is identical to appearance. Thought, precisely because what drives it is not the ideal but the real, must seize hold of appearance as appearance, or of the real as pure event of its own appearance. To achieve this, it must destroy every density, every claim to substantiality, every assertion of reality. It is reality that acts as an obstacle to the discovery of the real as pure surface. Here lies the struggle against semblance. But since the semblance-of-reality adheres to the real, the destruction of semblance comes to be identified with destruction pure and simple. At the end of its purification, the real, as total absence of reality, is the nothing. This path, undertaken by innumerable ventures in the century ? political, artistic, scientific ventures ? is the path of terrorist nihilism. Since its subjective motivation is the passion for the real, it is not a consent to anything, it is a creation, and one should recognise in it the traits of an active nihilism. Where are we today? The figure of active nihilism is regarded as completely obsolete. Every reasonable activity is limited, limiting, constrained by the burdens of reality. The best that one can do is to get away from evil, and to do this, the shortest path is to avoid any contact with the real. Ultimately one comes up against the nothing, the there-is-nothing-real, and in this sense one remains in nihilism. But since the terrorist element, the desire to purify the real, has been suppressed, nihilism is disactivated. It has become passive, or reactive, nihilism, that is, hostile to every action as well as to every thought. The other path that the century sketched out, the one that attempts to hold onto the passion for the real without falling for the paroxystic charms of terror, I call the subtractive path: to exhibit as a real point, not the destruction of reality, but minimal difference. To purify reality, not in order to annihilate it in its surface, but to subtract it from its apparent unity so as to detect within it the minuscule difference, the vanishing term which constitutes it. What barely takes place differs from the place wherein it takes place. It is in the 'barely' that all the affect rests, in this immanent exception. In both of these paths the key question is that of the new. What is the new? The question obsesses the century, because ever since its inception the century is invoked as figure of commencement. And first of all as the (re)commencement of Man: the new man. This syntagm, perhaps more Stalinist than Leninist, has two opposing senses. For a whole host of thinkers, singularly in the ambit of fascist thought, and without excluding Heidegger, the new man is in great part the restitution of the man of old, the one who had been obliterated, who had disappeared, who had been corrupted. Purification is really the more or less violent process of the return of a vanished origin. The new is a production of authenticity. In the final analysis, the task of the century is seen here as the restitution (of the origin) by the destruction (of the inauthentic). For another host of thinkers, particularly in the ambit of Marx-leaning communism, the new man is a real creation, something which has never existed before, because it emerges from the destruction of historical antagonisms. The new man of communism is beyond classes and beyond the State. The new man is thus either restored, or produced. In the first case, the definition of the new man is rooted in mythic totalities such as race, nation, earth, blood, soil. The new man is a collection of predicates (nordic, aryan, warrior, etc.). In the second case, on the contrary, the new man is conceived against all envelopes and all predicates, in particular against family, property, the nation-state. This is the project of Engels' book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Marx had already underlined that the universal singularity of the proletariat is to bear no predicate, to possess nothing, and in particular to have, in the strong sense, no fatherland. This conception of the new man ? anti-predicative, negative and universal ? traverses the century. A very important point here is the hostility towards the family, as the primordial nucleus of egoism, of rooted particularity, of tradition and origin. Gide's cry ? 'Families, I hate you' ? partakes in the apologetics of the new man thus conceived. It is very striking to see that the family has once again become, at the century's end, a consensual and practically unassailable value. The young love the family, in which moreover they remain until later and later. The German Green Party, considered to be a protest party (everything is relative: it is now in government?), contemplated at one point calling itself the party of the family. Even homosexuals, bearers in the century, as we've just seen with Gide, of a part of the protest, today demand their insertion within the familial frame, the tradition, citizenship. See how far we've come! The new man, in the real present of the century, stood first of all, if one was progressive, for the escape from family, property and state despotism. Today, it seems that modernisation, as our masters like to call it, amounts to being a good little dad, a good little mom, a good little son, to become an efficient employee, to enrich oneself as much as possible, and to play the responsible citizen. This is the new motto: Money, Family, Elections. Even if the money is that of the net-economy, the family that of two homosexuals, the elections a great democratic feast, I can't really see the political progress. The century ends on the motif of impossible subjective novelty and of the comfort of repetition. This motif has a categorial name, obsession. The century ends in the obsession of security, under the rather abject maxim: it's really not bad being where you are already, there is, and has been, worse elsewhere. Whilst what was alive in these hundred years placed itself, after Freud as after Lenin, under the sign of a devastating hysteria, of its activism, of its intransigent militancy. Our duty, supporting ourselves on Lenin's work, is to reactivate in politics, against the morose obsession of our times, the very question of thought. To all those who claim to practice political philosophy, we ask: What is your critique of the existing world? What can you offer us that's new? Of what are you the creator? Endnotes 1 A version of this text, dated April 7, 1999, and originally delivered in a series of lectures at the Collège International de Philosophie, will appear in Alain Badiou's forthcoming The Century, in a bilingual edition with translation and commentary by Alberto Toscano and responses by Alain Badiou.
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 The model of "one divided into two", which originated from old philosophy and traditional conception of development, has hindered rational comprehension on development.
2 About the law of the unity of opposite, the law of the one divided into two, and about how to settle the basic contradiction of the socialism, there are common ground and otherness.
3 Chairman Mao taught us, "One should seriously sum up one's experience." Looking back at the experiences of our own and of others in the past decade or so on the total synthesis of proteins and polypeptides, we have analyzed the inherent contradictions of the two alternative routes of synthesis on the basis of the dialectical viewpoint of "one divides into two".