REVIEW OF THE BOOK: THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS

REVIEW OF THE BOOK: THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS

By, Pedro Lara de Arruda.

When given the task of writing a review on a book on China the choice for Alain Badiou's “The Communist Hypothesis” was a far from a natural or automatic choice. In fact, the choice of one such book to be reviewed by me came as a result of my interest on reviewing some book which analysis doesn't pertain only to the field of mere empirical enunciation of facts, neither to the kind of speculative historical narrative which enrols on abstractions of what would have happened in hypothetical situations (e.g. If China haven't split with the URSS, if it wasn't by the Environmental Crisis which lead to the Great Famine during the Great Leap Forward, if Mao had decided to kill Deng Xiaoping and other reactionary cadres during his 'golden times' ahead of the party, etc). My pesonal belief on a Benjaminian duty of history in favour of the oppressed and the empirical fact that ideas do play a great role on the fields of politics and its modes of historical inscription and ideologial shaping (as clear on the case of the Maoist Revolution in China itself, and particularly during the Cultural Revolution)... both those reasons lead me to choose a book that went deeper on the meanings of the Chinese Revolution to the very conceptions of history, politics, ideology and, in a wider philosophical sense defined by Badiou, the conception of an Idea or Hypothesis itself. In the same way Badiou and Zizek invert the traditional inquire on what can communism make for one into the question of what can one make for communism, my reviewing choice doesn't analyse the development of China under the structural constraints but, instead, analyses the development of structural constraints under the Communist experience.

Writing in times of Economical Crisis in which the previous impossibility alleged by the State referring to minimal social benefits expansion have clearly assumed to be a lie as bigger amounts of money and State capability intervention are being proved to exist when the claimers are the International banks and multinational corporation lobbies (instead of workers and masses of poor and unassisted people), my interest is, therefore, to review a book which analyses China taking into account the flexibility in the limits of possibility. That way, my initial choice was for the 2007 version of On Practice and Contradiction, in which those papers of Mao are presented by Zizek in an analysis which both, recognize the historical right of the oppressed to commit mistakes on their process of shaping new parameters of possibility and impossibility and, at the same time, criticizes some particular aspects behind the mistakes that he credits to the Maoist Revolution which, according to him, accounted for Mao's shortcomings through capitalists mechanism loans that further would charge its price by sizing the whole revolutionary inheritance under the Authoritarian Capitalism imposed by Deng Xiaoping and his followers. After one such reading, however, I was caught in the never ending question of whether the strict judgement of Zizek over Mao represented some sort of implicit negation of historical possibilities of mistakes on the pursue of Communism or if in fact the mistakes commited by Mao were not being condemned for their failure to materialize long-term new superstructure with subsequent new patterns of possibility but, as alleged by Zizek, for the fact that his mistakes were capitalist mistakes reproduced during a revolutionary process which, otherwise, even if failing to materialize the long-lasting structural conditions for new limits of possibility, would still extend the array of possibilities by simply committing mistakes through genuine non-capitalist attempts. Badiou's book then emerged as both, a challenging position towards the nature of Mao's mistakes and a deep evaluation of the biopolitical processes investigated by Zizek since Badiou expose his ideas and processes to material evidences (documents and political facts) that enable him to dialogue with the Cultural Revolution as few other authors have ever done. Therefore, and for the many direct dialogues between this Book and Zizek's one, including a letter to Zizek in the appendix of Badiou's book, I believe that reviewing “The Communist Hypothesis” enables one to engage on the dialectical efforts to radicalize the pursue of Communism once again at the same time it informs one of the deep biopolitical meanings of some events during the Cultural Revolution which are fundamental to understand the whole order of events that transformed the Chinese Communist pursue in the currently capitalist aberration. However my own view is not crystalline on one such debate, though it is fairly more prone to Zizek's interpretation, I therefore present some main aspects of Badiou's book emphacizing the role of the Chinese experience more than the other cases he analyses (The Commune de Paris and the 'French' May of 1968), and also in the interest of highlighting the the dialectical process between his view and Zizek's one.

Published in 2010, three years after Zizek's referred publication, both them by the same publisher – Verso – Badiou's book is a collection of early papers and some newly unpublished analysis that present the concept that Communism is an Idea or Thesis that enable human-beings to recreate what he calls the 'transcendental' realities that shape the limits of possibility of each time. However acknowledging that other Ideas may also serve to foster similar processes of creating possibilities, or creating possibilities of possibilities, he is adamant regarding the fact that any sort of capitalism provides but the negation of Ideas, which means, the negation of the possibility to transform the transcedental situation in a process that creates new possibilities or, as he called, trues. Accordingly, the philosophical shift in comprehension would be the only possibility to overcome the imposed limits of impossibility – the transcedental reality – of a given time before it empirically collapsed by itself. In the latter case – of an empirical transcedental fiasco -, however, he points the risk of a repeated negation of Ideas since the capitalism works in a logic of self-destruction and cyclic recreation that even if extending the the content of possibilities keeps the monopoly over the shapes of possibilities and therefore limits the agency on the individual inscription in the historical narratives – the agents may be inscribed differently on their historical narratives concerning the future but still under a logic of passive obedience to the given parameters of reality, which he calls a 'historical fact', instead of an active process of assuming new possibilities to orchestrate one's decision in such a way that the process carried on according to such axiom creates itself a new reality, what Badiou called a 'body-of-truth'). In such analysis he points that a site is the event in which agents depart from their subjective capabilities to promote universal body-of-trues by ordering their lifes according to some assumed trues, or, according to his own definitions:

a site is a multiple that happens to behave in the situation with regard to itself as with regard to its elements, in such a way as to support the being of its own appearing […] a site is a singularity because it evokes its being in the appearing of its own multiple composition. It makes itself, in the world, the being there of its being. Among other consequences, this means that the site gives itself an intensity of existence. A site is a being that happens to exist by itself. (Badiou, 2010, p. 200).

A site, by its time, can be of bigger or smaller relevance due to the extend it succeeds on shaping new transcedental realities on the basis of its startlingly assumed truths and also, and maybe of even more relevance, a site can be of bigger or lesser importance due to the role its own failures may play in a bigger body-of-truth and further enable other sites to emerge in the struggle for inscribing the possibility of other Ideas in the conditions of transcendentality. Accordingly, a site would become an event if it pushes its own to the maximum, if it saturates the material possibilities of carrying on with the thesis orienting the assumed truth in the body-of-truth process. To that extent Badiou says that “Nothing has potential for an event [est en puissance d'événement] but a site whose value of existence is maximal” (Badiou, 2010, p. 215) and presents the following definition of an event:

I call an 'event' a rupture in the normal order of bodies and languages as it exists for any particular situation (if you refer to Being and Event [1988] or Manifesto for Philosophy [1989] or as it appears in any particular world (if you refer instead to Logics of Worlds [2006] or the Second Manifesto for Philosophy [2009])). What is important to note here is that an event is not the realization of a possibility that resides within the situation or that is dependent on the transcendental laws of the world [this would be simply a 'Historical fact']. An event is the creation of new possibilities. It is located not merely at the level of objective possibilities but at the level of the possibility of possibilities. Another way of putting this is: with respect to a situation or a world, an event paves the way for the possibility of what – from the limited perspective of the make-up of this situation or the legality of this world – is strictly impossible. If we keep in mind here that, for Lacan, the real = the impossible, the intrinsically real aspects of the event will be readily seen. We might also say that an event is the occurrence of the real as its own future possibility. (Badiou, 2010, p. 242-243).

Exposing those (among other) basic concepts of his theory in the preamble of the book, entitled “What is a failure?”, and summarizing them in the concluding chapter, entitled “The Idea of Communis”, Badiou drive us to the immediate conclusion that failures to materialize long term transcedental realities in accordance to the seminal truths assumed in the event of sites should not account automatically for a condemnable mistake since the real duty of a site is not so much that of materially succeeding but, rather, is that of becoming an event to the extend that it saturates its own possibilities to the maximum. In the latter case, even if failing to formally settle another transcedental reality, the site (event) would be an important part of a larger body-of-truth to the extent that it would generate genuinely new problems and questions presumed to originate new models of truth to orient new sites in a process that is in itself challenging the limits of possibility previously settled by capitalism. Therefore, Badiou selects three sites which, according to his judgement, were indeed events in the sense that their failures come through the exhaustion of their current axioms and paradigms orienting the Idea of Communism (the pursue to transform the Communist Hypothesis into reality). In this analysis he points that the Commune of Paris exhausted the paradigms and axioms of Communism through non-planed sites, leading to the emergence of the Leninist state-party referential as the presumed truth to orient a new Communist body-of-truth which, by it's time, was saturated by Maoism and by the French May of 1968 - experiences that, according to him, pushed those axioms to the exhaustion by both, entrusting the communist Hypothesis to the French State-party structure and entrusting the abandonment of the State-party axiom to the State-party itself in the case of the Cultural Revolution in China.

In line with such interpretation he passes through all those events (the Commune of Paris, the May of 68 and the Cultural Revolution) evaluating their real nature as events and evaluating the role they played on the forging of new axioms for the Idea of Communism. Thus, he claims that the Commune of Paris settled the limits of possibility that enabled the emergence of the axiom of the State-party (both Leninist and Kautskyit or 'Miterranyit'), that this experience and the forces which acted cooptating the events of May 1968 in France settled the limits of possibility for the Chinese axiom of a State-party movement against its own State-party ethos during the Cultural Revolution and that the exhaustion of this very event - the Cultural Revolution - unfolded the possibility of new axioms and arrangements, such as the Solidarity movement in Poland (1980-81), the first sequence of the Iranian Revolution, the Organisation Politique in France, the Zapatista movement in Mexico and even the Maoists in Nepal at the time he published the book (he just talks marginally about those new forms of articulating the Communist Idea).

In the first unit of his book he debates the role of the French May of 1968 in his proposed Idea of Communism. Through three texts, two from 2008 and one from 1968 (when the authors himself was involved in determining events of the 'May of 1968'). The first article from 2008, called “May 68 revisited 40 years on”, starts by investigating why the sudden relevance of the actual role of the May 1968 and, against more pessimistic perspectives that the Sarkozys and other aberrations of 2008 are outcomes of some 1968 failure, he claims that the regain of interest for the 1968 event is in itself an evidence of the necessity to arrange the lessons gained from this experience to revitalize the Communist Idea with some new sites arising from the axioms emerged from the 68 event. To struggle against those he calls 'pessimists', among which Zizek is possibly included, he presents a close historical analysis which in fact evaluates the event of 1968 as the interaction of three different sites and a fourth one which is almost strong enough to be considered an event in itself. The first three sites he refer to are: First, the University and youth movement; second, the workers unions movements and; third, the of moral, sexual and artistic emancipation movement. Some axiomatic gains are pointed to have emerged from each of those individual sites for the very fact that they overcame the traditional military fashion behind the previous Leninist axiom and even overcame the nationalistic axiom in the extent that all those movements were largely transnational and occurred in many countries at the same time with enmeshed agendas (something which was not so common since the Parisian Commune startling axioms were succeeded by the Leninist one). Even more relevant, Badiou claims that axiomatic achievements of the May 1968 were due to the integration between those three sites among themselves and among the different social sectors independently of any State-party interference. He even quotes a case, in which he was involved, in which central syndicates attempts to individualize and alienate proletarians were challenged by university groups joining factory strikes and vice-cersa.

The biggest axiomatic outcome of the may 68 for him was, however, the fourth site, which, however difficult to grasp for it didn't occur on the explosive Chronological momentum of May 1968 precisely but, instead, occurred from 1968 to 1978, accounted for an 'obsession' for answering the question: “What is politics?”. On processing the broke axiom of the Leninist State-party, exhausted by the Stalinism, the May of 68 event ended up giving a try to the Social-Democracy for understanding that a 'soft' State-party system would be the way to deviate the Communist Ideas from the axiomatic influence of the State-party itself. However failed as Badiou recognizes the Union of the Left government of François Mitterand to have been, the axiomatic possibilities created by this fourth site of the 1968 event are still claimed to have its importance for both, enabling the transcendental revolution in which the very nature of politics must be at the heart of the masses participation, and also the exhausting the belief that “there's an 'objective' agent inscribed in the social reality [presumably the Social Democrat State-party], and that

it offers the possibility of emancipation” (Badiou, 2010, p. 53). In this last conclusion the chapter clearly dialogues with the second unity of the book, dedicated to the Cultural Revolution in separately. After all he understands that the axiomatic necessity of escaping the State-party shortcoming on the Idea of Communism will be proved not to be possible through some self-counscious decision of the Party itself on this regard, neither through a softening disapearence of the party (supposedly in the case of the 'soft' Lefts like that of Miterrand), nor through an abrupt revolution of the party against itself (supposedly in the case of the 'hard' Cultural Revolution of Mao).

Complementary to this chapter there's a short note of hardly three pages in which Badiou bring us an article he wrote in 1968, demonstrating through this the “consistency of the movement and the aspect of its failure” (Badiou, 2010, p. 68). He points out how the previously mentioned axioms were empirically emerging from the practical necessities of the revolution and by contextualizing the impossibility of many achievements that at that time were considered impossible he gives a fenomenal sample of how the actions and ideas undertaken at that time were really something more than pure 'historical facts', being indeed sites strong enough to be considered events.

In the last article of the unity, entitled “The Crisis is the Spectacle: Where is the Real?” he presents a very contemporary analysis of the current Financial/ Economical Crisis and stresses the importance of taking this moment, in which the limits of impossibility are clearly and visibly being overpassed on the interest of Financial lobbies, multinational millionaires and other global-weight gangs, as the empirical prove of the fallacy of transcendent realities and, therefore, to regain the confidence on the subjective capacity of implementing universalized changes in the limits of possibility – just like it happened in 1968. In this point he basically calls for a contemporary use of the financial crisis to the emergence of an event which could develop the axiomatic inheritances of May 1968, the Cultural Revolution and the Commune of Paris into a new and necessary historical representation of the Idea of Communism.

The issue of the Cultural Revolution, already mentioned in the Preambule and repeatedly quoted in the relational analysis he offers of the May 68, gains a separate entire unit of the book in which he discuss its nature as an event (therefore impacting on the possibility of Idea and it's three subsequent categories that Lacan refers as orders of the subject – real, imaginary and symbolic). In such discussion he frames some more general philosophical effects of the Cultural Revolution over the more specific contexts of the Maoism, the Chinese Revolution in the long-term and the XX Century forms of socialism theirselves. On this effort Badiou faces the challenge of dealing with the different narratives of the Cultural Revolution by contrasting the dominant historiographical version of the 'Sinologists' with some other well documented facts and by contextualizing the political interest of the 'Sinologists' themselves – whether U.S.A Imperial oriented or Deng Xiaoping partidaries (what is pretty much the same thing).

Among the main keys addressed in his analysis there are: the issue of lack of stability during the Cultural Revolution, the issue of the recourse to external force (the Red Guard), and the most general critique that the Cultural Revolution was only a struggle of Mao to regain his personal power after the supposed failure of the Great Leap Forward reduced his political space. In most cases such criticism were dismissed by showing how Mao was operating under different axioms than those orchestrating traditional Stalinist and capitalist policies, therefore such readings are said to reduce the importance of the the body-of-truth being incubated behind all that.

Badiou also presents an unusual delimitation of the time of duration of the Cultural Revolution which, accordingly, lasted only from November 1965 to July 1968 (with a tolerable alternative that it lasted only from May 1966 to September 1967), instead of the traditional ten years that extend it from 1966 until the death of Mao in 1976. He points that the traditional date can only take place “if one reasons from the strict point of view of the history of the Chinese State, with the following criteria: civil stability, production, a certain unity at the head of the administration, cohesion in the army, etc” (Badiou, 2010, p. 110). However, since he departs from the axiom of 'political invention' and the transformation of transcendentalities, his criterias for delimiting the time-lasting of the process called Cultural Revolution involve:

the existence of a political activity of the masses, its slogans, its new organizations, its own places. Through all of this an ambivalent but undeniable reference is constituted for all contemporary political thought worthy of the name. In this sense, there is 'revolution' because there are the Red Guards, the revolutionary rebel workers, innumerable organizations and 'general headquarters', totally unpredictable situations, new political statements, texts without precedent, etc. (Badiou, 2010, p. 111).

According to Badiou the Cultural Revolution is the development of a historical dialectical process in all instances, from the attempt to use the State-party itself to banish the poles of formalism and terror that characterizes the very ethos of a State-party axiom, to the empirical behaviours of Mao sliding from the opposed forces that emerged from his startlingly claim for unplanned popular rebellion. Regarding this last aspect – Mao's sliding position along the stages of the Cultural Revolution – the stretch bellow inform us of the core chronological references that guide Badiou on his analysis:

The leading revolutionary group will first try to keep the revolt within the context of the educational institutions. This attempt began to fail in August 1966, when the Red Guards spread throughout the cities. Afterwards, it will be a question of containing the revolt within the framework of youth in school and university. But from the end of 1966 and particularly from January 1967 onward, workers become the principal force of the movement. Then the quest is on to keep the party and state administrations at a distance, but they will be in the midst of the turmoil starting in 1967 through a series of power struggles. Finally, the aim will be to keep the army in check at any cost as a power in reverse, a last resource. But this will turn out to be almost impossible with the unleashing violence in August 1967 in Wuhan and Canton. It is precisely with an eye on the real risk of a schism among the armed forces that the slow moment of repressive inversion will set in, beginning in September 1967. (Badiou, 2010, p. 114-115).

In the section of the chapter called “experimental fields” Badiou chooses 7 crucial points of the Cultural Revolution that expose his thesis according to which this event – the Cultural Revolution – marked the material acknowledgement of the role of practice on overcoming some revolutionary dialectical deadlocks. To some extend, the practice of Mao at this moment aimed at submitting theoretical gaps of the dialectical body-of-truth directly to the masses, what unfolded the possibility of new axioms emerging from practical creative new models and, in itself, was already an emerging new axiom which enabled the masses to have agency in a revolutionary moment in which they are usually alienated (by the authority of the Stalinist models or by the parliamentary farce of the 'soft lefts').

Badiou's analysis of those 7 crucial points supported his view according to which Mao did failed on sticking to the axiom he brought out and as a consequence the practical innovative models which could have possibly emerged from the popular dialectical development ended up being lost as he restored a level of State-party centrality that ended up re-alienating the people from the spaces they occupied during the early days of the Cultural Revolution. The acquittal of Mao come when Badiou stresses that, however the agents of the Cultural Revolution axiom failed on keeping it themselves, they championed on settling this new category of possibility which affected the transcedental reality in such a way that a resurgence of their axiom without the vicious that constrained its pioneering event are not only believed to be possible but, indeed, have proven to happen in the previously mentioned cases in which the Idea of Communism is referred by entirely different body-of-truths (he mentions the Solidarity movement in Poland (1980-81), the first sequence of the Iranian Revolution, the Organisation Politique in France, the Zapatista movement in Mexico and even the Maoists in Nepal at the time he published the book). The general idea behind this process of acknowledging the role of axiomatic failures in the inscription of subjectivities into historical narratives is better understood, however, only on the chapter on the Commune of Paris, in which Badiou introduces the concept of singularity to measure the intermediate strenght of sites which are not as strong as an event but, however, are crucial in the Idea of Communism (as in any Idea which follows Badiou's conception of the term) for “Beginnings can, then, be measured by the re-beginnings they authorize” (BADIOU, 2010, p. 219).

Without going into the deep analysis he presents for each of those seven moments in the Cultural Revolution, the list bellow gives a fair notion of the empirical backgrounds that enabled him to develop the aforementioned test of what he identified as the Cultural Revolution Hypothesis:

1. The 'Sixteen Points' decision of August 1966, which is probably for the most part from the hand of Mao himself, and which in any case is the most innovative central document, the one that breaks most abruptly with the bureaucratic formalism of parties-state.

2. The Red Guards and Chinese society (in the period from August 1966 to at least August 1967). Without a doubt, this involves an exploration of the limits of the political capacity of high-school and university students left more or less to themselves, whatever the circumstances.

3. The 'revolutionary rebel workers' and the Shanghai Commune (January/February 1967), a major and unfinished episode, because it proposes an alternative form of power to the centralism of the party.

4. The power seizures: the 'great alliance', 'triple combination and 'revolutionary committees', from January 1967 to the spring of 1968. Here the question is whether the movement really creates new organizations, or whether it amounts only to a regeneration of the party.

5. The Wuhan incident (July 1967). Here we are at the peak of the movement: the army risks division, and the far left pushes its advantage, but only to succumb.

6. The workers' entry into the universities (end of July 1968), which is in reality the final episode of the existence of independent student organizations.

7. Mao's cult of personality. This feature has so often been the object of sarcasm in the West that in the end we have forgotten to ask ourselves what meaning it might well have had, and in particular, what its meaning is within the Cultural Revolution, where the 'cult' functioned as a flag, not for the party conservatives, but for workers and student rebels.

(Badiou, 2010, p. 116-118).

The following chapter is a brief chronology of the Cultural Revolution (which is exactly its title), in which Badiou basically present a more rich factual and empirical evidence of the processes he referred on the construction of his arguments regarding the philosophical nature of the Cultural Revolution as well as its impacts in the material and cognitive instances of the transcendent realities along this event. The importance of the close historical approach in this chapter serves both, to highlight the extent of the Cultural Revolution as a classical event in the Idea of Communism, and also to defeat alternative narratives which misunderstand data and informations of that time to portrait critiques which fashion the play of evilness and cruelty necessary to counterbalance the images, symbols and heroes of the Communist Idea with forged impressions that have nothing to do with the Cultural Revolution body-of-truth and its subsequent effects. The close historical analysis which Badiou presents through the previous chapter and specially through the chapter we are now referring to will be extremely important also to support those critiques addressed to Zizek under the auspice that the Slovenian Communist subtle excesses of criticism towards Mao result from one slightly distant historical approach of Zizek – despite the already mentioned critique that such strict judgements may in fact jeopardize the right of committing mistakes that Zizek himself advocates for the Idea of Communism.

On the third unit of his book Badiou presents one multi-comprehensive analysis on the Commune of Paris, in which historical backgrounds, diverging narratives and a personal evaluation of the short-living standards of livelihood in the Commune are brought all together with a referential identification of this event in relation with the Cultural Revolution and the May 68. As the launcher of the seminal axioms which were re-signified in the process of Idealizing Communism, this experience is showed as a 'beginning which re-authorized re-begginings' like the Cultural Revolution and the May 68. Despite the macro-theoretical approach which Badiou takes the opportunity of evaluating the Commune of Paris to set clear for the reader at this point (which here we will skip for considering that most of its ideas were already introduced while covering the previous chapters of the book, however in a disconected way, it must be admited), it's also of great value the way he identifies the re-emergence of traditional axioms initially dismissed by the State-party axiom of Communism that followed the seizure of Paris but which, in light of the fiasco of the Leninist-based sites (events?), emerged as the reply of the masses to Mao's convocation of the people into the process of inventing new realities to overcome the dialectical deadlocks faced by China in the eve of the Cultural Revolution.

Focusing on this re-emergence of the commune Badiou highlight that many values and underdeveloped axioms inaproprietly dismissed along with the bigger idea of a non-organized revolution after the end of the Commune of Paris resurged through the practical management of the dialectic challenge of the Cultural Revolution - what supports his positions that beginings can become re-beginings amelioreted and unacompanied of the vicious that settled the end of the body-of-truth to which they originally begun/ from which they originally came. In light of the Shangai Commune and the general trend that marked the proliferations of Commune and Commune-like organizations in the early days of the Cultural Revolution, all them followed by a State-party seizing towards the end of the Cultural Revolution (according to Badiou's parameters), the author points that this was possibly the biggest failure of Mao and even compares some of his strict centralizatory speeches against non-state-owned communes to Stalin.

In any case, the same logic which re-launched the Commune in the heart of the Cultural Revolution is used by Badiou on saying that the essential elements for the Idea of Communism detach themselves from evanescent or dead event precisely for their future re-emergence in the occasion of strong sites and, naturally, new events. That's another strong pillar on which Badiou builds his critiques of Zizek, which he directly delivers in the last section of the book.

Contextualizing much of the theories and views worked out along the book, Badiou takes the study on the Commune of Paris to show how it's anarchic ethos marks one extreme of the Communist Idea while the State-party axiom sets the other and, therefore, experiences like the Cultural Revolution and the May 68 worked to exhaust the possibilities of 'developing the original axiom of Commune through the state-party axiom itself and, therefore, charge the contemporary subjects in the Idea of Communism with the duty of settling non-state-party axioms that could develop the values and principles launched by the Commmune of Paris.

In the conclusion chapter he basically gives an overview of the philosophical concepts and processes which oriented his previous reading over the events he analysed before, therefore making vary clear how each of those empirical cases ilustrates his concepts and also gain some coherence if understood by the processes of which such concepts belong – the process of Idea or, more specifically, the Idea of Communism. Also important to mention is the fact that his untold dialogue with Zizek, which is noticeable all over the previous chapters, here gains a direct materialization when Badiou resorts to Zizek and his particular comprehension over Hegel through the Lacanian psichoanalysis applied to biopolitics. In doing so, Badiou, who is self-declared a non-Hegelian philosophers (however without any restrictions to Hegel's philosophy in itself), uses the Lacanian three orders of the subject to ilustrate the dynamic process that he refers to as Idea of Communism. The perfect matching between the pure philosophical view of Badiou on the Idea of Communism and the Zizekian biopolitical-psychoanalitical claim for “politization of politics”, among other similar positions of claims and views, are not only a coincidence but, instead, a sample of their shared belief on the possibility of transforming parameters of possibility without falling in the trap of never ending 'boxes inside boxes' and void processes typical of post-modern and deconstructivist analysis.

No wonder that the last chapter of the book, in which Badiou addresses a public letter to Zizek criticizing the intensity of his judgement over the Cultural Revolution, in the terms that we already mentioned in this review, starts by greatly aknowledging the similarities among the authors and recognizing that the most important forces behind Badiou's Idea of Communism are not only kept safe on Zizek's own approach but also developed through his critical and explicit commitment to Communism. Therefore, the previously mentioned critiques that Badiou addresses to Zizek's view on the Great Revolution doesn't extend to his general philosophical perspectives neither challenge the fact that Zizek's approach to the Cultural Revolution is ultimately committed to the process of politicization of politics by the subjectivization of the universal problem of incompatibility between established orders and it's excluded (what one can say to be another description for the equaly dynamical process that is the Idea of Communist on Badiou's terms).