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DESTRUCTION, NEGATION, SUBTRACTION - on Pier Paolo Pasolini •
Alain Badiou
THE FULL TEXT CAN BE READ HERE



The abstract contents of my lecture is a very simple one. I can summarize it in five points:

1. All creations, all novelties, are in some sense the affirmative part of a negation. "Negation", because if something happens as new, it cannot be reduced to the objectivity of the situation where it happens. So, it is certainly like a negative exception to the regular laws of this objectivity. But "affirmation", affirmative part of the negation, because if a creation is reducible to a negation of the common laws of objectivity, it completely depends on them concerning its identity. So the very essence of a novelty implies negation, but must affirm its identity apart of the negativity of negation. That is why I say that a creation or a novelty must be defined paradoxically as an affirmative part of negation.

2. I name "destruction" the negative part of negation. For example, if we consider the creation by SchÏnberg, at the beginning of the last century, of the dodecaphonic musical system, we can say that this creation achieves the destruction of the tonal system, which, in the western world has dominated the musical creation during three centuries. In the same direction, the Marxist idea of revolution is to achieve the process of immanent negation of capitalism by the complete destruction of the machinery of bourgeois State. In both cases, negation is the evental concentration of a process through which is achieved the complete disintegration of an old world. It is this evental concentration which realizes the negative power of negation, the negativity of negation. And I name it destruction.

3. I name subtraction the affirmative part of negation. For example, the new musical axioms which structure for SchÏnberg the admissible succession of notes in a musical work, outside the tonal system, are in no way deducible from the destruction of this system. They are the affirmative laws of a new framework for the musical activity. They show the possibility of a new coherence for musical discourse. The point that we must understand is that this new coherence is not new because it achieves the process of disintegration of the system. The new coherence is new to the extent that, in the framework that the SchÏnberg's axioms impose, the musical discourse avoids the laws of tonality, or, more precisely, becomes indifferent to these laws. That is why we can say that the musical discourse is subtracted from its tonal legislation. Clearly, this subtraction is in the horizon of negation ; but it exists apart from the purely negative part of negation. It exists apart from destruction.

It is the same thing for Marx in the political context. Marx insists on saying that the destruction of the bourgeois State is not in itself an achievement. The goal is communism, that is the end of the State as such, and the end of social classes, in favour of a purely egalitarian organization of the civil society. But to come to this, we must first substitute to the bourgeois State a new State, which is not the immediate result of the destruction of the first. In fact, it is a State as different of the bourgeois State as experimental music of today can be of an academic tonal piece of the 19th century, or a contemporary performance can be of an academic representation of Olympic Gods. For the new State - that Marx names "dictatorship of the proletariat" - is a State which organizes its own vanishing, a State which is in its very essence the process of the non-State. Perhaps as for Adorno the "informal music" is the process, in a work, of the disintegration of all forms. So we can say that in the original thought of Marx, "dictatorship of the proletariat" was a name for a State which is subtracted from all classical laws of a "normal" State. For a classical State is a form of power; but the State named "dictatorship of proletariat" is the power of un-power, the power of the disappearance of the question of power. In any case we name subtraction this part of negation which is oriented by the possibility of something which exists absolutely apart from what exists under the laws of what negation negates.

4. So negation is always, in its concrete action - political or artistic - suspended between destruction and subtraction. That the very essence of negation is destruction has been the fundamental idea of the last century. The fundamental idea of the beginning century must be that the very essence of negation is subtraction.

5. But subtraction is not the negation of destruction, no more than destruction has been the negation of subtraction, as we have seen with SchÏnberg or Marx. The most difficult question is precisely to maintain the complete concept of negation from the point of view of subtraction, as Lenin, Schoenberg, or Marcel Duchamp, or Cage, or Mao Zedong, or Jackson Pollock have maintained the complete concept of negation from the point of view of destruction.

We can now conclude: the political problems of the contemporary world cannot be solved, neither in the weak context of democratic opposition, which in fact abandons millions of people to a nihilistic destiny, nor in the mystical context of destructive negation, which is an other form of power, the power of death. Neither subtraction without destruction, nor destruction without subtraction. It is in fact the problem of violence today. Violence is not, as has been said during the last century the creative and revolutionary part of negation. The way of freedom is a subtractive one; But to protect the subtraction itself, to defend the new kingdom of emancipatory politics, we cannot radically exclude all forms of violence; The future is not on the side of the savage young men and women of popular suburbs, we cannot abandon them to themselves. But the future is not on the side of the democratic wisdom of mothers and fathers law. We have to learn something of nihilistic subjectivity.

The world is made not of law and order, but of law and desire. Let us learn from Pasolini not to be "absorbed in a mysterious debate with power", not to abandon millions of young men ands women neither "in the white mountains", nor "on the serene plains".
















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