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Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 52, Number 1, 2015, pp. 47-64

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 revolution and event: mao in alain badiou’s
plato ’ s republic

Leihua Weng

abstract
Alain Badiou refers to his translation of Plato’s Republic as a ­“hypertranslation.”
In Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters (2012), Badiou contemporizes
Plato’s Republic, and reinvents Socrates into a Maoist philosopher who
constantly quotes Mao. This paper conducts a textual analysis of Badiou’s
references to Mao and Maoist Revolution and discusses these quotations as
part of his philosophical speculation. Badiou’s deployment of Mao reveals
his post-structuralist understanding of revolution, echoing Lacan’s notion
of the forever-negating “void” and Foucault’s “thinking from the outside.”
By contemporizing Plato’s Republic with a Maoist Socrates, Badiou claims
that the essence and relevancy of Mao’s Revolution lies in its consistent
­defiance of any institutional stabilization, and in its incessant drive for social,
political, and spiritual renewal.
keywords: Badiou, Plato’s Republic, Mao, Revolution, post-structuralism,
Lacan, Foucault

Alain Badiou (1937–), one of the major French philosophers of the twenty-
first century, published his book Plato’s Dialogue in 2012, in which he
translated and reinvented Plato’s Republic as something he calls a “hyper-
translation.” Badiou’s hypertranslation of Republic is a culmination of his
longtime efforts on Plato and Platonism.1 In this work, Badiou reduces
the temporal distance between classical Athens and the modern world:
Socrates and his interlocutors lavishly use contemporary street slang and
make frequent references to modern politicians and events. An intensive

comparative literature studies, vol. 52, no. 1, 2015.

Copyright © 2015. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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dramatization of Plato’s dialogues such as this is not frequently found in

the French postmodern reception of Plato and Platonism.2
Badiou’s “hypertranslation” of Republic is more than a literary
­dramatization of Plato and Platonism. The “hypertranslation” is also a
work on communism and Maoism. The work is an exhibition of how
Plato and communism are integrated as an important part of Badiou’s
thinking. As Reinhard put it, “For Badiou, Plato is the first warrior in the
eternal battle of philosophy against sophistry, of truth against opinion,
and the ­progenitor of the living idea of communism.”3 Badiou mentions
in The Communist Hypothesis that his translation of Plato’s Republic was
once named as Du Commnu(isme).4 Extensive discussions on Marxism
and ­communism are ubiquitous in his translation. Among the communist
leaders mentioned in this work, Mao and his Cultural Revolution are given
the highest ­evaluations by Badiou’s Socrates and his interlocutors. Badiou’s
reinvention of Plato’s Republic is not merely a “literary modernization” but
rather an effort to persuade us “to leave the cave of opinion, the comfort zone
of ‘what most people think,’ and to participate in the collective construction
of some truths from the perspective that such an exit affords.”5 Given the
priority of Mao and Mao’s Revolution in Badiou’s translation, herein arises
an intriguing question: to what degree does Mao’s Revolution participate
in truth-seeking?
This article considers that Badiou’s deployment of Mao and of Maoist
Revolution should be taken not only as a communist stand but also as a
post-structuralist speculation on the classical Platonic issue of Being and
beings. Badiou’s use of Mao in his hypertranslation offers us a vantage point
to understand his far-leftist position, and more important, to perceive his
unique post-structuralist perspectives.
This article posits Badiou’s usage of Maoism in his Republic in
­tandem with his notion of events, and discusses Badiou’s Mao and Mao’s
Revolution in the context of post-structuralism. It starts with a textual
examination of the passages on Mao and Mao’s Revolution in Badiou’s
translation of Republic, and then places Badiou’s Maoism in the French
intellectual context for a more detailed discussion of the political and
philosophical meanings and implications of his quotations of Mao in his
Plato’s Republic.
As Badiou often creatively incorporates Mao’s sayings into various
discussions, the meaning of Badiou’s Maoism does not always match the
conventional interpretation of Mao’s works. As such, it suffices here to go
through Badiou’s quotations of Mao from his translation of Republic on
their own terms. The following section is an analysis of Badiou’s use of

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 Revolu tion and Event 49

Maoism in energizing his hypertranslation of Republic. The order of the

chosen quotations in this article does not necessarily follow the sequence
in Badiou’s Republic.

Mao and Mao’s Revolution in Badiou’s Plato’s Republic

Quotations of Mao are spread out over the sixteen chapters of Badiou’s
translation of Republic, illustrating various points in Plato’s original text or
the points that he revises according to his own philosophy. The Maoisms are
drawn from Mao’s works to form part of Badiou’s discussions on ­communism
and on the possibility of achieving an ideal communist society. The quotations
are usually accompanied by positive evaluation and eulogy. In the following
passages, these quotations are examined and discussed in their respective
contexts in order to map out how these seemingly disparate quotations are
internally related to one another.
There are seven places in which Badiou directly mentions Mao or
quotes his sayings in Republic. The first implementation of Mao occurs when
Socrates and his interlocutors are discussing the dilemma that the welfare of
the people always comes into conflict with people’s tendency toward seeking
personal profit (28, 29).6 At this moment, Plato’s sister Amantha, Badiou’s
own feminization of the character Adeimantus, who was originally Plato’s
brother, reminds Socrates that Socrates himself once served on the Council
in Athens. Socrates responds with Mao Zedong’s directive: “Get involved in
state affairs” (31). Here Mao’s ­saying is cited to indicate that philosophers like
him have to be engaged in political activities. Philosophers should “get involved
in state affairs” precisely because a philosopher’s motivation to participate in
politics does not derive from the desire for personal profit but rather from a
political obligation to prevent scoundrels from obtaining power. Socrates quotes
an abbreviation of the ­statement Mao made at the beginning of the Cultural
Revolution: “You should pay attention to state affairs and carry the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution through to the end!”7 In Badiou’s translation,
Mao’s saying “Get involved in the state affairs” addresses a perpetual issue of
philosophy and ­politics: should ­philosophers stay away from politics? Badiou’s
Socrates answers with a resounding no, emphasizing his point using Mao as
a spokesman. Badiou’s verdict, as expressed through Mao and Socrates in his
­hypertranslation, is that philosophers should always participate in political
activities. Such ­participation is both a philosophical and social obligation. In
fact, according to Badiou, participation and involvement in social and political

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 50 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

activities are inherently part of philosophy. Mao’s statement in the first q­ uotation
reinforces Badiou’s strong assertion of philosophers’ political obligations.
In Plato’s famous Cave Myth, the prisoner who comes out of the Cave
and beholds the Truth will go back to the Cave and persuade other prisoners
to go beyond the Cave of the opinions. Both in Plato and Platonic tradition,
philosophy and politics have to be engaged with each other. Philosophy in
Plato is not a purely metaphysical endeavor for one’s own personal interest
only. Badiou retains this political aspect of Platonic philosophy and directly
connects it with communism. The leap from the conventionally perceived
political engagement to c­ ommunism is a great invention of Badiou that is
rarely found anywhere else in French modern philosophy.
For Badiou, philosophy must engage itself in a perpetual fight with
­sophists on the “Idea of communism.” In other words, the wars between Truth
and opinions have assumed a specific dimension, the correct understanding of
communism. Hence another quotation of Mao: “Not only will they themselves
be easily convinced that our project is the best one, as we’re in the process of
demonstrating at the level of philosophy, but the masses seizing hold of the
Idea, will turn it, as Mao put it, into ‘a spiritual atom bomb’” (196).
In this quotation, Badiou directly connects Mao with the “Idea of
­communism.” In Platonism the word “Idea” (εἶδος, eidos), which is also
frequently translated into English as “Form,” refers to the opposite of
­appearances (φαινόμενα). In both Platonism and Badiou, “Idea” guides
true philosophical pursuits. However, Badiou specifies the ideal form of
communism as a social and political system by inventing the term “Idea
of communism.” In other words, the presumed philosophical advantage
by which Badiou feels empowered to create a “hypertranslation” of Plato is
that Badiou has narrowed the search for an ideal society into a search for
the “Idea of c­ ommunism.” Equivalency between the ideal form of society
and ­communism in its truest form is one of the main points Badiou stresses
repeatedly in this h ­ ypertranslation and elsewhere. Therein lies the most radi-
cal ­difference between Badiou and other Platonists. Most other Platonists
hold that, as Cornford explains, Plato refuses to endorse any given form of
society as an ideal society free of evils: “Within the Republic itself, the more
­completely Plato discloses all that is meant by the pursuit of wisdom, the
farther recedes the prospect that the evils of human life will ever be cured
by the enthronement of reason in any possible form of society.”8 More
­optimistic than most of the other Platonists, Badiou takes the radical measure
of ­identifying the ideal society with communism.
Another important aspect of Badiou’s use of the Maoist phrase
“a ­spiritual atom bomb” is the radical change this quotation denotes.

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 Revolu tion and Event 51

The “spiritual atom bomb” echoes to “a few unpredictable shocks” (196) in

previous paragraphs. Both suggest that the means to realize communism
as the ideal social system is radical, unmediated, and even violent change,
both conceptually and socially. It is in Badiou’s concept of radical changes,
which he terms elsewhere as “event,” that Platonism, communism, and Mao’s
Revolution converge.
In Badiou’s translations, Mao and his sayings not only help to illustrate
Badiou’s concepts of philosophy’s roles and the ultimate goal of ­philosophical
pursuits, but also contribute details on various aspects of the process and
strategy of realizing communism. These tactics in the process of realizing
communism are structured around the concept of the incessant struggles of
Mao’s Revolution. Again, these tactics are unfolded in the dialogues through
Mao’s sayings.
While a great portion of the discussions in Plato’s Republic concerns
the definition of justice and the education of guardians, Badiou keeps this
part of the dialogue and interweaves it with Mao’s sayings. One instance
occurs ­during the discussion on the essential qualities guardians should
have. Socrates quotes Mao’s military strategies, which are drawn from the
Chinese classic The Art of War: “If the enemy advances, I retreat. But if
the enemy halts, I counter-attack. And if he retreats, I pursue and destroy
him” (74). The ­purpose of referring to Mao here is to describe the attri-
butes of ideal guardians, as Socrates himself sums up in the dialogue: “The
­objective ­qualities—physical and psychological—of our ideal guardian are
keen sense, speed, strength, and courage” (74). Socrates then immediately
points out the essence of this very quotation of Mao, that is, an alertness
to the enemy: “What makes a Subject of him is spirit, or, in other words,
that potential for anger that keeps him from being a coward” (74). The
military nature of this very quotation of Mao can be considered a variation
of participation. However, being military is a much stronger engagement
in realities. Philosophy no ­longer stays in a metaphysical sphere but seeks
out and adopts a more active form in ­participating in changes in realities.
Being military is one of the f­ eatures of Mao’s Revolution, in the sense that
demarcation is drawn between self and enemy, and violence is adopted to
reinforce this self–enemy delineation.
Following the discussion on the virtues of ideal guardians, Badiou’s
Socrates reaffirms the necessity of cultivating a guardian class and of
military endeavor in order to build up a communist society, one of mass
politics and of equal rights. In the dialogue, Socrates reminds his inter-
locutors that first of all, everyone is required to defend his country and to
defeat enemies; second, the shared purpose of ending war and obtaining

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perpetual peace will generate courage in each member. Amantha suddenly

alludes to Mao in the middle of the conversation: “First of all, we do not
like war, and second of all, we do not fear it” (123). Even though Amantha’s
interposition sounds a bit off-track here, Socrates immediately reinterprets
this declaration by Mao and incorporates it into the theme of the discus-
sion: “Exactly. And this means that the intellectual key to courage is to
be found in the body politic as a whole. . . . Courage must be everyone’s
responsibility” (123–24). Thus, through Socrates’s helpful reinterpretation,
Badiou’s Amantha quotes Mao’s sayings to express the notion of inces-
sant, pervasive, and all-encompassing social and political struggle, which
characterizes Mao’s Revolution.
Despite enormous efforts devoted to explaining, Badiou is still aware
of the theoretical and realistic discrepancy between the elitism of ­guardians
and the ultimate communist purpose. He acknowledges that there is a dis-
parity between guardians and the city, philosophers and the majority.9 Later
in the dialogue, in chapter 11, “What Is an Idea?” Badiou, speaking through
Socrates, ­readdresses the harmful potentiality that the selected class may
turn against the communist collective purpose:

Haven’t you ever heard about those little elite groups within
Communist parties who, after launching a victorious attack at the cost
of enormous sacrifices, set themselves up at the top of the ­government
without a further thought for the people below? Without ever t­ urning
back to the workers, peasants, or ordinary soldiers, to live among
them and, as Mao said, “stay close to the masses”? We won’t tolerate
their enjoying any such pleasure cut off from the new world. They’ll
have to go back down to those who weren’t able to get out, or who
gave out on the climb to the top of the mountain. The transitional
tasks and trivialities will have to be shared with them in the creative
new context of the Idea. (220)

In the passage quoted above, Badiou’s Socrates acknowledges the

potentiality and the realities that elite classes of communist parties, which
are supposedly representative and commissioned by society, may ­disengage
­themselves from the collective course of communism. He uses Mao’s
maxim “Stay close to the masses” to remind the selected elitist group of
the ­importance of staying committed and uncorrupted. It is a w ­ arning, as
­indicated by the imperative sentence structure and word choice in “We won’t
tolerate their enjoying any such pleasure . . . ” It echoes a similar announce-
ment of determination earlier in chapter 11: “And if only an ­aristocratic

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 Revolu tion and Event 53

minority manages to reach the top and revels in the Idea of the True up
there, we won’t allow what has nearly always been allowed them” (220). If the
overarching Subject, that is, the Idea of Communism, forbids any minority
group to enjoy privileges, there will arise the question of how to realize it,
and of how to retain the spiritual purity of the communist commitment of
this elitist group.
Badiou uses the concept of radical change, the “spiritual atom bomb”
as Mao puts it, to address the contradiction between elitism and commu-
nism. Given its context, Maoism in the quoted paragraph above indicates
an ­evaluation of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Mao’s Cultural Revolution
serves as an indispensable part of the communist social–political picture
presented by Badiou. Radical changes, such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution,
are n­ ecessary because they purify the minority group and refresh their
commitment in their communist pursuit. It is through constant reforming
changes such as Mao’s Cultural Revolution that the avant-garde group
can stay connected to the masses. It is with the very concept of Cultural
Revolution that Badiou tries to resolve the discrepancy of elitism and mass
politics.
To sum up, Badiou supports his Marxist speculations on politics and
philosophy through strategic use of Maoist sayings in his hypertranslation
of Plato. The Maoist quotations contribute to Badiou’s elaboration on the
communist society as the ideal social system, and of mass politics as the ideal
form of political life (123, 220). Badiou’s Maoism also explains the obligations
of philosophers in the pursuit of the ideal communist society (31); and they
indicate event and revolution as indispensable means to prevent philosophers
from being disconnected from mass politics (196, 220). In other words, Mao
and his Cultural Revolution serve an important role in Badiou’s ­philosophical
and political speculations. It is interesting to note that Mao is not the only
Marxist politician/theorist mentioned in Badiou’s translation. Marx, Lenin,
and other famous Marxists all make appearances. However, only Mao with
his Revolution is saluted with an exceptional amount of respect and eulogy
in this book. By the end of Alain Badiou’s Plato’s Republic, Mao is listed as
one of the great politicians who brings significant changes to this world
through their practice of politics: “Tell us, dear poet [Homer], what ­political
community owes its radical transformation to you, the way Russia owed
it to Lenin, and the way many others, big or small, owed theirs to many
­others, both in the past and today, from Robespierre to Mandela, by way of
Toussaint Louverture and Mao Zedong?” (322).
Termed as hypertranslation by Badiou himself, his Plato’s Republic is
more a reinvention of Plato and Platonism than a faithful representation of

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 54 C O M P A R AT I V E L I T E R AT U R E S T U D I E S

Plato. Actually, Badiou never hesitates to point out the places he differs from
Plato or to openly criticize Plato. On the issue of family, Badiou’s Socrates
denounces what Plato says in Republic: “Your elder brother Plato thought
he could speak in my name about this strange, almost intractable subject,
the family. He took off, it’s true, from a few careless remarks of mine, and
he has me say roughly the following . . . ” (159).
Taken as a philosophical and literary reinvention of Plato and
Platonism, Badiou’s translation has two intrinsic aspects that are pertinent
to the discussion here. One is on communism and the other on revolution.
In this book Badiou considers communism immortal and calls it “popular
aristocratism” or “universal aristocratism”: “As regards the one that we want,
its immortal name is communism. . . . In this sense, moreover, it would be
like a universal aristocracy—an aristocracy, since everything is guided by
the most subtle and far-reaching thought, and universal, since e­ veryone can
and must promote that thought” (147). The concept of universal aristocracy
is based on the idea that every citizen has access to wisdom, a premise
that Badiou stresses often in his book: “Politics is not and cannot be a
specialty. . . . And competence in these matters is automatically something
that everyone, not just a handful of people, ­possesses. Consequently, the
wisdom of deliberations and decisions is a virtue that must be found not
just in a few specially trained citizens but in every person who meets the
general requirements of our communist system and knows that he’s actively
involved in our collective destiny” (123).
The translator, Susan Spitzer, points out that Badiou changes Plato’s elitist
vision of the class of guardians to universalism and communism. Despite the
seemingly self-contradictory term “universal aristocracy,” Badiou’s notion of
communism does not erase the dichotomy between the elitist and the mass.
After all, either in Plato’s Cave myth or in Badiou’s Cinema Theater, which
is a representation of Plato’s Cave, only a few members of society are out of
the cave/theater in the first place. While universalism is stressed, there is still
an issue of sequence: will the initially enlightened ones have more k­ nowledge
and power over the rest of the group who get access to the Truth later? Badiou
retains the concept of guardians, who are philosophically wiser than the
“opinion-dominated” blind masses and have the obligation of “watching” over
the latter (179). Owing to the difference in the level of knowledge and political
influence generated by the time sequence, there is a potentiality of avant-garde
guardians turning against the collective purpose of communism, forgetting
their duties. In this sense, the Maoist concept of the Cultural Revolution
should be an intrinsic part of the process of realizing communism, because it
constantly purifies the guardian class.

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 Revolu tion and Event 55

Both the Maoist concepts of universal aristocracy and of revolution are

unconventional in Plato and Platonism. These two notions are interrelated
in Badiou’s hypertranslation of Plato’s Republic, as revolution serves as a
means to realize the communist ideal of universal aristocracy in Badiou’s
edifice of Communism. This article proposes that an examination of Badiou’s
inheritance of French Maoism and of French post-structuralism is needed
in order to understand Badiou’s Maoist reinvention of Plato’s Republic. The
following section will be devoted to a reading of Badiou’s Maoism in light
of his background in French post-structuralism since the 1960s.

Badiou’s Post-structuralist Background and Lacanian Maoism

Unique as it is, Badiou’s Maoism can still be placed and understood in

the context of modern French intellectual history, including events and
movements such as the French student uprising of 1968, and the French
post-structuralist reception of Plato. Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, and other
post-structuralist predecessors of Badiou were not necessarily Marxists, and
most of them only experienced a transient zeal for Mao and the Cultural
Revolution in China; however, their postmodern notions of truth, ­meaning,
and subject share considerable similarity with Badiou’s understanding of
Maoism as represented in his hypertranslation of Plato. The following
passages will start with a brief historiography of Badiou and other French
theorists since 1960.
French intellectual history since 1960 is marked by the student uprising
of 1968 and thought associated with the student movements, particularly the
theories of the ardent Marxist Louis Althusser (1918–90). Accompanying
French student movements, there was a rigorous and intensive interest in
Mao and Mao’s Cultural Revolution among students and Marxists, as well
as high-profile Marxist sympathizers, spanning the years 1966–74.10 With
new political and social novelties such as decolonization, third-worldism,
and a rapid increase in numbers of college students,11 French intellectuals
and college students were fascinated by Maoist China and Mao’s Cultural
Revolution, which represented to them a rigorous alternative to the failed
Marxist model of the Soviet Union. The Sinophilic sympathy for Mao
and Mao’s Cultural Revolution was multifarious and inclusive of the most
prominent thinkers of that period, including Louis Althusser, Simone de
Beauvoir, Foucault, Kristeva, Badiou, Judith Miller, and Jacques-Alain Miller
(the last two Lacan’s daughter and son-in-law, respectively). The list is long.

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Marxism and Maoism in the 1960s was more than “a lingua franca.”12
The French student movements and Maoism in universities and out in
the streets in the 1960s were accompanied by another, more long-standing
concern in philosophy, which can be formulated as the tension between
“the concrete experience of the life-world and the universal concepts of
rational thought,”13 or roughly put, the tension between Hegelianism and
phenomenology.14 Prior to the 1960s, existential phenomenology, which
emphasizes consciousness and the subject represented by Jean-Paul Sartre,
had a far-reaching influence. However, in the 1960s, the influence of Sartre
had already started to ebb, owing to its reduction of logic and rationality
to the level of human consciousness. It is because, as Gutting put it, “after
about 1960, younger philosophers who had found existentialist reductions
of Hegel to the endless dialectic of unhappy consciousness philosophically
inadequate (and likewise, as the French always had, rejected a culmination
of dialectic in absolute knowledge) were naturally drawn to a rethinking of
the role of the concept (rational structure) in Hegelian terms.”15
However, the return to Hegelian philosophy did not present itself to
most French intellectuals as a ready-to-go answer to their dissatisfaction
with Sartrian existential philosophy. There was a strong intention of ­seeking
different alternatives for a complete otherness. The urge for difference
was derived from a disgusted disillusion brought on by the horrors of the
Second World War. Accordingly, as put by Foucault in an interview, “we
wanted a world and a society that were not only different but that would be
an alternative version of ourselves: we wanted to be completely other in a
completely different world.”16
Under the guiding principle of “seeking difference,” there arose the
intensive interest in Marxism and Maoism, as well as sustained efforts in
an analytic investigation of Plato’s dialogues. Though not necessarily a good
solution for Foucault in the long term, Marxism and Maoism came to these
anxious French philosophers as a certain converging point of Hegelianism
and phenomenology, a promise of something new out of what there had been
previously. Marxism retains a thread of metaphysics in its structure by setting
communism as the purpose of history; at the same time, by ­emphasizing the
necessity of class struggle, it unites transcendentalism with the living world
of phenomena. Accordingly, the French intellectuals turned to “existentialist
versions of Hegelianism and its materialist offshoot, Marxism, which saw
human existence not as a continuous ascent to the good but as a violent
struggle in which meaning emerges as a final resolution of tragic conflicts.”17
It was in this conceptual context that Mao’s Cultural Revolution had a great
appeal. Mao’s Cultural Revolution, while stressing “the centrality of ideology,”

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 Revolu tion and Event 57

was a “revolution in signifying practice” allowing space for perpetual practice

in the living world.18
Consistent efforts in an analytical investigation of antiquity ran parallel
to the interest in Maoism and Marxism in the search for “otherness.” There
was a tradition of reviving antiquity in modern France. However, m ­ odernists
such as Sartre and Camus preferred more “dramatic spectacle rather than
analytic investigation,”19 focusing more on adapting Greek tragedies than
Platonic dialogues. For Sartre, Camus, and other French modernists, going
back to antiquity was an action of drawing parallels between ancient Athens,
Rome, and modern France. It was more an act of assimilation than a search
for otherness.20 Starting from Lacan, post-structuralists approach antiquity
from a perspective different than that of previous thinkers, which Paul Allen
Miller calls “thought from the outside,” la pensée du dehors, a term borrowed
from Foucault.21 In other words, the post-structuralists’ focus on Plato’s
dialogues was more of a dialectic exercise of reforming the self by going to
the external, to the outside, and to “otherness.”
For most French intellectuals since 1960, the interest in Marxism and
Mao was transient, and started receding in the mid-1970s. Foucault, Kristeva,
and other prominent thinkers withdrew from the Marxist zeal one after
another. Yet this was not the case with Badiou, who remains a ­committed
Marxist and Maoist. It is worthwhile to notice that Badiou proceeds
­simultaneously with his endeavors both in Marxism and in Plato, which are
two essential parts of his philosophy, correlating with and supplementing
each other. He considers that the only two correct understandings of Plato
on “issues of the real” actually emerged from the Maoism of the sixties.22
His first unorthodox reading of Plato, The Concept of Model, originated
from Althusser’s seminar right before the student uprisings in May 1968.
His long-term projects on both Marxism and Plato culminated in his 2012
hypertranslation of Plato’s Republic.
Badiou’s break with other post-structuralists on the issue of Maoism is
significant. It gives rise to the following questions: Does Badiou continue his
philosophical investigation under the guiding principle of “thinking from the
external” which marks French post-structuralists’ endeavor in reading the
classics? How does he avoid the disillusionment with Maoism that occurred
for other theorists? In which way does he explain and incorporate into his
general philosophical scheme the cruelties of Mao’s Cultural Revolution?
The following passages will address these questions on Badiou’s Maoism by
placing him together with other post-structuralists, especially with Lacan.
Badiou’s difference from other post-structuralists is obvious: no one in
this best-known French post-structuralist group is such a committed Maoist

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as Badiou is. His long-standing political position as a Marxist and a Maoist

strongly suggests the influence of Althusser, his teacher in Marxism. On
the other hand, such Marxist enthusiasm is seemingly incompatible with
his background in Lacan, who does not uphold any given belief, much less
ideology. However, this section of the article argues that Badiou’s Maoism,
particularly his Lacanian understanding of Mao’s Cultural Revolution,
should be considered part of his identity as a post-structuralist. This part of
the article also considers that Badiou’s reinvention of a Maoist Socrates in
his hypertranslation should be taken as his own post-structuralist practice
of “thinking from the external.” The following passage addresses Badiou’s
perspective of “thinking from the external,” and then moves to a discussion
of his notion of Maoist Revolution in his own post-structuralist framework
of “thinking from the external.”
While passionate about Marxism and Maoism, Badiou is also a
­consistent Lacanian. His influence from Lacan marks his stipulations on
the ontological division between “the Being” and “beings” and on his notion
of event. Unlike most of his post-structuralist contemporaries, he insists on
objective truth.23 Within the long-standing dichotomy in French philosophy
between Hegelianism and phenomenology, his insistence on objectivity can
be considered more of a Hegelian style, with its strong emphasis on static
structure and absolutism. However, from a certain perspective, Badiou’s
notion on truth/being leans more toward a post-structuralist position as
displayed by Lacan in his reading of antiquity.
In Lacan’s reading of Sophocles’s Antigone, he terms what Antigone
desires as the “real” which exists in “the realm beyond the contingent forms
of our socially constituted Symbolic norms and our individual Imaginary
projections.”24 Being incomprehensible to socially defined ethics, the “real”
goes beyond all social norms. And in order to meet our obligation to the
“real,” “we must go beyond the dictates of the pleasure and reality principles,
beyond good and evil to encounter pure desire [the real]: the moment in
which the canons of meaning shudder before their own beyond.”25 In his
reading of Plato’s Symposium, Lacan further identifies the “real” as a lack,
a vacuum, an emptiness: “It is a signifier without equal precisely because it
has no signified. The phallus literally means nothing.”26 The lack/vacuum/
emptiness makes substitutions possible, but also makes all substitutions
forever incomplete, insufficient, and infinite, as nothing is able to fill up the
ultimate and absolute lack.27
As such, Lacan’s readings of Antigone and Plato’s Symposium constitute
basic elements for post-structuralism on the Being and beings. Simply put,
the truth/the Being/the real is a lack, elusive of human comprehension; the

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truth guides the infinite transference of symbols which resemble but forever
fail to substitute the truth; as the truth exists beyond all normative categories,
the process of the substitution and transference cannot be defined as good
or evil.28 Therefore, the Lacanian understanding of the truth has an intrinsic
element of going beyond morality; the real can be immoral.
Badiou’s contemplation of being is close to the Lacanian notion of the
lack. According to Badiou, truths are “procedures that establish and expand
new ‘generic sets’— groupings of elements not organized according to any
shared objective predicates but merely by their subjective orientation around
a common void.”29 Setting his Marxist theory on the Lacanian notion of
being/lack/vacuum, Badiou considers Marxism as a “void” as well, “all
of which makes ‘Marxism’ the (void) name of an absolutely inconsistent
set.”30 He makes the notion of “the lack” more explicit in his other book,
The Century: “All the subjective categories of revolutionary, or absolute,
politics—‘convictions,’ ‘loyalty,’ ‘virtue,’ ‘class position,’ ‘obeying the Party,’
­‘revolutionary zeal,’ and so on—are tainted by the suspicion that the
­supposedly real point of the category is actually nothing but semblance.”31
It is within the Lacanian setting of “the void/the real” that Badiou justifies
Mao’s Revolution in his general philosophical construction. In this Lacanian
system of transference, the realities as substitutes for and ­resemblances to
the real always fall short; the realities, or in ontological terms, beings should
always be negated and replaced. In Badiou’s words, it is a ­necessary and crucial
process of purification. “Therefore, the ­correlation between a category and
its referent must always be publicly purged, p ­ urified.”32 It directly prepares
the logic of political purification, which according of Badiou, is of the nature
of the Maoist revolution. Badiou explicates his philosophy of revolution
as below: “This means purging subjects among those who lay claim to the
category in question, that is, purging the revolutionary personnel itself.
Furthermore, this must be carried out in accordance with a ritual that teaches
everyone a lesson about the uncertainties of the real. Purging is one of the
great slogans of the century. Stalin said it loud and clear: ‘A Party becomes
stronger by purging itself.’”33
In Lacan’s notion of the Being/lack, negation categorizes the process
of transference of symbols. While taking over the meaning of “negation,”
Badiou goes further with his term “purification,” which denotes more
political violence. On many occasions, Badiou uses the word “destruction,”
a much stronger word than the Lacanian “negation.” Badiou’s conception of
“destruction” should be understood in his notion of events.34 He believes that
it is only by overthrowing all existing realities that an improvement of the
resemblance of the “real” can be achieved. In its practical sense, particularly

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in the case of Mao’s Revolution, the term “destruction” is associated with

the atrocities committed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
Unlike the Maoists of the 1960s, Badiou has familiarized himself with
details of the Cultural Revolution.35 Then, how does he address the negative
parts of Mao’s Cultural Revolution that took many lives through political
“purification/destruction”? Never a self-proclaimed humanist,36 Badiou feels
the need to justify his thoughts in light of accusations from the humanists:

In The Phenomenology, Hegel tries to explain why the French

Revolution was terroristic. His thesis is that the Revolution ­presents
the subjective figure of absolute freedom. But absolute freedom
is a freedom that is not bound by any objective r­ epresentation of
the Good. Therefore, it is a freedom without criterion, a freedom
whose efficacy nothing can ever attest to. . . . We are therefore left
with the following enigma, which touches upon one of the great
questions of the century: What is the function of semblance in
the passion for the real, this passion that places politics beyond
Good and Evil?37

Though going back to Hegel, Badiou latches onto Lacan in his

­speculations about Revolution. It is in Lacan’s notion of the real, located
in a realm beyond good and evil, that Badiou secures his defense for Mao’s
Cultural Revolution in his philosophy on being and event. Reinhard
points out that in his hypertranslation of Plato’s Republic, Badiou replaces
“the idea of the Good” in Plato by translating the Greek τὸ ἀγαθόν (“the
good”) as “the truth.” It is an action of extracting moral connotation out
of Plato’s term τὸ ἀγαθόν: “By shifting ‘the Good’ to ‘the Truth,’ Badiou
no doubt violates the letter of Plato’s text, but he also thereby disengages
the Good from the Neoplatonic and Christian opposition between good
and evil in which it has long been mired, and thus he brings us closer to
Plato’s ‘Idea.’”38 Badiou’s logic in locating the justification in the realm
beyond good and evil shares a striking similarity with Lacan’s loca-
tion of Antigone’s desire in the vacuum that is beyond moral and social
­conventions. It is in the realm beyond good and evil that Badiou avoids the
association of ­historical atrocities that the term Mao’s Cultural Revolution
invokes, and thus r­ easserts the importance of Mao’s Revolution, especially
its conceptual sense.
As analyzed above, Badiou’s emphasis on the incessant struggles of
Mao’s Revolution is supported by his notion of the universal aristocracy of
communism, as well as his speculations about the necessity of ­purification to

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 Revolu tion and Event 61

realize the communist ideal. In other words, the guardian class of communism
needs to undergo a relentless process of purification in order to reinstall its
commitment to the ideal of communism. Badiou identifies the element of
this purification as Mao’s Revolution and locates it in the realm beyond moral
and social norms. Badiou’s understanding of Mao’s Revolution is Lacanian
in the sense that the concepts of relentless struggle and purification and the
emphasis on its nature transcending social norms echo Lacan’s reading of
the “void” in the realm beyond good and evil in Sophocles’s Antigone and
Plato’s Symposium.
Badiou’s incorporation of Lacanian notions into his understanding
of communism and Mao’s Revolution is a post-structuralist action. The
Lacanian notion of the “void” which initiates constant negation of realities
and which exists in the realm beyond good and evil can be traced to Freud’s
concept of the death drive. As explained by Žižek, “In Lacan, act is a purely
negative category, which (in Badiou’s terms) stands for the gesture of breaking
out of the constraints of Being, for the reference to the Void at its core, prior
to the filling in of this Void. In this precise sense, act involves the dimension
of death drive which grounds the decision (to exercise fidelity to a Truth),
but it cannot be reduced to it.”39
In one sense, Badiou’s employment of psychoanalysis does not rest only
with Lacan; he indeed revises the understanding of p ­ sychoanalysis tracing
back to Freud. According to Žižek, Badiou’s speculation on ­revolution
­c hallenges the conventional psychoanalysis. It revises “the s­tandard
­psychoanalytic skepticism about the final outcome of the revolutionary
process (i.e., the revolutionary process has to go wrong and end up in
self-destructive fury because it is unaware of its libidinal foundations).”40
Continuing more or less in Žižek’s assessment, Badiou’s understanding of
Mao’s Revolution can be considered as a rejuvenation of both Marxism and
psychoanalysis, of both Freud and Lacan in their post-structuralist context,
a rejuvenation through his philosophical endeavor of connecting these two
important traditions.
As stated above, Badiou’s speculation on Mao’s Revolution is very
Lacanian, and even Freudian in a certain sense. His understanding of Mao’s
Revolution places him and his Maoist theories among his post-structuralist
contemporaries. Like Foucault, Derrida, and other post-structuralist
­theorists, Badiou adopts the same perspective of “thinking from the
­external” in his visitation of Mao’s Revolution. In his defense for Mao’s
maxim, “It is right to rebel against the reactionaries,” Badiou ­rigorously
anchors his justification in the principle of “thinking d ­ ifferently” and
makes it a manifesto: “Outside which stands anyone who tries to consider

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Marxism not from the standpoint of rebellion but from that of the break;
not from the standpoint of history but from that of the system; not from
the standpoint of the primacy of practices but from that of the primacy of
theory; not as the concentrated form of the wisdom of the working people
but as its a priori condition.”41

Conclusion: De-familiarizing Plato and Mao

Badiou’s dramatization of Socrates in his hypertranslation, particularly

through his portrayal of a Maoist Socrates, is an act of “de-familiarization,”
to bring out its strangeness.42 Through “de-familiarizing,” he expected
to force people to review their opinions and the resemblances of the
real. Mao and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, with its notion of constant
struggles and purifications, is not a “lingua franca,” in Wolin’s words, but
an external reference, a vantage point outside the system that the self can
adopt to review itself and to negate itself in a radical way. The failings of
Mao’s Cultural Revolution do not appear to Badiou as a reason for mov-
ing beyond it, because Mao’s Revolution, with all its participation in and
revolt against the existing realities, demonstrates the ongoing process of
“negating the resemblance,” which in the Lacanian sense is the most crucial
part of ­philosophy and politics. Badiou explains, “Why is this something
other than destruction? Because, instead of treating the real as identity, it
is treated right away as a gap. The question of the real/semblance relation
will not be resolved by a purification that would isolate the real, but by
understanding that the gap is itself real.”43
As a Lacanian Maoist, Badiou points out what he thinks is the
essence of Mao’s Revolution, namely, a consistent refusal of institutional
stabilizing, and an incessant drive for social, political, and spiritual
renewal. As discussed in this article, Badiou’s view on Mao’s Revolution
continues with the French post-structuralism, particularly concepts from
Lacan and his concretization of his philosophical notion of “event,” into
the historical reality of Mao’s Revolution. In so doing, Badiou takes the
idea of renewal through struggle to such an extreme that it violates many
humanist views on the value of i­ ndividual life. There remains a question
as to whether we need to incorporate Badiou’s perspective in order to
revise our existing evaluations of Mao and his Revolution from a historical
standpoint. However, Badiou’s insistence on “thinking from the external”
as demonstrated in his advocacy of Mao’s Revolution should be treated

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with adequate respect and seriousness when we examine the philosophical

heritage of Mao and Mao’s Revolution.
Pacific Lutheran University

Notes
1. Badiou’s unconventional reading of Plato, which has been an essential part of his
t­ hinking, started in 1968 with his early book The Concept of Model. One of his most important
books, Being and Event (1988), started with an unorthodox reading of Plato’s Parmenides. He
has held several seminars on Plato since the 1980s. His “hypertranslation” of Plato’s Republic
is one of three recent projects on Plato: the seminars (2007–2010) titled “For Today—Plato!”
a forthcoming film on the life of Plato, and his “hypertranslation” of Republic. For a more
detailed list, see Kenneth Reinhard, “Introduction,” in Badiou’s Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in
16 Chapters, trans. Susan Spitzer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), viii. Also see
Badiou’s note to “The Idea of Communism,” in The Communist Hypothesis, trans. by David
Macey and Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2010), 229–30, in which he refers to this transla-
tion of Republic as “hypertranslation.”
2. In the French postmodern reception of Plato, Lacan and Foucault conduct close readings
of Plato’s dialogues mainly in the form of analytic investigations, which, compared to Badiou’s
“hypertranslation,” are more conventional. The only work that is closer to Badiou’s reinvention
of Plato’s dialogue is Derrida’s literary creative work The Post Card, in which Derrida depicts
Socrates taking dictation notes from Plato to posit that meaning is forever fluid and open to
different generations of readers.
3. Reinhard, “Introduction,” vii.
4. Badiou, Communist Hypothesis, 230.
5. Reinhard, “Introduction,” xii.
6. All parenthetical citations refer to page numbers from the main text of Badiou’s Plato’s
Republic. References to other scholarship will be indicated in footnotes in this paper.
7. Spitzer, “Note 9,” in her translation of Badiou’s Plato’s Republic (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2012), 357.
8. Francis MacDonald Cornford, “Introduction,” in Plato’s Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters
(London: Oxford University Press, 1975), xxvii–xxviii.
9. Right after the discussion on the role of philosophers’ calling on the masses to seize hold
of the Idea in chapter 10, “Philosophy and Politics,” Badiou seems to be aware of the logical
loop inherent in his argument in the mouthpiece of Socrates. He starts chapter 11 with a sense
of self-awareness: “After Socrates’ long, uncertain defense of philosophy and philosophers and
their controversial relationship with politics, everyone had remained silent” (197).
10. Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and
the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 155.
11. Ibid., 118, 52.
12. Ibid., 296.
13. Gary Gutting, Thinking the Impossible: French Philosopher Since 1960 (The Oxford History
of Philosophy) (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 32.
14. Badiou recently emphasized the role of the tension between Hegelianism and
­phenomenology and called for a rereading of the modern French philosophy in terms of this
tension (ibid., 32).
15. Loc. cit.
16. “Interview with Michel Foucault,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul
Rabinow, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 239–97.
17. Gutting, Thinking the Impossible, 22.

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18. Sollers wrote in his article “Sur la contradiction” in the prominent leftist journal Tel Quel
in  1971 on the philosophical and political significance of Mao’s notion of contradiction.
A ­summary of Sollers’s article can be found in Wolin, Wind from the East, 273.
19. Paul Allen Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices: The Construction of the Subject and the
Reception of Plato in Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2007), 32.
20. For a more detailed discussion on different approaches to antiquity between modernists
and postmodernists, see Miller.
21. Ibid., 11.
22. Reinhard, “Introduction,” ix.
23. Gutting, Thinking the Impossible, 165.
24. Miller, Postmodern Spiritual Practices, 13.
25. Ibid., 85.
26. Ibid., 106.
27. Ibid., 127.
28. The interpretation of Lacan in this paper is mostly based on Miller’s Postmodern Spiritual
Practices. For details of Lacan’s reading of Sophocles and Plato, see chapters 3 and 4 in Miller.
29. Reinhard, “Introduction,” xvii.
30. Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Baker (London: Verso, 2005), 58.
31. Badiou, The Century, 52–53.
32. Ibid., 53.
33. Ibid.
34. Reinhard, “Introduction,” xix.
35. His article “The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?” demonstrates his impressive
familiarity with the historical details of the Cultural Revolution.
36. According to Gutting, Badiou’s philosophy slides toward “mundane humanism.”
See Gutting, Thinking the Impossible, 201.
37. Badiou, The Century, 51–52.
38. Reinhard, “Introduction,” xv.
39. Slavoj Žižek, “Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou,” South Atlantic
Quarterly 97, no. 2 (1998): 257.
40. Ibid., 258.
41. Badiou, “An Essential Philosophical Thesis: ‘It is Right to Rebel Against the
Reactionaries,’” Positions, 13:3 (2005): 673.
42. Reinhard, “Introduction,” xii.
43. Badiou, The Century, 56.

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