Which Equality. Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach

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Which Equality? Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig FeuerbachNina Power

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Which Equality? Badiou and Ranciere in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach

Nina Power

1. The Problem of Equality

The question of equality has persistently haunted the various disciplines to which itlends itself. Mathematics, politics, philosophy all repeatedly talk about the concept,depend upon it even, but find themselves at a loss to locate it, to place the idea in itsproper location, or to transform it practically into something appropriate to itssimple, yet weighty, significance. Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere share acommon project in this regard, yet the core of their disagreement lies in theirrespective conceptions of the term, as the following two quotes initially establish.The first is from Ranciere, talking about the French schoolteacher Joseph Jacotot,and the second is from Badiou, taken from an essay entitled ‘Truths and Justice’:

Equality was not an end to attain, but a point of departure, asupposition to maintain in every circumstance.1

[P]olitical sequences take no account of any particular interests. Theybring about a representation of the collective capacity on the basis ofa rigorous equality between each of their agents.2

Both Badiou and Ranciere posit the necessity of a pre-emptive or pre-existing notionof equality. For both, too, this takes the form of a claim about the specificity ofhuman being. For Badiou ‘[t]hought is the one and only uniquely human capacityand thought, strictly speaking, is simply that through which the human animal isseized and traversed by the trajectory of a truth . . . people think, people are capableof truth’.3 For Ranciere, ‘Politics only occurs when these mechanisms [of the exerciseof majesty] are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totallyforeign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: thepresupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone . . . ’4 As a way of staging the‘disagreement’ between Ranciere and Badiou, I will take this shared category, atonce obvious and obscure, and try to pinpoint the subtly different role it plays in thework of each. Ultimately, I argue, this fundamentally comes down to adisagreement over the role of continuity and strategy in relation to equality. ForRanciere, somewhat pessimistically, the way in which ‘some new politics couldbreak the circle of cheerful consensuality and denial of humanity is scarcelyforeseeable or decidable right now’.5 For Badiou, on the other hand, once the ‘axiom

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of equality’ has been declared, all politics worth its name can be identified. Thisincludes a long series of political events that Badiou names in various places: TheParis Commune 1871, Russia 1917, May 1968. Ranciere’s use of history in hisdiscussion of equality is much less grandiose, we might say, focussing not on theeternal dates of revolutionary fervour, but on the forgotten men, women and eventsof a history which is too unique to be handed over wholesale to either thephilosophers or the historians as we might conventionally understand them.

One of the reasons, however, for the shared, if quite different, interest in equality,comes from a historical circumstance that should be noted, although it is perhapsmuch more of an issue for Badiou than it is for Ranciere. This is the role of thepolitical Party, and of a more general attitude to Marxism as it was theorised andpractised in the post-war period in Europe. Badiou’s eventual turn away from thelanguage of classical Marxism (although it is by no means total) informs histheoretical shift from a concern with antagonism and destruction (as present in earlytexts such as Theory of the Subject) to a more rationalist and classically philosophicalinterest in questions of universality, egalitarianism and the human. Ranciere hasperhaps been more consistently interested in such questions insofar as the break withAlthusser, scientism and philosophy per se comes much earlier in his intellectualcareer, and in so far as it leads him to ask the same kinds of questions from quite adifferent angle, that is to say from history and the archives of forgotten events, ratherthan from a rather grander intra-philosophical standpoint, as Badiou does.

On several levels, then, we can see great similarities between the projects of the twothinkers, in which equality, as yet undetermined, operates as a vital presupposition(perhaps the most vital presupposition) for their intellectual and political projects asa whole. This paper is an attempt to come to some resolution about the nature of the‘equality’ at stake in each case, and to trace some of the intellectual history behindthe term. To this end, I will turn, in the second section, to the period in which theproblem of equality emerged with full force on the intellectual and political scene –the late 1830s and 1840s in Germany, where the reception of Hegel and Hegelianphilosophy raised the question of how to implement the universality and equalitythat seemed everywhere apparent in the conclusions to Hegel’s thought, but somanifestly lacking in the world that his philosophy was supposed to be in some waythe rational reconstruction of. What this earlier problematisation of equality revealswith regard to our two later French thinkers, I will argue, is the fundamentalproblem of the location of equality, whether it is axiomatically/rationally posited, asin Badiou, or, rather more materially (or sensuously) positioned, as in Ranciere’sanarchistic notion of intelligence and his community of speaking beings. Ranciereadmittedly makes this problem of location a key feature of his analysis of equality,whereas for Badiou it is more baldly stated as a simultaneously philosophical andpolitical axiom. In this way, I will argue, each prolong one strand of the earlierreflection on equality present in the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, the mostprominent of the early readers of Hegel, who moves from a rationalist conception ofhuman equality in his earliest work to an embodied, practical (if not yet explicitlypolitical, as Marx points out) conception of human equality. This shift in Feuerbachcan be located in the movement between the claim that human reason is ‘one,universal and infinite’ in his dissertation (1828) to later ideas of the inseparability of

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thought and physical being: ‘Truth, reality, and sensuousness are one and the samething. Only a sensuous being is a true and real being’ (1843).6

In this way, we could say, bending the stick a little, that Badiou most resembles therationalist early Feuerbach, whilst Ranciere is closer to the sensuous humanist ofFeuerbach’s later works. This is not a claim without potentially serious difficulties, ofcourse, particularly as it must be noted that, once upon a time, Ranciere was astrong critic of Feuerbach. This criticism is most strongly present in his contributionto the Reading Capital project, where Ranciere follows the orthodox Marxist claimthat Feuerbach’s concept of alienation (Entfremdung) is an insufficient concept ofabstraction because it posits too simple a break between the ‘reality’ of man and the‘idealities’ of God and speculative philosophy. However, Ranciere, once brokenwith the discourses of mastery that constitute his early encounter with Althusser (anexperience which he analyses so acutely in his 1974 text, La Lecon d’Althusser), turnsonce again to Feuerbach.

However, and disappointingly for this author in particular, this research was cutshort by the events of May ‘68. As Ranciere tells us in the foreword toThe Philosopher

and His Poor (1983) there was once ‘a thesis on Feuerbach interrupted by the din ofthe street’. It would be too much to try and imagine what this thesis would havebeen (longer than Marx’s own, we would hope), but the figure of Feuerbach loomslarge (if silently) over Ranciere, particularly when he turns precisely to the period ofthe 1830s and 40s in the material of The Philosopher and His Poor, even if he is onlymentioned briefly once at the beginning of the book. I have argued elsewhere, too,about the missing analysis of Feuerbach in Badiou’s work, where returning to thequestions of the 1830s and 1840s, particularly concerning the roles of the generic,universality, humanity and, indeed, equality, could only usefully clarify Badiou’spost-Marxist (but in some ways pre-Marxist) attempt to recast the same problems.7

Before turning to the historical debate regarding equality, it is necessary to lay outthe grounds of this particular ‘disagreement’ – where Badiou and Ranciere mostfundamentally differ on this seemingly shared problematic. To my mind, there aretwo main divisions here. One appears in the relation to the question of ‘truth’. ForBadiou, the equality of thought is central because it is the only thing that bothseparates us from the animality that otherwise characterises our existence, andallows truth to take hold. Here Badiou fuses a classically rationalist proposition(Heraclitus’ ‘thought is common to all’, or Spinoza’s axiom ‘Man thinks’) with thesubjective upsurge we might usually associate with Sartre’s notion of the ‘project’(especially in its later collective incarnation in the Critique of Dialectical Reason withthe ‘group-in-fusion’). For Ranciere, however, the question of ‘truth’ is far lesscentral – it is for this reason that Badiou positions him, in his brief discussion ofRanciere in Metapolitics (1998) as the heir of Foucault (albeit a Nietzsche-freeFoucault). Badiou writes of Ranciere: ‘In Disagreement [ . . . ] he opposes real politicsto the politics of philosophers, or to the politics of truth’.8

The second major point of disagreement comes, as I’ve already intimated withreference to Feuerbach, over the question of the way in which equality is initiallyposited. Badiou in a way encompasses the three disciplines of equality I mentioned

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at the beginning of the article – mathematics, politics and philosophy – with hisaxiomatic, rationalist claim that ‘[t]hought is the one and only uniquely humancapacity and thought, strictly speaking, is simply that through which the humananimal is seized and traversed by the trajectory of a truth’. The equality of thisthought for Badiou is the precondition for all truth procedures, but most especiallypolitics, as it is in (real) politics that the subjective truth of the situation (that politicsimmediately engages the infinite capacity to think of all, albeit in a specificsituation). For Ranciere, however, it is not so much that equality cuts across thethree disciplines so much as it disrupts them all (for Badiou, this role would be playedby the ‘event’, but not by equality as such). ‘For a thing to be political, it must giverise to a meeting of police logic and egalitarian logic that is never set up in advance’.9

As Peter Hallward puts it:

According to Ranciere, equality is not the result of a fairerdistribution of social functions or places so much as the immediatedisruption of any such distribution; it refers not to place but to theplaceless or out-of-place, not to class but to the unclassifiable or out-of-class. ‘The essence of equality is not so much to unify as todeclassify, to undo the supposed naturalness of orders and replace itwith controversial figures of division. Equality is the power ofinconsistent, disintegrative and ever-replayed division’.10

Kristin Ross, a fine reader (and translator) of Ranciere gives a similar reading of thesame dimension of his work, with particular reference to The Ignorant Schoolmaster:

Against the seamless science of the hidden, Jacotot’s story reminds usthat equality turns on another, very different, logic: in division ratherthan consensus, in a multiplicity of concrete acts and actual momentsand situations – situations that erupt into the fiction of inegalitariansociety without themselves becoming institutions.11

Equality, following Jacotot, may well be the presupposition rather than the goal,but equality is destructive and disruptive, unruly in a way that Badiou could nevercountenance: the ‘subject’ of politics for Badiou is unnatural, just as it is forRanciere, in that it breaks with the way in which things are, or are thought to be.But this subject is rather more substantive for Badiou, a real entity that takes uponitself the continuing task of realising the equality upon which it is axiomaticallyfounded, however difficult this task might be. Ranciere’s equality remains firmly onthe side of disruption, which might make it purely a question of subversion for itsown sake. As Hallward notes:

Ranciere’s emphasis on division and interruption makes it difficult toaccount for qualities that are just as fundamental to any sustainablepolitical sequence: organization, simplification, mobilization,decision, polarization, to name a few.12

It should be noted, however, that Badiou and Ranciere share a fundamentalantipathy to the notion of equivalence, even as they defend their respective notions of

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equality. What do I mean by equivalence? This would be the kind of quantitativecounting undertaken by the state, the kind of illusory democracy that Ranciererefers to as ‘the management of places’13 and Badiou calls the ‘statistconfiguration’.14 Badiou indeed upbraids Ranciere for refusing to link thebrutalities of society and the police to a wider notion of the state. As he puts it,rather harshly: ‘I suspect that it is a question for Ranciere of never exposing himself,whetever the trajectory of his argument, to the mortal accusation of not being ademocrat’.15

Nevertheless, in this shared attack they are mainly on common ground: in a state orpolice regime, equality (which is to say equivalence) would mean that eachindividual would be counted, as thus ‘equal’ as in ‘one man (or woman), one vote’.But this form of representational equivalence is understood only from the standpointof a ‘realism’ that would only count that which is visible and would also reduce anysingularity to a single homogeneous and representable measure, for the purposes ofcontrol and regulation. As Ranciere puts it, very clearly, under democraticconsensus:

Everyone is included in advance, every individual is the nucleus andimage of a community of opinions that are equal to parties, ofproblems that are reducible to shortages, and of rights that areidentical to energies.16

This atomic, representational notion of equality is, I think, better understood as aform of pernicious equivalence, in which the fundamental mode of politicalbehaviour is selfish egotism (there are parallels here with Sartre’s notion of seriality).Ranciere uses this description of atomistic equivalence to explain how racism andxenophobia emerge, once he fear is created that others are taking ‘places’ away (or,in more psychoanalytic terms, that the other is stealing my enjoyment). Theuprising of the ‘part of those that have no part’ is the eruption of true politics ontoand into the consensual scene. But what underlies or constitutes this part of no part?

For Ranciere, the real inequality that we see everywhere and at all times is in factpredicated on equality itself (which is why we must begin from the assumption ofequality, and not from its opposite, for fear of beginning and ending with the sameproblem): ‘we can deduce that the inequality of social rank works only because ofthe very equality of speaking beings’.17

It is this same problem of the real incarnation, or eruption, of equality into the worldthat most concerned those early readers of Hegel in the 1830s and 40s. How to makemanifest the universalising and levelling features of Spirit in a world in whichinequality is so obviously apparent? For Hegel this was a problem resolved, or rathercurtailed, in the realm of the social, in which the excluded – the rabble (Pobel), inparticular, play the role of the ‘part of no part’, to use Ranciere’s term. But theobvious contradiction in Hegel between a apologia of the clear injustice of civilsociety and the promise of equality and universality of the philosophical work led theYoung and Left Hegelians to perform radical operations on Hegel’s oeuvre, by bothpushing his philosophy so far it became a new form of concretised non-philosophy

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(humanism), and by breaking abruptly with a system that claimed to be able toencompass all dimensions of human thought and practice in the form of a‘Philosophy of the Future’ that would simultaneously somehow also be anon-Philosophy of the Future, to paraphrase Feuerbach. That there could bea stance that would dispense with the very idea that philosophy has a privileged takeon the question of where to begin in thought. Why then, could we not begin with thepresupposition of equality instead?

This extra-philosophical demand for a notion of equality can be seen in both Badiouand Ranciere in different ways: if Philosophy is for Badiou strictly devoid of anyconcepts of its own (being merely the place where the effects of truth procedures inthe different conditions are untangled), and for Ranciere, where instances ofequality intervene to remind philosophy and politics (and in particular ‘politicalphilosophy’) that they are constitutively incapable of ‘recognising’ equality (for torecognise it would be already to diagnose it, to represent it, to capture it), then theperiod in intellectual history where equality made its appearance on the scene, bothintellectually and practically, is a vital place to rethink contemporary discussion ofthe concept.

2. The Origins of Equality

The conceptual trajectory of this section begins with a discussion of certain forms ofuniversalism and equality present in Hegel’s conception of Geist, before moving to aninvestigation, through Feuerbach, of the concrete implications of this universalismfor any ‘properly’ universal thinking of humanity. Uncovering the conceptualassumptions behind debates about humanism after the mid-nineteenth centuryrequires returning to the post-Hegelian philosophies and non-philosophies of the1840s as it is here, in the wake of the success of philosophemes clustered aroundHegel’s ‘absolute spirit’ in encoding a particular historical narrative into the logic ofphilosophy itself, that the status of ‘man’ seemed to be either in jeopardy (assecondary to the progress of Geist), or falsely elevated.

In the latter instance, Hegel’s theological critics would have it that ‘man’ assumedan importance commensurate with that of the Christian God itself. This sectionargues that Feuerbach and the early Marx are radically misunderstood if theirprojects are taken as mere formal critical reversals of religious postulates, just asBadiou and Ranciere are much less interesting if we understand themmerely as ‘left’thinkers reacting to a protracted period of ‘right’ politics. The eminently political

impulses of the Young and Left Hegelians should be stressed as part of a way into tothinking a trajectory of radical political humanism that concerns itself with forms ofthe collective, humanity and a form of rationalism that immediately deals withquestion of the species, just as later Badiou and Ranciere will both at different pointstalk of the people, the proletarian, capacities and generic humanity or genericintelligence.

Hegel’s claim, from the ‘Doctrine of the Notion’ in his Encyclopaedia Logic that ‘onlyin Christendom is man respected as man, in his infinitude and universality’

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incorporates several key moments: the idea that Christianity is the most universal ofreligions, encapsulating and surpassing the truth of all others; that Christendom isthe physical embodiment of this universality; and that the universal is intricatelyassociated with ‘the principle of personality’. Hegel does not however mean by thisthat personality is immediately apparent to the ‘person’ him or herself (elsewhere inthe Encyclopaedia he criticises Jacobi for speaking of personality in terms of a form ofidealist intuition).18 The slave’s self-recognition, in particular, would not be enoughto reveal to him his own universality according to Hegel.19 Indeed, without externalrecognition, the slave is not a person at all, he does not partake, as Hegel elsewhereputs it, in ‘the principle of theWestern world, the principle of individuality’.20 Hegeldoes not therefore understand this ‘principle of personality’ in terms of a personalrelation to God of which any man or woman could be the subject, as a typical‘personalist’ might – indeed, this is what his Christian theological detractors, such asStahl, found so problematic. In Hegel’s later and last major text, the Philosophy of

Right from 1821, ‘persons’ occupy the realm, between the private sphere and thestate, of bourgeois (or civil) society [burgerliche Gesellschaft]. What persons have incommon, however, is not their reason, nor feeling (as in the family) but ownership:private property and the collective ties that expand and regulate these relations:

When we say that a human being must be somebody [etwas], we meanthat he must belong to a particular estate [ . . . ] A human being withno estate is merely a private person and does not possess actualuniversality.21

‘Universality’ is thus understood as the systematic interweaving of individual andfamily ownership and institutions. The implication of Hegel’s so-calleduniversalism, therefore, is that one can be human in a biological sense, and yethave no actual relation to personhood or to the ‘actual’ universal or to equality inany practical sense. Women, in particular, according to Hegel, cannot contemplate‘universal’ activities such as philosophy, or governance, precisely because ‘theiractions are not based on the demands of universality but on contingent inclinationand opinion’.22 If we come to Hegel expecting a certain kind of universality to arisein the shared, if differential, capacities of the species (what we might namehumanity or Mankind, comprising both men and women), we will be disappointed,finding the breadth of this term restricted in the Philosophy of Right to thepermutations of marriage and reproduction, ‘Life’, or ‘the actuality of the species’.23

Not the life of men and women as it is lived in society, or could be lived, but the merefact of the propagation of the species, which is, in turn, subsumed by civil society asmarriage, thus relying on differentiation at a lower level in order to defend a rathercircumscribed ‘universalism’ at a higher. There is a tension between Hegel thephilosopher and Hegel the thinker of the articulation of the state and civil society, abattle in which the universality of the human is ultimately subordinated to concretesocial hierarchisation. This is one of the reasons that Ranciere will replace thediscussion of ‘Right’ with the importance of ‘Wrong’ in the realm of politics: ‘politicscomes about solely through interruption, the initial twist that institutes politics asthe deployment of a wrong or of a fundamental dispute’.24 It should be noted thatthis play on right and wrong is already present in the early Marx’s writings on theproletariat against Hegel.

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DespiteHegel’s insistence (following Spinoza’s Axiom in theEthics that ‘Man thinks’)that ‘Nature has given every one a faculty of thought’, this ‘generic thought’ does notreach the level of the universal until it ‘feels its own universality’.25 So whilst self-reflecting thought is that which constitutes the distinction between humanity andanimals, in the realm of thought, the philosopher and the bourgeois property-ownershare the distinction of being in exclusive possession of the ability to attain theuniversal: ‘the philosophic mode gets to be different from the more general thoughtwhich acts in all that is human, in all that gives humanity its distinctive character’.26

A mode of thought that, as noted, women and slaves are by definition unable topractice, according to Hegel, because of their ‘inability’ to attain the level of theuniversal either via the legal recognition of their full right to property (or limitedforms thereof), or because of their ‘natural’ restriction to the level of the contingentand the individual. Even in marriage and childrearing, the woman can only attainthe level of the generic [Gattung] by uniting with her husband, via ‘their consent toconstitute a single person’.27Above them, too, stands civil society as the ‘universal family’,in the face of the relative arbitrariness and contingency of the married couple asparents.28 We can see here how the rationalist position of Badiou (equality is anaxiom) and the anarcho-communist position of Ranciere (intelligence is givenequally to all) are both positions whose anti-naturalism is explicitly and importantlystressed. Hegel’s expressive notion of universality and the equality of thought (notthere until it feels its own universality) lays the ground for the defence of thehierarchical and repressive elements of the world as it is, precisely because it definesitself as an expressive account of the manifestation of universality.

In his earlier, work onHegel, the ‘Critique ofHegel’sDoctrine of the State’,Marxwillmake explicit the narrowness of Hegel’s conception of the universal and attack theidea that the ‘universal interest’ should be commensurate with the task of upholdinglegality.29 The Universal is repeatedly qualified by Hegel in The Philosophy of Right:

the process of legislation should not be represented merely by that oneof its moments whereby something is declared to be valid foreveryone; more important that this is the inner and essential moment,namely cognition of the content in its determinate universality.30

Everywhere in Hegel the universal and its equality are given, but circumscribed:everyone thinks, in principle, but only philosophy, and/or, the law-abidingproperty-owner thinks universally. This is why a critique of philosophy, such asundertaken in Feuerbach’s attempt to inaugurate a ‘non-philosophy’, andRanciere’s later attempt to undermine the supposed ‘scientificity’ of disciplinarydivision and philosophy’s pretensions in particular, is also a critique of thebourgeois, ‘cognising’ subject that underpins such a philosophy. For Hegel,however, everyone has an abstract relation to Right, yet one must have cognizance[die Kenntnis] of the content of the law in order to partake of it. As Marx puts it: ‘theuniversal appears everywhere as a determinate particular, while the individualnever achieves its true universality’.31

Lowith notes that, for Hegel, ‘man is far from being conceived as a member of ageneral class; rather the life of this class itself, society, is conceived as a framework

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external to the individuals, a restriction upon their original independence. The onlybond holding them together is [ . . . ] need and private interest’.32 Those thinkers thatfollowed Hegel, not only Marx, but those who Marx read, respected and arguedwith in the early years, most especially Feuerbach, oriented their projects towards aseries of complex tasks: how to rescue the universal from its Hegelian limitations andthus render it truly universal; how to redeem Man (understood as men and women)without simply redeeming the bourgeois man of property and security; how to learnthe lessons of the dialectic, and to criticise it, without retreating to a pre-Hegelianproblematic that could easily be criticised and subsumed by the subtleties of the all-consuming Hegelian system. As Feuerbach succinctly put it in 1843:

The culmination of modern philosophy is the Hegelian philosophy. Thehistorical necessity and justification of the new philosophy must thereforebe derived mainly from a critique of Hegel’s.33

There are a number of factors to bear in mind here. By the early 1840s, not only didthe original unifying force of the ‘rationalist’ Hegelian system appear to have beendissolved in its apparent opposition to the reality of the political state (namely, theascension of Pietist King Frederick Wilhelm IV and the political and academichostility towards Hegelianism), but the Hegelian school’s own unity was shatteredby the splintering off of myriad Hegelian factions.34 Practically, this meant thatcriticisms of theology were inextricably intermingled with those of politics(theoretical or existing). It is again Feuerbach who best summarises the theoreticallandscape post-Hegel, when discussing his proposal for a future philosophy:

The new philosophy is the negation of rationalism as much as mysticism; ofpantheism as much as personalism; of atheism as much as theism; it is theunity of all these antithetical truths as an absolutely independent and pure truth.35

Although Warren Breckman argues against ascribing too much influence to thepolitical circumstances of the 1840s as being responsible for radicalising the leftHegelians, pointing to the fact that the unity of religious and socio-political concernsin Feuerbach’s criticisms of personalism of the 1830s already exhibits character-istically radical themes, it is clear that there was a heightened alarm at theincreasingly repressive political state of affairs in Germany in the 1840s.36

But how could the Young and left Hegelians reconcile the concept of ‘genus’ with‘individuals’ who, far from exhibiting a shared rationality, couldn’t seem more atwar with one another? Although the attack upon and transformation of thereligious elements of Hegel (or, the question of how to be an atheistic Hegelian,as Feuerbach would have it) is initially crucial to this matter of the ‘properlyuniversal’ in the attempt to redeem man,37 the issue of religion, though it formeda major part of the conservative attack on Hegel, did not centrally pre-occupythe left-wing Hegelians. That honour goes instead to the question of ‘politicalhumanism’, as I understand the thematic of Feuerbach and the early Marx,understood as the attempt to restore to men and women certain forms of theirown power in the face of allegedly natural forms of hierarchy (sovereignty,monarchy, lordship and the newer, and more complex, form of domination,

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capitalism). This project of disalienation goes far beyond a simple reversal of thetyranny of religious oppression. It is thus disingenuous to state, as Hyppolitedoes, that ‘one may see in Christianity, as it is interpreted in Hegelianphilosophy, the source of everything in Marxian humanism’.38 Similarly,Ameriks’ claim that ‘the notion of the human species itself is Feuerbach’sepistemological, ontological, and ethical substitute for the absolute role that waspreviously played by the notion of God as traditionally understood’,39 againunderestimates the political elements in Feuerbach’s work, which is not simply ananalysis of theology, but also, and at the same time, of philosophy and certaintheo-political conceptions of civil society. Feuerbach and Marx’s early humanism,just as Ranciere and Badiou’s later notions of the people and generic humanityrepresent more than a simple transmutation of the veneration of the transcendent(God, idealism) to a veneration of the immanent (man, materialism). ‘Politicalhumanism’ is not solely the replacement of theology with anthropology. If itwere, we would expect it to retain the precise structure of theological arguments,rendering it vulnerable to criticisms along the line of Proudhon’s: ‘the deificationof our species, which is at bottom among the new atheists, is, only a last echo ofreligious terrors’.40 The so-called ‘deification’ of the species that Proudhon attacksin humanist atheism does not, and cannot, be a presupposition in eitherFeuerbach or Marx (or the later French thinkers), for it is precisely awareness ofhow stuck humanity has gotten in the face of its oppressions that guide theircriticisms of Hegel and theology.

This question of the formal reversal of philosophical-theological writing is, in anycase, pre-empted by Feuerbach in 1843:

The contradiction of the modern philosophy, especially of pantheism,consists of the fact that it is the negation of theology from the standpoint of

theology or the negation of theology which itself is again theology: thiscontradiction especially characterizes the Hegelian philosophy.41

Neither a theological negation of theology, nor the negation of the content of theologywithout a simultaneous destruction of its form. Admittedly, Feuerbach does givesome weapons to his critics when, especially in the later works, he occasionally makeclaims like

My aim in reducing theology to anthropology is rather to raiseanthropology to theology in just the same way as Christianity, byreducing God to man, elevates man into God, even if into atranscendent, fantastic God far removed from man.42

But his more comprehensive attacks on the formal ties between theology, philosophyand the ‘nature’ of civil society are more salient to the question of humanism per se,and it is these we shall briefly examine.

Some caveats are in order, however. As willing as Feuerbach was to connect hiscritique of religion to socialism, it is clear that Marx’s subsequent identification ofsocialism with the proletariat’s struggle actually militates (in both senses) against the

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core of Feuerbach’s own emancipatory project. Feuerbach never identified theproletariat as the universal class whose emancipation would liberate all mankind.Instead he remained committed to the task of the universal emancipation ofhumanity as such, and this must include proletariat and capitalist alike. In thissense, Feuerbach is attempting to make good the promise of the universal that Hegelnever carried out. However, we know too that the universal and equality plays alarge role in Marx’s 1843-44 work on Hegel. The formation of a class with ‘radicalchains’, the proletariat, is precisely a negatively universal class: its suffering is universal,its total ‘loss of humanity’ is a universal loss. It is as if Marx, with this notion of theproletariat, is taking his cue from Feuerbach’s claim that ‘only he who has thecourage to be absolutely negative has also the power to create something new’.43

If only one part of humanity emancipates itself, nevertheless this ‘one particular classundertakes from its particular situation the universal emancipation of society’.44 Marxhas here taken up Feuerbach’s ‘completed Hegelianism’ and added the beginningsof a more material political critique, without yet dropping the language of theuniversal. The relationship between the reformulation of the universal betweenFeuerbach and Marx is critical: it is here, rather than on the question of humanismper se, that they will ultimately diverge, as Marx becomes less and less convinced bystrictly ‘philosophical’ conceptions of politics and humanity. This developmentplays an important role in understanding the later claims of Ranciere, in particular,for whom the language of humanitarianism and victimology has almost completelytainted any useful conception of humanity:

Politics [ . . . ] is the art of the local and singular construction of casesof universality. Such construction is only possible as long as thesingularity of the wrong [ . . . ] is distinguished from theparticularization of right attributed to collectivities according totheir identity. And it is also only possible as long as its universality isseparate from the naked relationship between humanity andinhumanity.45

The biopolitical democratic model of the human as either fully countable andgovernable from the standpoint of the state or a pure victim (and again, Badiou andRanciere are very close on this point) has come to overtake the older language ofcommunist or Marxist humanism, where the propertylessness and ‘nothingness’ ofthe vast majority of humanity is in fact its strength and resource, not something to bepitied or regarded in an ‘animal’ way.

The question of how and in which ways this humanity individuates itself is also atstake in the 1840s: whilst Feuerbach will remain in the realm of that which binds atthe level of the generic (thought, love), Marx, particularly in the wake of Stirner’sattack on Feuerbach, will give much more prominence to the role of the complex‘individual’ (not to be understood as a substantive ‘person’ in Hegel’s sense).As Kouvelakis puts it, ‘when it is a question of determining, in positive fashion, theultimate human essence, Marx becomes highly elliptical, precisely where Feuerbach[ . . . ] is prolix’.46 Thus, there is a shift in the conception of ‘political humanism’,from Feuerbach’s 1839 claim that ‘[t]he species is indifferent to the individual’ andthat ‘[t]he reflecting individual carries the consciousness of the species within

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himself’,47 to Marx’s 1845 claim, in The German Ideology, for communism as the‘power of . . . united individuals’.48 Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach’s conception ofgeneric humanity retains Feuerbach’s concern for that shared humanity; what hedoes eliminate, however, is the idea of an ahistorical opposition between theindividual and the species, such that species-being would be revealed only ideally (inself-consciousness, for example, as Feuerbach argues in the preface to The Essence of

Christianity). Already we can see hints of Marx’s disagreement with Feuerbach onthis point in 1844:

The real, active relation of man to himself as a species-being, or therealisation of himself as a real species-being, i.e. as a human being, isonly possible if he really employs all his species-powers – which [ . . . ] isonly possible through the cooperation of mankind and as a result ofhistory.49

Man, for Marx, is identified neither with the isolated individual, nor the species asthe revelation of shared capacity, but with the practice of real individuals in theirshared, if differentiated, conditions and their historical specificity.

Marx makes the addition to his early form of humanism of a particular idea ofdemocracy that makes more explicit the immediately political nature of humanemancipation, thus further distinguishing himself from Feuerbach and avoidingsome of the problems inherent in the notion of species. As Kouvelakis remarks:

The reference to the species is haunted by a constitutive instability;that it is a provisional notion subject to progressive destabilisation;and that it operates like the spectral trace of a different social logic,one which comes from the future and is yet lodged at the heart ofbourgeois social relations. For its part, ‘true democracy’, defined asthe self-presence of the human essence, would be more an appeal . . .for a democratic political practice that does not yet exist or, moreprecisely, has not yet been recognised – and cannot yet be ‘named’ –rather than a stable concept awaiting its systematic presentation.50

We canof course ultimately question, asMarxdid,whetherFeuerbach really achievesa truly novel conception of explicitly political humanism as he imagines he did (we cansee just how preoccupied Feuerbach was with questions of futurity and temporality,and the immediateneed for anewkindof thinking fromperusing the titles of hisworks:‘Principles of thePhilosophyof theFuture’, ‘TheNecessity of aReformofPhilosophy’,‘Preliminary Theses on the Reform of Philosophy’). When Feuerbach states that‘[p]hilosophy steps into the place that religion hadoccupied’,which ‘means, however,that a totally different philosophy replaces all previous philosophy’, the question is towhat extent this new philosophy (or sometimes, this ‘non-philosophy’) can serve as anadequate account of the really existing state of affairs.51

Feuerbach construes ‘thinking’ to be the process by which we not only attain auniversal object, but become universal in ourselves. In opposition to the apparent

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‘personalism’ of his immediate predecessors, Feuerbach, argues in the Preface to the‘Principles of the Philosophy of the Future’ that

[a]t present, the task is not to invent a theory of man, but to pull manout of the mire in which he is bogged down [ . . . ] to establish acritique of human philosophy through a critique of divinephilosophy.52

We can pose Feuerbach’s early, post-Hegelian problematic in the following way:does man entertain a relationship to his species that extends beyond (mere) finiteself-relation? Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx all, in some sense or another, have anaffirmative answer to this enquiry.53 It is Schelling’s reversal of the move from‘thought to being’ to the one from ‘immediate being to thought’, however, thatpartly influences the Young Hegelians in the early stages, who find in his work oneway of escaping the perceived negativity of Hegelian dialectics. Also involved in theattacks on Hegel, and writing at the same time as Marx was actively creatinghimself as a Feuerbachian, Max Stirner flatly denies the possibility of species (orgenera)-relation: ‘But the species is nothing, and, if the individual lifts himself abovethe limits of his individuality, this is rather his very self as an individual; he existsonly in raising himself’.54 ‘Man’ is thus nothing other than a ‘solemn cliche’, not anobject of thought, not a goal to be attained, nor a category to be rescued from itsalienation in transcendence, as Feuerbach would see it. Yet, even though Marx willdistance himself from Feuerbach on this point, as Soper quite rightly puts it, ‘wemight note, however, that though there is a decisive shift away from Feuerbachianhumanism in The German Ideology, there is no break with humanist argument assuch’.55 The question is rather how the individual (the ego, or the self, for Stirner)lives in a social realm in which economic and political elements distance men andwomen from their own capacities. This in a sense is where Ranciere later begins hiswork, on the ground, using individual cases in The Philosopher and His Poor and The

Ignorant Schoolmaster.

Marx and Engels will savage the individualistic Stirner in The German Ideology, inorder to stake out a position that remains strictly ‘communist’ in the sense that someform of collective identification is possible, indeed, necessary. They declare that sucha thinker ‘by proclaiming his own thought as the end of philosophy and itstriumphant entrance into corporeal life’ presents an utterly impoverished (not tomention bourgeois) acquisitive individualism that upholds the current order, evenas it denies that this order has nothing to do with the individual’s supposedly‘anarchic’ anti-foundationalism.56 It is clear, however, that Stirner’s anarchisticundermining of Feuerbach shakes Marx and Engels quite severely: the German

Ideology is, after all, a text in which three hundred and eighty pages are devoted toStirner (compared to a mere seventy to Feuerbach, and twenty to Bruno Bauer).57

At this stage in their thought, however, it is questionable how much Marx andEngels interested themselves in the strictly philosophical Feuerbach-Stirner debate,that takes as its poles the terms the ‘generic’ and ‘the ego’ (Einzige).58 Nevertheless,the lineage of this debate, and of the origins of the concept of ‘Gattung’, are crucial foran understanding of how it was possible for Marx and Engels, in the first place, toformulate their critiques and programmes in the wake of Hegel. We should here

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remember Engels’ later claim that, upon the publication of The Essence of Christianity

in 1841, ‘at once we all became Feuerbachians’.59

All three thinkers under examination here (Hegel, Feuerbach and Marx), and thelater Badiou and Ranciere (particularly Badiou), draw on the language of thegeneric (Gattung) to elucidate the ways in which the individual relates to his ‘species’.We can roughly sketch the movement between the three earlier thinkers as the movefrom married and sexual life in civil society (Hegel), to non-alienated consciousness(Feuerbach), to labour and praxis (Marx). Even within the work of one of the threethinkers, for example, Feuerbach, these conceptual tensions are manifest. We couldunderstand Gattung as ‘species’ if we examine Feuerbach’s transcendental biologism,but ‘genus’ if we consider his theory that the human species is the ‘species of all thespecies’.60 If the term is not merely a biological, or naturalistic one for Feuerbach,because, as Agamben points out, it serves to identify the ‘vital activity’ proper toman alone, we must attend to its specifically different meanings in various contexts.In the shift from Feuerbach to Marx, we can see a movement from understandingGattungswesen as the theoretical differentiation of man from animal to a more active,productive demonstration of the separation of man inMarx that nevertheless retainssome vestiges of Feuerbach’s simple-seeming, yet complex, rationalism. In turn, thisshift from Feuerbach toMarx is prefigured by the different ways in which Hegel usesthe term. This separation between nature and capacity for rationality indicatessomething of the impossibility of any immediate revelation of the generic quality ofthought. This is Ranciere’s problematic too, particularly in Disagreement, as he triesto identify the link between the fundamental equality of speaking beings and theirunequal distribution in the world as it is.

3. Badiou and Ranciere: On Unequal Terms

But where does the real disagreement on equality come between Badiou andRanciere? In Badiou’s two short pieces on Ranciere in Metapolitics, one of which isentitled ‘Ranciere and the Community of Equals’, he argues that Ranciere is carefulnever to situate himself within any one particular discipline. (Incidentally, thismight explain why Ranciere reserves particular ire for Pierre Bourdieu as the creatorof a particular kind of ‘sociological science’ in which the unwitting subjects of theoperation – those without cultural capital, for example – are turned into anotherkind of object for study, deprived once again of any kind of voice.) Badiou writes:‘Ranciere’s enterprise is not internal to a system [dispositif] of knowledge’.61 Thiswould appear to be a strength of Ranciere’s approach, allowing him to range freelyover forgotten histories and neglected Figures (the anti-master Jacotot beingperhaps the best example). Indeed, this is an extraordinarily attractive approach,dismantling in one fell swoop the pretensions and hierarchies of disciplinarydivisions and the self-descriptions in bad faith that lead people to claim to speak ‘as aphilosopher’, ‘as a historian’. For Badiou, however, this move ‘tends, in an aporeticmanner, towards a political intervention that is forever suspended’ and,furthermore, ‘leads us to nothing in the order of real politics that could serve as areplacement’.62 Why? Because, for Badiou, Ranciere’s whole approach dependsupon the simultaneous positing of master (‘every bond presumes a master’) and the

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claim that ‘all mastery is an imposture’. Because of this, Ranciere is obliged to resortto the admittedly appealing motif of ‘the community of equals’, which would eitherdispense with mastery all together (a totality without a master – a kind ofanarchistic utopia) or ‘an equality which is held together under a pure empty markof mastery’ (mastery without a master). Badiou argues that either of these twoscenarios would destroy the very position from which Ranciere wishes to speak, andthat we would be best placed to give up on the ‘dream of the community of equals, orgeneric communism as a militant aim’. It should be noted, however, that Badiouhimself does not always do this, speaking in recent texts of both generic humanityand communism as yet-living terms. What Badiou recognises, however, is the sharedcommitment to a notion of equality that is postulated and not willed (i.e. a startingpoint, not a goal). As he put it:

We must reach agreement on the claim that equality has nothing todo with the social, or social justice, but with the regime of statementsand prescriptions, and is therefore the latent principle, not of simplescrawls on the parchment of proletarian history, but of every politicsof emancipation.63

The main disagreement on this point comes on the strategy to be pursued once thisinitial prescription has been declared. For Badiou, one must commence ‘the rigorouspursuit of consequences’, but for Ranciere, there is perhaps little to show us how theegalitarian moments of eruption and dissensus might establish themselves as a newmode of ‘proper’ politics. We might be persuaded by Ranciere’s slightly morepessimistic analysis, however, if Badiou does not convince us that his alternative (akind of prescriptive, organised project of equality) is of more practical andtheoretical use. How does he try and do this?

In another essay entitled ‘Ranciere and Apolitics’, Badiou attempts to outline themain features of Ranciere’s politics, many points of which touch on the question ofequality. Badiou claims, somewhat obscurely, that:

Ranciere’s doctrine can be defined as a democratic anti-philosophy thatidentifies the axiomof equality, and is founded ona negative ontology ofthe collective that sublates the contingent historicity of nominations.64

Ranciere, for Badiou, lacks a theory of names (vital for his own work), in whichpolitical sequences and events would involve a certain decision about what the eventcould be called, a certain wager as its appropriate nomination: the BolshevikRevolution, the Storming of the Bastille. Ranciere instead, claims Badiou, ‘will saythat our time is nameless’. Badiou opposes his systematic attempt to analyse all theelements of egalitarian political events (their structure, the act of naming them, thefidelity to their principles) to what he calls Ranciere’s ‘historicist phenomenologyof egalitarian occurrence’. But surely this is Ranciere’s point. Placing those momentsof egalitarian uprising in a philosophical sequence, as Badiou does, runs the risk ofobliterating history altogether, along with the sensuous appearance of individualexperiences on the stage of politics. Badiou would not deny this, seeing philosophy asthe (admittedly empty) discipline conditioned by politics, rather than history as a

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kind of archive to be unravelled. As Badiou puts it, rather didactically: ‘The correctthesis is that all philosophy is conditioned by instances of politics, to whichphilosophy gives shelter through a particular transcription destined to producestrictly philosophical effects’.65

With the notion of equality too, Badiou pursues are rather more forceful line,sweeping aside anymelancholic worries about the ends of politics or the prevalence ofhumanitarian conceptions of democratic consensus: ‘But so what? Is the capacity todeal with the egalitarian axiom within a situation, in singular statements . . .

unworkable?’66 For Badiou the answer is clearly ‘no’. Difficult, certainly, butimpossible, no. Badiou invokes new names – the immigrant workers – and calls fornew forms of organisation, a kind of combination of the undocumentedworkerswhosereal relation to work must be reestablished, and the ‘few, rare’ militants who haveunderstand how true egalitarian politics must (for the time being) take place at adistance from the state. It is this figure of the politicalmilitant that Badioupoints out isabsolutely absent for Ranciere, unsurprisingly we might say, seeing as the ‘politicalmilitant’ comprises a form of political subjectivity that is tied rather heavily to avant-garde forms of political action and organisation, a far cry from Ranciere’s optimistic‘community of equals’. Badiou proposes a notion of ‘politics without a party’ thatnevertheless retains the figure of the political militant; history cannot help us, he says.Badiou’s forward-looking conception of politics and of the way in which equality,once axiomatically assumed, must be enacted is certainly a bold prescription;Ranciere would not and could not be so bold. Are we to say, with Badiou, that hetherefore pits ‘phantom masses against an unnamed State’? I do not think so. Thereare places, and places of serious political contention, such as the classroom, theworkplace, and all the other situations regarding who has the ‘right’ to speak and towhom, in which Badiou’s militant notion of equality is of little help. Ranciere’spositing of the equality of speaking beings, and of the assumption of an intelligenceshared by all are in fact muchmore useful, andmuchmore egalitarian, appropriatelyenough. Perhaps then we should reserve Badiou’s notion of equality for thosemoments when organised anti-systemic political subjects rise up and work withRanciere’s conception in the everyday battles and sites of real struggle that threaten toprevent us from thinking that there can be something different than this at all.

Notes

1 Jacques Ranciere, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five

Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, trans. Kristin

Ross (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991),

p.138.2 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker

(London: Verso, 2005 [orig. 1998]), p.97.3 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, pp.98–99.4 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement: Politics and

Philosophy, trans. Julia Rose, Minnesota, p.17.5 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.140.6 Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Principles of the Philosophyof the Future’,The Fiery Brook, trans. Zawar Hanfi,

p.224.

7 See ‘Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude:

Badiou and the Political Subject’, Cosmos and

History, 2:1–2 (2006).8 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.114.9 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.32.10 Peter Hallward, ‘Staging Equality: On Ran-

ciere’s Theatrocracy, New Left Review 37 (Jan-

Feb 2006), pp.109–129, p.110. The quote is fromRanciere, On the Shores of Politics, trans. Liz

Heron (London and New York: Verso, 1995),

pp.32–3.11 Kristin Ross, ‘Ranciere and the Practice of

Equality’, Social Text, 29 (1991), pp.57–71, p.70.

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12 Kristin Ross, ‘Ranciere’, p.70.13 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.99.14 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.82.15 Jacques Ranciere, Metapolitics, p.120.16 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.116.17 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.49.18 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.97.19 It is interesting to compare Hegel on this point

to later socialist writers. Lasalle, writing in 1864,will say: ‘Under free competition the relation of an

employer to the employed is the same as to any

other merchandise . . . This is the leading feature

of the present age. In former times the relationswere those of man to man: after all, the relations of

the slaveowner to the slave, and of the feudal lord

to the serf were human’. Ferdinand Lassalle,‘What is Capital?’ (1864), German Essays on

Socialism in the Nineteenth Century, eds. Frank

Mecklenburg and Manfred Stassen (New York:

Continuum, 1990), pp.51–8.20 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic (London:

Hackett Publishing, 1991), p.214.21 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen

W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1991), p.239.22 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.207.23 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.200.24 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.13.25 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, p.38.26 G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, p.4.27 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.201. A claim nothelped by the obvious play on words Gattung

(genus) with Gatte/Gattin (spouse).28 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.264.29 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.329.30 G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy, p.310.31 Karl Marx, ‘Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the

State’, Early Writings, trans. Livingstone and

Benton (London: Penguin, 1992), p.99.32 Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche, trans.

David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart and

Winston, 1964), p.242.33 Ludwig Feuerbach, ‘Principles of the Philos-

ophy of the Future’, The Fiery Book: Selected

Writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, trans. Zawar Hanfi

(New York: Anchor Books, 1972), p.203.34 Left, Right, Young, and the movement between

various positions, as in Bauer’s turn from a

relatively orthodox Hegelian to a kind of utopian

socialist, as well as non-Hegelian right-wing andtheological critiques of Hegel. The ‘Young

Hegelians’ were known as Hegelinge (Hegelists) as

opposed to Hegelitern (Hegelians).35 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.170.36 Cf. Warren Breckman,Marx, the Young Hegelians

and the Origins of Radical Social Theory: Dethroning the

Self (Cambridge: CUP, 1999).37 Karl Marx, ‘A Contribution to the Critique of

Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction’, Early

Writings, p.243. As Marx said, ‘the criticism ofreligion is the prerequisite of all critique’.38 Jean Hyppolite, ‘Marx and Philosophy’, Studies

on Marx and Hegel, trans. John O’Neill (London:

Heinemann, 1969 [1955]), p.99.39 ‘The Legacy of Idealism in the philosophy of

Feuerbach, Marx, and Kierkegaard’, in The

Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. by

Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2000), p.262.40 From ‘System of Economic Contradictions: Or,

Philosophy of Poverty’ (1846).41 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.204.42 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.257.43 Ludwig Feuerbach, The Fiery Book, p.146.44 Karl Marx, Early Writings, p.99.45 Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement, p.139.46 Stathis Kouvelakis,Philosophy and Revolution: From

Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London:

Verso, 2003), p.213.47 Cf. also: ‘The unity of being and nothingness

has its positive meaning only as the indifference of

the species or of the consciousness of the speciestowards the particular individual’. Feuerbach,

Fiery, pp.92–93.48 Karl Marx,The German Ideology, ed. C.J. Arthur

(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970), p.86.49 Karl Marx, Early Writings, p.386.50 Stathis Kouvelakis, Philosophy and Revolution,

p.314.51 Ludwig Feuerbach, Fiery, p.148.52 Ludwig Feuerbach, Fiery, p.176.53 But many, not just personalist thinkers, have

argued against this possibility. Schelling in his Ideas

for a Philosophy of Nature rails against the anti-intuitionism (andHegelian dialectical rationalism)

of contemporary philosophy: ‘The product of

intuition is necessarily a finite one . . . it is clearwhy intuition is not – as many pretended

philosophers have imagined – the lowest level of

knowledge, but the primary one, the highest in the

human mind, that which truly constitutes itsmental nature’. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von

Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. by

Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988 [orig. 1797,revised 1803], pp.177–178.54 Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own [1845] trans.

John Carroll (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971),p.55.

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55 Kate Soper, Humanism and Anti-Humanism

(LaSalle, Illinois: Open Court, 1986), p.38.56 Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, vol 5, p.243 -

quoted in Karl Lowith, From Hegel to Nietzsche,

p. 105.57 Cf. John Carroll’s introduction to Max Stirner:

The Ego and His Own, p.14.58 Or, as Stirner put it ‘Man’ and ‘I’ (the two

divisions of The Ego and His Own).59 Frederick Engels, ‘Ludwig Feuerbach and the

end of Classical German Philosophy’ (Peking:

Foreign Languages Press, 1976 (orig. 1888)), p.14.60 See Louis Althusser, ‘On Feuerbach’, The

Humanist Controversy, Ed. Francois Matheron,

trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso, 2003),

p.137.61 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.107.62 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, pp.108, 110.63 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.112.64 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.115.65 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.118.66 Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, p.119.

Nina Power is Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University. She is the authorof the forthcoming One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books), and of many articles onEuropean philosophy. She is also currently co-editing a collection of Alain Badiou’spolitical writings for Columbia University Press.

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Documents

Which Equality. Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach