The Alleynian 704 2016

WE MUST REJECT ‘THE SEEMING OF A LIFE’, THE LIFE OF PURE INDIVIDUALITY WHICH IS SUBMITTED TO US

East requires Western control. The economist Thomas Piketty forecasts a return to Victorian levels of wealth inequality; areas of extreme poverty and unemployment are found within the most developed nations. Young people throughout Europe, submerged in nihilistic despair, turn to extremism – the consequence of being brought up to believe that there is nothing other than the pursuit of individual satisfaction; the consequence of being brought up to live without an idea. We are in the position of those who were tasked, in previous generations, with formulating a new emancipatory politics. We must mobilise our experiences of truths elsewhere in life – in science, the determination to investigate, analyse, and achieve a result; in art, the creative construction of something outside the fixed logic of the situation; even in love, the ability to conceive of the world from the point of view of ‘the two’ of amorous life instead of ‘the one’ of vulgar individualism. We can be militant in refusing the injunction to live without an idea, to live the life that is nothing more than ‘the seeming of a life’. We can reconstitute a different form of politics. We can, and so we must.

poor and sick of what little support they receive. (Apparently, we cannot afford a strong economy – but we can always afford to go to war.) What of the wider cultural response? Firstly, one is told to treat anxiety and its effects under the rubric of ‘management’: anger management, time management, and so on. Thus is mental health subordinated to individual responsibility and the language of the workplace: constantly managing, constantly being managed. One is informed that anxiety can be addressed through the so-called ‘power of positive thinking’, or – very fashionable now – ‘mindfulness’. It is as if the causes of anxiety could be imagined away. Secondly, the idea of a collective emancipatory politics is subordinated to the discrete struggles of competing demographics. The notion of class struggle has been dissolved under the name of ‘intersectionality’ into a myriad of competing, identitarian concerns. The public face of feminism, much to the frustration of an older generation of feminists, has turned to ‘representation’ and empty bourgeois sloganeering – ‘feel good about yourself!’ – resiling from collective efforts to redress socio-economic imbalances.

How do we respond? I should like to focus on two statements of the French philosopher, Alain Badiou. The first: ‘It’s a choice between happiness and satisfaction’. We must reject ‘the seeming of a life’, the life of pure individuality which is submitted to us. We can obscure our own anxiety and reach a kind of complacent satisfaction; but this comes at the cost of genuine happiness, which exists only as a component of the figure of change. Just as the students of May 1968 scrawled on the walls of the Sorbonne the slogan, ‘Boredom is counter- revolutionary’, it lies to us to affirm that ‘Mindfulness is counter-revolutionary’. The second: ‘When you abdicate universality, you obtain universal horror’. The material problems we face can only be adequately met with a universal politics, indifferent to identity. As in the 19th century, we face a cynical capitalism conceiving itself the only rational societal model; who could forget how Francis Fukuyama announced the ‘end of history’ immediately after the fall of communism? As in the high-imperial era, we are told that the poor are to blame for their poverty; that Africans are generally backward; that the Middle

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