There is a moment in The Meaning of Sarkozy when prominent French philosopher Alain Badiou brings up Sarkozy’s critique of May 1968 in France.  Sarkozy famously argued that the radical movement blurred the lines between good and evil; to Badiou, however, May 1968 is notable for clearly articulating differences between good and evil.  This book is Badiou’s attempt to draw a line in the sand once again.

The Meaning of Sarkozy opens in the run-up to the 2007 French presidential election: a gloomy moment for left-leaning French citizens, as they waited for Badiou’s “rat man,” “Sarkozy l’américain,” to trample over weak-kneed socialist candidate Ségolène Royal.  Badiou describes the presidential race as a choice between “fear” (“the twitchy accountant” Sarkozy) and “fear of fear” (the “hazy bourgeoise” Royal); fear, as we know, won the day.  But Badiou is less interested here in analyzing that fear and where it comes from than in taking on the leftist malaise that came to a head in France in 2007.  For in The Meaning of Sarkozy Badiou takes what he calls “depression” and fights it with all the force that a dedicated soixante-huitard can muster.

The text can be divided into two parts.  The first is shorter, and it deals with the question put forth in Badiou’s title: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (which translates somewhat awkwardly in English to “of what is Sarkozy the name?”).  Badiou’s answer here is relatively simple, for it takes Sarkozy at his own words when, during his election campaign, he famously attacked the legacy of May 1968 in France, advocating a “liquidation” of the movement once and for all.  This is what Sarko represents, then.  Not just global finance or capitalist order, but a world in which there is no other possibility, where emancipation is worse than impossible, worse than criminal.

Having outlined this bleak prospect, for the rest of the book Badiou sketches an emancipatory politics or, as he boldly puts it, a “communist hypothesis,” that he resolutely refuses to think of as dead.   Frankly taking it for granted that communism (which, he notes, “is what Kant called an ‘Idea’, with a regulatory function, rather than a programme”) is the right hypothesis, Badiou is brilliant at getting across what is at stake in abandoning emancipatory determination: “Sartre said in an interview, which I paraphrase: if the communist hypothesis is not right, if it is not practicable, well, that means that humanity is not a thing in itself, not very different from ants or termites.  What did he mean by that? If competition, the ‘free market’, the sum of little pleasures, and the walls that protect you from the desire of the weak, are the alpha and omega of all collective and private existence, then the human animal is not worth a cent.”  For Badiou the communist hypothesis represents the hope that humanity can overcome subordination, division of labor, and class structure; all that is left after such a hypothesis, then, is animality; in such a scenario the philosopher would have no function.

Like much of Badiou’s work, the book has been criticized as overly abstract, but this abstractness is rooted more in the fact that Badiou is explicitly writing in opposition to what he calls “repetition” than any lack of intellectual rigor or radical commitment.  Badiou’s hope is to posit something else, “a Real woven out of the impossible,” a new communist ideology that can oppose the capitalist order, rather than something like “the reconstruction of the Left” or the “reform of the Socialist Party.”  This is a notoriously hard space to navigate, and it’s probably unfair to fault Badiou for not offering any concrete model for a new emancipatory politics in this thin volume.  If Badiou offers no five-step plan for something new, moreover, it comes across as more of an advantage than not: throughout the text the closer he gets to anything prescriptive, the more he falters (see his suggestive but generally clumsy sections on “the foreigner”).  Indeed, if just for bravely and lucidly reminding his reader of the stakes of any real malaise, his attempt to fight leftist depression and disenchantment is an eminently useful endeavor.

Alain Badiou’s The Meaning of Sarkozy is out now in hardcover, published by Verso.  Badiou gave a somewhat awkward interview on the BBC’s Hardtalk back in March that is now online at google video.