While the events in Tunisia and Egypt can ellicit the sympathies of emancipatory movements and all those who care for human freedom, they do as yet not propose an alternative, only the desire to get rid of authocracy, and achieve the levels of insufficient democracy that we have in the Western world.

Such ‘riots without revolutions’, where people only know what they don’t want, but do not have real alternatives, are typical for ‘intervallic periods’, argues French philosopher Alain Badiou. The following are an imperfect, but still very readable, english translation of a seminar.

Alain Badiou (transcription excerpts):

“A government overthrown by popular violence (and in particular by the young, who spearheaded it) is a rare phenomena for which you must go back thirty years if you want to find a comparable precedent, namely to the Iranian Revolution (1979). Thirty years during which the dominant conviction was that such phenomena were no longer really possible. It declared this in the thesis of “the end of history”. That thesis obviously didn’t mean that nothing more would happen: “the end of history” meant “the end of events in history [l’événementialité historique]“, the end of a moment where the organisation of power could be thrown in favour of, as Trotsky said, “the masses entering on the stage of history”. The normal course of things was the alliance of the market economy and parliamentary democracy, an alliance that was the only tenable norm of the general subjectivity. Such is the meaning of the term “globalisation”: that subjectivity became global subjectivity. Furthermore, this wasn’t incompatible with punitive wars (Iraq, Afghanistan), civil wars (in broken African States), repression of the Palestinian Intifada, &c. So what is fascinating above all else in the Tunisian events is their historicity, they demonstrate that the capacity to create new forms of collective organisation is intact.

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You could think that, seeing recent events in Greece, Iceland, England, Thailand (the coloured shirts), the hunger riots in Africa, the considerable workers’ riots in China. Also in France, there is something like a pre-riot tension; through phenomena like the factory occupations, people are tending towards accepting riots.

To explain there is of course the systemic crisis of capitalism that became visible two or three years ago (and is far from finished) with its procession of social impasse, poverty, and the growing feeling that the system is not viable nor as magnificent as was previously said; the vacuity of political regimes has become manifest, service to the economic system is their only purpose (the “save the banks” episode was particularly demonstrative), which contributes greatly to their discrediting. In the same period, and precisely because they are the operators of systemic survival, states have taken dramatically reactionary measures in more and more areas (railways, post, schools, hospitals…).

I’d like to try and situate these phenomena in the framework of a historical periodisation. In my opinion, the rioters’ disposition arises in intervallic periods [périodes intervallaires]. What is an intervallic period? There is a sequence in which revolutionary logic is clarified and where it explicitly presents itself as an alternative, succeeded by an intervallic period where the revolutionary idea has not been passed on to anyone [déshérence], and in which it hasn’t yet been taken up, a new alternative disposition has not yet been built. In line with such periods the reactionaries can say, precisely because the alternative is impaired, that things have taken their natural course. Characteristically, this is what happened in 1815 with the restorers of the Holy Alliance. In intervallic periods, discontent exists but it has no structures, it can only draw power from a shared idea. It’s power is essentially negative (“make it go away”). This is why the form of mass collective action in an intervallic period is the riot. Take the period 1820-1850: it was a grand period of riots (1830, 1848, the revolt of the Lyonnais Canuts); but it doesn’t mean they were sterile, they were haphazard [aveugle] but very fertile. That period sorts out the great global political orientations that were the hinge [vertébré] of the next century. Marx says it best: the French workers’ movement was one of the source of his thought (beside German philosophy and English political economy).

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The particular problem of the riot, in as much as it calls state power into question, is that it exposes the state to political change (the possibility of its collapse), but it doesn’t embody this change: what is going to change in the state is not prefigured in the riot. This is the major difference with a revolution, which in itself proposes an alternative. That is the reason why, invariably, rioters have complained that a new regime is identical to an old one (it’s prototype, after the fall of Napolean III, is the constitution on 4 September of a regime made up of the old political staff). I have described to you how the party, of the type [concept] that was created by the RSDLP then by the Bolsheviks, is a structure explicitly designed to constitute itself as an alternative power in place of the state. When the figure of the rioter becomes a political figure, i.e. when it has in itself the political body that it needs and recourse to an inveterate politics [aux vieux chevaux de la politique] becomes useless, we can say that that moment there is the end of the intervallic period.

To return to the Tunisian riot, it is very likely that it is itself going to continue – and divide itself – by proclaiming that the figure of power that it will put in place it is so disconnected from the popular movement that it no longer wants it. On what criteria, then, can we evaluate the riot? In the first place, the criteria must have a definite empathy towards the riot, this is an absolutely necessary condition. It’s negative power is recognised, a lamentable [honni] power that vanishes [effrondre] fully into its own image. But what is affirmed?

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What would genuine change be? It would be a break with the west, a “dewesternisation”, and would take the form of an exclusion. A dream, you are thinking; but it is precisely a dream typical of an intervallic period like ours.

If there were a different evolution than the evolution toward Western inclusion, what could that attest to? No formal response can be given here. We can simply say there is nothing expected from the analysis of the state’s process which, through long and torturous necessity, will eventually result in elections. What is required is an patient and careful inquiry among the people, in search of that which, after an inevitable process of division (because it is always the Two that carries a truth, and not the One) will be carried by a fraction of the movement, namely: declarations [des énoncés]. What is stated can by no means be resolved within Western inclusion. If they are there, these declarations, they will be easily recognisable. It is under the condition of these new declarations that the development of the organisation of figures of collective action can be conceived.

We return, to conclude, to empathy. The lesson to draw from the Tunisian events, the minimal lesson, is that what appears as unfailing stable can itself in the end collapse. And that is reassuring [plaisir], very reassuring [plaisir].”