Abstract

This paper discusses the significance of violence in Alain Badiou’s concept of emancipatory politics. In literatures that affirm revolutionary ideas, violence is often justified as a legitimate form of resistance. This for example was explained by Fanon and Marx. There is a need to carefully study violence as a modality of resistance for two reasons. First, the discourse on violence as a modality of resistance must position itself away from the defensive side of the political spectrum. Its revolutionary and liberating possibility has been undermined as it is assumed, rather than argued, by dominant discourse as fundamentally unacceptable. A discourse on violence which is positive in nature must be articulated not only for the purpose of defending and rescuing such a revolutionary means from all the vilifying campaigns of contemporary reaction, but most of all to posit violence, borrowing from Badiou’s emancipatory politics, as a consequence of a positive or affirmative revolutionary creative act. Second, any affirmation of violence as a modality of resistance must not be confused with an absolution from political responsibility. Violence needs to recognize its own limits so as not to commit the grave historical error with finally identifying itself with terror and defeating its own emancipatory goals. Consciously minding violence’s restrictions renders such a modality of resistance not only effective but above all a powerful condition for the construction of the New.