Conclusion
The crowd event is the Real that incites the people as a collective, partisan subject. The party is the body that renders the subjectivizing crowd event into a moment in the subjective process of the politicized people. The people as subject is neither crowd nor party but between them, in the overlap of anticipation and retroactive determination with respect to a political process. Lissagaray, Lenin, Marx, and Badiou—from them we see in the Commune the movement of a subject. Their perspective is not reducible to a static place or position. It is instead a consequence of the appearing of the subject to which this perspective responds. More than a stationary moment pregnant with potential yet exhausted in the crowd’s dissipation, the Commune erupts to surprise and mis-assemble the social with the certainty of justice. We see this mis-assembly in the reaction of the other forced to respond, to react, to do things differently from the ways they were done before. As Badiou writes, “There is no subjectivization without anticipation, which in turn can be measured by the subjective process.”<sup>68</sup> It’s the people as political subject that concerns the party. How can it hasten their advance, how can it not stand in their way, how can it inscribe and extend their victories?
More than a body focused on the state, the party is a form for the expression and direction of political will. It concentrates disruption in a process in order to produce political power: these acts are connected; they demonstrate the strength of the collective. It endeavors to arrange the intensity unleashed by the crowd, to keep it present as fervent desire. Ross’s attention to the crowd in the Commune enables her to draw out the opening of collective desire, the lack that maintains it as a desire to desire. This attention rightly prevents us from reducing the Commune to an arrangement of offices or list of edicts, focusing us instead on the disruptive presence of the people where they should not be. At the same time, the Marxist tradition crucially sees the people as a subject and its struggle as enduring. The subject that expresses itself in the Commune event is not the diffusion of creative individuality; dominant power always allows for the carnivalesque. It is rather the people as a political subject manifest in the closure of directed intensity within the revolutionary opening. Because the party looks for them, the people are found. As Badiou writes,
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