{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","id":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","uuid":"e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title":"Crowds and Party","normalized_title":"crowdsandparty","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9781781686942","isbns":["9781781686942","9781781686720","9781781687666"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Crowds%20and%20Party","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/e781d2aa-cf12-457c-961d-b44b33fd41fc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":92,"pdf_page":91,"physical_index":91,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dde12700ece0f50504a6575881793c05ebc873ee4a2e7d3fdbbd1dbea46145e4"},"chapter":"CROWDS AND PARTY","content":"The people as a collective subject appear through the disruption of the crowd insofar as there is something about the insurrection that was unimaginable prior to its enactment. The impossible happens, compelling Marx to take a stand: whose side is he on? The subject forces a previously unimaginable interpretation of an event; the crowd doesn’t look like what it had been before. Now it looks like the people. With the appearance of the people as a political subject, the entire situation changes.\n\nHere is the unpredictability of an exciting cause, the people forcing a change of theory and practice. Riotous crowd, available political form, force of the impossible: the political subject impresses itself at the effervescent site of their convergence. Marx responds to this appearance of the people with fidelity. As he says in his letter to Kugelmann, no matter the Commune’s multiple tactical and policy errors, “the present rising in Paris—even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society—is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris.”<sup>52</sup>\n\nMarx nonetheless criticizes the Commune in this same letter. After praising the elasticity, historical initiative, and sacrifice of the Parisians, he chides them, first, for missing the moment when they fail to march on Versailles. He faults them, second, for eliminating the Central Committee of the National Guard and holding elections to institute the Commune.\n\nThe order Marx lists his criticisms is odd, seemingly backwards in that the first is a consequence of the second; the second happened first. Badiou, drawing from Lacan’s discussion of anticipation and certainty in “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,” explains why it is not. Marx is using Versailles’s reaction (or what he imagines Versailles’s reaction would have been) to register the Commune event. Versaille’s reaction validates the hasty or anticipatory move that created the Commune. A subject had acted and Versailles had no choice but to respond. Badiou writes:\n\nMarx judges the Commune to be precipitated—subjectivizing in its political haste—and blames it for not marching onto Versailles. But this is in order to indicate retroactively the nature of the certainty (of victory) of which this haste itself could be the bearer, insofar as it could be deciphered in the other: in the initial disorder and surprise of the inhabitants of Versailles, and in the possibility of changing the lack into reason by a second haste, that of the military offensive against Versailles. The latter would then be finally caught up in the subjective process, that is to say, in a consequent political direction, which is the only validation of the vanishing algebra of the Parisian masses into a consistent subject.<sup>53</sup>\n\nIn other words, to understand an event as the effect of a political subject, Badiou conjoins two operations: subjectivization and the subjective process. We will win. We will be shown to have been right. The certainty of the political subject—we will win— is always too soon, an anticipation of results it cannot guarantee but pursues nonetheless. Precipitous certainty is another name for political will. Rather than an amorphous combination of multiple possibilities, which is just a description of a manifold, the subject is a direction that cuts through this manifold. We find evidence of this direction in the other. The response of the other, its disorder and surprise, indicates the presence of a subject. The other’s response reads the disorder as an effect of a subject. It attributes to this subject a consistency of action, purpose, and will. That the other can do nothing but respond, that it cannot proceed as it had, is the work of the subject. In Badiou’s formulation: “In subjectivization, certainty is anticipated. In the subjective process, consistency is retroactive. To put into consistency the haste of the cause: therein lies the whole enigma of the subject.”<sup>54</sup>\n\n92","previous_page":91,"next_page":93}