It actually doesn't get much better from what I can tell. As opposed to Wilde, who says laws are made for the rich and should be disobeyed if they don't serve the interests of those in crushing poverty, Badiou says, "no one is asked to love a law, simply to obey it." This is after he earlier criticizes "the belief that the French need simply to accept the laws of the us-led world model and all will be well." In other words, he has plenty of issues that would structure a "point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order and what Lacan once called 'the service of wealth,'" but he settles for a sort of ideological unity that is, in some ways separate from the material reality he is trying to critique.
I see your point, but I'm not sure if Badiou is the best advocate. I once had a student who always making snide remarks, seemed to be perpetually amused at his ability to find every idea in the course completely incomprehinsible, but when we were talking about nationalism, imagined communities, etc.his response was actually somewhat astute, if crude: he said that the only way we'd ever get rid of any of that is if we were invaded by aliens from outer space.
The idea of a performative unity is somewhat sensible, but I still would want to know what that unity was. It sounds like a fairly atomistic one from the way he describes it--almost like the reverse of Feuerbach. Still, your point about the coalitions it can create is echoed in his discussion of a community organizing against police repression. But here, it basically requires some fundamental antagonism which is constituted only by the oppressive force for it to remain sutured. I see the lure of the positive unity he tries to imagine--and I respect your attraction to it for the reasons you give--but other than our common humanity, it is objectively untrue that everyone lives in the same world. I guess the question is whether saying that we do is enough to charge a movement towards what he calls the "Communist hypothesis" once again--that it is really about pointing to the way we have deviated from this and the tension this creates: what Gunnar Myrdel, speaking of the Civil Rights movement, called "the suppressed moral conflict" between "the material facts and people's valuations of and beliefs about these facts." This requires an articulation of an ideal in relation to "valuation on specific planes of individual and group living." In other words, one has an ideal which, though you thought it was already a reality, material facts prove it is not being realized in the material conditions on the ground. In a certain way, that is what brought the protesters you mention together: the perception of a common enemy in relation to a proposed ideal.
On this, Badiou slips a bit in discussing his example of community organizing by saying that their demands were, "all demands that are very natural for people who are basically in the same existential situation—people of the same world." But the existential situation they were in wasn't some natural phenomenon that affects everyone equally as some common humanity: it was the use of the repressive state apparatus in a particular situation that made these people see themselves as part of the same world, which is not the same thing as saying there is only one world. I'd also note that this example actually disproves his assessment of why Royal's campaign failed. He claims that it was because they focused on a fear "of the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows nor likes. This 'fear of the fear' is a secondary, derivative emotion, whose content—beyond the sentiment itself—is barely detectable; the Royal camp had no concept of any alliance with the excluded or oppressed; the most it could envisage was to reap the dubious benefits of fear." In other words, the empty proposition of the fear of fear failed on the national level, but it becomes the nodal point for his exemplary form of social organization. I see his point about having the counterpoint of communism as a corrective to the idea of capitalist civilization, yet I'm not sure but that he's trying too hard to reinvent the wheel here.
On the one hand, he begins with the premise that Sarkozy's victory says something about the death of the left in France. But his reading of the completely desperate straits the left in France seems overly pessimistic--and highly influenced by the presumed ascendancy of the US, a notion which seems increasingly tenuous in itself: it may be hegemonically assumed and even juridically mandated in certain respects, but its authority (or at least legitimacy) is at least more questionable than a decade ago. It would be better to ask exactly how Sarkozy was able to make this line stick despite the declining evidence. It would seem his answer is to use fear as a unifying political strategy. Here that might actually be a fairly accurate description of actual US politics, especially in its most paranoid style. On the other hand, while I see the theoretical outlines of what he's advocating, I'm sort of worn out by blanket appeals to unity, at least in and of itself. (though Bono's "One" campaign, which actually discusses poverty and inequality, is not ideal unity either.) I'm viewing this through the lens of the US election, of course, where Obama is the candidate focused on this. As Gary Younge recently observed in relation to this paean in US politics:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080211/younge
"In and of itself, bipartisanship is a goal that is both inarguable and insubstantial. It is treated as a matter of orthodoxy that Americans crave a more bipartisan approach to national politics. But polls show that on issues they care about, just about half want politicians to seek solutions through compromise. Their ambivalence is not surprising. As a means to an end, bipartisanship makes sense. But as an end in itself, it is a hollow notion unless you define who you want to join forces with and why. [. . . .] But the partisanship in Washington that has disillusioned people is in fact "partysanship"--the support not of one idea or program over another but of one party over another. [. . . .] While the Democratic Party's interests may at times coincide with that of the American people, they are clearly not synonymous. The party's raison d'être is to win elections, not to change America. Depending on the time, place and candidate, it may well stand for office but little else. The right understands these limits of electoral politics only too well. Its victories have ended in Washington, but they didn't start there and were not sustained there. The terrible truth about the past seven years is not that the country has been divided but that the wrong side has been winning. The right has fought for its agenda and has never been in doubt about who its enemy is.
It's high time the left did the same. Arguing for policies that eradicate poverty, confront racism and homophobia, tackle economic and gender inequality and corporate excess, normalize the status of millions of undocumented immigrants and address the ballooning prison-industrial complex is about being progressive, not divisive. It does, however, mean recognizing that divisions exist and that to resolve them we have to take sides and fight for our beliefs. Unity is not forged by fiat but by struggle. Candidates can talk about "transcending" race, gender, region and party all they like. But before we can talk sensibly about transcending difference, we must first transform the conditions that give these differences meaning. To get beyond race, for example, we must first get rid of racism. Then every day can be like Martin Luther King Day, and black people won't have to watch from the sidelines."
Badiou's ultimate point seems to be that electoral politics are somewhat useless in actually advancing his hypothesis, yet what he really seems to be crafting is a sort of electoral platform. It is hard, in other words, to see a real distinction between calling for a performative unity on the level of experience, even if it doesn't objectively exist, and a political program which actually tries to bring about that hypothesis. This, of course, wouldn't necessarily be confined to electoral politics. Howard Zinn recently made the argument a bit more clearly and, like Younge, lands up with a less philosophical proposition for action: "Historically, government, whether in the hands of Republicans or Democrats, conservatives or liberals, has failed its responsibilities, until forced to by direct action: sit-ins and Freedom Rides for the rights of black people, strikes and boycotts for the rights of workers, mutinies and desertions of soldiers in order to stop a war. Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens."
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/02/24/7261/
I don't think that Badiou's point is that none of this should happen. His idea of what the Communist Hypothesis entails seems clear:
"that the logic of class—the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collective organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of massive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free association of producers will see it withering away."
His conclusion is that there is a need, "through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground." Yet in calling for a performative unity instead of active mobilization, I think he ultimately rests both too lightly and too heavily on the part of praxis that is always necessary but insufficient, namely the idea that creates the tension with actually existing conditions, the possibility that they can be overcome. Too lightly in that the commitment he proposes is to abstract and airy to mean anything similar to everyone; and too heavily in that he seems to stop short of really advocating a movement around it. He basically wants there to be what Raymond Williams might call a new "structure of feeling," but I don't really see anything all that different in what he proposes. In this, maybe I should take solace in the position Julio seems to be promoting which is basically that Obama is useful in providing a narrative of change that can be appropriated by progressives when he fails to deliver. The downside, of course, is if people who support him come to believe that what he actually delivers is change, and adjust their horizons accordingly.
Sorry if all of this is a bit convoluted. I'm probably trying to negotiate too many historical and national contexts in this discussion. But perhaps that is part of the problem with the proposition that we live in one world, provocative as it may be.
s