Who The Fuck is Sylvain Lazarus?

A Breezy Introduction to a Fuckin' Legend

Ever feel like left wing politics doesn’t go anywhere? Ever feel like things get exciting for a bit then dissipate? Ever feel like you are living in the ruins of a utopic dream where all is left are the worn and empty halls of a once great cathedral? If so you probably play too much Dark Souls, but also suffer from left wing melancholy. The two often go together. Apart from Walter Benjamin, whose philosophy mostly consists of poking around in revolutionary rubble with a stick, radical theory doesn’t always do a good job of thinking about this. Either failure is terminal (‘whoops, all ideology, didn’t realize absolute spirit this time!’), or it’s time to become a liberal. But what if there was a third, secret, option?

Enter: Sylvain Lazarus. In recent years a handful of terminally online sickos – myself included -have begun reading Lazarus. This, naturally, might lead to the following questions: who the fuck is Sylvain Lazarus? and why should I read him? Aren’t we all a bit tired of French guys with theoretical systems? Well, if you want an answer to these questions you should read on. In the tradition of one of the greatest philosophy posts of all time – ‘Who the Fuck is Jacques Rancière?’ – I proudly present ‘Who the Fuck is Sylvain Lazarus?’ First as tragedy, then as farce.

Lazarus is a French political theorist, anthropologist and sociologist. Except he hates all of those disciplines and thinks they’re full of little shits. He’s also a pal of the first guy to ever experience an event – Alain Badiou – and they founded L’Organisation Politique (literally ‘the political organization’) in 1985.

For Lazarus politics is really about the fact that people think. He asks what is the “thought of politics” and how you can “think politics.” It turns out if you want to think politics properly you need to disentangle it from other disciplines: economics, history and especially sociology. Political science, you see, is the gathering of different methodological tools from disciplines obsessed with externalities and applying them to the one domain in which people free themselves from externalities. In order to see that politics is about people’s thought Lazarus erects a complex yet fascinating system. I’ve boiled it down to its three spiciest and most important components below.

1.     The Two Statements

Right at the heart of Lazarus’ work are what is fearsomely called ‘the two statements’. Here they are:

1)     People Think

2)     Thought is a relation of the real

We have already heard and will hear plenty about (1). Much of Lazarus’ work returns to this phrase. But what about (2)? What’s going on with this ‘of’ (there’s a real philosophy question if ever there was one). First, we need to know that Lazarus hates all these social science dweebs and their objective total science of the social. Durkheim? More like dick slime. Levi-Strauss? More like fuckin-grouse. You get the idea. So Lazarus wants the thought of politics to stand on its own, outside a discourse grasping for the objective in social and political relations. That’s the motivation.

You see social science discourse doesn’t think people think. It rarely says people don’t think, but rather it claims that science, and only science, thinks. While we tend to think in terms of causation and conditions – the kind of scientistic discourse Lazarus opposes – such thinking also makes it hard to articulate our own agency or the agency of those who make history. Everyone’s a social scientist until it comes time to explain their own thoughts and actions and then it turns out they’re the fucking only unconditioned object in the entire fucking universe. The problem with social science is that it cannot be the case that only science thinks, hence: people think.

But what does ‘thought is a relation of the real’ mean?  Here’s a typical Lazarus explanation:

“the relation of the real is the relation in which the real is not a relation of the object. If the real is necessary to the existence of thought it is not in the sense of the real being the object of thought or of claiming that thought can only be of the real. The relation of thought and of the real proposed here is different in that the real to which I refer erupts into thought as the which will be at stake and in question, for thought to think.” – Anthropology of the Name

What the actual fuck. Here’s the idiot’s (that’s us!) guide: there is a subjectivist thought in which the thought on its own terms is what matters most, this thought is part of the world, partakes in the world, without belong to the domain of objective study. It is a relation of the real – partakes in the world - but not a relation to the world.

All this is baffling in the extreme, but let’s hear this madman out: thinking in such terms allows us to see what was valuable in past endeavors of human emancipation. Some successful movements for human emancipation eventually regressed or gave way to horrors. Some stabilized into a set of liberal norms that hide other oppressions. Lazarus’ strange thought asks us to not locate such moments in a history of progress or failure, but to try and understand emancipatory moments on their own terms. Sometimes they simply have given all they have to give. This frees us from both telos and cynicism. To understand this more we need to turn to Lazarus’ account of what he calls ‘modes of politics’.

2.     Politics is Sequential and Rare

Lazarus doesn’t deny that history, society, and economics determine aspects of political life. It’s just that he’s only interested in the kind of politics that escapes those factors. He’s interested in what he calls politics in interiority, which he sometimes calls politics ‘at a distance from the state’, compared to politics in exteriority, or politics ‘in the space of the state’. Politics in exteriority is the shit we tend to think of when we use the word ‘politics’ normally: ‘T.V. makes you dumb’; ‘it’s the economy, stupid’; ‘why do people vote against their own interests’; ‘why should people who don’t understand tax law get to vote’; ‘why do men mistake their servitude for their salvation’; ‘the proletariat as the holders of no place in capitalism are the only ones who can change it’; ‘don’t you know that Robert Axelrod’s 1984 book Evolution of Cooperation shows that a tit for tat game theoretical model is a stable state solution and thus the basis for civil and political society and attempts to theorize politics outside of this model are nothing more than navel gazing and have no place at my CIA funded research center!’.  It’s everything that happens between the student union and the parliament floor, by way of the Political Science and Economics departments of the world.

Lazarus doesn’t care about this mode of politics. It is much discussed by everyone else, and everyone else is a fucking nerd. What’s important is that this view does not cover the entirety of politics. Lazarus cares about politics in interiority (I already told you that, remember?), which we can analyze by its “mode.”  Allow him to elaborate:

“I propose the category of mode of politics, maintaining that non-statist politics, that is, non-historicist politics, is uncommon, sequential, and identified by what I call its mode: a mode of politics is the relation of a politics to its thought, the bringing to light of its specific categories that permit an identification of the subjective on its own basis. Politics does not have to be conceived by way of a hypothetical object, the content of which is the state and power. A political sequence in interiority creates its categories, its theorists, its sites.” – Lenin and the Party

For Lazarus each mode of politics in interiority is singular. Rather than a grand tradition of revolutionary thought the stretches from the French Revolution to today, Lazarus will instead argue that the concept of revolution is a unique feature of the mode of politics associated with the French revolution. Lazarus identifies several modes of politics: the French revolution, Bolshevik party politics, the CCP at war. Each mode is unique, identifies a unique thought and exhausts itself. The mode closes and its categories can no longer mark politics in interiority.

By now every 24 year-old with a Dragonball Z avatar has the same furious objection: what about the Russian revolution? That was certainly a revolution, but Lazarus is looking for what marks it out as unique and singular, and as “politics in interiority.” That’s not the category of revolution – if that’s all it was there wouldn’t be anything new about the Russian Revolution. What was new was its introduction of the party as revolutionary. So Lazarus says that there was a specifically Bolshevik mode of politics running from 1902 – the year Lenin published What is to Be Done? – to 1917, the year the Bolsheviks seize power. This politics is not one where revolution is unique but one where the party as revolutionary is unique. Which consequently means that simply returning to the party might be a way for, let’s say, socialists to gain some power in America, but it’s not some kind of general solution for radical, emancipatory politics – in fact, “general solutions” and “politics in interiority” don’t get along too well at all.

At this point either you or every 24-year-old with a Dragonball Z avatar (or both) is grimacing at his screen and shouting, “if the modes are subjectivist and singular, why are we fucking talking about them?” Although a mode becomes exhausted, it can still be investigated, and its resources used both for theoretical investigations and future politics. This is what Lazarus calls “the method of saturation”. Like some kind of revolutionary Gordon Ramsay, it’s all about how you handle the produce:

“I term the ‘method of saturation’ the examination from within a body of work or a thought of the lapsing of one of its founding categories. It is a matter of interrogating the work from the standpoint of the lapsing of the category and of re-identifying it in this new conjuncture.” – Anthropology of the Name

You might think Lazarus only cares about the grand moments of politics, that his modes privilege extraordinary situations of rupture or newness. You might object that his people doing the thinking are figures like Lenin and Mao – hardly the masses or even the people. Good point, you fucking got ‘im.

Except not really. For Lazarus politics in interiority is also about what he calls “problematic words.” What does this mean? Let’s look at another example: factory workers in France in the 1980s.

See, in 1980s France there was this big dispute because a lot of workers were now immigrants, and when they wanted rights, or some control of their lives on the factory floor, some fuckers (including the Socialist Party fuckers who got elected) said “oh but not you’re not really workers with the rights and importance of workers you are immigrants” and then they would say “no we are workers you stupid snail eating fucks.” At this point you might be asking yourself, “what the hell is a worker anyway”? Well, that’s when the word worker became a “problematic word”, a word whose meaning is disputed by the forces of the state on the one hand, and people’s thought on the other. Lazarus puts it a little more eloquently when he writes:

“deciding as to the existence of the word – thus forbidding its disappearance, subjectivating it as what permits a transformation in consciousness as those who pronounce it – is exactly what I mean by people think” – Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?

So not just the grand shit, but also some more of the, as the French say, quotidian shit too (pretty sure that means “everyday life” in French or some shit).

3.     Time Does Not Exist

Badiou - the guy we were all supposed to stop reading in 2015 - says that Lazarus’ theory of time is notoriously difficult. Well Monsieur Badiou, the way I see it the theory is actually pretty fucking simple: time does not exist. Lazarus, in expounding his theory of politics calls for the abolition of time. Here’s the short version of the argument: politics is about the emergence of people’s thought, the fact that they think. For it to be politics in interiority it can’t be beholden to anything outside of itself, include temporality. We always say “well of course this happened during that revolution because people didn’t have this concept yet/the conditions hadn’t matured”, This puts thought under a condition of temporality. But also, clearly politics in interiority is about the possible, the new: new subjectivities, new thoughts, etc. The man himself says as much:

“the category “possible” is the category through which thought constitutes itself. For a situation to be understood by its possibles is a reversal compared to historicist or scientific thought, for which it is the precise investigation of what is, in terms of determinism, cause or law, that makes it possible to respond to the question of what could be.” – Worker’s Anthropology and Factory Inquiry

Now we’re getting into the long version of the argument, so strap the fuck in. See Lazarus realizes it’s hard to square possibility and temporality without reverting to ‘progressive’ history – i.e. something like Hegel’s little story about the development of freedom in The Philosophy of History (you know, the book that says Africans don’t have history or thought) – which would put the possible always in the future.

At this point we need to make a little detour. Lazarus develops his hatred of time via a discussion of historian Marc Bloch. Everybody loves Marc Bloch. And for good reason. Bloch was a historian committed to seeing his subjects as persons with, well, subjectivity. He was also a French Resistance fighter to boot, and was executed in 1944 by the Nazis, his last book The Historians Craft incomplete at the time of his death. Rare these days for people to be both martyrs and historians.  

The Historians Craft is simply put, fucking fantastic. But it has this problem. At a crucial moment Bloch is discussing his theory of time. He has the obvious, unobjectionable sentence:

“only the future has contingency. The past is something already given which leaves no room for possibility” – The Historians Craft

This sentence is a real fucking doozy, however. It actually links the past and the present and suggests both are without contingency – it’s Augustine’s old conundrum, so you know it must be important – as the past and the present can’t be clearly distinguished in Bloch. So no contingency in the present. But by definition the future is always to come, to arrive. Its moment never arrives and thus the possible is, in fact, the impossible. We could take a Derridan route here and just wallow in the difficulty of concepts, but Lazarus has a different approach: abolish time. Lazarus moves from a temporal analysis to a spatial one, going to “sites” rather than temporal events in the past.

All of this is bonkers, and if you’re a phenomenologist you’re probably having your lifeworld rocked right now. If you’re a physicist, you probably think time doesn’t exist anyway. Any astute reader (that’s you) might be wondering about these modes and their sequences from earlier. Doesn’t this all imply temporality? Lazarus objects:

“Sequences are the lapses of time in which a mode is at work. That is to say, it is the lapse of time in which a specific invention of a politics takes place. Or, better yet, in which what emerges is the absolutely singular and unprecedented presence of something which has never before been and which will never again occur, take place. This is what I have called a historic mode in interiority, a term which allows us to conceptualize and describe a mode in terms of sequencing (revolutionary mode, Bolshevik mode, etc.) and to trace out their boundaries and limits” [translation modified] – Subjective Singularities

This is a little confusing, I have two speculative guesses as to what this means: 1) the dates in the modes mark the absence of time not its continuation 2) you can order something without implying a temporal aspect.

But look, I don’t really know. All this shit is, to be blunt, pretty fucking wild. What it helps capture, however, is the vicissitudes of politics, especially self-emancipation. A long as fuck time ago, Immanuel Kant asked what enlightenment was and decided that it was when one becomes free of their self-incurred immaturity. But for it to work you had to inch yourself out of this immaturity, if anyone did it for you it wouldn’t count. Shit. So somehow there has to be a moment or possibility of freedom in every state of unfreedom, a moment of development from all stasis. Precisely what politics in exteriority denies. And although it’s true that we are often slaves to conditions and patterns outside our control, there are also moments where everything changes and these moments are not well explained by the models of determination and continuity. It also, as discussed in section uno, allows us to see emancipatory politics as neither a history of everything becoming liberalism nor total failure, at the expense of the concept of history itself.

So great. Here’s the problem: this account means that to properly account for politics there’s a point where theory stops and actions begins. Sounding a little familiar? Yeah, that’s right, it’s in Karl Marx too, and it’s what connects Lazarus to a radical tradition. But furthermore, it’s not some vulgar division between action and thought. The claim, after all, is that people think. Every mode of politics for Lazarus has its theoreticians - for example Saint-Just or Lenin –  so the objection really is to the idea that thought from outside could be a guide to action. No philosophical system or economic determinants will be able to guide or predict action in such a moment. Lazarus’s account of politics is fascinating, but it will never be truly absorbed by academia because it ends the academy’s deep belief that problems are rectified in journals and op-eds. Reading Lenin with the comrades is still, however, cool as fuck.

Further Reading:

i)                The Big Man Himself

Lazarus has six or so things translated into English. You should learn French (not that I have). In the meantime, here are his five or maybe six works – one book, four essays and one anonymous essay almost certainly penned by him:

1.    The Dialectical Mode (2005) – article, anonymous but most likely Lazarus

2. Lenin and the Party (2007) – chapter in edited collection, good on modes

3. A France for All (2015)— newspaper article written with Badiou and Michel in 1997, defending the sans-papiers.

4. Anthropology of the Name (2015) – book, dense and best read with friends

5.    Can Politics be Thought in Interiority? (2016) – article, start here

6.    Worker’s Anthropology and Factory Inquiry (2019) – article, also good place to start

7.    Subjective Singularities (2022) – article, weird translation

ii)              Other Cunts

1.     Who has written about Lazarus? Well for starters me, obviously. Apart from the above screed you can read me on Lazarus’ idea of problematic words here and on his theory of temporality here and here. I have tried to think through applying Lazarus to ecopolitics here, which I was interviewed about here. I have a conference paper on his theory of singularity and his relationship to Foucault here and some more stuff on Foucault and Lazarus here. A nicer version of the above screed, focusing on Lazarus’ two statements appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas blog here. AND FINALLY you can access an entire five week seminar I taught on Anthropology of the Name at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy here.

2.     Asad Haider has written about Lazarus a plenty. You can read ‘Socialist Think’ here and ‘Emancipation and Exhaustion’ here and his essay on the Chinese cultural revolution here. I interviewed Asad last year and we spoke a lot about Lazarus. You can read that here. Negation Magazine - who are publishing a lot of work on Lazarus - interviewed Asad as well. You can read and listen to that here.

3.     Fuckin Alain Badiou has of course written about Lazarus. The essay on Lazarus in Metapolitics slaps, as well the essay ‘philosophy and politics’ in Conditions.  His interview with Peter Hallward at the end of Ethics also has a few moments that really clarify Lazarus.

4.     Michael Neocosmos wrote this huge ass book Thinking Freedom in Africa. It fucking shreds. The first chapters have a lot on Lazarus. He also wrote an entire essay about him here.

5.     Neocosmos’ late mate Ernest Wamba Dia Wamba -RIP King – has also written on Lazarus extensively. Africa in search of a new mode of politics is a banger essay and shows how far the Lazarusian model can go in thinking the possibilities of people’s thought and global politics.

6.     My mate Bryan Doniger wrote an essay on Lazarus, and unlike my stupid bullshit he actually published it in a peer reviewed publication.

7.     “Taylor B”, infamous diagram lover, wrote about Lazarus and the concept of the party in Cosmonaut, where he had testy exchange with Donald Parkinson. All worth reading: here, here and here.

8.     Daniel Tutt has been on this shit for a while. An early blogpost of his can be found here. He also hosted a big symposium on Lazarus which you can watch here.

9.     Gabriel Tupinambá has this whole organization which takes questions of political organization and thought seriously. He does not always reference Lazarus, but Lazarus’ concepts are being used, as seen in this paper here.

10.  Knox Peden – author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology and all-round legend – has a paper on Badiou’s concept of history. Yet in explicating Badiou he discusses Lazarus at great length and explains many of his concepts in detail. It is well worth a read.

11. Cam W. - Editor at Negation Magazine - writes a little bit about Lazarus in his essay “The Premise of Organization”. The essay nicely sets up some of the problems in Marxist theory that Lazarus directly addresses.

12. There appears to be a Serbian contingent of Lazarus devotees. I found this article “Kosovo is the Heart of Serbia’s Power”, which I promise is not as jingoistic as it sounds. It is written by Branka Ćurčić and appears to use Lazarus’ idea of politics at a distance from the state to argue against ethnonationalism.

13. Chloe Cannon wrote a piece for Negation Magazine (who else?) on teleology, Marxism and of course, Lazarus, entitled “Politics at the End of History”. She was interviewed about it here.