Subtract Thyself

"The true question here is: how is externality with regard to the state to be operationalized? Since the Cultural Revolution signals the failure of the attempt to destroy the state from within, to abolish the state, is the alternative then simply to accept the state as a fact, as the apparatus which takes care of "servicing the goods," and to operate at a distance towards it (bombarding it with prescriptive proclamations and demands)? Or is it, more radically, that we should aim at a subtraction from the hegemonic field which, simultaneously, violently intervenes into this field, reducing it to its occluded minimal difference? Such a subtraction is extremely violent, even more violent than destruction/purification: it is reduction to the minimal difference of part(s)/no-part, 1 and 0, groups and the proletariat. It is not only a subtraction of the subject from the hegemonic field, but a subtraction which violently affects the field itself, laying bare its true coordinates. Such a subtraction does not add a third position to the two positions whose tension characterizes the hegemonic field (so that we now have, along with liberalism and fundamentalism, a radical Leftist emancipatory politics). The third term rather "denaturalizes" the whole hegemonic field, bringing out the underlying complicity of the opposed poles that constitute it...

...Badiou's "subtraction," like Hegel's Aufhebung, contains three different layers of meaning: (1) to withdraw, disconnect; (2) to reduce the complexity of a situation to its minimal difference; (3) to destroy the existing order. As in Hegel, the solution is not to differentiate the three meanings (eventually proposing a specific term for each of them), but to grasp subtraction as the unity of its three dimensions: one should withdraw from being immersed in a situation in such a way that the withdrawal renders visible the "minimal difference" sustaining the situation's multiplicity, and thereby causes its disintegration, just as the withdrawal of a single card from a house of cards causing the collapse of the entire edifice."

-Slavoj Zizek First as Tragedy, Then as Farce p. 128