The fol­low­ing is Alain Badiou’s full reply to Jean-​Luc Nancy’s “What the Arab peoples sig­nify to us”. With many thanks to Verso Books UK.

Yes, dear Jean-​Luc, the pos­i­tion you adopt in favour of ‘West­ern’ inter­ven­tion in Libya was indeed a sorry sur­prise for me.

Didn’t you notice right from the start the palp­able dif­fer­ence between what is hap­pen­ing in Libya and what is hap­pen­ing else­where? How in both Tunisia and Egypt we really did see massive pop­u­lar gath­er­ings, whereas in Libya there is noth­ing of the kind? An Arabist friend of mind has con­cen­trated in the last few weeks on trans­lat­ing the plac­ards, ban­ners, posters and flags that were such a fea­ture of the Tunisian and Egyp­tian demon­stra­tions: he couldn’t find a single example of these in Libya, not even in Benghazi. One very strik­ing fact about the Libyan ‘rebels’, which I’m sur­prised you didn’t note, is that you don’t see a single woman, whereas in Tunisia and Egypt women are very vis­ible. Didn’t you know that the French and Brit­ish secret ser­vices have been organ­ising the fall of Gad­dafi since last autumn? Aren’t you amazed that, in con­trast to all the other Arab upris­ings, weapons of unknown ori­gin emerged in Libya? That bands of young people imme­di­ately began fir­ing vol­leys in the air, some­thing incon­ceiv­able else­where? Weren’t you struck by the emer­gence of a sup­posed ‘revolu­tion­ary coun­cil’ led by a former accom­plice of Gad­dafi, whereas nowhere else was there any ques­tion of the masses who had risen up appoint­ing some people as a replace­ment government?

Don’t you real­ise how all these details, and many more, chime with the fact that here, and nowhere else, the great powers were called in to sup­port? That such rif­fraff as Sarkozy and Cameron, whose aims are trans­par­ently sor­did, were applauded and wor­shipped — and you sud­denly give them sup­port. Isn’t it self-​evident that Libya provided an entry for these powers, in a situ­ation that else­where totally escaped their con­trol? And that their aim, com­pletely clear and com­pletely clas­sic, was to trans­form a revolu­tion into a war, by put­ting the people out of the run­ning and mak­ing way for arms and armies — for the resources that these powers mono­pol­ise? This pro­cess is going on before your eyes each day, and you approve it? Don’t you see how after the ter­ror from the air, heavy weapons are going to be sup­plied on the ground, along with instruct­ors, armoured vehicles, strategists, advisers and blue hel­mets, and in this way the recon­quest (hope­fully a fit­ful one) of the Arab world by the des­pot­ism of cap­ital and its state ser­vants will recommence?

How can you of all people fall into this trap? How can you accept any kind of ‘res­cue’ mis­sion being entrus­ted to those very people for whom the old situ­ation was the good one, and who abso­lutely want to get back into the game, by for­cible means, from motiv­a­tions of oil and hege­mony? Can you simply accept the ‘human­it­arian’ umbrella, the obscene black­mail­ing in the name of vic­tims? But our armies kill more people in more coun­tries than the local boss Gad­dafi is cap­able of doing in his. What is this trust sud­denly exten­ded to the major butchers of con­tem­por­ary human­ity, to those in charge of the mutil­ated world that we are famil­iar with? Do you believe, can you believe, that they rep­res­ent ‘civil­isa­tion’, that their mon­strous armies can be armies of justice? I am stu­pefied, I must con­fess. I ask myself what good is philo­sophy if it is not imme­di­ately the rad­ical cri­tique of this kind of unre­flect­ing opin­ion, moul­ded by the pro­pa­ganda of regimes such as our own, which pop­u­lar upris­ings in regions stra­tegic for them have put on the defens­ive, and which are seek­ing their revenge.

You say in your text that it will ‘later’ be up to ‘us’ (but who is this ‘us’, if today it includes Sarkozy, Bernard-​Henri Lévy, our bombers and their sup­port­ers?) to make sure that oil and arms deals, and the like, don’t make their return. Why ‘later’? It is now that we have to make sure, by stop­ping the great powers as much as we can from inter­fer­ing in the polit­ical pro­cesses under way in the Arab world. By doing all that is pos­sible so that these powers, for­tu­nately out of the pic­ture for a num­ber of weeks, can­not rein­tro­duce — under the dam­aged name of ‘demo­cracy’ and the moral and human­it­arian pre­texts that have been used ever since the first colo­nial con­quests — oil and other deals, which are quite simply the only deals that these powers and their states are inter­ested in.

Dear Jean-​Luc, in cir­cum­stances of this kind it makes no sense for you or me to go with the grain of the West­ern con­sensus that says: ‘we abso­lutely have to remain in charge of everything hap­pen­ing’. We have to make a stand against the grain, and demon­strate that the real tar­get of West­ern bombers and sol­diers is in no way the wretched Gad­dafi, a former cli­ent of those who are now get­ting rid of him as someone in the way of their higher interests. For the tar­get of the bombers is def­in­itely the pop­u­lar upris­ing in Egypt and the revolu­tion in Tunisia, it is their unex­pec­ted and intol­er­able char­ac­ter, their polit­ical autonomy, in a word: their inde­pend­ence. To oppose the destruct­ive inter­ven­tions of the powers means sup­port­ing the polit­ical inde­pend­ence and the future of these upris­ings and revolu­tions. This is some­thing we can do, and it is an uncon­di­tional imperative.

With friendly greet­ings,
Alain