Badiou, Haussmann and Saint-Simon: Opening spaces for the state and planning between ‘post-politics’ and urban insurgencies

Abstract

The post-political literature – which equates ‘the political’ with insurgencies directed against the state – has only limited relevance for planning, focused as it is on the ways in which conflict is displaced from the functioning of the state apparatus. The post-political literature has however neglected a significant change in Alain Badiou’s conceptualisation of the relation between the political and the state: the introduction of a political subject which acts from the within the state – what he calls the state revolutionary. This figure, which makes ‘evental’ planning possible, is fleshed out through a Saint-Simonian reading of Haussmann’s planning practice in his first years as Prefect of the Seine.