Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin is presented as a figure whose significance lies in a set of unresolved tensions: the revolutionary as bearer of an impersonal truth, the materialist whose own position exposes a limit within materialist explanation, and the political strategist claimed by rival accounts of the relation between economy and revolution. Rather than tracing a life chronologically, the discussion tests what Lenin can mean for debates about consciousness, organization, and the fate of revolutionary action after it takes power.

Revolutionary identity and the body of truth

The discussion links the hysterical body to the figure of the revolutionary witness. In hysterical conversion, the body is described as invaded and taken over by a truth: its immediate organic reality recedes, while physical symptoms become a surface on which unconscious truth is inscribed. The body is no longer simply an individual possession; it functions as a medium through which something impersonal speaks.

That account is brought into contact with the words Joseph Stalin delivered at Lenin’s funeral, presenting communists as made of a special substance. The comparison does not make this Stalin’s own description of Lenin, still less a statement attributed to Lenin himself. Instead, Lenin’s funeral supplies the occasion for an image of communist identity in which the individual body is transfigured into a bearer of political truth. The claim’s force lies in its impersonality: the communist matters not as a collection of private qualities but as the material support of a truth said to exceed the individual.

This image also marks a danger. If the revolutionary’s authority derives from embodying a truth that is not personal, the body may be treated as though ordinary individual particularity no longer counts. The analogy with hysteria makes that transformation legible as a taking-over, not merely as a voluntary declaration of belief. Lenin consequently becomes the point around which a question about revolutionary subjectivity gathers: what kind of person can bear a universal political truth, and what happens when the person is made to appear only as its vessel?

Materialism and the problem of the subject

Lenin’s materialism is invoked through the criticism of the formula that everything is matter. In the account of Materialism and Empiriocriticism, that formula is said to rely on a constitutive exception: the subject whose mind is supposed to reflect matter occupies a position that the formula cannot straightforwardly include. The problem is not simply that consciousness has not yet been explained. It is that an apparently complete materialist picture quietly depends on an enunciating subject standing apart from the picture it describes.

The alternative proposed is not to exempt consciousness from matter, but to reject the claim that reality forms a fully closed totality. A materialism able to account for immaterial phenomena must allow that there is nothing outside matter while also refusing to treat matter as a completely bounded whole. This distinction makes the critique of Lenin’s formula part of a wider argument for nonreductive materialism: consciousness does not have to be installed as an extra substance, but neither can it be erased by declaring the material account complete.

A related example exposes the fantasy of total physical knowledge. David Chalmers argues that even exhaustive knowledge of the universe’s physical configuration and history would not yield conscious experience. The book regards the imagined exhaustive inventory itself as nonsensical, because a totality with no remainder would leave no place for subjectivity. Nikolai Bukharin’s hypothetical claim that complete knowledge of physical reality would allow the precise prediction of a revolution is presented as the determinist counterpart to this mistake. Lenin’s importance here is therefore not that the argument assigns him Bukharin’s proposition, but that Lenin’s materialist formulation helps stage the question of whether a materialism can acknowledge its own limit without abandoning material explanation.

Economy, political intervention, and the dispute over Lenin

Lenin is also associated with a double rejection: both economism, which treats economic processes as sufficient in themselves, and a version of pure politics that abandons the economy as a field of struggle. The proposed response is deliberately two-sided. The economy is the decisive domain in which the spell of global capitalism must be broken, but intervention there must be political rather than a passive fascination with economic functioning. Economic necessity cannot by itself produce emancipation; nor can political action become effective by treating economic relations as irrelevant.

This position challenges the easy radicalism of generalized anticapitalism. A film or public critique may denounce corporations and the pursuit of profit while still trusting that democratic institutions, or the honest democratic public, can correct the system. In that scenario, the criticism leaves intact the assumption that democratic form is a sufficient answer to capitalism. The argument instead identifies a split on the Left: some withdraw from economic struggle in favor of politics understood as autonomous, while others analyze the global economy in ways that foreclose political intervention. Lenin is recalled as a resource for refusing that choice between economic reduction and political abstraction.

The account nevertheless presents Lenin as internally divided across distinct works and subsequent readings. In What Is to Be Done?, the proposition that socialist-revolutionary consciousness must be brought to the working class from outside breaks with what is described as Marx’s alleged economism and asserts the autonomy of the Political. By contrast, The State and Revolution is associated with Lenin’s interest in modern centralized industry and in reorganizing the economy and state apparatus through depoliticized means. The contrast makes it impossible to treat Lenin as a single, uncomplicated authorization for either political autonomy or economic transformation.

Revolutionary sequence and the problem of building a new order

Alain Badiou and Sylvain Lazarus are presented as privileging the Lenin associated with What Is to Be Done? and with the revolutionary sequence that ends in October 1917. In their reading, Leninism loses its central interest once the Bolsheviks take power and attempt to construct a new state. The revolutionary break matters; the patient labor of administering and rebuilding social life afterward is liable to be classified as state policing. This preference sharpens the gap between the event of revolution and the work of sustaining a transformed order.

The book sets that preference against Karl Marx’s insistence that political struggle must be read through economic relations, including the relations liberal discourse marks as natural or unpolitical. A politics that leaves the economy untouched risks turning political freedom into a spectacle separated from the conditions that shape social life. The issue is not whether the revolutionary event matters, but whether fidelity to it can dispense with the difficult institutional and material work that follows. Lenin’s afterlife in this debate is therefore a struggle over which moment of his politics should count: the rupture that enables revolutionary action, or the effort to reorganize the state and economy after the rupture.

The comparison with the Cultural Revolution further complicates any simple celebration of political autonomy. Badiou treats that episode as a major attempt to find new forms of revolutionary action beyond the established party-state, but also as an experience whose impasse revealed how difficult it was to escape that framework. The effort to relaunch revolution and discover new forms of workers’ struggle ended in failure when the general structure of the party-state was maintained in the name of public order and the avoidance of civil war. That ending throws the Lenin dispute into relief: a revolution may expose the limits of the state form without thereby finding a durable way to do without it.

Organization and the Leninist moment

Lenin’s relevance extends beyond the choice between political and economic explanations. In the discussion of Jacques Lacan’s late work, the struggle to organize the psychoanalytic School is identified as a properly Leninist moment. The reference concerns the practical problem of organization: how a collective might be formed without simply reproducing a community founded on a Master or, in its modern capitalist version, on Knowledge.

The prospect of a collective organized around analytic work is described as a difficult one, and the history of psychoanalysis is judged to have failed to realize it. Yet the failure does not make the organizational question disposable. The collective is imagined as existing in a state of emergency, with ordinary social ties suspended rather than assumed to provide an adequate basis for the work. In this setting, Lenin signifies a demand to confront how a political or intellectual commitment takes institutional form. His importance is thus not confined to the seizure of power: it also lies in the unresolved labor of building a collective capable of carrying a project without reducing it either to an authoritative leader or to an impersonal body of established knowledge.