Polemics

by Alain Badiou, Steve Corcoran (Translator), Bruno Bosteels (Translator)

Following on from Alain Badiou’s acclaimed works Ethics and Metapolitics , Polemics is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution.

With the critical insight and polemical bravura for which he is renowned, Badiou considers the relationships between language, judgment and propaganda—and shows how propaganda has become the dominant force. Both wittily and profoundly, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Theory

339 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Alain Badiou, Ph.D., born in Rabat, Morocco in 1937, holds the Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School EGS. Alain Badiou was a student at the École Normale Supérieure in the 1950s. He taught at the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) from 1969 until 1999, when he returned to ENS as the Chair of the philosophy department. He continues to teach a popular seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, on topics ranging from the great 'antiphilosophers' (Saint-Paul, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Lacan) to the major conceptual innovations of the twentieth century. Much of Badiou's life has been shaped by his dedication to the consequences of the May 1968 revolt in Paris. Long a leading member of Union des jeunesses communistes de France (marxistes-léninistes), he remains with Sylvain Lazarus and Natacha Michel at the center of L'Organisation Politique, a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). He is the author of several successful novels and plays as well as more than a dozen philosophical works.

Trained as a mathematician, Alain Badiou is one of the most original French philosophers today. Influenced by Plato, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, he is an outspoken critic of both the analytic as well as the postmodern schools of thoughts. His philosophy seeks to expose and make sense of the potential of radical innovation (revolution, invention, transfiguration) in every situation.

Reviews

[Ian "Marvin" Graye]

Pending a review:

"What kind of philosopher would declare that a love affair is a route to philosophical truth? A French one."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...

And ain't it the truth!

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like much modern philosophy, this collection is sometimes illuminating and sometimes annoying. There is much too much on the topic of the word Jew. Yes, the word. It’s philosophy after all.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of this is pretty "inside baseball" w/r/t some French political/philosophical squabbles. To me, that was fun.

But what you also get is Badiou at his funniest and most withering. The essay about The Sycophant is just brutal. The essay about the many valences of the Islamic Headscarf Law in France is a particular favorite. Again, it is bitingly funny, but also effectively disembowels the various "justifications" for the law.

Other standouts (for me): The appreciation of the documentary _Local Angel_, which I need to track down and watch. Meditations upon various US military interventions. (One of these in particular left me pretty conflicted. Buy me a beer and we can chat about it sometime. Luckily I'm under no obligation to agree with AB all the time. Still, he's probably right.)

Plus you get his meditations upon the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution in China. If you're someone (like me) who's been curious why he continues to (kind of) identify as a Maoist, that's some interesting context. (I need to find a somewhat evenhanded history of 20th-century China. Does such a thing exist?)

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Badiou tries his hand at bog-standard political commentary, taking a stand against the so-called "War on Terror," parliamentary democracy, and the Israeli state. One could almost commend him for his principled stance against Islamophobia, except that, in his discussion on the banning of the veil, he quickly tips into his (sexual) conservatism (not that he doesn't have a point regarding capitalism's selling of sex, but it comes at the expense of a more sustained account of the French state's imposition of secularism.). Otherwise, we return to some familiar haunts: Saint Paul's universalism, the Paris Commune, the Cultural Revolution, but he simply doesn't have anything new to say—under the aegis of his mathematical ontology, it is simply the appearance of "worker-being" (as a class) that the Commune names.

[Biaru · Rating 1 out of 5]

I am giving this a one star because most of the essays went over my head and there is too much of an emphasis placed on the philosophical and sociological significance of the word "jew" to the point where a majority book just focusses on that. I was promised a broad range of issues and was left disappointed. Maybe I will return to this in the future but didn't really enjoy it

[Uthayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

best critique of the hijab ban I have ever read.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is very true to its name.