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Alain Badiou: a life in writing | Culture | The Guardian

Alain Badiou: a life in writing

'So many people now don't know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure, but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure'
Stuart Jeffries guardian.co.uk, Friday 18 May 2012 22.55 BST

Alain Badiou: 'for love to last, one has to reinvent oneself.' Photograph: Eric Fougre/VIP Images/Corbis

Love, says France's greatest living philosopher, "is not a contract between two narcissists. It's more than that. It's a construction that compels the participants to go beyond narcissism. In order that love lasts one has to reinvent oneself." Alain Badiou, venerable Maoist, 75-year-old soixante-huitard, vituperative excoriator of Sarkozy and Hollande and such a controversial figure in France that when he was profiled in Marianne magazine they used the headline "Badiou: is the star of philosophy a bastard?", smiles at me sweetly across the living room of his Paris flat. "Everybody says love is about finding the person who is right for me and then everything will be fine. But it's not like that. It involves work. An old man tells you this!" In his new book, Badiou writes about his love life. "I have only once in my life given up on a love. It was my first love, and then gradually I became so aware this step had been a mistake I tried to recover that initial love, late, very late the death of the loved one was approaching but with a unique intensity and feeling of necessity." That abandonment and attempt at recovery marked all the philosopher's subsequent love affairs. "There have been dramas and heart-wrenching and doubts, but I have never again abandoned a love. And I feel really assured by the fact that the women I have loved I have loved for always." But isn't such laborious commitment a pointless fuss in this age of ready pleasures and easily disposable lovers? "No! I insist on this that solving the existential problems of love is life's great joy," he says and then looks across the coffee table at his translator, Isabelle Vodoz, with a big, half-ironic grin. "There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise," he adds, popping a biscuit in his mouth and giggling. She giggles, too. "I am not only his translator," she tells me later. Below this sixth-floor apartment, an RER train screeches along the rails out of Denfert-Rochereau station. I think about the distinction Badiou describes in In Praise of Love. "While desire focuses on the other, always in a somewhat fetishist[ic] manner, on particular objects, like breasts, buttocks and cock," writes Badiou, "love focuses on the very being of the other, on the other as it has erupted, fully armed with its being, into my life that is
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consequently disrupted and re-fashioned." In other words love is, in many respects, the opposite of sex. Love, for Badiou, is what follows a deranging chance eruption in one's life. He puts it philosophically: "The absolute contingency of the encounter takes on the appearance of destiny. The declaration of love marks the transition from chance to destiny and that's why it is so perilous and so burdened with a kind of horrifying stage fright." Love's work consists in conquering that fright. Badiou cites Mallarm, who saw poetry as "chance defeated word by word". A loving relationship is similar. "In love, fidelity signifies this extended victory: the randomness of an encounter defeated day after day through the invention of what will endure," writes Badiou. But this encomium to creative fidelity surely shows Badiou to be a man out of his time. "In Paris now half of couples don't stay together more than five years," he says. "I think it's sad because I don't think many of these people know the joy of love. They know sexual pleasure but we all know what Lacan said about sexual pleasure." Indeed. Jacques Lacan argued that sexual relationships don't exist. (Badiou will shortly publish a book of conversations between Lacan and his biographer, Elisabeth Roudinesco.) What is real is narcissistic, Lacan suggested, what binds imaginary. "To an extent, I agree with him. If you limit yourself to sexual pleasure it's narcissistic. You don't connect with the other, you take what pleasure you want from them." But wasn't the rampant hedonism unleashed during Paris's May 1968 vnements, in which Badiou participated, all about libidinal liberation from social constraint? How can he, of all people, hymn bourgeois notions such as commitment and conjugal felicity? "Well, I absolutely agree that sex needs to be freed from morality. I'm not going to speak against the freedom to experiment sexually like some old arse" "un vieux connard" "but when you liberate sexuality, you don't solve the problems of love. That's why I propose a new philosophy of love, wherein you can't avoid problems or working to solve them." But, he argues, avoiding love's problems is just what we do in our risk-averse, commitment-phobic society. Badiou was struck by publicity slogans for French online dating site Metic such as "Get perfect love without suffering" or "Be in love without falling in love". "For me these posters destroy the poetry of existence. They try to suppress the adventure of love. Their idea is you calculate who has the same tastes, the same fantasies, the same holidays, wants the same number of children. Metic try to go back to organised marriages not by parents but by the lovers themselves." Aren't they meeting a demand? "Sure. Everybody wants a contract that guarantees them against risk. Love isn't like that. You can't buy a lover. Sex, yes, but not a lover." For Badiou, love is becoming a consumer product like everything else. The French antiglobalisation campaigner Jos Bov once wrote a book entitled Le Monde n'est pas une Marchandise (The World Isn't a Commodity). Badiou's book is, in a sense, its sequel and could have been entitled L'Amour n'est pas une Marchandise non plus (Love Isn't a Commodity Either). Surely that makes him an old romantic? "I think that romanticism is a reaction against classicism. Romanticism exalted love against classical arranged marriages hence l'amour fou, antisocial love. In that sense I'm neither romantic nor classic. My approach is that love is both an encounter and a construction. You have to resolve the problems in love live together or not, to have a child or not, what one does in the evening." This new book on love is an application of Badiou's singular philosophy of the subject and his outr conception of truth set out in incredibly forbidding books steeped in mathematics and deploying ZermeloFraenkel set theory, such as Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. These books have led him to be hailed as a great philosopher. "A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us," Slavoj !i"ek has written.
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Badiou's philosophy of the subject is an extrapolation of Sartre's existentialist slogan "Existence precedes essence" and incorporates a communist hypothesis that Althusser might have liked. It's also a rebuke to postwar and often postmodern French philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault with whom he argued and all of whom he has outlived. What is a subject for Badiou? "Simone de Beauvoir wrote that you are not born a woman, you become one. I would say you are not a subject or human being, you become one. You become a subject to the extent to which you can respond to events. For me personally, I responded to the events of '68, I accepted my romantic destiny, became interested in mathematics all these chance events made me what I am." How does truth come into all this? "You discover truth in your response to the event. Truth is a construction after the event. The example of love is the clearest. It starts with an encounter that's not calculable but afterwards you realise what it was. The same with science: you discover something unexpected mountains on the moon, say and afterwards there is mathematical work to give it sense. That is a process of truth because in that subjective experience there is a certain universal value. It is a truth procedure because it leads from subjective experience and chance to universal value." Badiou's very odd, post-existentialist, heretically Marxist and defiantly antiparliamentary conception of politics has a similar trajectory. "Real politics is that which gives enthusiasm," he says. "Love and politics are the two great figures of social engagement. Politics is enthusiasm with a collective; with love, two people. So love is the minimal form of communism." He defines his "real politics" in opposition to what he calls "parliamentary cretinism". His politics starts with subjective experience, involves a truth procedure and ends, fingers crossed, in a communist society. Why? "It's necessary to invent a politics that is not identical with power. Real politics is to engage to resolve problems within a collective with enthusiasm. It's not simply to delegate problems to the professionals. Love is like politics in that it's not a professional affair. There are no professionals in love, and none in real politics." Badiou hasn't voted since 1968, a habit he didn't break in France's recent presidential election. But he says he is writing a book about politics, a sequel to his 2007 succs de scandale De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (The Meaning of Sarkozy), in which he notoriously called the last French president "rat man" for playing on public concerns about crime and immigration. Earlier this month he wrote a marvellously vituperative column for Le Monde that has been trending across the francophone world. Sarkozy and Marine Le Pen, he maintained, weren't the only politicians responsible for "the rise of rampant fascism" in France. He argued that there was a Socialist party tradition of colluding with right-wing racism from Mitterrand through Jospin and, no doubt, into Hollande's first term. Ingeniously, Badiou suggested that mainstream politicians were disappointed in the French people for having a racist sensibility for which they, the "parliamentary cretins" (aided by some fellow intellectuals whom Badiou excoriated), were actually responsible for creating. "It is this stubborn encouragement of the state that shapes the ugly racialist opinion and reaction, and not vice versa In order to improve democracy, then, it's necessary to change the people, as Brecht ironically proposed." The article nicely conveys his sense that democracy as currently practised in France is a charade inimical to true rule of the people. Badiou's far-left politics were burnished in the late 60s. In 1969, he joined the Maoist Union des Communistes de France marxiste-lniniste (UCFml), enthused by Mao's Cultural Revolution that had begun three years earlier. Just as he has been faithful to all but one of his lovers, he has remained true to Maoism. Marianne magazine called him a "fossil of the 60s and 70s", but Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that the Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for him as falling in love despite the deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights with which it has been associated. When I ask him why, Badiou explains that the success of Lenin's disciplined Bolshevik
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party in the 1917 October Revolution spawned a series of other workers' revolutions, notably in China in 1949. "One soon saw that this instrument that was capable of achieving victory was not very capable of knowing what to do with its victory." Maoist bureaucracy was corrupt and self-serving, party activists were bourgeois and antisocialist, and the communist revolution under threat. "So the Cultural Revolution was important because it was the last attempt within that history to modify that in a revolutionary manner. That's to say they made an attack on the communist state itself to revolutionise communism. It was a failure but many interesting events are failures." He cites the Paris Commune and Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht's failed German revolution among such interesting failures. In his 2010 book The Communist Hypothesis, Badiou wrote about the importance of failure for like-minded communists (many of whom gathered with him and !i"ek at Birkbeck College, London in 2009 for a conference called On the Idea of Communism). "Any failure," he writes, "is a lesson which, ultimately, can be incorporated into the positive universality of the construction of a truth." Which means that Badiou at least has not lost faith in communism. "The old Marxist idea of creating an international society is truly the order of the day now," he says. "Today things are much more international than they have ever been commodities and people are much more international than before." So the time is more ripe than ever for international workers' revolution? "I wouldn't say that. Certainly at the world level there can be more hope than hitherto. We're climbing a very big ladder." Badiou was born in Rabat, Morocco, in 1937. His mother was a professor of philosophy, his father a maths professor and socialist mayor of Toulouse from 1944-58. His philosophical training began in 1950s Paris. He quickly became a Sartrean, devoted to the paradoxical philosophy that, he says, involved "a complicated synthesis between a very determinist Marxist theory of history and an anti-determinist philosophy of conscience". In a new book of essays entitled The Adventure of French Philosophy, Badiou argues that between the appearance of Sartre's Being and Nothingness in 1943 and the publication of Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy? in 1991, French philosophy enjoyed a golden age akin to classical Greece or Enlightenment Germany. Badiou's great fortune was to be part of that adventure. Like wine and cheese, French philosophy should, he says, be considered part of France's glory. "I tell our ambassadors you have with us philosophers the greatest export product." He speaks fondly of his times at the Universit Paris 8 Vincennes-Saint-Denis which, founded in the late 60s, fast became a bastion of countercultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with his fellow professors Deleuze and Lyotard, even though he considered them traitors to the communist cause. "These men were my rivals and my neighbours, people whom I admired and differed profoundly from." But why, if he's right, did France have this postwar adventure, this dizzying explosion of intellectual life? "I think because of the political catastrophe in France Ptain and the disaster of collaboration. That resulted in a philosophy that had a duty to respond to those disgraces, to propose a different way. What's more, there is a French model of being a philosopher which isn't enclosed in the academy as in England a philosopher who is an intellectual interested in all the things in their age. Such were Diderot, Rousseau and above all Pascal." He credits Sartre with revivifying that French model of what a philosopher could be. "All my eminent colleagues were profs because they had to live, but that wasn't their vocation they wanted to be politically engaged public intellectuals and often artists, like Sartre. Me, too." Badiou, like a mini-Sartre, is not just a publicly engaged philosopher, but a dramatist and novelist. Unlike Sartre, he has appeared in a Jean-Luc Godard film - as a philosopher lecturer on a luxury cruise ship in 2010's Film Socialisme. His says his overwhelming ambition has been to change the relationship between workers and intellectuals. "For me what was especially important from May 1968 to 1980 was that we created new political forms of organisations linking
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intellectuals and workers. Those links helped me reinvent myself as a human subject. One could say that attempt failed, but I keep dazzling memories of that time." Badiou's eyes gleam as if he's recalling an old love affair he can never forget, still less disown. Perhaps politics and love are not, if you're a French Maoist, so very different. Badiou chuckles bitterly. "France always exists through its exceptions. There are temporary exceptions that aren't representative of an overwhelmingly reactionary country but are what make it less disgusting than it would be without them. I mean exceptions like 1789, 1848, 1871, the resistance, French philosophy after the war. They are the underside to the reactionary tradition of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Ptain, Sarkozy." And you're one of those exceptions? "Why not? Certainly philosophy from Sartre to Deleuze and me has made France better than it would otherwise have been."

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charrette 18 May 2012 11:32PM "Truth is a construction after the event." Perhaps: Love is a commitment after the event. Politics is a commitment despite the event? Badiou on Milton's Paradise Lost might be interesting. thepopeinrome 19 May 2012 12:27AM Only the French could produce this crap. I mean, try to imagine this dude living in Leeds. fatkrautfrombedford 19 May 2012 12:35AM Don't talk to me about sophistication...I've been to Leeds. I consider myself a worker and an intellectual. Perhaps that's why I hate work. thepopeinrome 19 May 2012 12:46AM
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Perhaps I should have said "working in Leeds". Or "working" anywhere (outside France, of course). thepopeinrome 19 May 2012 12:59AM Response to charrette, 18 May 2012 11:32PM Are you a fukken blue?????????????????? holzy 19 May 2012 1:06AM If he gets in a cage with Zizek, and if they start fighting... well, I might be interested. Then again, probably not. zibibbo 19 May 2012 1:29AM Badiou is unrepentant. He still holds that Mao's Cultural Revolution was inspirational, as deranging and fertile for him as falling in love despite the deaths, rapes, tortures, mass displacements and infringements of human rights with which it has been associated. Why is Badiou worth listening to then? Surely defining yourself as a Maoist in the 21st century is grotesque. Couldn't Stuart Jeffries have at least come come up with some sort of explanation/mitigation of Badiou's position? This is a long profile/interview with a supposedly highly significant French philosopher but nowhere is it made evident what that significance is. What a wasted opportunity. tufsoft 19 May 2012 1:30AM I remember being in Paris on a hot day about 30 years ago and a complete stranger came over and said hi and took my bottle of beer and took a swig from it. At that moment I realised that even 200 years after the event there's a difference between a country that's had a revolution and a country that hasn't. And of course, they still have philosophers, and stuff like that. Terry001 19 May 2012 2:36AM As the article mentions, Alain Badiou is one of the philosophers who have, since the mid-1960's, 'taken something' from Louis Althusser and, as Perry Anderson has stated, Louis Althusser, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, was one of the two giants of 20th century philosophy. Never heard of Althusser? Well, in a sense, you're lucky because, while you will have missed out on years of mind-expanding reading, you will not have been exposed to the unrelenting distortions of, and vitriolic and slanderous attacks on, his work
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from both 'left' and right. And, as is the case with any 'dangerous' intellectual, where he was not attacked he was merely ignored: if you are presently at college/university reading philosophy, think when you last heard his name mentioned or check out how recently any of his books were last withdrawn from your library. For those wishing to make the effort, and it is an effort until the terminology has been learnt, along with Althusser read also the philosophers who contributed to the Franois Maspero Theorie series in the late-60's/early-70's (Balibar, Lecourt, Macherey, etc.) but body-swerve the intellectual poseurs (Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard and their ilk). A year or two of conscientious reading of these authors will give you a more profound understanding of philosophy than that of any (nonMarxist) professor of philosophy anywhere. ThamesUrchin 19 May 2012 2:49AM I have read much of Baidou's work over the years. Each time having been struck by how everything he writes revolves around definition, and the raising of opinion to fact. In this manner he shares much with a long tradition of French philosophers and indeed many a religious writer. Remove both of these stilts and the whole lot comes crashing down. Sometime ago I was reflecting on the over-riding feeling that I had after study of one of his works, that it was written about shadows, and much as the endeavour was to discover the source that caused them, it was never successful. This was particularly so when he wrote on political theme - eg Maoism. Perhaps, it is cultural and I am too set in my own, but I would venture that it is better for a philosopher to offer the tools to the reader for the discovery of "truths", that the reader may discover them for him/herself rather that be delivered/spoonfeed dictates of belief - which can only, it seems to me, be personal. And in this light I find Badiou's works those of invention rather than discovery. Invention of the mind rather than penetrating discovery of a diverse world beyond - walking along picking up pretty pebbles on Newton's beach rather than looking up and seeing the ocean that made them. CPryce 19 May 2012 3:48AM The French have philosophers like Alain Badiou and we end up with lightweights such as Alain de Botton. It makes me profoundly depressed. pbrennan 19 May 2012 3:51AM Response to thepopeinrome, 19 May 2012 12:46AM Or perhaps you should have said nothing thereby sparing us
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your xenophobic know-nothing "opinion". whoisNo1 19 May 2012 4:47AM "I think that romanticism is a reaction against classicism. Romanticism exalted love against classical arranged marriages hence l'amour fou, antisocial love. In that sense I'm neither romantic nor classic. My approach is that love is both an encounter and a construction. You have to resolve the problems in love live together or not, to have a child or not, what one does in the evening." I am blinded by the light he sheds. JohnHunt 19 May 2012 4:49AM Response to ThamesUrchin, 19 May 2012 2:49AM Each time having been struck by how everything he writes revolves around definition, and the raising of opinion to fact. Very well put. This seems to me to be the crutch of the matter. Everything then devolves into relativism, which is neither satisfying nor useful. JohnHunt 19 May 2012 4:51AM I must admit, however, that I do like the idea of love as the minimal form of communism. SugarBeet 19 May 2012 6:48AM Response to JohnHunt, 19 May 2012 4:51AM Or as PJ O'Rourke said, of course the young are socialist. Growing up in a family, that's all they know. hblove 19 May 2012 6:55AM drop by drop: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum love. SimonFromSydney 19 May 2012 6:59AM "It's also a rebuke to postwar and often postmodern French philosophers such as Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Foucault" Brilliant feature article, Stuart. Very good insights into Badiou's philosophy as a whole. I would perhaps be a little slower, however, to include Derrida in the above list of "linguistic" philosophers. Consider for
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instance, these words of Badiou taken from his recently published "Logics of Worlds": "Jacques Derrida has died. For two or three years, I had been in the process of patching up with him, after a very long period of semi-hostile distance and sundry incidents, the most pointed of which involved the colloquium Lacan avec les philosophes, in 1990. The documents relating to this quarrel can be found at the end of the proceedings published in 1991 by Albin Michel. At the beginning of this new phase in our relations, Derrida told me In any case, we have the same enemies'. And we all saw those enemies, especially in the United States, scurrying out of their rat-holes on the occasion of his death. Death, decidedly, always comes too soon. This is one of the forms taken by its terrifying logical power: the power to precipitate conclusions. I count on paying homage again, and often, to Jacques Derrida, rereading his oeuvre, otherwise, under this emblem: the passion of Inexistance." Note IV.3.4 Dismissive comments are unhelpful when what is more interesting is to look at the relation between these two great contemporaries. AllWashedUp 19 May 2012 7:31AM Response to Terry001, 19 May 2012 2:36AM Never heard of Althusser? The great mind who went crazy and strangled his own wife? Yes, I have heard of this great sage. AllWashedUp 19 May 2012 7:38AM Response to SimonFromSydney, 19 May 2012 6:59AM That hardly vindicates Derrida's a-political post-modern bullshite. Have you read 'Specters of Marx'? It's amazing how he manages to write a book ostensibly on Marx without discussing his philosophy or politics. And don't get me started on his non-philosophy 'deconstruction'. Badiou just about gets a pass because he doesn't faff around disguising his political ideas (although he does use ridiculously pretentious mathematical formulae). hblove 19 May 2012 8:01AM the pomposity and arrogance of badiou. "I really think that love, in our world such as it is, is encircled, threatened. And I think it's a philosophical task, among others, to defend it." from the jefrries article - is online dating desroying love? - of feb 6. thanks for helping us plebes out with this weighty task, alain.
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SimonFromSydney 19 May 2012 9:36AM Response to AllWashedUp, 19 May 2012 7:38AM Indeed, it is Badiou's uncompromising position on politics that makes him appealing, especially in times like ours, but it is the rigor of his philosophy that makes him great. JohnSalmond 19 May 2012 9:43AM Thanks for the article on someone who had gone under my radar (no surprises there, of course) and who says some extremely interesting things, especially on love and Mao, in this piece. Thanks too to several of the commenters viva La Guardian!! I say again JohnSalmond 19 May 2012 9:54AM Badiou's picutre of racism in French politics exactly parallels the story here in Australia -- the pollies create the racism which they then bow down to (an oversimplification, but it is clear to me that though most Australians are and long have been sleepwalking racists, the politicians have done their damndest to wake them up and retain the nightmare; led of course by the Liberals and their egregious bumpkin sidekicks) CrewsControl 19 May 2012 10:01AM Response to CPryce, 19 May 2012 3:48AM We produce philosophers like Raymond Tallis who not only made valuable contributions to science, health care and poetry but wrapped up Lacan and dropped him in the trash. We also nurtured Popper who did the same for Marxism I believe. Joshlondon 19 May 2012 10:04AM Anyone who cites Mao's Cultural Revolution as inspirational cannot have much capacity for human empathy let alone love. rimbaud60 19 May 2012 10:17AM He quickly became a Sartrean, devoted to the paradoxical philosophy that, he says, involved "a complicated synthesis between a very determinist Marxist theory of history and an anti-determinist philosophy of conscience". Ain't that the truth.

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theold12 19 May 2012 10:38AM I'm mindful of an old limerick, created just after '68: "Oi once 'ad a buddy named Cahva Ood stand no bloody palahva. Now 'is gil Eloise Ud philosophoise An' Cahva the basted ud stahva. Obviously, Carver would have benefitted enormously, and his relationship with Eloise would have reached a more satisfactory emotional plane, had he confronted his scepticism of his girfriend's taste for philosophy. Benulek 19 May 2012 10:49AM Response to CPryce, 19 May 2012 3:48AM At least we have the ability to see de Botton for the charlatan he is. Whereas this guy seems to think he's had some sort of impact on how people see the world - outside a very small circle of Verso-toting postgrads, that is. If he really thinks French philosophy is an export on a par with French wine and cheese, he's delusional. PollyMolly 19 May 2012 11:06AM This is a very insightful and useful statement when it comes to understanding France, I have really benefitted from it, has filled in a huge space for me after many years thinking about French duality. ""France always exists through its exceptions. There are temporary exceptions that aren't representative of an overwhelmingly reactionary country but are what make it less disgusting than it would be without them. I mean exceptions like 1789, 1848, 1871, the resistance, French philosophy after the war. They are the underside to the reactionary tradition of Louis Philippe, Napoleon III, Ptain, Sarkozy." And you're one of those exceptions? "Why not? Certainly philosophy from Sartre to Deleuze and me has made France better than it would otherwise have been." pbrennan 19 May 2012 11:37AM Response to CrewsControl, 19 May 2012 10:01AM but wrapped up Lacan and dropped him in the trash. We also nurtured Popper who did the same for Marxism I believe. You assert and 'believe' but don't show. xtrapnel 19 May 2012 11:56AM Response to tufsoft, 19 May 2012 1:30AM
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So, if someone does that to me in the UK, it's as a result of the civil war we had ? Or wasn't executing the king revolutionary enough for you ? Yes, the monarchy was restored, but not as an absolute monarchy - other places we admire such as Holland and Sweden still have a monarchy. We also have philosophers; just because they might not sound like Antoine de Caunes nor smoke Gauloises makes no odds. Don't get me wrong - I love the French, half my family are French; but, shock horror, they actually think we are 'cool' just as we think they are 'cool'. Although in this case I do think this bloke is talking absolute bollocks - but we have people like that too ! hellasbutnotleast 19 May 2012 12:40PM I'm French and I am not really sure what to think about this guy. He popped up on the mainstream radar after his attack on Sarkozy, and since then he is everywhere. I like the interview, it's much more constructive than all the things I have read in the French medias about him. However, give me Slavoj Zizek everyday ! SimonFromSydney 19 May 2012 1:41PM Response to rimbaud60, 19 May 2012 10:17AM Badiou's first love, philosophically speaking anyway, was Sartrean subjectivity. thepopeinrome 19 May 2012 1:42PM Xenophobic? Moi?

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PaulBowes01 19 May 2012 2:21PM Good interview: thank you. Unfortunately, Badiou seems to have adopted here as one of the successors to Derrida, Foucault and Lacan as 'hip name to drop for the next five years while I finish my Ph.D' - a device for separating the current generation of young academics from their immediate predecessors. See also: Jacques Rancire, Giorgio Agamben. At least in this piece we get an unfiltered glimpse of the man in all his Gallic otherness. I rather like his ideas about love. CPryce 19 May 2012 2:33PM Response to Benulek, 19 May 2012 10:49AM To asset that French philosophy is of minor importance shows a staggering level of ignorance.
www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2012/may/18/alain-badiou-life-in-writing

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Alain Badiou: a life in writing | Culture | The Guardian

maiaH 19 May 2012 2:35PM British American philosophy is good because it searches for truth, although usually stopping short of actual verification, scared of being replaced by science(which thinks it needs no philosophy and is unaware it is solely its child and plaything). Continental (=French,usually) philosophy is good because it makes you think and opens doors: it's as if we did all the negative work (that's not true, that's not true) and they did all the creative (how about this? this could be the case?). You need both. I personally would really encourage anyone to improve their french, not to read their philosophers in the original, but to read their newspapers and magazines when the talk about philosophy, so you pick up the different attitudes, simple explanations and gain an idea of who is 'important' to their approach so you can read them in translation. If i had my time as a philosophy student, i would have spent my effort on getting AS level French. redjackal 19 May 2012 2:42PM Response to CrewsControl, 19 May 2012 10:01AM I presume that you've read Popper's objections to Marx. I am relatively certain that you haven't bothered inquiring into the basic limitations that are implied by Popper's adherence to Humean empiricism. Marx worked with an ontology that is almost entirely foreign to that of Hume and his positivist descendants. To suggest that Popper did any thing more than misappropriate Marx's work simply proves that one has failed to take seriously the fundamental character of his thought. Start again. StephenTHall 19 May 2012 2:44PM Response to AllWashedUp, 19 May 2012 7:38AM It's true that much of Derrida's 'later' work is off the mark, despite still possession significance. Surely you can't deny the magnitude of his writings on Husserl's Logical Investigations in Speech and Phenomena or Of Grammatology, Writing and Difference and many of his earlier essays? Then I read your contemptible treatment of "deconstruction" as a "non-philosophy" and realised that you could. You probably think Heidegger was useless as well. pastis 19 May 2012 2:53PM French Maoist intellectual is not a cuddly name tag. I take it the journalist interviewing Monsieur Badiou didn't ask him about the murderous Pol Pot regime in Cambodia which was supported by some of these chaps when they were wide-eyed idealists. Or would that be too much like hard balling? This fellow also has sniped at some of his fellow philosophers.
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Alain Badiou: a life in writing | Culture | The Guardian

Insulting the religious philosopher Levinas in particular. So perhaps that's why he has been treated with wariness in certain circles. redjackal 19 May 2012 3:01PM As for Badiou... I spent a considerable period studying his philosophy, specifically his writings on politics. After a number of years studying in a different area of critical political theory I am relatively confortable suggesting that Badiou is lost in an ideological wilderness of his own making. That does not mean that he does not have interesting things to say. His book on ethics is a brilliant and scathing condemnation of liberalism and contemporary political democracy. however, as with many French philosophers over the past forty years, he is completely ignorant of the need to clarify the normative foundations of his critique. Furthermore, the fact that he has simply failed to deal with the implications of Marx's analysis of capital in any concrete way is incredibly frustrating. Events and miracles or the hard grind of intellectual investigation and real politics? Recommend? (0) Responses (0) Report
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