Polemics Cl

by Badiou,Alain

• ISBN13: 9781844670895
• ISBN10: 1844670899
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-11-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

Polemicsis 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 critical insight and polemical skill, Badiou considers how language becomes judgment, which judgments form opinion, how opinions harden into propaganda, and which propaganda becomes the dominant power. With wit and profundity, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.

Author Biography

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy.

Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University, is the author of Badiou and Politics, Marx and Freud in Latin America, and The Actuality of Communism. He is also the translator of several books by Alain Badiou: Theory of the Subject, Can Politics Be Thought? and What Is Antiphilosophy? Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Lacan. He currently serves as the General Editor of Diacritics.

Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is the author of several books including Absolutely Postcolonial, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, and Damming the Flood.

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction	vii
Acknowledgements	xxiv
Part One: Philosophy and Circumstances
Introduction	3	(12)
Philosophy and the Question of War Today
On September 11, 2001: Philosophy and the `War against Terrorism'	15	(21)
Fragments of a Public Journal on the American War against Iraq	36	(26)
On the War against Serbia: Who Strikes Whom in the World Today?	62	(13)
The `Democratic' Fetish and Racism
On Parliamentary `Democracy': The French Presidential Elections of 2002	75	(23)
The Law on the Islamic Headscarf	98	(13)
Daily Humiliation	111	(6)
Openings/Affirmations
The Power of the Open: A Discourse on the Necessity of Fusing Germany and France	117	(16)
Third Sketch of a Manifesto of Affirmationist Art	133	(34)
Notes to Part One	149	(8)
Part Two: Uses of the Word `Jew'
Introduction	157	(10)
Israel: the Country in the World where there are the Fewest Jews?	167	(5)
The Destruction of the European Jews and the Question of Evil (fragments from Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward)	172	(10)
A Dialogue between a Jew from Darzia and an Arab from Epirus	182	(6)
Saint Paul and the Jews (excerpt from Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, translated by Ray Brassier)	188	(7)
Against Negationism	195	(7)
Local Angel	202	(6)
Interview at the Daily Haaretz	208	(9)
The Master-Signifier of the New Aryans (by Cecile Winter)	217	(13)
The Word `Jew' and the Sycophant	230	(27)
Notes to Part Two	248	(9)
Part Three: Historicity of Politics: Lessons of Two Revolutions
The Paris Commune: A Political Declaration on Politics	257	(34)
The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?	291	(42)
A Brief Chronology of the Cultural Revolution	322	(7)
Bruno Bosteels
Notes to Part Three	329	(4)
Index	333