Polemics

by Badiou, Alain; Winter, Cecile; Corcoran, Steve; Bosteels, Bruno; Brassier, Ray

• ISBN13: 9781844677634
• ISBN10: 184467763X
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-01
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

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