Polemics
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Polemics Alain Badiou Verso, London and New York, 2006, trans. Steve Corcoran, 340pp. ISBN: 13 978 1 184467 0895. Contemporary Political Theory (2008) 7, 225–229. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.2007.16
French philosopher Alain Badiou’s new book is really a polemic against the nihilism of our contemporary condition, a savage attack on the meaninglessness of our present. This is, after all, a time in which we have give up on any hope of emancipatory politics, and where we cling to our miserable material comforts, resigned to the inevitability of the global neo-liberal capitalism. This is a time when democracy becomes more and more an empty, media-driven spectacle of mediocrity, and worse, the ideological rallying point — along with human rights — of Western militarism and US global hegemony. It is a time when universal notions of truth and justice are forfeited for ‘postmodern’ relativism in the realm of philosophy, and ‘postmodern’ romanticism in the realm of art. Badiou’s project has been to revitalize — indeed, to reinvent — the Enlightenment: to assert a militant politics of emancipation against democracy; to assert philosophy against ‘ethics’; to assert ‘affirmationist’ art against ‘entertainment’; to proclaim a genuine dimension of universality against communitarian particularism and the narcissism of identity politics. Central here is his notion of the Truth-Event — an event that is entirely unpredictable, that is not reducible to or even thinkable within, the circumstances of the situation in which it arises, and indeed, even retroactively constructs these circumstances: something like the French or Russian Revolutions in the field of politics; or the extraordinary encounter between Abelard or Heloise in the field of love; or Cantor’s invention of set theory in the field of mathematics. Events of this kind produce an encounter with a universal truth — an encounter through which one becomes genuinely a subject, and in which existing situations are radically altered, ‘pierced’ to the core. The role of philosophy, according to Badiou, is to think — and to allow us to think — these exceptional events that transcend our everyday existence. But perhaps because of this, philosophy also gives us important critical tools to analyse that which does not live up to the dignity of the event: situations where, on the contrary, truth is made destitute in the name of knowledge; where politics is disavowed in the name of ‘democracy’; and where we have, instead of the event, a series of non-events or false events. What is fascinating, then, about Polemics — what makes it so engaging — is that here philosophy’s powerful eye is turned to everything today in which truth is defiled and Contemporary Political Theory 2008 7
Book Reviews
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dissimulated: the ideological obfuscation, hypocrisy and terrorism of the ‘War on Terror’; the ignominy of the war in Iraq; the arrogance and emptiness of US imperialism; the fetishism of parliamentary democracy; the pettiness of the Islamic headscarf law in France; the authoritarian and raci
