“We could thus define the maximum ambition of future political work: to realise for the first time in history the first hypothesis, so that revolution will prevent war, rather than the second, i.e. that war will provoke revolution.”
Tag: Badiou
Julius Gavroche: “Reading the times with Alain Badiou”
“What such movements call for are myths, myths which as “precious stones of memory” (Marcel Detienne, L’invention de la mythologie) weave a present to a past powerful enough to project a future, myths which fracture the eternal present of capitalist utility generating profaned spaces and times of collective play, of common joyful expenditure (Georges Bataille),…
“Refusing to forget a revolution: The Arab Spring”
“An event, a revolution, is neither objectively caused so as to be explained, nor subjectively undertaken under some calculus of rational self-interest susceptible to an evaluation based on the success or failure of meeting the chosen ends.”
Gabriel Rockhill: “The Failure of the French Intelligentsia? Intellectuals and Uprisings in the Case of the Yellow Vests”
“Although France has the reputation of having a leftwing intelligentsia, some of the most visible theorists on the Left—including the self-proclaimed torchbearers of the ‘spirit of ’68’—have positioned themselves firmly against the movement or admonished it from the sidelines.”
Alain Badiou interviewed about the Gilets Jaunes, Macron and future of the French left.
“Things are happening, anarchically, as is always the case with beginnings. Experiments must be linked to a careful, prolonged and systematic examination of Marxism, but also to the revolutionary attempts of the twentieth century as a whole. What really happened in Petrograd and Shanghai? What is the balance sheet? What formulation allows us to avoid…
Alain Badiou: “Let’s lose interest in elections, once and for all!”
“There will never be a deathblow against our present servitude without … the historic tying-together of four factors: 1) A situation of historic instability, which overwhelms conservative subjectivities. Alas, such a situation would very probably be a war, as was the case for the Paris Commune in 1871, the Russian Revolution in 1917 and the…