9781844677634-polemics

Polemics

by Alain Badiou

Translated by Steve Corcoran

Overturning the dominant narrative of events, from the Paris Commune to the Iraq wars.
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.

Paperback, 364 pages

ISBN: 9781844677634

February 2012

$19.95 / £12.99 / $25.00CAN

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Reviews

  • Scarcely any other moral thinker of our day is as politically clear-sighted and courageously polemical, so prepared to put notions of truth and universality back on the agenda.

    – Terry Eagleton

  • In Polemics, there are withering critiques and witty demolitions of the so-called war on terror, the invasion of Iraq, the bombardment of Serbia and the pantomime of parliamentary democracy … There is a delightful Swiftian satire on the Islamic headscarf affair and a denunciation of the racism that led to the riots in the banlieues late in 2005.

    – Simon Critchley, London Review of Books

  • [Badiou’s] argumentative vigour is undeniable. There is a terrific excoriation of the French burka ban as symptomatic of the enforced display of women, a trenchant series of investigations into “Uses of the Word ‘Jew’”, and a “Manifesto of Affirmationist Art” that is a welcome anecdote to lazy anti-modernism.

    – Steven Poole, Guardian

  • Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy.

    – Times Higher Education Supplement

Blog

"Save the Greeks from their saviours!": Alain Badiou and others on the Greek bailout

In a fiery critical call for solidarity, rich with the language of class war, a number of European academics and artists call for a campaign of solidarity with the Greek people and a launch against the dehumanising and aggressive ideology of technocratic austerity.

"[T]he future of democracy and the fate of European nations are in question" under the restructuring of Greek debt and the "endless, devastating bailouts", according to the authors, who include French academics Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Jacques Ranciere and more. Public assets are being carved up for privatisation under the oversight of the troika, producing vast wealth for the international buyers but failing to address the sovereign debt crisis at all: "it has literally exploded into free fall in approaching 170% of GDP, while in 2009 it represented more than 120%".

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By Huw Lemmey / 23 February 2012 / 1 comment

Alain Badiou on riots and racism: 'Daily Humiliation'

'Daily Humiliation' is from Alain Badiou's Polemics, first published in Le Monde following the riots in Parisian banlieues and throughout France in November 2005. 

'Constant identity checks and questioning by police.' Of all the complaints made by the youth of this country in revolt, the omnipresence of police checks and being arrested in their everyday lives, this harassment without respite, is the most constant, the most widely shared. Do we really realize what this grievance means? The dose of humiliation and violence it implies?

I have a 16-year-old, adopted son who is black. Let's call him Gérard. No sociological or misérabiliste 'explanations' can be applied to him. He grew up in Paris, in all simplicity.

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By Sarah Shin / 22 August 2011 / post comment

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