“What's Right for the Left?”
Alain Badiou's The Communist Hypothesis has been reviewed in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, of all places. In a review that does little more than skim the surface of the arguments at stake, John Kappes discusses (and dismisses) Badiou's little red book alongside Pascal Bruckner's The Tyranny of Guilt and the late Tony Judt's Ill Fares the Land.
Enter Alain Badiou, only too eager to supply the remedy. Badiou is a philosopher by training who has become, for lack of a better term, "hot" among the cultural-studies crowd. Fellow star Slavoj Zizek compares him to Plato and Hegel. This isn't the place to consider Badiou's properly philosophical work, but I can tell you that the diagnosis of the left's woes he puts forward in The Communist Hypothesis makes it one of the saddest, funniest books of the past 20 years.
Visit the Cleveland Plain Dealer to read the review in full.