Archive of France

With the publication of Que signifie "changer le monde"? [What does 'changing the world' mean?], a new book based on his seminar, Alain Badiou looks back on what attaches him revolutionary hope.

In this interview with Nicolas Truong, philosopher and writer Frédéric Gros analyses how walking can take on a political meaning. Whether individual or collective, the march is the mode of popular expression par excellence.

Written upon the initiative of Media Palestine, this collective piece was produced in reaction to Emmanuel Macron’s commemoration of the Vel d’Hiv round-up and first published in Mediapart. The authors denounce the position taken by the French president: "Macron is here following in the footsteps of all those who want to criminalise the struggles fighting for justice in Palestine and for Palestinians’ rights."    

Israeli historian Shlomo Sand responds to Emmanuel Macron's speech in front of Benjamin Netanyahu, in commemoration of the 1942 Vel d’Hiv round-up of Jews. "Has this former student of philosophy, Paul Ricoeur’s assistant, read so few history books that he does not know that many Jews or descendants of Jewish heritage have always opposed Zionism, without this making them anti-Semites?"

Attacks against Houria Bouteldja are aimed against political anti-racism as a whole, which is to say any attempt to organise and fight to put an end to oppression.

If we can place any reasonable hope in the Macron presidency, it is that everything is going to become very, very obvious. Which is to say, odious like never before.

The fact that Macron adopts this position is a reflex, it is not something he has thought about doing. Everyone is the child of their own time and the circles they move in. That is the cost of his youth: for this generation has known nothing other than the hegemony of American visuals, an unconscious domination that has become like second nature. And the Finance Inspectorate, or banking is also a mental ecosystem in which the United States, the parent company, takes the code name "globalisation."

In any case, what sticks out amidst this mass vote is a feeling of absurdity. The absurdity of a mechanism that brings to power a man we know nothing about, and who has grounded his success precisely in his capacity to say nothing (the back cover of his book Révolution has not one line of text, but just a full page photo of Macron himself). The absurdity of a system that gives a crushing majority to such a man, in order to avoid a danger that is largely imaginary. Most of all, the absurdity of a focus on elections that we all feel have nothing to do with our lives, and which we all feel are playing out on a sort of flying carpet, above our heads.