Tag Archives: Badiou

Alain Badiou: “Thirteen theses and some comments on politics today”

Posted on January 25, 2023 by

“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.”

Posted in crisis, governance, Nota Bene, power, revolution, the Left

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Julius Gavroche: “Reading the times with Alain Badiou”

Posted on February 28, 2021 by

“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), myths which bind us to our shared ancestors, to the telluric or chthonic dimension of our lives which are not reducible to the managed and cultivated topoi of Gaia (Giorgio Agamben).”

Posted in agonism, crisis, defeat, freedom, Nota Bene, the Left

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“Refusing to forget a revolution: The Arab Spring”

Posted on December 29, 2020 by

“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.”

Posted in defeat, freedom, Nota Bene, revolution, tragic politics

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Gabriel Rockhill: “The Failure of the French Intelligentsia? Intellectuals and Uprisings in the Case of the Yellow Vests”

Posted on April 29, 2019 by

“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.”

Posted in Negri, Nota Bene, revolt, the Left, Žižek

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Alain Badiou interviewed about the Gilets Jaunes, Macron and future of the French left.

Posted on April 1, 2019 by

“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 the failures of these undertakings?”

Posted in founding, melancholy, Nota Bene, revolution, the Left, tragic politics, violence

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Alain Badiou: “Let’s lose interest in elections, once and for all!”

Posted on April 29, 2017 by

“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 Chinese Revolution between 1937 and 1947.
2) A strongly established ideological division … over the fact that … the whole space of political thinking must structure itself around the antagonistic contradiction between capitalism and communism.
3) A popular rising. Such a rising is often linked to point 1.
4) A robust organisation capable of proposing an active synthesis of the three first points, directed at its enemies’ collapse and … the implementation of the constitutive elements of the second, communist path.”

Posted in Nota Bene, revolution, the Left, violence

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