Polemics

Description

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.

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the Ecole normale superieure and the College international de philosophie in Paris. He is the author of several seminal works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and Manifesto for Philosophy. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, and The Communist Hypothesis.

A thinker of tremendously invigorating moral fervour, able to rise to Swiftian scorn or fine Cocteau-like flourishes....Badiou's passionate belief in human autonomy is inspiring * Daily Telegraph * 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 * Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy. * Times Higher Education Supplement * [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 *