The Pornographic Age

Description

Offering a piercing indictment of what we have let ourselves become, this short, critical work is a damning critique of the current age and of the democratic systems that characterize it. Alain Badiou argues that any truly radical politics must begin with dismantling the obscene (or pornographic) qualities of neoliberal capitalism. In The Pornographic Age he asks us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and confront the debasement of the political realities in which we live, the shock of which must galvanize us into action. It is only through this realization, this crucial confrontation with the perversity with which we conduct our daily lives that we can prompt true revolution. Including an afterword from international Badiou scholars A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens and a commentary by William Watkin, this book is a philosophical call to arms: Badiou's radical indictment of the current age is an exciting, no-holds-barred exploration of both how we live and how we might live.

Alain Badiou is a world-renowned French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure, France, and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Universite de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. A. J. Bartlett teaches philosophy in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths (2011), co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014) and What is Impossible: Alain Badiou and Contemporary Philosophy (2016). He is also the co-editor of Badiou: Key Concepts (2010), The Praxis of Alain Badiou (2006) and co-editor and translator of Alain Badiou's Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury 2014). Justin Clemens is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory (2003), Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy (2013) and, with A.J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014). He has edited many academic collections, including translating and editing Alain Badiou's Infinite Thought (Continuum 2003) with Oliver Feltham.

In The Pornographic Age, Alain Badiou argues that the dominant ideological fetish of our times is the word "democracy" itself - that is, democracy not in its original meaning of "the shared power of the demos," but in its contemporary perversions in the smug self-definitions of the neo-liberal State. A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens' translation and Afterword are superb, accurate and illuminating. * Kenneth Reinhard, Professor of Comparative Literature, UCLA, USA * In the original seminar from which this talk was drawn Badiou warned that his analysis of contemporary enjoyment would be hardcore, unlike other philosophers' softcore meanderings: indeed his analysis of Jean Genet's play The Balcony leads him all the way to identifying and denouncing the ideological emblem of our times - democracy - materialized as an endless shower of imaged and affect-ridden bodies * Oliver Feltham, Professor of Philosophy, American University of Paris, France *