Greece and the Reinvention of Politics

Description

In a series of seven trenchant interventions Alain Badou analyses the decisive developments in Greece since 2011. Badiou considers this Mediterranean country "a sort of open-air political lesson", with much to tell us about the wider situation. Greece is exemplary of "our fundamental contradictions in Europe, which are also ultimately the fundamental contradictions of the world such as it is-the world served up to the authoritarian anarchy of capitalism." Notwithstanding the Greeks' heartening opposition to the financial markets' hegemony, Badiou considers it also important to address the reasons why this opposition failed. "Movementist" politics may arouse widespread sympathy, but for the French philosopher they have "absolutely no effect other than to temporarily trap the movement in the negative weakness of its affects." Badiou argues that a consequential opposition inspired by the emancipatory politics of the past-or by what he calls "the communist hypothesis"-should set its compass by the "orienting maxims" proposed in this book, defining a direction for political action.

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the Ecole normale superieure and the College international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophy.

Badiou has been an intellectual hero of France's anti-capitalist left since the Paris street protests of 1968. * BBC HARDtalk * Magnificently stirring. A characteristically lucid polemic from a philosopher who is far from willing to abandon humanity to the vicissitudes of so-called global capitalism. -- Mark Fisher * Frieze * French philosophy still has a kick in it, and it can still turn heads. You have been warned. -- Jonathan Ree * Prospect * 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 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 * Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy. * Times Higher Education Supplement * Badiou's sardonically compressed style is never less than pungent. * Guardian * An heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. * New Statesman * A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us! -- Slavoj Zizek One of the most important philosophers writing today. -- Joan Copjec Whatever his pessimistic assessments of the contemporary situation (St Paul in the place of Lenin?), Badiou's emphasis on activity and production, his insistence on fidelity as the resurrected of the dormant Events of a seemingly extinct political praxis, can only be energizing for us. -- Fredric Jameson * New Left Review * In praise of Polemics: Alain Badiou is not only one of the most original and striking of contemporary philosophers, but also one of the most politically radical. -- Benjamin Noys * Capital & Class * In the past few years, Alain Badiou's oeuvre has imposed itself as the most significant philosophical import from the Continent. -- Alberto Toscano, author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea * The British Journal of Sociology *