Synopses & Reviews
Following on from Alain Badiou's acclaimed works Ethics and Metapolitics, 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.
With the critical insight and polemical bravura for which he is renowned, Badiou considers the relationships between language, judgment and propaganda - and shows how propaganda has become the dominant force. Both wittily and profoundly, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.
Review
"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." Guardian
Review
"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." Terry Eagleton
Review
"[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
Review
"Shaking the foundations of Western liberal democracy." Simon Critchley London Review of Books
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
A series of brilliant political reflections demolishing established positions on the Iraq War to the Cultural Revolution.
Synopsis
Overturning the dominant narrative of events, from the Paris Commune to the Iraq wars.
About the Author
Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège 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.
Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University, is the author of Badiou and Politics, Marx and Freud in Latin America, and The Actuality of Communism. He is also the translator of several books by Alain Badiou: Theory of the Subject, Can Politics Be Thought? and What Is Antiphilosophy? Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Lacan. He currently serves as the General Editor of Diacritics.
Peter Hallward teaches at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He is the author of several books including Absolutely Postcolonial, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation, and Damming the Flood.