Excerpt from
“France’s Greatest Export”
by Jonathan Rée
[…]
If you are repelled by radical leftism, you can brush Badiou
off as an unreconstructed Maoist bully. But even if you aren’t, you may feel
uncomfortable with some of the so-called “axioms” of his “post-dialectical
dialectics.” Politics, as Badiou understands it, is not about compromise,
negotiation, or listening to what other people have to say: it is essentially a
philosophical practice, and as such it cannot be satisfied with anything less
than “the Good and the True,” which, it seems, refuse to come out of hiding
except in the pure ecstasy of revolutionary action. You are therefore enjoined
to set aside your bourgeois qualms about “elitism,” “aristocracy,” or
“totalitarianism,” and enter the lists against “democratic stupidity,”
“humanitarianism,” “programmatic egalitarianism” and “human rights.” No doubt
about it: French philosophy still has a kick in it, and it can still turn
heads. You have been warned.
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