ALEX HALL is disgusted by the misuse of ‘emotional narratives’ to justify uninformed geo-political prejudice
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Breaking Badiou
MARTIN HALL steps gingerly through a work of French political theory, picking out the gems
Meeting of the Petrograd soviet in 1917
SUE TURNER welcomes a thoughtful, engaging book that lays bare the economic realities of global waste management
JOHN GREEN welcomes an insider account of the achievements and failures of the transition to democracy in Portugal
SIMON PARSONS applauds an imaginative and absorbing updating of Strindberg’s classic
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MICK McSHANE rubs shoulders with Mod legend Steve Craddock and joins in with the joyous Glasgow choir
DENNIS BROE sifts out the ideological bias of the newest TV series offerings, and picks out what to see, and what to avoid
A New Dawn for Politics
Alain Badiou, Polity, £9.99
GIVEN that Alain Badiou said in 2009 that “from Plato onwards, communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher,” it is not surprising that this latest collection of essays and lectures covers familiar ground for his readers. Badiou has always remained faithful to the communist Idea (as he would write it), stating that “there is no other” for those who do not wish to accept Western liberal democracy as the only form of organising a mode of production.
However, what has crept in is a certain level of negativity regarding how that “Idea” might become concrete. It wasn’t always so.
In 2011, Badiou was confident enough to describe the Arab Spring as the “rebirth of history” and by the time of his 2016 book, Greece and the Reinvention of Politics, in an attempt to get beyond the “state-managerial construction” that he calls capitalo-parliamentarianism, he was proposing “the invention of a new political truth that both confronts the principal contradiction between capitalism and communism and... institutes and develops a new modernity.”
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