Maybe I should expand a bit on my previous post on Badiou’s national subjectivity, since it could have come across as scurrilous. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Badiou, Subjectivity
July 22, 2009 • 3:07 pm 2
Economics —> politics?
Amid this extended — and pointless, I’d say — discussion of whether capitalism has an “outside,” Badiou avers the following: “So we must go from politics to economics and never from economics to politics.” Which is odd, because Organisation Politique’s motto is: “those who work and live here belong here.” In other words, what makes migrants, sans papiers, politically a part of France is their economic function: going from economics to politics. Communist Badiou, however, insists on moving from politics to economics. Rather than see this is a contradiction, though, I’d say it reveals something else: Badiou sees the nation as the foundational political unit, replacing the state and parties. So migrants must first translate their economic subjectivity into a political one, and a distance from the state can be achieved and communism approached by this established national subjectivity.
February 18, 2009 • 2:57 am 0
Against the Day
I’m more than halfway through Pynchon’s Against the Day, and so far, like most of his books, it is by turns enthralling, excruciating, beautiful, and boring. I’ll wait until I finish the book to talk about the story and thematic elements, but I just wanted to put in a quick note about something that I keep thinking about it as I read it. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Badiou, Bookshelf, Subjectivity
December 7, 2007 • 2:17 pm 1
Badiou and the possible
Badiou’s second criterion for how an event can be said to be political has to do with its relation to the infinite. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Badiou, Subjectivity
November 27, 2007 • 4:45 pm 0
Collective, universal
(Another in my intermittent series of notes on Badiou. I swear, all this is leading somewhere. I think.)
In his essay “Politics as Truth Procedure,” Badiou asks the question “When, and under what conditions, can an event be said to be political?” He answers that it must meet three basic conditions: it must consist of or be formed by a collective; it must create and display an infinite character; it must summon the infinity of the state of the situation, which the event then must overcome. In this post, I’ll look at the first of these. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Badiou
November 23, 2007 • 11:17 pm 0
Axiom of equality
Am I being churlish — especially on this beautiful Thanksgiving morning where the temperature is holding fast at a perfect 40 degrees and the sun is mostly hidden — to be kind of annoyed by the following, the first paragraph from Mark Devenney’s “Thinking the Postcolonial as Political,” in the most recent issue of Borderlands? Read the rest of this entry »
August 30, 2007 • 12:57 am 1
Thermidorian
In Metapolitics, Badiou outlines a subjectivity he calls Thermidorian, which, among other things, reveals the revulsion he shares with liberals and progressives at “material and legislative” corruption. The Thermidorian, like the Bushist, is treasonous, a self-interested profiteer, a pillager, an embezzler, and an imperialist, all of which betray revolutionary virtues and republican ideals. In this way, the Thermidorian and the Bushist are judged by their fidelity to the national interest. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Badiou, Economy, Subjectivity
August 14, 2007 • 12:52 am 2
Decision
Badiou finds in the fighters of the French Resistance the analog for a contemporary resistant politics. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Badiou, Opposition, Subjectivity, The State
August 2, 2007 • 3:58 pm 0
Against synthesis
Badiou:
Against the notion of dialectical synthesis, it is necessary to invoke here Sylvain Lazarus’ thesis that a political sequence should be identified and thought on its terms, as a homogeneous singularity, and not in terms of the heterogeneous nature of its empirical future. Specifically, a political sequence does not terminate or come to an end because of external causes, or contradictions between its essence and its means, but through the strictly immanent effect of its capacities being exhausted. It is precisely this exhaustion that Saint-Just refers to when he notes that ‘the Revolution is frozen.’
In other words, the category of failure is not relevant here, for it invariably consists in assessing the political sequence in terms of states of affairs that are external and heterogeneous to it. There is no failure, there is termination.
This is from Metapolitics, which I just started reading. In some ways this is very similar to what I wrote about discipline and politics in my last post, but in many other ways it, and other parts of the book, is quite different from what I was getting at, or trying to at least. Anyway, more on all this as I read through the book.
