[Reader-list] Alain Badiou in an interview...

[abir bazaz]

Alain Badiou in an interview with Christoph Cox and Molly Whalen:

My position...First, liberal capitalism is not at all the Good of humanity. Quite the contrary; it is the vehicle of savage, destructive nihilism. Second, the Communist revolutions of the 20th century have represented grandiose efforts to create a completely different historical and political universe. Politics is not the management of the power of the State. Politics is first the invention and the exercise of an absolutely new and concrete reality. Politics is the creation of thought. The Lenin who wrote What is to be Done?, the Trotsky who wrote History of the Russian Revolution, and the Mao Zedong who wrote On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People are intellectual geniuses, comparable to Freud or Einstein. Certainly, the politics of emancipation, or egalitarian politics, have not, thus far, been able to resolve the problem of the power of the State. They have exercised a terror that is finally useless. But that should encourage us to pick up the question where they left it off, rather than to rally to the capitalist, imperialist enemy. Third, the category “totalitarianism” is intellectually very weak. There is, on the side of Communism, a universal desire for emancipation, while on the side of Fascism, there is a national and racial desire. These are two radically opposed projects. The war between the two has indeed been the war between the idea of a universal politics and the idea of racial domination. Fourth, the use of terror in revolutionary circumstances or civil war does not at all mean that the leaders and militants are insane, or that they express the possibility of internal Evil. Terror is a political tool that has been in use as long as human societies have existed. It should therefore be judged as a political tool, and not submitted to infantilizing moral judgment. It should be added that there are different types of terror. Our liberal countries know how to use it perfectly. The colossal American army exerts terrorist blackmail on a global scale, and prisons and executions exert an interior blackmail no less violent. Fifth, the only coherent theory of the subject (mine, I might add, in jest!) does not recognize in it any particular disposition toward Evil. 


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