Slavoj Žižek, Costas Douzinas (eds.): The Idea of Communism (2010)

“Responding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.”

With contributions by Alain Badiou, Judith Balso, Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Costas Douzinas, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Mark Russo, Alberto Toscano, and Gianni Vattimo.

Publisher Verso, 2010
ISBN 184467455X, 9781844674558
230 pages

Conference

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)

Alain Badiou: Metapolitics (1998–)

“Metapolitics argues that one of the main tasks of contemporary thought is to abolish the idea that politics is merely an object for philosophical reflection.

Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities. Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible “political truth” be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision. Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Ranciere’s writings on workers’ history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.”

First published in French as Abrégé de métapolitique, Seuil, Paris, 1998

Translated and with an Introduction by Jason Barker
Publisher Verso, 2005
ISBN 184467035X, 9781844670352
159 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)

Ian Britain: Fabianism and Culture. A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, c. 1884–1918 (2005)

“This book is an attempt to remedy the neglect of the cultural and aesthetic aspects of English socialism in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An outstanding symptom of this neglect is the way in which the Fabian Society, and its two leading lights, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, have usually been depicted as completely indifferent to art and to the artistic ramifications of socialism. Most commentators have painted Fabian socialism as a narrowly utilitarian programme of social and administrative reform, preoccupied with the mechanisms of politics and largely obvious of wider, more ‘human’ issues. One of the basic aims of the book is to question this bleakly philistine image, by showing the basis of the Fabians’ beliefs in romancism as well as utilitarianism.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 2005
ISBN 0521021294, 9780521021296
360 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2016-9-8)