GEOFF BOTTOMS relishes a profoundly human portrait of a family as it evolves across 55 years in Sheffield
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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
[Boris Kavashkin/RIA Novosti/CC]
PAUL DONOVAN applauds an excellently crafted new musical that explores the life and death of Ruth Ellis
PAUL DONOVAN is tickled by the excruciating take-downs of one of the funniest, wittiest, political writers around.
RON JACOBS points out, via a transcription of Kissinger’s secret recordings, that Trump could never have existed without Nixon and Kissinger
ELLIS RAE is persuaded that the advantages of the ‘talking cure’ are superior to the treatment of mental illness with drugs
JOHN GREEN, MICHAL BONCZA and BELLA KATZ review The Good Boy, Broken English, and Don't Be Prey
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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