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I am hoping to start Theory of the Subject too, after I get a good understanding of Lacan.. currently I'm reading The Communist Hypothesis, which is much easier to understand and immediately relevent (its a book from 2010 that analysis the idea of communism, specifically the paris commune, may 68, and the cultural revolution, as well as the present financial crisis). I like most of what he says, and will try to post a proper reply after i finish it. He's a cool guy and its good to have a prominant maoist philosopher around.
Formerly zenga zenga !
Unless you have to do this to complete a college course, why read this a proiristic non-sense?
Scarlet:
Stay ignorant then.
Alex Callinicos deals with him in a recent book where he takes the fancy French thinkers more seriously than his book on PostModernism, which I thought was pretty kneejerk.
I started reading a critique of Deleuze by Badiou that was seemed soooooooooo abstract I couldn't take anything of value from it. I'd be interested to hear what different RLers who read him have to say.
I was surprised this was to the only thread on Badiou here. I'd love to find a forum to discuss his work a bit more in depth. To throw my two cents in here, what I've read of his work ('Ethics' and a few essays that were later collected into 'Communist Hypothesis') has been quite stimulating, but also a more than a bit frustrating. He makes no apologies for presuming a lot of prior knowledge, not only of Western Philosophy but also of his own work and the technical vocabulary he has developed over the years. I think we can't evaluate precisely what he means in a lot of key instances without having read 'Being and Event' several times over. I'm looking for people who have. If you're out there or know how to reach them, give urs a ring.
I read The Communist Hypothesis last summer, but I'd be lying if I said most of it didn't go over my head.
"Socialist ideas become significant only to the extent that they become rooted in the working class."
"If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. . .Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
SocialistWorker.org
International Socialist Review
Marxists Internet Archive
BTW- Badiou's scheduled to give a talk at NYU in NYC in a week or two. I have the details somewhere if anyone's interested.
I've heard he relates Marxism to Plato, which sounds utterly foolish to me, but other than that I can't say I know anything of him.
Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.-Leon Trotsky
A revolution without dancing is not worth having.-Emma Goldman
The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall. -Che Guevara
The wise thing to do is simply to skip the bosh and twaddle and vulgarity and untruth, and get the benefit out of the rest. -Teddy Roosevelt
You can relate anything to Plato, really.
That's why it's dishonest to do it.
Badiou was a theoretical Maoist at one time. I read The Communist Hypothesis after reading an excerpt printed at Monthly Review or New Left Review (I can't remember which one it was at the moment,) and his arguments about the effect of the Paris Commune as a model for the potential socialist society and how this shaped the thinking of the socialist left (both Marxist and anarchist) are well reasoned and informative. He also talks about the Shanghai Commune, the paradigm shift in the capitalist West brought about by May 68 and the future possibilities of communism. Aside from a radio interview this is the only work by Badiou that I've read.
I've been studying philosophy under Adrian Johnston for a few years now, and I highly recommend his book Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change. Johnston's specialties are in Hegel, Marx(ism), and Lacan, and he has been working actively with contemporary thinkers including the two cited in the book's title. This particular book is fairly accessible, considering the subject matter. I would also recommend Hegel and the Infinite in order to get a sense of where thinkers like Badiou are coming from. I haven't had the chance to dive into Badiou's body of work yet, but I hope this helps for those interested.
Since my old post in this thread, i've read theory of the subject twice; it is definitely one of the coolest books ever written. Was well worth studying the basic lacan beforehand.
Have read Being and Event once, hoping to read it a second time so i can understand it soon haha.
Formerly zenga zenga !
What about making a thread to discuss one or some of his works? I would be interested.
I haven't read anything by Badiou except his essay in The Idea of Communism, where (I think) he explains/writes about his communist hypothesis. The whole book is actually a collection of essays (talks, originally, on a conference discussing communism) based on Badiou's communist hypothesis. Which I haven't read
"What is necessary is to go beyond any false opposition of programme versus spontaneity. Communism is both the self-activity of the proletariat and the rigorous theoretical critique that expresses and anticipates it."
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"...Stalinism is eternally condemned to govern capital, and the ideological dynamics of Stalinism are tied to this peculiar type of capital management; it is locked within this framework, reproducing the logic of capitalism under the veil of communism. For this reason, Stalinism, and its various derivatives, cannot accurately be regarded as communist if we choose to define it in materialist terms." - Tim Cornelis
Deleuze is one of those thinkers I'm a bit wary of tackling first-hand, but every now and then another more down-to-earth thinker will use some of his abstract ideas in really interesting ways. Especially when it comes to questions of political movements, events and organisations (lines of flight, being-becoming, etc).
I'm planning on reading The Communist Hypothesis in the summer holidays since I will be embarking on postgrad Sociology next year and pretty much the majority of radical sociologists in the department thinks every non-dogmatic radical left student should read it.
And when Marx says, 'Hitherto the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways', what that 'hitherto' means is not a renunciation of theory and that all we need to do is wade in with our fists and there will be no more need for thought. This idea is in fact fascist, and it would be grossly unjust to Marx to impute such views on him.
--Theodor Adorno, 'On Theory and Practice'
I guess it's packaged as a little red book for a reason.
A Thousand Plateaus is a bit more accessible than people make out. I've tried to approach it on a pragmatist basis -- Does the idea work? Where would it work? Is it any use to me? I find the writing on lines of flight very powerful.
There are a couple of very interesting books on Deleuze and film by Anna Powell that try to do this. She's quite up front that it may not work.
COMMUNISM !