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Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, Gregory Elliot (trans), London, Verso, 2012, 120pp; £12.99 paperback

Never fear old lefties, the age of revolution is not over, merely experiencing a temporary break in service. Sit tight and stay faithful, because already the auguries of change are among us. This is the message of Alain Badiou’s Le réveil de l’histoire (2011), ‘The Reawakening of History’, published in English as The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2012). Le réveil is the sixth in Badiou’s series of polemics, Circonstances, where the French philosopher takes time out from his big works such as Being and Event and returns to his first love, contemporary politics. The series began with Kosovo, 11 septembre, Chirac/Le Pen (2003), the second was, Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France (2004), and the third, Portées du mot ‘juif’ (2005). There followed a brilliant and very funny attack on Nicolas Sarkozy, De Quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (2007), and then the more sober, L’Hypothèse communiste (2009). The publication of the series in France has coincided with Badiou’s growing visibility in the English speaking world, a visibility that is in part thanks to Peter Hallward’s excellent introduction and sympathetic critique: Badiou: a subject to truth.1 With The Rebirth of History, all the volumes bar the latest, Sarkozy: pire que prevu, les autres: prevoir le pire (Sarkozy: worse than expected. The others: expect the worse)2 have now been translated: the first three under one cover, Polemics, in 2006;3 while The Meaning of Sarkozy and The Communist Hypothesis both came out in 2010.4

Is Badiou’s late popularity justified? One French acquaintance of mine cynically puts it down to the fact that most of the other soixante-huitards are dead. But while there might be a Darwinist element of truth in this analysis, it is unfair. Badiou is a gifted political polemicist. Unlike the professional controversialists employed by the British press, Badiou uses contemporary events to return to and make accessible the philosophical concepts developed in Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and The Logics of Worlds. At the same time, he has developed a plausible historical analysis of the Left’s current weakness and its prospects for the future. There is a tautness to his sentences, a robustness to his ideas, and a bracing impatience with the shibboleths of the liberal left that makes Badiou work always an enjoyable, if slightly unnerving, read.

Le réveil d’histoire is no exception; and indeed, it may come as something of a relief to those who have followed the series. L’Hypothèse communiste ended on a rather a downbeat note. In it Badiou systematically took apart all the organisations that had sustained socialism, in both its oppositional and its ‘actually existing forms’, during the twentieth century: the political party; the trade unions; the Stalinist state, and so on. The bereaved reader could only ask whether there was anything left? No, came the answer, communism no longer has any material form. It had been reduced to an idea only, a hypothesis, no more than a flickering candle to be carried forward as a dim light into the darkness of the future. But in Le réveil, published just two years later, things are already looking a little brighter.

The event that turns up the dimmer switch for the socialist dawn is the Arab Spring, but [End Page 221] Badiou is also heartened by disturbances in France and England, which presage the end of what he calls ‘the painful years of an intervallic period’ (une période intervallaire) (p53). But an interval between what? For Badiou, history since 1789 has been marked by periods of revolutionary activity and ‘intervals’. In the Sarkozy volume, the two long ups were from 1792 to the defeat of the Paris Commune in 1871 and from 1917 to a last flurry of militancy between 1966 and 1975. The long down was between 1871 and 1917 and in The Communist Hypothesis Badiou suggested that since the late 1970s we have been experiencing a similar period...

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