In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Century
  • Andrew Taggart
Alain Badiou. The Century. Trans. Alberto Toscano. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity P, 2008. 233 pp.

Alain Badiou’s The Century is probably best understood as a philosophy of history. In the dedication, Badiou tells us that the text is comprised of thirteen lectures originally delivered at the Collége international de philosophie between 1998 and 2001. These lessons are meditations on the revolutionary spirit of the twentieth century: from the burst of creative energy in avant-garde movements around 1900 to the radical leftist political struggles of the 1970s. In keeping with this revolutionary spirit, Badiou’s work enjoins us to leave behind the Left’s melancholic judgments about dashed hopes and to criticize the Right’s triumphalist attitude towards neoliberalism. For in Badiou’s view, what the Left and the Right share is the belief that the past must be seen and retrospectively assessed from a “post-century” vantage point; whence Badiou’s seemingly naïve decision in this work is to look at the century from within itself.

It soon becomes clear that Badiou’s philosophy of history is anything but a standard sort. For the garden-variety philosopher of history, whatever in events and things that appears contingent must be shown to fall under universal laws of world-historical change, to give rise to specific patterns of rise and fall, or to move towards some higher purpose. Standard philosophy of history, like metaphysics, thereby conforms to the principle of sufficient reason whereby everything that is necessarily is. In The Century, we have a totally different conception of history and of the relation between philosophy and historical time. For Badiou, history is discontinuous and contingent, revealing no higher order in nature nor any larger patterns. It consists wholly of acts and experiments plotted out in discrete sequences—of subjects declaring, without evidentiary support, that certain events have occurred and pursuing new courses of action. And yet what unifies Badiou’s inquiry is precisely the fact that these movements express three motifs unique to the twentieth century, motifs which Badiou is at great pains to explicate and defend throughout the book.

But why such great pains? Why the all-out defense? Why, in short, the felt need to write such a history? A greater understanding of the context within which the book is written is key. In other works such as Metapolitics and Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, Badiou faults the period from 1976 to 1995 for its counter-revolutionary stance. In no less polemical terms in The Century, he writes that “what contemporary ‘democracies’ wish to impose upon the planet is an animal humanism. In it man only exists as worthy of pity” (175). For some time now, Badiou has been a strident critic of those political ideas—most notably, human rights, liberal democracy, the hegemony of late capitalism, and a [End Page 311] moralistic view of the world—that have crystallized and gained ground in the past thirty years. For example, he sees in calls for human rights the unchecked assumption that man is essentially a “victimized body” (175) in need of protection and in liberalism the view that society is made up solely of individuals in pursuit of happiness and so cannot allow for “active fraternity” (96). Whither has gone the idea that man is a project and that political life, far from being tragic, is epic through and through?

In order to break free from the current period, which he aptly terms Restoration, Badiou asks what the century “meant for the people of the century” (44), what the century has to “say about itself” (59). He finds that artists, political dissidents, and lovers all acted in accordance with a “passion for the real” (la passion du rèel). The real is not an object, not therefore empirical reality, but a force, a violence even, that ignites the creative potency of a subject. Those so swept up were pushed out of a moral framework, indeed cast beyond good and evil, and yet this experience required them to produce increasingly rarified forms which sought to capture the act of production (the movement, say, of Jackson Pollock’s...

pdf