The Meaning of Sarkozy

The Meaning of Sarkozy
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 115
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1789600677

In this incisive, acerbic work, Alain Badiou looks beyond the petty vulgarity of the French president to decipher the true significance of what he represents-a reactionary tradition that goes back more than a hundred years. To escape the malaise that has enveloped the Left since Sarkozy's election, Badiou casts aside the slavish worship of electoral democracy and maps out a communist hypothesis that lays the basis for an emancipatory politics of the twenty-first century.

The Meaning of Sarkozy

The Meaning of Sarkozy
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 129
Release: 2010-07-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1844676293

In this incisive, acerbic work, Alain Badiou looks beyond the petty vulgarity of the French president to decipher the true significance of what he represents—a reactionary tradition that goes back more than a hundred years. To escape the malaise that has enveloped the Left since Sarkozy’s election, Badiou casts aside the slavish worship of electoral democracy and maps out a communist hypothesis that lays the basis for an emancipatory politics of the twenty-first century.

The Communist Hypothesis

The Communist Hypothesis
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 225
Release: 2015-05-12
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1781688702

“We know that communism is the right hypothesis. All those who abandon this hypothesis immediately resign themselves to the market economy, to parliamentary democracy—the form of state suited to capitalism—and to the inevitable and ‘natural’ character of the most monstrous inequalities.”—Alain Badiou Alain Badiou’s “communist hypothesis,” first stated in 2008, cut through the cant and compromises of the past twenty years to reconceptualize the Left. The hypothesis is a fresh demand for universal emancipation and a galvanizing call to arms. Anyone concerned with the future of the planet needs to reckon with the ideas outlined within this book.

Philosophy for Militants

Philosophy for Militants
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 97
Release: 2015-05-05
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1781688699

An urgent and provocative account of the modern ‘militant’, a transformative figure at the front line of emancipatory politics. Around the world, recent events have seen the creation of a radical phalanx comprising students, the young, workers and immigrants. It is Badiou’s contention that the politics of such militants should condition the tasks of philosophy, even as philosophy clarifies the truth of our political condition. To resolve the conflicts between politics, philosophy and democracy, Badiou argues for a resurgent communism – returning to the original call for universal emancipation and organizing for militant struggle.

Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy

Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2019-07-23
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788734645

Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the “linguistic turn” in modern philosophy, and anatomizes the “anti-philosophy” of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Addressing the crucial moment where Wittgenstein argues that much has to be passed over in silence—showing what cannot be said, after accepting the limits of language and meaning—Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a series of esoteric aphorisms. in the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein’s anti-philosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Bruno Bosteels’ introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou’s overall project—and that a continuing dialogue with the exemplar of anti-philosophy is crucial for contemporary philosophy.

Translation Strategies in Global News

Translation Strategies in Global News
Author: Claire Scammell
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 103
Release: 2018-03-14
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3319740245

This book analyses the translation strategies employed by journalists when reporting foreign news events to home audiences. Using English-language press coverage of inflammatory comments made by Nicolas Sarkozy in his role as French interior minister in 2005 as a case study, the author illustrates the secondary level of mediation that occurs when news crosses linguistic and cultural borders. This critical analysis examines the norm for ‘domesticating’ news translation practices and explores the potential for introducing a degree of ‘foreignisation’ as a means to facilitating cross-cultural engagement and understanding. The book places emphasis on foreign-language quotation and culture-specific concepts as two key sites of translation in the news, and addresses a need for research that clarifies where translation, as a distinct part of the newswriting process, occurs. The interdisciplinary nature of this book will appeal to a broad range of readers, in particular scholars and students in the fields of translation, media, culture and journalism studies.

In Praise of Love

In Praise of Love
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: New Press/ORIM
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2012-11-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1595588892

The renowned French philosopher’s “ode to love’s power to unite in the face of eternity, and its optimism in the face of pain” (Publishers Weekly). In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance and love is all too often seen as a mere variant of desire and hedonism, Alain Badiou believes that love is under threat. Taking to heart Rimbaud’s famous line “love needs reinventing,” In Praise of Love is the celebrated French intellectual’s passionate treatise in defense of love. For Badiou, love is an existential project, a constantly unfolding quest for truth. This quest begins with the chance encounter, an event that forever changes two individuals, challenging them “to see the world from the point of view of two rather than one.” This, Badiou believes, is love’s most essential transforming power. Through thought-provoking dialogue edited from a conversation between Badiou and Truong, a vibrant cast of thinkers are invoked: Kierkegaard, Plato, de Beauvoir, Proust, and more, create a new narrative of love in the face of twenty-first-century modernity. Moving, zealous, and wise, Badiou’s “paean to the anticapitalist, antiessentialist, unifying power of love” urges us not to fear it but to see it as a magnificent undertaking that compels us to explore others and to move away from an obsession with ourselves (Publishers Weekly). “Finally, the cure for the pornographic, utilitarian exchange of favors to which love has been reduced in America. Alain Badiou is our philosopher of love.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless

Metapolitics

Metapolitics
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2020-05-05
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1789600359

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.

My Life in Politics

My Life in Politics
Author: Jacques Chirac
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2012-11-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1137088036

Along with Mikhail Gorbachev, Helmut Kohl, and Francois Mitterand, Jacques Chirac is one of the most iconic statesmen of the twentieth century. Two-time president of France, mayor of Paris, and international politician, a recent poll voted him the most admired political figure in France, with current president Nicolas Sarkozy ranking in 32nd place. This memoir covers the full scope of Chirac's political career of more than 50 years and includes the last century's most significant events. A protégé of General de Gaulle, Chirac started political life after France's defeat in Algeria in the early 1960s. He then became Prime Minister George de Pompidou's "bulldozer" and a personal negotiator with Saddam Hussein for France's oil interests in the Persian Gulf. He sold Iraq its first nuclear reactor and incurred the wrath of the United States and Israel, which he discusses in striking detail. As mayor of Paris, Chirac was famed for his success in beautifying the City of Lights and keeping it whole during the heady days of the 1968 riots. As president in the 1990s and early 2000s, Chirac took controversial steps to privatize the economy and plan the European Union. Chirac seldom pulls punches and in several dramatic chapters describes his opposition to the US invasion of Iraq in 2002 and his personal meetings with George W. Bush. These landmark events are brought into sharp focus in this memoir that the popular French magazine Paris Match said "steals the show" even after its author decamped the presidential palace.

The Adventure of French Philosophy

The Adventure of French Philosophy
Author: Alain Badiou
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 489
Release: 2022-03-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1788737067

The Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the “French moment” in contemporary thought. Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published here for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althusser’s canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of “potato fascism” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought. Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, he argues for the persistence of the Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea.