Alain Badiou

It is the spooks leaving you

Freedom = discipline
youtube.com/watch?v=oEY14y4jThY

philosopher king of the tankies zizek is his jester

What did xe mean by this

I downloaded The Communist Hypothesis earlier today, thought I'd give it a go. I skipped ahead a few chapters and gave it a skim. Immediately bounced off of it.

Badiou is yet another incoherent blowhard sending up a cloud of verbal chaff to keep the Left ignorant and inactive while he slowly rots away in academia.

Prove me wrong or apologise for ever recommending him, OP.

Does the bourgeoisie engage in class struggle by the way of cultivating "incoherent blowhard"s to confuse the left?

No, comfortable middle-class intellectual dilettantes spend their careers bloviating about philosophical esoterica from a 'radical' perspective without ever feeling the need to actually write something that will concretely aid the class struggle.

No need for the bourgeoisie to act at all, these fuckers manage to hold back the left all on their lonesome.

Again, prove me wrong by telling the thread one coherent argument put forward by this cunt. Either do that or apologise for wasting everyone's time.

Hi guys. I downloaded a book, went to the middle of it and skimmed a few lines. What a shit book. The author must be CIA. Prove me wrong. Protip you can't.

Are you the guy from and the person who started the empirical Marxist thread?

It would def. fit the profile.

Thanks user, I just realized I haven't had my daily dose of pseudo-left petty bourg "radical" yet

Ha, no. Starting a new thread would involve actually attempting to contribute something to the board - not really my style.

I've noticed that your responses so far have tended toward 'fuck you for asking for something concrete out of Badiou' and less 'sure user, one of the main clarifying arguments Badiou makes is X…'

It's much harder to pull of this kind of interrogation with the Empirical Marxists/Leftcoms/Bookchinfags/etc because they're usually all to happy to summarise the arguments made by the authors they're shilling for. It's only the Lacan/Deleuze/Zizek/Badiou fuckers who get butthurt when you ask them to summarise a single cohesive argument made by their pet philosophers.

Highly relevant: youtu.be/Qj2ozMbvldw

...

So…you gonna tell me what Baiou actually argues yet, or do you wanna get some more dumb shit out of your system. Any of the other tendencies on this board would have dealt with this criticism pretty handily by now

Actually was supporting your assessment of the situation, which you'd understand if you watched it.
Go do so, it's funny.

Haha, oh. Sometimes my low-effort shitposting is too low-effort

Wow this thread got mad. As far as I understand badiou tries to create a positive ethical system, based on the idea of truth as a moral good. And to debunk/despook negative ethics ("the rights of man and the divine rights of kings") as effectivly nihilist. I havent read him, and so was asking about whether I should.

holy shit that's hilarious, the first person in this thread to actually try to summarise the stuff Badiou writes about hasn't even fuckin read him mein gott

But seriously, not every author is automatically worthy of being read just because they've written a bunch of shit. If you want to come in and shill for an author you should be prepared to tell us why we should read him.

also someone in another thread said he was a mathematician like that was supposed to redeem him? lol mathematicians are the most philosophically useless fuckers in the universe, most of the ones I know still believe in god

if that's what he writes about it sounds like a bunch of useless wank tho. how does that help us do communism and whatever?

WHY IS THIS FUCKER SO OMNIPRESENT IN LEFTISM REEEEEEE

I am the OP and specifically asked what people thought of him, so i can decide wether to read him. I am sort of interested because he seems to be a very comprehensive thinker: materialist epistemology of math, set-theory ontology, truth events, positive ethics, etc. all i have heard of him is just one lecture, he has a very strong accent so its hard to understand him.

Oh, sorry for shitting up your thread by asking his fans to explain the first thing about him then dude

Because ever achieving Communism is a pipedream so we need the analysis of dreams to understand it.

Oh boy I'm glad to be a pragmatic then

There are also other ways to analyse dreams

Giant brain

because we're trying to find out why people are so retarded they disagree with our objectively correct opinions

What book should I begin with?

Because psychoanalysis is the left's meme science and he was a low-key materialist (see p.119-124).

How do we exploit the meme potential in psychoanalysis?

try reading him ya dingus

If by "strawman" you mean BTFO, then yes, yes he did.

Kind of like australian economics?

he lost me in the first sentence.
i think lefty thinker would benefit from making their theories more accessible to regular people by using simple words.

What's so hard to understand?

So, I tried taking the text of and making it more concise and using simpler language without losing any of the content. The fact that I could do this at all suggests he needs to fire whoever edits his work. If it was a speech he should be ashamed of himself. Anyway, in the process of doing that I found a couple of bits that I thought were vague or possibly contradictory. Here's the text, I directly quoted from the text and bolded the bits I found troubling.

People have claimed that revolutionary politics are nondemocratic since at least the time of the Bolsheviks. Lenin responded in two ways. First, he argued that proletarian democracy reflects the will of more people, more comprehensively than bourgeois democracy. Second - and more relevant to today - he pointed out that the Classical idea of 'democracy' implies the existence of a State that exerts the 'democratic will' as a coercive force. For Lenin, the aim of politics is for the State to become entirely obsolete. We could call this Communism - Marx basically expresses this point in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. Communism describes an egalitarian society where people can freely associate. In this society, management by the collective power of needs takes the place of regulations and technical and social articulations. The State will not be a separate thing from public coercion.

I have no idea what Badiou is trying to describe when he says this. Obviously he isn't saying that our needs will somehow separate from us, take a life of their own, and start dictating our affairs, so the literal interpretation of the statement can be safely discarded. Beyond that I've got nothing.

I'm taking a shot in the dark here and assume he's talking about the breakdown of what Marx would refer to as the 'social division of labour'? As in, the social division between expert and unskilled labour, workers and management, mental and manual labour, etc. If so he should probably have just used Marx's terminology for maximum clarity. If not he should have given an example of what he's referring to.

Earlier in the text he describes Democracy as "the capability of the demos to exert coercion by itself", and describes this as a form of rule that constitutes a State. By the end he seems to say that it's not a State when you've just got "public coercion". I'm not sure I see the difference between "public coercion" and the people 'exerting coercion by themselves' [presumably on themselves, since pretty much by definition nobody is outside the demos]. It seems to me like he's just playing with definitions so that he can avoid calling a communist society democratic, even though he says that the public exerts coercive force under communism.

In this part he seems to be saying that the public will directly administer itself rather than indirectly via institutions/bodies separate from the general population. Production is determined by people collectively deciding what to produce via inclusive/all-encompassing bodies such as workers councils, and any necessary coercion is carried out by the people themselves rather than a separate empowered organisations such as the police and courts. Furthermore action would be taken directly rather than mediated or constrained by law, legislation and regulations. The people would simply collectively decide what needs to be done and then carry out the necessary actions. In that sense it's not "democratic" in the sense of a democratic state, as there is no state (at least in the marxist sense of the term), although it's certainly democratic in the colloquial sense of the term.

English isn't even Badiou's first language and he learn't it pretty late apparently, calm down guys

a lot of us are not wellread, but there are more well read people here than any other board and reddit for that matter

Based

good one