Recording Surface

In Metapolitics, Badiou outlines a subjectivity he calls Thermidorian, which, among other things, reveals the revulsion he shares with liberals and progressives at “material and legislative” corruption. The Thermidorian, like the Bushist, is treasonous, a self-interested profiteer, a pillager, an embezzler, and an imperialist, all of which betray revolutionary virtues and republican ideals. In this way, the Thermidorian and the Bushist are judged by their fidelity to the national interest. (more…)

The final Lemony Snicket book is, so far (we’re on chapter 10), kind of a disappointment, mostly because of its not-so-veiled personification of the Bushits and their political failings. (more…)

“Justice is no more than the immanent process of desire.” I’m sometimes thick, but this line from Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka book, and Deleuze’s usage of the term justice generally, has always confused me. (more…)

Badiou finds in the fighters of the French Resistance the analog for a contemporary resistant politics. (more…)

Nate has tagged me with an eight-things-about-yourself meme. I’ve been tagged in the past, but a combination of laziness and antisocialism (heh) have prevented me from responding before, and almost certainly will again. Here goes: (more…)

Badiou:

Against the notion of dialectical synthesis, it is necessary to invoke here Sylvain Lazarus’ thesis that a political sequence should be identified and thought on its terms, as a homogeneous singularity, and not in terms of the heterogeneous nature of its empirical future. Specifically, a political sequence does not terminate or come to an end because of external causes, or contradictions between its essence and its means, but through the strictly immanent effect of its capacities being exhausted. It is precisely this exhaustion that Saint-Just refers to when he notes that ‘the Revolution is frozen.’

In other words, the category of failure is not relevant here, for it invariably consists in assessing the political sequence in terms of states of affairs that are external and heterogeneous to it. There is no failure, there is termination.

This is from Metapolitics, which I just started reading. In some ways this is very similar to what I wrote about discipline and politics in my last post, but in many other ways it, and other parts of the book, is quite different from what I was getting at, or trying to at least. Anyway, more on all this as I read through the book.

A few additional points on the last post: (more…)