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Title: Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil by Alain Badiou, Peter Hallward ISBN: 1-85984-435-9 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: December, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (5 reviews)
Rating: 1
Summary: Sooo Bad
Comment: This book largely consists of bad reasoning and rhetorical, statetist platitudes. It has little to do with evil and a lot to do with leftover propaganda from the era of Marcuse and other peddlers of communitarian/Marxist nonsense. For a much more thorough and rational consideration of evil, ethics, and economics, read M. Berumen's Do No Evil.
Rating: 1
Summary: very low level bs
Comment: Badiou is a joke. Ultimately his definition of Evil is that it's simply anything he wants it to be. It's like sophomores throwing the word "fascist" around. Capitalism causes every sex murder, every murder by a mother of her child. And Mao was a "genius" whose ideas have been insufficiently explored. Sure.
Rating: 3
Summary: More about Radical Politics than Ethics
Comment: This is in reality only a pamphlet-sized work inflated in size by an appendaged introduction by the translator over 40 pages long and an interview also conducted by the translator about 50 pages long. Though short, this pithy little work remains important just by virtue of how widely read it is, comparable to the role of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO to Marx's uvre.
The introduction describes this work as a bit of a manifesto, and indeed, its contents are written with such bravado and conviction, combined with a laconic lucidity and concluding summaries, which one would expect to see in a manifesto. Being written by a scholar who has already written a decent sized book on Badiou, the introduction is actually key to the entire publication insofar as it situates the work itself and its author within the intellectual currents which produced both.
One becomes increasingly clear, however, is that "ethics" is throughout a word equivocated with the current global politico-economic system, which Badiou is really trying to subvert here. Hence, he hopes to supplant this order, embodied in human-rights discourse, with his own neo-Marxist, radical politics. His ethics is, therefore, an attempt to put the revolution back into "revolutionary Marxism". Though ostensibly about ethics, this is, indeed, Alain Badiou's chief of concerns
Some of his ideas are ingenious, but others are a bit loony. Predominant throughout is the theme of Truth as event which defines 'the Good'. This revolutionary intervention initiates and creates subsequently a truth-process which creates and ethical good as such. Evil is not autonomous here but merely a perversion, abuse, or betrayal of the truth event. This posits as the alternative to Kantian, natural law tradition which reifies "evil" and thereafter nihilistically, in Badiou's eyes, constructs a negative ethics that is essentially conservative. Themes present in the works of Kant, Lacan, and Lévinas [whom he criticizes quite often rejecting his ethics of 'the other'] often intersect, and they remain his main phantom interlocutors throughout the extended essay.
The interview at the end moves from issues particular to contemporary France like *les sans-papiers* and the status of immigrant communities to philosophical questions giving opportunity for caveats and discussions of other works besides *Ethics*.
Overall, Badiou offers some interesting ideas in this book, but writers such as Alisdair MacIntyre who are really concerned with ethics and not so much with reviving some nostalgic revolutionary politics offer much more enlightening critiques and examinations of modern ethics such as human rights, etc.
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Title: Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Cultural Memory in the Present) by Alain Badiou, Ray Brassier ISBN: 0804744718 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy by Alain Badiou, Justin Clemens, Oliver Feltham ISBN: 0826467245 Publisher: Continuum Pub Group Pub. Date: June, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian (Stanford, Calif.).) by Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Heller-Roazen ISBN: 0804732183 Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr Pub. Date: June, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences by Slavoj Zizek ISBN: 0415969212 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: December, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity by Slavoj Zizek ISBN: 0262740257 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 12 October, 2003 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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