The Century
Alain Badiou, "The Century"
ISBN: 0745636314, 0745636322 | 2007 | EPUB | 248 pages | 364 KB
Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned:the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminalideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of falseavant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced byabstraction.
It is not Badiou's wish to plead for an accused that isperfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nordoes he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre'sPrisoners of Altona, 'I have taken the century on my shoulders andI have said: I will answer for it!' The Century simply aims toexamine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding,said that it was. Badiou's proposal is to reopen the dossier on thecentury - not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we toooften claim to be, but from the standpoint of the centuryitself.