In March of this year Jean-Luc Nancy published an article entitled “What the Arab Peoples Signify to Us” in the Libération newspaper. The article supported the NATO lead military intervention in Libya. Alain Badiou penned an acerbic response, claiming that Nancy had misread the situation in Libya entirely. The uprising in Libya was not at…
Politics is back on the streets of Europe, that much is clear. The PIGS are striking back. Portugal, Ireland Greece and Spain. Except that’s not quite right. I will address the failure of Irish radicalism and contrast that with Greece and Tunisia, in order to begin to pull out a number of important lessons of…
The war that has been escalated in Libya over the last week is not the same as the revolt that gripped the country months ago. Even today in Benghazi there are two orders – war and revolt – at work, but the logic of war is destroying the multiplicity of a revolution. In this sense,…
A deluge of articles, statements and comments on the peoples’ protests across a region defined in imperial geopolitical and cultural discourses as the Middle-East or the Arab World have so far been driven by two main questions: ‘how it happened?’ and ‘what will happen next?’ The ‘how’ and ‘what next’ are impossible questions at times…
The following is Alain Badiou’s full reply to Jean-Luc Nancy’s “What the Arab peoples signify to us“. With many thanks to Verso Books UK. Yes, dear Jean-Luc, the position you adopt in favour of ‘Western’ intervention in Libya was indeed a sorry surprise for me. Didn’t you notice right from the start the palpable difference…
The Arab peoples are signifying to us that resistance and revolt are with us once again, and that history is moving beyond History. They are doing it, as is appropriate, with all the fortune and misfortune that it involves. At the very least they have sent an irreversible signal whose effects we can expect to…
Today I’ll talk to you about the riots in Tunisia. We won’t leave the subject of this year’s seminar — What does “change the world” mean? – an expression whose ambiguous character I’ve already described to you. If by “riots” we mean the street actions of people who want to overthrow the government by means…