Alain Badiou - Allegiance to the Truth Event

Now for Alain Badiou. My objective is cycle in these posts on the key individuals and topics regarding revolutionary praxis I wish to serve. Badiou is a key modern philosopher for me with respect to insights about revolutionary struggle as an outward focus and for his insights regarding the congruent internal development afforded to ones thinking ability by his minimalist mathematics (ontology = mathematics). Today I simply hope to awaken your interest in his political observations and will address the mathematics later.

I refrain from interpreting or analyzing myself. Rather I follow the instincts and intuitions operative in my exploration of information on the web and collect and share bookmarks through the Delicious tool linked on the sidebar. To date there are some 70 links to articles on or by Badiou. These are all annotated with excerpts and tagged for database management for your use. I have selected four entries I feel are most germane to my present objective(some hint at the meaning of his "Truth Event" and the political action that is inspired in "allegiance" to the event):

Alain Badiou - 'On the Truth-Process', August 2002

"For the process of truth to begin, something must happen. Knowledge as such only gives us repetition, it is concerned only with what already is. For truth to affirm its newness, there must be a supplement. This supplement is committed to chance—it is unpredictable, incalculable, it is beyond what it is. I call it an event. A truth appears in its newness because an eventful supplement interrupts repetition."

On Evil: An Interview With Alain Badiou

"Today we see liberal capitalism and its political system, parlimentarianism, as the only natural and acceptable solutions. Every revolutionary idea is considered utopian and ultimately criminal. We are made to believe that the global spread of capitalism and what gets called "democracy" is the dream of all humanity. And also that the whole world wants the authority of the American Empire, and its military police, NATO."

Savoj Zizek - On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes

"In the revolutionary explosion as an Event, another utopian dimension shines through, the dimension of universal emancipation which, precisely, is the excess betrayed by the market reality which takes over "the day after" - as such, this excess is not simply abolished, dismissed as irrelevant, but, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, continuing to haunt the emancipatory imaginary as a dream waiting to be realized. The excess of revolutionary enthusiasm over its own "actual social base" or substance is thus literally that the future of/in the past, a ghost-like Event waiting for its proper embodiment."

Alain Badiou — Philosophy as Biography

"I have given a philosophical order to myself : 'transform the notion of truth in such a way that it obeys the equalitarian maxim', this is why I gave the truth three attributes: 1) It depends on an irruption, and not on a structure. Any truth is new, this will be the doctrine of the event. 2) All truth is universal, in a radical sense, the anonymous equalitarian for-all, the pure for-all, constitutes it in its being, this will be its genericity. 3) A truth constitutes its subject, and not the inverse, this will be its militant dimension"

Blog Guide: A discussion of blog features and primary topic content may be found at the initial entry. The first few entries give a good idea of how best to use the blog, especially for the tagging and social bookmarking at my external Delicious site, and for instructions regarding the Stefandav TV widget.

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