universalism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Book Reviews
>Edward Skidelsky
>Monday 21st May 2001
>
>Ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil
>Alain Badiou, translated by Peter Hallward
>Verso, 166pp, 18 ISBN 1859842976
>
<snip>
>Badiou believes that he possesses the answer to this dilemma. Truths such
>as the Bolshevik revolution can be recognised by their "universal
>address"; simulacra such as the Nazi revolution are distinguished by their
>rejection of universality and their "invocation of blood and soil". This
>distinction is historically dubious. Badiou seems to accept without
>question the orthodox Marxist equation of the proletariat with the
>"universal class". Yet Nazi theorists were equally adamant that Germany
>was a "universal nation". On what grounds does Badiou accept one
>identification and reject the other?

If Edward Skidelsky doesn't know why positing the proletariat as a 
class whose emancipation calls for the emancipation of humanity from 
class society (= "equation of the proletariat with the 'universal 
class'") is a political good but positing Germany as a "universal 
nation" is a political evil, it's Skidelsky's problem, not Alain 
Badiou's.  If Skidelsky can't understand that the rhetoric of human 
rights as employed by bourgeois politicians (often to start a war, 
etc.) is inimical to the universal emancipation of humanity, it's 
again Skidelsky's problem, not Badiou's.

Perhaps Skidelsky's mad at Badiou because, for all the taste for 
avant-garde art & allegedly complicated sex life, there's too much 
Marxism left in Badiou's & other French philosophers' pronouncements.

Badiou & French philosophers may be criticized, but not on the 
grounds that Skidelsky criticizes them.

Yoshie