<html> <DIV> >A harsh review of a Verso philosopher in the current New Statesmansuggests however that >the mistakes may be instructive... --CG Estabrook What do you mean by the mistakes may be instructive? This review is typical of the very liberal commentator that Badiou is railing against in Ethics, so it is unsurprising that the reviewer hated it.  The article is also pretty worthless in that there are no new criticisms of the stereotype of the French philosopher he rehearses.  I just began reading Ethics yesterday and was surprised by how readable it is.  Badiou's intention is to not get caught up in the obscurity of language and he abhors jargon.  So any difficulty the reviewer had with the ideas seems due to the fact that he had this anti-French philosophy article to get out and the obstacle of having to actually sit down and read the book from cover to cover was just too much to ask from him.  Here's my take on the review after reading only the introduction and the first chapter: First of all we are to believe that Badiou's ideas are bad, outdated, trivial, and bogus because he is not a "sober" and "professional" follower of Anglo-American analytic philosophers who cultivate a boring, objective lifestyle so as not to be deemed inconsistent by their own individualist press.  This judgement of Badiou's anti-analytic stature is not even entirely true because he does not stereotypically denounce analytical philosophy tout court, just positivism.  Badiou must also be bad because he approvingly writes about such relics as Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, comes a little too close to concepts that are by right Sartre's alone, and, gasp, favors the 1960s, that era of hedonism and unbridled radicalism when different worlds were thought possible.  Badiou is also disingenuous; he calculates what he writes, after the manner of circus acts, for the applause of the British reading public, even though the book was written for French hi! gh school students and undergrads.  And then the main accusation comes out: the reference to Alan Sokal, the last word on scientific rigor, the policeman of fashionable nonsense--mention Sokal and you are relieved of taking someone's work seriously.  All this so much so that it would be inconvenient to point out that Badiou was trained in mathematics, as well as philosophy. Anyhow, after a list of descriptions that range from awkward to wrong, he gets to the part about universalism, which he again misreads. Badiou's critique of bourgeois natural law and the ideology of human rights is that those theories assume a priori a conception of human nature that is then applied to all situations.  This is the bad type of universalism, what Kant and Hegel called abstract universality.  Badiou favors an ethics based on concrete universality that is commited to the particular situation and advances what he calls generic truths, that which is true for all in the situation.  This is done only from within the situation and by subtracting differences, concerning oneself with only what is valid for all.  A possible translation, something Zizek once attributed to Badiou, is that Marxism is not only about saving the proletaiat, but the bourgeoisie as well (or the Palestinians as well as the Israelis).  And while the proletariat (conceive! d here, as in Marx, as not a positive class, but the void of the bourgeoisie) is the truth of the capitalist situation and the illegal immigrant the truth of the Western situation, Badiou is very suspicious of immediate class politics.  So the reviewer's charge against Badiou of claiming the proletariat as the universal class is kinda off the mark as well and would not have occurred if he had finished the book.  The point of _Ethics: An Essay in the Understanding of Evil_ is to show how human rights ideology today sees evil everywhere except the West and dismisses radical politics as necessarily totalitarian and evil rather than something which is only possibly perverted.</DIV> By the way, does anyone know anything about the "Organisation Politique" that Badiou is supposed to be part of? Josh <hr>Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at <a href="http://explorer.msn.com">http://explorer.msn.com</a> </html>