The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou
Extract: "The very nature of the crisis today is not, in my opinion, the crisis of capitalism, but the failure of socialism. And maybe I am the philosopher of the time where something like the “Great Hypothesis” coming from the nineteenth-century—and maybe much more, for the French Revolution—is in crisis. So it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind the idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world, of the possibility of, really, another organization of society, and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisis of the historical possibility of something like that is caught in the facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it is a crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one. The idea of negation is by itself a negation of newness, and that if we have the means to really negate the established order—in the moment of that sort of negation—there is the birth of the new order. And so the affirmative part or the constructive part of the process is included in negation. Finally, we can speak also of the “crisis of dialectics” in the Hegelian sense."
http://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/the-80s-i-think/
Ismail Lagardien
Nihil humani a me alienum puto