On Mar 7, 2012, at 8:40 AM, Ismail Lagardien wrote:
> 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."
"Behind every no lay a passion for yes that had never been broken." - Wallace Stevens