Alain Badiou being interviewed here by a lethally obnoxious (ie a 'normal' pompous twerp) BBC broadcaster.
In a BBC HARDtalk interview broadcast on 24 March 2009, Stephen Sackur talks to French socialist philospher Alain Badiou: "As the world's richest economies plunge deeper into recession could there be a whiff of revolution in the air? Alain Badiou has been an intellectual hero of France's anti-capitalist left since the Paris street protests of 1968. His recent book 'The Meaning of Sarkozy', in which he attacked the French President, has caused a storm in France. But does anyone beyond Parisian café society believe communism is the answer to the current crisis? Alain Badiou talks to Stephen Sackur."
Does anyone beyond the University of Chicago's cafeteria believe neo-liberalism, etc ...
Why haven't these ratmen been shot, yet?
On “Privilege”
1 day ago
10 comments:
So it's the interviewer's fault that Badiou couldn't answer a single pointed question? That he wouldn't even admit he was a communist? Sure it was...
Yes, I know! Let's shoot people!
The pro-war Left is the pro-war Right's perfect mimetic double: a nostalgia machine, a Death Cult, and a book burning party.
Congratulations.
"Are you or have you ever been ..." ...
I wasn't actually commenting on Badiou (who isn't even a Marxist)but on the viseral - and ridiculously stereotypical - commonsensical ideological presuppositions and framings of the interviewer, who, as aptly observed elsewhere, unwittingly serves to render the whole interview as a bizarre Brass Eye parody. Ironically, it is such "Hardtalk", the brutal, plain-speaking pragmatism and bulldog empiricism - of which British commentators are so proud - that is a part of what gave rise to the present finance capital meltdown.
As for shooting people, is there no tolerance for metaphor in your world?
I'm not sure how we might fit such non-sequiturs as the 'pro-war left', the 'pro-war right', nostalgia, death cults, or book burnings into all of this. Any suggestions?
I think she's talking to the voices.
One rather telling construction she goes in for is the rhetorical question followed by a sneering retort to an assumed answer -
"So it's the interviewer's fault that Badiou couldn't answer a single pointed question? That he wouldn't even admit he was a communist?"
...er, well, actually, the problem was that the questions were cra...
"Sure it was..."
Oh well. Sod having a conversation with you, then...
I was left wondering whether it might have been a variation of what you previously claimed about many of Dworkin's (and Derrida's) over-zealous, reactionary critics:
Really, why bother with all this literary criticism? Get to the bit where you say all sex is rape already. Well, not say: imply. Slippery bitch, why can’t you just come out and say what we say you mean?
And vis-a-vis Derrida, Not only does he say these ridiculous things, he doesn’t even say them!
Voices? What the hell are you talking about? Why don't you go scream about how much your life sucks?
"on the viseral - and ridiculously stereotypical - commonsensical ideological presuppositions and framings of the interviewer, who, as aptly observed elsewhere, unwittingly serves to render the whole interview as a bizarre Brass Eye parody. Ironically, it is such "Hardtalk", the brutal, plain-speaking pragmatism and bulldog empiricism - of which British commentators are so proud - that is a part of what gave rise to the present finance capital meltdown."
Oh, I see. So the only people who are allowed to ask Badiou anything are people who have been through graduate school in philosophy who know the jargon? I'm sure the interviewer was asking the questions the network paid him to ask, and as such I'd never expect them to be entirely "honest" questions.
I think he would've looked much better if he'd just been as straighforward and brash as the interviewer.
What do non sequiturs about Derrida or Dworkin have to do with this?
Any suggestions?
While we're on Dworkin, however, Beckett--
Wasn't it you who so eloquently and vehemently argued against the logic of "bans"? (On a forum once.)
Why should Dworkin be exempt from this same criticism? She did, after all, spend a couple of decades trying to push through legislation that would ban pornography.
Do you really think banning pornography and/or strip clubs will get rid of or assuage sexism, or could doing so push these things farther underground and make the situation actually much worse for victims?
Try to get at least the simplest things right.
The legislation proposed by Dworkin and MacKinnon banned nothing. It defined some harms arising from the production and use of pornography as amenable to legal redress. The harms would still have to be demonstrated in court: someone would have to come forward, say that they had been harmed, and persuade the court that the making or use of pornography had been material to that harm. No doubt the possibility of someone actually doing this might have had what free speech advocates call a "chilling effect" on pornographers' speech, much as laws against certain forms of racial discrimination might a "chilling effect" on the publication of racist diatribes (this was, in fact, the intended model).
Were flagrant, obnoxious lies told about this legislation by pornographers? Yes, you bet: they stood to lose a lot of money, if women they or their customers had abused started taking them to court. Did you question those lies? Apparently not.
The operation proceeds in this manner: Dworkin said pornography should be banned. Oh no, she didn't: she said something else. Well, she didn't exactly not say it, then. What she actually said is unimportant - fat wordy bitch, who cares? - whereas what she didn't exactly-not-say is, coincidentally, precisely what we wanted her to say. That'll do (it'll have to) - roll those presses, boys...
Badiou didn't exactly-not-say he was a communist, of course.
"I think he would've looked much better if he'd just been as straighforward and brash as the interviewer.
Maybe the flamboyant-refusing Badiou would have 'looked' even better if he had brought along Zizek as his partial object, as his ventriloquist dummy, so empowering Zizek's death-driven militant tics and gesticulations to pulverize the interviewer into silent submission. Or maybe he could have resurrected an immobile, ghoulish Lacan instead, with the latter's clipped, gnomic aphorisms transforming the interviewer's hysterical ego into the void of subjective destitution.
Post a Comment