The Last Reader: On the Method for Thinking about the Century

Abstract

Under the question “What is a century?” Badiou seeks to view the Twentieth Century through the eyes of those who lived it, to see it from within the unfolding of its own becoming. The author deliberately avoids the witness position who tells from lived experience. He rather searches for poetic procedures of truth within History, for the discovery of forms of subjectivation inscribed in literary (as well as pictorial or cinematic) texts. Watching the century with its own eyes entails in other words a displacement toward reading as a way of meaning production that appears to exceed the experience of the individual subject. All this confronts us with the complex and multifaceted figure of the philosopher as reader. In this study, we thus ask: What does Badiou read, and how does he read it? What kind of reader is constituted by what he reads? Or, in his own terms, what kind of subjectivation is inscribed in The Century?