The Century, Alain Badiou and Historical Time

Abstract

Badiou’s The century analyses the twentieth century against the grain of the contemporary conservative balance that only sees in it an overflow of enthusiasm and totalitarianism. Badiou analyses: (a) the coupling between politics and barbarism characteristic for twentieth century; and (b)ow the 20th century assumed this conjunction (politics and barbarism) that the 19th century believed it had resolved by surrendering to a progressive historical becoming. The twentieth century will discover the lack of sense of the real under passive (suffering the real) and active (being passionate about the real, about the act) forms. Its central concept is then “passion du réel”. “Passion for the real” unfolds in two ways: “logic of identity”, leading to total destruction, and “logic of minimal difference”, which, without avoiding destruction, opens up an infinite productive unfolding. 

Badiou proposes to rescue the conjunction "politics and barbarism" from his contemporary moralization as a condition for proposing other policies, whose generic name is “communism”, which understand in depth its causes and deactivate them.