allan siegel on Wed, 7 Mar 2012 12:54:50 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> capitalism; will socialism survive? |
Hello In regards to will capitalism survive question I am posting this interview will Alain Badiou where he shifts the discourse in a worthwhile direction. cheers Allan Van Houdt >From Kant to Husserl, and now to your work, the move to transcendental philosophy has, for the most part, taken place in times of ?crisis.? For Kant it was the potential failure of classical accounts of rationality at the skeptical hands of David Hume, for Husserl it was the collapse of the spirit of philosophy under the joint pressure of modern science (the critiques of psychologism) and the onset of Nazism (the Crisis), and for you the problem is what you call ?the crisis of negation.? How do you define ?negation? and why it is in crisis today? Badiou My answer is a simple one, in fact. 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. In Hegel we know that the creative part of the negation was negation of negation, so the negation of negation was not a return to before, but was on the contrary, the degradation of the content, the positive content of negation. And there are so many things of the failure of this vision that so proves that very often negation is under a negation. And that is the crisis of negation. On all sides today we know that the pure views of negation are practically very often militant to negation, and to the future of negation?s negations. Exactly, that the future of revolution, victorious revolution, has been finally a terrorist state. The complete discussion of all that is naturally much more complex, necessitates dates, and all that, but philosophically there is something like that. So therefore we must pronounce that there is a crisis of negation, and from this problem, there are two possible consequences: first to abandon purely and simply the idea of revolution, transformation of the world, and so on, and to say that the capitalist world, with moderate democracy, and so on, is the best world after all ? not so good but not so bad, and finally we have with that answer, the first vision. And so it is a vision where in some sense the relationship between philosophy and history is separation. Because it is my conviction that if the history of humankind has as its final figure the figure of our world, it is proof that history is of no philosophical interest, that there is only left a pragmatic position, and so the best is business. In that case, the best is not philosophy but business! So that is why if, precisely when I speak of the ?crisis of negation,? I name ?negation? the revolutionary conception of negativity which was dominant from the French Revolution until sometime at the end of the last century; it was the 80s I think. The 80s, something like that, the time of your birth, maybe? The Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou http://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/the-80s-i-think/ # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org