Badiou and the Ethics of Prose: Revaluing Beckett
We can begin from the singularity of Alain Badiou’s contention in the current theoretical debates, and his pamphleteering radicality: his critique of contemporary nihilism, philosophical but also more generally cultural, and his critique of the morals associated with identity politics. From the startling effect this is having on Anglo-Saxon theory in particular – insofar as much of it is based on those twin supports: the deconstructionist lineage of Continental phenomenology, and the native development of cultural studies. For there is much to be gained from what his forceful readings identify as the points of conceptual concretion in these discourses, the complacencies of doxa where the poststructuralist and postmodernist incisiveness has turned to, in his own words, “non-thought”. There is a tonic in the critical insights that they produce about the relativist abdication of philosophy, as he sees it, and its compensatory reliance on aestheticized fetishes. My aim is therefore to see which questions his intervention raises, and which he further enables us to raise.
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