Book Review: Calcagno, Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time
A review of Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and Their Time (Continuum Studies in Continental Philosophy)
A decade ago, Richard Beardsworth stated in his introduction to Derrida and the Political: “the twenty-first century approaches, and it is clear that our political concepts, and, therefore, the fields in which these concepts are discursively organized, acquire meaning and operate, need to be reinvented”.[1] A seism of unheard of proportions has shaken the space of the political, a field whose conceptual system has been elaborated throughout a long history as the effect of a complex and stratified legacy: Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian. Yet, ten years on, the reinvention of the category of the political still remains an imperative and unavoidable task. Today our political space appears overdetermined by a set of notions: the crisis of the nation-state, of the concepts of citizenship and sovereignty, the omnipresence of globalization and empire, the dangerous appeal to a permanent state of exception, and finally, the pressing impact of biopolitics. However, instead of providing a useful map with which to orient and to intervene in an active transformation of the political space, this constellation of notions marks a limit, an impasse, and signals a difficulty of orientation for political theories or philosophies that still depend on the sovereign One.