IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES
IN DEFENSE OF LOST CAUSES
SLAVOJ
First published by Verso 2008
Copyright © Slavoj
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-429-9
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed in the US by Maple Vail
Alain Badiou was once seated amongst the public in a room where I was delivering a talk, when his cellphone (which, to add insult to injury, was mine—I had lent it to him) all of a sudden started to ring. Instead of turning it off, he gently interrupted me and asked me if I could talk more softly, so that he could hear his interlocutor more clearly . . . If this was not an act of true friendship, I do not know what friendship is. So, this book is dedicated to Alain Badiou.
Contents
Introduction: Causa Locuta, Roma Finita
1 Happiness and Torture in the Atonal World
Human, all too human—The screen of civility—Gift and exchange—Ulysses’ realpolitik—The atonal world—Serbsky Institute, Malibu—Poland as a symptom—Happy to torture?
“Capitalist realism”—The production of the couple in Hollywood . . .—. . . and out—The real Hollywood Left—History and family in Frankenstein—A letter which did arrive at its destination
Hiding the tree in a forest—A domestication of Nietzsche—Michel Foucault and the Iranian Event—The trouble with Heidegger—Ontological difference—Heidegger’s smoking gun?—Repetition and the New—From Heidegger to the drive— Heidegger’s “divine violence”
4 Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao
“What do you want?”—Asserting the inhuman—Transubstantiations of Marxism—The limits of Mao’s dialectics—Cultural revolution and power
5 Stalinism Revisited, or, How Stalin Saved the Humanity of Man
The Stalinist cultural counter-revolution—A letter which did not reach its destination (and thereby perhaps saved the world)—Kremlinology—From objective to subjective guilt—Shostakovich in Casablanca—The Stalinist carnival . . .—. . . in the films of Sergei Eisenstein—The minimal difference
6 Why Populism Is (Sometimes) Good Enough in Practice, but Not in Theory
Good enough in practice . . .—. . . but not good enough in theory—The “determining role of the economy”: Marx with Freud—Drawing the line—The act—The Real—The vacuity of the politics of jouissance