Author Archives: pfannkuchea

Badiou’s conversion, which he himself has called his “road to Damascus” (alluding to the exemplary mystical conversion of the Apostle Paul), was his experience of the solidarity of French students and workers in May 1968. It was an event that could claim universal significance. It seemed to echo the Maoist Chinese Cultural Revolution, and itContinue reading “Badiou’s Wrong Turn Between the One and the Many”

Globalization doesn’t result from a few bad decisions by Democratic politicians in the mold of a Bill Clinton or a Tony Blair. Anyone with a clue about how the world works can see that competition compels firms to search for raw materials, cheap labor, and lucrative markets beyond national boundaries. Globalization is something more deeplyContinue reading “Getting Our Minds Around the Global Expansion of Capital”

The new Puritanism of our “cancel culture” of the Right and of the Left has not only rendered certain words and behaviors unutterable. Since those words and actions were not as rigorously sanctioned in the past, the past itself has come to seem unbearably obscure and evil. The past is an unthinkable darkness. An unintendedContinue reading “The Dialectic of the Normal and the Abnormal”

If you can recall a college roommate whom you mildly disliked yet shared unforgettable experiences with, this is how I feel about reading the books of the French author Emmanuel Carrère. He was once referred to as “the French Knausgaard”—the ultimate hypnotically self-absorbed author. He can’t rue his male malfeasance without regaling us with theContinue reading “A Badiouvian Reading of Emmanuel Carrère”

Where are we in the swirling ocean currents of history? Postmodernism has gotten us used to speaking of and distancing ourselves from the so-called “grand narratives”: the narratives of continual progress or revolution or regression. We could carry this metaphor of narrative structure further by attending to the motifs or recurring plot figures that historicalContinue reading “Apocalypse or Liberation: Narrative Patterns of Opposition”

On this quiet gray Saturday afternoon, in the last days before an election that seems to come at us like a road approaching a chasm without a bridge, I read two interesting articles in short order. The first by Stephanie Burt writing in The New Yorker (“The Never-Ending Story”) is about the prevalence of theContinue reading “On the Meaning of Multiple Worlds”

I discovered Alain Badiou when I was holed up in a Montmartre apartment last November, collaborating on a research project by day and trying to improve my uncertain French comprehension in the evenings. In search of a clear, cognate-rich French, I googled politicians and authors. Then I happened upon Badiou about whom I knew almostContinue reading “Discovering Alain Badiou”