Category Archives: Plague Thoughts

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”

“Everyone needs a right of free movement, because the world belongs to no one; . . . goods move in large ships, even as human beings are deprived of the right to circulate . . .” Manifesto of the School of Acts. Aubervilliers, 2018. I’m not a prophet, but on the eve of the secondContinue reading “Germinal at the School of Acts”

Now I have spent over a month reading Badiou’s philosophical and literary texts, reading secondary literature about him, listening to his magnificent YouTube presentations, and even corresponding with scholars who know him. While my admiration for his breadth and stalwart adherence to his principles is unchanged, I now have some reservations about the soundness ofContinue reading “Too Badiou”

Before I leave this topic behind, I would like to sum up my theory. The conversion experience and its analogues (Badiou’s événement or the universal transformation of love at first sight, the coup de foudre, as well as the so-called mystical experience)—these are possible because the sphere of our experience does or did encompass certainContinue reading “Conversion: What It’s All About (Part 4)”

A subject is what acts in an active verb and what transforms an infinitive of possibility into a fact of positive discourse. An object is what is acted upon. Transpose it into the subject position and the sentence becomes passive. In our minds and culture, we have embedded a grammar of passivity in which weContinue reading “The Grammar of Conversion (Part 3)”

But I want to get back to the question. Now I want to formulate my thoughts about two kinds of life-transforming experiences: falling in love and becoming politically oppositional. Alain Badiou places them together under the heading of life-transforming events, though the first is personal and oriented toward one other and the second social andContinue reading “Conversions: Falling in Love, Becoming Political (Part 2)”

In the first entry I wrote for this blog site, I claimed that I wanted to explore who we are and what we have in us to become. On several occasions, I wrote about what I referred to as the “conversion” experience. What I had in mind was that young people of the 60s generationContinue reading “The Conversion Experience Revisited (Part 1)”

To any reader of my blog entries, I would like to apologize for the overwrought language of my recent writing. I was evidently working several thoughts out in my head, and since I wasn’t yet able to articulate them very clearly I instead resorted to bathos. One of the ideas taking shape was the continuumContinue reading “The Plague of Capitalism”

You and Erik are thinking about what the study of history is or should be. The question interests us because we think in terms of radical change and because we entertain the question whether the way things are going now is inevitable or natural. I like the bracing Marxist perspective which proceeds from the realizationContinue reading “Plague Analysis from France”

After a week back home I have read or reread Badiou’s texts in his Les possibles matins de la politique, Interventions 2016-2020.  Two things impress me about his concept for L’Ecole des Actes. First of all, he rejects the notion of the “migrant” or the legal or illegal immigrant, as well as the legitimacy ofContinue reading “Plague Thoughts Recalling France”