Subject: “Move over Jacko, Idea of Communism is hottest ticket in town this weekend.” The Unrepentant Radical
by Nina Power The Philosophers' Magazine June 15, 2009 [Dr Nina Power is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, UK. Her book 'One-Dimensional Woman' is out in November 2009 from Zero Books. She also writes for several magazines, including New Statesman, New Humanist, Cabinet, Radical Philosophy and The Philosophers' Magazine. She is reviews editor for The Philosophers' Magazine and also runs a film club (Kino Fist) in her spare time.] Full: <http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=303> "[...] The main reason for Badiou’s London trip, however, is to speak at an immensely and surprisingly popular conference about communism at Birkbeck, an event which was moved twice to accommodate all those who wanted to attend and which prompted the Guardian to write a piece entitled “Move over Jacko, Idea of Communism is hottest ticket in town this weekend.” The conference does indeed boast an impressive line-up of contemporary European philosophers: Slavoj Žižek, Gianni Vattimo, Jacques Rancière, Antonio Negri, as well as some Anglo-American voices in the shape of Michael Hardt, Peter Hallward and Terry Eagleton. "But why the sudden interest in what is, after all, a rather unpopular idea? Isn’t “communism” rather too tarnished by its historical associations? Badiou is only too aware of the strangeness: “I know – a thousand people in a room in London to hear some philosophers talking about communism! It would have been impossible ten years ago, so we have to give some explanations. The first one is that after the victory of global capitalism, there have been some deceptions, something wrong. There hasn’t been a new peaceful world. We have huge inequality. There’s no unified world, but instead a rich western world and another world which is not at the same level at all. We have also inside the rich world itself very strong inequalities, which are getting worse. We have wars everywhere in the world: Africa, Iraq. And we have something very important I think, a sort of confusing uncertainty. People cannot really know where they are going.”[...]" Full: <http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=303> -- http://venukm.blogspot.com http://www.shelfari.com/kmvenuannur http://kmvenuannur.livejournal.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
