Alain Badiou 
The Century 

Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned:
the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal
ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false
avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by
abstraction.

It is not Badiou’s wish to plead for an accused that is
perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor
does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre’s
Prisoners of Altona, ‘I have taken the century on my shoulders and
I have said: I will answer for it!’ The Century simply aims to
examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding,
said that it was. Badiou’s proposal is to reopen the dossier on the
century – not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too
often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century
itself.

Inhoudsopgave

Translating The Century

Dedication

1. Search for a Method

2. The Beast

3. The Unreconciled

4. A New World. Yes, but When?

5. The Passion for the Real and the Montage of Semblance

6. One Divides into Two

7. Sex in Crisis

8. Anabasis

9. Seven Variations

10. Cruelties

11. Avant-gardes

12. The Infinite

13. The Joint Disappearances of Man and God

Select Bibliography

Commentary

Remarks on the Translation

Over de auteur

Alain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy, l’Ecole normale superieure