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.

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

"The lesson of the book is: remain faithful to the twentieth century. The Century is not 'the best' book of the last decade, it is simply the book of the last decade! Read it with the proper tremor, aware that you are reading a classic, that a figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us!"

Slavoj Žižek

"Badiou's sardonically compressed style is never less than pungent."

Steve Poole, The Guardian

Alain Badiou, Professor of Philosophy, l'Ecole normale superieure 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.