The author is much better off working with large binaries and conflicts, both true and false.

Binaries sometimes get a bad rap on the left, but Badiou shows how they can be a useful tool to proceed through arguments. Once he establishes the false binary between liberalism and fascism, Badiou contrasts it (binarily) with the true binary between “two visions of the inevitable abandonment of the hierarchizing symbolic tradition ... : Western capitalism’s a-symbolic vision, which produces monstrous inequalities and pathogenic disorientation, and the vision commonly known as ‘communism.’” Since the collapse of the USSR and the marketization of the People’s Republic of China, the true opposition has been obscured, and fascism has stepped in to fill the gap as liberalism’s sparring partner. There are certainly liberals who prefer risking the false conflict to handling the true one. Maybe even most of them. But properly considered, the false conflict between liberalism and fascism collapses into a single term (hierarchy, or inequality), whose opposite is the egalitarian symbolic order of communism. The underlying idea isn’t new or unique, but Badiou’s formulation has—at times—a sparkling mathematical clarity.

In his latter two sections, Badiou divides his focus according to another binary: gender. First he addresses “the contemporary fate of boys,” and it doesn’t look great. One of the traditions that Badiou sees evaporating into thin air is the initiation ritual whereby boys become men. Without a clear transition, we are condemned to infinite adolescence in three different forms: the piercings, tattoos, and drugs of the deadened “perverted” body; the extreme discipline and self-renunciation of the “sacrificed” body; and the normie career-and-music-festivals pursuit of the meritocrat “deserving” body. The critique is almost a synthesis of the opposition between MTV and Jerry Falwell: careerism is the “hole-plugger of meaninglessness,” but pornographic sexuality is “the marking of the body in the repetition of inertia.” Thinking beyond these impoverished forms of life is a challenge.

You can tell Badiou is getting somewhere because he arrives naturally at the fascist right’s appeal, before dismissing it as the true enemy. “Perhaps it’s through our sons,” he writes, “that we are faced more than ever with the strategic choice between two opposite forms of the withering away of the state: communism or barbarism.” Badiou’s call for a “new violence” —especially under the male sign—walks the line between the two. He’d like us to enjoy “a political life that would be capable of providing a strong, effective figure of disinterested discipline to counter the law of commodified representation and suicidal adolescent inertia,” but that desire can take egalitarian and inegalitarian forms. Badiou’s failure to consider the particular myth of whiteness makes the whole analysis dangerous, perhaps irresponsibly so. And yet, he is right: the “non-deadening discipline” of organized collective action is the only way out, and that process will be at very least symbolically violent.



“I am hesitant as I approach the issue,” Badiou begins his section on the contemporary fate of girls. He’s aware that, as awkward as it is for an old man to tell young people about youth, it’s doubly awkward for an old man to tell young women about being young women. But it doesn’t stop him, and that’s (surprisingly) a good thing. Like boys, Badiou sees girls as deprived of their traditional initiation ritual: specifically, marriage and motherhood. That isn’t to say women don’t get married or have children, but their lives are no longer automatically structured around men. Unlike boys, Badiou doesn’t see girls as stuck in childhood. Rather, they are always already adults. “Basically, the idea is that not only can women do everything men do, but, under the conditions of capitalism, they can do it better than men,” Badiou writes, “They’ll be more realistic than men, more relentless, more tenacious. Why? Precisely because girls no longer have to become the women that they already are, while boys don’t know how to become the men that they are not.” To our dialectical guide, this could go one of two ways.

What does philosophy become once the word “woman” resonates with the power of symbol-creating equality?

The first possibility is on Wall Street, glaring at the Bull. “The girl-woman is being urged to provide a tough, mature, serious, legal, and punitive version of competitive, consumerist individualism,” Badiou writes, while the boys provide a “weak, adolescent, frivolous, lawless, or even borderline criminal” version. “Bourgeois, authoritarian feminism” calls for “the world as it is to be turned over to women power.” Badiou warns young women away from this offer, and the future vision of “a herd of stupid adolescent boys led by smart career women” shouldn’t sound appealing to anyone involved. Saying that women and girls have more to fear from capitalism’s seduction than from men (as he does) is, however, a bit of a reach.