Ethics

An Essay on the Understanding of Evil

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by Alain Badiou,

Translated by Peter Hallward

Verso

Due/Published November 2002, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 1859844359

New in paper (F02)

If ethical questions have been dominating recent political and academic agendas, Badiou explodes the facile assumptions behind this ethical turn. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ideology of the status quo, and fail to provide a framework for an effective understanding of the concept of evil.

In contrast, Badiou summons up an "ethic of truths" which is designed both to sustain and inspire a disciplined, subjective adherence to a militant cause (be it political or scientific, artistic or romantic), and to discern a finely demarcated zone of application for the concept of evil. He defends an effectively super-human integrity over the respect for merely human rights, asserts a partisan universality over the negotiation of merely particular interests, and appeals to an "immortal" value beyond the protection of mortal privileges.

This edition also includes a concluding interview with Badiou on the matter of Politics and Philosophy! 

"Against the predominant fashion for anti- and post- philosophies, Ethics enacts a return to full-blown philosophy which strikes as a thunder into the morass of postmodernist sophisms and platitudes. . . . A book that aims at the very heart of politically correct "radical" intellectuals, undermining the foundations of their mode of life!"--Slavoj Zizek

Series: Wo es War