I am beginning to work through Alain Badiou’s The Century, and while in its late chapters he returns to some of the broadly predicative concepts that demand deep knowledge of the whole body of work going back to the 1980s, there are some very interesting and more accessible early problems established in this powerful and emotionally challenging piece of work, which I have produced some notes about, below.  If I have anything drastically wrong, please feel free to correct me, or to inveigh against my open-source essaying (the project here, as well as to comment on Badiou, is really to trace my development as an amateur theorist so that there is a transparent place of reference that might inspire others’ trust in their own individual developments):

Despite the multiple interpretations of the twentieth century which Badiou outlines in his first lesson of the book, it is apparent that the last century was most dominantly inscribed by Crimes of barbarism. The problem which Badiou defines relative to this interpretation, is the surreptitious absolution of barbarism abetted by unthinking. This refusal to think atrocities as they were thought, Badiou claims as a major obstacle towards constructing truths about the past century, and moreover towards deciphering culpability and curtailing such atrocities as were witnessed in the 20th century – Nazi extermination of the European Jews as their paragon – as well as those that are currently being witnessed – untended AIDS in Africa for example.

His argument here is that if we relegate barbarisms to the realm of Evils, which we deny as forms of thought or politics, we subscribe to a feeble theology which does not think, and thereby does not take into account that these supposed Evils were indeed thought through, and carefully at that. Badiou goes on to identify the “real problem” of the past century as being located in the linkages between democracies and that which, after the fact, they delineate as their Other, and to which they are therefore capable of committing ‘wholly innocent’ acts of barbarism. The Other, as with the Africa savagely colonized by Europe, is capable of being thought of as material, and it occurred that the 20th century compounded this in that it had its own obsession with the promise of reconstituting man, mainly through various communist and fascist projects, but in every case with a forgetting of the individual experience of such projects.
At the century’s empirical close, Badiou finds irony in that while these projects are buried in favor of conservation, we finally have the technological and financial means to remake and remap man through genetics. The problem Badiou identifies here is with ”the automatism of things”, something like technological determinism, whereby we finally have the means via genetic manipulation and biomedicine to reconstitute man, yet the problem of Science, grand as it is, is that it has no project; genetics is apolitical, “stupid”. Since we live in an era of the second Reconstitution, which hates thought, for its necessary correlate is the real, which threatens Terror, we will allow profit to dictate the decisions of Science in the twenty-first century, leading only to more unthought atrocities, this time unnameable culprits of the same effective continuation of death, unethicality as in the twentieth, however lacking the umbrella of a defined ideological project.
I tend to agree on the one hand that we live in an era in which taking up ideological projects on a grand modernist register is viewed as almost a literal taboo considering the putative epic failures of modernity and Modernism, however I believe that there is a subtending Project to be unearthed in Science, even Scientism, and this is a desire, such as in biogerontology, and in theories of the coming Singularity, to overcome aging, the loss of memory, and most of all our mortal finitude, death. There is a growing faction that takes up a hybrid of Scientific Reducibility and a Schopenhauerian view of the universe, but places technology squarely as the antidote. We have long been aware of the pharmakos aspect of science, and that, as Bernard Stiegler recounts from Greek mythology, we are bound to techne, which is both our cure and poison, and so whether it will be profit, as Badiou claims, blindly driving our “automatic” arrival at decisions with regard to remodeling man, we in every case oughtto beware of uncritical fanatics of science, who, for instance, are wiling to suppress prospects of putative disaster, such as artificial-intelligence overthrowing humans, in light of the exciting prospects of supercomputing power that could either end sickness or mortality, or formulate a computed moral calculus, etcetera.

Counter to common quotidian analyses, Badiou writes the century as being non-ideological in that it was in constant demand of action Now rather than promising a romantic, characteristically 19th c. Ideal-to-come (which we have crucially never shaken off – a highly consequential reality not for analysis here), from Lenin’s 1902 decree to Situationist activity, so I ask in consideration: have we returned in the “rump century” outcome, to Ideology, this time in Zizek’s sense of ‘unknown knowns’? In other words, has the meaning of ideology changed since Marx and after psychoanalysis to now define unregistered and unconscious, as opposed to explicit, political desires?

Returning to Badiou, he goes on to develop through several lessons a far-reaching, complicated thematic problem: that of the century’s divided interpretation of the meaning of dialectics. In lectures, he has elsewhere defined four interpretations of Aristotle’s laws of negation and I hope to better understand the differing schemata. But while his account here culminates in a stunning overview of the Chinese cultural revolutions of 1965-76, in which dialectics could either stand for radical division expressed as suppression through war, or alternatively as radical synthesis signifying a desire for peace and unity, the action towards which this dilemma is centrally directed are the great wars of the century. We must also note a complex corollary relationship to nihilism in the context of which morality is merely genealogical and we are beyond it. In this context, Badiou introduces the notion that the century announced its law as that of the Two: antagonism. However, this figure of the Two was arguably animated by the desire for the One, nameable as the victorious and therefore the real. In that the century had a passion for the real, which Badiou seems to celebrate reminiscently in its political implications as much as he decries its concomitant atrocities, this antagonism occurred under the paradigm of war, and it was thought by its actors that the wars taking place on its stage were final in their resulting victors, after many centuries in which war promised finality only to be defined by failure.

An expression of this diagnosis was that the first world war was so bloody that in interwar France it was said to have been the end of the end, however it seems in my attempt to grasp Badiou here, that it was simultaneously considered an unjust war in need of closure vis a vis a just and essentially more total war, but here we come across the problematically false belief in the dialectical nature of war. The problem of the justification of war under the logic of its creative potential (such as the Nazi vision of the Thousand Year Reich, or Mao’s dream of permanent class eradication, hence peace) whether by split or fusion, is that, since we, beyond good and evil, could find no basis for meaning, we thought in the century that we must turn to our own fates as actors in historical destiny. A lethal byproduct was the belief in the dialectical resolution of unjust war via just war, which is problematic in that war is un-dialectical in the Hegelian sense, and further does not promise that the newly created order will be better than the old one.

I’ll let my understanding settle here and approach some of the other readings before returning to the twentieth century’s megalithic motors of change, particularly after seeking more clarity on Badiou’s concepts of structure, negation, and the real.