Badiou is funny and Zizek: The Movie

So Badiou has a sense of humour. This is awesome. Elspeth’s comments re reactionaries and the necessary response from academics are exemplified in Badiou’s article on the hijab and the French situation. My favourite bit of the article isn’t so funny though:

19. There’s no getting around it: thought’s enemy nowadays is property, business, things such as souls, but not faith. What should be said instead is that [political] faith is what lacks the most. The “rise of religious fundamentalism” is but a mirror through which sated Westerners consider the frightful effects of the devastation of minds over which they have presided. And especially of the ruining of political thought, which Westerners have attempted to organize everywhere, either under cover of insignificant democracies or with the sizable back-up of humanitarian paratroopers. Under such conditions, secularism, professing to be at the service of different forms of knowledge, is but a scholarly rule by which to respect the competition, train according to “Western” norms and be hostile to every conviction. This is a schooling system for consumer cool, soft business, free ownership and disillusioned voters.

He also has some interesting stuff to say about militant violence such as suicide bombing and describes Bin Laden as “a creature of the American services.”

Hot the heals of his high society wedding comes, Zizek: The Movie. That kind of speaks for itself, Zizek: The Spectacle.

Badiou via undercurrent and Sandy. Zizek via cultcrit.