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pinkmooon 's review for:
Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil
by Alain Badiou
Interesting ideas wrapped up in obnoxious French-theory opacity. I’ll admit my share of fault for failing to grasp some of the language in this book - I hate to dismiss anything based on my misunderstanding of it, because my inability to engage should not detract from a work’s merit. Still, I can voice some irritation at Badiou’s style.
I have a masochistic relationship with philosophy in that I want to engage completely with the heart of contemporary, radical issues, and to do so I have to read the Big Names, who are all indebted to Tradition and are nigh-incomprehensible without a strong working knowledge of that Tradition. This results in writers like Badiou composing a supposedly non-academic, accessible text with an engaging premise that is tied to arguments and references to difficult thinkers whose views are only casually alluded to. It’s frustrating, as someone who doesn’t wish to dismiss any thinker out of hand, to feel like an outsider to a text. Badiou has lots of stylistic flourishes that I wouldn’t personally encourage in a formal argument, but he also makes cryptic references to Lacan that an uninformed reader cannot hope to make sense of. He has his cake and eats it, and it’s disappointing as someone interested in tje central thesis.
I’ll need to read this again before I know for sure if it’s well-argued or not. The style is certainly not to my taste. Perhaps I am too ignorant to grasp this book, or perhaps my gut instinct is reliable and it’s more flash than substance. Oh well. Can’t win them all.
I have a masochistic relationship with philosophy in that I want to engage completely with the heart of contemporary, radical issues, and to do so I have to read the Big Names, who are all indebted to Tradition and are nigh-incomprehensible without a strong working knowledge of that Tradition. This results in writers like Badiou composing a supposedly non-academic, accessible text with an engaging premise that is tied to arguments and references to difficult thinkers whose views are only casually alluded to. It’s frustrating, as someone who doesn’t wish to dismiss any thinker out of hand, to feel like an outsider to a text. Badiou has lots of stylistic flourishes that I wouldn’t personally encourage in a formal argument, but he also makes cryptic references to Lacan that an uninformed reader cannot hope to make sense of. He has his cake and eats it, and it’s disappointing as someone interested in tje central thesis.
I’ll need to read this again before I know for sure if it’s well-argued or not. The style is certainly not to my taste. Perhaps I am too ignorant to grasp this book, or perhaps my gut instinct is reliable and it’s more flash than substance. Oh well. Can’t win them all.