Good and bad, good and evil
I’m been reading some terrifyingly bad books recently. First up was Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man, which is really hilariously rubbish. The argument proceeds via vague resemblances between theorists, like one of my terrible undergraduate essays, except it goes on for about a million pages or something. High-minded, wooden-headed discussions of Hegel and Nietzsche, all directed to the most banal of conclusions. In a similar ‘reactionary bollocks’ vein, I also read a paper that attempted the audacious task of combining Samuel P. Huntington and Jean-Luc Nancy, with predictably hilarious consequences. Still, it did suggest that Nancy’s The inoperative community might be worth reading. Nancy also has a couple of books on Hegel I’d like to read, one of which only because its title is One of Hegel’s Bon Mots.
And I have also been reading some good books — Agamben’s State of exception, which I read in a hurry (a tip: don’t try reading in a Camridge college library when students are doing exams, unless you like overhearing overwrought discussions about the difficulty of neoclassical economics), but which I’m reasonably sure is very good. The chapter on Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of emergency, sovereignty and revolutionary violence is certainly bloody brilliant. Also Badiou’s book on Deleuze, which features anecdotes about Badiou sending a Maoist brigade to disrupt Deleuze’s classes in 1968, and interesting material on what precisely is at stake for Badiou in his rejection of totality. I may post more on that, if I get round to it.
I’ve also just finished re-reading Ken MacLeod’s Engines of light series, which is better than I thought (and I already liked it a lot when I first read it). I prefer the first two books to the last, as the final book seems to rush to cover too many events; in places it felt like the _Foundation_ books, in which Asimov has to deal with a thousand years of history via the medium ten-thousand word short stories. But this acceleration of pace may well be intentional, given that one of the themes of the series is the time-dilating effects of travelling at the speed of light, which makes years of history pass instantaneously, rendering the history of class struggle an obvious empirical truth. Also:
> “No matter what the gods do that should make people angry, it only makes them more
> afraid. Cringing bastards… No offence.”
>
> “None taken,” said Salasso. “I despise them myself. Even millions of years after
> something much worse than genocide was comitted against my people, they still regard
> the gods as good and theicide as the ultimate sin.”
>
>
Ken Macleod, Engine city.
And:
> We who are summoned by the void, we who intervene so as to decide the undecidible,
> we who are sustained by the indiscernible truth, we who are finite fragments of that
> infinity which will come to establish that there is nothing more true than the indifferent
> and the generic, we who dwell in the vicinity of that indistinction in which all reality
> dissolves, we, throws of the dice for a nameless star — we are greater than the sacred,
> we are greater than all gods, and we are so here and now, already and forever.
>
>
Alain Badiou, Une soirée philosophique.
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