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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not just a reader's guide, May 29, 2010
This review is from: Badiou's 'Being and Event': A Reader's Guide (Reader's Guides) (Paperback)
Not Just A Reader's Guide: a review of C. Norris's Badiou's Being and Event
by Dr Marianna Papastephanou
Associate Prof of Philosophy, University of Cyprus, Department of Education
Badiou's work has been heralded in contemporary philosophical contexts as a provocative, topical, versatile and insightful intervention in both time-honoured and present-day debates. With his new book Badiou's Being and Event, Christopher Norris's makes a central part of Badiou's work (namely his lengthy and dense Being and Event) extremely accessible to readers without for a minute compromising the commitment to high levels of originality, accuracy, thoroughness and lucidity. Norris's book enriches the Badiou literature in an exceptionally methodical, reflective and masterful way. In the hands of many contemporary thinkers, a readers' guide, despite good intentions, often remains just an uninspiring perfunctory commentary. But in the hands of Norris, it becomes an indispensable piece of prolegomena and, much more than that, it becomes a most welcome interpretation of Badiou that goes beyond the merely exegetical. Surely it offers a powerful, wonderfully written exploration of crucial notions and terms of the Badiouian idiom such as "forcing", "singularity", "evental site" etc. But it also is refreshing in many other respects. For it draws attention to themes (such as the affinity of Badiouian philosophy with critical realism) that often go unnoticed even within circles already associated with Badiouian thought; it clarifies various connections between politics, ontology and art that other publications on Badiou leave aside (for instance, the difference between inclusion and belonging is explained out in an exemplary manner); and by means of elegant prose it succeeds in conveying intricate yet important details of Being and Event which would have otherwise remained impenetrable and inaccessible to the non-specialized reader of Badiou.
Overall, Norris's book enlarges thought rather than tailoring it to some supposedly new vogue or setting the pace toward a new orthodoxy, as it sometimes happens in more popular kinds of introductions which are too eager to make concessions to readers so as to turn them into disciples of this or that trend. It is a book of skilfully constructed exposition and argument, one that I highly recommend as suitable and valuable to a very wide readership.
Surely it is a book that raises demands upon the reader as it presupposes some background knowledge of Badiou's work and some familiarity with longstanding philosophical debates within continental philosophy. While satisfying absolutely the introductory requirements of a readers' guide, it nevertheless demands some sophistication and erudition on the part of the reader. The significance of the book goes well beyond descriptive purposes but, to discern it, a reader must be equipped with an ethic of reading, a concern for the kind of philosophy that avoids aphorisms and facile generalizations and some openness to path-breaking thought with which one should engage in a constructive manner even if one decides not to side with either Badiou or Norris.
It is a book like any other by Norris, that is, one moved by deep and disinterested commitment to a vision of a better world against all Eurocentrisms (both in modalities of writing/thinking and of global political life), and by a genuine love for philosophy. For this reason, it is a book that has no patience for, and challenges, the simplistic (and I would say obtuse) kind of thinking that: creates reductive intellectual choices; impoverishes discourse by recourse to vague or downright jaundiced labelling; disparages philosophies by resorting to the superficial authority of the socio-cultural or disciplinary high-ground rather than to cogent argumentation; and corresponds, more generally, to what philosophers term, since Adorno's critique of some products of the then American culture industry, "identitary" and truncated thinking. Thus, this book will not satisfy those who subscribe to such a kind of thinking. And it will certainly not satisfy those who set themselves to the task of disciplining the profession of the philosopher-disciple, i.e., of the scholastically reverent follower of a persuasion, unmoved by any new philosophical theory and resistant to the course of philosophy itself, to the fact that philosophy is, amongst other things, about meeting and responding critically and thoughtfully to new challenges. But I am absolutely sure that it will satisfy all others, be they adherents, sympathetic, critical readers or even opponents of Badiou alike.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
reviewer reviewed, August 10, 2010
This review is from: Badiou's 'Being and Event': A Reader's Guide (Reader's Guides) (Paperback)
This open-access reviewing thing on Amazon is all very nice and democratic but wide open to abuse, as Peter Frank's `review' makes clear, by people who want to work off some obscure private grudge or just be nasty for the hell of it. The trouble is that it offers a splendid chance for anyone to say whatever they like about any book they like (or don't like) without the least effort to substantiate their claims. Mr Frank's self-confessed outburst of spleen merely shows that he has read neither my book nor Badiou's Being and Event. (In fact this is the most charitable supposition since otherwise - if he had read them - then his comments would betray an extraordinary failure of basic comprehension and hence a total lack of fitness to pronounce on such matters.) Of course it is good for readers to have their say but not if this provides a handy platform for those who wish to vent their feelings of inchoate rage on whatever book lies closest to hand or happens to provoke their wrath.
I have no wish to engage Mr Frank on the issue of Badiou's philosophical achievement, or the depth and acuity of his mathematical thought, or the significance of his work in philosophic terms. Nor do I want to defend my book against charges that are never spelled out beyond the level of playground abuse or juvenile name-calling. What I do want to say is that there is something wrong - something basically unethical - about a forum of public exchange that allows anyone a chance to sound off in the most abusive, ignorant and malevolent way about books which have cost their authors a great deal of effort and which the sounder-off may not have read, or else have read with certain very fixed negative preconceptions.
Still you have to take the rough with the smooth, I suppose, and as concerns those other books of mine that Mr Frank sees fit to rubbish in passing there are enough good reviews out there to outweigh this unreasoned exhibition of gratuitous spite. I am glad that other people have posted comments which show his remarks up for what they are: an expression of that `motiveless malignity' that Coleridge diagnosed in Shakespeare's Iago and which tends to disfigure too many aspects of present-day academic (or would-be academic) life.
Re Badiou: a great thinker - about mathematics among other things - whose reputation among those worth consulting won't suffer through uninformed (and, I venture to suggest, politically motivated) attacks of this kind. Re myself and my book: I don't know how best to help Mr Frank to an improved understanding since it was aimed at reasonably bright and committed undergraduate students and on the whole they seem to have profited by it. Probably he could get a bit further along if he picked up some basic knowledge of developments in mathematics and modern set theory, for which he could hardly do better than go to Badiou's excellent primer Number and Numbers. Philosophically speaking he will need to do a whole lot of reading-around in order to get anywhere near the stage of having something worthwhile to contribute on the topic. It is unfortunate that someone so patently ill-equipped to debate these issues and so clearly in the grip of a desire to destroy what he cannot comprehend should be offered a free platform for airing his views to a online readership who may not be best placed to check them out against more reliable sources.
About writing only on faddish topics: I've written books not only about deconstruction and postmodernism (actually taking a very dim view of postmodernism, although of course Mr Frank wouldn't know that, not having read them) but also about Spinoza, William Empson, quantum mechanics (a realist approach), philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of logic, philosophical semantics, and platonism in musical aesthetics. Not exactly a penny-catching bunch of topics, you would think. If I had stuck to deconstruction it would no doubt have caught more pennies but might also have given a bit more unearned credibility to Mr Frank's thoroughly disreputable smears.
About prose-style: his comments in this regard really got up my nose because I put a lot of effort into writing decent English and (I hope this doesn't sound too pompous) have had a good press over the years for doing just that. Indeed I dare say that Mr Frank might himself pick up some useful lessons in good writing - as well as good manners - by reading my books, although not by reading this present piece of mine which has (I regret) taken on something of his own unlovely polemical style. Constructing good sentences and making them hang together while getting the emphasis and tone just right is really hard and it annoys me - in fact has a positively fist-clenching effect - to see all that effort subject to this kind of cocksure vulgar abuse. Lucky the Atlantic is there between us.
I suggest that Mr Frank remove the `review' forthwith, or at least (as he promised some time back) make changes to remove its more offensive features. Beyond that, I would advise that Amazon introduce some kind of monitoring system in order to protect customers and publishers (see Mr Frank's utterly unwarranted and downright libellous remarks about Continuum) from scurrilous abuse of this sort. I don't want to sound too much like de Toqueville (Mr Frank: look him up on Wikipedia) but there does come a stage in the democratisation of politics, culture and intellectual life when those things need defending against the encroachments of militant ignorance, stupidity, and dumbing-down. The fact that some readers find it hard to construe any sentence with a clause structure more complex than the speech-acts of a Hemingway drunk doesn't mean that we all have to write like Hemingway drunks.
Let Mr Frank read Badiou to improve his powers of intellectual grasp and then, if he has time to spare, take a look at that Derrida book of mine (the one that he so breezily trashes) to see what the reviewers were on about. And let him then - if still disposed to raise non-issues on the basis of non-reading - seek help from some suitably qualified counsellor rather than keep reading books that fuel his hatred of whatever he fails to understand.
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5 of 42 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Rigorous Proof That We Can Ignore Badiou, January 25, 2010
This review is from: Badiou's 'Being and Event': A Reader's Guide (Reader's Guides) (Paperback)
Norris' book is nice because it is a final, fully rigorous proof that we can ignore Badiou, that is, beyond the need to familiarize ourselves with academic fads. Norris likes to write long, poorly composed sentences. As is true with many books published by Continuum, this readers guide could have used a good editor. Take _Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace_ or Lanham's _Revising Prose_ and use Norris' book as workbook for improving nasty, badly coordinated sentences. But even if you can get beyond Norris' inability to write a plain English sentence (I did), you will find that Badiou's work is not worth following. His mathematic metaphors for politics, art, and love are silly. Ultimately, Badiou's philosophy attempts to explain how new things happen, a problem left over from his days studying with Althusser. But Badiou went even farther down the misguided road Althusser was following, mistaking bad, "theoretical" language for insight. If Badiou wants to talk about how new things happen (events, in his terminology), let him say it. His math, as most mathematicians point out, is a joke. In this work, Norris demonstrates two things: 1. He can't write. 2. His subject was not worth the inquiry. Norris has written many books, but from his earliest work on Derrida to today, he has been moved only by current theoretical fancy. He lacks individual depth but rides instead on academia's faddish chatter.
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