The Irish Century (1)

Ireland's Century

Alain Badiou is one of the few philosophers of substance to emerge from the radical left of the 1960-70s and to continue writing challenging works. His major work, Being and Event, makes an innovative attempt to base metaphysics on set theory. Almost alone, structuralism and Maoism still seem serious reference points for this formidable French philosopher. In his book The Century he grapples with the meaning of the twentieth century, in a series of talks delivered between October 1998 and March 2000.

His subject matter slips from us, even as we read. His desired subject matter may be the historical geography of some shared pubic space for the international intelligentsia of Western Europe, or it may be the public space of French civic society. What it isn't - and couldn't be - is a shared space adequate to the fractured civil society of the European Union or an experience that would comprehend the particular concerns of the Irish intelligentsia, if there is such strange beast. Indeed a convention underlies the book which has been problematic in West European theoretical debate for centuries. We can engage with this work, but we cannot simply enter its fictional shared space, what ever that may be.

His translator describes this work as a "pedagogy of conviction that must of necessity abhor nostalgia, it is a matter of conveying moments and inventions that were simultaneously refractory to interpretation and addressed to everyone, over and above linguistic affiliation." (P.xi) That this is what the translator also calls a 'universal address' is the first challenge this work presents, even before we position ourselves in relation to its commitment to conviction - and that is because it is not a universal address.

But that is an opportunity. His work easily becomes a foil with which to engage with a putative public space closer to us. It allows another 'us' to be invented and played with, a collectivity which may be the 'us' of an aspiring nation, of a frustratingly unempowered Irish intelligentsia or of the few pro-Europeans by principle. It doesn't really matter, as long as this 'we' is used in the understanding of how problematic it also is.