requested The Century by Alain Badiou

As requested … I have some more Badiou around, not a fan personally though.

Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction.

It is not Badious wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartres Prisoners of Altona, I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have said: I will answer for it! The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badious proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century - not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself.

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mirror 1 (some pages may be missing, mostly from Ch. 2)

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The Meaning of Sarkozy by Alain Badiou

A trenchant and witty dissection of the French political scene by the leading radical philosopher.

Alain Badiou, in this sharp and focused intervention, claims that, in and of itself, the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as President is not an event, nor is it the cause for wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth. To understand the significance of "Sarkozy," we have to look behind the insignificance and vulgarity of the figure and ask what he represents, namely a reactionary tradition which goes back to the early nineteenth century. To escape from the ambience of depression and fear that currently envelops the Left, Badiou casts aside the slavish worship of electoral democracy and maps out a communist hypothesis that can lay the basis for emancipatory politics in the twenty-first century.

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mirror 1: megaupload

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The Communist Hypothesis by Alain Badiou

The Meaning of Sarkozy was okay, but I don’t really mess with the man.  I’ll try to parse through this new little red book at some point, but Badiou’s prose is usually too convoluted for my Anglo-American mind and post-Maoists tend to unnerve me.  Here’s something generic from the publisher:

Alain Badiou’s formulation of the “communist hypothesis” has traveled around the world since it was first aired in early 2008, in his book The Meaning of Sarkozy. The hypothesis is partly a demand to reconceptualize communism after the twin deaths of the Soviet Union and neoliberalism, but also a fresh demand for universal emancipation. As “third way” reforms prove as empty in practice as in theory, Badiou’s manifesto is a galvanizing call to arms that needs to be reckoned with by anyone concerned with the future of our planet.

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Mediafire

If anyone can convert this double-page scan into an ebook compatible single page scan, it’d be most appreciated.

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