The Pornographic Age

Offering a piercing indictment of what we have let ourselves become, this short, critical work is a damning critique of the current age and of the democratic systems that characterize it.

Alain Badiou argues that any truly radical politics must begin with dismantling the obscene (or pornographic) qualities of neoliberal capitalism. In The Pornographic Age he asks us to hold up a mirror to ourselves and confront the debasement of the political realities in which we live, the shock of which must galvanize us into action. It is only through this realization, this crucial confrontation with the perversity with which we conduct our daily lives that we can prompt true revolution.

Including an afterword from international Badiou scholars A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens and a commentary by William Watkin, this book is a philosophical call to arms: Badiou’s radical indictment of the current age is an exciting, no-holds-barred exploration of both how we live and how we might live.

Author Biography

Alain Badiou is a world-renowned French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, France, and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard.

A. J. Bartlett teaches philosophy in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths (2011), co-author of Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014) and What is Impossible: Alain Badiou and Contemporary Philosophy (2016). He is also the co-editor of Badiou: Key Concepts (2010), The Praxis of Alain Badiou (2006) and co-editor and translator of Alain Badiou’s Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury 2014).

Justin Clemens is Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of The Romanticism of Contemporary Theory (2003), Psychoanalysis is an Antiphilosophy (2013) and, with A.J. Bartlett and Jon Roffe, Lacan Deleuze Badiou (2014). He has edited many academic collections, including translating and editing Alain Badiou’s Infinite Thought (Continuum 2003) with Oliver Feltham.