The democratic imperium

In the new issue of Radical Philosophy, French philosopher Alain Badiou writes of a new form of global liberalism, which he perversely calls "democratic materialism" for which:

"Communities and cultures, colours and pigments, religions and religious orders, traditions and customs, disparate sexualities, public intimacies and the publicity of the intimate: everything and everyone deserves to be recognized and protected by the law.

Having said that, democratic materialism acknowledges a global limit to its polymorphous and animalistic tolerance. A language that does not recognize the universal juridical and normative equality of languages does not deserve to benefit from this equality. A language that claims to regulate all the others, to rule over all bodies, will be termed dictatorial and totalitarian. Then it is no longer a matter of tolerance, but of our 'right to intervention': legal, international and, if necessary, military intervention. Aggressive actions serve to rectify our universalistic claims, along with our linguistic sectarianism."

I can't decide if this is sensible analysis or nonsense.



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Tags: Globalisation, Globalization