The situation has considerably changed since then. Philosophy was threatened with obliteration at the time, whereas today it finds itself under threat for the diametrically opposed reason: it is endowed with an excessive, artificial existence. "Philosophy" is everywhere. It serves as a trademark for various media pundits. It livens up cafés and health clubs. It has its magazines and its gurus. It is universally called upon, by everything from banks to major state commissions, to pronounce on ethics, law and duty. In essence, "philosophy" has now come to stand for nothing other than its most ancient enemy: conservative ethics.
Badiou's second manifesto therefore seeks to demoralize philosophy and to separate it from all those "philosophies" that are as servile as they are ubiquitous. It demonstrates the power of certain eternal truths to illuminate action and, as such, to transport philosophy far beyond the figure of "the human" and its "rights". There, well beyond all moralism, in the clear expanse of the idea, life becomes something radically other than survival.
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Alain Badiou.
Thinking the Event.
Thesis 1: Thought is the proper medium of the universal.
Thesis 2: Every universal is singular, or is a singularity.
Thesis 3: Every universal originates in an event, and the event is intransitive to the particularity of the situation.
Thesis 4: A universal initially presents itself as a decision about an undecidable.
Thesis 5: The universal has an implicative form.
Thesis 6: The universal is univocal.
Thesis 7: Every universal singularity remains incompletable or open.
Thesis 8: Universality is nothing other than the faithful construction of an infinite generic multiple.
Slavoj Zizek.
'Philosophy is not a dialogue'.
Discussion.
