Alain Badiou. The Question of Democracy.

Alain Badiou. The Question of Democracy. lacanian ink. Vol. 28, Fall 2006. English.

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AH: You claim that nowadays the enemy is not capitalism but democracy. Why?

AB: My thought about this topic is a little more complex. Not only I think that capitalism as a system is an enemy of human emancipation. I also think that there is no signification today in the idea of directly fighting against it, because capitalism is an abstract and objective system, a structural domination. So we have to fight the political expression of capitalism, and not directly its economic imaginary.

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AH: With regard to the Israel-Palestine conflict, what do you think about the Zionist project of establishing a Jewish State?

AB: I think that the Zionist project has two different and opposite significations. On the one side, it was in the framework of the idea of emancipation. It is true that many Zionists had the general idea to create a new form of state with a collective democracy and so on. So there is a part at the beginning of the Zionist project which is in fact a part of the general idea of progress in the nineteenth century. But there is another part which is purely within the ideology of colonialism. So the Zionist project is the result of a strange mixture between the European idea of emancipation and the colonialist ideas..

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