Book Review: Alain Badiou’s “The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings”

This is a book I’m anxious to read as I am always looking for new ideas of struggle in a world where things are changing and old methods just don’t work today. It is time to look at new methods and ideas and I hope to get some from this book. -សតិវ អតុ
This review was posted on the LA Review of Books website and also Kasama Project;
By Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover
1.
Riots are the Sphinx of the left. Every soi disant radical intellectual feels compelled, it seems, to answer the riddle they hear posed by the riots of the present, in Bahrain or Asturias, Chile or Britain: Why now? Why here? Why riot? These answers generally come in a few simple varieties. First, if the riot seems to lack focus or present clears demands – that is, if it is illegible as “protest,” as in the case of the London riots of summer 2011 – the intellectual will paint them as a “meaningless outburst” (Slavoj Žižek), undertaken by “mindless rioters” (David Harvey). Invariably, attributions of unmeaning must find support in patronizing sociology, rendering the rioters mere side-effects of an unequal society, symptoms of neoliberalism, capitalist crisis and the ensuing austerity. Frequently, such commentary adheres to the flinching rhetorical structure of “yes, but…” In the words of Tariq Ali from the London Review of Books:Yes, we know violence on the streets in London is bad. Yes, we know that looting shops is wrong.
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