Badiou's Ontology of the Present: Society, Economy and Culture in Transition

“Michael Hauser constructs a compelling theory of the present as the repetition of interregnum in an atonal world without Events. Hauser articulates an original interpretation of Badiou’s thought, in which the concept of interregnum serves to interrogate both the Stalinist past and the contemporary neoliberal and postmodern order. Hauser argues that the post-1989 neoliberal order was fundamentally parasitic and prosthetic, grafting the egalitarian promises of socialism to better infiltrate decomposed, post-socialist societies. In the present, in contrast, this clarity has dissolved into a cacophonous conflation of social models, the forms of which circulate in a culture of immediate consumption without Idea. In this context, Hauser deploys the thought of Alain Badiou in a highly original configuration, to discern the limits of the present interregnum, as well as the emergent promise of an egalitarian, communist order to come.” ―Professor Nick Nesbitt, Department of French & Italian, Princeton University

“Hauser’s wager: not only is a philosophy of history still possible, but it can cast such a light on the ideological impasses of the current era that we begin to see our way around them. Hauser develops an original reading of Alain Badiou’s philosophy in which he focuses on the ambiguities and the adequacy of the latter’s diagnosis of Stalinism, and more broadly on the question of the periodization of the idea of communism, and its exhaustion, in the twentieth century. He creatively employs Badiou’s conception of subject-positions as being derived from particular relationships to political events in order to diagnose a hidden but exploited element of emancipatory energy in even the most reactionary ideologies.” ―Professor Oliver Feltham, American University of Paris