The Century

The twentieth century has been judged and condemned as the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and dangerous ideologies, of empty illusions and mass genocides.

In this major new book, the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou undertakes to re-examine this century - not from the customary moral standpoint of a wise judge looking back, but rather through an immanent investigation of the century itself in its unfolding.

In order to do this, he considers poems, philosophical fragments, political programmes, theatre pieces - a whole body of material in which the nature of the century is uncovered.

Against the grain of all other judgements hitherto pronounced, Badiou argues that the passion of the twentieth century was not at all the passions for utopia or ideologies, even less was it messianic passion.

The terrible passion of the twentieth century - in contrast to the prophetic character of the nineteenth century - was the passion for the real.

It was a question of activating the True, here and now.