At 79 years of age the philosopher Alain Badiou surveys the youth: the
youth whom liberalism has left without a compass, the youth tempted by
Daesh, and so, too, his own youth, marked by communism, to which he
remains faithful. Interview by Juliette Cerf for Tlrama. Translation by
David Broder
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Corrupting the Youth Juliette Cerf Halaman 2
That is its very process. Youths problem is exactly the same as the
philosophers, though it doesnt know it!
Like Plato you call for the "corruption" of youth. But how does
wanting to help young people to orient themselves, to find
truth, constitute a form of corruption?
What were Socratess judges reproaching him with when they accused
him of corrupting the youth, and condemned him to death for doing so?
They reproached him with putting in doubt certain aspects of tradition, of
openly flaunting his impiety with regard to the gods of the city, of turning
the youth away from its familial and civic duty. If philosophy "corrupts,"
that is because its function is more critical than conservative. However, in
this regard the current situation is more complex than the situation in
Platos time. Today the great landmarks of tradition have been destroyed,
but without society proposing new ones in their place. There are new
pleasures [jouissances], yes, but not new values. Everything has dissolved
in the fascination for the commodity, in what Marx called the "icy waters
of egotistical calculation." Young people are wedged between, on the one
hand, the mortifying possibility of a return to tradition which is always
a matter of resuscitating a corpse and bringing ghosts to life and, on the
other hand, the possibility of taking a place in the general competition
and struggling for their own survival therein, to the sole end of not being a
loser. What I, following Rimbaud, call the "true life" is a third way: neither
the return to defunct traditions nor the adoption of the rules of globalised
capitalism, which whatever their semblance of civilization are in reality
brutal and savage. At an extremely young age Rimbaud was acutely
conscious of the disorientation that was on its way. He saw very clearly
that the old Christ had abandoned the Earth. He roamed through the
world, where he did a little of everything, including poetry, one of his
follies. He burned through life before concluding that the modern world
is money and success. He then became a colonial trafficker
So what is the true life?
A life that does not limit itself either to obedience or the satisfaction of
immediate impulses. A life in which the subject constitutes herself as a
subject. For me there are four domains in which truth manifests itself,
what I call the four procedures for the construction of truth: art, love,
politics and science. My wish for the youth is that they traverse these four
conditions: to encounter art in all its forms; to be loving in fidelity, and for
a long time; and to participate in the political reconstruction of a world of
justice, as against the world such as it is. And not to be as ignorant of
science as they currently are, so that they do not leave it in the hands of
technology or capital.
Corrupting the Youth Juliette Cerf Halaman 3
You devote one section of your text to young men and women:
is the difference between the sexes still relevant for thinking
about youth today?
Yes. The weakening of traditions has not had the same effects on young
women and on young men. It has opened up more doors to women, who
have little-by-little been liberated from the male oppression and
dependence on marriage that reigned in the old world. It has opened up
career prospects and possibilities that they did not previously have.
Ultimately young women are more at ease in the contemporary world
than young men, and that includes doing better at school. I have attended
trials of young men who are completely disoriented: petty dealers, mock
local bosses in the cits [projects/council estates] etc. Their sisters, for
their part, were lawyers For young men the disappearance of military
service symbolized the general disappearance of any initiation. For
thousands of years the question of youth and reaching adulthood was
governed by regulated procedures that set out the relevant thresholds.
Nowadays identifying the different ages of ones life is difficult, hence the
cult of youth the fact that the norm is now to remain young as long as
possible, even when power remains in the hands of the old and there also
reigns a fear of young people, gangs of young people All this creates a
general confusion.
In some of your recent political interventions another youth
appears: the young people enrolled by Daesh, who you
characterize as "young fascists."
The word "radicalized" is very much in fashion, but I prefer the term
"fascists." I use "fascism" as the name for a popular subjectivity generated
by capitalism which mixes into an identitarian, nationalist discourse.
Fascism is a reactive subjectivity: indeed, these young people have often
experienced the frustration that goes with being nothing more than a
petty trafficker in the cits, and the disillusionment over not having been
able to become a great hero of capitalism. They reject the rather desolate
and opportunist roam through immediate, worldly satisfactions, as well as
the harsh law of competition and success. They situate themselves outside
the alternative most youth live through the alternative between
consuming and burning up ones life in transgression and immediacy, or
taking a place in society, becoming a banker or the manager of a start-up
listed on the Stock Exchange. Their nihilism is a mix of sacrificial and
criminal heroism, and a general aggression toward the Western world.
This fascist aggression is based on forms of traditional and identitarian
regression, on the debris of tradition that are offered to them, in part by
Islam. It is the fascination that Islamizes them, not Islam that makes
them fascist. Religion is but a formalism; it proposes a general
envelopment allowing the satisfaction of a frustrated subjectivity that
thinks it can save itself through suicidal acting out and the murder of the
other.
Corrupting the Youth Juliette Cerf Halaman 4