A Course on Greece

One of the world's leading radical philosophers analyses the failure of the Syriza experience in Greece

In a series of seven trenchant interventions Alain Badiou analyses the decisive developments in Greece since 2011. Badiou considers this Mediterranean country -a sort of open-air political lesson-, with much to tell us about the wider situation. Greece is exemplary of -our fundamental contradictions in Europe, which are also ultimately the fundamental contradictions of the world such as it is--the world served up to the authoritarian anarchy of capitalism.-

Notwithstanding the Greeks' heartening opposition to the financial markets' hegemony, Badiou considers it also important to address the reasons why this opposition failed. -Movementist- politics may arouse widespread sympathy, but for the French philosopher they have -absolutely no effect other than to temporarily trap the movement in the negative weakness of its affects.-

Badiou argues that a consequential opposition inspired by the emancipatory politics of the past--or by what he calls -the communist hypothesis---should set its compass by the -orienting maxims- proposed in this book, defining a direction for political action.