A decent, quick read that might serve well (sort of) as an introduction to Badiou.

The True Life is a book published by Polity. Little, it is 80 pages but dense of considerations it is written for young people by Alain Badiou and translated by Susan Spitzer.

The author starts with Socrates and Plato. Yes it was maybe true that between the two men there was more than a friendship but there is to saying something else: that every kind of sex, including the homosexual one was very practiced in old Greece and accepted, and like said our touristic guide when I was 15 years and we visited Greece, it was the Catholicism that destroyed their society in this sense introducing the idea of sin.

Said that, who is a young boy and girl today and which is the purpose of the young person today?

Sure there is a lot of confusion and for obvious reasons. Living for ideals, so being a good person, living with some ideals and building a life of success, good house, great career? Is it possible to living adopting these two situations? Which is the true life? Maybe the true life can be a life of sublime thoughts disconnected by an excessive wealth.


The author traces also a historic condition of the past generations in terms of work and study and what it meant in the past the gap between the various social classes.

The author takes also a proper picture of a politician inspired by The Republic by Plato. Is a politician always a good man?

In which society the young people live first of all?

It's an anarchic society, an immature society; it's a sort of Youth-Land where everyone is young, where no one is old, where responsibilities don't exist, where the old schemes are all gone and it's possible to live the life dreamed without passing through that symbolic moment of initiation so typical in the past. For a girl marrying someone meant to entering in the adult age; at the moment it doesn't say anything because weddings in general end pretty soon and there is not anymore a real emotional stability.

Old people must be young as well, and when necessary they must prove that they are young with exercise, plastic surgery and all the possible escapism for avoiding old age.
The wisdom of the age is seen as a scaring thing, and not like the time able to presenting to youngest ones some lessons for their life although it's better to commit life's errors. So also the multi-generational help is gone.
This one is a society of consumers and grown-up infants, and this society is a society asking continuously to people of every age of buying everything.
The latest great TV, the other great object able to satisfying the most profound desire, the best house, the best trip, everything.
The author admits that when an adult is taken by consumerism so badly it means that he is not yet an adult.

In the past society asked of saving money to people, keeping them wisely apart. Now, it's a continuous asking for money, without any sort of job-stability and so with a more uncertain future.

Just a very little part of population have biggest amount of money in their hands. All the rest of population lives without a lot of expectations and money.

If in the past solidity was given by a society structured and able to give answers, securities, jobs, a family with children,, a good future, when the system collapsed, the uncertainty created a lot of Peter Pan although adults and in a dangerous condition according to the author, because this one an extension of the infant age.

So the young person doesn't feel anymore the sensation of "becoming adult" as it happened in the past.

The author later describes the role of the young male and the one of the girl in our society.

A society in which old roles, old values are not yet over, but put in serious crisis by this lack of... values fundamentally and this extra-freedom in grade to give the permission of being whoever the young want to to be. Just...Where this world will drive us?

Plus oldest generations although in search for the fountain of the eternal youthfulness are scared by young boys and girls and interrogate themselves with a certain worry: where these young boys and girls will be in grade to go and do being like this?

A very stimulating book written by a 79 years old man for young people, so perfect for a gift, but according to me great for everyone.

I surely thank NetGalley and Polity for this ebook.

This book puts forth some rather ridiculous ideas. I'll admit it's been a good decade since I last read Badiou, but I don't remember his work being this out of touch or poorly written. The basic premise concerns a series of lectures Badiou gave that are oriented towards 'the youth.' While recognizing the potential absurdity of an 80 year old philosopher lecturing young folk on political participation; he also simultaneously manages to misunderstand or misrepresent so many aspects of 'youth culture' as he identifies it. Many of his sweeping generalizations and proofs are either poorly supported or simply factually inaccurate. One claim that is central to his argument is that there are no longer rituals to mark entry into adulthood because mandatory military service is gone. What a culturally myopic assumption. The bar/bat mitzvah, the Quinceañera, age limits on activities like driving and drinking. All of these things persist to mark entry into adulthood. Not to mention there are countries where mandatory national and/or military service still exists (or never existed in the first place). And there were so many instances of the examples Badiou choses to use simply not supporting his argument. At one point, when discussing why he assumed Occupy Wall Street failed as a movement; he asserted it was because a) all of the participants were middle class b) they never made any effort to make alliances with the working poor. Then literally on the next page of the book, when trying to illustrate 'good' examples of this, he cites chapters of the Occupy moment working together with local labor groups (like Occupy Oakland protesting in solidarity with the dockworkers at the Port of Oakland). And none of this even touches on the absurdity of the fact that the last two chapters are divided into 'boys' and 'girls' concerns. (did you know that Feminism as project has only ever had one issue? According to Badiou it's women's independence from men! Who knew.)

An excellent book but does require considerable prior knowledge of philosophy in order to fully appreciate the scholarship.

Alain Badiou, the octogenarian, Maoist and self-proclaimed neo-Platonist, is simply a joy to read in these small outbursts of lucid writing and reflection. These series of small books translated into English (another one I’ve read is Black: The Brilliance of a non-color) is highly recommended anyone who is interested. This is the TL;DR version.

Badiou starts the book humorously by mentioning Socrates who is condemned to death because of the “corruption of the youth”. As an old man who is about to become 80, he definitely takes up the duty. There is a great procession of ideas here: Badiou recognizes how old people tries to teach “life lessons” to young people and they are usually full of regrets and goes on to talk about Rimbaud from whom the expression “the true life” originated. Then, a poem by Rimbaud comes up in which he talks to his 17-year-old self full of regret and longing. When he was 20-year-old. So, there is Rimbaud standing in between two choices that the young people faces according to Badiou: instant gratification (hedonism) and that which “conservative and structural life” (career-building) both of which Rimbaud experienced before he was 20.

Of course, Badiou is for neither of them and he claims that the youth needs a “well-conceived and highly effective plan” which sounds a lot like famous Badiou adage, “those who have nothing to lose has only their discipline”. When he proposes an alliance of under 30s and over 60s (old radicals that he is a member), it is possible that he has the adage in mind: the young people whose future is stolen from them, locked in a perpetual state of adolescence and old radicals who lost once but has their discipline.

His two-part treatise on boys and girls is fascinating as it makes use of psychoanalysis in incredible clarity (one should always applaud such an effort of making psychoanalysis intelligible). Badiou writes a fast-paced “Totem and Taboo for the 21st Century” on boys which explains the perpetual adolescence of boys in contemporary times. This is because we are lacking the initiation rites of the old symbolic order (alongside other reasons) for Badiou that usually includes military service, marriage and employment for boys. But nowadays the symbolic order is eroding and “boys will be boys” who are very much into “toys” that consumerist culture provides to them.

The last part on girls is probably the most interesting part in the book because of a number of reasons. First, he uses the classical principle of Maoism (that Badiou very frequently deploys in other works) “One Divides into Two” to explain the girls’ situation. His move here is pretty pleasant to read. After a thorough discussion, he raises two concern: women taking over boys whose most ridiculous form would be career women controlling the ever-adolescent men. He claims that this is possible under a “bourgeois, authoritarian form of feminism” which we already have traces of. We need to be aware of the fact that there is a danger of women becoming “reserve army of capitalism” (in the case of me and the other boys continue to act like we are still 16 years old for the next 20 years), he claims (no, I claim the last part of course, but still) and I tend to agree.

The other concern of Badiou’s that ends the book was the bourgeois feminism’s hostility towards child-bearing. While child-bearing is seen as a remnant of “woman, the Servant”, Badiou argues that the servile mode could be overcome by the new symbolic order that is co-created by men and women. It was just a different experience that one of the leading philosophers in the world is really worried about humankind’s extinction because of bourgeois feminism’s hostility towards child-bearing for half a page quoting Kantian ethics.

All in all, 5 stars.

As much as I like Alain Badiou (see my review of Our Wound is Not So Recent), I found The True Life to be irresponsibly dense. It is irresponsible because it purports to be talks to adolescents in school lectures. Facing the uncertainty they do, adolescents would very much appreciate some straight talk, the keys to the kingdom if possible, and answers they can use. None of that is available in The True Life.

Badiou boils the choices down to two – go out, see the world and find yourself, or pick a career and stick with it. To bolster his position he quotes poets like Rimbaud and Beaudelaire, philosophers like Plato and Goethe, and of course, Karl Marx. This does not help.

Living in this western society, and having been an adolescent at some point too, I could not relate to the status quo Badiou describes, or what preceded it. He comes at this from some alternate reality. He mourns the loss of traditional adolescent initiations, claiming loud music and tattoos have replaced them. He says higher education is no replacement for the military, another grand tradition/initiation that all males had to undergo in France. He says it gave them maturity and Ideas, both lacking since conscription ended.

His chapter on girls is framed in terms of boys and God. I don’t think more need be said about that.

The bottom line is that today, girls are too mature, boys are too immature. Have a nice life.

David Wineberg