PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPT OF THE XXTH CENTURY BY ALAIN BADIOU

Abstract

The article highlights the views of the famous, somewhat controversial French philosopher A. Badiou on the past century. In the context of current events, in particular, the current Russian-Ukrainian war, this understanding is relevant, since the past directly affects the present.This analysis provides an opportunity to better understand what the present century is and can be. The thinker explores the 20th century using the method of interiorization, looking at the subject of study from within itself, examining it through the prism of its own art, poetry, literature, documents, etc., rather than just dry facts.A. Badiou emphasizes that the past century constantly sought to implement the project of creating a new man, proposed by F. Nietzsche, who was to appear as a negation of the old, imperfect man. It was an unsuccessful project, the new man was never created. But its creation was paid for with tens of millions of human lives.This project was a project of rupture and foundation. The century emerged as openly voluntarist, contradictory, since the ontology of Life and the voluntarist rupture of its continuity turned out to be incommensurable. The means of creating a new man was terror in the Soviet era, in China, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, etc., and at the same time, the beginning of somethingqualitatively different was proclaimed. The philosopher concludes that the past century was a passionate fascination with the real, even in its most horrific forms.The century constantly sought to achieve final victory by means of absolute war, supposedly the most just, and not local, unjust ones. Obsessed with the heroic, it did not think about the cost of this victory. The twentieth century. emerged as a century of total division. Destruction as a method of creating something new has been used in all spheres of life. A. Badiou proposes a method of subtractive thinking to minimize differences and overcome total division. Since the division is not overcome, the 21st century will be a century of war – this is the disturbing conclusion the philosopher came to.