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Alain Badiou
Verso, London, 2008, 117pp., £12.99/$16.95,
ISBN-13: 978-1844673094
Written before and after Sarkozy's election to the French presidency in 2007, The Meaning of Sarkozy gathers a range of interventions - mainly seminars delivered at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris - in which Alain Badiou combines political passion and philosophical rigour. It is unsurprising that this publication has triggered intense reactions, attracting the attention of the media in France and abroad for reasons that are not entirely philosophical.
This is a razor-sharp book, which in some passages recalls a pamphlet from another epoch and in others the act of accusation addressed by a philosopher to the present Zeitgeist . But despite the celebrity of the name titling the book, despite the ruthless portraits the author sketches of that celebrity - 'police chief whose dream costume is a gigantic rubber penis', 'Napoleon the very small', 'rat man' (pp. 9, 36) and so on - and also despite the bitter public accusations that these portraits provoke (including that of anti-Semitism), this is not a book about Nicolas Sarkozy. And moreover it is not the reference to a political celebrity as such that makes this work so intriguing. In Badiou's perspective Sarkozy constitutes the name of the unconscious subjectivity haunting the French parliamentary scene, a subjectivity that has its roots in Petainism, but expresses itself...