Philosophical Militant

Andrey Gordienko holds a PhD from University of California, Los Angeles, USA, where he has taught a graduate seminar on contemporary film theory. His work has been published in Philosophy Today, SubStance, Paragraph, Continental Philosophy Review, and Sartre Studies International.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: The Philosopher as the ContemporaryPart I. Struggles on the Philosophical Battlefield1. Politics and Philosophy in the Red Years: Sartre, Althusser, and the Problematic of Suture 2. The Cause of the People: Sartre’s Encounter with Lacan in Badiou’s Theory of the Subject 3. The Ethics of Communism: From Sartrean Responsibility to Lacanian Drive 4. Foucault, Badiou, and the Courage of PhilosophyPart II. Diagnoses of the Political Disease 5. “The Most Cynical Prostitution”: Liberalism and Democracy6. Is There a Theory of Neoliberalism in Badiou’s Work?7. Does the Left Dream of the Commune or the Lockdown?8. Trump and the Erasure of Political FrontiersNotes Select Bibliography

Gordienko’s book on Badiou is a brilliant, rigorous, and timely intervention into contemporary political philosophy. By staging a critical dialogue with Sartre, Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault (among others) the book situates Badiou within a lineage of radical thought while also mounting an uncompromising polemic against the ideological complacencies of our technocratic order. Rejecting the conciliatory gestures of liberal capitalism, Gordienko reasserts the vitality of (anti)philosophy as a political act—one committed to confronting the Real and reimagining the conditions of the possible.