The oldest combat of the intellect is undoubtedly the one that Plato organized under the name of philosophy, against a precisely named enemy: δοξα, opinion. The intellect builds arguments, refers at each step to previously clarified notions, passes from the singular to the universal and back again, in order to free individuals from fallacious images and mass constraints, and change them rather into subjects in service of a handful of truths.
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The intellect, today, faces the most powerful, the most subtly seductive, and the least yielding machinery that humanity has ever known. This global machinery has a generic name, capitalism; and a propagandistic name, democracy. It thrives upon unprecedented devastation and a kind of haggard submission, a kind of wandering among fake satisfactions whose ultimate and only measure is money. It accepts, often even sight-unseen, the domination of a miniscule oligarchy. That is why the intellect is either combatant or worthless. Plato still: leave the cave, get out into the light, enumerate all the inhuman ramifications of the capitalist machinery; see them, at last, for what they are. And return to the cave and organize there, at last, a mass exit, a march into the light, as the cave collapses, at last, upon its billionaire directors and their government hirelings.
text by ALAIN BADIOU, portrait by GIASCO BERTOLI, translation by PETER BEHRMAN DE SINÉTY, purple MAGAZINE — “Purple 76 Index” S/S 2018 issue 29.
via Alain Badiou on the End Times and Beyond: Philosophy, Truth, and Opinion — SubSense