Following on from Alain Badiou’s acclaimed works Ethics and Metapolitics, Polemics is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution. With the critical insight and polemical bravura for which he is renowned, Badiou considers the relationships between language, judgment and propaganda—and shows how propaganda has become the dominant force. Both wittily and profoundly, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.

Performative Polemic offers a literary history of the French-language pamphlets that denounced absolutism during Louis XIV's personal reign (1661-1715). The book employs performativity as a conceptual framework to trace the evolution of anti-absolutist pamphlets from legalistic texts indicting the French crown to satirical narratives that transformed the Sun King into a laughable object of derision.

These new essays by leading scholars examine some famous and less well-known instances of polemical encounters. The essays are enhanced by an interview with Gayatri Spivak, specially conducted by Jane Gallop for this volume Historically rigorous, theoretically astute, and sometimes wickedly funny, Polemic makes criticism a critical issue.

If terms are associated with particular historical periods, then ‘polemic’ is firmly rooted within early modern print culture, the apparently inevitable result of religious controversy and the rise of print media. Taking a broad European approach, this collection brings together specialists on medieval as well as early modern culture in order to challenge stubborn assumptions that medieval culture was homogenous and characterized by consensus; and that literary discourse is by nature ‘eirenic’. Instead, the volume shows more clearly the continuities and discontinuities, especially how medieval discourse on the sins of the tongue continued into early modern discussion; how popular and influential medieval genres such as sermons and hagiography dealt with potentially heterodox positions; and the role of literary, especially fictional, debate in developing modes of articulating discord, as well as demonstrating polemic in action in political and ecclesiastical debate. Within this historical context, the position of early modern debates as part of a more general culture of articulating discord becomes more clearly visible. The structure of the volume moves from an internal textual focus, where the nature of polemic can be debated, through a middle section where these concerns are also played out in social practice, to a more historical group investigating applied polemic. In this way a more nuanced view is provided of the meaning, role, and effect of ‘polemic’ both broadly across time and space, and more narrowly within specific circumstances.

A polemic against love that is “engagingly acerbic ... extremely funny.... A deft indictment of the marital ideal, as well as a celebration of the dissent that constitutes adultery, delivered in pointed daggers of prose” (The New Yorker). Who would dream of being against love? No one. Love is, as everyone knows, a mysterious and all-controlling force, with vast power over our thoughts and life decisions. But is there something a bit worrisome about all this uniformity of opinion? Is this the one subject about which no disagreement will be entertained, about which one truth alone is permissible? Consider that the most powerful organized religions produce the occasional heretic; every ideology has its apostates; even sacred cows find their butchers. Except for love. Hence the necessity for a polemic against it. A polemic is designed to be the prose equivalent of a small explosive device placed under your E-Z-Boy lounger. It won’t injure you (well not severely); it’s just supposed to shake things up and rattle a few convictions.

Strategies of Polemics in Greek and Roman Philosophy brings together papers written by specialists in the field of ancient philosophy on the topic of polemics. Despite the central role played by polemics in ancient philosophy, the forms and mechanisms of philosophical polemics are not usually the subject of systematic scholarly attention. The present volume seeks to shed new light on familiar texts by approaching them from this neglected angle. The contributions address questions such as: What is the role of polemic in a philosophical discourse? What were the polemical strategies developed by ancient philosophers? To what extent did polemics contribute to the shaping of important philosophical doctrines or standpoint? Contributors are: Mauro Bonazzi, André Laks, Robert Lamberton, Carlos Lévy, Daniel Marković, Jozef Müller, Charlotte Murgier, Christopher Shields, Naly Thaler, Voula Tsouna, and Sharon Weisser.

This book revisits the definition of polemical discourse and deals with its functions in the democratic sphere. It first examines theoretical questions concerning the management of disagreement in democracy and the nature of polemical discourse. Next, it analyses case studies involving such issues as the place of women in the public space, illustrated by the case of the burqa in France and public controversy in the media on the exclusion of women from the public space. The book then explores reason, passion and violence in polemical discourse by means of cases involving confrontations between secular and ultra-orthodox circles, controversies about the Mexican Wall and fierce discussions about stock-options, and bonuses in times of financial crisis. Although polemical exchanges in the public sphere exacerbate dissent instead of resolving conflicts, they are quite frequent in the media and on the Net. How can we explain such a paradox? Most studies in argumentation avoid the question: they mainly focus on the verbal procedures leading to agreement. This focus stems from the centrality conferred upon consensus in our democratic societies, where decisions should be the result of a process of deliberation. What is then the social function of a confrontational management of dissent that does not primarily seek to achieve agreement? Is it just a sign of decadence, failure and powerlessness, or does it play a constructive role? This book answers these questions.

Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion demonstrates that literature and polemic interacted constantly in sixteenth-century France, constructing ideological frameworks that defined the various groups to which individuals belonged and through which they defined their identities. Contributions explore both literary texts (prose, poetry, and theater) and more intentionally polemical texts that fall outside of the traditional literary genres. Engaging the continuous casting and recasting of opposing worldviews, this collection of essays examines literature's use of polemic and polemic's use of literature as seminal intellectual developments stemming from the religious and social turmoil that characterized this period in France.

In Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity politico-cultural, philosophical, and religious forms of critical conversation in the ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, Graeco-Roman, and early-Islamic world are discussed. The contributions enquire into the boundaries between debate, polemics, and intolerance, and address their manifestations in both philosophy and religion.

This rhetorical and historical analysis of sermons in the reign of James I argues that the official polemic of Jacobean government belies its claim to religious consensus and political moderation in pre-Civil War England.