Yes!!! I think you are right on the mark with what you have written in the above post.

It is interesting to see you reference Dennett here, by the way. I enjoy his work, but am usually afraid to bring it up in what I perceive to be hostile environs (although Zizek has made a few favorable comments, interestingly enough).

The Badiou project looks from the outside like ‘new communism’ à la ‘new labour’ – and with new labour the shift with clause 4 was to say, nationalisation is not a necessary condition to achieving social justice. ‘Old’ communists believe that the state/ democratic worker collectives, not the market, has to control all areas of the economy to ensure social justice.

So it’s not a demand for a political programme, but a political principle. Otherwise, he seems to be putting a communist/ radical label on what would normally be called mixed-economy social democracy.

My gripes with Badiou are at the level of metaphysics, not his theory of the subject. With that said, I think Badiou’s development of the “body” in relation to the subject in Book I of Logics of Worlds is a tremendous improvement over the account of the subject in Being and Event. I think his discussions of Sparticus and the slave revolt are especially illuminating. Here I think Badiou’s analysis of these sorts of movements comes very close to Latour’s actor-network-theory of social formations. It’s all about how new bodies are built or assembled in a way that departs from the manner in which a situation is structured. I suspect that when I sit down and read the whole thing I’ll have a similarly positive response to the later parts of the book. I’m just disappointed with the theory of objects and relations. So it goes.

Narratives matter. Daniel Dennett refers to the “self” as a “centre of narrative gravity”: the non-selves that we are narrate selves into being, and not only personal and individual selves but also animistic alter egos, political and economic demons and spirits. Our theories about politics or economics have to take account of the hyperstitional character of these folk-entities, which means both postulating that they’re not “what’s really there” and recognising that they are produced as, and in turn produce, real effects.

The demand for a political programme is a rhetorical trap, I think. Programmes get put together by movements, not by bloggers trying to will movements into existence. It’s as silly to ask the likes of me for a political programme as it is to expect Badiou to provide a roadmap to Communist Utopia. That’s not how anything has ever happened, and it’s not how anything is going to happen in the future.

“We need a compelling counter-narrative” – don’t you really need (and clearly lack) a compelling counter-proposal? How far do you re-nationalise? BT? Vodafone?