Overview

We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in ‘revelatory’ terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, ‘truth’. Otherswill be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism. Yet these ‘ordinary’ scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamental—and fundamentally rare—form of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such ‘real scandal’, but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy. From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this ‘static’ fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.

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9781350068551

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Alex Ling's Scandalous Times is a lucid argument that the realm of contemporary scandal is one in which everything changes so everything can stay the same. Against this conservatism, Ling provides a philosophical defence of the real scandal that would overturn our scandalous reality. * Benjamin Noys, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Chichester, UK * Alex Ling turns a much needed philosophical gaze on scandals, one of those key yet widely misunderstood concepts currently shaping our reactionary political age. Ling's lucid, challenging and thoroughly engaging analysis forces us to think of our current political moment as one saturated with simulacral scandals (or state-sanctioned controversies), both perversely satisfying an inevitable demand for shock and horror in times such as ours, and precluding any real change. Building on Badiouian philosophy, this timely and powerful book is not just a sharp and original account of how to think about scandals and the role they play in our societies, but a guide for how to reimagine them, and explore ways towards new political horizons and ultimately the possibility of real happiness . * Aurelien Mondon, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of Bath, UK *

Alex Ling's Scandalous Times is a lucid argument that the realm of contemporary scandal is one in which everything changes so everything can stay the same. Against this conservatism, Ling provides a philosophical defence of the real scandal that would overturn our scandalous reality. * Benjamin Noys, Professor of Critical Theory, University of Chichester, UK *

Author Information

Alex Ling is Senior Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of Badiou Reframed (2016) and Badiou and Cinema (2011) and co-editor and translator of Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury, 2014).

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