Alain Badiou has just published Notre mal vient de plus loin. Penser les tueries du 13 Novembre (Paris: Fayard, 72 pages, 2016). Maggiori and Vécrin of Libération give an interview of the author. What are the real causes of radicalization leading to the murderous attacks in Paris, Turkey, Lebanon, US, and other places? Are they social, economic, and religious? For Badiou, these mass murders are a symptom of the radicalization of worldwide capitalism. Badiou calls for an alternative. His analysis in the interview goes something like this:

1. The collapse of progressive ideologies after the collapse of socialist states has left a big ideological hole. Part of the responsibility (especially in France) rests with intellectuals who were disappointed by the outcome of movements in the sixties and seventies and went to serve the state and elites. Another organization of economic and social forces is possible but hardly discussed.
2. Global capitalism and the domination of states by oligarchies is near complete. Its victory is a fact. [I add to this: one can now speak of the servitude of any modern state, including the United States, whether under Democrats or Republicans, though here mystifications are still operative. For instance yesterday, Obama spent much energy glorifying the state and proposing a take-no-prisoner approach regarding the jihadists. Or see the latest paper by Edsall in the NYT about the inroads made by oligarchies and money interests in buying political and ideological power in most of the states. Edsall proposes that democrats do the same and not be content with exercising power over the federal government. The “progressive” aspects he notes at the federal level are really about consumption and moral issues, not about fundamental structural issues like finances and military. End of my bracketed comment.] Badiou says that no alternative is proposed or thought possible between consumerism and wild nihilism.
3. In the case of the attacks in Paris: In January, targeted ideological and antisemitic attack, in November nihilistic mass murder. The ideological answer to the first: massive demonstration of unity of the nation, no other ideology present. Reaction to the second one in November: no demonstration, and the government immediately declaring war on the barbarians, plus defense à la Le Pen of “our values” (these values being now left unspecified, a very thin justification for war and radical decisions on immigration and the use of police or military force). How is one to avoid the murderers’ nihilism and the state’s police response?
4. The murderers came from Islamic background, true, but the analysis shouldn’t begin with Islam. The attackers are caught inside a désir d’Occident opprimé ou impossible. The capitalism that uses Western states as its proxies proposes an inaccessible world for so many who live in it everywhere and cannot avoid its projections as most desirable. If the criteria for one’s dignity and suitability (fitness?) are money, comfort, consumption, what happens when this situation is unreachable (and often blocked socially as in France because of its history of colonization and racism, not only psychologically or as part of a broader phenomenon of inequality of incomes)?
5. Religion is not the prime object of analysis for Badiou. The youth’s fascism—tempted by both ideological violence and suicidal nihilism—takes shape in religion, granted. Yet, it is fascism that precedes islam, not islam that precedes fascism.