The complaints against Badiou that have been raised on this thread mostly fall into two generic types. The first is that some variety of "academic philosophy", an elite leisure occupation, has had the temerity to propose a political programme; this is supremely dangerous, because the political programmes dreamed up by academic philosophers are invariably projections of intellectual authority, whose real purpose is to sustain the fantasy that what academic philosophers do and are is virtuous and significant. Badiou and "Badiouvians" are guilty of that most unpardonable offence against democratic materialism: telling others what to think.
The second is that what Badiou and "Badiouvians" have to offer is in fact so abstract, so void of consequence with respect to the real and urgent political issues that concern everybody (outside of the ivory towers in which academic philosophy is pursued), that its glaring and fatal flaw is that it cannot in any way be parlayed into a political programme. It is guilty of that second most dreadful offence against democratic materialism: irrelevance.
If one proposes a political programme, one has fallen for the fatal seductions of intellectual authority. If one does not propose a political programme, one is playing parlour games and wasting everybody's time. The world, meanwhile, retains its prerogative of ignoring or, if needs be, beating up egghead intellectuals who make a nuisance of themselves with their annoying ideas. (This is undoubtedly what the intellectuals are so riled up about in the first place - as everyone knows, the study of academic philosophy is a form of displaced vengeance against playground bullies).
With respect to this (no doubt intentionally) paralysing dichotomy, it is perhaps useful to step back and ask: what is a political programme? How does it unfold? At what moments in its development are theorisations and decisions involved, and to what do they pertain?
Badiou argues that the condition of politics in the "Western" nations is one of imposed, and normalised, disorientation. Our capacity, as citizens, to decide on matters of importance to us is alternately denied (all is opinion, there is no secure basis for a decision on any matter, we must resign ourselves to the somewhat wan dissensus of the "marketplace of ideas" and wait patiently for profit to tell us what to do) and subject to criminalising suspicion (those who seek to introduce the category of truth into the language of politics are, in Hayek's phrase, "totalitarians in our midst", no better than or different from terrorists or religious fanatics). Against this disorientation, he proposes that we look for "points", real issues on which it is possible to take a principled yes/no position.
For example: should the managerial imperative of testing and measurement dominate the way in which people actually work, in factories or in schools? The teachers who are preparing a strike in which they will refuse to administer standardised tests to pupils in UK schools assert that it should not: they are fed up with "teaching to the test", and declare that the value and meaning of their work as educators lies elsewhere. Badiou proposes, as one of the "points" around which we might organise, the primacy of workers' productive capacity over managerial necessity. Management is a second-order discipline, a co-ordinating function; when it becomes self-serving managerialism, which subordinates the work it co-ordinates to its own requirements (and fosters a cult of the charismatic manager, whose enrichment is only the just reward for "excellence"), then it is time to revive the slogans "there are workers in the factory" and "there are students in the university".
There are several other "points" that Badiou proposes (notably in his short book The Meaning of Sarkozy). Not everyone will agree that they are really as clear-cut as he asserts, and not everyone will take the position that he thinks we should take on them. But there is certainly a difference between disagreeing over whether or not this or that proposed "point" is really a point, and the systematic denial that any "point" could ever arise (the world being, in every particular, too complex and multivalent for any decision to be possible). Badiou's conception of politics entails that any real political sequence must treat of some points, must pass through a series of principled decisions (taken as they arise, rather than determined in advance according to criteria given by some philosophical Master) which determine its effectiveness. To deny the existence of such points, and to deny the possibility of a political truth-procedure, are one and the same thing.
