Can One Think About Politics In The Interior Of Syria Lazarus?

“Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?” is an essay from The Intelligence of Politics, a book-length work by French anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus. Lazarus’ first book, Anthropology of the Name, was published in October 2015, and it can be considered his first work. In this essay, Lazarus warns against subordinating radical political thinking to its relationship with extant social reality.

Lazarus’ thinking about politics as a kind of internal sequencing can be seen parallel to Badiou’s notion of fidelity as a temporal ordering in thought. Lazarus’ discussion of Maoism in “Can Politics be Thought in Interiority?” reveals two claims not only about the nature of “enthusiasm for socialism”, but also about the concept of “politics in exteriority”.

Lazarus’ work is a robust attempt to defend and redefine radical egalitarianism and emancipatory politics after the political upheavals of the twentieth century.

The article reviews the concepts of French anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus and philosopher Alain Badiou, aiming to show that using Badiou’s concept of model, we can better understand the often-complex grammar that Lazarus adopted for his model of politics.