To Live and Think Like Pigs

To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies Gilles Châtelet Urbanomic/SequenceNovember 2014Translated by Robin MackayForeword by Alain Badiou Paperback 115x175mm, 190pp. ISBN 978-0-9832169-6-4    Gilles Châtelet’s scathing polemical tract opens at the end of the 70s, when the liberatory dreams of ‘68 are beginning to putrefy, giving rise to conditions more favourable to a new breed of self-deluding ‘nomads’ and voguish ‘gardeners of the creative’. Gulled by a ‘realism’ that reassures them that political struggle is for anachronistic losers, their allegiances began to slide inexorably toward the ‘revolutionary’ forces of the market’s invisible hand, and they join the celebrants of a new order governed by boredom, impotence and envy…. As might be expected of Châtelet—mathematician, philosopher, militant gay activist, political polemicist, praised by contemporaries such as Deleuze and Badiou for his singularly penetrating philosophical mind—