Badiou addresses “the contemporary fate of boys,” and it doesn’t look great. One of the traditions that Badiou sees evaporating into thin air is the initiation ritual whereby boys become men. Without a clear transition, we are condemned to infinite adolescence in three different forms: the piercings, tattoos, and drugs of the deadened “perverted” body; the extreme discipline and self-renunciation of the “sacrificed” body; and the normie career-and-music-festivals pursuit of the meritocrat “deserving” body. The critique is almost a synthesis of the opposition between MTV and Jerry Falwell: careerism is the “hole-plugger of meaninglessness,” but pornographic sexuality is “the marking of the body in the repetition of inertia.” Thinking beyond these impoverished forms of life is a challenge.
Like boys, Badiou sees girls as deprived of their traditional initiation ritual: specifically, marriage and motherhood. That isn’t to say women don’t get married or have children, but their lives are no longer automatically structured around men. Unlike boys, Badiou doesn’t see girls as stuck in childhood. Rather, they are always already adults. “Basically, the idea is that not only can women do everything men do, but, under the conditions of capitalism, they can do it better than men,” Badiou writes, “They’ll be more realistic than men, more relentless, more tenacious. Why? Precisely because girls no longer have to become the women that they already are, while boys don’t know how to become the men that they are not. To our dialectical guide, this could go one of two ways.
The first possibility is on Wall Street, glaring at the Bull. “The girl-woman is being urged to provide a tough, mature, serious, legal, and punitive version of competitive, consumerist individualism,” Badiou writes, while the boys provide a “weak, adolescent, frivolous, lawless, or even borderline criminal” version. “Bourgeois, authoritarian feminism” calls for “the world as it is to be turned over to women power.” Badiou warns young women away from this offer, and the future vision of “a herd of stupid adolescent boys led by smart career women” shouldn’t sound appealing to anyone involved.
[...] Badiou is politically excited at the idea of what the abolition of gender inequality would mean: “What is a woman philosopher?” he asks, jumping out of his shoes, “And, conversely, what do creative politics, poetry, music, cinema, mathematics, or love become—what does philosophy become—once the word ‘woman’ resonates in them in tune with the power of symbol-creating equality?” Nothing else in the book seems to excite the author like the idea of women’s collective self-determination beyond capitalism. The gender binary splits like an atom.
They will invent a new girl, he writes, and she will universalize the symbolization of reproduction “so childbearing and childcare will never again mean being a servant.” Men and women will share in “a new universal symbolization of birth and all its consequences.”
The book ends with “the girl, as yet unknown but who is coming” proclaiming to “the sky empty of God” in the words of Paul Valery: “Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!”
