Review: Alain Badiou, The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, [2011] 2012). 120 pages.

In the wake of the Arab Spring, Alain Badiou’s The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings ([2011] 2012) offers an analysis of riots, how they relate to political transformation, and what they portend about the current state of leftist resistance to the neoliberal world order. As the consequences of the 2011 uprising in Egypt continue to unfold in 2013, with millions of Egyptians once again occupying Tahrir Square, Badiou’s book provides an approach that allows us to discern and hold onto the original promise of the event; however, it also acknowledges the undeveloped state of movement organizations. He posits a framework of historical periodization that is based on the presence or absence of an Idea, and in so doing conceptualizes a shared condition that has more to do with ideological and organizational questions than with economic or technological determinism. Badiou argues that the riots we are enacting signal the return of History with a capital H