Weinfield Minefield, communism, Badiou and Chavez

Has there ever been a worse translator of Mallarmé, I ask you, than Henry Weinfield?

Unrelatedly, you might like to read this excellent article on the less than final death of Communism:

No major 20th-century political tradition is without blood on its hands, but battles over history are more about the future than the past. Part of the current enthusiasm in official western circles for dancing on the grave of communism is no doubt about relations with today's Russia and China. But it also reflects a determination to prove there is no alternative to the new global capitalist order - and that any attempt to find one is bound to lead to suffering and bloodshed. With the new imperialism now being resisted in both the Muslim world and Latin America, growing international demands for social justice and ever greater doubts about whether the environmental crisis can be solved within the existing economic system, the pressure for political and social alternatives will increase. The particular form of society created by 20th-century communist parties will never be replicated. But there are lessons to be learned from its successes as well as its failures.

I got it from that pinko commie blogger, IT. And yes, I've read The Gulag Archipelago, and at least five other tomes of similar size on Stalinism, and all about Stalin's alleged plans for the Jews.

Here is your daily Badiou:

Alas, contemporary thought will not advance one bit without the courage to think that Nazism was a politics. A criminal politics, but a politics, of which "Jew" was one of the categories. For fighting against a politics in the name of a necessary conformity of opinions grounded in being-together–as if what was being contested wasn't a politics, or even an opinion–is exactly what made for the unfathomably weak (and ongoing) manner in which the Western powers have dealt with Nazism. (Metapolitics, 19)

And here is a good post by Brian Leiter, on Hugo Chavez.

Does anyone know what the hell happpened to Critical Montages.