We live in scandalous times. Every day some new controversy demands our attention, our emotional investment, and, ultimately, our judgment. Many of these routine transgressions will be understood in 'revelatory' terms, as peeling back the multiple layers of artifice and spin to reveal an underlying, and oftentimes disturbing, 'truth'. Otherswill be recognized as calculated marketing exercises that simply present the strategic face of contemporary capitalism.
Yet these 'ordinary' scandals can themselves be seen to be largely derivative of another, altogether more fundamental-and fundamentally rare-form of disruption. Such is the real scandal that accompanies instances of authentic creation. Building on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, Scandalous Times not only argues the case for such 'real scandal', but also shows how it is today being abrogated and substituted through the increasing production of novel forms of state-sanctioned controversy.
From Duchamp to Donald Trump, Scandalous Times explores the ways in which areas from art and advertising to politics and social media have come to actively contribute to this 'static' fabrication of controversy, all the while arguing for the need to rethink creativity as a radical exception to the state, and not its proxy.

Alex Ling is Senior Research Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Western Sydney University, Australia. He is the author of Badiou Reframed (2016) and Badiou and Cinema (2011) and co-editor and translator of Mathematics of the Transcendental (Bloomsbury, 2014).

Introduction: Notes on a Scandal
Part I: Scandals
1. The Big Reveal
2. Chaos and Novelty
Part II: Foundations
3. Grounds for Annulment
4. Making Sense of Everything
Part III: Creation
5. A Terrible Beauty
6. Wresting with the Impossible
Part IV: Controversy
7. Brave New World
8. The Real Problem