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Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou (/bɑːˈdj/;[3] French: [alɛ̃ badju] ; born 17 January 1937) is a French philosopher, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure (ENS) and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Université de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard. Badiou's work is heavily informed by philosophical applications of mathematics, in particular set theory and category theory. Badiou's "Being and Event" project considers the concepts of being, truth, event and the subject defined by a rejection of linguistic relativism seen as typical of postwar French thought. Unlike his peers, Badiou openly believes in the idea of universalism and truth. His work is notable for his widespread applications of various conceptions of indifference. Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations, and regularly comments on political events. Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force.[4]

Biography edit

Badiou is the son of the mathematician Raymond Badiou [fr] (1905–1996), who was a working member of the Resistance in France during World War II. Alain Badiou was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the École Normale Supérieure (1955–1960).[5] In 1960, he wrote his diplôme d'études supérieures [fr] (roughly equivalent to an MA thesis) on Spinoza for Georges Canguilhem (the topic was "Structures of Demonstration in the First Two Books of Spinoza's Ethics", "Structures démonstratives dans les deux premiers livres de l'Éthique de Spinoza").[6] He taught at the lycée in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright (and philosopher) François Regnault,[7] and published two novels before moving first to the faculty of letters of the University of Reims (the collège littéraire universitaire)[8] and then to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in 1969.[9] Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser, became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l'Analyse.[9] By then he "already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic (along with Lacanian theory)",[9] and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers "anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy".[9]

The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou's commitment to the far Left, and he participated in increasingly militant groups, such as the Union des communistes de France marxiste-léniniste [fr] (UCFml). To quote Badiou himself, the UCFml is "the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel, Sylvain Lazarus, myself and a fair number of young people".[10] During this time, Badiou joined the faculty of the newly founded University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) which was a bastion of counter-cultural thought. There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean-François Lyotard, whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism.

In the 1980s, as both Althusserian structural Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis went into decline (after Lacan died and Althusser was committed to a psychiatric hospital), Badiou published more technical and abstract philosophical works, such as Théorie du sujet (1982), and his magnum opus, Being and Event (1988). Nonetheless, Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan, and sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon in his more recent works (most notably Petit panthéon portatif / Pocket Pantheon).[11][12]

He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999. He is also associated with a number of other institutions, such as the Collège International de Philosophie. He was a member of L'Organisation Politique [fr] which, as mentioned above, he founded in 1985 with some comrades from the Maoist UCFml. This organization disbanded in 2007, according to the French Wikipedia article (linked to in the previous sentence). In 2002, he was a co-founder of the Centre International d'Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine, alongside Yves Duroux and his former student Quentin Meillassoux.[13] Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays such as Ahmed le Subtil.

In the last decade, an increasing number of Badiou's works have been translated into English, such as Ethics, Deleuze, Manifesto for Philosophy, Metapolitics, and Being and Event. Short pieces by Badiou have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals, such as Lacanian Ink, New Left Review, Radical Philosophy, Cosmos and History and Parrhesia. Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in countries like India, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa.[citation needed]

In 2014–15, Badiou had the role of Honorary President at The Global Center for Advanced Studies.[14]

Key concepts edit

Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his philosophy, which he discerns from close readings of the philosophical literature from the classical period. His own method cannot be fully understood if it is not situated within the tradition of French academic philosophy. Badiou's work engages a detailed decrypting of texts, in line with philosophers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Balibar, Bourdieu, Derrida, Bouveresse and Engel, all of whom he studied with at the Ecole Normale Superieure.

One of the aims of his thought is to show that his categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical critique. Therefore, he uses them to interrogate art and history as well as ontology and scientific discovery. Johannes Thumfart argues that Badiou's philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism.[15]

Conditions edit

According to Badiou, philosophy is suspended from four conditions (art, love, politics, and science), each of them fully independent "truth procedures." (For Badiou's notion of truth procedures, see below.) Badiou consistently maintains throughout his work (but most systematically in Manifesto for Philosophy) that philosophy must avoid the temptation to suture itself ('sew itself', that is, to hand over its entire intellectual effort) to any of these independent truth procedures. When philosophy does suture itself to one of its conditions (and Badiou argues that the history of philosophy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is primarily a history of sutures), what results is a philosophical "disaster." Consequently, philosophy is, according to Badiou, a thinking of the compossibility of the several truth procedures, whether this is undertaken through the investigation of the intersections between distinct truth procedures (the intersection of art and love in the novel, for instance), or whether this is undertaken through the more traditionally philosophical work of addressing categories like truth or the subject (concepts that are, as concepts, external to the individual truth procedures, though they are functionally operative in the truth procedures themselves). For Badiou, when philosophy addresses the four truth procedures in a genuinely philosophical manner, rather than through a suturing abandonment of philosophy as such, it speaks of them with a theoretical terminology that marks its philosophical character: "inaesthetics" rather than art; metapolitics rather than politics; ontology rather than science; etc.

Truth, for Badiou, is a specifically philosophical category. While philosophy's several conditions are, on their own terms, "truth procedures" (i.e., they produce truths as they are pursued), it is only philosophy that can speak of the several truth procedures as truth procedures. (The lover, for instance, does not think of her love as a question of truth, but simply and rightly as a question of love. Only the philosopher sees in the true lover's love the unfolding of a truth.) Badiou has a very rigorous notion of truth, one that is strongly against the grain of much of contemporary European thought. Badiou at once embraces the traditional modernist notion that truths are genuinely invariant (always and everywhere the case, eternal and unchanging) and the incisively postmodernist notion that truths are constructed through processes. Badiou's theory of truth, exposited throughout his work, accomplishes this strange mixture by uncoupling invariance from self-evidence (such that invariance does not imply self-evidence), as well as by uncoupling constructedness from relativity (such that constructedness does not lead to relativism).

The idea, here, is that a truth's invariance makes it genuinely indiscernible: because a truth is everywhere and always the case, it passes unnoticed unless there is a rupture in the laws of being and appearance, during which the truth in question becomes, but only for a passing moment, discernible. Such a rupture is what Badiou calls an event, according to a theory originally worked out in Being and Event and fleshed out in important ways in Logics of Worlds. The individual who chances to witness such an event, if he is faithful to what he has glimpsed, can then introduce the truth by naming it into worldly situations. For Badiou, it is by positioning oneself to the truth of an event that a human animal becomes a subject; subjectivity is not an inherent human trait. According to a process or procedure that subsequently unfolds only if those who subject themselves to the glimpsed truth continue to be faithful in the work of announcing the truth in question, genuine knowledge is produced (knowledge often appears in Badiou's work under the title of the "veridical"). While such knowledge is produced in the process of being faithful to a truth event, for Badiou, knowledge, in the figure of the encyclopedia, always remains fragile, subject to what may yet be produced as faithful subjects of the event produce further knowledge. According to Badiou, truth procedures proceed to infinity, such that faith (fidelity) outstrips knowledge. (Badiou, following both Lacan and Heidegger, distances truth from knowledge.) The dominating ideology of the day, which Badiou terms "democratic materialism," denies the existence of truth and only recognizes "bodies" and "languages." Badiou proposes a turn towards the "materialist dialectic," which recognizes that there are only bodies and languages, except there are also truths.

Inaesthetic edit

In Handbook of Inaesthetics Badiou both draws on the original Greek meaning and the later Kantian concept of "aesthesis" as "material perception" and coins the phrase "inaesthetic" to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies "the reflection/object relation" yet, at the same time, in reaction against the idea of mimesis, or poetic reflection of "nature", he affirms that art is "immanent" and "singular". Art is immanent in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art, and singular in that its truth is found in art and art alone – hence reviving the ancient materialist concept of "aesthesis". His view of the link between philosophy and art is tied into the motif of pedagogy, which he claims functions so as to "arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them". He develops these ideas with examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé and Fernando Pessoa (who he argues has developed a body of work that philosophy is currently incapable of incorporating), among others.

Being and Event edit

The major propositions of Badiou's philosophy all find their basis in Being and Event, in which he continues his attempt (which he began in Théorie du sujet) to reconcile a notion of the subject with ontology, and in particular post-structuralist and constructivist ontologies.[16] A frequent criticism of post-structuralist work is that it prohibits, through its fixation on semiotics and language, any notion of a subject. Badiou's work is, by his own admission,[17] an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy's fixation upon language, which he sees almost as a straitjacket. This effort leads him, in Being and Event, to combine rigorous mathematical formulae with his readings of poets such as Mallarmé and Hölderlin and religious thinkers such as Pascal. His philosophy draws upon both 'analytical' and 'continental' traditions. In Badiou's own opinion, this combination places him awkwardly relative to his contemporaries, meaning that his work had been only slowly taken up.[18] Being and Event offers an example of this slow uptake, in fact: it was translated into English only in 2005, a full seventeen years after its French publication.

As is implied in the title of the book, two elements mark the thesis of Being and Event: the place of ontology, or 'the science of being qua being' (being in itself), and the place of the event – which is seen as a rupture in being – through which the subject finds realization and reconciliation with truth. This situation of being and the rupture which characterizes the event are thought in terms of set theory, and specifically Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice. In short, the event is a truth caused by a hidden "part" or set appearing within existence; this part escapes language and known existence, and thus being itself lacks the terms and resources to fully process the event.

Mathematics as ontology edit

For Badiou the problem which the Greek tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is that while beings themselves are plural, and thought in terms of multiplicity, being itself is thought to be singular; that is, it is thought in terms of the one. He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration: that the One is not (l'Un n'est pas). This is why Badiou accords set theory (the axioms of which he refers to as the "ideas of the multiple") such stature, and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology: Only set theory allows one to conceive a 'pure doctrine of the multiple'. Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set (that is, another set too). What individuates a set, therefore, is not an existential positive proposition, but other multiples whose properties (i.e., structural relations) validate its presentation. The structure of being thus secures the regime of the count-as-one. So if one is to think of a set – for instance, the set of people, or humanity – as counting as one, the multiple elements which belong to that set are secured as one consistent concept (humanity), but only in terms of what does not belong to that set. What is crucial for Badiou is that the structural form of the count-as-one, which makes multiplicities thinkable, implies (somehow or other) that the proper name of being does not belong to an element as such (an original 'one'), but rather the void set (written Ø), the set to which nothing (not even the void set itself) belongs. It may help to understand the concept 'count-as-one' if it is associated with the concept of 'terming': a multiple is not one, but it is referred to with 'multiple': one word. To count a set as one is to mention that set. How the being of terms such as 'multiple' does not contradict the non-being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology: for there to be a term without there also being a system of terminology, within which the difference between terms gives context and meaning to any one term, is impossible. 'Terminology' implies precisely difference between terms (thus multiplicity) as the condition for meaning. The idea of a term without meaning is incoherent, the count-as-one is a structural effect or a situational operation; it is not an event of 'truth'. Multiples which are 'composed' or 'consistent' are count-effects. 'Inconsistent multiplicity' [meaning?] is [somehow or other] 'the presentation of presentation.'

Badiou's use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that (as with set theory) there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself. This results from the axiom of foundation – or the axiom of regularity – which enacts such a prohibition (cf. p. 190 in Being and Event). (This axiom states that every non-empty set A contains an element y that is disjoint from A.) Badiou's philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the 'one': there cannot be a grand overarching set, and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos, a whole Nature, or a Being of God. Badiou is therefore – against Georg Cantor, from whom he draws heavily – staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation 'founds' all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets – thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely 'new' occurrence. And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently 'pragmatically abandoned' an area which philosophy cannot. And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: that ontology can say nothing about the event.

Several critics have questioned Badiou's use of mathematics. Mathematician Alan Sokal and physicist Jean Bricmont write that Badiou proposes, with seemingly "utter seriousness," a blending of psychoanalysis, politics and set theory that they contend is preposterous.[19] Similarly, philosopher Roger Scruton has questioned Badiou's grasp of the foundation of mathematics, writing in 2012:

There is no evidence that I can find in Being and Event that the author really understands what he is talking about when he invokes (as he constantly does) Georg Cantor's theory of transfinite cardinals, the axioms of set theory, Gödel's incompleteness proof or Paul Cohen's proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis. When these things appear in Badiou's texts it is always allusively, with fragments of symbolism detached from the context that endows them with sense, and often with free variables and bound variables colliding randomly. No proof is clearly stated or examined, and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician's wand, to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics.[20]

An example of a critique from a mathematician's point of view is the essay 'Badiou's Number: A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology' by Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David Nirenberg,[21] which takes issue in particular with Badiou's matheme of the Event in Being and Event, which has already been alluded to in respect of the 'axiom of foundation' above. Nirenberg and Nirenberg write:

Rather than being defined in terms of objects previously defined, ex is here defined in terms of itself; you must already have it in order to define it. Set theorists call this a not-well-founded set. This kind of set never appears in mathematics – not least because it produces an unmathematical mise-en-abîme: if we replace ex inside the bracket by its expression as a bracket, we can go on doing this forever – and so can hardly be called "a matheme."'

The event and the subject edit

Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory – Badiou's language of ontology – to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology. He employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J. Cohen, using what are called the conditions of sets. These conditions are thought of in terms of domination, a domination being that which defines a set. (If one takes, in binary language, the set with the condition 'items marked only with ones', any item marked with zero negates the property of the set. The condition which has only ones is thus dominated by any condition which has zeros in it [cf. pp. 367–371 in Being and Event].) Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible (nameable or constructible) set is dominated by the conditions which don't possess the property that makes it discernible as a set. (The property 'one' is always dominated by 'not one'.) These sets are, in line with constructible ontology, relative to one's being-in-the-world and one's being in language (where sets and concepts, such as the concept 'humanity', get their names). However, he continues, the dominations themselves are, whilst being relative concepts, not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought; rather one can axiomatically define a domination – in the terms of mathematical ontology – as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination. One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a 'set of dominations', which he refers to as the indiscernible set, or the generic set. It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls forcing. And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject – about which the ontological situation cannot comment – to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event. Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought.

Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: 'decide upon the undecidable'. It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains in which a subject (who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process) can potentially witness an event: love, science, politics and art. By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecidability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place. Through this maintenance of fidelity, truth has the potentiality to emerge.

In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the evental [sic] (his translators' neologism) rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew. Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of 'decisionist' (the idea that once something is decided it 'becomes true'), but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability. As he says of Galileo (p. 401):

When Galileo announced the principle of inertia, he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton. How could he, with the names he fabricated and displaced (because they were at hand – 'movement', 'equal proportion', etc.), have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to-come that was the establishment of modern science; that is, the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name 'rational physics'?

While Badiou is keen to reject an equivalence between politics and philosophy, he correlates nonetheless his political activism and skepticism toward the parliamentary-democratic process with his philosophy, based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.

L'Organisation Politique edit

Alain Badiou is a founding member (along with Natacha Michel and Sylvain Lazarus) of the militant French political organisation L'Organisation Politique, which was active from 1985 until it disbanded in 2007.[22] It called itself a post-party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues (including immigration, labor, and housing). In addition to numerous writings and interventions, L'Organisation Politique highlighted the importance of developing political prescriptions concerning undocumented migrants (les sans papiers), stressing that they must be conceived primarily as workers and not immigrants.[23]

Public controversies edit

Anti-Semitism accusation and response edit

In 2005, a fierce controversy in Parisian intellectual life erupted after the publication of Badiou's Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif' ("The Uses of the Word 'Jew'").[24] This book generated a strong response, and the wrangling became a cause célèbre with articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in the cultural journal Les Temps modernes. Linguist and Lacanian philosopher Jean-Claude Milner, a past president of Collège international de philosophie, accused Badiou of anti-Semitism.[25]

Badiou forcefully rebutted this charge, declaring that his accusers often conflate a nation-state with religious preference and will label as anti-Semitic anyone who objects to this tendency: "It is wholly intolerable to be accused of anti-Semitism by anyone for the sole reason that, from the fact of the extermination, one does not conclude as to the predicate "Jew" and its religious and communitarian dimension that it receive some singular valorization – a transcendent annunciation! – nor that Israeli exactions, whose colonial nature is patent and banal, be specially tolerated. I propose that nobody any longer accept, publicly or privately, this type of political blackmail."[26]

Badiou characterizes the state of Israel as "neither more nor less impure than all states", but objects to "its exclusive identitarian claim to be a Jewish state, and the way it draws incessant privileges from this claim, especially when it comes to trampling underfoot what serves us as international law." For example, he continues, "The Islamic states are certainly no more progressive as models than the various versions of the 'Arab nation' were. Everyone agrees, it seems, on the point that the Taliban do not embody the path of modernity for Afghanistan.”[26] A modern democracy, he writes, must count all its residents as citizens, and "there is no acceptable reason to exempt the state of Israel from that rule. The claim is sometimes made that this state is the only 'democratic' state in the region. But the fact that this state presents itself as a Jewish state is directly contradictory."[26]

Badiou is optimistic that ongoing political problems can be resolved by de-emphasizing the communitarian religious dimension: "The signifier 'Palestinian' or 'Arab' should not be glorified any more than is permitted for the signifier 'Jew.' As a result, the legitimate solution to the Middle East conflict is not the dreadful institution of two barbed-wire states. The solution is the creation of a secular and democratic Palestine...which would show that it is perfectly possible to create a place in these lands where, from a political point of view and regardless of the apolitical continuity of customs, there is 'neither Arab nor Jew.' This will undoubtedly demand a regional Mandela."[26]

Sarkozy pamphlet edit

Alain Badiou gained notoriety in 2007 with his pamphlet The Meaning of Sarkozy (De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?), which quickly sold 60,000 copies, whereas for 40 years the sales of his books had oscillated between 2,000 and 6,000 copies.[27]

As Rafael Bahr pointed out at the time (in 2009), Badiou despised Sarkozy and barely could write his name. Instead, Badiou usually called Sarkozy "the Rat Man" throughout The Meaning of Sarkozy.[28] Steven Poole also pointed out that this characterization (Rat Man) brought charges of antisemitism against Badiou.[29] But as Bahr notes, the controversy went beyond antisemitism, striking at the heart of what it means to be French:

“[Badiou] sees Sarkozy as the embodiment of a strain of moral cowardice in French politics, in which the defining moment was the installation of Marshal Pétain as head of the pro-Nazi collaborationist government. For Badiou, Sarkozy is a symbol of "transcendent Pétainism".”[28]

Mark Fisher was impressed with Badiou’s efforts:

“The book treats Sarkozy as an emblem of a particular kind of reactionary politics, and identifies him with an attempt to kill off that which is officially already dead: the emancipatory project that, defiantly, Badiou still calls communism. Badiou claims that Sarkozy’s rise is the return of a kind of ‘Pétainist’ mass subjectivity first instigated by the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazis in World War II; the enemy that is being acquiesced to now, though, is of course capital”[30]

Works edit

Philosophy edit

  • Le concept de modèle (1969, 2007)
  • Théorie du sujet (1982)
  • Peut-on penser la politique? (1985)
  • L'Être et l'Événement (1988)
  • Manifeste pour la philosophie (1989)
  • Le nombre et les nombres (1990)
  • D'un désastre obscur (1991)
  • Conditions (1992)
  • L'Éthique (1993)
  • Deleuze (1997)
  • Saint Paul. La fondation de l'universalisme (1997, 2002)
  • Abrégé de métapolitique (1998)
  • Court traité d'ontologie transitoire (1998)
  • Petit manuel d'inesthétique (1998)
  • Le Siècle (2005)
  • Logiques des mondes. L'être et l'événement, 2 (2006)
  • Petit panthéon portatif (2008)
  • Second manifeste pour la philosophie (2009)
  • L'Antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein (2009)
  • Éloge de l'Amour (2009)
  • Heidegger. Le nazisme, les femmes, la philosophie co-authored with Barbara Cassin (2010)
  • Il n'y a pas de rapport sexuel co-authored with Barbara Cassin (2010)
  • La Philosophie et l'Événement interviews with Fabien Tarby (ed.) (2010)
  • Cinq leçons sur le cas Wagner (2010)
  • Le Fini et l'Infini (2010)
  • La Relation énigmatique entre politique et philosophie (2011)
  • La République de Platon [fr] (2012)
  • L'aventure de la philosophie française (2012)
  • Jacques Lacan, passé présent: Dialogue (2012)
  • De la fin. Conversations with Giovanbattista Tusa (2017)
  • L'immanence des vérités (2018)
  • Sometimes, We Are Eternal with Kenneth Reinhard, Jana Ndiaye Berankova, Nick Nesbitt (Suture Press 2019)

Critical essays edit

  • L'autonomie du processus esthétique (1966)
  • Rhapsodie pour le théâtre (1990)
  • Beckett, l'increvable désir (1995)
  • Cinéma (2010)

Literature and drama edit

  • Almagestes (1964)
  • Portulans (1967)
  • L'Écharpe rouge (1979)
  • Ahmed le subtil (1994)
  • Ahmed Philosophe, followed by Ahmed se fâche (1995)
  • Les Citrouilles, a comedy (1996)
  • Calme bloc ici-bas (1997)

Political essays edit

  • Théorie de la contradiction (1975)
  • De l'idéologie with F. Balmès (1976)
  • Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hégelienne with L. Mossot and J. Bellassen (1977)
  • Circonstances 1: Kosovo, 11 Septembre, Chirac/Le Pen (2003)
  • Circonstances 2: Irak, foulard, Allemagne/France (2004)
  • Circonstances 3: Portées du mot "juif" (2005)
  • Circonstances 4: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? (2007)
  • Circonstances 5: L'hypothèse communiste (2009)
  • Circonstances 6: Le Réveil de l'Histoire (2011)
  • Circonstances 7: Sarkozy: pire que prévu, les autres : prévoir le pire (2012)
  • Mao. De la pratique et de la contradiction with Slavoj Žižek (2008)
  • Démocratie, dans quel état ? with Giorgio Agamben, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross and Slavoj Žižek (2009)
  • L'Idée du communisme vol. 1 (London Conference, 2009) (Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek eds.), with Judith Balso, Bruno Bosteels, Susan Buck-Morss, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Minqi Li, Jean-Luc Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Rancière, Alessandro Russo, Roberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Wang Hui and Slavoj Žižek (2010)
  • L'Explication, conversation avec Aude Lancelin with Alain Finkielkraut (2010)
  • L'Antisémitisme partout. Aujourd'hui en France with Eric Hazan (2011)
  • L'Idée du communisme, vol. 2 (Berlin Conference, 2010), (Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek eds.) with Glyn Daly, Saroj Giri, Gernot Kamecke, Janne Kurki, Artemy Magun, Kuba Majmurek, Kuba Mikurda, Toni Negri, Frank Ruda, Bülent Somay, Janek Sowa, G. M. Tamás, Henning Teschke, Jan Völker, Cécile Winter and Slavoj Žižek (2011)

Pamphlets and serial publications edit

  • Contribution au problème de la construction d'un parti marxiste-léniniste de type nouveau, with Jancovici, Menetrey, and Terray (Maspero 1970)
  • Jean Paul Sartre (Éditions Potemkine 1980)
  • Le Perroquet. Quinzomadaire d'opinion (1981–1990)
  • La Distance Politique (1990–?)
  • Notre mal vient de plus loin, 2016

English translations edit

Books edit

  • Manifesto for Philosophy, transl. by Norman Madarasz; (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999): ISBN 978-0-7914-4220-3 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-7914-4219-7 (hardcover)
  • Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, transl. by Louise Burchill; (Minnesota University Press, 1999): ISBN 978-0-8166-3140-7 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8166-3139-1 (library binding)
  • Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, transl. by Peter Hallward; (New York: Verso, 2000): ISBN 978-1-85984-435-9 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-85984-297-3
  • On Beckett, transl. and ed. by Alberto Toscano and Nina Power; (London: Clinamen Press, 2003): ISBN 978-1-903083-30-7 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-903083-26-0 (hardcover)
  • Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, transl. and ed. by Oliver Feltham & Justin Clemens; (London: Continuum, 2003): ISBN 978-0-8264-7929-7 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8264-6724-9 (hardcover)
  • Metapolitics, transl. by Jason Barker; (New York: Verso, 2005): ISBN 978-1-84467-567-8 (paperback); ISBN 978-1-84467-035-2 (hardcover)
  • Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism; transl. by Ray Brassier; (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003): ISBN 978-0-8047-4471-3 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8047-4470-6 (hardcover)
  • Handbook of Inaesthetics, transl. by Alberto Toscano; (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004): ISBN 978-0-8047-4409-6 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-8047-4408-9 (hardcover)
  • Theoretical Writings, transl. by Ray Brassier; (New York: Continuum, 2004)[31]
  • Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology, transl. by Norman Madarasz; (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005)
  • Being and Event, transl. by Oliver Feltham; (New York: Continuum, 2005)
  • Polemics, transl. by Steve Corcoran; (New York: Verso, 2007)
  • The Century, transl. by Alberto Toscano; (New York: Polity Press, 2007)
  • The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, transl. by Zachery Luke Fraser & Tzuchien Tho; (Melbourne: re.press, 2007). Open Access[32]
  • Number and Numbers (New York: Polity Press, 2008): ISBN 978-0-7456-3879-9 (paperback); ISBN 978-0-7456-3878-2 (hardcover)
  • The Meaning of Sarkozy (New York: Verso, 2008): ISBN 978-1-84467-309-4 (hardcover) ISBN 978-1-84467-629-3 (paperback)
  • Conditions, transl. by Steve Corcoran; (New York: Continuum, 2009): ISBN 978-0-8264-9827-4 (hardcover)
  • Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, Volume 2, transl. by Alberto Toscano; (New York: Continuum, 2009): ISBN 978-0-8264-9470-2 (hardcover)
  • Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy, transl. by David Macey; (New York: Verso, 2009): ISBN 978-1-84467-357-5 (hardcover)
  • Theory of the Subject, transl. by Bruno Bosteels; (New York: Continuum, 2009): ISBN 978-0-8264-9673-7 (hardcover)
  • Philosophy in the Present, (with Slavoj Žižek); (New York: Polity Press, 2010): ISBN 978-0-7456-4097-6 (paperback)
  • The Communist Hypothesis, transl. by David Macey and Steve Corcoran; (New York: Verso, 2010): ISBN 978-1-84467-600-2 (hardcover)
  • Five Lessons on Wagner, transl. by Susan Spitzer with an 'Afterword' by Slavoj Žižek; (New York: Verso, 2010): ISBN 978-1-84467-481-7 (paperback)
  • Second Manifesto for Philosophy, transl. by Louise Burchill (New York: Polity Press, 2011)
  • Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy, transl. by Bruno Bosteels; (New York: Verso, 2011)
  • The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic, transl. by Tzuchien Tho; (Melbourne: re.press, 2011)
  • The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings, transl. by Gregory Elliott; (New York: Verso, 2012): ISBN 978-1-84467-879-2
  • In Praise of Love, (with Nicolas Truong); transl. by Peter Bush; (London: Serpent's Tail, 2012)
  • Philosophy for Militants, transl. by Bruno Bosteels; (New York: Verso, 2012)
  • The Adventure of French Philosophy, transl. by Bruno Bosteels; (New York: Verso, 2012)
  • Plato's Republic : A Dialogue in 16 Chapters, transl. by Susan Spitzer; (New York : Columbia University Press, 2013)
  • The Incident at Antioch/L'Incident d'Antioche: A Tragedy in Three Acts / Tragédie en trois actes, transl. by Susan Spitzer; (New York : Columbia University Press, 2013)
  • Badiou and the Philosophers : Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy, transl. and ed. by Tzuchien Tho and Giuseppe Bianco; (New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2013)
  • Philosophy and the Event, (with Fabian Tarby); transl. by Louise Burchill; (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013)
  • Reflections on Anti-Semitism, (with Eric Hazan); transl. by David Fernbach; (London: Verso, 2013)
  • Rhapsody for the Theatre, transl. and ed. by Bruno Bosteels; (London: Verso, 2013)
  • Cinema, transl. by Susan Spitzer; (Malden, MA: Polity, 2013)
  • Mathematics of the Transcendental: Onto-logy and being-there, transl. by A.J. Bartlett and Alex Ling; (London: Bloomsbury, 2014)
  • Ahmed the Philosopher: Thirty-four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else, transl. by Joseph Litvak; (New York : Columbia University Press, 2014)
  • Jacques Lacan, Past and Present: A Dialogue, (with Elisabeth Roudinesco); transl. by Jason E. Smith; (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014)
  • Controversies: Politics and Philosophy in our Time, (with Jean-Claude Milner); transl. by ?; (London: Polity, 2014)
  • Confrontation: A Conversation with Aude Lancelin, (with Alain Finkielkraut); transl. by Susan Spitzer; (London: Polity, 2014)
  • The Age of the Poets: And Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, transl. by Bruno Bosteels; (New York: Verso, 2014)[33]
  • The end, (with Giovanbattista Tusa); transl. by Robin Mackay; (Cambridge: Polity, 2019) ISBN 978-1509536276
  • The Immanence of Truths: Being and Event III, transl. by Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard; (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022) ISBN 978-1350115309

Journals edit

  • "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revolution?", transl. by Bruno Bosteels; , Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
  • "Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution", transl. by Alberto Toscano with the assistance of Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power; , Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
  • "Further Selections from Théorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution", transl. by Lorenzo Chiesa; , Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
  • "The Triumphant Restoration", transl. by Alberto Toscano; , Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
  • "An Essential Philosophical Thesis: 'It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries'", transl. by Alberto Toscano; , Volume 13, Issue 3, Winter 2005; (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005): ISSN 1067-9847
  • What is a philosophical Institution? or: Address, Transmission, Inscription. 28 March 2013 at the Wayback Machine Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol 2, No 1-2 (2006)
  • Interviewed by Ata Hoodashtian, for Le journal Philosophie Philosophie, Université Paris VIII.

DVD edit

  • Badiou, A Film in association with the Global Center for Advanced Studies (2018), Directed by Gorav Kalyan, Rohan Kalyan Gorav Kalyan.
  • Democracy and Disappointment: On the Politics of Resistance: Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation, (Event Date: Thursday, 15 November 2007); Location: Slought Foundation, Conversations in Theory Series | Organized by Aaron Levy | Studio: Microcinema in collaboration with Slought Foundation | DVD Release Date: 26 August 2008

Lectures edit

See also edit

Notes edit

  1. ^ "Alain Badiou: "Mao thinks in an almost infinite way"". Versobooks.com. Retrieved 19 November 2021.
  2. ^ Sean Bowden, Badiou and Philosophy, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, p. 63.
  3. ^ "Radical thinkers: Alain Badiou's Ethics"
  4. ^ Badiou, Alain; Engelmann, Peter (27 March 2015). Philosophy and the Idea of Communism. Polity Press. ISBN 978-0745688367.
  5. ^ Tzuchien Tho, Giuseppe Bianco, Badiou and the Philosophers: Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy, A&C Black, 2013, pp. xvii.
  6. ^ Tzuchien Tho, Giuseppe Bianco, Badiou and the Philosophers: Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy, A&C Black, 2013, pp. xviii–xix.
  7. ^ François Regnault Homepage at Cahiers pour l'Analyse 18 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  8. ^ "La chronobiographie". alain-badiou (in French). Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  9. ^ a b c d Badiou Homepage at Concept and Form: The Cahiers pour l'Analyse and Contemporary French Thought 17 April 2010 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ Badiou, Alain (2010). "Part I: "We Are Still the Contemporaries of May '68"". The Communist Hypothesis (pbk). translated by David Macey and Steve Corcoran. Verso. p. 58. ISBN 978-1-84467-600-2.
  11. ^ Badiou, Alain. "Jacques Lacan." Pocket Pantheon. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso, 2009
  12. ^ Badiou, Alain. "Louis Althusser." Pocket Pantheon. Trans. David Macey. London: Verso, 2009
  13. ^ . CIEFPC. Archived from the original on 8 September 2011. Retrieved 24 January 2014.
  14. ^ . The Global Center for Advanced Studies. Archived from the original on 28 March 2016. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  15. ^ Thumfart, Johannes. "Learning from Las Vegas: Badiou's Platonism Today". The Symptom 9. Lacan.com. Retrieved 11 August 2020.
  16. ^ See here Feltham and Clamens's introduction in Badiou's book Infinite Thought, Continuum (2004)
  17. ^ See Badiou's book Infinite Thought, Continuum (2004)
  18. ^ See here Badiou's comments in the introduction to the English version of Being and Event, Continuum (2005)
  19. ^ Sokal, Alan and Jean Bricmont (1999) Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science Macmillan, ISBN 9780312204075, p. 180
  20. ^ Scruton, Roger (31 August 2012). "A Nothing Would do As Well". Times Literary Supplement.
  21. ^ Nirenberg, Ricardo L.; David Nirenberg. (PDF). Critical Inquiry. Archived from the original (PDF) on 11 August 2017. Retrieved 20 April 2016.
  22. ^ See the organisation's website at
  23. ^ Robinson, Andrew (30 March 2015). "An A to Z of Theory. Alain Badiou: Political Action and the Organisation Politique". Cease Fire Magazine. Retrieved 23 April 2016.
  24. ^ "Alain Badiou – Uses of the Word "Jew"". Lacan.com. from the original on 25 May 2011. Retrieved 18 June 2011.
  25. ^ On that subject, see articles against Badiou by:
    • Roger-Pol Droit ("Le Monde des livres", 25 November 2005) and Frédéric Nef ("Le Monde des livres", 23 December 2005), and in defense of Badiou by: Daniel Bensaid ("Le Monde des Livres", 26 January 2006);
    against Badiou by:
    • Claude Lanzmann, Jean-Claude Milner and Eric Marty ("Les Temps modernes", Nov.-December 2005/January 2006), and Meir Waintrater "L'Arche" February 2006: "Alain Badiou et les Juifs: Une violence insoutenable", and the answers by Alain Badiou and Cécile Winter followed by rejoinders by Claude Lanzmann and Eric Marty ("Les Temps modernes", March–June 2006). See also Badiou's response to Eric Marty
  26. ^ a b c d Alain Badiou, Circonstances 3: Portées du mot 'juif', Paris: Leo Schéer, 2005 (The Uses of the Word 'Jew'), translated by Steve Corcoran. Accessed 22 November 2019.
  27. ^ Eric Conan, "Badiou, la star de la philo est-il un salaud?", in Marianne no. 671, 27 Feb 2010, p. 18.
  28. ^ a b "A denunciation of the 'Rat Man' | Nicolas Sarkozy | The Guardian". amp.theguardian.com.
  29. ^ "The Meaning of Sarkozy | Politics books | The Guardian". amp.theguardian.com.
  30. ^ Fisher, Mark (4 April 2009). "The Meaning Of Sarkozy". Frieze (122) – via www.frieze.com.
  31. ^ Includes:
    • Mathematics and Philosophy: The Grand Style and the Little Style, (unpublished)
    • Philosophy and Mathematics: Infinity and the End of Romanticism, (from Conditions, Paris, Seuil, 1992).
    • The Question of Being Today, (from Briefings on Existence, )
    • Platonism and Mathematical Ontology, (from Briefings on Existence)
    • The Being of Number, (from Briefings on Existence)
    • One, Multiple, Multiplicities, (from Multitudes, 1, 2000)
    • Spinoza's Closed Ontology, (from Briefings on Existence)
    • The Event as Trans-Being, (revised and expanded version of an essay of the same title from Briefings on Existence)
    • On Subtraction, (from Conditions, Paris, Seuil, 1992)
    • Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable, (from Conditions, Paris, Seuil, 1992)
    • Kant's Subtractive Ontology, (from Briefings on Existence)
    • Eight Theses on the Universal, (from Jelica Sumic (ed.) Universal, Singulier, Subjet, Paris, Kimé, 2000)
    • Politics as a Truth Procedure, (from Metapolitics)
    • Being and Appearance, (from Briefings on Existence)
    • Notes Toward Thinking Appearance, (unpublished)
    • The Transcendental, (from a draft manuscript [now published] of Logiques des mondes, Paris, Seuil)
    • Hegel and the Whole, (from a draft manuscript [now published] of Logiques des mondes, Paris, Seuil)
    • Language, Thought, Poetry, (unpublished)
  32. ^ Alain Badiou, The Concept of Model 28 August 2008 at the Wayback Machine.
  33. ^ "The Age of the Poets | Alain Badiou | Review |".
  34. ^ The Nouvel Obs invited the philosophers Alain Finkielkraut and Alain Badiou, members of opposite political camps, to talk about national identity. According to Aude Lancelin who moderated the discussion, "it came to an ideological confrontation of rare violence". [1]

Further reading edit

Secondary literature on Badiou's work edit

in English (books) edit

  • Jason Barker, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction, London, Pluto Press, 2002.
  • Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003.
  • Peter Hallward (ed.), Think Again: Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, London, Continuum, 2004.
  • Andrew William Gibson, Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of intermittency, Oxford, Oxford University press, 2006.
  • Paul Ashton (ed.), A. J. Bartlett (ed.), Justin Clemens (ed.): The Praxis of Alain Badiou; (Melbourne: re.press, 2006).
  • Adam Miller, Badiou, Marion, and St. Paul: Immanent Grace, London, Continuum, 2008.
  • Bruno Bosteels, Badiou and Politics, Durham, Duke University Press, 2011.
  • Oliver Feltham, Alain Badiou: Live Theory, London, Continuum, 2008.
  • Burhanuddin Baki, Badiou's Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory, London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.
  • Sam Gillespie, The Mathematics of Novelty: Badiou's Minimalist Metaphysics, (Melbourne, Australia: re.press, 2008) (details on re.press website 17 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine) (Open Access)
  • Chris Henry, The Ethics of Political Resistance: Althusser, Badiou, Deleuze (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
  • Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Žižek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 2009.
  • Gabriel Riera (ed.), Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions, Albany: New York, SUNY Press, 2005.
  • Frank Ruda, For Badiou: Idealism Without Idealism, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 2015.
  • Christopher Norris, Badiou's Being and Event: A Reader's Guide, London, Continuum, 2009.
  • A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens (eds.), Badiou: Key Concepts, London, Acumen, 2010.
  • Alex Ling, Badiou and Cinema, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010.
  • Ed Pluth, Badiou: A Philosophy of the New, Malden, Polity, 2010.
  • A. J. Bartlett, Badiou and Plato: An education by truths, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2011.
  • P. M. Livingston, The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism, New York, Routledge, 2011.
  • Steven Corcoran (ed.): The Badiou Dictionary, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press 2015, ISBN 978-0-7486-4096-6
  • Am Johal: Ecological Metapolitics: Badiou and the Anthropocence, New York, Atropos Press, 2015.

In English (journals, essays and articles) edit

  • Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Becket, meme combat: The philosophy of Alain Badiou essay by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Radical Philosophy 093. January / February 1999
  • Je te Mathème: Badiou's De-Psychologisation of Love, essay by Carlos Gómez Camarena. Annual Review of Critical Psychology 8 (2010).
  • by Bruno Bosteels
  • (See: "Environment and Planning D: Society and Space contents vol 29". Envplan.com. from the original on 22 June 2011. Retrieved 18 June 2011.)
  • Fatal Repetition: Badiou and the Age of the Poets, with Appendix, A Psychoanalysis of Alain Badiou, by James Luchte, Istiraki (Turkey), 5 May 2014.

In French (books) edit

  • Charles Ramond (éd), Penser le multiple, Paris, Éditions L'Harmattan, 2002
  • Fabien Tarby, La Philosophie d'Alain Badiou, Paris, Éditions L'Harmattan, 2005
  • Fabien Tarby, Matérialismes d'aujourd'hui : de Deleuze à Badiou, Paris, Éditions L'Harmattan, 2005
  • Eric Marty, Une Querelle avec Alain Badiou, philosophe, Paris, Editions Gallimard, coll. L'Infini, 2007
  • Bruno Besana et Oliver Feltham (éd), Écrits autour de la pensée d'Alain Badiou, Paris, Éditions L'Harmattan, 2007.

In Basque (books and articles) edit

  • Antton Azkargorta (1996): "Hitzaurrea" in Alain Badiou, Etika, Bilbo, Besatari ISBN 84-921104-1-4
  • Imanol Galfarsoro (2012): "Alain Badiou. Filosofia etiko-politikoa II", hAUSnART, 1: 108–114
  • Imanol Galfarsoro (2012): "Alain Badiou eta hipotesi komunistaren birdefinizioak", hAUSnART, 2: 82–99
  • Imanol Galfarsoro (2012): "(Post)Marxismoa, kultura eta eragiletasuna: Ibilbide historiko labur bat" in Alaitz Aizpuru(koord.), Euskal Herriko pentsamenduaren gida, Bilbo, UEU. ISBN 978-84-8438-435-9
  • Xabier Insausti & Irati Oliden (2012): Konpromisorik gabeko filosofia. Alain Badiou, Donostia, Jakin ISBN 978-84-95234-44-5
  • Alain Badiou on the Lapiko Kritikoa basque website.

In Spanish (books and articles) edit

  • Carlos Gómez Camarena and Angelina Uzín Olleros (eds.), Badiou fuera de sus límites, Buenos Aires, Imago Mundi, 2010. ISBN 978-950-793-102-4
  • Angelina Uzín Olleros (2008). Introducción al pensamiento de Alain Badiou. Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi. ISBN 978-950-793-076-8
  • Je te mathème: Badiou y la despsicologización del amor (por Carlos Gómez Camarena- Revista Teoría y Crítica de la Psicología)
  • Badiou, la ciencia, el matema 22 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine (por Carlos Gómez Camarena- Revista Reflexiones Marginales)
  • Alfonso Galindo Hervás, Pensamiento impolítico contemporáneo. Ontología (y) política en Agamben, Badiou, Esposito y Nancy, Sequitur, Madrid, 2015.

External links edit

  • at Lacan Dot Com
  • at MidEastDilemma.com
  • Plato, Badiou and I: an Experiment in Writerly Happiness Cordite Poetry Review

Critical opinions edit

  • by Slavoj Žižek
  • by Chris Cutrone
  • The Anarchist Hypothesis, or Badiou, Žižek, and the Anti-Anarchist Prejudice by Gabriel Kuhn

alain, badiou, ɑː, french, alɛ, badju, born, january, 1937, french, philosopher, formerly, chair, philosophy, École, normale, supérieure, founder, faculty, philosophy, université, paris, viii, with, gilles, deleuze, michel, foucault, jean, françois, lyotard, b. Alain Badiou b ɑː ˈ d j uː 3 French alɛ badju born 17 January 1937 is a French philosopher formerly chair of Philosophy at the Ecole normale superieure ENS and founder of the faculty of Philosophy of the Universite de Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze Michel Foucault and Jean Francois Lyotard Badiou s work is heavily informed by philosophical applications of mathematics in particular set theory and category theory Badiou s Being and Event project considers the concepts of being truth event and the subject defined by a rejection of linguistic relativism seen as typical of postwar French thought Unlike his peers Badiou openly believes in the idea of universalism and truth His work is notable for his widespread applications of various conceptions of indifference Badiou has been involved in a number of political organisations and regularly comments on political events Badiou argues for a return of communism as a political force 4 Alain BadiouAlain Badiou 2012Born 1937 01 17 17 January 1937 age 86 Rabat French MoroccoEducationEcole Normale Superieure B A M A EraContemporary philosophyRegionWestern philosophySchoolContinental philosophyMaoism 1 MarxismModern Platonism 2 InstitutionsUniversity of ReimsUniversity of Paris VIIIEcole normale superieureMain interestsSet theory category theory topos theory history of philosophy philosophy of mathematics metapolitics metaphysics ontology psychoanalysisNotable ideasEvent ontology of the multiple ontology is mathematics the One is not count as one metapolitics Contents 1 Biography 2 Key concepts 2 1 Conditions 2 2 Inaesthetic 3 Being and Event 3 1 Mathematics as ontology 3 2 The event and the subject 4 L Organisation Politique 5 Public controversies 5 1 Anti Semitism accusation and response 5 2 Sarkozy pamphlet 6 Works 6 1 Philosophy 6 2 Critical essays 6 3 Literature and drama 6 4 Political essays 6 5 Pamphlets and serial publications 6 6 English translations 6 6 1 Books 6 6 2 Journals 6 7 DVD 6 8 Lectures 7 See also 8 Notes 9 Further reading 9 1 Secondary literature on Badiou s work 9 1 1 in English books 9 1 2 In English journals essays and articles 9 1 3 In French books 9 1 4 In Basque books and articles 9 1 5 In Spanish books and articles 10 External links 10 1 Critical opinionsBiography editBadiou is the son of the mathematician Raymond Badiou fr 1905 1996 who was a working member of the Resistance in France during World War II Alain Badiou was a student at the Lycee Louis Le Grand and then the Ecole Normale Superieure 1955 1960 5 In 1960 he wrote his diplome d etudes superieures fr roughly equivalent to an MA thesis on Spinoza for Georges Canguilhem the topic was Structures of Demonstration in the First Two Books of Spinoza s Ethics Structures demonstratives dans les deux premiers livres de l Ethique de Spinoza 6 He taught at the lycee in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright and philosopher Francois Regnault 7 and published two novels before moving first to the faculty of letters of the University of Reims the college litteraire universitaire 8 and then to the University of Paris VIII Vincennes Saint Denis in 1969 9 Badiou was politically active very early on and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party PSU The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria He wrote his first novel Almagestes in 1964 In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l Analyse 9 By then he already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic along with Lacanian theory 9 and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy 9 The student uprisings of May 1968 reinforced Badiou s commitment to the far Left and he participated in increasingly militant groups such as the Union des communistes de France marxiste leniniste fr UCFml To quote Badiou himself the UCFml is the Maoist organization established in late 1969 by Natacha Michel Sylvain Lazarus myself and a fair number of young people 10 During this time Badiou joined the faculty of the newly founded University of Paris VIII Vincennes Saint Denis which was a bastion of counter cultural thought There he engaged in fierce intellectual debates with fellow professors Gilles Deleuze and Jean Francois Lyotard whose philosophical works he considered unhealthy deviations from the Althusserian program of a scientific Marxism In the 1980s as both Althusserian structural Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis went into decline after Lacan died and Althusser was committed to a psychiatric hospital Badiou published more technical and abstract philosophical works such as Theorie du sujet 1982 and his magnum opus Being and Event 1988 Nonetheless Badiou has never renounced Althusser or Lacan and sympathetic references to Marxism and psychoanalysis are not uncommon in his more recent works most notably Petit pantheon portatif Pocket Pantheon 11 12 He took up his current position at the ENS in 1999 He is also associated with a number of other institutions such as the College International de Philosophie He was a member of L Organisation Politique fr which as mentioned above he founded in 1985 with some comrades from the Maoist UCFml This organization disbanded in 2007 according to the French Wikipedia article linked to in the previous sentence In 2002 he was a co founder of the Centre International d Etude de la Philosophie Francaise Contemporaine alongside Yves Duroux and his former student Quentin Meillassoux 13 Badiou has also enjoyed success as a dramatist with plays such as Ahmed le Subtil In the last decade an increasing number of Badiou s works have been translated into English such as Ethics Deleuze Manifesto for Philosophy Metapolitics and Being and Event Short pieces by Badiou have likewise appeared in American and English periodicals such as Lacanian Ink New Left Review Radical Philosophy Cosmos and History and Parrhesia Unusually for a contemporary European philosopher his work is increasingly being taken up by militants in countries like India the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa citation needed In 2014 15 Badiou had the role of Honorary President at The Global Center for Advanced Studies 14 Key concepts editThis section possibly contains original research Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations Statements consisting only of original research should be removed August 2018 Learn how and when to remove this template message Badiou makes repeated use of several concepts throughout his philosophy which he discerns from close readings of the philosophical literature from the classical period His own method cannot be fully understood if it is not situated within the tradition of French academic philosophy Badiou s work engages a detailed decrypting of texts in line with philosophers such as Foucault Deleuze Balibar Bourdieu Derrida Bouveresse and Engel all of whom he studied with at the Ecole Normale Superieure One of the aims of his thought is to show that his categories of truth are useful for any type of philosophical critique Therefore he uses them to interrogate art and history as well as ontology and scientific discovery Johannes Thumfart argues that Badiou s philosophy can be regarded as a contemporary reinterpretation of Platonism 15 Conditions edit According to Badiou philosophy is suspended from four conditions art love politics and science each of them fully independent truth procedures For Badiou s notion of truth procedures see below Badiou consistently maintains throughout his work but most systematically in Manifesto for Philosophy that philosophy must avoid the temptation to suture itself sew itself that is to hand over its entire intellectual effort to any of these independent truth procedures When philosophy does suture itself to one of its conditions and Badiou argues that the history of philosophy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is primarily a history of sutures what results is a philosophical disaster Consequently philosophy is according to Badiou a thinking of the compossibility of the several truth procedures whether this is undertaken through the investigation of the intersections between distinct truth procedures the intersection of art and love in the novel for instance or whether this is undertaken through the more traditionally philosophical work of addressing categories like truth or the subject concepts that are as concepts external to the individual truth procedures though they are functionally operative in the truth procedures themselves For Badiou when philosophy addresses the four truth procedures in a genuinely philosophical manner rather than through a suturing abandonment of philosophy as such it speaks of them with a theoretical terminology that marks its philosophical character inaesthetics rather than art metapolitics rather than politics ontology rather than science etc Truth for Badiou is a specifically philosophical category While philosophy s several conditions are on their own terms truth procedures i e they produce truths as they are pursued it is only philosophy that can speak of the several truth procedures as truth procedures The lover for instance does not think of her love as a question of truth but simply and rightly as a question of love Only the philosopher sees in the true lover s love the unfolding of a truth Badiou has a very rigorous notion of truth one that is strongly against the grain of much of contemporary European thought Badiou at once embraces the traditional modernist notion that truths are genuinely invariant always and everywhere the case eternal and unchanging and the incisively postmodernist notion that truths are constructed through processes Badiou s theory of truth exposited throughout his work accomplishes this strange mixture by uncoupling invariance from self evidence such that invariance does not imply self evidence as well as by uncoupling constructedness from relativity such that constructedness does not lead to relativism The idea here is that a truth s invariance makes it genuinely indiscernible because a truth is everywhere and always the case it passes unnoticed unless there is a rupture in the laws of being and appearance during which the truth in question becomes but only for a passing moment discernible Such a rupture is what Badiou calls an event according to a theory originally worked out in Being and Event and fleshed out in important ways in Logics of Worlds The individual who chances to witness such an event if he is faithful to what he has glimpsed can then introduce the truth by naming it into worldly situations For Badiou it is by positioning oneself to the truth of an event that a human animal becomes a subject subjectivity is not an inherent human trait According to a process or procedure that subsequently unfolds only if those who subject themselves to the glimpsed truth continue to be faithful in the work of announcing the truth in question genuine knowledge is produced knowledge often appears in Badiou s work under the title of the veridical While such knowledge is produced in the process of being faithful to a truth event for Badiou knowledge in the figure of the encyclopedia always remains fragile subject to what may yet be produced as faithful subjects of the event produce further knowledge According to Badiou truth procedures proceed to infinity such that faith fidelity outstrips knowledge Badiou following both Lacan and Heidegger distances truth from knowledge The dominating ideology of the day which Badiou terms democratic materialism denies the existence of truth and only recognizes bodies and languages Badiou proposes a turn towards the materialist dialectic which recognizes that there are only bodies and languages except there are also truths Inaesthetic edit In Handbook of Inaesthetics Badiou both draws on the original Greek meaning and the later Kantian concept of aesthesis as material perception and coins the phrase inaesthetic to refer to a concept of artistic creation that denies the reflection object relation yet at the same time in reaction against the idea of mimesis or poetic reflection of nature he affirms that art is immanent and singular Art is immanent in the sense that its truth is given in its immediacy in a given work of art and singular in that its truth is found in art and art alone hence reviving the ancient materialist concept of aesthesis His view of the link between philosophy and art is tied into the motif of pedagogy which he claims functions so as to arrange the forms of knowledge in a way that some truth may come to pierce a hole in them He develops these ideas with examples from the prose of Samuel Beckett and the poetry of Stephane Mallarme and Fernando Pessoa who he argues has developed a body of work that philosophy is currently incapable of incorporating among others Being and Event editThe major propositions of Badiou s philosophy all find their basis in Being and Event in which he continues his attempt which he began in Theorie du sujet to reconcile a notion of the subject with ontology and in particular post structuralist and constructivist ontologies 16 A frequent criticism of post structuralist work is that it prohibits through its fixation on semiotics and language any notion of a subject Badiou s work is by his own admission 17 an attempt to break out of contemporary philosophy s fixation upon language which he sees almost as a straitjacket This effort leads him in Being and Event to combine rigorous mathematical formulae with his readings of poets such as Mallarme and Holderlin and religious thinkers such as Pascal His philosophy draws upon both analytical and continental traditions In Badiou s own opinion this combination places him awkwardly relative to his contemporaries meaning that his work had been only slowly taken up 18 Being and Event offers an example of this slow uptake in fact it was translated into English only in 2005 a full seventeen years after its French publication As is implied in the title of the book two elements mark the thesis of Being and Event the place of ontology or the science of being qua being being in itself and the place of the event which is seen as a rupture in being through which the subject finds realization and reconciliation with truth This situation of being and the rupture which characterizes the event are thought in terms of set theory and specifically Zermelo Fraenkel set theory with the axiom of choice In short the event is a truth caused by a hidden part or set appearing within existence this part escapes language and known existence and thus being itself lacks the terms and resources to fully process the event Mathematics as ontology edit This section possibly contains original research Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations Statements consisting only of original research should be removed December 2014 Learn how and when to remove this template message For Badiou the problem which the Greek tradition of philosophy has faced and never satisfactorily dealt with is that while beings themselves are plural and thought in terms of multiplicity being itself is thought to be singular that is it is thought in terms of the one He proposes as the solution to this impasse the following declaration that the One is not l Un n est pas This is why Badiou accords set theory the axioms of which he refers to as the ideas of the multiple such stature and refers to mathematics as the very place of ontology Only set theory allows one to conceive a pure doctrine of the multiple Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set that is another set too What individuates a set therefore is not an existential positive proposition but other multiples whose properties i e structural relations validate its presentation The structure of being thus secures the regime of the count as one So if one is to think of a set for instance the set of people or humanity as counting as one the multiple elements which belong to that set are secured as one consistent concept humanity but only in terms of what does not belong to that set What is crucial for Badiou is that the structural form of the count as one which makes multiplicities thinkable implies somehow or other that the proper name of being does not belong to an element as such an original one but rather the void set written O the set to which nothing not even the void set itself belongs It may help to understand the concept count as one if it is associated with the concept of terming a multiple is not one but it is referred to with multiple one word To count a set as one is to mention that set How the being of terms such as multiple does not contradict the non being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology for there to be a term without there also being a system of terminology within which the difference between terms gives context and meaning to any one term is impossible Terminology implies precisely difference between terms thus multiplicity as the condition for meaning The idea of a term without meaning is incoherent the count as one is a structural effect or a situational operation it is not an event of truth Multiples which are composed or consistent are count effects Inconsistent multiplicity meaning is somehow or other the presentation of presentation Badiou s use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history Nature the State and God Most significantly this use means that as with set theory there is a strict prohibition on self belonging a set cannot contain or belong to itself This results from the axiom of foundation or the axiom of regularity which enacts such a prohibition cf p 190 in Being and Event This axiom states that every non empty set A contains an element y that is disjoint from A Badiou s philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition Firstly it secures the inexistence of the one there cannot be a grand overarching set and thus it is fallacious to conceive of a grand cosmos a whole Nature or a Being of God Badiou is therefore against Georg Cantor from whom he draws heavily staunchly atheist However secondly this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event Because according to Badiou the axiom of foundation founds all sets in the void it ties all being to the historico social situation of the multiplicities of de centred sets thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action or an entirely new occurrence And whilst this is acceptable ontologically it is unacceptable Badiou holds philosophically Set theory mathematics has consequently pragmatically abandoned an area which philosophy cannot And so Badiou argues there is therefore only one possibility remaining that ontology can say nothing about the event Several critics have questioned Badiou s use of mathematics Mathematician Alan Sokal and physicist Jean Bricmont write that Badiou proposes with seemingly utter seriousness a blending of psychoanalysis politics and set theory that they contend is preposterous 19 Similarly philosopher Roger Scruton has questioned Badiou s grasp of the foundation of mathematics writing in 2012 There is no evidence that I can find in Being and Event that the author really understands what he is talking about when he invokes as he constantly does Georg Cantor s theory of transfinite cardinals the axioms of set theory Godel s incompleteness proof or Paul Cohen s proof of the independence of the continuum hypothesis When these things appear in Badiou s texts it is always allusively with fragments of symbolism detached from the context that endows them with sense and often with free variables and bound variables colliding randomly No proof is clearly stated or examined and the jargon of set theory is waved like a magician s wand to give authority to bursts of all but unintelligible metaphysics 20 An example of a critique from a mathematician s point of view is the essay Badiou s Number A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology by Ricardo L Nirenberg and David Nirenberg 21 which takes issue in particular with Badiou s matheme of the Event in Being and Event which has already been alluded to in respect of the axiom of foundation above Nirenberg and Nirenberg write Rather than being defined in terms of objects previously defined ex is here defined in terms of itself you must already have it in order to define it Set theorists call this a not well founded set This kind of set never appears in mathematics not least because it produces an unmathematical mise en abime if we replace ex inside the bracket by its expression as a bracket we can go on doing this forever and so can hardly be called a matheme The event and the subject edit Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory Badiou s language of ontology to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology He employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J Cohen using what are called the conditions of sets These conditions are thought of in terms of domination a domination being that which defines a set If one takes in binary language the set with the condition items marked only with ones any item marked with zero negates the property of the set The condition which has only ones is thus dominated by any condition which has zeros in it cf pp 367 371 in Being and Event Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible nameable or constructible set is dominated by the conditions which don t possess the property that makes it discernible as a set The property one is always dominated by not one These sets are in line with constructible ontology relative to one s being in the world and one s being in language where sets and concepts such as the concept humanity get their names However he continues the dominations themselves are whilst being relative concepts not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought rather one can axiomatically define a domination in the terms of mathematical ontology as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a set of dominations which he refers to as the indiscernible set or the generic set It is therefore he continues possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language by a process Cohen calls forcing And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible it falls to the subject about which the ontological situation cannot comment to nominate this indiscernible this generic point and thus nominate and give name to the undecidable event Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post structuralist thought Badiou s ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of decide upon the undecidable It is to name the indiscernible the generic set and thus name the event that re casts ontology in a new light He identifies four domains in which a subject who it is important to note becomes a subject through this process can potentially witness an event love science politics and art By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a generic procedure which in its undecidability is necessarily experimental and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place Through this maintenance of fidelity truth has the potentiality to emerge In line with his concept of the event Badiou maintains politics is not about politicians but activism based on the present situation and the evental sic his translators neologism rupture So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent He vigorously rejects the tag of decisionist the idea that once something is decided it becomes true but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability As he says of Galileo p 401 When Galileo announced the principle of inertia he was still separated from the truth of the new physics by all the chance encounters that are named in subjects such as Descartes or Newton How could he with the names he fabricated and displaced because they were at hand movement equal proportion etc have supposed the veracity of his principle for the situation to come that was the establishment of modern science that is the supplementation of his situation with the indiscernible and unfinishable part that one has to name rational physics While Badiou is keen to reject an equivalence between politics and philosophy he correlates nonetheless his political activism and skepticism toward the parliamentary democratic process with his philosophy based around singular situated truths and potential revolutions L Organisation Politique editAlain Badiou is a founding member along with Natacha Michel and Sylvain Lazarus of the militant French political organisation L Organisation Politique which was active from 1985 until it disbanded in 2007 22 It called itself a post party organization concerned with direct popular intervention in a wide range of issues including immigration labor and housing In addition to numerous writings and interventions L Organisation Politique highlighted the importance of developing political prescriptions concerning undocumented migrants les sans papiers stressing that they must be conceived primarily as workers and not immigrants 23 Public controversies editAnti Semitism accusation and response edit In 2005 a fierce controversy in Parisian intellectual life erupted after the publication of Badiou s Circonstances 3 Portees du mot juif The Uses of the Word Jew 24 This book generated a strong response and the wrangling became a cause celebre with articles going back and forth in the French newspaper Le Monde and in the cultural journal Les Temps modernes Linguist and Lacanian philosopher Jean Claude Milner a past president of College international de philosophie accused Badiou of anti Semitism 25 Badiou forcefully rebutted this charge declaring that his accusers often conflate a nation state with religious preference and will label as anti Semitic anyone who objects to this tendency It is wholly intolerable to be accused of anti Semitism by anyone for the sole reason that from the fact of the extermination one does not conclude as to the predicate Jew and its religious and communitarian dimension that it receive some singular valorization a transcendent annunciation nor that Israeli exactions whose colonial nature is patent and banal be specially tolerated I propose that nobody any longer accept publicly or privately this type of political blackmail 26 Badiou characterizes the state of Israel as neither more nor less impure than all states but objects to its exclusive identitarian claim to be a Jewish state and the way it draws incessant privileges from this claim especially when it comes to trampling underfoot what serves us as international law For example he continues The Islamic states are certainly no more progressive as models than the various versions of the Arab nation were Everyone agrees it seems on the point that the Taliban do not embody the path of modernity for Afghanistan 26 A modern democracy he writes must count all its residents as citizens and there is no acceptable reason to exempt the state of Israel from that rule The claim is sometimes made that this state is the only democratic state in the region But the fact that this state presents itself as a Jewish state is directly contradictory 26 Badiou is optimistic that ongoing political problems can be resolved by de emphasizing the communitarian religious dimension The signifier Palestinian or Arab should not be glorified any more than is permitted for the signifier Jew As a result the legitimate solution to the Middle East conflict is not the dreadful institution of two barbed wire states The solution is the creation of a secular and democratic Palestine which would show that it is perfectly possible to create a place in these lands where from a political point of view and regardless of the apolitical continuity of customs there is neither Arab nor Jew This will undoubtedly demand a regional Mandela 26 Sarkozy pamphlet edit Alain Badiou gained notoriety in 2007 with his pamphlet The Meaning of Sarkozy De quoi Sarkozy est il le nom which quickly sold 60 000 copies whereas for 40 years the sales of his books had oscillated between 2 000 and 6 000 copies 27 As Rafael Bahr pointed out at the time in 2009 Badiou despised Sarkozy and barely could write his name Instead Badiou usually called Sarkozy the Rat Man throughout The Meaning of Sarkozy 28 Steven Poole also pointed out that this characterization Rat Man brought charges of antisemitism against Badiou 29 But as Bahr notes the controversy went beyond antisemitism striking at the heart of what it means to be French Badiou sees Sarkozy as the embodiment of a strain of moral cowardice in French politics in which the defining moment was the installation of Marshal Petain as head of the pro Nazi collaborationist government For Badiou Sarkozy is a symbol of transcendent Petainism 28 Mark Fisher was impressed with Badiou s efforts The book treats Sarkozy as an emblem of a particular kind of reactionary politics and identifies him with an attempt to kill off that which is officially already dead the emancipatory project that defiantly Badiou still calls communism Badiou claims that Sarkozy s rise is the return of a kind of Petainist mass subjectivity first instigated by the Vichy regime s collaboration with the Nazis in World War II the enemy that is being acquiesced to now though is of course capital 30 Works editPhilosophy edit Le concept de modele 1969 2007 Theorie du sujet 1982 Peut on penser la politique 1985 L Etre et l Evenement 1988 Manifeste pour la philosophie 1989 Le nombre et les nombres 1990 D un desastre obscur 1991 Conditions 1992 L Ethique 1993 Deleuze 1997 Saint Paul La fondation de l universalisme 1997 2002 Abrege de metapolitique 1998 Court traite d ontologie transitoire 1998 Petit manuel d inesthetique 1998 Le Siecle 2005 Logiques des mondes L etre et l evenement 2 2006 Petit pantheon portatif 2008 Second manifeste pour la philosophie 2009 L Antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein 2009 Eloge de l Amour 2009 Heidegger Le nazisme les femmes la philosophie co authored with Barbara Cassin 2010 Il n y a pas de rapport sexuel co authored with Barbara Cassin 2010 La Philosophie et l Evenement interviews with Fabien Tarby ed 2010 Cinq lecons sur le cas Wagner 2010 Le Fini et l Infini 2010 La Relation enigmatique entre politique et philosophie 2011 La Republique de Platon fr 2012 L aventure de la philosophie francaise 2012 Jacques Lacan passe present Dialogue 2012 De la fin Conversations with Giovanbattista Tusa 2017 L immanence des verites 2018 Sometimes We Are Eternal with Kenneth Reinhard Jana Ndiaye Berankova Nick Nesbitt Suture Press 2019 Critical essays edit L autonomie du processus esthetique 1966 Rhapsodie pour le theatre 1990 Beckett l increvable desir 1995 Cinema 2010 Literature and drama edit Almagestes 1964 Portulans 1967 L Echarpe rouge 1979 Ahmed le subtil 1994 Ahmed Philosophe followed by Ahmed se fache 1995 Les Citrouilles a comedy 1996 Calme bloc ici bas 1997 Political essays edit Theorie de la contradiction 1975 De l ideologie with F Balmes 1976 Le Noyau rationnel de la dialectique hegelienne with L Mossot and J Bellassen 1977 Circonstances 1 Kosovo 11 Septembre Chirac Le Pen 2003 Circonstances 2 Irak foulard Allemagne France 2004 Circonstances 3 Portees du mot juif 2005 Circonstances 4 De quoi Sarkozy est il le nom 2007 Circonstances 5 L hypothese communiste 2009 Circonstances 6 Le Reveil de l Histoire 2011 Circonstances 7 Sarkozy pire que prevu les autres prevoir le pire 2012 Mao De la pratique et de la contradiction with Slavoj Zizek 2008 Democratie dans quel etat with Giorgio Agamben Daniel Bensaid Wendy Brown Jean Luc Nancy Jacques Ranciere Kristin Ross and Slavoj Zizek 2009 L Idee du communisme vol 1 London Conference 2009 Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek eds with Judith Balso Bruno Bosteels Susan Buck Morss Terry Eagleton Peter Hallward Michael Hardt Minqi Li Jean Luc Nancy Toni Negri Jacques Ranciere Alessandro Russo Roberto Toscano Gianni Vattimo Wang Hui and Slavoj Zizek 2010 L Explication conversation avec Aude Lancelin with Alain Finkielkraut 2010 L Antisemitisme partout Aujourd hui en France with Eric Hazan 2011 L Idee du communisme vol 2 Berlin Conference 2010 Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek eds with Glyn Daly Saroj Giri Gernot Kamecke Janne Kurki Artemy Magun Kuba Majmurek Kuba Mikurda Toni Negri Frank Ruda Bulent Somay Janek Sowa G M Tamas Henning Teschke Jan Volker Cecile Winter and Slavoj Zizek 2011 Pamphlets and serial publications edit Contribution au probleme de la construction d un parti marxiste leniniste de type nouveau with Jancovici Menetrey and Terray Maspero 1970 Jean Paul Sartre Editions Potemkine 1980 Le Perroquet Quinzomadaire d opinion 1981 1990 La Distance Politique 1990 Notre mal vient de plus loin 2016 English translations edit Books edit Manifesto for Philosophy transl by Norman Madarasz Albany SUNY Press 1999 ISBN 978 0 7914 4220 3 paperback ISBN 978 0 7914 4219 7 hardcover Deleuze The Clamor of Being transl by Louise Burchill Minnesota University Press 1999 ISBN 978 0 8166 3140 7 paperback ISBN 978 0 8166 3139 1 library binding Ethics An Essay on the Understanding of Evil transl by Peter Hallward New York Verso 2000 ISBN 978 1 85984 435 9 paperback ISBN 978 1 85984 297 3 On Beckett transl and ed by Alberto Toscano and Nina Power London Clinamen Press 2003 ISBN 978 1 903083 30 7 paperback ISBN 978 1 903083 26 0 hardcover Infinite Thought Truth and the Return to Philosophy transl and ed by Oliver Feltham amp Justin Clemens London Continuum 2003 ISBN 978 0 8264 7929 7 paperback ISBN 978 0 8264 6724 9 hardcover Metapolitics transl by Jason Barker New York Verso 2005 ISBN 978 1 84467 567 8 paperback ISBN 978 1 84467 035 2 hardcover Saint Paul The Foundation of Universalism transl by Ray Brassier Stanford Stanford University Press 2003 ISBN 978 0 8047 4471 3 paperback ISBN 978 0 8047 4470 6 hardcover Handbook of Inaesthetics transl by Alberto Toscano Stanford Stanford University Press 2004 ISBN 978 0 8047 4409 6 paperback ISBN 978 0 8047 4408 9 hardcover Theoretical Writings transl by Ray Brassier New York Continuum 2004 31 Briefings on Existence A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology transl by Norman Madarasz Albany SUNY Press 2005 Being and Event transl by Oliver Feltham New York Continuum 2005 Polemics transl by Steve Corcoran New York Verso 2007 The Century transl by Alberto Toscano New York Polity Press 2007 The Concept of Model An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics transl by Zachery Luke Fraser amp Tzuchien Tho Melbourne re press 2007 Open Access 32 Number and Numbers New York Polity Press 2008 ISBN 978 0 7456 3879 9 paperback ISBN 978 0 7456 3878 2 hardcover The Meaning of Sarkozy New York Verso 2008 ISBN 978 1 84467 309 4 hardcover ISBN 978 1 84467 629 3 paperback Conditions transl by Steve Corcoran New York Continuum 2009 ISBN 978 0 8264 9827 4 hardcover Logics of Worlds Being and Event Volume 2 transl by Alberto Toscano New York Continuum 2009 ISBN 978 0 8264 9470 2 hardcover Pocket Pantheon Figures of Postwar Philosophy transl by David Macey New York Verso 2009 ISBN 978 1 84467 357 5 hardcover Theory of the Subject transl by Bruno Bosteels New York Continuum 2009 ISBN 978 0 8264 9673 7 hardcover Philosophy in the Present with Slavoj Zizek New York Polity Press 2010 ISBN 978 0 7456 4097 6 paperback The Communist Hypothesis transl by David Macey and Steve Corcoran New York Verso 2010 ISBN 978 1 84467 600 2 hardcover Five Lessons on Wagner transl by Susan Spitzer with an Afterword by Slavoj Zizek New York Verso 2010 ISBN 978 1 84467 481 7 paperback Second Manifesto for Philosophy transl by Louise Burchill New York Polity Press 2011 Wittgenstein s Antiphilosophy transl by Bruno Bosteels New York Verso 2011 The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic transl by Tzuchien Tho Melbourne re press 2011 The Rebirth of History Times of Riots and Uprisings transl by Gregory Elliott New York Verso 2012 ISBN 978 1 84467 879 2 In Praise of Love with Nicolas Truong transl by Peter Bush London Serpent s Tail 2012 Philosophy for Militants transl by Bruno Bosteels New York Verso 2012 The Adventure of French Philosophy transl by Bruno Bosteels New York Verso 2012 Plato s Republic A Dialogue in 16 Chapters transl by Susan Spitzer New York Columbia University Press 2013 The Incident at Antioch L Incident d Antioche A Tragedy in Three Acts Tragedie en trois actes transl by Susan Spitzer New York Columbia University Press 2013 Badiou and the Philosophers Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy transl and ed by Tzuchien Tho and Giuseppe Bianco New York Bloomsbury Academic 2013 Philosophy and the Event with Fabian Tarby transl by Louise Burchill Malden MA Polity 2013 Reflections on Anti Semitism with Eric Hazan transl by David Fernbach London Verso 2013 Rhapsody for the Theatre transl and ed by Bruno Bosteels London Verso 2013 Cinema transl by Susan Spitzer Malden MA Polity 2013 Mathematics of the Transcendental Onto logy and being there transl by A J Bartlett and Alex Ling London Bloomsbury 2014 Ahmed the Philosopher Thirty four Short Plays for Children and Everyone Else transl by Joseph Litvak New York Columbia University Press 2014 Jacques Lacan Past and Present A Dialogue with Elisabeth Roudinesco transl by Jason E Smith New York Columbia University Press 2014 Controversies Politics and Philosophy in our Time with Jean Claude Milner transl by London Polity 2014 Confrontation A Conversation with Aude Lancelin with Alain Finkielkraut transl by Susan Spitzer London Polity 2014 The Age of the Poets And Other Writings on Twentieth Century Poetry and Prose transl by Bruno Bosteels New York Verso 2014 33 The end with Giovanbattista Tusa transl by Robin Mackay Cambridge Polity 2019 ISBN 978 1509536276 The Immanence of Truths Being and Event III transl by Susan Spitzer and Kenneth Reinhard London Bloomsbury Academic 2022 ISBN 978 1350115309 Journals edit Journal of Badiou Studies The Cultural Revolution The Last Revolution transl by Bruno Bosteels positions asia critique Volume 13 Issue 3 Winter 2005 Durham Duke University Press 2005 ISSN 1067 9847 Selections from Theorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution transl by Alberto Toscano with the assistance of Lorenzo Chiesa and Nina Power positions asia critique Volume 13 Issue 3 Winter 2005 Durham Duke University Press 2005 ISSN 1067 9847 Further Selections from Theorie du sujet on the Cultural Revolution transl by Lorenzo Chiesa positions asia critique Volume 13 Issue 3 Winter 2005 Durham Duke University Press 2005 ISSN 1067 9847 The Triumphant Restoration transl by Alberto Toscano positions asia critique Volume 13 Issue 3 Winter 2005 Durham Duke University Press 2005 ISSN 1067 9847 An Essential Philosophical Thesis It Is Right to Rebel against the Reactionaries transl by Alberto Toscano positions asia critique Volume 13 Issue 3 Winter 2005 Durham Duke University Press 2005 ISSN 1067 9847 What is a philosophical Institution or Address Transmission Inscription Archived 28 March 2013 at the Wayback Machine Cosmos and History The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy Vol 2 No 1 2 2006 Les Reponses Ecrites D Alain Badiou Interviewed by Ata Hoodashtian for Le journal Philosophie Philosophie Universite Paris VIII DVD edit Badiou A Film in association with the Global Center for Advanced Studies 2018 Directed by Gorav Kalyan Rohan Kalyan Gorav Kalyan Democracy and Disappointment On the Politics of Resistance Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation Event Date Thursday 15 November 2007 Location Slought Foundation Conversations in Theory Series Organized by Aaron Levy Studio Microcinema in collaboration with Slought Foundation DVD Release Date 26 August 2008 Lectures edit Interview with Alain Badiou BBC HARDtalk March 2009 Creative Thinking Al Quds University Jerusalem Palestine 17 January 2009 Is the Word Communism forever Doomed Miguel Abreu Gallery New York 6 November 2008 Theatre et Philosophie with Martin Puchner amp Bruno Bosteels La Maison Francaise New York University New York 7 November 2008 Democracy and Disappointment On the Politics of Resistance permanent dead link with Simon Critchley Slought Foundation Philadelphia the Departments of Romance Languages History and English and the Program in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania 15 November 2007 Homage to Jacques Derrida permanent dead link University of California Irvine 1 March 2006 RealPlayer Ours is not a terrible situation with Simon Critchley Labyrinth Books New York 6 March 2006 Politics Democracy and Philosophy An Obscure Knot Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities at University of Washington 23 February 2006 Panorama de la Filosofia Francesa Contemporanea Biblioteca Nacional de Buenos Aires 2004 Finkielkraut Badiou Le Face a Vace The Nouvel Obs Transcript in French 34 Faut il reinventer l amour Ce Soir French television En direct France 3 French See also editSpeculative realismNotes edit Alain Badiou Mao thinks in an almost infinite way Versobooks com Retrieved 19 November 2021 Sean Bowden Badiou and Philosophy Edinburgh University Press 2012 p 63 Radical thinkers Alain Badiou s Ethics Badiou Alain Engelmann Peter 27 March 2015 Philosophy and the Idea of Communism Polity Press ISBN 978 0745688367 Tzuchien Tho Giuseppe Bianco Badiou and the Philosophers Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy A amp C Black 2013 pp xvii Tzuchien Tho Giuseppe Bianco Badiou and the Philosophers Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy A amp C Black 2013 pp xviii xix Francois Regnault Homepage at Cahiers pour l Analyse Archived 18 August 2010 at the Wayback Machine La chronobiographie alain badiou in French Retrieved 24 February 2018 a b c d Badiou Homepage at Concept and Form The Cahiers pour l Analyse and Contemporary French Thought Archived 17 April 2010 at the Wayback Machine Badiou Alain 2010 Part I We Are Still the Contemporaries of May 68 The Communist Hypothesis pbk translated by David Macey and Steve Corcoran Verso p 58 ISBN 978 1 84467 600 2 Badiou Alain Jacques Lacan Pocket Pantheon Trans David Macey London Verso 2009 Badiou Alain Louis Althusser Pocket Pantheon Trans David Macey London Verso 2009 Quentin Meillassoux CIEFPC Archived from the original on 8 September 2011 Retrieved 24 January 2014 Alain Badiou Member Page The Global Center for Advanced Studies Archived from the original on 28 March 2016 Retrieved 23 April 2016 Thumfart Johannes Learning from Las Vegas Badiou s Platonism Today The Symptom 9 Lacan com Retrieved 11 August 2020 See here Feltham and Clamens s introduction in Badiou s book Infinite Thought Continuum 2004 See Badiou s book Infinite Thought Continuum 2004 See here Badiou s comments in the introduction to the English version of Being and Event Continuum 2005 Sokal Alan and Jean Bricmont 1999 Fashionable Nonsense Postmodern Intellectuals Abuse of Science Macmillan ISBN 9780312204075 p 180 Scruton Roger 31 August 2012 A Nothing Would do As Well Times Literary Supplement Nirenberg Ricardo L David Nirenberg Badiou s Number A Critique of Mathematics as Ontology PDF Critical Inquiry Archived from the original PDF on 11 August 2017 Retrieved 20 April 2016 See the organisation s website at https web archive org web 20071028083920 http www orgapoli net Robinson Andrew 30 March 2015 An A to Z of Theory Alain Badiou Political Action and the Organisation Politique Cease Fire Magazine Retrieved 23 April 2016 Alain Badiou Uses of the Word Jew Lacan com Archived from the original on 25 May 2011 Retrieved 18 June 2011 On that subject see articles against Badiou by Roger Pol Droit Le Monde des livres 25 November 2005 and Frederic Nef Le Monde des livres 23 December 2005 and in defense of Badiou by Daniel Bensaid Le Monde des Livres 26 January 2006 against Badiou by Claude Lanzmann Jean Claude Milner and Eric Marty Les Temps modernes Nov December 2005 January 2006 and Meir Waintrater L Arche February 2006 Alain Badiou et les Juifs Une violence insoutenable and the answers by Alain Badiou and Cecile Winter followed by rejoinders by Claude Lanzmann and Eric Marty Les Temps modernes March June 2006 See also Badiou s response to Eric Marty a b c d Alain Badiou Circonstances 3 Portees du mot juif Paris Leo Scheer 2005 The Uses of the Word Jew translated by Steve Corcoran Accessed 22 November 2019 Eric Conan Badiou la star de la philo est il un salaud in Marianne no 671 27 Feb 2010 p 18 a b A denunciation of the Rat Man Nicolas Sarkozy The Guardian amp theguardian com The Meaning of Sarkozy Politics books The Guardian amp theguardian com Fisher Mark 4 April 2009 The Meaning Of Sarkozy Frieze 122 via www frieze com Includes Mathematics and Philosophy The Grand Style and the Little Style unpublished Philosophy and Mathematics Infinity and the End of Romanticism from Conditions Paris Seuil 1992 The Question of Being Today from Briefings on Existence Platonism and Mathematical Ontology from Briefings on Existence The Being of Number from Briefings on Existence One Multiple Multiplicities from Multitudes 1 2000 Spinoza s Closed Ontology from Briefings on Existence The Event as Trans Being revised and expanded version of an essay of the same title from Briefings on Existence On Subtraction from Conditions Paris Seuil 1992 Truth Forcing and the Unnameable from Conditions Paris Seuil 1992 Kant s Subtractive Ontology from Briefings on Existence Eight Theses on the Universal from Jelica Sumic ed Universal Singulier Subjet Paris Kime 2000 Politics as a Truth Procedure from Metapolitics Being and Appearance from Briefings on Existence Notes Toward Thinking Appearance unpublished The Transcendental from a draft manuscript now published of Logiques des mondes Paris Seuil Hegel and the Whole from a draft manuscript now published of Logiques des mondes Paris Seuil Language Thought Poetry unpublished Alain Badiou The Concept of Model Archived 28 August 2008 at the Wayback Machine The Age of the Poets Alain Badiou Review The Nouvel Obs invited the philosophers Alain Finkielkraut and Alain Badiou members of opposite political camps to talk about national identity According to Aude Lancelin who moderated the discussion it came to an ideological confrontation of rare violence 1 Further reading editThis further reading section may need cleanup Please read the editing guide and help improve the section February 2017 Learn how and when to remove this template message Secondary literature on Badiou s work edit in English books edit Jason Barker Alain Badiou A Critical Introduction London Pluto Press 2002 Peter Hallward Badiou A Subject to Truth Minneapolis University of Minnesota Press 2003 Peter Hallward ed Think Again Badiou and the Future of Philosophy London Continuum 2004 Andrew William Gibson Beckett and Badiou The Pathos of intermittency Oxford Oxford University press 2006 Paul Ashton ed A J Bartlett ed Justin Clemens ed The Praxis of Alain Badiou Melbourne re press 2006 Adam Miller Badiou Marion and St Paul Immanent Grace London Continuum 2008 Bruno Bosteels Badiou and Politics Durham Duke University Press 2011 Oliver Feltham Alain Badiou Live Theory London Continuum 2008 Burhanuddin Baki Badiou s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory London Bloomsbury Academic 2015 Sam Gillespie The Mathematics of Novelty Badiou s Minimalist Metaphysics Melbourne Australia re press 2008 details on re press website Archived 17 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine Open Access Chris Henry The Ethics of Political Resistance Althusser Badiou Deleuze Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2019 Adrian Johnston Badiou Zizek and Political Transformations The Cadence of Change Evanston Northwestern University Press 2009 Gabriel Riera ed Alain Badiou Philosophy and its Conditions Albany New York SUNY Press 2005 Frank Ruda For Badiou Idealism Without Idealism Illinois Northwestern University Press 2015 Christopher Norris Badiou s Being and Event A Reader s Guide London Continuum 2009 A J Bartlett and Justin Clemens eds Badiou Key Concepts London Acumen 2010 Alex Ling Badiou and Cinema Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2010 Ed Pluth Badiou A Philosophy of the New Malden Polity 2010 A J Bartlett Badiou and Plato An education by truths Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2011 P M Livingston The Politics of Logic Badiou Wittgenstein and the Consequences of Formalism New York Routledge 2011 Steven Corcoran ed The Badiou Dictionary Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press 2015 ISBN 978 0 7486 4096 6 Am Johal Ecological Metapolitics Badiou and the Anthropocence New York Atropos Press 2015 In English journals essays and articles edit Cantor Lacan Mao Becket meme combat The philosophy of Alain Badiou essay by Jean Jacques Lecercle Radical Philosophy 093 January February 1999 Je te Matheme Badiou s De Psychologisation of Love essay by Carlos Gomez Camarena Annual Review of Critical Psychology 8 2010 Alain Badiou s Theory of the Subject Part 1 The Recommencement of Dialectical Materialism by Bruno Bosteels Society and Space Theme Issue Being and Spatialization vol 27 Issue 5 2009 interview and articles by M Constantinou N Madarasz J Flowers MacCannell See Environment and Planning D Society and Space contents vol 29 Envplan com Archived from the original on 22 June 2011 Retrieved 18 June 2011 Fatal Repetition Badiou and the Age of the Poets with Appendix A Psychoanalysis of Alain Badiou by James Luchte Istiraki Turkey 5 May 2014 In French books edit Charles Ramond ed Penser le multiple Paris Editions L Harmattan 2002 Fabien Tarby La Philosophie d Alain Badiou Paris Editions L Harmattan 2005 Fabien Tarby Materialismes d aujourd hui de Deleuze a Badiou Paris Editions L Harmattan 2005 Eric Marty Une Querelle avec Alain Badiou philosophe Paris Editions Gallimard coll L Infini 2007 Bruno Besana et Oliver Feltham ed Ecrits autour de la pensee d Alain Badiou Paris Editions L Harmattan 2007 In Basque books and articles edit Antton Azkargorta 1996 Hitzaurrea in Alain Badiou Etika Bilbo Besatari ISBN 84 921104 1 4 Imanol Galfarsoro 2011 Alain Badiou Filosofia etiko politikoa I hAUSnART 0 124 129 Imanol Galfarsoro 2012 Alain Badiou Filosofia etiko politikoa II hAUSnART 1 108 114 Imanol Galfarsoro 2012 Alain Badiou eta hipotesi komunistaren birdefinizioak hAUSnART 2 82 99 Imanol Galfarsoro 2012 Post Marxismoa kultura eta eragiletasuna Ibilbide historiko labur bat in Alaitz Aizpuru koord Euskal Herriko pentsamenduaren gida Bilbo UEU ISBN 978 84 8438 435 9 Xabier Insausti amp Irati Oliden 2012 Konpromisorik gabeko filosofia Alain Badiou Donostia Jakin ISBN 978 84 95234 44 5 Alain Badiou on the Lapiko Kritikoa basque website In Spanish books and articles edit Carlos Gomez Camarena and Angelina Uzin Olleros eds Badiou fuera de sus limites Buenos Aires Imago Mundi 2010 ISBN 978 950 793 102 4 Angelina Uzin Olleros 2008 Introduccion al pensamiento de Alain Badiou Buenos Aires Imago Mundi ISBN 978 950 793 076 8 Je te matheme Badiou y la despsicologizacion del amor por Carlos Gomez Camarena Revista Teoria y Critica de la Psicologia Badiou la ciencia el matema Archived 22 August 2016 at the Wayback Machine por Carlos Gomez Camarena Revista Reflexiones Marginales Alfonso Galindo Hervas Pensamiento impolitico contemporaneo Ontologia y politica en Agamben Badiou Esposito y Nancy Sequitur Madrid 2015 External links edit nbsp Wikimedia Commons has media related to Alain Badiou nbsp Wikiquote has quotations related to Alain Badiou Alain Badiou Bibliography at Lacan Dot Com Alain Badiou Archive at MidEastDilemma com Plato Badiou and I an Experiment in Writerly Happiness Cordite Poetry ReviewCritical opinions edit On Alain Badiou and Logiques des mondes by Slavoj Zizek The Marxist hypothesis a response to Alain Badiou s communist hypothesis by Chris Cutrone The Anarchist Hypothesis or Badiou Zizek and the Anti Anarchist Prejudice by Gabriel Kuhn Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Alain Badiou amp oldid 1187590173, wikipedia, wiki, book, 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