Bøker av Alain Badiou

The author takes on contemporary 'dating agency' conceptions of love that come complete with zero-risk insurance. He develops a new take on love that sees it as an adventure, and an opportunity for re-invention, in a constant exploration of otherness and difference that leads the individual out of an obsession with identity and self.

Alain Badiou's 1985 seminar on Parmenides initiated his ongoing dialogue with the pre-Socratic philosopher and set out some of the foundational ideas of his own major philosophical works, including Being and Event.

Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Alain Badiou's seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, which consider the relationship between philosophy and notions of "the present."

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of "e;the present."e; In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one's own time-that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence.Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Badiou's seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, partly against the backdrop of the war in Iraq. Given while Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds, the second of the three volumes of Being and Event, these lectures address some of the same questions of existence in a particular world in a more personal and conversational tone, with reference to literature, philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture. He proposes a new concept of living in a real present as the twisting together of something from the past and something of the future.Featuring some of the philosopher's most inspiring and approachable work, Images of the Present Time is an important book for all readers interested in the practical as well as conceptual possibilities of Badiou's thought.

For Alain Badiou, theatreunlike cinemais the place for the staging of a truly emancipatory collective subject. In this sense theatre is, of all the arts, the one strictly homologous to politics: both theatre and politics depend on a limited set of texts or statements, collectively enacted by a group of actors or militants, which put a limit on the excessive power of the state. This explains why the history of theatre has always been inseparable from a history of state repression and censorship.This definitive collection includes not only Badious pamphlet Rhapsody for the Theatre but also essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, on the political destiny of contemporary theatre, and on Badious own work as a playwright, as author of the Ahmed Tetralogy.

Claims that the election of Nicholas Sarkozy as President is not an event, nor is it the cause for wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth.

This book revisits and revises some of the most basic concepts of time in the Judeo-Christian tradition, drawing on St. Paul's writings to rethink a new kind of radical faith in truth as an event, as the advent of the incalculable, a modality that remakes the pairing religious/secular.

The transcript of Alain Badiou's year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, this book offers a forceful reading of an enigmatic yet foundational thinker and sheds light on the crucial role that Lacan plays in Badiou's own thought. It is the first volume of Badiou's seminars to be published in English.

Alain Badiou offers a tour de force encounter with a lesser-known seventeenth-century philosopher and theologian, Nicolas Malebranche, a contemporary and peer of Spinoza and Leibniz. The seminar is at once a record of Badiou's thought at a key moment and a lively interrogation of Malebranche's key text, the Treatise on Nature and Grace.

The eminent French philosopher "dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy.In this unique essay, first delivered as a lecture during a panel discussion with the artist and philosopher Reza Negarestani, Alain Badiou identifies and "dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle's complex of matter and form is called to mind to describe the inner logic of a hard foam sculpture. A bronze statue with holes activates Plato's notion of participation of the concrete world in the "injured Idea of the Beautiful.” A small metallic and incomplete "angel” engages Leibniz's affirmation that "everything that exists is composed of an infinity of things.” Badiou's musings go on to pair a broken and repaired plastic chair with Victor Hugo; a terrible hand made of concrete with the Freudian unconscious; and a large-scale "red and blue monster” with rudimentary mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, the famous "I think, therefore I am,” with unexpected inversions and variations.Badiou refrains, of course, from claiming that Moulène thinks about any of these philosophers when making his specific works. What he points to, however, in this richly illustrated bilingual volume, is that the artist and his art are "on the side of philosophy.”

Following on from Alain Badiou's acclaimed works Ethics and Metapolitics, Polemics is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution.With the critical insight and polemical bravura for which he is renowned, Badiou considers the relationships between language, judgment and propagandaand shows how propaganda has become the dominant force. Both wittily and profoundly, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.

In Can Politics Be Thought?-published in French in 1985 and appearing here in English for the first time-Alain Badiou offers his most forceful and systematic analysis of the crisis of Marxism in which he argues for the continuation of Marxist politics.

The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic is the last in a trilogy of political-philosophical essays, preceded by Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology, written during the dark days at the end of the decade after May '68. With the late 1970's "triumphant restoration" in Europe, China and the United States, Badiou and his collaborators return to Hegel with a Chinese twist. By translating, annotating and providing commentary to a contemporaneous text by Chinese Hegelian Zhang Shi Ying, Badiou and his collaborators attempt to diagnose the status of the dialectic in their common political and philosophical horizon. Readers of Badiou's more recent work will find a crucial developmental step in his work in ontology and find echoes of his current project of a 'communist hypothesis'. This translation is accompanied by a recent interview that questions Badiou on the discrepancies between this text and his current thought, on the nature of dialectics, negativity, modality and his understanding of the historical, political and geographical distance that his text introduces into the present.

"Alain Badiou's first major work, Le Concept de modele, originally published in 1969 and long out of print, establishes a solid mathematical basis for a rational materialism, which undermines the implicit assumptions of a predominating 'bourgeois epistemology'. Readers familiar with Badiou will no doubt find within this early text the lineaments of his later radical developments. The translation will be published with an accompanying interview with Badiou wherein he elaborates on the connections between this early work, the subsequent developments and his most recent position"--Provided by publisher.

Published in 1973, "e;L'Etourdit"e; was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical explorations, including his famous idea that "e;there is no such thing as a sexual relationship,"e; which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality. In There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take possession of Lacan's short text, thinking "e;with"e; Lacan about his propositions and what kinds of questions they raise in relation to knowledge. Cassin considers the relationship of the real to language through a Sophist lens, while the Platonist Badiou unpacks philosophical claims about truth. Each of their contributions echoes back to one another, offering new ways of thinking about Lacan, his seminal ideas, and his role in advancing philosophical thought.

An urgent and provocative account of the modern ';militant', a transformative figure at the front line of emancipatory politics. Around the world, recent events have seen the creation of a radical phalanx comprising students, the young, workers and immigrants. It is Badiou's contention that the politics of such militants should condition the tasks of philosophy, even as philosophy clarifies the truth of our political condition.To resolve the conflicts between politics, philosophy and democracy, Badiou argues for a resurgent communism returning to the original call for universal emancipation and organizing for militant struggle.

In this dialogue, Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical "e;masters,"e; Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Elisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death-critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work. Their exchange reinvigorates how the the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker is perceived.

Leading radical intellectual tackles the many controversial interpretations of Wagner's work