Download or read book Philosophy in the Present written by Alain Badiou and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two controversial thinkers discuss a timeless but nonetheless urgent question: should philosophy interfere in the world? Nothing less than philosophy is at stake because, according to Badiou, philosophy is nothing but interference and commitment and will not be restrained by academic discipline. Philosophy is strange and new, and yet speaks in the name of all - as Badiou shows with his theory of universality. Similarly, Zizek believes that the philosopher must intervene, contrary to all expectations, in the key issues of the time. He can offer no direction, but this only shows that the question has been posed incorrectly: it is valid to change the terms of the debate and settle on philosophy as abnormality and excess. At once an invitation to philosophy and an introduction to the thinking of two of the most topical and controversial philosophers writing today, this concise volume will be of great interest to students and general readers alike.
Download or read book Badiou and the Philosophers written by Alain Badiou and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first English-language translation of a unique televised interview project undertaken by Alain Badiou between 1965 and 1968.
Download or read book Philosophy and the Event written by Alain Badiou and published by Polity. This book was released on 2013-06-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This concise and accessible book is the perfect introduction to Badiou’s thought. Responding to Tarby’s questions, Badiou takes us on a journey that interrogates and explores the four conditions of philosophy: politics, love, art and science. In all these domains, events occur that bring to light possibilities that were invisible or even unthinkable; they propose something to us. Everything then depends on how the possibility opened up by the event is grasped, elaborated and embedded in the world – this is what Badiou calls a ‘truth procedure’. The event creates a possibility but there then has to be an effort – a group effort in the case of politics, an individual effort in the case of love or art – for this possibility to become real and inscribed in the world. As he explains his thinking on politics, love, art and science, Badiou takes stock of his major works, reflects on their central themes and arguments and looks forward to the questions he plans to address in his future writings. The book concludes with a short introduction to Badiou’s philosophy by Fabien Tarby. For anyone wishing to understand the work of one of the most widely read and influential philosophers writing today, this small book will be an indispensable guide.
Download or read book Philosophy for Militants written by Alain Badiou and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2015-05-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Wittgenstein s Antiphilosophy written by Alain Badiou and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the "linguistic turn" in modern philosophy and anatomizes the "antiphilosophy" of Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein's thinking, Badiou refines his own definitions of the universal truths that govern his work. Bruno Bosteels's introduction argues that a continuing dialogue with Wittgenstein is inescapable for contemporary philosophy.
Download or read book In Praise of Love written by Alain Badiou and published by New Press/ORIM. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The renowned French philosopher’s “ode to love’s power to unite in the face of eternity, and its optimism in the face of pain” (Publishers Weekly). In a world rife with consumerism, where online dating promises risk-free romance and love is all too often seen as a mere variant of desire and hedonism, Alain Badiou believes that love is under threat. Taking to heart Rimbaud’s famous line “love needs reinventing,” In Praise of Love is the celebrated French intellectual’s passionate treatise in defense of love. For Badiou, love is an existential project, a constantly unfolding quest for truth. This quest begins with the chance encounter, an event that forever changes two individuals, challenging them “to see the world from the point of view of two rather than one.” This, Badiou believes, is love’s most essential transforming power. Through thought-provoking dialogue edited from a conversation between Badiou and Truong, a vibrant cast of thinkers are invoked: Kierkegaard, Plato, de Beauvoir, Proust, and more, create a new narrative of love in the face of twenty-first-century modernity. Moving, zealous, and wise, Badiou’s “paean to the anticapitalist, antiessentialist, unifying power of love” urges us not to fear it but to see it as a magnificent undertaking that compels us to explore others and to move away from an obsession with ourselves (Publishers Weekly). “Finally, the cure for the pornographic, utilitarian exchange of favors to which love has been reduced in America. Alain Badiou is our philosopher of love.” —Simon Critchley, author of The Faith of the Faithless
Download or read book Alain Badiou written by Gabriel Riera and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-05-11 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There is little doubt that Alain Badiou is one of the most challenging and controversial figures in contemporary philosophy. This volume of essays brings together leading commentators from both sides of the Atlantic to provide an introduction to Badiou's work through critical studies of his more productive and controversial ideas. Over the course of three decades, his numerous and extensive texts have challenged traditional views on ontology, mathematics, aesthetics, literature, politics, ethics, philosophy, and sexual difference. His texts on Plato, Saint Paul, Pascal, Lacan, Althusser, Heidegger, MallarmeŒ, Pessoa, and Beckett are among the most perceptive and penetrating essays on contemporary philosophical and literary culture. In addition to providing insight into the basic conceptual apparatus of Badiou's philosophy, the essays also offer a more substantial critical assessment of the import of his main theses for different disciplines.
Download or read book Badiou written by Ed Pluth and published by Polity. This book was released on 2010-03-29 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou is one of the leading philosophers in the world today. His ground-breaking philosophy is based on a creative reading of set theory, offering a new understanding of what it means to be human by promoting an “intelligence of change”. Badiou’s philosophical system makes our capacity for revolution and novelty central to who we are, and develops an ethical position that aims to make us less anxious about this very capacity. This book presents a comprehensive and engaging account of Badiou’s philosophy, including an in-depth discussion of The Theory of the Subject, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. In a clear and careful analysis, Ed Pluth considers exactly how Badiou’s theoretical “anti-humanism” is linked up to what is, for all intents and purposes, a practical humanism. Central to this is an account of Badiou’s theory of the subject, and his attempt to develop an “ethic of truths”. The role of set theory, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in Badiou’s philosophy is also given close attention. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of philosophy, as well as to all those keen to develop a critical understanding of one of the most controversial and important thinkers of the twentieth century.
Download or read book Cinema written by Alain Badiou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-09-25 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form? This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiou’s account of cinema. He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the Other and renders human presence visible, thus testifying to the universal value of human existence and human freedom. Through the experience of viewing, the movement of thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity. Cinema is an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people – a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is this, argues Badiou, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of our civilization, in the way that Greek tragedy, the coming-of-age novel and the operetta were in their respective eras.
Download or read book Anti Badiou written by Francois Laruelle and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-01-03 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This compelling and highly original book represents a confrontation between two of the most radical thinkers at work in France today: Alain Badiou and the author, François Laruelle. At face value, the two have much in common: both espouse a position of absolute immanence; both argue that philosophy is conditioned by science; and both command a pluralism of thought. Anti-Badiou relates the parallel stories of Badiou's Maoist 'ontology of the void' and Laruelle's own performative practice of 'non-philosophy' and explains why the two are in fact radically different. Badiou's entire project aims to re-educate philosophy through one science: mathematics. Laruelle carefully examines Badiou's Being and Event and shows how Badiou has created a new aristocracy that crowns his own philosophy as the master of an entire theoretical universe. In turn, Laruelle explains the contrast with his own non-philosophy as a true democracy of thought that breaks philosophy's continual enthrall with mathematics and instead opens up a myriad of 'non-standard' places where thinking can be found and practised.
Download or read book Being and Event written by Alain Badiou and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2007-07-15 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A translation of one of the single most important works of recent French philosophy, Badiou's magnum opus, and a must-have for his growing following and anyone interested in contemporary Continental thought.
Download or read book Badiou and Indifferent Being written by William Watkin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results. Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: “I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy”. Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds, published nearly twenty years later. At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements Being and Event-the void, the multiple, the set and the event-Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being. Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers.
Download or read book Manifesto for Philosophy written by Alain Badiou and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contra those proclaiming the end of philosophy, Badiou aims to restore philosophical thought to the complete space of the truths that condition it.
Download or read book Badiou and Plato written by A.J Bartlett and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2011-06-29 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book will help you to understand Badiou's central concepts, the philosophical relation between Badiou and Plato and will rethink the importance of Badiou's 'Platonic' claim that 'the only education is an education by truths'.
Download or read book Lacan written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou is arguably the most significant philosopher in Europe today. Badiou’s seminars, given annually on major conceptual and historical topics, constitute an enormously important part of his work. They served as laboratories for his thought and public illuminations of his complex ideas yet remain little known. This book, the transcript of Badiou’s year-long seminar on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, is the first volume of his seminars to be published in English, opening up a new and vital aspect of his thinking. In a highly original and compelling account of Lacan’s theory and therapeutic practice, Badiou considers the challenge that Lacan poses to fundamental philosophical topics such as being, the subject, and truth. Badiou argues that Lacan is a singular figure of the “anti-philosopher,” a series of thinkers stretching back to Saint Paul and including Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, with Lacan as the last great anti-philosopher of modernity. The 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. This seminar, more accessible than some of Badiou’s more difficult works, will be profoundly valuable for the many readers across academic disciplines, art and literature, and political activism who find his thought essential.
Download or read book Ahmed the Philosopher written by Alain Badiou and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: English-speaking readers might be surprised to learn that Alain Badiou writes fiction and plays along with his philosophical works and that they are just as important to understanding his larger intellectual project. In Ahmed the Philosopher, Badiou's most entertaining and accessible play, translated into English here for the first time, readers are introduced to Badiou's philosophy through a theatrical tour de force that has met with much success in France. Ahmed the Philosopher presents its comic hero, the "treacherous servant" Ahmed, as a seductively trenchant philosopher even as it casts philosophy itself as a comic performance. The comedy unfolds as a series of lessons, with each "short play" or sketch illuminating a different Badiousian concept. Yet Ahmed does more than illustrate philosophical abstractions; he embodies and vivifies the theatrical and performative aspects of philosophy, mobilizing a comic energy that exposes the emptiness and pomp of the world. Through his example, the audience is moved to a living engagement with philosophy, discovering in it the power to break through the limits of everyday life.
Download or read book The Adventure of French Philosophy written by Alain Badiou and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2022-03-01 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the “French moment” in contemporary thought. Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published here for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althusser’s canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of “potato fascism” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought. Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, he argues for the persistence of the Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea.
