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'.
Think Again Hallward, Peter
2004, 2004-05-01
eBook
Slavoj Š ZiŠzek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badiou's recent work is "the event of contemporary philosophy." Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying ...his assessment. Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badiou's work, presents a range of essays which explore Badiou's most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics. Alain Badiou has devised perhaps the only truly inventive philosophy of the subject since Sartre. Almost alone among his peers, Badiou's work promises a genuine renewal of philosophy, a subject he sees as conditioned by innovation in spheres ranging from radical politics to artistic experimentation to mathematical formalization. Slavoj Š ZiŠzek is not alone in thinking that Alain Badiou's recent work is "the event of contemporary philosophy." Think Again, the first publication of its kind, goes a long way towards justifying his assessment. Badiou is nothing if not polemical and the most suitable way to approach his philosophy is precisely through the controversies it creates. This book, which opens with an introduction aimed at readers new to Badiou's work, presents a range of essays which explore Badiou's most contentious claims in the fields of ontology, politics, ethics and aesthetics.
Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain ...of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.
Alain Badiou’s Being and Event is the most original and significant work of French philosophy to have appeared in recent decades. It is the magnum opus of a thinker who is widely considered to have ...re-shaped the character and set new terms for the future development of philosophy in France and elsewhere. This book has been written very much with a view to clarifying Badiou's complex and demanding work for non-specialist readers. It offers guidance on philosophical and intellectual context, key themes, reading the text, reception and influence; and further reading.
Badiou has said that his entire philosophical project stems from the need to “update” the traditional philosophical categories of Truth, Being, the Infinite and the Universal in the wake of the ...19th Century German mathematician Georg Cantor’s explication of transfinite set theory. In his essay, “What is Love?”, he provides an account of one of the ways in which a post-Cantorian reconfiguration of the ontological status of the category of Woman might operate. This is given in the form of a postscript subtitled “The Feminine Position and Humanity” wherein he gives Lacan’s conception of supplementary feminine jouissance “an extra turn of the screw”. This essay draws on Badiou’s reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman to examine the implications of another postscript, that which abruptly concludes the 2003 novel Elizabeth Costello by J. M. Coetzee. It reads Coetzee’s invention of the “Letter of Elizabeth, Lady Chandos” with recourse to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and on through the ontological reconfiguration of the philosophical category of Woman demonstrated by Badiou. It argues that Coetzee assembles, through the intervention of the postscript, a situation that “makes it possible to argue”, along with Badiou, that, for the woman position, love knots together the four types of truths – Politics, Art, Science, and Love (2008, 196).
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.
Alain Badiou’s Being and Event continues to impact philosophical investigations into the question of Being. By exploring the central role set theory plays in this influential work, Burhanuddin Baki ...presents the first extended study of Badiou’s use of mathematics in Being and Event. Adopting a clear, straightforward approach, Baki gathers together and explains the technical details of the relevant high-level mathematics in Being and Event. He examines Badiou’s philosophical framework in close detail, showing exactly how it is ‘conditioned’ by the technical mathematics. Clarifying the relevant details of Badiou’s mathematics, Baki looks at the four core topics Badiou employs from set theory: the formal axiomatic system of ZFC; cardinal and ordinal numbers; Kurt Gödel’s concept of constructability; and Cohen’s technique of forcing. Baki then rebuilds Badiou’s philosophical meditations in relation to their conditioning by the mathematics, paying particular attention to Cohen’s forcing, which informs Badiou’s analysis of the event. Providing valuable insights into Badiou’s philosophy of mathematics, Badiou’s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory offers an excellent commentary and a new reading of Badiou’s most complex and important work.
The Evental Conception of Love Shmugliakov, Pioter
The Southern journal of philosophy,
June 2023, 2023-06-00, 20230601, Letnik:
61, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article proposes a critical presentation and development of Alain Badiou's theory of romantic love, at the center of which is an understanding of the phenomenon in terms of a truth‐generating ...event. I discuss this notion against the more familiar ontological modes of theorizing love: as the subject's intentional attitude and as an activity of internal value. Arguing that the evental conception of love poses a preferable alternative to the former mode, my analysis focuses on its complementary relations with the latter, of which I take Stanley Cavell's theory of marriage as a representative. My further argument is concerned with the place of sexuality in the evental conception of love, compensating for what I argue to be the shortcomings of Badiou's treatment of the topic by turning to Roger Scruton's account of the immanent significance of the sexual.
The highlight of the 2011 special issue of Positions on Slavoj Zizek is the debate between Liu Kang and Zizek on "Revolutionary China." It unpacks the Western left's political unconsciousness and ...myths about China in several respects. First, revolution is not a parody-travesty of the "tradition" that Zizek concocts from romanticized fantasies of a "retrospective tradition" drawn from Jorge Luis Borges and T. S. Eliot. Second, revolution is not Alain Badiou's "truth event," which tends to reduce the Chinese Cultural Revolution to an abstract "event" in process, neglecting the real calamities of the so-called utopian experiment. Third, the key problematic of the debate is alternative modernity. Contrary to Zizek's and Badiou's rejection of alternative modernity, Liu argues that the Chinese search for alternative modernity ought to be understood in terms of complex and overdetermined historical contradictions. "Revolution" in contemporary China continues to command tremendous emotional, intellectual, and political power, rather than being a "symptom" of or "antidote" to the left's depression. Finally, Zizek's contemporary China fad showcases the performativity of an ex-Soviet bloc, PTSD victim's communist nostalgia, with his radicalism completely hollowed out by Chinese academics. The China that truly exists, however, continues to challenge various myths manufactured by the Zizekians.
