Cantor, Lacan, Mao, Beckett, meme combat The philosophy of Alain Badiou (original) (raw)
Related papers
Alain Badiou: A Student of Sartre
After Existentialism: UKSS 2017, 18 July, Oxford University, Oxford, 2017
Alain Badiou has famously called Sartre his “absolute Master,” and scholarly attempts have been made to connect his work, which The Guardian has called “post-existentialist,” with Sartre’s. These efforts, however, have mostly either focused on superficial similarities or discussed merely a narrow portion of the large philosophical oeuvre of both thinkers. In this paper, I will show that Badiou’s philosophical system is an extension of Sartre’s thought, and that the two thinkers complement each other. I will trace a line of ethics through Sartre’s and Badiou’s thoughts in parallel and draw explicit conceptual links between them. The main extension originating in Badiou is his solution to what Thomas Flynn calls the fraternity-terror problem plaguing the fused group in the Critique of Dialectical Reason I. Instead of having the fused group pledge to each other, which introduces exis into pure praxis, Badiou has the fused group continue to seek and oppose an Outside, and the structural mathematics that underlies his system is aimed at delineating how this movement can be possible. In this sense, he takes up Sartre’s challenge of formulating a structuralism that accounts for praxis and develops concepts that Sartre merely intuits and sketches out in his later works.
Aitías.Revista de Estudios Filosóficos., 2023
“L’histoire des idees”, has a nominal existence in the period of the Enlightenment, that is to say, it has its origins in the 19th century in France. From the moment of its appearance and establishment as an independent field, it maintained a close and complementary relationship with philosophy. At present, the History of Ideas is a field in dialogue with History, Historiography, Philosophy and even Psychoanalysis. It is necessary to return to the French intellectual terrain, to the living history and intellectual production of our time in order to analyze the contribution that French philosophers make to the history of Ideas in the 21st century. Specifically, to pay special attention to the system of thought created by the philosopher Alain Badiou. The present document, which emerges as an initial and introductory kick-off to a more complex project, is a general reading and analysis of some of Badiou’s contributions to contemporary philosophy.
Description Following the publication of his magnum opus L’être et l’événement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France’s greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticising Badiou’s stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou’s concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognised as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou’s work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark. Authors, editors and contributors Paul Ashton Victoria and LaTrobe University A. J. Bartlett The University of Melbourne Justin Clemens The University of Melbourne
In the light of some recent criticisms, this text seeks to promote a debate that takes place on two fronts: on the one hand, the logic of the origin of logic and, on the other hand, the relationship between psychoanalysis and Marxism. To this end, some texts published by Alain Badiou towards the end of the 1960s, in which he polemicizes with Jacques-Alain Miller around the concepts of "suture" and "subject" (Zizek), are recovered in order to situate both the different positions and the coherent reconsiderations throughout his intellectual trajectory. Indeed, from "The Concept of the Model" to his most recent trilogy (Theory of the Subject, Being and the Event and Logic of Worlds), a perspective is proposed that, far from establishing hierarchies and subordinations, seeks to promote connections based on specificities and differences through that particular path that is philosophy. In this way it is possible to appreciate that, despite his critique of the primacy of the logic of the signifier, the concepts proposed by Jacques Lacan functioned as a notorious source of inspiration for Badiou, especially in relation to the subject of the unconscious.
Alain Badiou’s New Constructivism and Universalism
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2018
French philosopher Alain Badiou (b. 1937) is one of the more important European thinkers to emerge after May 1968. His work may be read as a response to the structuralism, post-structuralism, existentialism, and postmodern thought characteristic of post-World War II French theory. Through the use of set theory, he argues that our understanding of reality is largely determined by major, world shifting events in politics, mathematics/science, aesthetics/poetry, and love. A Maoist, he maintains that true changes in human reality require decisive interventions that create a new sense of temporality, subjectivity, and order. Events radically change the order of an existing world and create new worlds. For example, the Russian or French revolutions brought an end to absolutist monarchies and the rule that were specific to them. A new order and form of political power were introduced by the ascendant regimes. The sense of who and what human beings living under such regimes were changed fro...
Alain Badiou ' s Theory of the Subject : Part
2007
Built into the essence of materialism is an intrinsic dimension of praise and blame, of jnstice and infamy, as witnessed by the endless attacks and rebuttals that make up most of the history of its stmggle against idealism. This is not merely an issue of judgment or taste, whether good or bad, added onto the ideas of materialism and idealism as a moral or political afterthought. Instead, the strategic value of each term is inseparable from the definition of the concepts themselves, just as the use made out of both terms belongs to the core of their meaning. There is thus something irreducibly practical and impure about the debate concerning materialism, which from the start defeats the purpose of a strictly speculative or philosophical elaboration. One should never forget, in other words, how the concept of materialism functions as part of a polemical apparatus-or