Philosophy as anti-religion in the work of Alain Badiou

Sophia 47 (3):345-358 (2008)
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Abstract

The Heideggerian rupture in the history of philosophy in the name of a phenomenological and poetic ontology has provided an opening which many of the key figures in twentieth century continental thought have exploited. However, this opening was marked by Heidegger himself as an ambiguous one, insofar as metaphysics was perhaps integrally ‘onto-theology,’ that is, ultimately continuous with the world-historical capture of the thought of being. This piece argues that the philosophy of Alain Badiou, which departs from the recognition that Heidegger is the ‘last universally recognised philosopher’, provides the means for a radical reconsideration of the philosophy-theology relationship in its specifically Heideggerian form, involving as it does further questions of science and technology, the status of the poem, and the nature of ontological thought as such. We argue that, through the deployment of mathematics as ontology, the Gordian knot of onto-theology and its legion of consequences can be cut, and a new assemblage of many of the key Heideggerian motifs can be put into play: the poem, history, and philosophy itself.

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Author Profiles

Justin Dominic Clemens
University of Melbourne
Jon Roffe
Deakin University

Citations of this work

From the Ultimate God to the Virtual God: Post-Ontotheological Perspectives on the Divine in Heidegger, Badiou, and Meillassoux.Jussi Backman - 2014 - Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 6 (Special):113-142.
On Alain Badiou’s ‘critique of religion’.Mads Peter Karlsen - 2018 - International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 79 (1-2):36-59.

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References found in this work

Totality and infinity.Emmanuel Levinas - 1961/1969 - Pittsburgh,: Duquesne University Press.
Margins of philosophy.Jacques Derrida - 1982 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Poetry, Language, Thought.Martin Heidegger - 1971 - Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 31 (1):117-123.

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