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.

The subtractive : preface by Francois Wahl -- Philosophy itself -- The (re)turn of philosophy itself -- Definition of philosophy -- What is a philosophical institution? -- Philosophy and poetry -- The philosophical recourse to the poem -- Mallarm's method : subtraction and isolation -- Rimbaud's method : interruption -- Philosophy and mathematics -- Conference on subtraction -- Truth : forcing and unnameable -- Philosophy and politics -- Philosophy and love -- What is love? -- Philosophy and psychoanalysis -- Subject (...) and infinite -- Antiphilosophy : Lacan and Plato -- Writing of the generic -- Writing of the generic : Samuel beckett. (shrink)

Aladdin.--Pan.--Jupiter.--Christophorous.--Selected bibliography.

Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction. It is not Badiou's wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre's Prisoners of Altona, 'I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have (...) said: I will answer for it!' The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou's proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century - not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself. (shrink)

Didacticism, romanticism, and classicism are the possible schemata for the knotting of art and philosophy, the third term in this knot being the education of subjects, youth in particular. What characterizes the century that has just come to a close is that, while it underwent the saturation of these three schemata, it failed to introduce a new one. Today, this predicament tends to produce a kind of unknotting of terms, a desperate dis-relation between art and philosophy, together with the pure (...) and simple collapse of what circulated between them: the theme of education. Whence the thesis of which this book is nothing but a series of variations: faced with such a situation of saturation and closure, we must attempt to propose a new schema, a fourth type of knot between philosophy and art. Among these “inaesthetic” variations, the reader will encounter a sustained debate with contemporary philosophical uses of the poem, bold articulations of the specificity and prospects of theater, cinema, and dance, along with subtle and provocative readings of Fernando Pessoa, Ste;phane Mallarme;, and Samuel Beckett. (shrink)

Badiou explores the exponentially rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published her for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althussers's canonical works For Marks and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of 'potato fascism' in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guttari's A Thousand Plateus. 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, the argues for the persistence of 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. (shrink)

The din and deadlock of public life in America--where insults are traded, slogans proclaimed, and self-serving deals made and unmade--reveal the deep disagreement that pervades our democracy. The disagreement is not only political but also moral, as citizens and their representatives increasingly take extreme and intransigent positions. A better kind of public discussion is needed, and Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson provide an eloquent argument for "deliberative democracy" today. They develop a principled framework for opponents to come together on moral (...) and political issues.Gutmann and Thompson show how a deliberative democracy can address some of our most difficult controversies--from abortion and affirmative action to health care and welfare--and can allow diverse groups separated by class, race, religion, and gender to reason together. Their work goes beyond that of most political theorists and social scientists by exploring both the principles for reasonable argument and their application to actual cases. Not only do the authors suggest how deliberative democracy can work, they also show why improving our collective capacity for moral argument is better than referring all disagreements to procedural politics or judicial institutions. Democracy and Disagreement presents a compelling approach to how we might resolve some of our most trying moral disagreements and live with those that will inevitably persist, on terms that all of us can respect. (shrink)

Alain Deligne est philosophe et Professeur émérite de littérature française à l'Université de Münster (Allemagne). Ses travaux portent sur l'idéalisme allemand (Schopenhauer, Schleiermacher), sur la traduction, la littérature ainsi que sur l'image. Il est coéditeur de catalogues sur la caricature ainsi que de la revue Ridiculosa et l'auteur de la première monographie française sur C. G. Carus (La Terre qui vit - Peinture et savoirs, 2003), et de la première monographie allemande sur Weil (Ein zeitgenôssischer Philosoph, 1998). Du jeune (...) Éric Weil, recommandé par Albert Einstein à Ernst Cassirer, on connaissait son doctorat sur Pomponazzi (1932), son essai sur Plotin et Ficin (1933) et son grand article sur l'intérêt pris à l'histoire (1935). Mais nous ignorions tout d'autres écrits précédents ou contemporains. Grâce au travail d'édition bilingue d'Alain Deligne, nous avons maintenant accès à ses exposés d'étudiant, conférences, articles, interventions radiophoniques ou ses travaux en vue de futures études (1922-1936). Nous pouvons ainsi mieux saisir ce qu'Éric Weil allait devenir : le fondateur d'un système ouvert de compréhension (Logique de la philosophie, 1950) et rester : un philosophe curieux de toutes les formes de savoir. À cette fin, il fallait, sur la base d'archives, restituer ses multiples intérêts en philosophie, sciences, histoire de l'art, germanistique, Renaissance italienne et occultisme. Sa pensée plonge ses racines dans les débats politiques de la République de Weimar pré-hitlérienne. Depuis l'exil parisien de 1933, Éric Weil en affrontera toute la violence."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article examines the trajectories of contemporary academic Marxism through three hypotheses: Marxism as an economic science, a science of history, and a political ideology. We criticize the reduction of Marxism to mere economic or historical science, highlighting the intricate relationship between Marxism and revolutionary politics. And we argue that Marxism, as a philosophy, must be intrinsically linked to revolutionary practice to maintain its significance. In this sense, the term ‘Marxism’ refers to a multifaceted framework that encompasses all levels of (...) analysis and understanding, particularly in its relation to political practice. Rooted in the concept of class, Marxism serves as a dynamic force driving collective action, aimed at inventing new practices capable of overcoming inherent divisions in the perception of societal components. Its core objective lies in weaving together unified outcomes from diverse perspectives, oriented towards irreversible change. (shrink)

Since at least as far back as the seventeenth century, the “Quarrel Between the Ancients and the Moderns” has figured on the philosopher’s agenda, in aesthetics and in natural philosophy as well as in ethics and in politics. In this last field, one of the most important stakes of the quarrel turns on the distinction which Benjamin Constant drew in 1819, between two different conceptions of liberty: that of the Ancients and that of the Moderns. The problem of freedom lies (...) at the very heart of all philosophical reflection: in metaphysics and in theology, as well as in ethics and in social and political philosophy. Being founded on a very strong affirmation of the preeminent value of individual freedom, liberalism has, for at least two centuries, been at the centre of the discussion both in modern political philosophy and in economics. Not only were its first rivals, namely anarchism, socialism and a reactionary mode of thought together with its nostalgia for a hierarchical society, defined against the background of liberalism; but the internal discussions within liberalism itself have not been any the less intense, as is realized when comparing its “solidarist” with its “proprietarist” or “libertarian” versions. Some liberals claim descent from Burke, others from Condorcet, some from Humboldt and others from the early Fichte. Liberalism can indeed be spelt out in different ways. One can anyway perceive in present-day objections to liberalism the reappearance of a good many classical philosophical theses. Thus the communitarian criticism of abstract universalism and of state neutrality reminds one of the Hegelian and romantic criticism of the Enlightenment; while some arguments advanced by “leftist” communitarians recall the Marxist criticisms aimed at the formal idealism inherent in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. (shrink)

Cutting through simultaneously the conventions of sinology and a capitalist universalism modeled on the West, Jullien unfolds a difference between Chinese thought and philosophy that allows it to be thought out without taking sides. His unusual move insists on the irreducibility of the difference yet at the same time renders the irreducibility intelligible; Jullien gives us a world structured by distinct lines of thought.

Comme première étape pour parler de la philosophie française, je pars d'un paradoxe : ce qui est la ¾philosophie¾ la plus universelle est aussi, en même temps, la plus particulière. C'est ce que Hegel appelle l'universel concret, la synthèse de ce qui est absolument universel, qui est pour tous, et qui à la fois a une place et un moment particuliers. Absolument universel, il a des particularités nationales et culturelles. Il y a ce que j'appellerais des moments de philosophie, dans (...) l'espace et dans le temps. Ainsi, je voudrais soutenir une thèse historique et nationale : il y a eu ou il y a, selon les cas, un moment philosophique français qui a duré pendant la seconde moitié du XXe siècle et je voudrais essayer de présenter le lien entre tous ces philosophes et la littérature dans cette séquence. Et je parlerais aussi de la discussion constante, tout au long de cette période, entre la philosophie et la psychanalyse. Question d'origine, question d'opérations, question de style et de littérature, question de psychanalyse, tels seront mes moyens pour tenter d'identifier cette philosophie française contemporaine. (shrink)

While Logics of Worlds already emphasized that one’s participation in a process of truth is signalized by an affect and already pointed out some of the affects connected with these processes (enthusiasm, joy, pleasure, beatitude), the further elaboration of this topics remains the task of the third part of the Being and Event, which has yet to be written and is entitled The Immanence of Truths. The first part of the lecture discusses the very reasons for this work, its necessity, (...) and its place in my opus thus far. The task of The Immanence of Truths is to elaborate the question of how somebody is incorporated into a truth-process, how this relates to the question of the subject and the very role of philosophy itself. The latter is not the process of truth in a similar manner as its four conditions, it does presuppose them, but not the other way around. A short sketch of the inner structure of The Immanence of Truths follows and the argument in favour of the transformation of the formal category of negation. The role of the paraconsistent logics in The Immanence of Truths is to conceptualize the process of truth. The aleatory, the contingent character of any event namely means that we have to insist that there is a cut and that the truth is in the position of an exception, but which, however, is not something untransmittable. Concerning the question of the transmission and the ineffable, I distance myself in relation to Plato’s as well as to Bergson’s treatment of this question. For me, the category of an exception is a dialectical category. It has to be thought on one hand as a negation, which is not a miracle of some sort, and on the other as something inner, immanent (perhaps that was aimed at by Lacan with the term ‘extimacy’). The negation is namely an operator which simultaneously divides and includes, it is also part of the dialectical thought which includes the contingent and is therefore not deterministic. Everything that has been said so far has consequences for the functions of philosophy and concerns the question of the relationship between philosophy and life. Philosophy for me as a discipline departs from the conviction that there are truths. It is triple, being at the same time the diagnostics of an age, the construction of the concept of truth, and the existential experience of true life i.e. the immanent experiment of what is a true life, “what is it to live”. This is signalled by the affect of true life and by the formula “to live as an immortal”, which does not entail any kind of sacrifice or recompense. (shrink)

Dans toutes les langues occidentales, le mot " temps " recouvre deux notions différentes : le temps, collectif, de l'horloge, et celui, individuel, de l'âme. Husserl, Bergson et Heidegger ont cerné le temps individuel mais ne sont pas allés au bout des conséquences de leur introspection. Einstein, en relativisant le temps de l'horloge, n'en a pas développé les implications philosophiques. Cette étude propose d'explorer cette nouvelle approche dans laquelle le temps n'est plus " a priori ", mais est généré par (...) le " phénomène ", au sens large du terme. On bascule alors dans un monde nouveau où l'inexistence du temps " habituel " entraîne des modifications considérables dans la philosophie, la théologie et... la vie quotidienne. C'est au cours de ses explorations dans les solitudes désertiques de l'Alaska que l'auteur a eu l'idée de cette nouvelle approche du temps. (shrink)

First conversation -- The situation of the left today and the necessity of an alternative -- The democratic discourse -- Communism as modern politics? -- Second conversation -- The new imperialism -- Politics of identity -- The principle of the common good, or, Beyond the economy.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Toward a Political Economy of the Libro De AlexandreSimone Pinet (bio)The carefully composed and craftily pronounced stanzas of the thirteenth-century Libro de Alexandre, if mostly a (free) translation of Gautier de Châtillon’s Alexandreis, provide readers with glimpses of northern Iberia in descriptions and comparisons, but especially through curious formulations and eloquent rewritings.1 These incite the reader to reflect upon the emergence of the vernacular regime of literary composition by (...) clerics that developed in the thirteenth century, a corpus known to us as the mester de clerecía. In this corpus, the use of the vernacular, in particular, brings with it an unproblematized sense of transparency of the context in which the works of mester de clerecía were produced, a genre of which the Libro de Alexandre is a key poetic point of origin. Next to an emphasis on a Latinate syntax and recitation techniques that underline the corpus’s clerical production, the irruption of quotidian phrases, vocabulary, figures of medievalization, and especially of Iberization, make these texts a privileged site to study the articulation of the varied phenomena that from economics to the grammatical, from Aristotle to technology, come to revolutionize medieval culture from the twelfth century onward. Of the many peculiar uses of the vernacular in the Libro de Alexandre, references that connote a sense of worthlessness through the repeated structure “not worth an X, ” especially those that express the comparison with minted coinage of little value: dinero, meaja, pepión, or sueldo, as in “not worth a penny,”2 will serve here as a point of entry. These hyperbolic [End Page 44] expressions, common to Romance languages, underline not only the moral and economic ambivalence of terms such as preçio, valor, honor, pagar(se), dar crédito, and so forth, but also the incorporation of a monetary economy within this ambivalence. These types of expressions, moreover, produce a linguistic marker for such ambiguity, as Louis F. Sas noted when he underlined the “affect” which marks, at the level of speech, the reference to abstract terms such as infinity, nothing, and zero in these types of constructions [469, 471].3Sas notes that the vast majority of the occurrences of these phrases in the Libro de Alexandre happen “in combination with the word valer, with its synonyms, or with dar por, that is, in contexts of exchange” [475]. Many years before Sas exhaustively documented these expressions, Alois Richard Nykl had interpreted their presence as related to barter and a supposed clerical contact with local markets, which to some extent could explain their frequent use in the poem, and he especially mentioned the use of fruits and vegetables in these expressions. Nykl also suggested these were “rustic” similes, favored by men of the clergy such as Berceo, Juan Ruiz, and the authors of the Alexandre and the Fernán González, showing, in his opinion, these men’s contact with a certain world in which fruits and vegetables could serve as payment for the church or diezmo, bringing in through this curious interpretation not only a historical economic context but also its [End Page 45] qualification as something “rustic” or at least foreign to the cleric [311].4In 1929, a couple of years after Nykl’s article appeared, George Irving Dale would correct his affirmations, noting that the expressions called “rustic” by Nykl belonged to a well-studied figure called figurative negation. Dale remarked that figurative negation appeared already in the Poema de mio Cid, and he directed the reader to the bibliography offered by Menéndez Pidal in his edition of the Poema under the title of “Refuerzo de la Negación” [Cantar de Mio Cid 1: 376 and glossary]. In his article, Dale wrote in passing that the type of adjectives used with these expressions “increases the insignificance or lack of value” [324]. Later, agreeing with Dale, Sas wrote that the emphasis added to these phrases through the use of adjectives such as vile or rotten did not point to any medieval particular practice beyond that of a peculiar affect, which has been interpreted in terms of “simplicity.” In the next pages I want to suggest some lines of... (shrink)

«L'année de ce Séminaire (1986), j'étais en train d'achever L'être et l'événement, qui constitue le socle de l'ensemble de mon oeuvre philosophique. Il propose en effet une métaphysique contemporaine, où sont redéfinis et réordonnés tous les concepts classiques. Centralement, le triptyque fondamental : être, vérité, sujet. Finalement, dans la mesure où c'est Heidegger qui a rendu à la philosophie contemporaine le couple originaire, parménidien, de l'être et de la pensée, mon entreprise ne peut se présenter que comme un dépassement dialectique (...) de Heidegger. En un sens, avec et contre Heidegger, ce Séminaire raconte comment s'invente une ontologie dans le discord philosophique, l'amitié pour le poème, et l'instruction du mathème.». (shrink)

This paper examines the relationship between philosophy and its conditions. The affirmation “mathematics is ontology”, which I posited thirty years ago, has certain inconveniences. In this article, I present six varying possibilities for ontology. My own philosophical decision was to proclaim that being is a pure multiplicity, without the One and without any specific attribute such as “matter” or “spirit”. This movement of thought brought me to study the mathematical condition of philosophy and to search for a rigorous structuration of (...) my speculative decision within the field of mathematics. However, my initial postulate that “Being is the multiplicity without the One” is not a mathematical but a philosophical statement. This paper concludes with a presentation of the relationship between mathematics and philosophy in Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. (shrink)

Como primer paso para hablar de filosofía francesa comienzo por una paradoja: eso que es lo más universal ¾la filosofía¾ es también, al mismo tiempo, lo más particular. Es lo que Hegel llama el universal concreto, la síntesis de lo que es absolutamente universal, que es para todos, y de lo que al mismo tiempo tiene un lugar y un momento particulares. Siendo absolutamente universal tiene particularidades nacionales y culturales. Hay eso que yo llamaría momentos de la filosofía, en el (...) espacio y en el tiempo. Querría así pues sostener una tesis histórica y nacional: ha habido o hay, según situación, un momento filosófico francés que se mantiene durante la segunda mitad del siglo XX y querría intentar presentar el vínculo de todos estos filósofos con la literatura en esta secuencia. Y hablaría también de la discusión constante, durante todo este periodo, entre la filosofía y el psicoanálisis. Cuestión del origen, cuestión de las operaciones, cuestión del estilo y de la literatura, cuestión del psicoanálisis, tales serán mis medios para intentar identificar esta filosofía francesa contemporánea. (shrink)

La tradition sociologique a habituellement considéré la mobilité, qu’elle soit sociale ou spatiale, comme le déplacement entre des positions établies, l’essentiel étant d’analyser le système formé par ces positions. On trouve cependant, dans la sociologie même, les moyens pour élargir cette perspective. Des travaux sur la mobilité sociale, on tire une interrogation sur l’accès aux ressources qui prend en compte diverses formes de mobilité. Simmel développe l’analyse du rôle de la proximité et de la distance dans la construction du social. (...) Des travaux contemporains qui portent sur les déplacements ou sur la télématique s’inscrivent dans la même perspective. Tocqueville introduit la notion d’une mobilité individuelle, notamment spatiale, consommatoire, et qui n’a d’autre objectif qu’elle-même. Ces trois orientations permettent à la sociologie de contribuer à une théorie de la mobilité généralisée, qui croise l’interrogation sur la modernité.Sociological tradition used to consider mobility – whether social or spatial – as a movement from an established position to another, but it put more emphasis on the positions system than on the movement itself. Yet sociology itself provides the means to widen the scope. Studies on social mobility have eventually resulted in the larger problématique of resource acquisition involving various forms of mobility. Simmel developed an in-depth analysis of the influence of presence vs absence in the set up of social relationships, interrelated with current studies dealing with movements and telematics. Earlier Tocqueville had introduced the concept of individual mobility, notably spatial, consumption-focussed, and with a life of its own ; which eventually resulted in the philosophy of self-reference. These three orientations enable sociology to contribute to a theory of generalized mobility intersecting with the questioning on modernity. (shrink)