Alain Badiou (Key Concepts)

224 Pages·2010·3.13 MB·English

by  A. J. Bartlett

Alain Badiou
Key Concepts
Key Concepts
Published
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Forthcoming
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Edited by Dianna Taylor Edited by Will Dudley and
Kristina Engelhard
Jiirgen Habermas: Key Concepts
Edited by Barbara Fultner
Alain Badiou
Key Concepts
Edited byAJ. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
ACUMEN
© Editorial matter and selection, 2010 A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens.
Individual contributions, the contributors.
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.
No reproduction without permission.
All rights reserved.
First published in 2010 by Acumen
Acumen Publishing Limited
4 Saddler Street
Durham
DH1 3NP
www.acumenpublishing.co.uk
ISBN: 978-1-84465-229-7 (hardcover)
ISBN: 978-1-84465-230-3 (paperback)
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
This publication is supported by a grant from the Research and
Research Training Committee, Faculty of Arts, The University of
Melbourne.
Designed and typeset in Classical Garamond and Myriad.
Printed in the UK by the MPG Books Group.
Contents
Contributors vii
Acknowledgements xi
Abbreviations xiii
Introduction: Badiou's form 1
A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
1. Biography and early works 8
Oliver Feltham
PART I: THE FOUNDATIONS OF BADIOU'S THOUGHT
2. Philosophy 13
Oliver Feltham
3. The conditions 25
Justin Clemens
4. The subject 38
Bruno Besana
5. Ontology 48
Alex Ling
PART II: BADIOU'S KEY CONCEPTS OR
"CONDITIONS"
6. Science 61
Ray Brassier
V
ALAIN BADIOU: KEY CONCEPTS
7. Love 73
Sigi Jottkandt
Art 82
£//£ During
9. Politics 94
Nina Power and Alberto Toscano
PART III: BADIOU'S ENGAGEMENT WITH
KEY PHILOSOPHERS
10. Plato 107
A. J. Bartlett
11. Spinoza 118
Jon Roffe
12. Kant 128
Peter Hallward
13. Hegel 137
Bruno Bosteels
14. Heidegger 146
Mark Hewson
15. Lacan 155
A. /. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
16. Deleuze 168
John Mullarkey
17. New directions 176
Z. L. Fraser
Afterword: Badiou's futures 185
A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens
Bibliography 191
Index 203
Contributors
A. J. Bartlett teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at
the University of Melbourne and in the School of Communication and
Creative Arts at Deakin University. He co-edited The Praxis of Alain
Badiou (2006) and is the author of "Plato, Badiou: An 'Education by
Truths'" (forthcoming). He is currently extending the latter enquiry
to the thought of Saint Paul, Marx and Lacan in order to establish the
non-state foundations of contemporary state pedagogy.
Bruno Besana is fellow researcher at the ICI-Kulturlabor, Berlin, where
he is in charge, together with Ozren Pupovac, of the Versus Labora
tory Project. He has published (in French, English, Italian, German
and Slovenian) several articles on the relation between philosophy
and its aesthetic and political conditions, especially via the thought
of Jacques Ranciere, Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou. Together with
Oliver Feltham he has edited the volume Ecrits autour de la pensee
dAlain Badiou (2007). He has also translated into Italian Jacques Ran-
ciere's La fable cinematographique and other philosophical texts.
Bruno Bosteels is Associate Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell
University. He is the author most recently of Alain Badiou, une tra-
jectoire polemique (2009). Two other books are forthcoming: Badiou
and Politics and Marx and Freud in Latin America. He has published
extensively on Latin American literature and politics, and on European
philosophy and political theory. He is currently preparing After Borges:
Literature and Antiphilosophy and a short book, La Revolution de la
honte, on the twentieth-century uses of Marx's correspondence with
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ALAIN BADI0U: KEY CONCEPTS
Arnold Ruge. He also currently serves as general editor of the journal
diacritics.
Ray Brassier is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American Uni
versity of Beirut, Lebanon. He is the author of Nihil Unbound (2008)
and is the translator of Badiou's Saint Paul: The Foundation ofUniver-
salism and, with Alberto Toscano, he has edited Alain Badiou's Theo­
retical Writings (2004).
Justin Clemens is the author of several books of poetry and fiction,
including Villain (2009), TheMundiad (2004) and, with Helen Johnson,
Black River (2007). He is also co-editor of The Jacqueline Rose Reader
(2011) with Ben Naparstek, The Work of Giorgio Agamben (2008)
with Nicholas Heron and Alexander Murray, and The Praxis of Alain
Badiou (2006) with Paul Ashton and A. J. Bartlett. He teaches at the
University of Melbourne.
Elie During is Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of
Paris Ouest - Nanterre. He studied at the Ecole Normale Superieure
(ENS - Paris) and Princeton University. A member of the CIEPFC (Cen
tre International d'Etude de la Philosophic Frangaise Contemporaine,
ENS), he also teaches "theory" at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris.
With Q. Meillassoux, P. Maniglier and D. Rabouin, he is series editor
of "MetaphysiqueS" at the Presses Universitaires de France. His cur
rent research focuses on the interplay between metaphysics, art and
science, with special interest in the contemporary constructions of
spacetime. He is the author of Matrix, machine philosophique, with A.
Badiou et al. (2003). More recently, he has produced a critical edition
of Henri Bergson's Duree et Simultaneity (2009) and a study of the
Bergson-Einstein debate: Bergson et Einstein: la querelle de la relativite
(forthcoming). His publications on issues of aesthetics include Faux
Raccords: la coexistence des images (2010), and a co-edited book, In
actu: de Vexperimental dans Vart (with L. Jeanpierre, C. Kihm and D.
Zabunyan, 2009). He has written several articles on Alain Badiou's
philosophy, among them "How Much Truth Can Art Bear? On Badiou's
'Inaesthetics'" (2005) and "Alain Badiou" (2009).
Oliver Feltham is an associate professor in the Department of Compara
tive Literature and English at the American University of Paris, where he
coordinates the Philosophy Program. His translation of Alain Badiou's
Being and Event appeared in 2006. He has edited and contributed to
two anthologies of essays on Badiou's work, Ecrits autour de la pensee
viii
CONTRIBUTORS
d'Alain Badiou (2007), and Autour de Logiques des mondes d'Alain
Badiou (2006). His monograph on Badiou, Alain Badiou: Live Theory,
was published in 2008. He is currently working on a book on political
action, playing seventeenth-century English radical politics against early
modern philosophy in the conceptualization of action.
Z. L. Fraser is a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of
Guelph, Canada. He has translated Badiou's 1969 book, The Concept
of Model, and has written widely on Badiou's thought. Fraser's current
research seeks to work out the philosophical significance of a recent
metamorphosis in the science of logic.
Peter Hallward teaches at Kingston University, London, and is the
author of Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment
(2007), Out of this World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation
(2006), Badiou: A Subject to Truth (2003) and Absolutely Postcolonial
(2001). He is currently working on a project entitled "The Will of the
People".
Mark Hewson teaches in the School of Culture and Communication
at the University of Melbourne. He has a study forthcoming, entitled
Blanchot and Literary Criticism.
Sigi Jottkandt is author of First Love: A Phenomenology of the One
(2010) and Acting Beautifully: Henry James and the Ethical Aesthetic
(2005). She teaches in the Writing and Publishing programme at NMIT,
and is a co-founder of the Open Humanities Press.
Alex Ling teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at
the University of Melbourne and is the author of Badiou and Cinema
(forthcoming).
John Mullarkey was educated at University College Dublin, Univer
sity College London, and the University of Warwick. He has taught
philosophy for the past sixteen years at the University of Sunderland
(1994-2004), and the University of Dundee (2004 to date). He has
published Bergson and Philosophy (1999), Post-Continental Philosophy:
An Outline (2006), Refractions of Reality: Philosophy and the Moving
Image (2009), and edited, with Beth Lord, The Continuum Companion
to Continental Philosophy (2009). His work seeks new ways of engag
ing with "non-philosophy", believing that philosophy is a subject that
gains its identity through continual challenge from outsider-thought,
ix