Table Of Content

Badiou and the Philosophers Also available from Bloomsbury: Being and Event, Alain Badiou Logics of Worlds, Alain Badiou Alain Badiou: Live Theory, Oliver Feltham Badiou’s ‘Being and Event’, Christopher Norris Badiou and the Philosophers Interrogating 1960s French Philosophy EDITED AND TRANSLATED BY TZUCHIEN THO AND GIUSEPPE BIANCO Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 175 Fifth Avenue London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10010 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 English Translation © Tzuchien Tho, 2013 Commentary © Tzuchien Tho and Giuseppe Bianco, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. The authors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: 978–1–4411–9988–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Badiou, Alain. Badiou and the philosophers : interrogating 1960s French philosophy / edited and translated by Tzuchien Tho and Giuseppe Bianco. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-8485-6 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-9521-0 (pbk.) -- ISBN 978-1- 4411-0959-0 (epub) -- ISBN 978-1-4411-9988-1 (ebook pdf) 1. Philosophy, French--20th century. 2. Philosophers--France--Interviews. 3. Badiou, Alain--Interviews. 4. Badiou, Alain. I. Tho, Tzuchien. II. Bianco, Giuseppe. III. Title. B2421.B2713 2013 194--dc23 2012030172 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Editors’ and translator’s introduction ix 1 Philosophy and its history (with Jean Hyppolite) 1 2 Philosophy and science (with Georges Canguilhem) 15 3 Philosophy and sociology (with Raymond Aron) 33 4 Philosophy and psychology (with Michel Foucault) 47 5 Philosophy and language (with Paul Ricœur) 61 6 Philosophy and truth (with Georges Canguilhem, Dina Dreyfus, Michel Foucault, Jean Hyppolite, and Paul Ricœur) 79 7 Philosophy and ethics (with Michel Henry) 99 8 Model and structure (with Michel Serres) 111 vi CONTENTS 9 Teaching philosophy through television (with excerpts from Jean Hyppolite, Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Aron, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricœur. Alain Badiou by telephone and Dina Dreyfus in the studio) 139 Appendices: A Short biographies of participants 153 B The critical value of images Alain Badiou (1993) 159 Index 161 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS “Philosophy and its History”, “Philosophy and Science”, “Philos- ophy and Sociology”, “Philosophy and Psychology”, “Philosophy and Language”, “Philosophy and Truth”, “Teaching Philosophy through Television” and “The Critical Value of Images” were translated from the French transcripts of those interviews that is available in print in a special volume of the journal Cahiers Philosophiques, 55 (June 1993). A subset of these texts had appeared as teaching materials produced by Dossiers pédagogiques de la Radio-Télévision scolaire in 1965. A modified version of “Philosophie et psychologie” was published in Foucault’s collected works Dits et Écrits, Vol. I (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 546–67. Transcription and Translation of “Philosophy and Ethics” and “Model and Structure” from videos made available by the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique. Since “Model and Structure” contain extensive use of Molière’s Don Juan, we also need to acknowledge our use of Graverley and Maclean’s translation published by Oxford University Press. MOLIERE: DON JUAN & OTHER PLAYS translated by Graveley & Maclean (2008) pp. 33, 63–4, 72–5, 91. By permission of Oxford University Press. We are thankful to Bernard Canguilhem (Canguilhem estate), Claude Chippaux-Hyppolite and Alain Chippaux (Hyppolite estates), Dominique Schnapper (Aron estate), Gregori Jean and Jean Leclercq of the Fonds Ricœur, Catherine Goldenstein of the Fonds Michel Henry and Gallimard publishers (Foucault estate) for their permission to translate and publish these texts. We are also grateful to the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique for their permission to use these materials. Much thanks also go to Alain Badiou for his permission and encouragement for undertaking this project. EDITORS’ AND TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION Sailin’ on: Voyages in French philosophy 1957–67 “According to this interrogation, thought is forced to weigh anchor and to set sail on an uncertain sea; thought is for itself that quasi- other that everyone is, in Borreil’s view, for everyone else. The nomadic image is inscribed from the outset in that singular style, which never asserts anything except under the rule of an interrogation, and interposes between the interrogation and the response the interval between the morning departure and the evening halt.”1 Socratic interlocutor In the epigraph above, Alain Badiou speaks of Jean Borreil, his colleague at the University of Paris VIII, and remarks on his admiration for his style of interrogations. These are not questions aimed at interpretation, as Badiou insists, but direct interrogations that mark the interlocutor and implicate her within a nomadic movement of thought. Badiou’s elegy to his friend and colleague first pronounced at the College Internationale de Philosophie was collected in a series of essays on French philosophical figures in 2008 as Petit Panthéon Portatif, a Pocket Pantheon. In this volume, Alain Badiou pointed his readers to a range of figures who