Badiou: A Subject To Truth

✍ Scribed by Peter Hallward

• Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 506
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Alain Badiou is one of the most inventive and compelling philosophers working in France today-a thinker who, in these days of cynical resignation and academic specialization, is exceptional in every sense. Guided by disciplines ranging from mathematics to psychoanalysis, inspired as much by Plato and Cantor as by Mao and Mallarmé, Badiou's work renews, in the most varied and spectacular terms, a decidedly ancient understanding of philosophy-philosophy as a practice conditioned by truths, understood as militant processes of emancipation or transformation.

This book is the first comprehensive introduction to Badiou's thought to appear in any language. Assuming no prior knowledge of his work, it provides a thorough and searching overview of all the main components of his philosophy, from its decisive political orientation through its startling equation of ontology with mathematics to its resolute engagement with its principal competition (from Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Deleuze, among others). The book draws on all of Badiou's published work and a wide sampling of his unpublished work in progress, along with six years of correspondence with the author.

Peter Hallward pays careful attention to the aspect of Badiou's work most liable to intimidate readers in continental philosophy and critical theory: its crucial reliance on certain key developments in modern mathematics. Eschewing unnecessary technicalities, Hallward provides a highly readable discussion of each of the basic features of Badiou's ontology, as well as his more recent account of appearance and "being-there."

Without evading the difficulties, Peter Hallward demonstrates in detail and in depth why Badiou's ongoing philosophical project should be recognized as the most resourceful and inspiring of his generation.

Peter Hallward is lecturer in the French Department at King's College, London. His previous publications include Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2002) and a translation of Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001).

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 8
Foreword: Hallward’s Fidelity to the Badiou Event......Page 10
Acknowledgments......Page 16
Notes on Translation......Page 18
Abbreviations......Page 20
Introduction: A New Philosophy of the Subject......Page 22
Part I. Matters of Principle......Page 38
1. Taking Sides......Page 40
2. From Maoism to L’Organisation Politique......Page 66
3. Infinite by Prescription: The Mathematical Turn......Page 86
Part II. Being and Truth......Page 116
4. Badiou’s Ontology......Page 118
5. Subject and Event......Page 144
6. The Criteria of Truth......Page 190
Part III. The Generic Procedures......Page 218
7. Love and Sexual Difference......Page 222
8. Art and Poetry......Page 230
9. Mathematics and Science......Page 246
10. Politics: Equality and Justice......Page 260
11. What Is Philosophy?......Page 280
Part IV. Complications......Page 290
12. Ethics, Evil, and the Unnameable......Page 292
13. Generic or Specific?......Page 308
14. Being-there: The Onto-logy of Appearing......Page 330
Conclusion......Page 354
Appendix: On the Development of Transfinite Set Theory......Page 360
Notes......Page 386
Bibliography......Page 464
A......Page 490
C......Page 491
D......Page 493
F......Page 494
H......Page 495
I......Page 496
L......Page 497
M......Page 498
N......Page 499
P......Page 500
R......Page 501
S......Page 502
U......Page 503
Z......Page 504