The Praxis of Alain Badiou

Following the publication of his magnum opus L’être et l’événement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France’s greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticising Badiou’s stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou’s concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognised as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou’s work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark.


Introduction
Masters & Disciples: Institution, Philosophy, Praxis
Paul Ashton, A. J. Bartlett & Justin Clemens

What is a Philosophical Institution? Or: Address, Transmission, Inscription
Alain Badiou

Science
The Law of the Subject: Alain Badiou, Luitzen Brouwer and
the Kripkean Analyses of Forcing and the Heyting Calculus
Zachary Fraser

The Limits of The Subject in Badiou’s Being and Event
Brian Anthony Smith

Had we but worlds enough, and time, this absolute, philosopher…
Justin Clemens

Love
Count-as-one, Forming-into-one, Unary Trait, S1
Lorenzo Chiesa

Introduction to Sam Gillespie
Sigi Jöttkandt

Giving Form to Its Own Existence: Anxiety and the Subject of Truth
Sam Gillespie

Conditional Notes on a New Republic
A. J. Bartlett

Art
An Explosive Genealogy: Theatre, Philosophy and the Art of Presentation
Oliver Feltham

Ontology and Appearing: Documentary Realism as a Mathematical Thought
Lindsey Hair

Can Cinema Be Thought? Alain Badiou and the Artistic Condition
Alex Ling

Politics
Towards an Anthropology of Infinitude: Badiou and the Political Subject
Nina Power

The Bourgeois and the Islamist, or, The Other Subjects of Politics
Alberto Toscano

Philosophy and Revolution: Badiou’s Infidelity to the Event
Toula Nicolacopoulos and George Vassilacopoulos

Follysophy
Dominique Hecq

Bibliography of Work on and by Alain Badiou in English

Contributors

Index