Cfp: INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF BADIOU STUDIES 1.1 (Forthcoming).

The inaugural issue of the IJBS will be dedicated to the idea of 'Badiou Now!' Why? Because Badiou's philosophical interest is fundamentally contemporary and political. The notion of Badiou Now! captures the urgency that Badiou sees in combating the 'Thermidorian' spirit, reactive and obscurantist subjects that deny the necessity of rupture, events, acts, new truths, who replace action with political apathy, and radical democracy with a return to 'pure' transcendental notions. In contrast to the Evental-negating/denying subject, Badiou is concerned with the question of how to maintain fidelity to the event, while remaining aware of competing subjective forces and of the materialist dialectical need for endless events, for perpetual breaks and splits, which promote the present as future. The first issue then, will seek proposals that address the role of Badiou's thought in building a 21st century conception of human organization.

http://badioustudiesorg.ipower.com/cgi-bin/ojs-2.3.6/index.php/ijbs

Wieseltier, Leon. "Non-Event." THE NEW REPUBLIC June 30, 2010.

For my sins, I have been reading Alain Badiou. (The intellectual’s work is never done.) He is, in his own words, “the most widely read and translated French philosopher in the world.” More banally, he is the very latest professor of liberation; and more banally still, the very latest professor of liberation from liberalism. In his conceptually delirious way, he mocks “the presumed ‘rights of man’” and “the humanism of human rights” in favor of an “emancipatory politics.” If the word “democracy” can still be salvaged, it is only by means of “a detour through the Idea of communism.” Badiou regards it as his “thrilling task” to “give new life to the communist hypothesis.” He adduces “the People’s War of Liberation in China, from 1927 to 1949” and “Bolshevism in Russia, from 1902 to 1917” and “the Great Cultural Revolution [in China], at any rate from 1965 to 1968” as examples of “a new practice of collective emancipation.” He lists “the first sequence of the Iranian revolution” and the Zapatistas in Mexico admiringly alongside the Solidarity movement in Poland. He once wrote a commentary—“guided by the idea of the eternity of the True”—on Mao’s writings on Stalin. This slavish devotion to historical cataclysm, this guiltless affiliation of progressivism with barbarism, is derived from the mysticism of “the event” in his masterwork (“I was quite aware of having written a ‘great’ book of philosophy”) Being and Event, a rancidly overdeveloped and almost risibly arcane system of ontology according to which “truth procedures” in art, science, politics, and love are melodramatically inaugurated by a rupture in the normal order of things and new possibilities are violently disclosed. Badiou’s “event” is something between a revolution and a revelation, and it expresses his deep contempt for the transcendences that may be had in unclimactic, unecstatic, unapocalyptic experience, in events that are not “events.” The human subject is “nothing other than an active fidelity to the event of truth,” or “a militant of truth.” This is not at all postmodernism (which is all the good that can be said of it); it is a godless theology in which Badiou’s elect, in the radiance of l’événementiel, march to free us from “our ‘democratic’ totalitarianism” and attain “the emancipation of humanity in its entirety.” In sum, a heartless bastard. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/75954/non-event.

Crockett, Clayton. Review of Frederiek Depoortere, BADIOU AND THEOLOGY. NDPR (June 2010).

Depoortere, Frederiek. Badiou and Theology. London: Continuum, 2009. Despite Badiou's professed atheism, there are a number of ways that his philosophy can be related to theology. The value of Depoortere's book is that it is not simply a survey but a constructive engagement with Badiou's thought, centered on his set-theoretic ontology. This value, however, is also a limitation, because Depoortere's overall engagement is somewhat idiosyncratic and incoherent, as I will discuss below. After an introduction that provides helpful context for reading Badiou in terms of Christian theology, the rest of the book consists of three fascinating but uneven chapters. The body of the book represents an attempt to articulate, justify and defend a proof of God's existence in both traditional Thomistic and modern set-theoretical terms, over against Badiou's atheistic interpretation of set-theoretic ontology. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=19847.

"Subject and Appearance: On Alain Badiou's THEORY OF THE SUBJECT and LOGICS OF WORLDS, Middlesex University, November 20, 2010.

Hosted by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. 10.00 Registration 10.20 Introduction, Peter Hallward 10.30 SUBJECT

• Bruno Bosteels, Theory of the Subject (Cornell University, NY)
• Kristin Ross, "Badiou, Mallarmé and the Commune" ( New York University)

11.15 Discussion Chair: Peter Hallward

12.30 Lunch Break

1.45 APPEARANCE

• Alberto Toscano, Logics of Worlds (Goldsmiths, London)
• Ali Alizadeh "Badiou and Hegel" (CRMEP, Middlesex University)

2.30: Discussion Chair: Peter Osborne

3.45 Break

4.00 Subject, Appearance, Politics Panel:

Ali Alizadeh, Bruno Bosteels, Nina Power, Kristin Ross, Alberto Toscano Chair: Éric Alliez 4.30 Closing discussion 5.00–6.30 Reception Further information is here: http://www.mdx.ac.uk/www/CRMEP/EVENTS/Subject&Appearance.htm.

Livingston, Paul M. Review of Alain Badiou, LOGICS OF WORLDS. NDPR (October 2009).

Badiou, Alain. Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II. Trans. Albert Toscano. London: Continuum, 2008. If it is reasonable to hope that the current moment in philosophy may ultimately represent one of transition, from the divided remnants of the still enduring "split" between "analytic" and "continental" philosophy to some form (or forms) of twenty-first century philosophy that is no longer recognizably either (or is both), it seems likely as well that the thought and work of Alain Badiou can play a key role in articulating this much needed transition. One of the central innovations of Badiou's work is that it uses the kind of rigorous formalism characteristic of much good analytic philosophy in its attempt to think through some of the main problems of ontology, metaphysics and political theory that have troubled continental philosophers over the course of the twentieth century. Both in Badiou's 1988 magnum opus, Being and Event and its new sequel, Logics of Worlds, the result is a kind of paradoxical formalism of the limits of formalism itself, striking a sometimes uneasy balance between the inveterate tendency of analytic thought to seek formal solutions for theoretical problems of epistemology and metaphysics, and that of continental thought to seek the solution to what are seen as more-than-theoretical problems of social and political praxis in the kinds of liberation that may occur outside the "closed" regime of all that is calculable or tractable by formal systems. In Logics of Worlds, as in the earlier book, Badiou's overriding aim is to theorize the possibility of radical novelty, or of discontinuous and essentially unforeseeable change, in any of a variety of domains (chiefly those of the "four generic procedures": politics, art, science, and love). To this end, in Being and Event, Badiou developed an elaborate and innovative theory of formal ontology based on mathematical structures, in particular that of mathematical set theory on its standard, ZFC axiomatization. This allowed Badiou to theorize what he there called the "event", the paradoxical occurrence that, by locally suspending the fundamental axioms normally governing the appearance of any object or entity as such, allows essentially new groupings, indiscernible by means of the resources of the existing situation, suddenly to appear and work their transformative effects. In Logics of Worlds, Badiou supplements this earlier "ontological" account of evental change with a comprehensive formal theory of appearance, what Badiou here terms a "phenomenology". Although the underlying apparatus is once again drawn from mathematical formalism, the sociopolitical implications of such possibilities of change are also, once again, very much to the fore. Indeed, in its "Preface", Badiou presents the whole argument of Logics of Worlds as part of an attempt to theorize what escapes the assumptions of contemporary "natural belief", what he sees as the confining dogmas of postmodern relativism and conventionalism (pp. 2-3). Such views, Badiou thinks, can ultimately yield only a monotonous regime of "democratic materialism" that, in seeing all cultures and their claims as on a level, forecloses both any possibility of real development and any effective intervention to produce fundamental change (pp. 2-8). Badiou proposes to replace this axiomatic of contemporary conviction with one that he calls, following Althusser, a "materialist dialectic". The central difference here is Badiou's unhesitating affirmation of what he calls Truths, which are, according to him, generally denied or suppressed in the contemporary orthodoxy of belief (p. 4). Badiou's notion of truth, however, is a heterodox one, not to be understood in terms of any familiar (e.g., correspondence or coherence) notion. For Badiou, the central mark of a Truth is its capacity to break with (or "subtract itself from") an existing regime of knowledge, and so to define a direction of radical transformation which, if followed out, will lead to the substantial re-ordering of basic possibilities of presentation and representation within the existing order (pp. 9-10). This vector of transformation is, for Badiou, always infinite. Thus the punctual articulation of a Truth by means of an evental break with a given situation is always partial, and liable to be taken up again, even after a lapse of centuries or millennia, through the renewal of a faithful tracing of the consequences of a subsequent Event by the agency of what Badiou terms the "subject" (pp. 33-35). Much of this terminology is familiar from Being and Event's theory of radical, evental change, and Badiou's aim here is not so much to alter that theory in any fundamental way as to remedy certain deficiencies he now sees in it. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=17765.

Power, Nina. Review of Alain Badiou's CONDITIONS. NDPR (July 2009).

Badiou, Alain. Conditions. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2008. (1992) Conditions, originally published in France in 1992, is a collection of companion essays to what remains Alain Badiou's magnum opus and the most exhaustive exposition of his philosophical system, Being and Event (which first appeared in 1988). It is possible to treat the book as a series of engaging explorations of an extraordinarily diverse range of topics -- from Mallarmé to set-theory, sophistry to psychoanalysis, Beckett to academia -- without immersing oneself in the system proper. Nevertheless it probably helps to do so. Indeed, in his preface, François Wahl, longtime associate of Badiou, explicitly stresses that Conditions should not be read without first tackling the formidable system as a whole. Even bearing this caveat in mind, however, some of the essays -- the one on Beckett and the essay entitled "Philosophy and Politics", in particular -- are as good an introduction to Badiou's main concerns as you'll find anywhere else in his not insubstantial oeuvre. Badiou has become an increasingly central name in European thought in recent years, and it is important to note that many of these pieces have already been published elsewhere. Corcoran lists these at the beginning of the book, although he neglects to mention that the essay on Beckett, "The Writing of the Generic", was also already published in a collection from 2003 entitled On Beckett, published by Clinamen. (I mention this not merely because I co-edited the collection, but because if you've already read that book as well as Manifesto for Philosophy, Infinite Thought, Theoretical Writings and other translations in Umbr(a) and Cosmos and History, you'll have already encountered many of the texts contained here.) The essays in Conditions are based on lectures and papers of varying lengths written and presented in the years following the publication of Being and Event. Sometimes it is very clear that the texts are written with a definite audience in mind; for example, in "Philosophy and Psychoanalysis", Badiou tells the reader "I intervene among you as someone, like the Eleatic Stranger from the Sophist, neither an analyst, nor an analysand". Useful notes at the back, however, make it clear in each case who the intended recipients of the essays or talks were, so one need not get too caught up in the shifts in tone and style. The core idea that links all the essays together, however disparate their topics, is conveyed by the title of the collection. Conditions for Badiou are the four types of "truth procedure" that provide the material for philosophy, which itself produces no truths. Badiou argues, or rather, states that there are four conditions: science (in particular, mathematics), art (in particular, the poem), politics (in particular, a politics of emancipation) and love (or more precisely, "the procedure that makes the truth of the disjunction of sexuated positions" [p. 23]). This four-fold claim is laid out in a very short piece near the beginning of Conditions entitled simply "Definition of Philosophy". It is here too that Badiou makes it clear that philosophy's task is to "compossibilize" or assemble truths "on the basis of the void" (p. 24). This means that philosophy as such can generate no truths of its own, and certainly is not capable of designating a particular conception of "Truth" as the unified meaning of history or thought. (If Badiou is to be understood as a "systematic" thinker, his system lacks the drive to totalize that often accompanies such a project.) Indeed, whatever truths are generated by the four conditions (a revolution in mathematics, a political uprising in the name of equality, a poem that reconfigures the field or a love that changes the way the couple see the world), they have very little to do with meaning, and in one fell swoop Badiou waves aside all hermeneutical and phenomenological approaches to the question of truth: "I propose to call 'religion' everything that presupposes that there is a continuity between truths and the circulation of meaning" (p. 24). . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=16706.

Power, Nina. "The Unrepentant Radical." THE PHILOSOPHERS' MAGAZINE June 15, 2009.

Badiou is in many ways closer to an older model of the French intellectual (think Sartre) than the Nouveaux Philosophes (think Bernard-Henri Lévy) who came to dominate Gallic thought in the 70s and continue to hold sway over much of the media. Although many still associate French philosophy with the smoking of Gitanes, the drinking of black coffee and long existential discussions at cafés, the truth is that this stereotype has long fallen out of fashion in France, if not yet on the other side of the channel. Whilst Badiou doesn’t smoke, nor indeed drink alcohol (unusual for a Frenchman, let alone a philosopher), he fits in with certain aspects of an older model of the French intellectual: left-wing, charismatic, keen to pronounce on contemporary events, engagé, institutionalised – Badiou was the chair of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure – yet fiercely critical. Unlike another set of clichés about French philosophy, Badiou is also strongly anti-relativist and against the postmodern malaise. His work, as systematic as it is wide-ranging, is concerned with classical, even ancient, philosophical concerns: truth, being and, much like his master, Sartre, subjectivity. Badiou’s main theoretical work is also concerned with debates in contemporary mathematics in set and category theory, but as austere and abstract as this sounds, even his most conceptual work is political through and through. And indeed, the opportunities thrown up by the current political situation are currently preoccupying Badiou to a large degree. The recent financial crisis, alongside continued and brutal military campaigns, has generated a sense of disappointment and anger; recent months have seen a return to student radicalism in Europe unknown this side of the 60s, with occupations and dramatic clashes between students and university administrations. But is there anything new about the form of these protests? Badiou was himself radicalised by the events of May ’68, and is well placed to compare the two periods. “This revolt is between a sort of repetition of some aspects of ’68, certainly, occupations and so on, and something which is not completely clear. This is the search for political determination which is not the return to old ideas of forty years ago, but which is not resignation.” The main question for Badiou is the kind of thinking that accompanies this desire for action, what he describes as “new forms of subjectivity”. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=303.

Alain Badiou on BBC's HARDTALK March 24, 2009.

Watch him here: http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?docid=7936414602517427743&ei=Nm_NSce7OsW2-AaTtdngBQ&q=badiou+hardtalk&hl=en.

May, Todd. Review of Oliver Feltham's ALAIN BADIOU: LIVE THEORY. NDPR (March 2009).

Feltham, Oliver. Alain Badiou: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2008. There is a dual thread Feltham follows throughout Badiou's work, the strands of which are entwined. Each of these strands is derived from puzzles that vexed the thought of Badiou's teacher Louis Althusser. One strand concerns the question of how to conceive political change; the other concerns the relation of theory and practice. The intertwining of these strands occurs around the issue of politics. A theory of change must somehow be enlightening for the engagement with political practice. On the other hand, one might ask how much practice itself can enlighten one's theoretical conception of politics and political change. For Badiou, who has never abandoned the field of engaged politics, these issues can be said to structure his thought. It seems to me that by placing them front and center, Feltham has touched on the heart of that thought. . . . Read the whole review here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=15526.

Kaufman, Eleanor. "The Desire Called Mao: Badiou and the Legacy of Libidinal Economy." POSTMODERN CULTURE 18.1 (2007).

This essay addresses the legacy of the synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism that reached its apogee in France shortly after the events of May 1968. It attempts to delineate how this synthesis, largely abandoned by the mid-1970s, at least in its libidinal economic dimension (though certainly taken into entirely new registers by later thinkers such as Jameson and Žižek), might be said to be resurrected and reconfigured in the work of Alain Badiou. It is a reconfiguration that is in some sense unrecognizable as such, though Badiou's 1982 Théorie du sujet explicitly addresses the conjunction of Lacan and Mao, and his most recent work returns more forcefully to some of the earlier thematics--especially that of destruction--that to a large extent fell by the wayside in his 1988 opus Being and Event. If the "libidinal economy" theory of the early 1970s might be defined by a certain defiant, even delirious energy--defiant of interpretation, localization, or even of a specific mapping onto Marxism or psychoanalysis per se--then Badiou's reconfiguration of the conjuncture of psychoanalysis and Marxism is spoken in a tone of order and restraint that might be more characteristic of the period Badiou labels the "Restoration," namely the last two decades of the twentieth century. Perhaps such a shift in tonality is above all symptomatic of a shift from the conjucture of Marx and Freud to that of Mao and Lacan, but the claim will be that what has shifted concerns the unconscious itself, that the early 1970s moment of libidinal economy allowed the unconscious full reign, whereas the later moment of the early 1980s and beyond demanded that the unconscious and other wayward desires be brought to full and absolute clarity. If unconscious desires served as a driving motor for libidinal economy theory, they are left aside in Badiou's engagement with psychoanalysis, only to surface in different form around questions of number, counting, and periodization. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/18.1kaufman.html.

Riera, Gabriel. "Review of Antonio Calcagno's BADIOU AND DERRIDA." NDPR May 2, 2008.

Calcagno, Antonio. Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time. London: Continuum, 2008. Badiou and Derrida: Politics, Events and their Time brings together two major thinkers for whom the question of the political is the question of our century. Some common features between these two philosophers are evident: for both philosophy is an act of resistance (with all the richness and ambiguity that resonates in this term); they approach the political as a field in which to wage war against the sovereign One. For Derrida, the central question which governs the deconstruction of the political is the question of the One that produces violence and protects itself from the other, while for Alain Badiou, insofar as the One is the result of an operation of counting (the counting-as-one) of multiplicities, it closes off any possibility of thinking the event, that which suddenly comes to the impersonality of Being, that which exceeds Being qua Being and thus demands a process of subjectivation and fidelity to the event's truth. Badiou's ontology, not unlike Derrida's deconstruction of the sign and its radical re-conceptualization of writing, is a war machine against the metaphysics of the One, the only possible way to treat politics, according to Badiou, as one of the four conditions of philosophy. They both subscribe to a "militant political critique without end" [Jacques Derrida, Rogues] of normative theoretical and institutional discourses and practices. For both, Derrida and Badiou, the political cannot be simply conceived as consensus building or as simple management of the economy. Antonio Calcagno engages in a detailed examination of the relationship between politics and time through the works Derrida and Badiou. This is the first book that brings together the two leading French thinkers, and it does so in view of positing a theory of the relationship of time and politics able to account for both political undecidability (Derrida) and decidability (Badiou). Whether this theory is viable, especially since Badiou is being mobilized to achieve a certain "overcoming" of "the Derridean aporia of the double bind" [2], is a matter of debate. Contemporary philosophy has taught us to pause when coming across a desire to achieve any overcoming too hastily; Heidegger's is the case that comes to mind. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=13023.

Badiou, Alain. "The Subject of Art." THE SYMPTOM 6 (2005).

My Father was accustomed to say, "We must begin by the beginning." So, I must begin this lecture about the subject of art by its beginning. But, what is this beginning? I think we have to begin with the oldest question—the question of being, the question of being as being, of being qua being. What is being? What are we saying when we say something is, something of art is…? Something of art is a joy forever, for example. What are we saying? I begin by a fundamental distinction between three levels of the signification of being. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.lacan.com/symptom6_articles/badiou.html.

Badiou, Alain. "Philosophy as Biography." THE SYMPTOM 9 (2007).

Nietzsche wrote that a philosophy is always the biography of the philosopher. Maybe a biography of the philosopher by the philosopher himself is a piece of philosophy. So I shall tell you nine stories taken of my private life, with their philosophical morality. . . . Thanks for the link to www.continental-philosophy.org. The whole essay is here: http://www.lacan.com/symptom9_articles/badiou19.html.

Dews, Peter. "Review of Alain Badiou's BEING AND EVENT." NDPR February 18, 2008.

Being and Event consists of thirty-seven interlaced 'meditations', some more mathematical, some more philosophical, and some interpretations of major figures in the canon of Western thought. Through these discussions, Badiou develops his conception of a dimension of existence which escapes the purview of constructive knowledge, or 'the encyclopedia' as he calls it, and which can perhaps best be regarded as the dimension of revelation or the donation of meaning. It is here that he locates what he calls the 'event'. Fidelity to an event (or rather, fidelity as the process through which an event is recognized and sustained) is what constitutes us as 'subjects': as more than merely natural beings intent on satisfying our needs and reproducing our kind. Badiou is not the only French philosopher of recent times to have set the notion of fidelity at the heart of his thinking, as we shall find. But what makes Badiou's work unusual, given these preoccupations, is the crucial role which he allots to mathematics, both in specifying his complex general ontology, and in providing the basic modelling of human situations. Badiou's whole philosophy, we could say, is generated by the tension between his basic claim that mathematics is ontology, and his equally fundamental claim that, as he puts it, 'ontology is a situation' (p. 25). For this means that, although ontology exhausts what there is, it cannot capture everything which occurs: there can be other situations, regardless of how difficult it may be to portray them theoretically. So despite his hostility to the 'anti-philosophical' tradition in post-Hegelian thought, Badiou himself plays his own version of that tradition's typical game. What cannot be known is what it is most urgent to know, what really matters, politically and existentially. Badiou -- and here he differs from his post-structuralist contemporaries -- is inclined to call it 'truth'. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu:80/review.cfm?id=12406.