Philosophy for Militants

by Badiou, Alain; Bosteels, Bruno

• ISBN13: 9781844679867
• ISBN10: 1844679861
• Edition: 00
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-11-20
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

This concise, accessible volume captures the relationship between politics and philosophy as it is conceived Alain Badiou's work. Harking back to his mentor Louis Althusser, Badiou explains how politics conditions philosophy, while suggesting that philosophy itself may be needed to clarify the truths produced within the political condition. Badiou also offers an intriguing take on what he calls the four major ensembles of French and, more broadly, Western society today, in which new emancipatory forms of politics are emerging: students, the young, workers and immigrants. Badiou concludes with a return to the notion of communism, here defined as an answer to the obscure knot that ties politics, philosophy and democracy.

Author Biography

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the École normale supérieure and the Collège international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works, including Theory of the Subject, Being and Event, Manifesto for Philosophy, and Gilles Deleuze. His recent books include The Meaning of Sarkozy, Ethics, Metapolitics, Polemics, The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein’s Anti-Philosophy.

Bruno Bosteels, Professor of Romance Studies at Cornell University, is the author of Badiou and Politics, Marx and Freud in Latin America, and The Actuality of Communism. He is also the translator of several books by Alain Badiou: Theory of the Subject, Can Politics Be Thought? and What Is Antiphilosophy? Essays on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Lacan. He currently serves as the General Editor of Diacritics.