Badiou

by Hallward, Peter; Zizek, Slavoj

• ISBN13: 9780816634613
• ISBN10: 0816634610
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-03-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

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 Mallarme, 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 samplin

Author Biography

Slavoj Zizek is senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Hallward's Fidelity to the Badiou Event	p. ix
Acknowledgments	p. xv
Notes on Translation	p. xvii
Abbreviations	p. xix
Introduction: A New Philosophy of the Subject	p. xxi
Matters of Principle
Taking Sides	p. 3
From Maoism to L'Organisation Politique	p. 29
Infinite by Prescription: The Mathematical Turn	p. 49
Being and Truth
Badiou's Ontology	p. 81
Subject and Event	p. 107
The Criteria of Truth	p. 153
The Generic Procedures
Love and Sexual Difference	p. 185
Art and Poetry	p. 193
Mathematics and Science	p. 209
Politics: Equality and Justice	p. 223
What Is Philosophy?	p. 243
Complications
Ethics, Evil, and the Unnameable	p. 255
Generic or Specific?	p. 271
Being-there: The Onto-logy of Appearing	p. 293
Conclusion	p. 317
On the Development of Transfinite Set Theory	p. 323
Notes	p. 349
Bibliography	p. 427
Index	p. 453
Table of Contents provided by Rittenhouse. All Rights Reserved.