Badiou, una introducción (Spanish Edition)

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While government think-tanks ponder the dilemmas of bio-ethics, medical ethics and professional ethics, respect for human rights and reverence for the Other have become matters of virtually instinctive consensus. He shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve to reinforce an ideology of the status quo and demonstrates that an ethics conceived in terms of negative human rights or tolerance of difference cannot sustain decisive and precisely situated interventions any more than they can underpin a coherent concept of evil.

Our consensual ethical norms amount to nothing more than a jumbled confusion of legalistic formalism, scandalised opinion, and theological mystification. What is a people? Alain Badiou surveys the idea of a people as a productive force of solidarity and emancipation and as a negative tool of categorization and suppression. Pierre Bourdieu follows with a sociolinguistic analysis of "popular" and its transformation of democracy, beliefs, songs, and even soups into phenomena with outsized importance.

Judith Butler calls out those who use freedom of assembly to create an exclusionary "we, " while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "people" from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations. Together with Democracy in What State? Metapolitics by Alain Badiou Book 28 editions published between and in 3 languages and held by WorldCat member libraries worldwide "Metapolitics argues that one of the main tasks of contemporary thought is to abolish the idea that politics is merely an object for philosophical reflection, devoid of any truly radical and emancipatory possibilities.

Badiou, Alain

Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes a politics as the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He argues that truth in the political sphere must be separated from the abstractions of public opinion, and that political action should be re-thought as a process that binds discussion to decision. Badiou also critically examines the thought of Jacques Ranciere, Louis Althusser and Sylvain Lazarus, and scrutinises the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.

Cinema by Alain Badiou Book 20 editions published between and in 3 languages and held by WorldCat member libraries worldwide For Alain Badiou, films think, and it is the task of the philosopher to transcribe that thinking. What is the subject to which the film gives expressive form' This is the question that lies at the heart of Badiou's account of cinema.

He contends that cinema is an art form that bears witness to the Other and renders human presence visible, thus testifying to the universal value of human existence and human freedom. Through the experience of viewing, the movement of thought that constitutes the film is passed on to the viewer, who thereby encounters an aspect of the world and its exaltation and vitality as well as its difficulty and complexity.

Cinema is an impure art cannibalizing its times, the other arts, and people ' a major art precisely because it is the locus of the indiscernibility between art and non-art. It is this, argues Badiou, that makes cinema the social and political art par excellence, the best indicator of our civilization, in the way that Greek tragedy, the coming-of-age novel and the operetta were in their respective eras. Second manifesto for philosophy by Alain Badiou Book 28 editions published between and in 3 languages and held by WorldCat member libraries worldwide Twenty years ago, Alain Badiou's first Manifesto for Philosophy rose up against the all-pervasive proclamation of the "end" of philosophy.

In lieu of this problematic of the end, he put forward the watchword: The situation has considerably changed since then. Philosophy was threatened with obliteration at the time, whereas today it finds itself under threat for the diametrically opposed reason: It serves as a trademark for various media pundits. It has its magazines and its gurus.

It is universally called upon, by everything from banks to major state commissions, to pronounce on ethics, law and duty. In essence, "philosophy" has now come to stand for nothing other than its most ancient enemy: Badiou's second manifesto therefore seeks to demoralize philosophy and to separate it from all those "philosophies" that are as servile as they are ubiquitous. It demonstrates the power of certain eternal truths to illuminate action and, as such, to transport philosophy far beyond the figure of "the human" and its "rights".

There, well beyond all moralism, in the clear expanse of the idea, life becomes something radically other than survival.

It is, in short, a force worth reckoning with. For Badiou, Paul is neither the venerable saint embalmed by Christian tradition, nor the venomous priest execrated by philosophers like Nietzsche: In this work, Badiou argues that Paul delineates a new figure of the subject: Badiou shows that the Pauline figure of the subject still harbors a genuinely revolutionary potential today: Here, philosophy is firing on all cylinders: Socrates and his companions are joined by Beckett, Pessoa, Freud, and Hegel, among others. Together these thinkers demonstrate that true philosophy endures, ready to absorb new horizons without changing its essence.

Set theory does not operate in terms of definite individual elements in groupings but only functions insofar as what belongs to a set is of the same relation as that set that is, another set too. What individuates a set, therefore, is not an existential positive proposition, but other multiples whose properties i. The structure of being thus secures the regime of the count-as-one.

So if one is to think of a set — for instance, the set of people, or humanity — as counting as one, the multiple elements which belong to that set are secured as one consistent concept humanity , but only in terms of what does not belong to that set.

It may help to understand the concept 'count-as-one' if it is associated with the concept of 'terming': To count a set as one is to mention that set. How the being of terms such as 'multiple' does not contradict the non-being of the one can be understood by considering the multiple nature of terminology: The idea of a term without meaning is incoherent, the count-as-one is a structural effect or a situational operation ; it is not an event of 'truth'.

Multiples which are 'composed' or 'consistent' are count-effects. Badiou's use of set theory in this manner is not just illustrative or heuristic. Badiou uses the axioms of Zermelo—Fraenkel set theory to identify the relationship of being to history, Nature, the State, and God. Most significantly this use means that as with set theory there is a strict prohibition on self-belonging; a set cannot contain or belong to itself.

This results from the axiom of foundation — or the axiom of regularity — which enacts such a prohibition cf. This axiom states that every non-empty set A contains an element y that is disjoint from A. Badiou's philosophy draws two major implications from this prohibition. Firstly, it secures the inexistence of the 'one': Badiou is therefore — against Georg Cantor , from whom he draws heavily — staunchly atheist. However, secondly, this prohibition prompts him to introduce the event. Because, according to Badiou, the axiom of foundation 'founds' all sets in the void, it ties all being to the historico-social situation of the multiplicities of de-centred sets — thereby effacing the positivity of subjective action, or an entirely 'new' occurrence.

And whilst this is acceptable ontologically, it is unacceptable, Badiou holds, philosophically. Set theory mathematics has consequently 'pragmatically abandoned' an area which philosophy cannot.

Key concepts

And so, Badiou argues, there is therefore only one possibility remaining: Several critics have questioned Badiou's use of mathematics. Mathematician Alan Sokal and physicist Jean Bricmont write that Badiou proposes, with seemingly "utter seriousness," a blending of psychoanalysis, politics and set theory that they contend is preposterous. An example of a critique from a mathematician's point of view is the essay 'Badiou's Number: Nirenberg and David Nirenberg, [21] which takes issue in particular with Badiou's matheme of the Event in Being and Event , which has already been alluded to in respect of the 'axiom of foundation' above.

Nirenberg and Nirenberg write:. Badiou again turns here to mathematics and set theory — Badiou's language of ontology — to study the possibility of an indiscernible element existing extrinsically to the situation of ontology. He employs the strategy of the mathematician Paul J. Cohen , using what are called the conditions of sets. These conditions are thought of in terms of domination, a domination being that which defines a set.

If one takes, in binary language, the set with the condition 'items marked only with ones', any item marked with zero negates the property of the set.

The condition which has only ones is thus dominated by any condition which has zeros in it [cf. Badiou reasons using these conditions that every discernible nameable or constructible set is dominated by the conditions which don't possess the property that makes it discernible as a set. The property 'one' is always dominated by 'not one'.

These sets are, in line with constructible ontology, relative to one's being-in-the-world and one's being in language where sets and concepts, such as the concept 'humanity', get their names. However, he continues, the dominations themselves are, whilst being relative concepts, not necessarily intrinsic to language and constructible thought; rather one can axiomatically define a domination — in the terms of mathematical ontology — as a set of conditions such that any condition outside the domination is dominated by at least one term inside the domination.

One does not necessarily need to refer to constructible language to conceive of a 'set of dominations', which he refers to as the indiscernible set, or the generic set. It is therefore, he continues, possible to think beyond the strictures of the relativistic constructible universe of language, by a process Cohen calls forcing. And he concludes in following that while ontology can mark out a space for an inhabitant of the constructible situation to decide upon the indiscernible, it falls to the subject — about which the ontological situation cannot comment — to nominate this indiscernible, this generic point; and thus nominate, and give name to, the undecidable event.

Badiou thereby marks out a philosophy by which to refute the apparent relativism or apoliticism in post-structuralist thought. Badiou's ultimate ethical maxim is therefore one of: It is to name the indiscernible, the generic set, and thus name the event that re-casts ontology in a new light. He identifies four domains in which a subject who, it is important to note, becomes a subject through this process can potentially witness an event: By enacting fidelity to the event within these four domains one performs a 'generic procedure', which in its undecidability is necessarily experimental, and one potentially recasts the situation in which being takes place.

Through this maintenance of fidelity, truth has the potentiality to emerge.

Alain Badiou

In line with his concept of the event, Badiou maintains, politics is not about politicians, but activism based on the present situation and the evental [ sic ] his translators' neologism rupture. So too does love have this characteristic of becoming anew.

Even in science the guesswork that marks the event is prominent. He vigorously rejects the tag of ' decisionist ' the idea that once something is decided it 'becomes true' , but rather argues that the recasting of a truth comes prior to its veracity or verifiability. As he says of Galileo p. While Badiou is keen to reject an equivalence between politics and philosophy, he correlates nonetheless his political activism and skepticism toward the parliamentary-democratic process with his philosophy, based around singular, situated truths, and potential revolutions.

Alain Badiou is a founding member along with Natacha Michel and Sylvain Lazarus of the militant French political organisation L'Organisation Politique , which was active from until it disbanded in In addition to numerous writings and interventions, L'Organisation Politique highlighted the importance of developing political prescriptions concerning undocumented migrants les sans papiers , stressing that they must be conceived primarily as workers and not immigrants.

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December Learn how and when to remove this template message. This article contains weasel words: Such statements should be clarified or removed. Bellassen Circonstances 1: De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom? Quinzomadaire d'opinion — La Distance Politique —? Notre mal vient de plus loin , Books [ edit ] Manifesto for Philosophy , transl. The Clamor of Being , transl. An Essay on the Understanding of Evil , transl. Truth and the Return to Philosophy , transl. The Foundation of Universalism ; transl. Stanford University Press, Continuum, [25] Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology , transl.

Continuum, Polemics , transl. Verso, The Century , transl. Polity Press, The Concept of Model: An Introduction to the Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics , transl. Being and Event, Volume 2 , transl. Figures of Postwar Philosophy , transl.

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Polity Press, Wittgenstein's Antiphilosophy , transl. Times of Riots and Uprisings , transl. Serpent's Tail, Philosophy for Militants , transl. Verso, The Adventure of French Philosophy , transl. Verso, Plato's Republic: A Dialogue in 16 Chapters , transl. Columbia University Press, Badiou and the Philosophers:

• Drachenflug: Wirtschaftsmacht China quo vadis? (German Edition)
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• Псевдоним (Russian Edition)