Posts Tagged ‘Badiou’

Interview with Badiou at Infinite thought about new word for communism, the sans papiers, Brad Pitt in ‘The life of Plato’, with Badiou as Socrates (not really).

Badiou by TheDopper

Nessie, new online French/English philosophy journal. With, amongst others, an essay by Daniel Smith (who translated Essays Critical and Clinical): ‘Mathematics and the Theory of Multiplicities: Badiou and Deleuze Revisited’: pdf

Oh yes, and just to spread the word; Badiou’s Logics of worlds has finally become reality.

Found this at Infinite Thought a while ago. A story by Badiou translated into English. Am curious about his novels, maybe try one in French?.. Also wonder how well known he is as a fiction writer in France.

Am stealing this reference and bio from Infinite Thought:

Story can be found in French Writing Today, ed. by Simon Watson Taylor (also translated the story) (London: Penguin, 1968). Original reference is: Alain Badiou, ‘Histoire de Duphort’ from Almagestes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1964).

‘Born 1937 in Rabat, Moroco. Graduate of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris with a degree in philosophy. At present lecturer in philosophy at the University of Reims. The short text printed in this volume, an extract from his first novel, Almagestes (1964), written between 1956 and 1960, must not be considered particularly ‘representative’ of an extremely diffuse and complex work. The second volume of what is intended to be a trilogy, Portulans, started in 1960, appeared in 1967. Badiou’s critical articles include ‘L’autonomie du processus esthétique’ (Cahiers Marxistes Léninistes, September 1966), and a long essay on the Marxist philosopher L. Althusser (Critique, May 1967).’

Am reading a theory book with a staggeringly diverse frame of reference. One reason I think I have always felt attracted to that style of writing is that you get to enjoy thinking about authors/topics you otherwise wouldn’t realistically have the time to read. There is also the perverse satisfaction of having the feeling that everything is being taken in, that a topic has been completely milked with nothing left to say about it (desperately suppressing the knowledge that there will always remain one more book to be written).  Sort of a temporary antidote to the secret desire to read everything. The tracing of a transversal line through the whole encyclopedia of knowledge.

One author who is a master at this is the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Not surprising that he won the Sigmund Freud Prize for the style of his academic prose (2005), and two other prizes for his essayistic writing. His Sphären (a ‘morphological’ history of humanity) is a monumental philosophical work (spanning around 2500 pages) that includes references to just about any (sub-)discipline, religion, individual-of-interest you can think of. Including pictures on just about every third page. But apart from winning prizes, Sloterdijk’s style has also been criticized for being too convoluted and not suitable as academic register. Sjoerd van Tuinen uses most of the introduction  to his short but very lucidly written monograph on Sloterdijk to introduce just this aspect of the philosopher’s work.

We are dealing with a synthetic-associative thinker who – in his at times megalomanic work – attempts to offer the reader insight into the most unlikely connections. His texts demand very undogmatic readers who are prepared to embrace a dynamic interpretation of the distinction between form and content,  and allow themselves to be carried away by the current of an incomparable discourse that vacillates between theology and literature, psychoanalysis and politics, mythology and science, ingenious abstraction and banal jokes. (Sloterdijk: binnenste buiten denken, p. 13; my translation)

The above description could apply (if not quite as neatly) to the writing of Deleuze (an important inspiration for Sloterdijk), especially his books written in collaboration with Guattari (and then mainly Milles plateaux).

At the other end of that extreme there are the writers of spare, succinct prose, who use hardly any footnotes and get straight to the core of their argument. From recent reading, I’m thinking of Quentin Meillassoux in particular. Where Deleuze & Guattari might add notes as a means of legitimated digression and have endless bibliographies, Meillassoux’s recent Apres l’finitude (140 pages) has a mere two-page bibliography and only employs footnotes where strictly necessary.

Badiou doesn’t use footnotes at all because he reckons if they really want to know, people will look things up for themselves (think I remember that from somewhere in the introduction to (the translation of) Deleuze: clameur de l’etre. Now there’s an affirmative/Bruce-Lee-reading-attitude I can sympathize with. Especially since Google). His style – similarly to much Continental philosophy – is very important to the content, but unlike the flair, exuberance, or convolution of his (recent) contemporaries, Badiou writes in a sober and analytic tone. Badiou does not use irony, association, or wit, to stimulate a reader’s thinking; his syntax, for example, serves the very different purpose of being as unambiguous as possible, and to indicate the hierarchical importance of the parts of a sentence (cf. introduction Being and event).