Bøger af Alain Badiou

An urgent and provocative account of the modern ';militant', a transformative figure at the front line of emancipatory politics. Around the world, recent events have seen the creation of a radical phalanx comprising students, the young, workers and immigrants. It is Badiou's contention that the politics of such militants should condition the tasks of philosophy, even as philosophy clarifies the truth of our political condition.To resolve the conflicts between politics, philosophy and democracy, Badiou argues for a resurgent communism returning to the original call for universal emancipation and organizing for militant struggle.

Following on from Alain Badiou's acclaimed works Ethics and Metapolitics, Polemics is a series of brilliant metapolitical reflections, demolishing established opinion and dominant propaganda, and reorienting our understanding of events from the Kosovo and Iraq wars to the Paris Commune and the Cultural Revolution.With the critical insight and polemical bravura for which he is renowned, Badiou considers the relationships between language, judgment and propagandaand shows how propaganda has become the dominant force. Both wittily and profoundly, Badiou presents a series of radical philosophical engagements with politics, and questions what constitutes political truth.

What Is a People? seeks to reclaim "e;people"e; as an effective political concept by revisiting its uses and abuses over time. 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 "e;popular"e; 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 "e;we,"e; while Georges Didi-Huberman addresses the problem of summing up a people with totalizing narratives. Sadri Khiari applies an activist's perspective to the racial hierarchies inherent in ethnic and national categories, and Jacques Ranciere comments on the futility of isolating theories of populism when, as these thinkers have shown, the idea of a "e;people"e; is too diffuse to support them. By engaging this topic linguistically, ethnically, culturally, and ontologically, the voices in this volume help separate "e;people"e; from its fraught associations to pursue more vital formulations.Together with Democracy in What State?, in which Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Ranciere, Kristin Ross, and Slavoj iek discuss the nature and purpose of democracy today, What Is a People? expands an essential exploration of political action and being in our time.

English-speaking readers might be surprised to learn that Alain Badiou writes fiction and plays along with his philosophical works and that they are just as important to understanding his larger intellectual project. In Ahmed the Philosopher, Badiou's most entertaining and accessible play, translated into English here for the first time, readers are introduced to Badiou's philosophy through a theatrical tour de force that has met with much success in France. Ahmed the Philosopher presents its comic hero, the "e;treacherous servant"e; Ahmed, as a seductively trenchant philosopher even as it casts philosophy itself as a comic performance. The comedy unfolds as a series of lessons, with each "e;short play"e; or sketch illuminating a different Badiousian concept. Yet Ahmed does more than illustrate philosophical abstractions; he embodies and vivifies the theatrical and performative aspects of philosophy, mobilizing a comic energy that exposes the emptiness and pomp of the world. Through his example, the audience is moved to a living engagement with philosophy, discovering in it the power to break through the limits of everyday life.

In this dialogue, Alain Badiou shares the clearest, most detailed account to date of his profound indebtedness to Lacanian psychoanalysis. He explains in depth the tools Lacan gave him to navigate the extremes of his other two philosophical "e;masters,"e; Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. Elisabeth Roudinesco supplements Badiou's experience with her own perspective on the troubled landscape of the French analytic world since Lacan's death-critiquing, for example, the link (or lack thereof) between politics and psychoanalysis in Lacan's work. Their exchange reinvigorates how the the work of a pivotal twentieth-century thinker is perceived.

"e;Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?"e;In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Ranciere highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it.Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.

Alain Badiou har er i en sen alder opnået fornyet popularitet. Hans politiske tænkning har sprængkraft og aktualitet i en tid, der præges af popularisme og neoliberalisme. Denne bog samler to meget kritiske tekster om Donald Trump og samtidens politiske landskab - herunder ikke blot USAs men også Europas. Badiou advarer om, at vi bruger for meget krudt på Trumps mediecirkus og opfordrer i stedet til at se populisternes fremmarch som et symptom, der kalder på noget radikalt nyt. Badiou understreger i den forbindelse nødvendigheden af et reelt alternativ til ‘the establishment’ på venstrefløjen, og her er det naturligvis Bernie Sanders snarere end Hilary Clinton, der peges på.

The eminent French philosopher "dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy.In this unique essay, first delivered as a lecture during a panel discussion with the artist and philosopher Reza Negarestani, Alain Badiou identifies and "dialecticizes” five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulène's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle's complex of matter and form is called to mind to describe the inner logic of a hard foam sculpture. A bronze statue with holes activates Plato's notion of participation of the concrete world in the "injured Idea of the Beautiful.” A small metallic and incomplete "angel” engages Leibniz's affirmation that "everything that exists is composed of an infinity of things.” Badiou's musings go on to pair a broken and repaired plastic chair with Victor Hugo; a terrible hand made of concrete with the Freudian unconscious; and a large-scale "red and blue monster” with rudimentary mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, the famous "I think, therefore I am,” with unexpected inversions and variations.Badiou refrains, of course, from claiming that Moulène thinks about any of these philosophers when making his specific works. What he points to, however, in this richly illustrated bilingual volume, is that the artist and his art are "on the side of philosophy.”

Alain Badious klassiske tekst om kærlighedens væsen. Teksten følges op af fire artikler der belyser kærlighedens filosofi; i forhold til både Badious samlede forfatterskab og kærligheden som et tema i hele filosofihistorien

The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic is the last in a trilogy of political-philosophical essays, preceded by Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology, written during the dark days at the end of the decade after May '68. With the late 1970's "triumphant restoration" in Europe, China and the United States, Badiou and his collaborators return to Hegel with a Chinese twist. By translating, annotating and providing commentary to a contemporaneous text by Chinese Hegelian Zhang Shi Ying, Badiou and his collaborators attempt to diagnose the status of the dialectic in their common political and philosophical horizon. Readers of Badiou's more recent work will find a crucial developmental step in his work in ontology and find echoes of his current project of a 'communist hypothesis'. This translation is accompanied by a recent interview that questions Badiou on the discrepancies between this text and his current thought, on the nature of dialectics, negativity, modality and his understanding of the historical, political and geographical distance that his text introduces into the present.

"Alain Badiou's first major work, Le Concept de modele, originally published in 1969 and long out of print, establishes a solid mathematical basis for a rational materialism, which undermines the implicit assumptions of a predominating 'bourgeois epistemology'. Readers familiar with Badiou will no doubt find within this early text the lineaments of his later radical developments. The translation will be published with an accompanying interview with Badiou wherein he elaborates on the connections between this early work, the subsequent developments and his most recent position"--Provided by publisher.

Leading radical intellectual tackles the many controversial interpretations of Wagner's work