Series: The Seminars of Alain Badiou

Finalist, 2024 Translation Prize - Nonfiction, French-American Foundation Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of "the present." In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one's own time—that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment...

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of "the present." In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one's own time—that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence. Images...

Alain Badiou's 1983–1984 lecture series on the One is the earliest of his seminars that he has chosen to publish. It focuses on the philosophical concept of oneness in the works of Descartes, Plato, and Kant—a crucial foil for his signature metaphysical concept, the multiple. Badiou declares that there is no "One": there is no fundamental unit of being; being...

Alain Badiou's 1983–1984 lecture series on "the One" is the earliest of his seminars that he has chosen to publish. It focuses on the philosophical concept of oneness in the works of Descartes, Plato, and Kant—a crucial foil for his signature metaphysical concept, the multiple. Badiou declares that there is no "One": there is no fundamental unit of being; being...

For Alain Badiou, Friedrich Nietzsche is the prince of anti-philosophy. French leftist thinkers celebrated Nietzsche in the second half of the twentieth century, but when a backlash emerged in the 1990s, Badiou refused to join the attack. Instead, Badiou devoted his 1992-1993 seminar to an astonishingly original reading of Nietzsche—to whom he had previously shown indifference or scorn—in which he...