November 5, 2006

"Event" Plug: Alain Badiou

Alain Badiou is one of the most, if not the most, important French philosopher living today. He is just starting to get his due here in America as a philosopher whose work could open up incredibly novel positions on ontology, ethics, and the role of philosophers in today's world. It's difficult to forecast these things, but his magnum opus Being and Event could (and I think should) be considered in the same neighborhood of the philosophical pantheon as two other "Being" books of the past century (i.e. Sartre's and Heidegger's).

And he's coming to Dartmouth Thursday, the 9th, at 4:30.

Seriously, go to this. While he'll probably never reach the celebrity, cultic status of Derrida or Foucault (for one thing, most humanities scholars are probably turned off by his insistence on grounding being in Cantorean set theory), he is (and will become more so, I think) undoubtedly a seriously heavy hitter in French thought of the past thirty years.

If you're curious (and I hope you are), here is an article on Badiou from the excellent N+1 magazine. (A side note, though--the bits about Brian Leiter are both inaccurate and unfair. He's a fantastic Nietzsche scholar, for one thing, which belies the author's charge of a Leiterian vendetta against the Continentals.)

2 comments:

  1. So what's the big original insight in Being and Event? I'm curious because I thought it was interesting, but didn't change anything. How will philosophy be different after Badiou?

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  2. While I would say that Badiou's eventual contribution will probably be more cosmetic than substantive (i.e. I think some will try to use him to work in the space between continental and analytic), I would say that he certainly intended to be both original and revolutionary. I think his specific deployment of the figure of the null set is important, and his foregrounding of pure multiplicity as the grounds for being (rather than the one) is, while not perhaps unheard of, new in its context.

    Perhaps I'm unsure, though, as to your criteria for changing things.

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