Manifesto for Philosophy

Alain Badiou is Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 8—"Vincennes at Saint-Denis," Saint-Denis, France. He is also Conference Director at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. He has published extensively and his books include Théorie du sujet, Peut-on penser la politique? and Casser en duex l'histoire du monde? among others.

"Alain Badiou's work is a breath of fresh air in the ofttimes pious and romantic twentieth-century renderings of philosophy in which the latter seems to cover both everything and nothing. Delimiting and yet simultaneously radicalizing philosophy's role, Badiou maintains the possibility of something other than the end of philosophy: a new and different step." — Bruce Fink, coeditor of Reading Seminars I and II and Reading Seminar XI"…An excellent introduction to the work of one of the most important philosophers writing today, Manifesto for Philosophy will undoubtedly quicken the discourse that has become too comfortable with its own death." — Joan Copjec, author of Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists"One of the most provocatively innovative thinkers writing in French today, Alain Badiou constantly unsettles his reader by not only absorbing but also reversing and displacing the major motifs of modernist 'antiphilosophy' from Nietzsche through Derrida. In the limpid, programmatic texts presented in readable translations here, Badiou sketches his project—spelled out in his magnum opus, L'Etre et l'événement—to reestablish systematic philosophy as a 'Platonism of the multiple,' articulated around the four conditioning discourses of science (notably the mathematics of set theory), politics (in a post-Marxist mode informed by the events of May '68), art (especially poetry from Holderlin to Celan), and love (as conceptualized by Lacan). The most significant challenge to 'antiphilosophy' in a long time, Badiou's thought promises either to displace its currently dominant forms or to deepen and refine their self-understanding. It is, in short, a force worth reckoning with." — Jeffrey S. Librett, translator, Of the Sublime: Presence in Question

• IntroductionManifesto for Philosophy 1. Possibility 2. Conditions 3. Modernity 4. Heidegger Viewed as Commonplace 5. Nihilism? 6. Sutures 7. The Age of Poets 8. Events 9. Questions 10. Platonic Gesture 11. Generic The (Re)turn of Philosophy Itself Definition of Philosophy Chapter Notes Notes on the Translation Bibliography Contributors Index