In this short and accessible book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon the central concepts and major preoccupations of Badiou's philosophy: fundamental ontology, mathematics, politics, poetry, and love. Well-chosen examples illuminate his thinking in regards to being and universality, worlds and singularity, and the infinite and the absolute, among other topics.
Paperback edition: Stanford University Press, 2022.
Offering an in-depth interpretation of Sigmund Freud’s 'collective' or 'social' works, León Rozitchner insists that the Left should consider the ways in which capitalism inscribes its power in the subject as the site for the verification of history. Thus, after a brief commentary on Freud’s New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, the present book provides the reader with a chapter-by-chapter analysis of Civilisation and Its Discontents and Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Freud’s views, according to Rozitchner’s original reading, offer a striking contribution to a materialist theory and history of subjectivity.
This book was first published in Spanish as Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués by Siglo XXI Editores, 1972.
Hardcover: Leiden: Brill, 2021 (Historical Materialism Book Series, Volume 240).
Paperback edition: Chicago: Haymarket, 2022.
“This elegant and indispensable translation of a crucial text from Alain Badiou's 1980s political writing redirects the entire English-language discussion of Badiou's communism. The real break is not between Badiou's communism and Marxism but between Badiou's militant, political Marxism and the Marxist analytics of political economy. Badiou gives us a Marxist subjectivity released from and by the defeats of the twentieth century and armed with new capacities to think and move.” — Jodi Dean
Duke University Press, 2018.
Download the translator’s introduction here.
The Age of the Poets revisits the age-old problem of the relation between literature and philosophy, arguing against both Plato and Heidegger’s famous arguments. Philosophy neither has to ban the poets from the republic nor abdicate its own powers to the sole benefit of poetry or art. Instead, it must declare the end of what Badiou names the “age of the poets,” which stretches from Hölderlin to Celan. In addition, drawing on ideas from his first publication on the subject, “The Autonomy of the Aesthetic Process,” Badiou also offers an illuminating set of readings of contemporary French prose writers, giving us fascinating insights into the theory of the novel while also accounting for the specific position of literature between science and ideology.
Verso, 2014.
Available here.
For Alain Badiou, theatre—unlike cinema—creates a space in which philosophy can be lived. It is, of all the arts, the most closely related to politics: both depend on a limited number of texts or statements, which are collectively enacted by a group of actors or militants who test the limits of the structure in which they are confined, be it the medium of drama or the nation-state. For this reason, the history of theatre is inseparable from the history of state repression and censorship.
This definitive collection of Badiou's work on the theatre includes not only the title essay "Rhapsody for the Theatre," originally published as a pamphlet in France, but also essays on Jean-Paul Sartre, on the political destiny of contemporary drama, and on Badiou's own work as a playwright.
Verso, 2013.
Available here.
The Adventure of French Philosophy is essential reading for anyone interested in what Badiou calls the “French moment” in contemporary thought.
Badiou explores the exceptionally rich and varied world of French philosophy in a number of groundbreaking essays, published here for the first time in English or in a revised translation. Included are the often-quoted review of Louis Althusser’s canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of “potato fascism” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Barbara Cassin, notable points of interest on an expansive tour of modern French thought.
Guided by a small set of fundamental questions concerning the nature of being, the event, the subject, and truth, Badiou pushes to an extreme the polemical force of his thinking. Against the formless continuum of life, he posits the need for radical discontinuity; against the false modesty of finitude, he pleads for the mathematical infinity of everyday situations; against the various returns to Kant, he argues for the persistence of the Hegelian dialectic; and against the lure of ultraleftism, his texts from the 1970s vindicate the role of Maoism as a driving force behind the communist Idea.
Verso, 2012. Paperback edition: Verso, 2022.
Available here.
Alain Badiou takes on the standard bearer of the "linguistic turn" in modern philosophy, and anatomizes the "antiphilosophy" of Ludwig Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Addressing the crucial moment where Wittgenstein argues that much has to be passed over in silence—showing what cannot be said, after accepting the limits of language and meaning—Badiou argues that this mystical act reduces logic to rhetoric, truth to an effect of language games, and philosophy to a series of esoteric aphorisms. in the course of his interrogation of Wittgenstein's anti-philosophy, Badiou sets out and refines his own definitions of the universal truths that condition philosophy. Bruno Bosteels' eloquent introduction shows that this encounter with Wittgenstein is central to Badiou's overall project—and that a continuing dialogue with the exemplar of anti-philosophy is crucial for contemporary philosophy.
Verso, 2011 (hardcover); 2019 (paperback).
Available here.
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.
Verso, 2012.
Available here.
“A rare achievement, a true philosophical classic, comparable to only two or three books in the twentieth century, such as Heidegger's Being and Time. The difference is that, if Being and Time left its mark on twentieth-century thought, Theory of the Subject announces the thought of the twenty-first century. It opens up the path that Badiou followed in his two later classics, Being and Event and Logics of Worlds, but it enforces this opening with a violent freshness that far surpasses its later developments. So beware, reader: when you open this book, you hold in your hands proof that philosophers of the status of Plato, Hegel and Heidegger are still walking around today!” – Slavoj Žižek,
“Theory of the Subject is the first of Badiou's three great philosophical works, along with Being and Event and Logics of Worlds. It is his most passionate, most uncompromising and most revolutionary book. Bruno Bosteels has long been its most ardent and eloquent reader, and he is the ideal person to present and translate this challenging text.” – Peter Hallward, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, UK,
Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2009.
Available here.