Logics of Worlds: Being and Event II

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Logics of Worlds is the long-awaited sequel to Alain Badiou's much-heralded masterpiece, Being and Event. Tackling the questions that had been left open by Being and Event, and answering many of his critics in the process, Badiou supplements his pioneering treatment of multiple being with a daring and complex theory of the worlds in which truths and subjects make their mark - what he calls a materialist dialectic. The radical recasting of ontology in Being and Event is followed and complemented here by a thoroughgoing transformation in our very understanding of logic, conceived as a theory not of being but of appearing. Unafraid to resurrect and reinvent the classical themes of philosophy, Badiou gives new meaning to concepts such as object, body and relation, mobilising them in arresting studies that range from the architectural planning of Brasilia to contemporary astronomy, and confronting himself with towering philosophical counterparts (Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Deleuze). The book culminates in an impassioned call to 'live for an Idea'.

Reviews

"This time it's true; this really IS the book we have been waiting for. Since the publication of his magisterial Being and Event, we have been impatient to see what could not be foreseen: the way worlds look, according to Badiou. Logics of Worlds delivers a powerful theory of the uncanny appearance of truths; a rigorous polemic against the tedious nominalist-historicist materialism of our day; and a phenomenology every bit as impressive as Badiou's justly celebrated ontology."- Professor Joan Copjec, University at Buffalo, USA
... [provides] a comprehensive understanding of the French author's philosophical views... Responding to the problems raised in postmodern French thought, Alain Badiou's book offers an original rational scenario of interpreting them in a new key. -- The European Legacy, Vol. 16, No. 4
Reviewed in Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.

Author Bio

Alain Badiou is a world-renowned French philosopher, formerly chair of the cole Normale Suprieure in Paris, France, and founder of the faculty of Philosophy at the University of Paris VIII with Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jean-Franois Lyotard. Badiou has authored multiple major works of philosophy, many of which have been published in English by Bloomsbury, including Being and Event (2005), Logics of Worlds (2009), and The Immanence of Truths (forthcoming, 2021). Alberto Toscano is Lecturer in Sociologyat Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the editor and translator, with Ray Brassier, of Alain Badiou's Theoretical Writings (London: Continuum, 2004).