The Adventure of French Philosophy

(Paperback)

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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 Althussers canonical works For Marx and Reading Capital and the scathing critique of potato fascism in Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris A Thousand Plateaus. There are also talks on Michel Foucault and Jean-Luc Nancy, and reviews of the work of Jean-Franois 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.

Reviews

French philosophy still has a kick in it, and it can still turn heads. You have been warned. -- Jonathan Re * Prospect *
One of the most important philosophers writing today. -- Joan Copjec
A figure like Plato or Hegel walks here among us! -- Slavoj Zizek
An heir to Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser. * New Statesman *
Focused and illuminating, technical and deft. -- Shahidha Bari * Times Higher Education *
A series of snapshots of how Badiou participates in and understands what ... we might call the post-1960s moment in French philosophy. * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *

Author Bio

Alain Badiou teaches philosophy at the Ecole normale suprieure and the Collge international de philosophie in Paris. In addition to several novels, plays and political essays, he has published a number of major philosophical works. His recent books include The Communist Hypothesis, Five Lessons on Wagner, and Wittgenstein's Anti-Philosophy.