Theoretical Writings

Description

Alain Badiou is arguably the most original and influential philosopher working in France today. Working against the tide of postmodern orthodoxy, Badiou revitalizes philosophy's perennial attempt to provide a systematic theory of truth. Theoretical Writings presents, in Badiou's own words, 'the theoretical core of [his] Philosophy'. Beginning with the controversial assertion that ontology is mathematics, the chapters step the reader through his key concepts of being, subject and truth via startling re-readings of canonical figures including Spinoza, Kant and Hegel and engagements with poetry, psychoanalysis and radical politics. Theoretical Writings is an indispensable introduction to one of the great thinkers of our time. Cover HalfTitle Series Page Title Copyright Contents List of Sources Editors’ Note Author’s Preface SECTION I Ontology is Mathematics CHAPTER 1 Mathematics and Philosophy: CHAPTER 2 Philosophy and Mathematics: 1. The disjunction of mathematics as philosophically constitutive of Romanticism 2. Romanticism continues to be the site for our thinking today, and this continuation renders the theme of the death of God 3. Plato carries out a philosophical deployment of mathematics at the frontier between thought and the freedom of thought 4. Hegel deposes mathematics because he initiates a rivalry between it and philosophy with regard to the same concept, that 5. The re-entanglement of mathematics and philosophy aims at a dissolution of the Romantic concept of finitude and at the esta CHAPTER 3 The Question of Being Today CHAPTER 4 Platonism and Mathematical Ontology 1. Mathematics thinks 2. Every instance of thought – and a fortiori mathematics – requires decisions (intuitions) taken from the point of the unde 3. The sole criterion for mathematical questions of existence is the intelligible consistency of what is thought CHAPTER 5 The Being of Number CHAPTER 6 One, Multiple, Multiplicities1 CHAPTER 7 Spinoza’s Closed Ontology SECTION II The Subtraction of Truth CHAPTER 8 The Event as Trans-Being CHAPTER 9 On Subtraction1 CHAPTER 10 Truth: Forcing and the Unnameable1 CHAPTER 11 Kant’s Subtractive Ontology CHAPTER 12 Eight Theses on the Universal 1. Thought is the proper medium of the universal 2. Every universal is singular, or is a singularity 3. Every universal originates in an event, and the event is intransitive to the particularity of the situation 4. A universal initially presents itself as a decision about an undecidable 5. The universal has an implicative structure 6. The universal is univocal 7. Every universal singularity remains incompletable or open 8. Universality is nothing other than the faithful construction of an infinite generic multiple CHAPTER 13 Politics as a Truth Procedure SECTION III Logics of Appearance CHAPTER 14 Being and Appearance CHAPTER 15 Notes Toward a Thinking of Appearance CHAPTER 16 The Transcendental A. The inexistence of the Whole B. Derivation of the thinking of a being on the basis of that of another being C. A being is thinkable only in as much as it belongs to a world D. Appearance and the transcendental E. It must be possible to think in a world what does not appear within it F. The conjunction of two apparents in a world G. The regional stability of worlds: the envelope H. The conjunction between a being-there and a region of its world I. Dependence: the measure of the link between two beings in a world J. The reverse of an apparent in the world K. There exists a maximal degree of appearance in a world L. What is the reverse of a maximal degree of appearance? CHAPTER 17 Hegel and the Whole A. Hegel and the question of the Whole B. Being-there and the logic of the world C. Hegel cannot accept a minimal determination D. The appearance of negation CHAPTER 18 Language, Thought, Poetry1 Notes POSTFACE Aleatory Rationalism Index of Concepts Index of Names