(Ed.) Badiou and the State (Nomos)

In this paper, I couple Alain Badiou’s more theoretical writings with his recent political treatises on the “communist hypothesis” to show how his ontology and theory of the event can offer us a better way of considering the problem regularly addressed by resorting to human rights. Arendt and Agamben both describe this problem in the terms of the logic of the nation-state: the power to recognize belonging is precisely the power to exclude; those not recognized by a governmental power have no recourse or body of appeal that would recognize or enforce their belonging. Jacques Rancière argues that this logic follows from dividing bios from zoē as Arendt does and Agamben follows. The dilemma and impotence of human rights requires a new logic of community, one not grounded in the capacity to exclude, a logic that I argue Badiou’s two claims that the multiple is ontologically basic and that the world is one accomplish. Together, these claims jointly expose the exclusionary logic of the state while encouraging a politics that unites instead of dividing the world, as it has been divided in the service of wealth. The maxim, “there is only one world,” encourages, in place of the logic of human rights, a performed politics that manifests and activates the belonging of all who are present.

krisis.eu

I presented what was, in some sense, and introduction to Badiou for an interdisciplinary audience. At the same time , I begin to formulate my own, often unique, reading of Badiou's philosophy (i.e. as a sort of neo-Hegelianism, as a subject-independent ontology, etc...).

Parrhesia : A Journal of Critical Philosophy, Issue 16, 2013

Reviews the two books in question as an opportunity to reflect on the "State of Badiou Studies Today" and on the role of French Philosophy within Anglophone Academia

Culture Machine, 2012

The ambitious challenge taken on and met by Badiou and Politics is to add to one of a handful of meta-tropes defining our current era and to add to an already sizable literature base surrounding one of the world's most significant continental philosophers and living theorists. Bruno Bosteels meets this challenge head on by dividing the major uptake on Badiou's work into two primary trajectories: the 'being' camp that stresses the logical ontology of oneness as pure multiplicity, and the 'event' camp that traces the ways a subject assumes certain truths as situations prompt particular procedures. Once Bosteels has set up these two approaches, he proposes a third way to encounter Badiou. Bosteel's corrective borrows from both approaches, settling on an affirmation of the politics of a dialectical materialism that would deploy both 'being' and 'event' strategies in a substantial reanimation of Badiou's place on, and contribution to, the philosophical map. This project goes beyond academic intervention for Bosteels, who shows how his friendship with Badiou springs from a passion and connection to his ideas that enriches both of them. Politics is a tough topic to tackle on any level. Badiou is a tough thinker to engage with. Bosteels unites, complements, and distinguishes both in his 436-page book working through the theories of a thinker who himself is grappling directly with politics: politics as an event, politics as being, and politics as one of four truth procedures defining the subject. Following and resisting many of the paths blazed by Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Butler among others, the works of Badiou feature a deeper philosophical conversation about being, power, time, and subjectivity led by earlier giants such as Heidegger, Marx, and Mao, even stretching back further to logical binarisms represented by Plato and Aristotle, or the 'plus one' practices of St. Paul within BOSTEELS • BADIOU AND POLITICS

Badiou Studies, 2014

In the Ethics, Badiou writes against ideal, abstract and rule-based conceptions of ethics. As in some pragmatic ethics, it implies denying the received moral vocabulary and focusing instead on agency. This explains why Badiou " s Ethics is often read as a radical statement in today " s normative landscape. This paper evaluates such a claim. In particular, it questions the extent to which an ethical approach that idealizes the situation through the notion of " fidelity to the event " can truly be non-ideal and radical. Three points are problematic. First, one has to discover actual " events " that demand ethical action; but who can tell us what an event is? Second, one has to be " faithful " to those events; but it is unclear whether Badiou allows for " evil " events and why fidelity to the event is better than its denial or occultation. Three, how can a non-ideal and radical ethical approach be premised on the idea of truth, and which consequences follow for its capacity to provide normative guidance? Put simply, this paper argues that while Badiou seems to perform a radical shift in contemporary moral reasoning, his contribution is more ambiguous. He seems to (i) reinstate an ethics based on naturalistic conceptions of good and evil; and, (ii) replace the role of reason in devising moral rules for the role of the philosopher that defines what counts as an event. Finally, while the results are modest, Badiou " s ethics forces us to adopt a vocabulary that impoverishes the description of moral life, and fails to build an ethics that is sensitive to concrete situations.

2017

Like any doctoral journey, mine has been one full of ups and downs. Now that its excitement and bewilderment are over, and that new excitements and bewilderments lie ahead, I am happy to thank all those that have made my journey more cheerful, fascinating and insightful than it would have otherwise been. I am solely responsible for this work, but the result would have been even more flawed without their help. First and foremost, I am grateful to Antonella Besussi, for believing in me and saving my passion for political philosophy. She has always encouraged and urged me to think autonomously and to look after what I thought. For this, I owe her immensely. I wish to thank the whole Political Theory Project and the NASP Graduate School in Social and Political Sciences for illuminating discussions, endless classes, much debated reading groups and helpful conversations, covering far more things than simply my dissertation. I am indebted to all my professors, colleagues and friends who shared this journey with me and made more than three years pass by unnoticed. A special thank must go to Giulia Bistagnino and Francesca Pasquali, for patiently discussing my ideas time and again, especially when I felt I was going astray, but did not know how to get back. They carefully read my work and gave me advice and encouragement when I most needed it. I am also grateful to the Department of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, which welcomed me as one of their PhD students for one term and provided me with first-hand experience of political philosophy as a collective enterprise. In particular, I wish to thank Tom Christiano, David Schmidtz for discussing my and their work with me and for always taking seriously what I had to say. During my PhD I had the chance to discuss the ideas of this dissertation at some conferences and seminars, among which the Summer School in Equality and Citizenship at the University of Rijeka, the ASPP conferences in Amsterdam and London, the workshop on discursive dilemma in Turin, the conference on democracy at the University of Iceland, the colloquium and meeting in moral and political philosophy at the University of Minho and the graduate conference in Pavia. I am grateful to the organizers and participants of these events for their comments, criticisms and suggestions on my work. I am also much indebted to those who generously read all or part of my dissertation and gave me indispensable food for thoughts. In particular, I

Philosophy Today, 2018

Why did politics, for Badiou, become something of a new "absolute" that almost everything depends on, every possible event in the relationship between humans and even the way of shaping the space between the Being as a multitude and the event as a condition for the emergence of a new condition and situation? Undoubtedly, throughout his work from the early 1960s to today, the fact that such a high place is devoted to politics stems from his belief that a change in life is possible only if it also means a change in thought. We cannot change the world without changing our thinking or our interpretation of the world. This "re-philosophizing" of Marx, however, does not mean much more than an attempt at getting rid of the traces of scientificity and at freeing the world of the deposition of pseudo-humanism. All of this marked the reading of Marx in France of the 1960s and beyond. If politics indicates neither the field of moral inscription, nor the scientific verification of what is happening in the world, it is because of Badiou's intervention in the area of the irreducibility of the political, which he performed together with Rancière in contemporary philosophy-an original intervention in the way it was released from the stranglehold of the economy and culture, rights and morals, sciences and cultures. We know that the beginning of this process is signified by Schmitt's notion of the political as polemic struggles and the understanding of politics in the conflicts of friends against enemies. Badiou does not even deal with the question of so-called realpolitik. True to the will, this is a cancer of almost the entire normative theory of politics and the political by thinkers from Habermas and Rawls, the most significant representatives of the so-called liberal consensus, to Deleuze, Lyotard, and Rancière. Because of this, the nomos of the political is exposed to him as being beyond the obsession with the idea of the sovereignty of the people in the modern form of the rule of a democratic or