Alain Badiou’s New Constructivism and Universalism

Irish Marxist Review, 2012

Aitías.Revista de Estudios Filosóficos., 2023

“L’histoire des idees”, has a nominal existence in the period of the Enlightenment, that is to say, it has its origins in the 19th century in France. From the moment of its appearance and establishment as an independent field, it maintained a close and complementary relationship with philosophy. At present, the History of Ideas is a field in dialogue with History, Historiography, Philosophy and even Psychoanalysis. It is necessary to return to the French intellectual terrain, to the living history and intellectual production of our time in order to analyze the contribution that French philosophers make to the history of Ideas in the 21st century. Specifically, to pay special attention to the system of thought created by the philosopher Alain Badiou. The present document, which emerges as an initial and introductory kick-off to a more complex project, is a general reading and analysis of some of Badiou’s contributions to contemporary philosophy.

Alain Badiou"s theory of political subjectivity entails a strict division between what he calls, in many places throughout his work, an "individual" and a "subject." 1 Individuals cannot be true political subjects and true political subjects are not, once "subjectivized" merely individuals, but rather become, as Badiou describes it, "one of the elements of another body, the body of truth, the material existence of a truth in the making in a given world." 2 Such a political subject, according to Badiou, arises in relation to an "event," which has the effect of producing the possibility of such a subjectivity. The "event" thus marks the dividing line between the individual and the subject. This division tracks quite nicely a division in Badiou"s acknowledged philosophical education, that between the quasi-structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and Jean-Paul Sartre"s late work on collective subjectivity found mainly in The Critique of Dialectical Reason. 3 This paper does three things. First it articulates the Badiouan theory of the distinction between the political subject and the apolitical individual in relation to Badiou"s reading of Althusser and Sartre. Second, it offers a further attempt at making sense of Badiou"s concept of the emergence of communal political subjectivity in connection with the "event" by reading it in relation to the Durkheimian idea of "collective effervescence" as reconstructed by

chapter in "Treue zur Wahrheit. Die Begründung der Philosophie Alain Badious"

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

International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016

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.

Res Publica. Revista de Historia de las Ideas Políticas, 2023

This article explores the philosophy of Alain Badiou from the vantage point of the concepts of the localization, delocalization, and relocalization of the void as thematized through literary arts, religion, emancipatory politics, and the subject of psychoanalysis. In short, these moments around the void characterize the processes through which truth is processed and seen through their full realization by a philosophical engagement across the various conditions in which these truths occur. The localization of a void is the naming of an indiscernible element that is incommensurable to the rubric of constructible knowledge, sense and meaning which could saturate the space of truth. Thus, the naming that localizes the void acts as a subtraction of the invariant in the variance of situation such that across various points in space and time, we are still able to subtract the universal as the invariant not just as the fidelity to the localized truth but also as the resurrection of truth upon its relocalization at a different place and a different time. At its core, this article is concerned with truth, why truth is persistent, and why we have to struggle to articulate the truth that we are trying to be faithful to again and again with each instance that truth risks being covered-over and obscured.